I'm 39 and it was Iran/Contra for me. Normally that's not the sort of thing that a six-year-old would register but my dad was a flaming anti-Reagan liberal at the time so we watched the testimony (and the news recaps of it) every night. https://twitter.com/HRHSherlock/status/1252015174422163456

Well wait a second, the Challenger explosion happened before Iran/Contra, so I guess that's actually the first one. Iran/Contra is the first major POLITICAL event I remember.

It's funny that the second major political event I remember (other than GHWB's election in 1988 -- I remember asking my piano teacher who she was voting for, which is lame even for an 8-year-old) was the Gulf War in 1991. It took that long for anything else to register.

You know, I keep blowing these answers. The Berlin Wall in 1989! I'm just thinking in terms of domestic American politics, but obviously everyone was fixated on the fall of the Wall.