Bush was made out to be a real hero and someone who understood the military.
UFOs generated ratings for shows like "Unsolved Mysteries" (a very entertaining show, imo.) The European Union was talked about when I was in school, and they way they pitched it to us was that they wanted to compete with the US and make a large economic block and reduce barriers.
I didn't wake up before 1990, but I remember the news broadcasts all the way back to 1986 or so. I remember when the government sold us on the Reagan amnesty, the Libya strikes, the Iraq invasion, the intervention in Somalia, the 93 WTC incident, OKC, Yugoslavian conflict, through 9/11.
The Reagan amnesty came with promises of increased border enforcement. Libya was painted as a very serious sponsor of terrorism and our schools were praising the military as heroes when air strikes were launched. It was the same stuff when the first Iraq invasion came about also. The first WTC bombing was scary. I remember after OKC they were running around looking for middle eastern men before they settled on trying to pin blame on militia groups. If I remember correctly, the interviewed the guys in Michigan on the national news programs. (They tried real hard to paint these guys as gun-nuts.) When the Yugoslavian conflict happened, they made a hero out of a pilot (S.O.) who got shot down -- he was interviewed on Larry King's show and they had him talking about how he lived off of bugs.
I didn't wake up until the internet came around, though. No one was there to explain the depth of events beyond what was out there in the MSM, though I had friends passing around newsletters from Limbaugh and books by P.J. O'Rourke trying to discredit global warming.
It was really, really hard to wake up before the internet. You couldn't get non-mainstream news sources without going to the fringes of a college campus, and even then, if you got your hands on it and read the stuff, it never seemed believable and never fit the narrative.
The biggest pre-90 events that raised the most suspicion were probably JFK. However, after Oliver Stone's movie came out, the media was on damage control. I remember ABC news dedicating a special news report to reaffirm the official narrative.
I think what saddens me the most is that, even with the internet, some people can't piece together the truth to this day.