Cambridge University Press 0521801168 - US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis David Patrick Houghton Excerpt More information 1 Jimmy Carter and the tragedy of foreign policy When an American president has been defeated at the November election held to determine who will sit in the Oval Office for the next four years, he usually spends the last days and hours of his presidency preparingfor the handover of power which takes place the following January. He contemplates, usually with much regret, the change which has come over his life, undoubtedly mullingover the unpleasant and sometimes icy task of escortingthe winningcandidate to his inaugur- ation. He begins to plan what will come next, perhaps thinking about the arrangements for the presidential library which will carry his name. The end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency was different. His last two days were spent cloistered in the Oval Office with his closest advisers, enmeshed until the very last minutes in an issue which had come to obsess him personally and which helped destroy any prospect he might have had of achievingre-election in 1980: the release of the American hostages who had been held in Tehran for almost 444 days. That issue was about to become another man’s problem. But Jimmy Carter was not a man to leave loose ends. There was unfinished business to do. The president and his closest advisers worked around the clock, eatingtheir meals in the Oval Office, their only sleep an occasional cat nap on one of the sofas which now adorn the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta. The black and white photographs of these last hours tell the story more vividly than any words can. The photos – reminiscent of the vivid portraits of Lyndon Johnson during the last days of his struggle over Vietnam – show a haggard, sleep-deprived president, surrounded by similarly exhausted advisers doingwhat they can to reach a deal before time runs out. The photographs, and the ABC News film shot on the day Carter left the presidency, paint a compellingand tragicpic- ture. Even in the car on the way to the inauguration ceremony that 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521801168 - US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis David Patrick Houghton Excerpt More information US foreign policy and the Iran hostage crisis would see Ronald Reagan become America’s 40th president, Carter was still receivinglast minute reports from his adviser Hamilton Jordan on the hostage situation. The pressure on Carter to act decisively, to do somethingwhich would bringthe crisis to its resolution and bringthe hostageshome, had been immense. From the very beginning, the hostage crisis had exerted a strikingeffect on ordinary Americans, who graduallybecame as obsessed as Carter with the fate of their countrymen.1 On ABC television, Ted Koppel began hosting a nightly programme – which later became Nightline – endlessly detailingthe latest developments in the crisis, while on CBS Walter Cronkite, a man implicitly trusted by most Americans, kept up the continual pressure on Carter by signing off his newscast each night with the number of days the hostages had been held in captivity. Americans bought yellow ribbons and Iranian flags in record numbers (the ribbons for tying to oak trees, the flags for public burning). Stunned by the hatred they saw broadcast daily from Iran on the nightly news but found well-nigh incomprehensible, Americans had responded with a nationalism, and often a jingoism, of their own. Archival television footage captures the vivid colours of the times: the yellow of the ribbons, the red, white and blue of Old Glory and effigies of Uncle Sam, the green and rusty brown of Iran’s standard, and, perhaps most of all, the symbol-laden red and orange of fire. By the springof 1980 Carter had tried every peaceful means he could think of to obtain the release of the hostages. He had stopped importing Iranian oil, broken off diplomatic relations, asked the United Nations to intercede, sent a variety of third parties and intermediaries to Tehran, brainstormed America’s Iranian experts in the universities, and more besides. Nothinghe tried had produced the desired result. Five months into the crisis he had then, on 24 April 1980, resorted to a military rescue mission, an option initially considered so difficult to implement that it had been more or less rejected by military planners early on. The mission was the greatest disaster of Carter’s presidency. Eight servicemen died in the rescue attempt, all as a result of a collision between aircraft which occurred followingthe cancellation of the oper- ation midway through. To make matters worse, the remaining mem- bers of the rescue force chose or were compelled to leave behind the bodies of their colleagues – together with sensitive government docu- ments – in the Iranian desert. Both the bodies and the documents were 1 Gary Sick, October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1991), pp. 17–18. 2 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521801168 - US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis David Patrick Houghton Excerpt More information Jimmy Carter soon publicly and triumphally paraded by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, much to President Carter’s disgust. At 1.15 on the morning of 25 April the events of the previous day were made public in a statement issued from the White House; then, at 7 o’clock that same morning, a devas- tated and ashen-faced Jimmy Carter appeared live on national televi- sion and radio to announce that America had tried to free the hostages militarily but had failed. Speakingfrom the Oval Office, Carter made a frank statement: I ordered this rescue mission prepared in order to safeguard American lives, to protect America’s national interests, and to reduce the ten- sions in the world that have been caused amongmany nations as this crisis has continued. It was my decision to attempt the rescue oper- ation. It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed in the placement of our rescue team for a future rescue operation. The responsibility is fully my own . The United States remains deter- mined to bringabout their safe release at the earliest date possible. Perhaps surprisingly, the immediate public reaction to the announce- ment of the failed mission was favourable to the president. On 4 November 1979 – the day the hostages were seized – Carter’s approval ratingwas a meagre32 per cent, but it rose dramatically to 61 per cent shortly thereafter. As Kenneth Morris explains, ‘although the effect was not immediate, in the way that Americans rally behind the president in times of international crisis Carter soon saw his approval ratings rising. By the end of November they had once again crossed the 50 percent mark; by January they approached 60 percent.’2 While these ratings began to fall again thereafter, there was also a rather more modest ‘rally around the flag’ effect after Carter announced that he had tried to rescue the hostages. Carter’s approval rating rose from 39 per cent before the announcement to 43 per cent shortly after. Some members of America’s foreign policy establishment also lauded Carter’s attempt, seeingthe move as a brave, well-intentioned and perhaps unavoidable effort to restore American pride. James Schlesinger, for instance, called it a ‘courageous decision’, which had ‘drawn the public support deserv- edly given to Presidents during times of trouble’. The global dangers of not actingin the face of such an unforgivableprovocation were too great and were outweighed by the disadvantages, he argued.3 Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and future CIA Director James 2 Kenneth Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 277–8. 3 James Schlesinger, ‘Some Lessons of Iran’, New York Times, 6 May 1980. 3 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521801168 - US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis David Patrick Houghton Excerpt More information US foreign policy and the Iran hostage crisis Woolsey also voiced their support in the days after the failed raid.4 In the longer term, however, the effects were deeply negative. By the middle of Summer 1980, the proportion of Americans sayingthat they approved of Carter’s overall performance had fallen to a low of 21 per cent.5 For many in the American and international media, the failed mission was emblematic of the Carter administration as a whole, pro- vidingyet further evidence of the foreignpolicy incompetence with which they had longchargedJames Earl Carter as a president. 6 The campaign of Ronald Reagan consciously fed upon the atmosphere of disillusionment, frustration and national impotence which the failed rescue mission had helped to instil. While foreign policy was certainly not the only or decisive factor which led to Carter’s defeat in the presidential election of 1980 – the state of the economy, as is so often the case at national US elections, had a decisive effect upon the incumbent’s fortunes – seemingly insoluble foreign and economic policy difficulties meshed together to create the inevitable appearance of a well-inten- tioned but ultimately failed presidency. This book is about the crisis which brought Jimmy Carter to this point. It is about a tragedy in American and Iranian foreign policy which continues to affect relations between the two nations today, memories of which continue to engender distrust and dislike. Before embarkingupon the narrative which follows, however, some dis- claimers are in order. This book is not intended as a full history of US–Iranian relations. This task has already been undertaken with con- summate skill by others.