During the Iranian Hostage Crisis I was a paper-boy. Every afternoon I would load up my 3-speed bicycle with about fifty copies of the Trenton Times and deliver them to my neighbors. I obviously noticed what was on the front-page, and the front-page always had a box with a graphic telling me how many days the hostages had been in captivity. It would eventually grow to 444 days. As a 9-10 year-old boy, I learned to have some definite antipathy for Iran. I later learned about our history with the Shah and developed a more nuanced view of Iran, Iranians, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis. But I still retain a basic bad feeling about the Iranian government. And I think it is totally justified.
What were you doing during the hostage crisis?
Teething.
In 1979 I broke free of a toxic family environment & began supporting myself in downtown NYC. I resisted emotional involvement with the hostage crisis. Was more concerned about the nuclear arsenal & growing conservatism. Hated Reagan & his ‘revolution’. Wall St was for pigs.
AND hated Reagan and his revolution. I went around telling people there was no way the American people would elect a dunce like him to the Presidency. I was still saying the same thing in the fall of ’83 before his second election. Was it Mencken who said “No man ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American people”?
Sorry for the insult to Wall Streeters, Ed. Prejudice is prejudice, alas.
I didn’t read it as an insult.
Rooting for Jimmy Carter.
Developing a serious loathing of Ronald Reagan.
Loving the game of hockey (USA! USA! USA!).
Growing facial hair.
“But I still retain a basic bad feeling about the Iranian government. And I think it is totally justified”
Maybe. But given we did engineer the overthrow of their former elected government, I think an Iranian would have every right to feel the same way about us.
It’s only recently that I learned that a show that I’ve always loved “Nightline” (the ORIGINAL ONE with Ted Koppel) started out as a latenight countdown show for when the hostages in Iran would be released. And since then, we have learned that G.H.W. Bush (Sr.) and his intelligence agency friends actually arranged to have the hostages held extra-long until Reagan won the election in order to totally humiliate the good president Jimmy Carter… But that’s all been whitewashed from history and now we have this…
God help us…
Not just Nightline but — and lots of people, especially liberals, tend to not know this one — Walter Cronkite, normally not hostile to Carter among a rather anti-Carter MSM crowd, ended his ratings-leading CBS Evening News each day with a reminder to viewers about how many days our American hostages were spending in captivity in Iran.
This went on for months in 1980. A double-whammy from Walter early in the evening and a reminder later on from Ted. That in addition to Jimmy getting pounded daily by the corp media for any other thing they could find or cook up or distort to make him look bad or ineffective.
And on that little conspiracy matter re Reagan/Poppy violating the law to keep the hostages from being released by Carter — good luck seeing that accepted by most historians in our lifetimes. And not with the sort of strongly pro-Reagan corp media and political establishment and softie Dem party we have — any historian stepping out of line too far would get the “conspiracy theorist” ad hom treatment and would likely be in jeopardy of losing his academic position.
I was an art student in college and there was an exchange student from Iran studying here. I can remember her saying thatbif she was back home in Iran, she too would be out in the streets protesting against America.
That pissed me off. I thought that if she was taking advantage of educational opportunites here, even if she didn’t embrace our country’s beliefs, she should at least keep quiet about it. She was a hypocrite at best.
If we take advantage of what the US has to offer & also protest or oppose governmental policy, are we also hypocrites?
Should we ‘love it or leave it’?
If not, I’m not sure why free speech is acceptable for citizens but not for visitors. Is this attitude basically just xenophobia? Are we lessened or hurt in any way by opposition anywhere to US policy, either individually or collectively?
Me, I don’t identify with my government so strongly that I’m insulted by opposition to it. Especially since I’m poor & have no particular representation.
Over-identifying with the government makes it possible for powerful interests to confuse us & vote against ourselves.
Over-identifying with the government makes it possible for powerful interests to confuse us & wevote against ourselves.
Hope dissent doesn’t piss you off any more.
I was a deputy director of a community action agency (non-profit agency established by the “War on Poverty”) in Appalachia. The Republicans in that county were descendants of Lincoln Republicans, but they supported the R label out of habit. Little did I know then what these folks’ children would become.
The result of the hostage crisis was the election of Reagan, who immediately cut funds for community action agencies. The reduction-in-force cost me my job and significantly impacted work training programs, HeadStart, and job programs for displaced homemakers.
Iran bargained with someone violating the Logan Act, who got away with it be being elected President. In return Iran got sophisticated (for the time) American missiles and a blank check to fight Iraq.
The Iranian government is one in which there are theocratic checks on cultural change and military checks on clerical power. And the Savak continues under a different name. Which means it is a regime as subject to the same corruption as existed under the Shah.
Iran was relatively stable until Ahmedinejad stole the election in 2009. The endorsement of this by the Supreme Leader cost the Supreme Leader his legitimacy. That situation will not survive the Arab Awakening. But it will likely take years before it completely unwinds. Denying the formation of a potential successor government and arguing that its either the current oligarchy or chaos will be what preserves the regime a little longer.
Iranians have a bad feeling about the US government because of the overthrow of Mossadegh. They expected better from the first anti-colonialist movement. (Yeah, yeah, the US was always an aspiring empire, which is what drove its anti-colonialism in the 1700s).
Governments act in what they perceive to be in their own interest. In acting out their vengeance on the US over 444 days, the Iranian people became supportive of the Iranian government’s leading the US around by the nose and then getting Mr. Tough Talk Reagan to give them something in return for the hostages, something that President Carter had scrupulously avoided. What Carter offered was giving their seized assets back to them in exchange for release of the hostages.
Inauguration day in 1981 was the day I began to have a really bad feeling about the Republican Party. The spirit of Richard Nixon seemed to have metastasized.
I knew quite a few Iranians in college — folks who were on their way to engineering, agricultural, or medical degrees. I wonder how these folks have fared under the theocracy. I think of the conversations I had with them about what was going on in Iran in looking at the capture of conservative religion by the Republican Party.
BTW, the fact that I had a management position in a non-profit funded primarily out of federal funds automatically caused difficulties for me in getting employment in the private sector. The private sector, for all its yammering about it, does not respect efficiency and effectiveness in operating on low budgets. In the twenty-five years I worked in the private sector, I saw more waste, fraud, abuse, and plain-out idiocy than I saw in my previous fifteen years working in the public and non-profit sector.
The Iranian Hostage Crisis and 9/11 are the key events that prevented a restoration of sanity after Vietnam. Since both the Iranian theocracy and al Quaeda seek the end of American power, it is instructive how much they have been helped in reaching their goals by the Republican Party.
Persepolis, a graphic novel and film by Marjane Satrapi, is probably one of the most engaging and informative pieces I’ve come across on everyday life in Iran. The film took the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize for her story of a 9 year old girl growing up amidst the political upheaval in Tehran.
“What were you doing during the hostage crisis?”
Hoping like hell the damned thing would end. Our publisher got the bright idea of running our flag upside down every week, since flying a flag upside down is an international signal for distress. It looked sort of stupid on the front page that first week, and we got lots of calls from readers about it, to the point he had to put an explanatory paragraph on the edit page each week. But, hey, we were doing our bit to make sure the hostages weren’t forgotten. Then the ‘crisis’ dragged on and on and on, every week, with our front page looking increasingly stupid.
When Reagan was nominated, I figured he was a joke candidate. After all, a divorced, washed-up movie star, former TV series host who made a hash of running California was going to run for President on a family values platform? But then the moron won, and when he ended the hostage crises I congratulated him for the first and last time that he was in office. Because we could get the front page back to looking less stupid.
Then, of course, we found out exactly what Reagan’s negotiations consisted of, and, with the rest of his nefarious acts, his place in history as just another GOP political criminal was assured, not to mention being the first serving President with Alzheimer’s, which ought to give all of us little flutters in our hearts when we think that his finger really was next to that red button…
Reagan was never underestimated, or written off as a moron, by professional politicians inside the Democratic Party.
Not after winning the CA governorship twice, and nearly taking down Ford in ’76. Hell, Nixon took great personal pains to keep Reagan on the bench in the ’68 nomination race — early enough for the ‘washed-up movie star’ stuff to still stick — and there was a man who knew how to assess a political threat.
Carter was never better than even money to win re-election in ’80, regardless of the challenger, because of the economy alone. Iran was the second torpedo — not the one that sank the ship.
No question the economy — high interest rates, high inflation, unemployment ticking upward — was a major factor in Carter’s defeat.
But it’s important not to underestimate the hostage situation as a factor. Carter and his pollsters — tracking things daily — actually noted that the hostages were the central concern of voters in the final days before the election. And it was the anniversary of the hostages being taken — the date being just a few days before Election Day — and all the negative news about them still being stuck in Iran that hit voters in massive corp media coverage just before the election. And that stopped the Carter momentum (apparently real) that was beginning to develop in the final stages of the campaign as nervous or soft pro-Reagan voters, the undecided, and some soft pro-Anderson voters decided not to back Jimmy.
But had Carter somehow managed to get the hostages out in the period before the election — then, despite a lousy economy, at the very least it’s likely JC would have come up to a neck-and-neck race with Reagan, with Anderson’s eventual 6.7% support probably dropping considerably along with Jimmy taking a few points away from Ronnie.
See for the polling, the recently published Carter Diaries. He also briefly mentions, in a post-Diary segment, the allegations by ex-State Dept official Gary Sick and his book about the October Surprise where he charges Reagan/Poppy campaign people with interfering with Carter’s negotiations with Iranian leaders. That is, JC by citing the book and author by name and mentioning the charges w/o explicitly endorsing them, seems to be suggesting there might be some there there. He says the reader should check into the material and decide for himself.
One correction to my above: Election Day 1980 was actually the one-year anniversary of the hostages being taken in Iran — so an even worse situation for Carter as the voters going to the polls that day would have had the hostages on their minds all the more, as the MSM kept constantly reminding them.
Also: I believe it’s safe to state that had that April ’80 rescue mission for the hostages been successful (a big If for sure as it was 10 times more difficult to accomplish than getting OBL in Pakistan), it would have had an electrifying effect on the electorate, and Carter likely would have gone on to re-election. Certainly no worse than a razor-thin victory over Reagan, as Anderson’s numbers would have gone way down and Reagan’s just enough as former Carter backers, once dissatisfied would have returned to the fold.
I was emerging from my sojourn in back-to-the land hippiedom and headed into a divorce. That period brings back memories of the air traffic controllers strike and subsequent union busting by St. Ronnie. One of my old high school classmates, who was a controller at Indianapolis Center was fired and never worked as a controller again. The sixties aftermath was morphing into the Me Decade.
I was 3 years old.
From my Résumé:
Senior Engineer – International Harvester June 1979 – March1982 (direct employee)
· Designed PID software for closed loop control of a hydrostatic power transmission.
· Utilized the 8085 and 8051 microprocessors, PL/M-80, PL/M-51 and assembly languages.
· Created software simulation models of various hydraulic systems and devices in FORTRAN on IBM 4331 and DEC PDP-11 computers.
I was working in construction in Northern California — but before that I’d attended UC Berkeley. Under the shah, young upper middle class Iranians were shipped to our area to go to school and maybe stay out of political trouble. They all hated the shah and feared his vicious secret police.
So I figured the Iranian revolution was their thing and if they had a beef with the US, they probably had the right of the matter. Not nice to lock up diplomats, but good to end the torture chambers …
I had no beef with Iran and still don’t except that many of the people there seem to have had it with the theocracy. If we keep out of the way, maybe they’ll get rid of the mullahs. They are an ancient, proud people.