6. “Let’s Make America Great Again”: 1980
BY APRIL 24, 1980, FIFTY-THREE AMERICAN HOSTAGES HAD BEEN held for six months at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. President Jimmy Carter had negotiated with Iran but to no avail. Exasperated, he authorized a risky operation to rescue the hostages. “I do not want to undertake this operation,” he told his military brass, “but we have no other recourse….We’re going to do this operation.”1 Carter judged it was time “to bring our hostages home; their safety and our national honor were at stake.”2
The adrenaline surged among elite U.S. forces. Carter’s plan called for a complex two-night operation involving hundreds of varied personnel, including the elite Delta Force and its 132 commandos and a unit of Army Rangers. Forty-four aircraft would be deployed among six different locations, among them the critical RH-53 helicopters and C-130 Hercules transports rigged with temporary 18,000-gallon fuel tanks. On day one, the helicopters and C-130s would meet in an isolated spot in the Iranian desert where they would refuel the choppers, load the rescue team, and move on to hideouts near Tehran. On day two, undercover U.S. intelligence agents with trucks would escort the elite forces to the embassy, where they would seize the building and evacuate the hostages to a nearby soccer stadium. From there, all would be picked up by the helicopters and taken to the Iranian-controlled Manzariyeh Air Base forty miles away. Army Rangers were to take and hold the air base, shooting anyone who threatened the mission. Once the copters arrived, so would C-141s to fly out the hostages and rescue team.
Unfortunately it never got that far. Failure came in the first critical phase—getting the aircraft to their initial desert destination. Flying low to avoid detection, the helicopters were blinded by dust and sandstorms. Only six of the eight made it to their destination, leaving no room for error. Just then, one of the remaining six succumbed to hydraulic failure. The operation was over; the commander on the scene scrapped the mission.
But the troops were not out of the woods. In their aborted effort, they made quite a bit of noise, shooting at one Iranian truck that ran a roadblock and detaining an Iranian bus with over forty passengers on board. The forty-four troops needed to lift up and out.
First, a single helicopter that was parked behind one of the large C-130s needed to move. As it tried to lift off, it kicked up a dust cloud, forcing it to angle sideways rather than upward. Its blades sliced into the large aircraft, ripping open the huge fuel bladder. Suddenly, these safe havens became giant fireballs. Munitions and explosives ignited. Elite forces tumbled on to the ground, screaming in agony as their flesh smoldered. “The accident was a calamity heaped on despair,” said Colonel James Kyle, the on-scene commander who watched in horror. “It was devastating.” He called it “the most colossal episode of hope, despair, and tragedy” that he had experienced in nearly three decades of military service. Kyle is still haunted by the nightmares.3 In the words of Staff Sergeant Taco Sanchez, they had “failed America.”4
At 7 am the next day, April 25, President Carter, a man for whom things could not get worse, informed a sleepy nation that eight of its servicemen had died in a secret, failed rescue operation. When the bodies were returned, a memorial service was held at Arlington National Cemetery. Captain J. V. O. Weaver escorted the wife and children of one of the deceased troops. Carter walked over to the family. Said Weaver: “[H]e looked down at those two little boys, and he just got down on his knees and wrapped his arms around them. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. Here’s the president of the United States, on his knees, crying, holding these boys.”5
The ordeal was dubbed Desert One, named for that awful area in the Iranian desert, and like “Bay of Pigs,” it became synonymous for a military fiasco. Desert One was not just another humiliation in a long line of U.S. embarrassments; it was a microcosm of the stagnation and low morale that America faced. More than just an aborted rescue mission, this was a cry not just for a new leader but for a new paradigm.
FROM THE FALL OF SAIGON TO THE PROSTRATE ECONOMY, this was a bad time for America. It was the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era in which the flatlined economy was underscored by a pessimistic measurement called the “misery index.” Unemployment and inflation were at doubledigit levels. Interest rates approaching 20 percent nearly halted home buying. An energy crisis wrought soaring gas prices and queues. In short, the nation faced its worst economic situation since the Great Depression.
In addition, military morale, still stained from Vietnam, had faced yet another setback with the Desert One fiasco, and U.S. foreign policy was not faring much better. With hostages remaining in Iran, the United States faced hostile regimes in Iran and Nicaragua, and Soviet advances around the globe. Only weeks after Americans were taken hostage in Iran, President Carter met another foreign-policy nightmare when the Red Army stormed into Afghanistan, Moscow’s first direct military intervention outside the Warsaw Pact since World War II.
Carter’s initial reaction to the Soviet invasion did nothing to slow his slide in opinion polls. In a television interview six days later, he said: “My opinion of the Russians has changed most dramatically in the last week…. [T]his action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”6 His remark was viewed by many as dangerously naive, as a form of on-the-job education unacceptably late for a president. Ronald Reagan privately said that Carter’s assessment “would be laughable, I think, if it were not so tragic.”7 In a separate private comment, Reagan added: “It is frightening to hear a man in the office of the presidency who has just discovered that the Soviets can’t be trusted, that they’ve lied to him.”8
The public agreed. After the Red invasion, Carter’s approval rating fell to 20 percent.9
As Uncle Sam reeled, the Soviets hammered Afghanistan, mercilessly pounding the Afghan resistance. Campaigning in Pensacola, Florida on January 9, 1980, Ronald Reagan had a policy recommendation: the United States should supply the guerrillas with shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missiles to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships.10
While that suggestion became a battle that he would wage during his presidency, for now it was clear that one of Reagan’s most ardent beliefs had come true: detente was dead. Now, much of America agreed with Reagan that detente was a joke that merely let Moscow pursue expansionary interests with no improvement in behavior; the Soviet invasion was a wake-up call.
Unfortunately, in the eyes of many, America, too, was dead. The nation, we were told, was “in decline”; it had seen its glory days. Edmund Morris captured the mood: “When President Carter wasn’t telling us about his hemorrhoids, he was telling us about our national malaise. ‘Patriotism’ was an embarrassing word. Young people were snickering at men and women in uniform.”11
Morale was at its lowest point in fifty years, with seemingly little prospect for reversal, and it was this trend that Ronald Reagan sought to reverse. In 1980, more than forty years after he saved seventy-seven people from drowning in Dixon, Illinois, the former Rock River lifeguard appointed himself a new rescue mission: America.
REAGAN’S VISION FOR RESTORATION
In his previous presidential campaign four years earlier, Reagan made it clear what he was against. Now, in 1980, he was especially vocal about what he favored. Ronald Reagan wanted a confident America, a global leader that would protect and promote freedom; the country was to serve as a Shining City Upon a Hill—a light of liberty that would “shine unto the nations,” acting not just as a model of liberty but a purveyor.12 To Reagan, spreading freedom entailed rolling back Communist totalitarianism. The Shining City represented not just a lofty ideal; it signaled a future in which America stood proud, a future in which there was not a Soviet superpower.
In U.S. history, the Shining City was invoked in 1630 aboard the Arabella by John Winthrop, the leader of the small group of pilgrim settlers approaching the shoreline. While other Americans cited the metaphor in subsequent centuries, few latched on to it like Reagan. Both Reagan and Winthrop felt that this role for America was divinely ordained: God had chosen their land as an example, to be set upon a hill, aglow, admired by all who
