Suspense over the election and the hostages rose toward a crescendo on election eve. Once again the nation was poised for a happy ending…and nothing happened. The Iranian leaders had apparently expected Carter to grab at the chance to save his presidency; they had demanded that he simply announce his acceptance of the deal on television. To his credit Carter didn’t bite. He coolly issued a statement calling the proposed deal “a good and constructive move,” but said that his actions would not be governed by the press of the campaign or his desire for a second term. There was still a filament of hope that the Iranians would go through with the release and complete the negotiations afterward. The president would note in his memoirs, “Now my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control.”
There were complex legal issues involved. Probably the most difficult conditions were the requests that Iranian assets be unfrozen and that legal claims against the country be dropped. There were about $10 billion in assets at stake, which included securities, gold deposits with the Federal Reserve, and money in the U.S. Treasury and in American banks both at home and abroad. At least $500 million was being held by American companies. Lodged against that fortune were lawsuits over debts incurred by the shah’s government that had gone unpaid after the revolution, including a $175 million bill from Sedco, a Texas oil equipment firm, a $93 million bill owed the E. I. Du Pont Corporation for a synthetic textile plant it had built in Iran, and an unpaid $85 million bill to the Xerox Corporation. The most hopeful part of the proposal was Iran’s suggestion that Algerian diplomats mediate final discussions.
Instead of a breakthrough, however, Carter’s beleaguered face appeared on TV to announce yet another in a long series of disappointments. The result was immediate. With typically cold calculation, Carter wrote in his diary that evening, Monday, November 3:
Pat [Cadell, his pollster] was getting some very disturbing public-opinion poll results, showing a massive slippage as people realized that the hostages were not coming home. The anniversary date…absolutely filled the news media.
On Election Day, Carter returned to his home in Plains, Georgia, to cast his vote. He told reporters, coyly, “I asked my wife who she was voting for, and I voted the same way.” When reporters asked him what he planned to do in the event that he lost, he demurred, saying that he expected to win, but he already knew the truth. In a moment rare for him, the president lost his composure thanking the gathered friends and family from his hometown. He said he felt “more encouraged than I have in the past” about winning the hostages’ release, and, asked about the impact the hostage crisis had on his reelection campaign, Carter said with conviction tinged by a trace of wistfulness, “I’d have to say it was a negative factor, but we acted properly.”
In the end, the third-party candidate Anderson wasn’t even a factor. American voters making up their minds at the last minute decided in favor of the Republican candidate, giving Reagan and his party an overwhelming victory. The former movie star and California governor took almost 10 percent more of the popular tally and a landslide of electoral votes—489 to 49. He carried forty-four of the fifty states.
There was widespread rejoicing in Iran over Carter’s defeat. It was regarded by many as another sign of Allah’s hand in world affairs, although no less a local hero than Mousavi Khoeniha, spiritual adviser to the student hostage takers, was less sanguine. Referring to Reagan, he told a reporter, “The yellow dog is brother to the jackal.”
On the first anniversary of their captivity, some of the hostages were awakened in Evin prison by radio broadcasts in English. Apparently the students wanted to spread the news, and had tuned in to a BBC station and cranked up the volume. Some of the report concerned the Polish uprising against its Soviet masters, and then came the news that Ronald Reagan had defeated Jimmy Carter in the American election.
Most of the hostages were delighted. They assumed that Reagan’s election meant something was going to happen. They had done such a good job convincing their guards that the “something” would not be good for Iran that Joe Hall felt the need to reassure a fearful Big Ali that nothing would happen right away.
“In the American system, Reagan will not take office until the end of January,” he explained.
Even those hostages who preferred Carter were heartened. They had known nothing of the deal for their release that had seemed so close as the election approached, so this news was the first in months that suggested change. Everyone, hostages and guards, started counting down the days until Reagan’s inauguration, January 21, 1981.
After Reagan’s victory, talks over the hostages cooled. For Laingen, Howland, and Tomseth, the only captives who were in a position to follow the process closely, it was maddening. Perhaps most distressing was the absence of continued American outrage. Somehow during the year of captivity, the threats and counterthreats and the failed rescue mission, the capacity for anger seemed to have exhausted itself. Negotiations proceeded through November, with overtures and responses, as though America were hammering out a trade agreement, not dealing with a criminal regime. Carter welcomed the conditions demanded by the Iranian kidnappers. Reagan, after the election, pledged to abide by whatever solution was reached. It seemed that American blood could no longer boil. Clare Boothe Luce, the elderly former journalist, ambassador, and conservative congresswoman, commented sarcastically, “The United States will end up apologizing to Iran for its having declared war on us.”
The passion had also drained out of Laingen’s writings. In the early months of captivity, his journal and long letters home were filled with repetitive railing against the flagrant injustice and folly of Iran’s policies. But he had emptied that well. Like a man who wakes up to a green sky, he had worn himself out trying to get other people to notice that something was wrong and now had given himself over to simple observation.
He wrote in his journal:
How do I feel about Iran? It has gone on so long that I think I have overcome most of the anger and bitterness I felt earlier. It is behind us now; we are alive and well and physically no worse for wear—only a year older! I could not feel good toward the leadership, certainly not the hard-liners, certainly not the clerics and the “student” militants. I think I feel scorn for them but not hate. They will suffer—are suffering—for what they did. They have brought Iran to the point of collapse, to a war that they encouraged in the sense that they weakened Iran to the point where Hussein felt he could attack—or felt angry enough to attack because of [Khomeini] and his constant call for Hussein’s overthrow…. There is the hard reality of our country’s interest. It is not in our interest to see Iran defeated or dismembered by war, or to see it weakened so that extremist political elements of another persuasion take over. On balance, our long-range interests are Iran, not Iraq.
Still, there was that “scorn.” Most revolutions are driven at least in part by fantasy, the belief that a certain class or tribe of people is special or chosen, that some idea represents the permanent apex of human thought, if not God’s own. Never was this more evident than in Iran. The rhetoric of the revolution was arrogant and self- righteous to the point of parody, and from his third-floor perch, monitoring the local TV, radio, and press, Laingen had heard about all he could stand. “Sanctimonious” was the word he used for it in his journal. It resembled the doublespeak of Orwell’s
Month by month the clerics’ double-talk was becoming more institutionalized, more the official vocabulary of the state. If it were not totally clear that the religious extremists were in control, it became so when Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the dapper official who had stepped down as foreign minister to make way for an appointee more acceptable to the ruling clerics, was briefly arrested in mid-November. Among other heresies, he pronounced in a TV interview, “Iran is governed by a group of fascist extremists who are driving this country to disaster.”
