disguised contempt, noting the “stark, depressing reality” of the standoff and itemizing each day’s new insult and outrage. More than any foreign policy episode in American history, the Iran hostage crisis would be shaped by television. In any age, the capture of several score Americans in an obscure world capital would have been a big story, but one that in time would have faded. Prior to the television era, those directly interested in the story would have followed it in newspapers and magazines, of course, but for the masses of Americans concern over the captives’ fate would have diminished and eventually dropped off the front pages.
But this was a story made for television, particularly at a time when satellites had enabled instant reporting of events from almost anywhere in the world. It was a suspenseful, unfolding story, a real-life cliff-hanger, and it tapped an insatiable appetite for political intrigue, scandal, military analysis, drama, and pathos. It was a huge story for newspapers and magazines, too, but the tube was in just about every living room in America. The story grabbed the nation by the neck and held on. The United States was being publicly humiliated, goaded, maligned, and insulted on an international stage. The students themselves were media savvy, and with regular press conferences and dramatic pronouncements made sure the story didn’t fade. Reporters from American newspapers and the big three TV networks were allowed to set up in Tehran and file daily reports—ABC’s were delivered nightly by future anchorman Peter Jennings. The constant torrent of demeaning images and disturbing rhetoric from this obscure and exotic land was both frightening and fascinating. Why did they call Americans devils? Why did they assume all the diplomats and marines they held were spies? Some of the questions they raised seemed plausible. By 1979 most Americans knew that their country was not above undermining the internal affairs of small foreign countries. Were these accusations true? Did the hostages deserve what was happening to them?
On a national level, the Carter administration appeared to have badly blundered by admitting the shah. Why had the embassy not been closed first? Weren’t the consequences entirely predictable? Every night a wide range of experts was invited to interpret each mystifying new twist of the drama. Why couldn’t the United States respond militarily? How could we let these Iranian hotheads get away with this? The story had another thing going for it. Each of the sixty-six Americans in captivity had hometowns, families, relatives, friends, and coworkers. Every local news outlet in the country had a local angle. Hundreds of city TV stations were used to just taking the network feed for breaking national and international stories, just as its newspapers tapped wire services, but with this one they could break their own stories and view the crisis through their own fresh and emotionally powerful lens. Over the first weeks, local reporters scrambled to learn the names of the hostages—with some diplomats still hiding in Tehran, the government refused to release a complete list of names—but gradually the identities of all of the Americans were revealed. Reporters and cameras descended on quiet neighborhoods in just about every state. The hostages’ families found themselves at the center of a media storm. Every word they uttered, every tear they shed, was suddenly news. Stations in local markets vied for access to them. Dorothea Morefield, the poised, articulate wife of consul general Dick Morefield, who had undergone the terrifying mock execution, became a regular on San Diego television. “My heart aches,” she told a reporter there, watching new film of the hostages on the day of capture. The mother of marine Billy Gallegos wept for cameras in Colorado, one of many hostage family members who broke down for local newsmen. State Department communicator Bill Belk’s wife told the camera, “There are no words to explain how I feel.”
The crisis was a ratings dream, a conundrum, a scandal, and a tear-jerker, with no clear resolution in sight. Every day brought new provocative twists. Some Iranian students on college campuses in the United States defended the embassy takeover and were confronted by crowds of angry American students. There were isolated acts of retaliation against Iranians living in the United States, fear of oil shortages, signs of military maneuvers, and countless gestures of citizen support for the captives. Cable television and the advent of the twenty-four-hour news cycle were still a few years away, but the decade-long ratings success of the CBS weekly news show
The networks extended their newscasts and packaged hourlong specials in prime time to update and analyze the story, but despite all the hours of television time devoted to the crisis very little effort was made to understand why there were mobs of fist-waving Iranians massed outside the Tehran embassy, or why the students had been motivated to take Americans hostage. The students were referred to as “militants” or extremists, and their action was seen as a wild, inexplicable act of fanaticism. There was little or no explanation of the role played by the United States in overthrowing Iran’s government more than a quarter century earlier, or any of the other reasons for Iranian anger or suspicion. Iranian rage was presented as something incomprehensible, something mad. Americans were no longer surprised by Third World hostility; the sentiment “Yankee Go Home” seemed to require no explanation. By the end of the 1970s America had come down hard from its post–World War Two fantasy of invincibility; it had weathered the tragedy and humiliation of Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and concurrent revelations of CIA and FBI excesses, the long lines at gas stations that resulted from the OPEC embargo. While still ostensibly the leader of the “free world,” the nation suddenly seemed powerless, corrupt, inept, and despised. Many of the bad things people said about us had turned out to be true. A seized embassy and scores of American officials held hostage was just further confirmation of a depressing new reality. The images on television reinforced a decade of American disappointment.
For the Carter administration, this confluence of story and medium was pure disaster. Already Jimmy Carter had demonstrated a gift for making Americans feel bad. His effort to introduce morality and concern for human rights in foreign policy was seen by more bellicose citizens as a strategy of compromise and retreat. In the most ill-considered idea in the history of public relations, Carter had devised the “misery index” to gauge the national mood, as inflation and rising oil prices battered household income. His decision to give back the Panama Canal, while entirely defensible, was seen as yet another retreat, as was his prudent call for Americans to conserve fuel, which he called “a real challenge to our country, a test.” He was right, even prescient, but it was stern medicine, delivered by a homely, preternaturally sad-looking man in a somber, earnest monotone. In his bad-news mode, the very folds of the president’s face and the hang of his heavy lips seemed a mask of disappointment. The leader of the free world looked whipped. And now this. The hostage crisis seemed designed to complete the unfair image of Carter as a weak, apologetic leader. A rabble of college students seizes an American embassy, holds his countrymen hostage, sends daily taunts, insults, and accusations across the ocean, and the president of the United States does…nothing. At least it seemed that way. On just a moment’s reflection, though, it was easy to see that anyone in his position would have been hamstrung, but no one else was in Carter’s position, and the longer it lasted the more he seemed somehow to
Everyone wanted Carter to do something, but there were few good ideas about what it should be. Public sentiment ran in favor of striking back at Iran, but ran just as strongly in favor of taking no action that might harm the hostages.
In a speech before Congress, Representative George Hansen, a Republican from Idaho, called for Carter to be impeached “if he doesn’t do something,” and referred contemptuously to the administration’s “weak-kneed nonpolicy.” He offered no suggestions.
Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from the same state, whose committee hearings had famously exposed CIA excesses just a few years before and prompted severe restrictions on intelligence-gathering methods, now complained about the dearth of intelligence. “It’s extremely frustrating and difficult to find the [Iranian] government or determine who speaks with authority.”
“Carter should get off his duff,” said one man stopped on the street in Dallas for a TV interview, expressing a widespread feeling.
“What do you think he can do?” the reporter asked.
“I don’t know,” said the man.
A woman stopped on the same sidewalk said, “Force should be used.”
“But what if responding militarily would mean that the hostages would be harmed?” she was asked.
“No, then we shouldn’t use force,” she said. “I don’t want them to be harmed.”
Americans had long enjoyed the luxury of neither knowing nor caring about the grievances of small foreign nations. Suddenly, the Third World had found a way to compel their attention. Where was Iran? Who were these “militant” students? What was an ayatollah? Why did they hate us so much?
ABC aired a long interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, chain-smoking and looking gloriously bored, whose insights were close to the mark.
“I believe the crowd is in control of Khomeini,” she said. “When I saw that Ahmad was going to the
