Carter, the Hostages, and the Shah

These blog posts usually address Native American and local history; I try especially to trace the pre-contact history and culture, and the early and continuing relationships of Indians and non-Indians in the Wallowa Country. But I also try to keep blog followers aware of new work in Native American history generally; I want people to know that the pope repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, and to know what that Doctrine is and how it entered into American Indian Law, and how its impact can be followed right down to Nez Perce treaties.

We know about the Indian Boarding schools now, but it took Canadian school graves and our first Native American Secretary of the Interior to bring them to the attention of Americans. And we now know something of their immediate impact on Native Americans from the 1870s forward, and we can discuss the lingering generational impacts on families—and individuals—of these schools. Many of our Nez Perce friends have family stories that involve boarding schools and their consequences. Etc.

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I call the blog “Omissions and Celebrations: A History Blog,” and occasionally I do take on other aspects of US and world history. Especially when I have personal experience that I can relate to larger events—to history’s “omissions.”

On President Carter’s death, with all of the news coverage of his improbable assent to the Presidency from his Georgia peanut farm—and of the Iranian hostage crisis that some say was the death of his presidency, I am thrown back to my own long-ago experience in Iran. It was common knowledge—at the time, in 1979—that David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger applied serious pressure on a reluctant Carter to allow the deposed Shah Riza Pahlavi into the United States for medical treatment. I have heard nothing of this in the many news accounts I have read and watched since Carter’s death. Is it just forgetfulness? Or do Rockefeller and Kissinger have special places in our story that make us reluctant to dig up old bones?

My own story goes back further than the events of 1979, to a 1968 visit to Iran as an evaluator of the Peace Corps program. In those days, Peace Corps evaluated every program almost every year, and I was recruited as the junior member of a two-man evaluation team because I spoke Turkish. The Azerbaijanis in a rich part of northwestern Iran speak a dialect of Turkish, and I could be understood and make myself understood by bosses and colleagues of Volunteers. My partner, Park, was married to an Iranian and spoke Farsi, the primary language of the country. We did the best we could in parts of the country where Arabic, Kurdish, and other languages and dialects were spoken.

After a month touring the country, visiting Volunteers in their worksites and attending a few conferences, we gathered in Tehran for final meetings with Peace Corps staff members—and an “exit interview” with the American ambassador. We relayed what we had heard: many Volunteers were hearing serious anti-Shah sentiment, and that they themselves were often assigned jobs that were aimed at glorifying the Shah rather than helping the people. Specifically, a group of engineers and architects were designing parks and grand boulevards to the Shah’s name and glory.

As I recall, and remember that this is all over 50 years ago now, the Ambassador cut our interview short, asking us to leave. We were basically kicked out for our unwanted report. By then I knew how important the Shah’s regime was to our government, how we bought oil and sold enormous amounts of weapons to them. I did not know about the CIA’s role in the 1953 overthrow of a popular government. That was admitted only years later, although many Iranians obviously knew about it.

Ten years later, the American embassy was overrun by young partisans of the Ayatollah led government, and Carter’s presidential fall began. I was not surprised, and in fact knew one of the hostages. He had been a Volunteer in Turkey, where I was on staff, and I had helped transfer him to Iran as our program wound down in 1970. Mike went from the Peace Corps to the State Department, and was one of the hostI goages who spent 444 days in confinement.

I recently googled to check my facts, and found an essay by a former hostage turned professor,
Dr. William J. Daugherty. In a 2003 article in American Diplomacy, he confirmed what I had believed from 1979. By that time, he wrote, the State Department and embassy staff were trying to form ties by a still volatile revolution that had deposed the Shah. They warned superiors that allowing the Shah into the US might mean a takeover of the American embassy. President Carter and his immediate advisors believed them. And tried to deal with conflicting reports of the Shah’s illnesses and need for medical treatment.

The Shah went to Egypt, to Mexico, and to the Bahamas as events proceeded. Ultimately, with a lapse of time, dubious medical reports, and strong pressure from Rockefeller and Kissinger, who worked for Rockefeller, whose bank had done big business with the Shah, Carter gave in. The embassy staff was aghast, and the takeover and 444-day siege began. Neither Kissinger or Rockefeller had official government positions at the time. And, as I recall, England did not accept the Shah’s request for asylum.

The siege strengthened the Ayatollahs’ hold on Iran, whose more centrist and West-leaning factions were soon overwhelmed. I wonder now how the course of history, of Iran’s history, and of our relations with Iran and the broader Middle East turned on this event.

And the course of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

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