As they sat locked in the same room day after day, week after week, month after month, listening to “death to America” chants and wondering when the bullet might come, the 52 American hostages being held in Iran had no idea what President Jimmy Carter was doing or if he even cared.
All they knew was that he had not gotten them out.
Only later, after the handcuffs and the blindfolds came off, after the plane carried them out of Iranian airspace, after the threat of show trials and summary executions finally vanished, did the hostages held for 444 days realize just how much Mr. Carter had done, and how consumed he had been with freeing them — perhaps, he later admitted, even too much.
Of all the people around the world mourning the death of Mr. Carter at age 100 this week, few could say that he changed the course of their lives more directly and consequentially than the Americans taken captive by Iranian militants at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979. For them, the swirl of emotions is complicated but bone deep as memories flood back from those dark days.
“There’s no doubt about it in my mind that if it weren’t for President Carter, I don’t think I would be here now,” Barry Rosen, 80, the press attaché at the embassy during the takeover, said in an interview from his home in New York. “He took the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on our behalf, and he saved our lives.”
To history, the Iran hostage crisis remains the emblem of a failed presidency, a grievous wound to American stature around the world and a proximate cause of the electoral tidal wave that swept Mr. Carter out of the White House after a single term.
But to at least some of those who lived it, Mr. Carter remains a figure worthy of respect and admiration for his relentless determination to bring them home, even at the expense of his own political career.
“He did his best,” said Michael Metrinko, 78, a consular officer at the time. “He was dealing with a time of insanity — compete insanity, political insanity — on the part of the Iranians, on the part of a lot of Americans.”
Mark Bowden, the author of “Guests of the Ayatollah,” said most of the former hostages he had spoken with for his book were grateful to Mr. Carter “for his careful handling of an impossible situation.”
Still, over the years there has been a strain of anger among some of the former hostages that it took so long to secure their release. Some, including L. Bruce Laingen, the chargé d’affairs and highest-ranking diplomat taken hostage, blamed Mr. Carter for precipitating the crisis by allowing Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the deposed shah, into the United States for cancer treatment, infuriating the Islamist militants who had taken over Iran.
“They saw it as needlessly provocative and were proved right,” Mr. Bowden said. Even so, he added, “their anger was reserved for Iran’s Islamist regime and for their captors but also for misguided Americans,” including liberal political figures, “who traveled to Tehran to participate in propaganda events orchestrated by the hostage takers.”
It is hard to convey to those too young to remember just how consuming the hostage crisis was. Americans were obsessed with the standoff and tied yellow ribbons around trees to demonstrate concern for the hostages. Network newscasts led off night after night with the latest developments, counting the number of days of that America had been “held hostage.” Mr. Carter brought much of this on himself by making freeing the hostages his top public priority, even refusing at first to campaign for re-election so he could concentrate on bringing them home.
The crisis had its origins in the Iranian revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who installed a radical religious order in Tehran. An ally of the United States, the shah went into exile in Mexico. But as his cancer worsened, Mr. Carter came under pressure to admit the shah from influential figures like former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and the wealthy banker David Rockefeller.
Mr. Carter anticipated the consequences.
“What are you guys going to advise me to do when they overrun our embassy now and take our people hostage?” he asked his staff, according to a book by his former aide, Stuart E. Eizenstat. Yet despite his misgivings, Mr. Carter granted the shah’s request.
As Mr. Carter predicted, outraged Iranian militants stormed the embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, taking 52 Americans as captives. Mr. Carter responded by imposing sanctions on Iran, freezing its assets in the United States and embarking on months of painstaking diplomacy.
He ordered a military rescue attempt in April 1980, but the mission failed when a helicopter crashed into a plane in the Iranian desert, leading to the death of eight marines and airmen. After more months of stalemate, Americans, who had initially rallied behind Mr. Carter, turned on him and for that and other reasons elected Ronald Reagan in November.
Through it all, the hostages waited and worried. Some were beaten. Some were subjected to mock executions. All were cut off from the outside world.
“There was no communication,” recalled Rocky Sickmann, 67, then a Marine stationed at the embassy who now lives in St. Louis. “You were not allowed to speak. You just sat there tied up and listening through the broken windows. The city of Tehran, it would wake up in the morning, and you could hear the noise and you could hear the protests.”
Mr. Sickmann said he was only allowed to go outside seven times during his more than 14 months in captivity. “You didn’t know if you were going to live or die, morning, noon or night,” he said. And he did not know if people back home even thought about them. “Who’s going to care?” he recalled thinking. “Little did I realize that everybody did care.”
The hostages understood something had happened when the rescue mission failed because suddenly they were moved and dispersed to thwart future attempts. But even today, some of them remain haunted by the American troops who died trying to save them.
“Every morning I wake up, I think of those eight,” said Mr. Sickmann, who now works for Folds of Honor, a nonprofit organization providing scholarships to children of fallen troops, police officers and firefighters. “Imagine: Those eight would never have the chance to have a son to go fishing with. Those eight would never have the chance to go to a father-daughter dance. Those eight would never have a chance to walk their daughter down the aisle. Those eight would never have grandchildren.”
Over the decades since, some of the hostages and plenty of others have suspected that people around Mr. Reagan plotted to discourage Iran from releasing the hostages before the election, knowing that it would benefit Mr. Carter. At the time, his associates speculated publicly that Mr. Carter would engineer their release as an “October surprise” to fuel his own re-election campaign.
Last year, a new account revived the matter. Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, told The New York Times that he unwittingly participated in an effort to delay the release of the hostages. Mr. Barnes said his mentor, former Gov. John B. Connally Jr. of Texas, who was angling for a post in a Reagan cabinet, invited him in 1980 to come along on a trip around the Middle East.
During meetings with leaders in the region, Mr. Barnes said he was shocked to hear Mr. Connally urge them to convey the message to Iran not to release the hostages before the election, promising a better deal under Mr. Reagan. After returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Connally and Mr. Casey have both died and confirming the account is difficult all these years later. But another book published this fall added more fuel to the fire. In “Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House,” Craig Unger, a longtime journalist, connects more dots, concluding that Mr. Casey helped sabotage efforts to free the hostages before the election.
Some of the former hostages remain convinced that they were used as pawns in a political game. But many also recalled Mr. Carter’s concern and attention, and how he got to know their families during the long ordeal.
“Carter was by far and away the best president we had,” said Mr. Metrinko, who has retired from the foreign service and lives in Carlisle, Pa. “He was the most humane, the most compassionate, the most honorable, the greatest integrity and decency of any politician that I know.”
Historians, foreign policy analysts and even former aides have concluded that Mr. Carter erred by making the hostages such a public cause, both because it gave leverage to the Iranians and because it drained his domestic support.
“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Mr. Carter told The Washington Post in 2018. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”
A final, frenetic round of diplomacy after the election finally yielded an agreement to free them in exchange for releasing Iranian assets in U.S. banks, but in a last snub to the outgoing president, the Iranians held the planes until minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath on Jan. 21, 1981.
At Mr. Reagan’s behest, Mr. Carter flew to Wiesbaden, in what was then West Germany, to greet the hostages on their journey home. “It was an act of really great bravery on his part, because he did not know what kind of reception he would receive,” Mr. Metrinko recalled.
Some of the former hostages refused to meet with him, but most greeted him with appreciation. “He smiled and he asked for forgiveness and we gave him a round of applause,” said Mr. Rosen. “I think many of us were angry at him. I personally wasn’t — I felt he made a promise to keep us alive. He made a promise to our families that he would get us out. And it was just a joyful period.”
Like others, Mr. Sickmann was left this week to ponder the what ifs, including what would have happened if Mr. Carter had not been the one in the Oval Office at the time.
“Had it been any other president,” he said, “you wonder: Would they have taken this much interest in our case?”
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