#iran hostage crisis

[deadpresidents]

Is there any truth to the 1980 October surprise theory?

The New York Times published a story earlier this year where Ben Barnes -- a Republican supporter of Reagan's in 1980 who had once served as Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and protege of former Texas Governor John Connally -- confirmed that the Reagan campaign absolutely encouraged Iran not to release the American embassy hostages before the election because Reagan would give the Iranians a better deal if he was elected President. Barnes admitted that he was present as Connally passed that message around while on a trip to the Middle East in order to get word to the Iranians. It's not exactly a smoking gun because virtually everyone seemingly involved in implementing the October Surprise is dead other than Barnes, but it's a weird thing for Barnes to lie about 45 years later, especially considering how close his relationship was with Governor Connally. Plus, we know that there were shady contacts between people in the Reagan Administration and Iran because of the Iran-Contra scandal.

I think there is definitely some truth to the theory, but I also believe that the Iranians were more than happy to spite President Carter by not releasing the hostages until literally the moment Reagan took the oath of office. The Iranians were still furious with the Carter Administration for letting the Shah come to the United States for medical treatment after he was forced to leave Iran as the Iranian Revolution exploded and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to become Supreme Leader. Carter had also helped broker the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which also infuriated Iran and much of the Islamic world. Plus, Carter had ordered Operation Eagle Claw -- the failed attempt to rescue the hostages by force -- and that was seen as an act of war. So, the Ayatollah and leaders of Revolutionary Iran had no love lost for President Carter and weren't interested in doing him any favors before he left office.

The October Surprise that many people overlook is the one which took place in 1968 shortly before the Nixon vs. Humphrey election. When it looked like there might be some progress made in peace talks to bring the Vietnam War to a close, Nixon and his advisers got word to the South Vietnamese to hold off on working toward peace until Nixon was elected and could give them better terms. It was such an egregious act that LBJ actually told people around him that he felt Nixon had committed treason and that he had the blood of American soldiers on his hands for sabotaging peace talks. We even have the tapes of LBJ's phone calls after finding out about Nixon's actions where President Johnson straight-up says, "This is Treason!"

[politicalrpf]

1979 political cartoon of Jimmy Carter, by Mahammud Kahil.

[spikedluv]

I learned about this recently and am disgusted by it. But sadly, not surprised.

[firstoccupier]

Timeline of Jimmy Carter's Presidency (1977 - 1981)

1977 January 20: Inauguration of Jimmy Carter as the 39th President. He emphasizes transparency, human rights, and energy conservation. March 2: Creation of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education to streamline governmental operations and focus on key national issues. April 18: The first extensive reorganization of the federal government in decades, aiming for efficiency and…

[alanfromrochester]

like Nixon convincing the North Vietnamese to not make a deal with LBJ

For every righteous and correct step forward, reactionary Republicans drag the country back decades.

Ronald Reagan was in his 70s and pretty much said 'fcuk you' to younger generations.

That is how all conservatives act: they get so lonely/greedy with their money, they leave the country/society much worse off.

[xtruss]

Jimmy Carter’s Rock-and-Roll Legacy

The former President has a surprisingly long list of musician friends, some of whom, in the past days and weeks, have been reflecting on the time they’ve had with him.

In recent weeks, the former President has mostly been listening to favorites like Willie Nelson, whose music helped get him through the Iran hostage crisis. Photograph by Thomas S. England/Getty

In the decades since Jimmy Carter left the White House, there have been many reconsiderations of the former President’s legacy. Among the more unexpected of these is “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President,” a documentary released in 2020, which chronicles Carter’s overlooked relationship not only with rock and roll but also with country, jazz, folk, and other genres. The movie had accidental beginnings: its lead producer, Chris Farrell, who’d previously worked in finance and had never made a film, set out to make a movie about the Allman Brothers Band, a group that, like him, hails from Jacksonville, Florida. Then a friend suggested that he call up some people in Atlanta who had worked for Carter.

“They start telling me all these amazing stories about Carter and the Allmans,” Farrell recalled recently. Carter had struck up a friendship with the band’s members when he was the governor of Georgia, in the early nineteen-seventies. One night, Carter and Gregg Allman, the band’s lead singer, were drinking scotch on the porch of the Governor’s Mansion, and Carter told Allman he was going to be President. (Allman said that they had had “just about all” of a bottle of J&B; Carter recalled only “a drink.”) “We all thought, Oh, really,” Chuck Leavell, the band’s pianist at their peak, in the early seventies, told me. “But we did some concerts for him. We thought, Wouldn’t it be great to have a President from Georgia?” The band had split, temporarily, by the time Carter took office, but they were invited to some formal White House events. “We weren’t sure how to act,” Leavell said. Greg Allman came to one dinner with his then wife, Cher, who mistook a finger bowl for a drink and downed it.

The former Carter staffers Peter Conlon and Tom Beard had more stories—about Willie Nelson, for instance, who, Farrell learned, had smoked pot on the White House roof with the President’s son Chip. At Nelson’s Georgia shows, Carter would sometimes take the stage and pretend to play the harmonica during “Georgia on My Mind,” while Mickey Raphael was really playing it in the wings. After these and other tales, Farrell was about to say goodbye to Conlon and Beard when one of them asked, “Wanna hear about Bob Dylan?”

The stories that Farrell heard that day immediately changed his focus. (Conlon, who became an executive producer on the film, and is now the chairman of Live Nation Georgia, told me that making a film about “the first President to embrace rock music in his campaign” was his idea.) Farrell called an old friend, Mary Wharton, who had produced and directed a number of music-related TV shows. She agreed to direct the film. The veteran music journalist Bill Flanagan helped track down and interview the musicians who appeared in the movie: Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Larry Gatlin, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Buffett, Rosanne Cash, Bono.

Dylan, who rarely grants interviews, was maybe the most coveted target on the filmmakers’ list. “Bob was the white whale,” Farrell told me. Flanagan, who was close with Dylan’s manager, put in a request, and eventually got good news. “Even on the day it finally happened,” Farrell said, “I remember waiting for him to show up and thinking, I don’t know.”

“He wanted to do his interview in a kitchen,” Wharton told me. “I was, like, I wonder if he’s gonna share some recipes with us.” They met at a house in Connecticut, near a gig that Dylan had at the time. When he arrived, Dylan made it clear that he didn’t like the kitchen. He helped Wharton decorate another room to his taste. (Among the items he suggested was a triptych of three goddesses.) “He’d come prepared with things he wanted to say,” Wharton told me. They did a few takes, as Dylan worked out the rhythm of his words. “There’s many sides to him,” he said, of Carter. “He’s a nuclear engineer, woodworking carpenter. He’s also a poet. He’s a dirt farmer. If you told me he was a race-car driver, I wouldn’t even be surprised.” It seemed to Wharton “like he’d written a song about Jimmy Carter.” Dylan also told the story of the first time he and Carter met. “The first thing he did was quote my songs back to me. It was the first time that I realized my songs had reached into, basically, into the establishment world.” He called Carter “a kindred spirit to me of a rare kind.”

“He’s not generally loquacious,” Conlon said, of Dylan. “But around Carter he’s totally different. He relaxes and tells stories. Not the Dylan you’re used to.” When Carter sat for his interviews for the movie, in 2018, “he was kind of rigid at first, but, when he realized that all we wanted him to do was talk about music, it was almost like a light bulb went off and you could see the joy emanating out of him as he recounted all these stories,” Farrell said. The former President described Dylan as “one of my best friends.”

Part of the argument of the documentary is that Carter, who is now ninety-eight and in hospice care, changed the relationship between rock and roll and political power. “Previously,” Conlon explained, “the thinking was that there was too much risk mixing politicians and rock and roll—‘You can’t be around this guy. He does drugs.’ But Carter was very accepting of people and their frailties.”

Beard helped put on concerts in support of Carter’s Presidential campaign—including one headlined by Lynyrd Skynyrd that nearly went off the rails when the singer Ronnie Van Zant was too tanked to perform—and later served as deputy assistant to the President. Beard’s basement office occasionally hosted musicians waiting their turn to see Carter. Among those who stopped by were members of the group Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Stephen Stills, who had performed in the concerts that Beard helped to organize, told me about the band’s visit. “We took the pictures and stuff,” he said. David Crosby’s 2006 memoir refers to an unnamed member of the band “smoking a joint somewhere in the White House, just to say he did.” Stills told me that Crosby himself, along with one of the band’s managers, “lit up a doobie in the Oval,” although people who worked in the White House at the time cast doubt on the likelihood of this. “I was so embarrassed I didn’t speak to him for a couple of days,” Stills said, insistent that it happened.

Stills found the connection to Carter ennobling: “He made you take yourself seriously, you know? In a very offhand kind of way, he’d kind of remind you that you had a part to play here. I don’t know, I bit.”

Conlon recalled another occasion in the White House, in 1977, when he was hanging out with Carter’s call screener one night “and Elvis called.” Apparently, Elvis called sometimes. “I talked to Elvis for a minute,” Conlon said. Years later, Conlon asked Carter about the call. “First of all,” he recalled Carter responding, “Elvis and I are cousins. The Carters and the Presleys go way back.” Then the former President explained: “Elvis was calling because a friend of his was in jail in Memphis for passing bad checks and he wanted me to give him a Presidential pardon.” Carter told him he couldn’t help.

Musicians were occasionally asked to do more than just play. “He tasked me to do things, and I’d carry them out,” Stills said, noting that, on a musical-diplomacy visit to Havana, in 1979, Carter’s people had told him, “Pay attention while you’re in Cuba.” He added, “It wasn’t transactional. I liked him. My favorite thing about Jimmy was his laugh. He had this sort of half guffaw and half bray that came out when he was really tickled.” I asked Stills when Carter had been the happiest during his Presidency. He was often happy, Stills said, “but I heard he had more fun at Camp David than any other time in his life—riding around between those little houses while he told them to say the helicopter is broken.” Stills was on the South Lawn the day that the Camp David Accords were signed.

“Musicians are drawn to his spirituality and authenticity,” Conlon said, offering a theory for why Carter became friends with so many of them. “He’s deeply soulful and open-minded. He doesn’t judge people. Wouldn’t that be nice, in the current political environment?” (Conlon once asked Carter what he thought about Donald Trump. He chuckled at the one-word answer that he said Carter gave, with a wry smile: “Interesting.”)

Jim Free, who served as special assistant to the President for congressional liaison, told me a story that seemed to illustrate this characterization. When China’s Ambassador visited the United States in 1979, Carter asked whether there was anything he could do for the envoy. The Ambassador was a fan of country music, and wanted to go to Nashville. Free was tasked with putting the visit together. The Ambassador saw the Fisk Jubilee Singers and visited the Grand Ole Opry. The weekend ended on Sunday morning, at the home of Tom T. Hall, the musician and short-story writer, who’d invited “everybody who was anybody in the Nashville music industry,” Free recalled. Minnie Pearl, Jimmy C. Newman, Johnny and June Carter Cash all came. “When it came time to say the blessing, there was this awkward moment,” Free said. “And all of a sudden John and June started singing, ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’ I still get chills.”

Leavell appreciated Carter’s generous spirit, too, recalling a Newport-style jazz festival that took place on the South Lawn, which featured Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, and Cecil Taylor, among others. “I remember Carter running over at the end of Taylor’s piece and giving him this huge hug,” Leavell told me. “I thought, If Carter gets that atonal stuff, that’s pretty cool.” Carter also joined Gillespie onstage to sing his bebop tune “Salt Peanuts,” which Carter did enthusiastically, later calling it “a very peculiar song.”

Before “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President” premièred, Wharton asked Jason Carter, the President’s grandson, about the title. Jason told her, “He says that the two things he’s most proud of in the world are, No. 1, having a U.S. Naval submarine named after himself, and, No. 2, being called the rock-and-roll President.”

Conlon told me that, in recent years, Carter noted his admiration for current musicians, including Jason Isbell, the singer-songwriter formerly of the Drive-By Truckers. But, at home in Plains, Georgia, in recent weeks, in the same house where he has lived since 1961, he has been listening to favorites like Willie Nelson, who helped get him through the Iran hostage crisis. “I would play Willie Nelson music primarily,” Carter said, of the time that he spent alone, in his study, in 1980, “so I could think about my problems and say a few prayers.”

Stephen Stills said, “Jimmy thought that the artists had a kind of a view over the horizon by intuition that some other people didn’t—a canary-in-a-coal-mine sort of aspect to us that he paid attention to. And he called upon us to comment, and he supported our commentary—the troubadour aspect to us. He just liked our deal.” ♦

[o-the-mts]

It’s also a reminder that contrary to the fairytale the public is being fed by many of these same sources, US politics and the GOP were far from bastions of decency and righteousness until the dastardly Donald Trump came along and messed everything up. It was Reagan, the Republican president most often cast these days as Trump’s polar opposite, who carried out something close to treason to win an election, before carrying out a host of other crimes and outrages as president. Everything in our scandal-filled times is, sadly, part and parcel of decades of US political tradition.

Once Dismissed as Absurd, Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Is Now Confirmed as True

[bloghrexach]

Carter dies at 100: His remarkable path from peanut farm to Nobel Prize

I wonder, why to the good ones pay the price? ... George Petras, USA TODAY ...

"Carter's administration, however, was crippled by number of problems, including an energy crisis that created shortages and long lines at gas stations, rising inflation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the seizure of U.S. hostages in Iran."

[agentfascinateur]

Code Pink's Medea on where things stand

🩷

[thenerdcantina]

The House on Sun Street by Mojgan Ghazirad: Book Review

Moji is a young girl living in Tehran, Iran. She and her younger sister Mar Mar love spending time with their grandfather Agha Joon, listening to the fascinating stories in One Thousand and One Nights. But it is 1979, and Iran is on the brink of a tumultuous revolution to overthrow the monarchy. With her home and family in danger, Moji unknowingly views history in the making. A cultural and…

[heritageposts]

MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor Walz, if you are the final voice in the situation room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes. TIM WALZ: Well, thank you. And thank you for those joining at home tonight. Let's keep in mind where this started. October 7th, Hamas terrorists massacred over 1400 Israelis and took prisoners. Iran, or, Israel's ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental, getting its hostages back, fundamental, and ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.

so intent on getting all his pre-approved zionist talking points across in the allotted two minutes that he forgot he wasn't supposed to say the quiet part out loud. and this is supposed to be the ''progressive'' voice of the harris campaign.

[thebreakfastgenie]

Since people are finally talking about Reagan sabotaging Iran hostage crisis negotiations to hurt Jimmy Carter politically and help him win (and comparing that to Trump's communications with Netanyahu) this feels like a good time to remind everyone that Nixon literally did the same thing, sabotaging peace talks in Vietnam to help him win the 1968 election.

[icedsodapop]

This is so foul

Red carpets may be a chance to talk up current projects while wearing high-wattage fashion, but they’re also an opportunity for stars to express their support for vital issues — that’s why viewers of Sunday’s 2024 Golden Globe Awards are seeing some attendees wearing yellow ribbons at tonight’s ceremony.

J. Smith-Cameron of Succession and John Ortiz of American Fiction are among the stars who have arrived sporting a yellow ribbon to show support for the roughly 130 hostages who are still being held in captivity by Hamas since the terrorist organization attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The symbolic effort was organized by Bring Them Home, an Israeli hostage advocacy organization that has been working behind the scenes to supply the ribbons, and is being coordinated by Ashlee Margolis, founder of Beverly Hills-based branding agency The A List. While the Israeli hostages are the main focus of the effort, the hostages reportedly represent 30 nationalities.

The choice of yellow is rooted in the origins of the symbol. Yellow ribbons became a popular emblem of support during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held in captivity in Tehran for 444 days. Worn on lapels and seen on front porches and trees across the U.S., the yellow ribbon became the most widely used symbol of bringing the hostages safely home.

It's to support US imperialism, pure and simple.

- mod sodapop

[countesspetofi]

We just assumed that it happened, But Ben Barnes was in the room where it happened

Reagan was truly a sack of shit