Bill Moyers Journal; 727; Reflections on Iran

BILL MOYERS' JOURNAL

Reflections on Iran

June 19, 1981

BILL MOYERS: Every once in a while an event occurs that touches the soul of the nation. The Vietnam War was one such event. Watergate, another. The most recent was the crisis with Iran, which reached its climax five months ago this week on the 20th of January. It seems like only yesterday that scenes like these played nightly on our television screens:

[tape clips - chanting crowd in Iran; blindfolded hostage; homecoming celebration]

MOYERS [voice-over]: Iranian revolutionaries, their passions and hatreds rocketing halfway around the world to shock and confound America. Our diplomats seized and humiliated to begin an ordeal they would endure 444 days. And finally, their release and return to a heroes' welcome.

MOYERS: Our joy at their return relieved the poison of resentment that had built up during their captivity. But it also overwhelmed any desire to ask if there was something to be learned from the long ordeal and the events that precipitated it. As are all such events, this one was made of many parts. There was reality two realities actually: Iran's and ours. And there was also the perception of reality, again from two viewpoints: theirs and ours. The perceptions became so beclouded that reality drifted out of focus, the way your own image does in one of those tricky reflecting mirrors at the circus. In this final edition of my Journal, we'll consider how such flawed perceptions contributed to the crisis.

I'm Bill Moyers, with Reflections on Iran.

MOYERS: This is not an examination of "who lost Iran." The question implies that it was ours to lose, which it never was. It also suggests that once an answer has been reached, the matter can then be neatly tucked away in the history books the culprits identified and presumably held accountable for their actions. But in foreign policy, beyond a certain limit, simplicity leads to ruin. There are more important lessons: how we make and hold alliances, how our politics and our public opinion are molded by the media, and how our leaders become trapped in a single-minded strategy to preserve the status quo irrespective of what may be happening contrary to their preconceptions. America's involvement with Iran was far more complicated than our understanding of Iranians. For example, we never took the measure of how strongly they resented foreigners. Their resentment flared early this century when Britain and Russia divided Persia into three parts. It grew with the high-handed way the British monopolized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and it mounted as Russia and we turned Iran into an early testing ground of the cold war, for geography and oil combined to make of Iran one of the most strategic areas in the Middle East. The Soviets had their eye on a slice of it and we sought to check their ambitions. But before long we came to think and act toward Iran as if it were only a geopolitical chess piece. We interpreted Iranian nationalism as inherently anti-American. And we placed all our bets on one man - the Shah of Iran. So totally were we committed to him that not even when his own people turned against him and he began to act against our own interests

it was the Shah, after all, who inspired the creation of OPEC - not even then could we free ourselves of the mentality that Iran and the Shah were one and the same.

[film and tape clips: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter]

MOYERS [voice-over]: Starting with Franklin Roosevelt, who met the young Shah in Tehran in 1943, the Iranian monarch would become for American presidents the figure of authority around whom could be built a modern Iran. Not only would he be expected to provide access to Persian oil and stability in a volatile region, he would keep the Russians out and the communists down. Matters of Mideast defense were discussed when the Shah visited Harry Truman in the White House in 1949. The U.S. pledged protection in the event of Soviet aggression, but the Shah wanted his own full-scale military deterrent --- against enemies both foreign and internal. Steadily — especially after the CIA helped to restore him to power from exile during the nationalistic reign of Prime Minister Mossadegh - American fears of Soviet ambitions coincided with the Shah's desire to become a military power. In a visit to Iran, however, Dwight Eisenhower told the Shah that he could not rely on military strength alone to assure stability. Spending too much of the country's oil wealth on arms would impede social reforms and increase the poverty which the Shah himself had called the greatest asset of communism. On each visit the Shah found a friend in the White House. To each president, and to the nation at large, he appealed for arms. Keep up your military aid, he pleaded. The Shah became, in Washington, Iran personified. By the time he met Lyndon Johnson in 1967, there was dissent growing against his policies at home. There were anti-Shah demonstrations outside the White House as well - and dissent in our government too, the State Department now arguing for more arms sales, and Pentagon officials responsible for justifying those sales insisting that the Shah was already spending too much on military power. But by 1969 the doubters were routed. It was the beginning of the Nixon Doctrine, which proclaimed that the U.S. would no longer be the policeman of the world. Instead, we would rely on surrogates who would protect our interests with arms made in America. Nixon promised the Shah he could buy anything short of nuclear weapons. Anything for such a staunch ally.

RICHARD NIXON: I believe that the relations between Iran and the United States have never been better. That is due to your leadership. It's due also to the fact that we feel a special relationship, not only to your country, but to you, a relationship which in my case goes back many years.

MOYERS [voice-over]: Gerald Ford, pressed by his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, promised to intensify the close cooperation and consultation between Iran and America. So did Jimmy Carter, whose visit from the Shah was marked by the tear-gassing of Iranian dissidents protesting near the White House. Carter reprimanded the Shah for violating human rights, but he too embraced the monarch as a brother-in-arms. In Teheran on New Year's Eve, 1977, he toasted Iran.

JIMMY CARTER: Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect, and the admiration and love which your people give to you.

MOYERS: We now know, with hindsight, how far off the mark was President Carter when he noted the love and affection Iranians felt toward the Shah. But at the time it was what we wanted to hear and needed to believe. For in our assumptions there was no alternative to the Shah our Shah, a popular Shah, above all a powerful Shah. No country - except South Vietnam no ruler received more arms from us than Iran and the Shah. He was sharpening his plowshares into swords and we were his whetstone. His desire for arms mirrored our desire to sell them; it was good for business. Showered with weapons by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in particular, Iran became a salesman's bazaar. Even poor, pathetic Willy Loman could have hustled a living peddling weapons from the arsenal of democracy to our surrogate in Teheran. That the Shah used the arms to became a virtual dictator ironically accelerated the forces that would bring him down.

[film clips: C-130s and F-14s; weapons; goosestepping soldiers]

MOYERS [voice-over]: In four years during the mid-1970s the Shah spent more than 10 billion dollars on his military. Raising the price of oil to finance his shopping, he bought the most modern weapons available at such a pace that his air force technicians had not yet mastered one sophisticated system before a newer one would arrive. Villagers barely acquainted with the automobile were expected to become technicians for supersonic aircraft. More than 20,000 American military and civilian personnel were sent to train Iranians or to operate the equipment themselves. All of this gave his enemies a common grievance. They saw the country's wealth being squandered on weaponry. As much as 70 percent of the public housing budget, by one account, was going to the armed forces. Even the country's immense oil wealth was no longer sufficient to keep Iran's balance of payments in line. Inflation soared. Yet while the Shah paraded his power as if it were the nation's salvation, others looked upon it as further evidence of their ruination. They were impressed not with the panoply of might but with its high price, and with how the Shah used it to keep his critics in place and to smother dissent. The Shah's spectacle of weapons and warriors became a symbol of his megalomania and the sacrifice of their country's integrity to American strategy.

MOYERS: Even as he militarized his country, the Shah was "modernizing" it. We cheered the one as lustily as the other. The American press looked at the new supermarkets, freeways, hotels and office buildings in Tehran and feeling at home - pronounced it good. If it's modernization, we thought, surely it means a better life for the average person. But the chief benefits went to the educated minority and to the elite surrounding the Shah. The typical Iranian found himself suffering as agriculture faltered, urban life grew more chaotic, and imports virtually destroyed local economies built on traditional crafts. There spread through the land a conviction on the part of ordinary people abetted by local religious leaders that with the Shah's Blessings Western goods were combining with Western culture and Western power to undermine their way of life. Iran was kindling, just waiting for a match. Plenty of people - students, leftists, clerics, nationalists, right-wing fundamentalists — plenty of people were ready to strike the first spark.

MOYERS [voice-over]: Less than ten months after President Carter toasted him in Tehran on New Year's Eve, 1977, the Shah was using his arms to gun down demonstrators in Teheran. Throughout the autumn months of 1978, the Iranian revolution gathered force, assembled its players, and broke into the open. To Americans, watching events like these on television, the wonder was not only at the violence and hatred directed toward the Shah, but that it was happening at all. Nor could we quite understand the anti-American rhetoric that was part of the revolutionary philosophy. We saw it all on television in simple terms: an erratic Ayatollah Khomeini leading fanatic followers in a Revolution gone crazy. It wasn't that simple at all. L. Bruce Laingen was our charge d'affaires in Tehran during the months leading up to the seizure of our hostages — and he was our senior diplomat held captive for those 444 days.

L. BRUCE LAINGEN: Well, I think we should all recognize and accept that the revolution in Iran was and to some extent still is a genuinely popular revolution. It was rooted in the strength of Islam in that society, led by the personal vendetta of the Ayatollah against the Shah, fed by the convictions of the clergy that our cultural- our culture, our ways of life are counter-productive and regard them with antipathy because they challenge the kind of culture, the kind of values that they perceive for their country and their revolution.

MOYERS: In what respect, then, was the Iranian revolution an idea whose time had come?

LAINGEN: You know, I think those of us who attempt to judge or assess the political currents in a country have to take account of all political currents that exist. That's our business, representing the foreign service and our government abroad. And I think it was clear to most people by the summer of 1978 that there was something very fundamental involved here that was grabbing the attention of the masses, if you will. It was bringing them out on the streets, or at least was capable of bringing them out on the streets and being used in that way. It seems to me that by that time the leadership of those who were opposed to the Shah were able to use what was a groundswell of criticism of the Shah for his failure to provide some degree of participation in the politics of the country, for the excesses of the court in a larger sense in its opulence and its apparent willingness to go along with this tremendous difference between rich and poor in Tehran.

MOYERS: Certainly the Iranians who opposed the Shah transferred much of their hostility toward him toward us.

LAINGEN: That's correct.

MOYERS: Why did they hate us so?

―

LAINGEN: They see our way of life, our values, the way they see us conducting ourselves and I must say they know damn little about this country — but their perception is such that they regard it as a threat to the kind of society, the kind of values that they think should influence and guide their people. That was painfully clear and remains clear.

MOYERS: Why would they fear our culture or dislike our culture from a distance? Is it because they felt—

LAINGEN: I don't think it was so much at a distance, Mr. Moyers. It was there all around them, too. The streets of Tehran are full of Kentucky Fried Chicken places, and cassettes selling rock music are everywhere. But beyond that, I think there is, going way back, the extent of foreign influence and involvement in Iran on which all this rests, particularly on the part of the nationalists, and I don't mean to suggest that it's only the clergy that led this revolution, there are certainly the secular nationalists as well, now in eclipse because of the strength of the clerics. But these people all sense, I think, that in the history of Iran since certainly the beginning of the 19th century there has been a continuing series of excessive involvement interference, if you will, in Iranian affairs.

MOYERS: First the Russians and the British.

LAINGEN: First the Russians, and the British, and then they have perceived that we are the hit man or the leader of this involvement. We are the scapegoats. We are the foreign influence behind every tree in Teheran.

MOYERS: More things fed that paranoia than our fast food establishments and our pop music. We Americans cannot fancy ourselves unloved, much less unappreciated, by a world for whose freedom from fascism and communism we labored so magnanimously during and after the second World War. But these considerations carried little weight with the Iranians. Far more pertinent to them were such indignities, in their sight, as our ties to SAVAK, the Shah's security agency accused of torturing his opponents. The CIA had indeed helped to organize SAVAK many years ago, to ferret out communist influence and keep an eye on the Russians. But as the Shah created enemies, SAVAK became the agent to repress dissent. Our involvement with SAVAK became one more reason his enemies cast us as the devil behind their paranoia tree. Remember this scene from the West Point press conference held by the released hostages as they returned to the States.

[West Point, January 7, 1981]

WOMAN REPORTER: I believe I have to ask this question because I don't believe that anyone here will. I'm sorry for being disruptive, but I'm afraid that I would probably be the only person to ask this question. You talked—there was a lot in the press about this question of torture. And frankly I think it's quite the height of hypocrisy for the United States government to talk about torture. [laughter] What the CIA did under the auspices of the United States government to the Iranian people, people were mutilated, people were killed, people were electrocuted. I want to know what the nature of this so-called torture was all about. [boos, hisses]

MODERATOR: We'll take one other question

MOYERS: Even some members of the press joined in hooting down the woman trying to ask about American ties to SAVAK. Not only had a skeleton been dragged out of the closet at a family reunion, but no one really wanted to believe that the seizure of the Americans could have been connected to the matter anyway. Monarchs in Iran either ruled with an iron hand, or didn't remain in power. But we don't believe in torture what possibly could a Persian `ruler's severity toward his own people have had to do with us? Well, we have to see it as they saw it:

GERHARDT ELSTON: The documentation is grim. It involved very brutal treatment by SAVAK agents of accused persons of a whole variety of kinds and, unfortunately, also, the torture of relatives, children.

MOYERS [voice-over]: Gerhardt Elston is Executive Director of the U.S. branch of Amnesty International, an agency that collects information on human rights abuses and the use of torture.

ELSTON: They did use electric shock methods as well as burning people with cigarettes. So I think it ranged the full range. Sexual abuse, of course, is all too easy and they did invent their own wrinkles to that by our account. It's not very pleasant to talk about that, but people did testify to having heated bottles inserted in their anus, in the case of women into the vagina. Hot eggs. They were hung upside down or face up and beaten. Hot grills were touched to their body at various points.

MOYERS: What were the periods from the time you began to study torture and human rights abuses in Iran that were the worst?

ELSTON: Well, our last trip while under the Shah said that there seemed to have been after he promised that torture would be abolished as a procedure, that there was a lessening, but that it had not ceased and was still pervasive and countrywide. We don't say it was the worst at any one particular time or moment because it's always the worst for the particular person who's the victim at that moment. And for the family of that person and Torture is brutal and grim. It can be very primitive, it can be very sophisticated, and it can be totally gratuitous. In Iran under the Shah they added at one period torture of people who had already made enforced confessions and had been convicted and then they tortured them to get a statement of how well they had been treated from them. So that was sort of a special wrinkle for a while. ·

MOYERS: To what extent were we responsible for the crimes of SAVAK?

LAINGEN: Well, I think that's an excessive charge. That's in the category of revolutionary mythology or rhetoric, that in the past couple of years has so dominated the Iranian scene.

MOYERS: Are you saying there were no crimes committed by SAVAK?

LAINGEN: No, I'm not saying that at all. I don't exclude that there were excesses by— I assume there were excesses by that organization, but I'm saying where there is excessive rhetoric and mythology it is in the context of our role with SAVĀK. The allegations that we somehow were the— again using it as a puppet and influencing and then directing it and being responsible for all its excesses and its crimes. I think the role— our role in that was minimal, relatively minimal. Minimal in the sense that the vast majority of the influence came from the Iranians themselves, and that if we were involved it was more in an administrative organizational capacity than anything else.

MOYERS: Did you know that the Shah's government was using torture?

WILLIAM SULLIVAN: Well, by the time I arrived there I think torture had ceased.

MOYERS: Which was?

SULLIVAN: In June of '77. We had no evidence from then on that torture was being used.

MOYERS [voice-over]: William Sullivan, our last Ambassador to Iran.

SULLIVAN: By the time I arrived there he was making considerable effort. Torture had been stopped. New procedures were introduced on juridical handling of prisoners, but the essential quality of the regime was still politically oppressive and repressive.

MOYERS: What forms did that oppression take?

SULLIVAN: Well, during the time I was there, although people were permitted to have meetings there would be sudden appearances of people who were not in uniform, who appeared to be young patriots but all armed with clubs, and they'd break up the meetings and people would be beaten. It was pretty clear that this was SAVAK but nobody could pin it on them, because you couldn't identify the individuals who swooped in and did this and then swooped out again. Over hundreds of years the history of Iran, of Persia, has been one of violence and brutality and constant disintegration of political advances. So this has to be taken into account when one examines the nature of the governance that the Shah used in his country.

MOYERS: I think most people do, Mr. Ambassador, but what is different and what concerns so many people is that it's generally acknowledged that in 1957 the CIA linked up with SAVAK in an institutional way for intelligence purposes and became identified therefore in Iran with this organization that was responsible not only for the torture, but for the continuing oppression of which you just spoke.

SULLIVAN: No, there's no question of that; the United States, CIA and the Israeli Mossad were the prime elements in training SAVAK in its intelligence function. Now the political police function was something that was grafted onto it, which had nothing to do with the associations that CIA or Mossad had with the organization.

MOYERS: But Iranians generally didn't make that distinction, did they?

SULLIVAN: Iranians did not make that distinction and of course that's one of the reasons that the United States is still pilloried in Iran now.

MOYERS [voice-over]: David Emil, a New York corporate lawyer, visited Iran for Amnesty International in the fall of 1978. He interviewed approximately 100 torture victims, or their relatives.

MOYERS: We have been told by American officials that they believed the Shah and that there was no torture after 1976 or after early 1977. What did you find?

DAVID EMIL: It's the position of Amnesty International, and it's my belief on the base of what I saw, that torture did continue after 1977. There were reports which we— I verified, particularly with regard to women, and this is a type of torture where steel bands would be tightened around one's wrist, so that your hand would be held down onto the arm of a chair and the steel bands would be tightened with a screw-type device. This leaves a mark. There were also reports of so-called phalanga, which involves beating of the feet with either rods or chains, beating at the bottom of the feet with either rods or chains.

MOYERS: Did you ever go to President Carter and ask him for counsel on how to relate to

SAVAK? What should be the role of the United States Mission to SAVAK?

SULLIVAN: Yes, before I went to Iran I had a meeting with President Carter; he had some very specific decisions and guidance that he gave me at that time. And his guidance on SAVAK's relationship and the CIA's relationship was that we should continue the intelligence relationship because the intelligence that we gained, particularly with respect to some things involving the Soviet Union, were of great value to us and even though we had these problems with the nature of SAVAK, that on balance he wanted to continue the relationship.

MOYERS: He made the decision to continue the relationship with SAVAK for intelligence purposes but to try to disassociate ourselves from the political oppression.

SULLIVAN: Well, we'd always been— we'd never been involved in the political oppression. There's no way in which one could have divorced the perception of that in the eyes of the Iranians, unless we broke clean with any relationships with SAVAK. But we had never been involved as the Iranian revolutionaries will now say in instructing SAVAK how to commit torture. No one has to instruct a Persian how to commit torture. They wrote the book on the subject.

MOYERS: Everyone knows President Carter pressed the Shah to ease up. It's even argued that the pressure hastened the Shah's demise by softening him to the point that he was helpless to crush the revolution. But we're dealing here with Iranian perceptions, and the evidence that fed them. The Ambassador has just acknowledged that the President, for all his concern with human rights, instructed the CIA to go on working with SAVAK in the gathering of intelligence. But one man's intelligence can be another's intimidation, and to the Shah's victims, SAVAK was SAVAK. The family of a poor wretch stretched across the rack in a Teheran torture chamber could hardly be expected to make distinctions befitting the geopolitical requirements of American foreign policy. As we learned with Batista in Cuba and Somoza in Nicaragua, and as we may yet learn with the generals in Argentina and Guatemala, and with Marcos in the Philippines, a dictator's friend should not expect esteem from the dictator's victims when they rise in revenge. President Carter's failure to understand this to perceive how the Iranians had transferred their hatred from the Shah to us led directly to his decision to admit the Shah to America. The President acted ostensibly on humanitarian grounds — the Shah was a sick man, and he had been a loyal ally. But in the end the decision that precipitated the seizure of the embassy was made because the President was more sensitive to the pressure of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger than to perceptions in Iran. When those two powerful boosters of the Shah applied the squeeze, Carter buckled. For Iranian revolutionaries, it was the last straw. Kissinger had armed their nemesis. Rockefeller or so they imagined had financed him. Now Kissinger was working for Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank. Small wonder the militants saw the smoke of conspiracy.

MOYERS [voice-over]: Barry Rosen was our press attache in the American Embassy when it was seized, and he remained a hostage to the end.

MOYERS: Why did they not accept the medical rationale for admitting the Shah?

BARRY ROSEN: Iranians just couldn't accept that because they felt that was a pretext, a game, an American attempt to reassume control over Iran. There was a great deal of fear in Iran that this was a game to mollify them and then set the Shah back in power. In my opinion, one has to look at that very very strongly, the overwhelming fear of the Iranians that this was going to happen again. And Iranians feared that is, those who were making the revolution, those who were in power that the Shah would return and that, to them, conjured up a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety.

MOYERS: This was not a game in their mind. They really believed in this.

ROSEN: Well, the people that I talked to, yes, they did. Definitely so.

MOYERS [voice-over]: Peter Straus was director of the Voice of America and one of the senior officials in Washington on the receiving end of warnings about the dangers of admitting the Shah.

PETER STRAUS: With respect to the particular decision about admitting the Shah for medical or other reasons, we had cables and personal visits from our officials who've been in Teheran, I think weekly is probably a fair description toward the end, saying we understand the decision has many components, and that is a decision that's going to have to be made by the White House. But if you do, be sure to get everybody out of here. Not because we're personally fearful, but because we can tell you what is going to happen. We can tell you there's going to be an attempt, and possibly a successful one, to take over the Embassy.

MOYERS: Was there unanimity on that point, that if the Shah is going to be allowed for medical treatment into the United States, you'd better get everybody out of here?

STRAUS: I think there was unanimity from the persons involved either in Teheran or involved with Iranian affairs at this end. Pretty nearly unanimity on that subject.

MOYERS: So there was no doubt in your mind that there were plenty of warnings?

STRAUS: Plenty of warnings and a real risk of danger. Now how you read that, whether it was a 90 percent assurance or a 30 percent assurance that there would be trouble, but I think all knowing people on this subject were aware that there was a real and significant imminent danger of some kind.

MOYERS: What were your counsels to Washington on letting the Shah into the country?

SULLIVAN: While the Shah was still in Egypt, I recommended that it would be hazardous for the United States to permit the Shah to come to the United States. In fact, I said that I thought if he did come to the United States hostages would be taken. And that point of view was endorsed by the Secretary of State and I believed was going to prevail. Therefore I was surprised in October, later, when the Shah was permitted into the United States, but I was not surprised in November when the hostages were taken.

MOYERS: I know that you sent warnings back to Washington about the situation as it worsened. How were those warnings regarded?

ROSEN: Well- This is very difficult for me.

MOYERS: I know that.

ROSEN: Well, there were cables sent, there were discussions had in Washington concerning in general the Shah, the admittance of the Shah, what would be the problem, if there would be a problem, and of course discussions about the situation in Iran, and several people in Washington maintained that the reporting was more negative than it should have been, and that I expressed my personal feelings that it wasn't a good time to accept the Shah into the country to the United States, and that perhaps we would have problems securing our own— the security of the embassy.

MOYERS: Were you ever asked by anyone in Washington, should the Shah be admitted?

ROSEN: Yes. I was directly asked that.

MOYERS: And what was your answer?

ROSEN: My answer was emphatically no and that not only the Shah himself but also the entire Pahlavi family should not be admitted.

LAINGEN: The Shah, as such, was not the real issue. His return was not the real issue. The real issue was to get the revolution back on its course, back on the radical, if you will, populist, Islamic course that they saw it drifting off from. And they used that admission of the Shah as the peg on which they acted.

MOYERS: Was there a time, do you think, Mr. Laingen, when it would have been possible to admit him with less risk than at that particular moment?

LAINGEN: I always felt that way. I certainly never said myself that he should never be admitted. I personally felt that we had a kind of obligation to him for his long association with us, to be helpful to him in his exile at the right time. And I did not feel that with the revolution incomplete, with a provisional government still in place, with the constitution drafting process not completed, with no ambassador on our part there, that that was the best time to do it. I thought it would be very risky to do it at that time.

MOYERS: When you heard that the decision had been made to admit him, what went through your mind?

LAINGEN: Well, I was somewhat apprehensive. I recall the two words that I said: “Oh, God!'', in the sense, well, now we got a difficult task ahead of us.

MOYERS: Did you think of yourself as a potential casualty?

LAINGEN: No, I don't think I did. I can't honestly say that I did. I felt having done my duty in terms of alerting Washington to the difficulties and the possible dangers, which we did, that it was my duty to implement the policy that my government had decided upon.

MOYERS: When you were seized that day did you have any idea that this could extend a year—

LAINGEN: No, sir.

MOYERS: 444-

LAINGEN: No, I didn't. If I had known on November 4 that I had been sentenced to 444 days in a room, it would have been hard to take. Not knowing that it somehow was easier to take and the days passed more easily.

MOYERS: What were you told and how did you learn about, and what were the Iranian people told about the rescue mission that failed?

LAINGEN: We had access to a shortwave radio and we were getting news on VOA. What the Iranian people learned of it was that it had been an American failure. Further evidence that God was on their side. Further evidence that Carter could do nothing, which was a common expression one heard there. "Carter can do nothing." But particularly that God somehow was on the side of the revolution and would protect them.

MOYERS: We come, perhaps, to the heart of the matter that in holding the hostages the Iranians felt vindicated by the very God to whom Jimmy Carter was praying daily for their release. Poor God, so many doorbells to answer from such divergent callers! But this basic contradiction in perception produced the surprises that constantly thwarted our policy makers. We were surprised that politics and religion were so tightly meshed in Persian life. We were surprised when one of the best-equipped armies in the world could not keep the Shah in power. We were surprised that revolutionary fervor permeated the whole of society. We were surprised they hated us so. We were surprised because neither we nor the Shah could in the end control events. There were young Foreign Service officers who warned Washington what was coming. but we now know they were ignored because, like Barry Rosen, their reporting didn't fit the policy that simplistic policy which saw Iran and the Shah as one and the same. A policy reinforced for years by images from the media so superficially drawn as to make a heresy of subtlety. The lens through which Americans long viewed Iran was a cloudy lens, taking one-dimensional snapshots of a complex culture.

[film clips: Iran scenes, old and new; coronation; Persepolis; Iran mosques, murals; revolution scenes]

MOYERS [voice-over]: The media love conflict and contrast. And nothing caught our fancy quite like the contrast between ancient Persia and the new Iran. What coverage occurred of pre-revolutionary Iran treated us to scenes by our standards — of a backward nation, peopled by primitive folk, scarcely aware of the 20th century. Somehow the camels and donkeys and the communal villages reminiscent of the 19th century reassured our own sense of progress, reminding us that while we enjoyed the fruits of technology, there were still cultures, like Iran's, following the ruts of an ancient way, waiting for deliverance. In contrast, there was the Iran under the Shah leaping and bounding in our direction, sharing with us the pleasure of the internal combustion engine; high-rise buildings and apartment houses, much like those we ourselves live in; progress; improvement; mobility. They made us feel good at being imitated and the imitation made them worthy of our admiration and respect. And how we were bedazzled by the Shah himself. The living contrast of old and new. A seeker of modernity, cloaked in the pomp and ceremony of bygone days. In 1955, in a glittering ceremony at the royal palace of Tehran, he crowned himself the Shahanshah of Iran the ultimate Shah, confirming for himself a regency begun in 1925, by his father, Riza Khan. And who can forget the revelry, in 1971, of the 2,500th anniversary celebration of the Persian Empire, organized by the Shah at the ancient capital of Persepolis. The guest list for the celebration included 600 national leaders, 9 kings, 8 sheiks, 2 sultans, and two vice presidents, including the yet-unindicted Spiro Agnew. The parades of Iranian troops, dressed in the costumes of regal Persia, went on for hours, mingling the extravagance of the past with the steely ambition of a modern Xerxes. The American news media covered this in all its splendor, bringing to the American public a view of Iran that evoked long-ago glories and implied, as the Shah surely intended, their resurrection in the new Iran. Persepolis was merely the most colorful chapter in the storybook land called Iran presented to us by television. If we were surprised by what finally happened, well, who ever heard of revolutions in a fairytale? And when revolution came, television presented Iran in storybook terms, condensing the story into comic-strip symbols of good and evil. The coverage was stark, emotional, simplistic. Above all, once our hostages were taken, it was incessant:

[clips of news programs]

ABC ANNOUNCER: This is an ABC News Special: "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage.” Day 13.

WALTER CRONKITE: And that's the way it is, Wednesday, January 16, 1980, the 74th day of captivity for fifty Americans in Iran.

ABC ANNOUNCER: Day 250 of the crisis in Iran.

CRONKITE: And that's the way it is Tuesday, January 20, 1981, a day that began as the 444th day of captivity and ended as the first day of freedom for the American hostages in Iran.

MOYERS [voice-over]: Professor William Adams of George Washington University's public administration faculty has documented television's coverage of Iran:

WILLIAM ADAMS: Coverage was unprecedented by almost any standard of comparison. Television's coverage of the hostage crisis is remarkable by every prior standard of TV news. I've gone back and analyzed in detail the exact number of minutes that each network devoted to the hostage story, and the volume of time was such that, for example, in the first two months of the crisis the networks gave over half of every weeknight newscast to Iran, night after night, for two solid months between 10 to 13 minutes of coverage, out of 22 to 24 minutes of news, were devoted to Iran.

MOYERS: How does that coverage compare with the coverage of Iran before those events?

ADAMS: Like day and night. There is a dramatic increase in the attention to Iran. I have a chart that indicates the year-by-year coverage that was given the nation of Iran and then the amount of time given the hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980.

MOYERS: Explain it to me.

ADAMS: This chart indicates how much time the average network gave Iran on the weeknight newscast over an entire year. So, for example, in 1973, the average of ABC, NBC and CBS was 41⁄2 minutes devoted to Iran over the entire year.

MOYERS: The whole year?

ADAMS: The entire year, cumulative amount of attention to Iran. The next year it went up, to 6 minutes, averaging about one minute every other month on the subject of Iran. This is remarkably little coverage given the enormous American involvement with Iran, the enormous American military aid. The big growth comes at the end of 1978 when the rumblings in Iran began and it became clear that the Shah was in trouble. Then, as you can see, coverage grows by about tenfold in 1979 to 698 minutes on Iran and on the hostage crisis. In 1980, the networks spent over 700 minutes on news about the hostage crisis alone.

MOYERS: During this period of peak coverage, why do you think television went at it so extensively?

ADAMS: The crisis was clearly newsworthy by the conventional, traditional standards of what's newsworthy. But it seems to me that you have to look for other explanations. For example, the story was ready-made for network television news. Network television loves to focus on a story that is highly dramatic, conflictual, of interest to the entire nation, has good vivid action footage, that has simple themes, two conflicting sides, preferably has the involvement of the president, and if possible has some predictability in terms of the locales and the sources. It's difficult to imagine a story that met all of those criteria any better than the hostage story.

MOYERS: And the particular perspective of television is?

ADAMS: Crisis journalism. Dramatic, action, emotional, vivid, melodrama.

ROSEN: In my dealings with the press, I don't feel that they were ready to really understand what was going on in Iran. Most of the people who came to Iran that is television people, and there were of course print media people there, they were people who were reassigned from other areas, would sit down with me and then ask me for a 5-minute, 10-minute review of Iran and perhaps Islam, what was causing the revolution.

MOYERS: How would you describe this? As a kind of cultural illiteracy?

ROSEN: Well, I think it's also a factor of the American news media itself, more than— that's a factor, cultural illiteracy is a factor, too, but I think people were not ready to come to grips with the press corps was not ready to come to grips with the situation in Iran. They were not ready for it. I think also you had a bit of ethnocentrism.

MOYERS: What do you mean?

ROSEN: Well, in the sense that the reporters couldn't deal with the situation that was not to their ethical or perhaps cultural identity. They could deal with a middle-class society, or a society that looked somewhat like the United States, and they could fit predispositions into that. But when it came to Iran or many third world countries in general, I would think they come in with predispositions that do not fit the country itself. They identified with the modern elite in Iran, a very small group of people; people who wore Western suits, people who lived in central and northern Teheran and the idiom was somewhat the same, that is, the language idiom was somewhat the same. They would speak in English, they would not speak in Farsi. And the reporters themselves had that difficulty, too, in Iran — they did not know the language nor the culture, and they needed intermediaries many times, and perhaps the inter- mediaries were telling them what they wanted to know.

STRAUS: We were taken, Bill, and for a reason that requires quite a lot more thought and quite a lot more study. We are not used, in the media in the United States, or the Western world generally, to being used by very sophisticated people, who I think the students who took over the embassy are, who understand how to manipulate our media, and we were used. There's no question about it.

MOYERS: Why were they so capable of understanding our medium?

STRAUS: For one reason, a good many of them had been to college here, and knew their way around. And I think they had focused on the uses of an appeal to public opinion in the United States over and above the normal diplomatic process.

MOYERS: What effect do you think the media's concentration on the story had in this country and on the perceptions of what was happening in Iran?

STRAUS: I think we saw large numbers of Americans saw a country of which they'd only vaguely heard before for the first time, and saw very dramatic and in some cases grisly vignettes without the broader understanding. And so we come back to this problem of our kind of television coverage of the news, which is wholly episodic. And so we don't set a general context of who was Khomeini and who are the mullahs and what is the background of the Shah's regime and our relationships with it.

MOYERS: Vignettes. That's an interesting term you used. What do you mean?

STRAUS: It's a snippet. It is two blindfolded Americans being paraded in front of the embassy gates and being threatened with raised fists. But that is not the totality of our relationships in the Middle East or with Iran.

MOYERS: What effect do you think that coverage had on American public opinion? Did it change the way we see the world?

ADAMS: I think it was the most critical ingredient in one of the biggest changes in American public opinion that we've witnessed in the last couple of decades. Something extraordinary happened in American public opinion in the last couple of years. A few years ago only about a tenth of the American people said they wanted to increase defense spending. In the last year, that proportion has increased to about three-fourths of the American people saying they want to increase defense spending. What comes through the Iranian coverage over and over again is the idea that the world is a dangerous place and that maybe it is better to deal with it through a position of strength than through sentimentality and good intentions.

MOYERS: And yet those events were not happy ones. They did reflect a reality that the world is dangerous - the world is a dangerous place.

ADAMS: Absolutely. I'm not suggesting that the networks created those events. What I am suggesting is that it was critical that the networks gave those events high visibility and treated them as menacing, not just unfortunate.

MOYERS: What do you think was the effect of Cronkite saying every night at the closing of his broadcast, this is the 250th day, this is the 300th day, this is the 340th day, this is the 400th day, constantly reminding people of the hostages being held even when the President might have been looking the other way?

ADAMS: Most studies indicate that the presidency and the networks have a very symbiotic, interactive kind of relationship. The networks follow the activities of the president very closely. And so the fact that the President put it at the top of his agenda— the National Security Council was doing little else for many days but meeting on the hostage crisis helped keep it at the top of the network agenda for a long time. At the same time, the President responds to the media and it's very difficult for the President to ignore a story that Cronkite, Chancellor and Reasoner all said was the most important event in the world that day.

MOYERS: The ability of television and politics to influence one another grows in an election year when politicians play not to the head but to the heart, whose strings no medium plucks better than this one. The result is more often impassioned sentiment than informed insight. Politics and diplomacy require time, bargaining, ambiguity, and privacy. Television thrives on emotion, immediacy and articulation. Of the hostages, the story we kept seeing was starkly emotional. All of us felt involved in the fate of human beings we came to know by their first names, with families and kinfolk like those next door. Their fate became the one story television could tell with all the dramatic qualities inherent to its nature. Other national policy considerations than their safety were abbreviated if not ignored, so that our frustrations were fed even as our understanding was not. Ten years earlier the 83 crew members of the USS Pueblo languished for 11 months in North Korea, also seized and held illegally by a hostile government, this one communist. But television was allowed no visa to their plight and they soon ceased to be news. Nor did these crewmen of the Pueblo come home heroes. The Americans held in Tehran did-television transformed their return into an emotional pageant:

MOYERS [voice-over]: Home they came to an ecstasy of welcome. Emotionally, it was their story- human endurance and dignity during an unjust imprisonment. And not a few of us felt our hearts in our throats as we watched. Every now and then we had to suppress the temptation to ask why this homecoming was treated so differently from that of the crew of the Pueblo, a dozen years earlier, or so differently from the returning veterans of Vietnam, who arrived to indifference and even embarrassment. For the Iranian hostages, there was only affection— a heroes' welcome.

STRAUSS: They were indeed heroic. They conducted themselves superbly. As a colleague foreign officer I am very proud of those men and women. But secondly, we are in desperate need of heroes. We need heroes in the United States. And these were immediately available, obviously attractive, articulate, and fortunately surviving heroes. And I think we our need for them built them as much as what they did.

ADAMS: The melodrama required the climax and the ending, and since we had, fortunately, a happy ending it was necessary that it be brought to a conclusion with the magnitude that it had been covered to begin with. So we had the succession of homecomings, in Wiesbaden, in West Point, in Washington, in New York, in hometowns and in neighborhoods. Each covered in depth as a media event.

MOYERS: Americans love a happy ending.

ADAMS: Absolutely.

MOYERS: And this was the happiest of endings for that drama.

ADAMS: That's right. Television had to give us in detail the last chapter in that drama.

MOYERS: It was the end of the captives' ordeal but not of the story. On the very day of their release we inaugurated a new president. There was talk of a new beginning, a new sense of optimism. But the new beginning turns out to contain many of the old perceptions which had proved self-defeating in Iran. Did military strength alone save the Shah? You'd think so, the way we now seem willing to arm any right-wing regime that professes to be anti- communist. Were we tarred with the repression the Shah inflicted upon his subjects? You'd think not, the way we are being urged to rationalize the use of force and oppression by those regimes. It's being said now that America has to be just as cynical, just as crass, and just as nasty as the Soviets if we're going to get our way in the world. They put their puppets in power and keep them there by sheer naked force no tribute paid to ideas above the state's ambition.

We can't do it. We can't do it because we're not built that way. No matter how tempted we are to play their game, something in our tradition won't totally allow us to forget who and what we are. America finds it hard with this split personality to live in the world, and we make a lot of mistakes because of it. We'll make more if the lesson we take away from Iran is the one we're hearing these days. For it's one thing to suffer a setback, as we did there, and another to lose our soul. The hostages came home heroes, I'm convinced, because they reminded us we do have a soul. To be sure, we needed heroes. After two decades of assassinations and scandals, inflation and defeat in Vietnam, oil hikes by OPEC, riots in our streets and the failure of first one aspiration and then another, we needed a happy ending an occasion for joy, someone to cheer. And they were someone to cheer. But in one sense the hostages were not heroes but victims. And this may be the final lesson of Iran.

Captives and captors alike were victims in this long ordeal between our two countries, victims of cultural illiteracy, of ways of seeing that stare across gaps of culture, language, history, and perception — and staring, do not connect with the other reality on the other side. It is the oldest lament of all, and the most likely to persist and bring us to grief— that mankind has not the gift to see ourselves as others see us, or others as they are.

I'm Bill Moyers. Goodnight, for the Journal.