As we all know, Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid against Ronald Reagan thanks in part to the long-running Iranian hostage drama. It's long been suspected that Reagan's team actively tried to persuade Iran not to release the hostages so that Carter wouldn't get a victory bump, but there's never been any firm proof.
Until now. In a story that's getting surprisingly little play, the New York Times reports that Ben Barnes, a major player in Texas politics back in the day, says he accompanied John Connally on a mid-election tour of the Middle East:
What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then shortly 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, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
The tour kicked off on July 18. Here's what Gallup polling looked like on that date:¹
Carter plummeted in the polls during the first months of the hostage crisis, but recovered in April and stayed ahead of Reagan for the next couple of months. Reagan opened up a small lead on Carter in July, but it was narrowing. It was precisely the time that the Reagan campaign was probably most worried.²
So that fits. Still, how do we know that Barnes is telling the truth?
Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years....All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago....Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. An itinerary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.
Did the Reagan campaign ask Connally to do this? Did they even know he was doing it?
Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”
There's no way to know for sure. But we know that Richard Nixon tried to sabotage a Vietnam peace deal before the 1968 election. This would be right in character.
¹I've erased the Republican convention bump in late August in order to provide a clearer view of what the polling trends looked like at the time.
²There's an extensive literature about the 1980 polls and whether they were accurate. But that doesn't really matter here. What matters is what people thought at the time, and the Gallup poll is a pretty reliable indicator of that.
I've always thought that the release of the hostages on Inauguration Day was more than a little suspicious.
"I've always thought that the release of the hostages on Inauguration Day was more than a little suspicious."
It made sense from Iran's point of view.
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So, basicly, the Republicans have been the Treason Party for a long, long time. And Democrats have been letting them get away with it.
Probably the worst mistake the Democrats have made in the past 35 years was not to pursue Iran-Contra in 1993 in the name of “moving on,”
George H W Bush pardoned all the people who could testify against him.
Meaning they couldn’t have hidden behind the 5th amendment if Congress had called them to testify. The point would not have been so much to lock them up, sweet as that might have been, as to bring the truth to light when it might still have mattered.
Republican Party treason is the rule and not the exception for over half a century now. It won't be changing any time soon.
"But we know that Richard Nixon tried to sabotage a Vietnam peace deal before the 1968 election."
I know no such thing. Everything I've read says that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did sabotage the peace deal. Same method as Reagan with Iran, but with a small twist. They told our putative ally South Vietnam to hold out for a better deal once Nixon was elected. Screwed them over pretty good. And the peace talks were secret. Kissinger informed Nixon of secret developments.
Wait - I thought this was well-known already. (seriously - I thought this had already been proven and accepted, which is why this story gets no play now.) https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Agree. This is an old story.
This is the first first-person account of the scheme from someone who was directly involved.
Republicans get away with things like this, no wonder they think getting away with it is their special thing.
Conservatives face almost no accountability ever for anything at all and if they do, or if accountability is even threatened, they are completely freaked out.
And yet I’ve had to fly into “ Reagan Washington National Airport” dozens of times.
Reagan was Trump 1.0. If there had been no Reagan we’d have never gotten to where we got in November 2016.
At least this story was published while a decent man in Plains still lives
Yes, flying there and seeing the signs makes my stomach turn.
You dare to sully the name of St. Ronald of St. Reagan?
Republicans have been doing this shit for 40 years, and getting away with it for 40 years. And the media never hangs it on them until it's ancient history. They're still getting away with it.
The instinct for treason runs strong in the GOP.
When ever I see something like what Kevin has posted here, I’m reminded of something Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel said many years ago:
“During the 1966 California gubernatorial primary, Kuchel was urged by moderates to run against conservative actor Ronald Reagan. Citing the hostilities of the growing conservative movement, Kuchel decided not to run. He instead issued a negative statement about the conservatives: "A fanatical neo-fascist political cult of right-wingers in the GOP, driven by a strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear that is recklessly determined to control our party or destroy it!" Earlier in 1964, Kuchel warned in campaign ads for Rockefeller that the control of the right-wing movement in the Republican party would lead to the destruction of the two-party system.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuchel
Haven’t we known this for decades.
People have alleged it for a while, but this is the first first-person account we have from someone who was directly involved.
But the article, however correct or truthful, doesn't explain the big uptick in Reagan's poll numbers just days before the election? I wasn't living in the states at the time but does any remember anything of significance in those days? It's very reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's drop in the polls following Comey's letter just days for the election. Albeit much larger.
We still had stagflation. Carter had appt. Volcker to Fed, and he kept raising rates to tame inflation. The big reason for the voters breaking for Reagan--he did well in the debates. He did not come across as a nut job and was able to sell his "City on the Hill" imagery, though his policies certainly wouldn't get us there.
From a 2015 article: States rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi:
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/16/seven-things-reagan-wont-mentioned-tonight-gops-debate/
I remember how disheartened I was at Reagan's last minute uptick. At the time I had two thoughts:
It was becoming obvious the mullahs were playing political games with the hostages, hinting at their imminent release and then issuing new demands. They American public was sick and tired of the whole humiliating mess and they blamed Carter.
There were many people who were unenthusiastic about Carter, but leery of Reagan given his numerous looney pronouncements over the years. As the election approached Reagan was on his best behavior and many people decided he was probably okay.
"As the election approached Reagan was on his best behavior and many people decided he was probably okay."
That helps but it doesn't explain that really remarkable uptick just days before the election. Reagan's polling shows a slow increase starting at the conventions but then, all of a sudden, bang, it shoots up.
I wasn't in the country at the time, but surely there was some cause for that effect?
My thought is that people didn’t make up their mind until forced to.
This is a borderline ridiculous story.
The core problem is that no country/leader on that supposed list had tied to Iran. Those countries hated the Ayatollah and had been allied with the shah. I’d like suggesting Biden went to ukraine to do a secret back door deal with Putin. It makes no sense.
Further Connolly hated Reagan- they were bitter rivals. The more likely scenario is that Connolly/Barnes cooked this up to discredit Reagan.
Disagree. It's true that Connally was unhappy about having lost the GOP primary to Reagan, but it's also true that Connally was angling for a senior Cabinet post in a Reagan administration. As for no country on the list having ties to Iran, maybe not to the mullahs, but quite possibly to other influential people in the country to whom the mullahs were still listening.
Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign by going to Philadelphia, Mississippi and giving a speech about states' rights barely a stone's throw from where three murdered voting rights workers were buried.
I don't put anything past him.
John Anderson had an impact in the election, once it was clear Carter was going to lose a lot of voters went that way. Basically stated, Carter did note engender a lot of partisan loyalty because he was to the right of the party and instead of building bridges he accosted the left. There is a reason why Kennedy actually ran a surprisingly good primary race against an incumbent Democratic president. The hostages did hurt Carter but not as much as other factors. That said, if the hostages had been released on November 1 would it have swong the election? Impossible to know.
I recently had a long-term friend over to dinner. During dinner he mentioned how much he admired Jimmy Carter. I replied that it was too bad he hadn't voted for him. His initial reaction was shocked denial, followed by chagrin as he realized I was right and he had chosen John Anderson over Jimmy Carter. At the time I had argued with him that he had no idea of what the right wing had in mind if they succeeded in defeating Carter. I finally won the argument, a futile victory forty+ years too late.
We all know Carter lost re-election because of the hostage crisis? This is just historically illiterate. Before the hostages were taken, Carter was deeply unpopular. Prominent Democratic pols like Sen. Scoop Jackson were positioning themselves to challenge him for the nomination. What scared them off was Ted Kennedy. Kennedy was crushing Carter in the polls and was treated as the nominee-presumptive. But Kennedy proved a poor campaigner and famously mishandled an interview that reignited an old scandal, Chappaquiddick.
Then there was a revolution in Iran and hostages were seized. Carter got a rally-round-the-flag bump in the polls and played that for all it was worth. Remember the Rose Garden strategy? Carter pledged not to campaign in order to focus on the hostage crisis, but made frequent appearances in the White House Rose Garden. It was the Iran hostage crisis that saved Carter's re-election bid, at least initially. As the crisis dragged on and on without a sign of resolution, the patriotic surge that boosted Carter just deflated, a recession loomed, and Carter resumed his pre-crisis unpopularity.
I admire Jimmy Carter and think that he would have been a better president than Reagan, but let's not rewrite history to create a comforting myth.
Ben Barnes is and was a Democrat. Is it remotely plausible that Connally would have taken him on a treasonous mission to sabotage a Democratic presidential candidate?
It's ironic now that Israel consented gladly to passing along advanced weaponry to Iran as part of Reagan's "sweeter" deal, given that they're now beating the war drums on how the United States needs to go to war with Iran to "protect" them.