Operation Eagle Claw - 25 April 1980

Since time began, every general has known that if a daring military adventure succeeds, it's brilliant, and if it fails, it’s an outrage. President Carter is going to have to live for some time with this bitter knowledge.

Three times in his melancholy broadcast apology, he said that the responsibility was his alone. I made the decision to attempt it, I made the decision to cancel it. At what must have been the bleakest moment of his presidency, he heard in the middle of Thursday night, that through equipment failure, the adventure had misfired.

And then, having cancelled it, hearing the worst news – that two aeroplanes, turning back to base, had collided on the ground with the loss of eight men.

The first word of this fiasco, conceived, he assured us, as a humanitarian mission, not directed at Iran or the Iranian people, must have alarmed him as soon as it sickened him. And he was up at dawn and requesting time from all the television and radio networks, in order to get on the air at seven in the morning eastern time, six Chicago time, and 4am in California to get his account of it to a sleepy people before they had time to hear, as Europe heard, of the unexplained horror itself. In this accident of the time zones, he had, at least, a smidgen of luck.

We must first ask ourselves what the president didn’t tell us – why he conceived the plan, and why he decided to do it just at this difficult time when the allies, rousing themselves to back his plan for economic sanctions against Iran, were suddenly alarmed at the possibility of an immense upheaval in the Middle East, and the chance of a Soviet-American war if the president were to attempt any military move at all.

Now, in spite of the rumours that sifted out of a secret meeting in the White House the, I think mischievous and exaggerated reports, of a dire split between the president and his advisors about the wisdom of flexing a military muscle, the president is not, and was not, uninformed about the charges of his political opponents and the fears of the European allies.

Everybody in Washington knew what they amounted to – that Mr Carter was so depressed by the slump in his national popularity, so provoked by the jibes at his backing and filling on what to do about the hostages, that he was ready to prove his machismo by a military action against Iran. Or that he is a man so confused by a babble of competing advisors, that he doesn’t really know which way to turn.

Or that he was so obsessed with winning the presidential campaign that he has given little thought to the strong possibility of paralysing reprisals, such as shutting off all oil to the west, which might follow on an American mining of the Gulf. Or that he has only a dim understanding of European history and is untouched by German analogies with 1914 and is deaf to the distant rumble of the guns of August.

I still believe, that most of these fears and inferences to be quite wrong. Every morning, shortly after six, he receives the overnight cables, which include not only the latest word from Tehran and Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, and London and Tokyo and what the Chase national bank is doing to its prime interest rate, but also digests of the foreign press, including what the editor of Die Zeit has been writing and what the deputy editor of Le Monde.

Well, for now, and maybe for some time to come, we can only guess at what was on his mind, when he gave the signal for the rescue operation to begin.

Two things occur to me. One is the recollection of President Kennedy’s initiative in 1961 to sanction and mount an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The adventure was a total disaster. But the public response to it contradicts the maxim with which I began this talk – namely that a successful act is daring as a triumph, and a failed one is remembered, as an outrage.

President Kennedy, too, openly admitted that the responsibility was his alone. The result – his standing in the polls went soaring. The second thought is one with which Mr Carter must have been thoroughly familiar. The evidence of a reliable national poll, which showed that 55% of the American people were in favour of a military action against Iran, and never mind a humanitarian mission not directed at Iran or the Iranian people.

Now, whether one or both of these considerations were on his mind, he decided to take the gamble. It’s bad for him that it failed. It could be worse for him in a nation which prides itself on its technological know-how, and on its air force's scrupulous respect for flying by the book, that it was doomed, because, of equipment failure, and then, because of human error, in manoeuvring two lonely planes in the desert.

I am talking in the aftershock of the misadventure, and while the Soviet response could have been written beforehand, there is no telling just yet, what the considered response will be of the three or four factions in Iran that seem to be jostling for power.

What we can do is to speculate about the effect that this disaster is likely to have on the presidential campaign in general, and on the Carter presidency in particular. I see no sign at the moment that the president is going to reap the peculiar gain in prestige that came so surprisingly to President Kennedy after his abortive defiance of Fidel Castro.

For one thing, President Kennedy was in his first six months in the White House, President Carter is there in an election year. If you can indulge your patience for a while, let me take you back to last Wednesday morning, a day that must seem to the president like an age away.

Imagine him getting up on that morning, taking his early breakfast, listening – as is his wont – to a little Mozart, with which to rinse out his mind. It’s natural to infer that he leapt with a whoop on the good news from Pennsylvania, which showed him a dead heat with Senator Kennedy, for the precious hall of delegates which that fourth most populous state has to offer. The promised thrashing from Senator Kennedy had not taken place.

The good news for the rest of us – imagine, only a day or two ago – was that the president could now relax in the knowledge that he was about two-thirds of the way towards a certain nomination by his party, that Senator Kennedy, in order to challenge him, was going to have to win 70% or more of the delegates available in the remaining primaries. And that these are to be held in a country – mostly south and west – which for Senator Kennedy is unfriendly country.

So, we innocently assumed, the president could forget his campaigning obsession, and attend to the perils of his foreign policy, here and now.

There was, however, and now there is more than ever, another threat to his reelection which begins to wax as the omen of Senator Kennedy begins to wane. And this threat is the name and presence of the white-thatched owlish little liberal Republican from Illinois, Representative John Anderson.

After the last few Republican primaries, it became painfully clear to Mr Anderson that he had no hope of battling Governor Reagan, or anybody else, for the Republican nomination. His appeal has been to Democrats disillusioned with Carter, to students inflamed by a new McGovern – a liberal ideologue to independents who are thinking of voting for nobody, and to moderate Republicans who see in Reagan a right-wing leader on a white charger with a sword in one hand, and a nuclear bomb in the other.

These disenchanted ones make up a considerable body of the voters. The independents alone claim to be just less than one-third of all the eligible voters. And if they all saw in Mr Anderson the answer to a maiden's prayer, he might, indeed, stop both Carter and Reagan in their tracks. But under which party banner? He has decided under none.

I stress this because I keep reading in European papers, and hearing, I regret to say, on the BBC, that Mr Anderson is going to run as a third party candidate. He is not, the history of third party crusades in presidential politics is a record of broken ideals.

A third party candidate, even one so popular and powerful as Theodore Roosevelt, emerged not as a realistic choice for president, but as a spoiler who managed to take enough votes away from his old party's regular nominee, to throw the election to the opposition, which was what Roosevelt managed to do for Woodrow Wilson.

So Mr Anderson is not, like a Follet or Henry Wallace, starting a progressive party, or an American party, or a conservative party. He will run as an independent. It’s very late for him to get on the ballot in some states, and too late in others. And as a maverick outside a registered party, he is not eligible for federal campaign funds. He will have to hope for a legion of admirers ready to put down the maximum allowed contribution of $1,000.

He’s considered all this, and he appears to have yielded to the tempting prospect of taking so many votes from Reagan and Carter, that neither of them would have a majority of electoral votes to win. The tally of popular votes, that is the totals of all the people who vote, is not in question.

It's possible – it happened with Wilson and Truman – that they got less than a majority of the popular vote, but each of them got the majorities in states that had, all together, a majority of electoral votes. So they went into the White House, as what are known as minority presidents. But suppose that Mr Anderson succeeded – and the Iranian rescue disaster quickens the possibility – succeeded in leaving neither Carter nor Reagan, or whoever the Democratic and Republican nominees are to be, with enough electoral votes, to establish a clear majority. What happens then?

Under the Constitution, the election would then be decided in a vote of the House of Representatives. This has happened once. In 1824 there were four runners, none of them got anything like a majority of the electoral votes, and the house voted to choose John Quincy Adams, who, in the election, had won actually less than one-third of the electoral votes.

Mr Anderson had better start hoping that there will be one or two other attractive men to run on other tickets, or like him, to run on no party ticket at all. A day or two ago, I would have confidently said that Mr Anderson’s candidacy was doomed at the start. After the disaster in the Iranian desert, I, and a lot of other sceptics, are not so sure.

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