Air Force One by Kenneth T. Walsh

Author:Kenneth T. Walsh [Walsh, Kenneth T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4013-9791-3
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2010-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

LATE IN CARTER’S third year, on November 4, 1979, a mob of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and took 52 Americans hostage. This proved to be the defining crisis of the Carter administration, and for more than a year, Carter worked doggedly to free them. In fact, he became so obsessed with the crisis that he declared a near-moratorium on his own travel so he could devote full time to liberating them. For much of 1980, until the fall campaign against Ronald Reagan, Air Force One was rarely used.

This made the president a prisoner in the White House, and the TV networks began using logos on their nightly newscasts keeping count of each day the hostage crisis dragged on. It made matters worse when the zealots paraded the blindfolded hostages before screaming, threatening crowds in Teheran, all before the television cameras. America seemed helpless.

In April 1980, Carter ordered a military mission to free them, but it failed miserably when a U.S. helicopter collided with a C-130 aircraft in the Iranian desert, killing several American troops. This only deepened the public’s sense that he was in over his head. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who resigned after Carter overruled his opposition to the rescue mission, said it was a unique folly. “The decision,” Vance wrote in his memoirs, “to attempt to extract the hostages by force from the center of a city of over five million, more than six thousand miles from the United States, and which could be reached only by flying over difficult terrain, was different: I was convinced that the decision was wrong and that it carried great risks for the hostages and our national interests.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.