Word: tehran
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...debacle. For a generation Iranians lived in fear, oppressed by a tyrant placed in power by our Central Intelligence Agency and maintained by our largesse. It is not hard to understand why Iranians hate the United States. It is not hard to understand why they lined the streets of Tehran to shout "Death to America" as the hostages left. And it is not hard to predict that, should America try in other lands, perhaps Latin America, what it tried in Iran, the result will be the same...
...past 14½ months may offer the only way out of a blind rage. Blindness has been a metaphor throughout. The U.S. was blind not to see the extent and temper of the Iranian revolution against the Shah; blind fanatics seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran; the Ayatullah Khomeini's blind sense of vengeance sanctioned the seizure; and the hostages suffered their own blindness, held in solitary and the dark. All year long, photographs of American heads in blindfolds became icons of the crime. Now the U.S. itself is like those blindfolded prisoners as they unwrap their bindings...
Starting two weeks ago, Brown quickened the pace still more, seemingly because he had received word that the Tehran government wanted to settle the matter before the beginning of the Reagan Administration. Brown flew to New York on Jan. 9, and in phone calls from his room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he asked each bank for its final tabulations of debts and credits with the Iranians...
...soon after it hit the streets, one vendor was offered $5 for a copy. Many other newspapers put out special supplements on the hostages. In Milwaukee, the Journal started printing a special eight-page wraparound section moments before the planes carrying the hostages to freedom took off from Tehran. The special sold an extra 45,000 over the normal press run of 320,000. Says Assistant Managing Editor George Lockwood: "It was nip and tuck at the end. There were butterflies in our stomachs." Newspapers in the U.S. and Europe generally gave the hostage story top billing over the Inauguration...
...hostage story neared its climax, network anchormen displayed uncharacteristic tension. Citing an Agence France-Presse report at 10:23 a.m. that a plane was taxiing on the runway at Tehran airport, CBS's Dan Rather snapped that the wire service had been "a pillar of inaccuracy." Minutes later, convinced that the Iranians were holding the hostages until Carter was out of office, Walter Cronkite angrily confessed on the air: "I try to remain the cool correspondent, impartial and unaffected by events, but it seems like the most uncivilized final touch to an uncivilized performance that I can imagine...