Tie a Yellow Ribbon

Abstract

On November 4, 1979, as tens of thousands of Iranian demonstrators filed past the U.S. embassy in Tehran, a smaller group of radical students broke through the embassy gates, overpowered Marine guards, and took scores of American embassy employees captive. The students were angered and alarmed by President Jimmy Carter's decision to allow Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran's exiled monarch, to enter the United States to receive medical treatment, a move portending, the students believed, a U.S.-led effort to reverse the Iranian Revolution and reinstate the hated Shah. It was at first widely expected—not least by the students themselves—that Iran's revolutionary authorities would quickly step in to rescue the American captives, as they had done following a similar embassy takeover the previous February. This time, however, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the revolutionary regime, publicly endorsed the students' action, making a speedy release of the Americans politically impossible. It was, as David Farber relates in this intelligent and lively book, the beginning of a 444-day saga that would further radicalize Iran, outrage the American people, wreck Carter's presidency, and leave a legacy of U.S.-Iranian bitterness that remains with us today.