Bryce Zabel's INSTANT HISTORY

Iran Decides Not to Party Like It's 1979

Iran has decided to let its most recent hostages go. The 15 British sailors who've been detained in Teheran have been even paraded in front of the leader with the name nobody can pronounce to shake his hand and make small talk before they get on the plane home. Maybe Iran has learned something from its own history.

Back in 1979, Iran first took hostages, paraded them on TV, threatened to put them on trial, forced them to confess their crimes and generally behaved as very, very bad hosts. An d instead of holding them for a couple of weeks and moving on with a handshake and a smile, back then they held them for exactly 444 days.

Monday, November 19, 1979

The Time magazine above, "Blackmailing the U.S." is the first issue to come out in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian hostage crisis which basically dragged on for 14 months, cost Jimmy Carter his presidency, and gave it to Ronald Reagan. Remember that it ended literally on the day Reagan took office and the Iranians knew either the hostages came home or the missiles started flying. Here's how the article began:

It was an ugly, shocking image of innocence and impotence, of tyranny and terror, of madness and mob rule. Blindfolded and bound, employees of the U.S. embassy in Tehran were paraded last week before vengeful crowds while their youthful captors gloated and jeered.

On that gray Sunday morning when 60 Americans were imprisoned by their Iranian student captors, the world changed. President Carter said at the beginning that "These last two days have been the worst I've had." Well, they didn't get better. Carter was seen as weak already, and this just made things seem even clearer to the public.

As frustration about the plight of the hostages increased, there was a sense that the Administration should do something —anything—to free them. The White House, for sound tactical and strategic reasons, rejected the military options. There were demands for the mass deportation of the 50,000 Iranian students in the U.S.—or at least those who had taken advantage of their visas to picket and demonstrate against the U.S. That was also rejected, since it would blatantly violate U.S. immigration laws. Instead, as it has had to do in a number of other recent crises, the Administration decided on restraint.

Around the U.S. though, there was the beginning of push-back. Iranian students were here in the U.S. in large numbers as the article indicated above, and they were largely out protesting against our country for letting the hated Shah of Iran in for medical treatment.

In New York City, at the close of an Iranian student demonstration, a Columbia University undergraduate shouted: "We're gonna ship you back, and you aren't gonna like it! No more booze. No more Big Macs. No more rock music. No more television. No more sex. You're gonna get on that plane at Kennedy, and when you get off in Tehran, you're gonna be back in the 13th century. How you gonna like that?" The Iranians, who stared back glumly, did not respond.

This situation was a key illustration of how the terrorism game was set up to work. One of the Iranian hostage-taking "students" was quoted in Time saying: "If the Marines don't shoot, we take over. If they do, we have our martyr. Either way, we win." Then there was the White House aide who talked like a Pentagon war gamer: "It's a classic case of gaming versus an irrational opponent. As the irrationality approaches 100%, your ability to game nears zero."

Not that I think the current leader of Iran is any more rational than Khomeini or the students were, the optimism that was felt three decades ago actually was warranted this time. Here's how it played in 1979.

Still, by week's end the Administration was feeling a bit more hopeful about the situation. Having avoided any sort of response that might have worked to the disadvantage of the hostages, the U.S. was increasingly counting on growing pressure from the international community and from Iran's own middle class to exert some influence on the religious leaders and the students. One goal of the American diplomatic strategy was to isolate Iran and make it appear as an irrational outlaw in world opinion.

I'm not sure if the Iranian hostage crisis quite rises to the "Where Were You?" level of 9/11, JFK or Challenger, but I have vivid memories. I was the weekend anchor at KVOA-TV in Tucson, Arizona and I remember reading the first wire copy, and then doing the update on the news. I worked the late shift in those days, and I also remember coming back and watching that new ABC late-night show, "America Held Hostage" with some guy named Ted Koppel who had even bigger hair than I did back then.

Yes, the times they were really changing. Time really nailed it with the very last two sentences of their article, capturing the wave of the future. Worth reading again.

However the embassy affair ends, it is a sharp reminder of the degree to which the traditional rules of international conduct can no longer be taken for granted. The world is changing; the unpredictable is becoming the commonplace.

Anyway, that's how they reported it some 28 years ago during the grand-daddy of all hostage crises.

King Kong Re-Make: Been There, Done That

Pretty much everyone on the globe now knows that Peter Jackson's version of King Kong hits the theaters on December 13. We know that it is based on the 1933 King Kong, brought to the screen by Merian C. Cooper. We are awash in re-make hype but did you know that it's all happened before? It did, 29 years ago, back in 1976 with the hugely anticipated Dino de Laurentis version of King Kong. And here's the cover of Time to prove it.

Here Comes King Kong
Time, October 25, 1976

Just for the fun of it, let's play the numbers game. The 1933 version cost $670,000 and grossed $1.7 million and this was no small matter considering that FDR has just closed the banks that year. The 1976 version cost $24 million and grossed $132 million worldwide. This latest version is budged at $207 million and God-only-knows what it will eventually make.

Yet somehow it (the 1933 version) worked, back in the early days of talking pictures, and damned if it doesnot look like it is going to work again, in a supposedly more sophisticated age. The ultimate triumph of special effects over common sense? A weird sexual charge, heavy in portent, reassuringly innocent in presentation? A comic strip rendering of a myth dredged up out of the collective unconscious and splashed so boldly over the screen that the audience is awed into acceptance by it's sheer audacity? Or is it, finally, just an act of primal showmanship, a Barnum-like invitation to admit to ourselves that we are all members of the great fraternity of suckerhood and simply revel in the release of cultural inhibitions that admission sometimes encourage?

That's a heap of questions. By the time I get to the last one, I've forgotten what the first one was. In any case, Time noted that the screenings of the 1976 Kong had played "excellently" to the "carefully selected audiences."

It's become popular since 1976 to pooh-pooh that version which was Jessica Lange's introduction to film audiences. But Time certainly wasn't buying into that, calling screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s script "marvelously clever, yet touching." This was an interesting piece of praise considering that Semple Jr. was known, at the time, as the creator of TV's Batman series. More tidbits: Barbara Streisand almost signed on to play the Fay Wray role and they thought about Cher but she was pregnant when production started. So they went with an unknown.

Time concluded their article with this quote from mega-producer de Laurentis:

"No one cry when Jaws die," Dino says, his voice rising in passion as he develops his theme. "But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. Intellectuals gonna love Kong; even film buffs who love the first Kong gonna love ours. Why? Because I no give them crap. I no spend two, three million to do quick business. I spend 24 million on my Kong. I give them quality. I got here a great love story, a great adventure. And she rated P.G. For everybody."

I'm imagining Peter Jackson has his own New Zealand way to express his passion, but he probably feels much the same. He might also add, hopefully, that the third time's the charm!

McCartney's First Tour in 1976

November 30 marks the end of Paul McCartney's 2005 tour, something he's done enough of in recent years that it seems familiar. But it wasn't always like that. Back in 1976, McCartney took his band, Wings, on tour and it was his first tour since the Beatles had played their last "live" song together in the late summer of 1966 at San Francisco's Candlestick Park.

Time, May 31, 1976
Cover by Peter Max

Time noted that, with this tour, McCartney was "bucking Elton John as Pop's top gun." His 21 city tour sold out everywhere and in Los Angeles and New York the tickets were snapped up within four hours in a time before Ticketmaster and ticket brokers.

His bounteous melodic gifts seemed to be reflected in the brightness of his step, the openness of his smile. His impishness, and his considerable charm, always had an ironic undercurrent of worldliness and assurance. Even now, in performance or in conversation, he has the surprised sophistication of a gremline who has just been caught under the drawbridge compromising the fairy princess. It is not for any of this that Paul is popular, however. It is for the music he is making, the flowing Pop that typifies, even defines, the snug place much contemporary rock has found... McCartney is tempering the revolution he helped to create.

The article spends considerble space on the McCartney/Beatles story, praising him and slamming him at the same time. Noting that he is "bucking hard for Pop's Top Gun", it includes this unattributed quote under a concert photo: "If you're a young, vital person who goes to discos, maybe the music's just fine." Ouch. There's the requisite description of Paul and his wife, Linda, as a family that keeps close together by traveling together and, of course, the necessary dissection of the end of the Beatles.

McCartney's roughtest critic over the years was also his best friend. "He sounds like Englebert Humperdink," said John Lennon of McCartney's first solo efforts. Later, in Lennon's remarkable album Imagine, he put it directly to Paul in "How Do You Sleep?", a fierce song full of anger and injury...The song was less spiteful than revealing, fueled by the kind of fury that can only come out of friendship, injured perhaps irreparably, that refuses to disintegrate completely or to mend. Wounds went deep, and they stayed open for a while. McCartney says now: "It's a decision you make, that's all. Otherwise I would have ended up thinking John was the most evil person on this earth...saying all that."

The article closed with the persistant rumors of a potential Beatle's re-union, including the $50-million for one concert offer that was currently on the table. But it quoted a 17-year-old fan who answered that question maybe even better than John or Paul: "...I don't want them to get back together. It would be a super-letdown. They could never produce the music they once did. It's a different era, and they've changed in different ways."

Actually, Paul said it even better. In his spare style, he got it down to three words.  Let It Be.

America Test-Drives A Ford

The hot days of August in 1974 ushered in the most traumatic transition of presidential power ever -- if assassinations are not counted -- and maybe even if they are.  Nearly 800 days after the Watergate break-in, 289 days after the Saturday Night Massacre, 97 days after the White House transcripts were released, twelve days after the Supreme Court voted unanimously that the President must surrender 64 more tapes, five days after the House Judiciary Committee voted out articles of impeachment -- after all that, the defenses of President Richard Nixon had finally vanished.  He resigned on August 9, 1974 and President Gerald Ford was sworn in.

The Healing Begins
Time / August 19, 1974

Of interest here is that the newsmagazines prefer to be forward looking and give the covers to the man taking office -- so Ford gets the cover, not the disgraced Nixon.  Newsweek, back in 1963, issued its reporting on the Kennedy assassination with President Johnson on the cover, not JFK.

Time started its coverage with a pretty mundane description of how Ford was taking office in the East Room of the White House while Nixon was on a plane to California.  Then they got to the heart of the matter.

It was the first time in American history that a President had resigned his office.  The precedent was melancholy, but it was hardly traumatic.  All fo the damage had been done before in the seemingly interminable specatcle of high officials marched through courtrooms, in the recitation of burglaries, crooked campaign contributions and bribes, enemies lists, powers abused, subpoenas ignored -- above all, in the ugly but mesmerizing suspense as the investigations drew closer and closer to the Oval Office.  Now the dominant emotion was one of sheer relief.

It's worth remembering exactly what Gerald Ford said when he put his hand on his oldest son's bible that day and then spoke to the nation:  "Our long national nightmare is over."  Time noted the essential irony of his succession to power:

In a curious way, Gerald Ford comes to the presidency under a kind of grace precisely becuase he was not elected to office... But Ford promises a new and welcome style in the White House, an openness and candor harking back perhaps to Truman or to the more amiable qualities of Eisenhower.

Of course, Ford would blow that opportunity to be elected in his own right less than a month later when he pardoned Richard Nixon for all crimes.  The public still wasn't ready for that.  He lost the election to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and was gone from the White House just over two years after moving in.