Last week, Our Land reader Ernie Drown sent in a request: “I wish you’d comment about the astonishing revelations in Peter Baker’s March 18 article in the New York Times about John Connally’s efforts to steal the election from Jimmy Carter. IMO, one of the most important stories of the decade, which has been followed by deafening silence.”
Usually, I respond to such queries in the Mailbag section of the newsletter (which is available only to premium subscribers), but Ernie’s note warrants lead-item attention. In case you missed it, let’s start with the “astonishing revelations” he references. Ben Barnes, a veteran Texas politician, told the New York Times that during the 1980 election he witnessed a secret effort by candidate Ronald Reagan’s team to stall the release of the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran. The goal was to prevent incumbent President Jimmy Carter from gaining a political bounce. What Barnes described would be one of the vilest and meanest political dirty tricks in US history, delaying freedom for Americans held in appalling conditions in order to undermine a president and affect an election. This story is a vivid reminder of a damning fact: Most modern Republican presidents won office thanks to some degree of skullduggery.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Barnes was a Democratic state legislator and lieutenant governor in the Lone Star State, with the reputation for working well with Republicans. He had helped George W. Bush obtain a much-desired spot in the Texas Air National Guard, which kept the young fellow from being drafted and possibly sent to Vietnam. His mentor was Connally, a towering figure in Texas politics who had been riding in the limo with President John Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. A protégé of Lyndon Johnson and a former governor, he had served in the administrations of Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Connally, who switched from a D to an R in the 1970s, competed in the GOP presidential primaries in 1980 and was clobbered by Reagan, then governor of California. Afterward, he eagerly jumped on the Reagan express, committed to helping his former foe win the White House and hoping that his loyalty would land him a job in a Reagan administration.
Throughout the 1980 race, the Reagan team fretted that if Carter managed to achieve the release of the hostages—who had been seized the previous year after the Iranian revolution led to the installation of an Islamic fundamentalist regime—the president’s popularity would soar and boost his reelection prospects. According to Barnes, that summer, he and Connally took a trip to the Middle East, and in meetings with regional leaders in various capitals, Connally shared a message that was to be conveyed to Iran: Hold on to the hostages; you will get a better deal if Reagan wins. Once Connally and Barnes were back in the United States, Barnes recalled, Connally briefed William Casey, the Reagan campaign chair, on the trip at a lounge in the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport.
Reagan ended up soundly defeating Carter, and the hostages were released months later on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981, once Carter was out of office. For years afterward, arms dealers, Middle East fixers, and other shifty figures claimed the Reagan campaign had conspired to persuade Tehran to hold on to the hostages until after the election. These unconfirmed whispers and allegations included tales of secret overseas visits and covert negotiations conducted by Casey (a future CIA director), supposedly including a hush-hush trip to Madrid to huddle with Iranian representatives. Eventually, Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Carter, published an op-ed in the New York Times in April 1991 suggesting the Reagan campaign had cut a treasonous deal with Iran. The shorthand term for this scandal was the “October Surprise.”
House and Senate investigators examined the October Surprise story and found no evidence to confirm that Casey and the Reagan campaign had sought a covert accord with Tehran. (They had never heard of a Connally mission and did not investigate that.) Yet two decades later, a relevant White House memo written during the George H.W. Bush years was discovered. It reported the existence of “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” This memo had not been turned over to the congressional investigators. Very suspicious, right?
Without substantiation, the October Surprise tale faded away and became part of the forgotten lore of ever-scheming Casey. Barnes’ disclosure revived this hard-to-nail-down scandal. “History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes told the Times. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”
Is Barnes telling the truth? Baker set out to corroborate his explosive allegations. “Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account,” Baker writes. “But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.” Baker was able to find a document in Texas records showing that the former Texas governor did travel to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel in the summer of 1980, and that Barnes was listed on an itinerary as accompanying him. And, as Baker reports, over the years, Barnes has shared the story of this trip and Connally’s message to Tehran with several friends. But there is no direct confirmation of Connally encouraging Iran to keep the Americans to benefit the Reagan campaign. There’s no telling how involved Casey or Reagan might have been in this initiative.
But Barnes’ account is solid—though not conclusive—evidence of a traitorous Republican misdeed. Encouraging a foreign adversary to hold on to American hostages would be a profound betrayal and an act of tremendous villainy.
If the October Surprise caper did occur, that would mean that most of the GOP presidents since Dwight Eisenhower have reached the White House via dirty tricks. During the 1968 election, Richard Nixon clandestinely impeded the Vietnam war peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam to deny Lyndon Johnson and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential candidate, a political victory that would bolster Humphrey’s campaign. (Garrett Graff details this foul plot in his recent book, Watergate: A New History, and Rachel Maddow produced a documentary on this episode.) Nixon narrowly won that contest. And in 1972, there was Watergate. Forty-four years later, Trump triumphed partly due to the help of the secret Russian attack on the election that he and his campaign aided and abetted by falsely denying its existence.
In between Nixon and Trump, the Bushes also attained the White House with the aid of underhanded trickery. George H.W. Bush covered up—that is, lied about—his role in and knowledge of the Iran-contra scandal when he ran for president in 1988. His team that year mounted what political journalists of the day considered the dirtiest presidential election in decades, with its below-the-belt attacks on Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee. (Remember the whisper campaign that Dukakis had an undisclosed psychological ailment and the infamous Willie Horton ad?) And George W. Bush prevailed in the 2000 election, partly because of the phony “Brooks Brothers riot” that his campaign operatives and supporters orchestrated to stop an important recount in Miami. He won reelection in 2004 with help from the Swift Boat smear campaign waged by Bush allies against Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic standard-bearer.
Certainly, not all political perfidy is created equal. Trying to prolong a war or committing break-ins, forgeries, and other crimes to win an election (Nixon) is more devious than spreading rumors that an opponent is mentally ill (George H.W. Bush). Providing cover to a foreign adversary covertly attacking an American election (Trump) is worse than winking at a lie-driven operation to brand a rival as a war-hero fraud (George W. Bush.) Encouraging a regime to keep Americans imprisoned longer than necessary hits the high end of the list of sleazy and mendacious tactics.
It's noteworthy that none of the successful Democratic presidential contenders of the past 50 years have been credibly accused of such deceit. Trump tried with the Big Lie—his evidence-free argument that Democrats, the Deep State, the media, and who-knows-who-else stole the election from him. But only his cultists fell for that crap. Republicans might point to Kennedy’s narrow win in Illinois in 1960 and allegations of ballot-stuffing. But these accusations have long been debated without yielding a definitive conclusion, and Kennedy would have won the Electoral College vote without Illinois.
Unfortunately, the Barnes revelation has generated only a moderate ripple in the news cycle. PBS’s NewsHour aired a segment on this scoop. A few newspapers ran stories. (A New York Post columnist harrumphed at the New York Times piece for being predicated on a single source.) The Times followed up with reactions from the former hostages. Barry Rosen, who was press attaché at the US embassy in Tehran, observed, “It’s nice that Mr. Barnes is trying to soothe his soul during the last years of his life. But for the hostages who went through hell, he has not helped us at all. He has made it just as bad or worse.” He chastised Barnes for waiting 43 years to come forward, and added, “It’s the definition of treason...knowing that there was a possibility that the Carter administration might have been able to negotiate us out of Iran earlier.” (The paper also reported an outrageous transgression: Many of the surviving hostages “feel neglected by the government, which has paid them only about a quarter of the $4.4 million that they were each promised by Congress in 2015, after decades of lobbying for compensation.”)
Barnes’ account—coming from a credible witness—ought to receive more attention. Perhaps there is a person in the United States or the Middle East who can back up his story. Did US intelligence collect any information about Connally’s trip? His tale now taints Reagan’s victory. Moreover, it prompts a broader question: Can a Republican win a presidential election without engaging in dishonest scheming or betraying the nation?
Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.
