by Ira Shapiro
The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled in Paris, provided leadership to the rising opposition, spurring them to a near frenzy. In the last week of November, he called upon his followers to take action during Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. “This is the month that blood will triumph over the sword . . . the month the oppressors will be judged and the Satanic government abolished. . . . The Imam of the Muslims has taught us to overthrow tyrants. You should unite, arise, and sacrifice your blood.” On December 10, a crowd estimated at 1 million gathered around the Shayad Monument in Tehran, chanting “Death to the American cur.”
The crisis in Iran hit Washington without warning. In August, the CIA had reported to Carter that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.” The Defense Intelligence Agency analysis predicted the shah’s rule was stable for at least a decade. The United States had relied on Iran as a listening post to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union. But the United States seemed to have no listening post to understand what was going on in the shah’s Iran. The Carter administration offered the shah support, but without understanding just how fragile his position was. In late October, one comprehensive Department of State memo outlining the dire situation facing the shah and the grim alternatives for U.S. policy never made it to the president or for discussion in the National Security Council.
William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador to Iran, understood the severity of the situation and tried to force high-level consideration of the problem but could not break through Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, who downplayed the urgency of Sullivan’s cables. When the Carter administration did fully focus, it found itself fundamentally divided. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance wanted the shah to introduce more democratic reforms and expand his political base. Brzezinski believed that the shah’s only option was to install a military government, which would be willing to use force if necessary to put down the resistance.
One result of the Senate’s string of legislative accomplishments was that Jimmy Carter had begun to rely intensively on Robert Byrd’s counsel and judgment in foreign policy issues. At the president’s request, Byrd undertook a major trip to the Middle East, meeting with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria to support the breakthrough agreement negotiated at Camp David. But with the situation in Iran confused but clearly deteriorating, Byrd decided to go to Tehran as well. Even above and beyond the potentially enormous national security implications of the shah’s situation, Byrd had a personal interest in Iran; his daughter had married an Iranian physician.
Before leaving Washington, Byrd met with Brzezinski, who told him that the State Department was preventing the shah from taking the strong action needed to deal with the dissidents. He urged Byrd to help stiffen the shah’s spine, by telling him to use whatever means he thought were necessary to stay in power.
Byrd arrived in Tehran on November 26. A curfew was in effect, and security conditions were very tight. There was practically no traffic on the road from the airport to the U.S. embassy, but bonfires could be seen, and military troops were in evidence. A car was turned on its side, burning near the gates of the embassy.
Byrd, accompanied by his chief foreign policy adviser, Hoyt Purvis, met for five hours with Ambassador Sullivan. The grim conversation through the long evening persuaded Byrd that urging the shah to crack down on the dissidents could lead to many deaths. Byrd came away from the meeting with a strong sense that the shah was not likely to stay in power very long.
When Byrd met with the shah, he found him dispirited, preoccupied, and very much adrift. Byrd could only conclude that the situation was deteriorating rapidly, probably irreversibly. At the end of his trip, the Carter administration asked if Byrd would make a statement expressing confidence that the shah would be on the throne for a long time. Having concluded that the shah’s days were numbered, Byrd refused.
Ambassador Sullivan had recognized the urgency of the situation facing the shah. But he had also advised U.S. officials that Khomeini and his supporters were anti-Communist and anti-Soviet and predicted that “Iranian economic ties with the West could continue” and that the Iranian military could preserve the nation’s integrity. These wildly inaccurate assessments showed just how little anyone knew about the Islamic militant revolutionary forces at work. But Sullivan was right on the mark with another observation: “A single misstep could produce unforeseeable consequences.”
An eventful year, 1978 would come to an end with the bright promise of peace between Israel and Egypt, the hope for a new relationship between the United States and China, and deep uncertainty about the future in Iran.
Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) greets five of the eight Democrats elected to the Senate in 1962, the election that cemented the progressive Senate of the 1960’s and 1970’s. From left to right, Thomas McIntyre (NH), George McGovern (SD), Ted Kennedy (MA), Daniel Inouye (HI), and Abraham Ribicoff (CT).
Credit: © Bettmann/CORBIS
Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Thomas “Tip” O’Neill (D-MA) become Senate majority leader and Speaker of the House as the Ninety-fifth Congress begins in January 1977.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Howard Baker (R-TN) (right), during the Watergate hearings that made him a household name, along with Fred Thompson, the Republican chief counsel. Baker becomes Senate minority leader in January 1977. Thompson is elected to the Senate in 1994, also representing Tennessee.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Byrd and Baker, here huddling with principal aides Joseph Stewart and William Hildenbrand, worked together closely as Senate leaders.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Three iconic senators serving together on the Foreign Relations Committee: from left to right, Edmund Muskie (D-ME), Jacob Javits (R-NY), and Hubert Humphrey (D-MN).
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Warren Magnuson (D-WA) and Bob Packwood (R-OR) led the Commerce Committee in a bipartisan way characteristic of the Great Senate.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), the father of Earth Day, and one of the greatest environmentalists in American history.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Two of the most influential senators ever to serve: Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA). Jackson supported Kennedy’s challenge to Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980.
Credit: AP Photo/Harvey Georges
Veteran senator John Tower (R-TX) provided leadership on defense matters, while freshman senator Orrin Hatch (RUT) led the newly mobilized business community against labor law reform.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Jesse Helms (R-SC), the “righteous warrior,” played a determined and effective role in obstructing the work of the Senate and the will of the majority, while lowering the wall that separated the Senate from partisan politics.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Robert Dole (R-KS), seen here with Marshall Matz, from George McGovern’s staff. Usually a tough partisan, Dole began working with McGovern and Matz in a historic forty-year alliance to fight hunger in the United States and globally.
Frank Church (D-ID) (right) and Paul Sarbanes (D-MD), floor managers of the Panama Canal treaties, meet with Jimmy Carter in the Rose Garden in the spring of 1978.
Credit: Boise State University
Democratic senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan (NY), Russell Long (LA), Byrd, Ribicoff, and Bill Bradley (NJ) savor a long-awaited victory in the three-year fight over energy policy.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Key senators on foreign policy issues—Javits, Baker, Church, and Byrd—with Deng Xiaoping, leader of the People’s Republic of China, as the United States moves forward with recognition of the PRC in 1979.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Freshman Carl Levin (D-MI) (right) meets with Vice President
Walter Mondale during the effort to prevent Chrysler from going under in 1979. Young senators played increasingly prominent roles in the democratized Senate of the 1970’s.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Joseph Biden (D-DE) with Ted Kaufman, his administrative assistant. In 2009, when Biden became vice president, Kaufman was appointed to his Senate seat.
Richard Lugar (R-IN) (right), seen here with Baker, played an indispensable role in rescuing New York City in 1978 and Chrysler the next year.
Credit: U.S. Senate Historical Office
Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Strom Thurmond (R-SC) led the inquiry into the connection between Billy Carter and the government of Libya, exonerating the Carter administration just weeks before the 1980 election.
Credit: Photo by Charles Geer. Image provided by the U.S. Senate Historical Office
Byrd, Bayh, and John Stennis (D-MS) (left) coming from the Capitol after the failed mission to rescue the hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Credit: AP Photo/Harrity
1979
chapter 13
BEFORE THE STORM
THE SENATE THAT CONVENED IN JANUARY 1979 INCLUDED TWENTY NEW senators, a record number of new members. As always, the group represented a broad spectrum of experience and ideology. The celebrities included Virginia Republican John Warner, a former secretary of the navy better known as Elizabeth Taylor’s husband; Maine Republican William Cohen, who had distinguished himself as a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon’s impeachment proceedings; and New Jersey Democrat Bill Bradley, a former Rhodes Scholar from Princeton, who had deferred his entry into politics until after completing a great career in the National Basketball Association, where he was a cornerstone of two champion New York Knicks teams. Several other newly elected members seemed destined to become solid senators: Democrat Carl Levin, a thoughtful, intense lawyer from Michigan, who had ended Bob Griffin’s Senate career; Democrat Howell Heflin, a Supreme Court justice from Alabama, who reminded many Senate watchers of a younger Sam Ervin; Paul Tsongas, a cerebral, “new Democrat,” from Massachusetts who had upset Ed Brooke; and Alan Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, elected to a seat that his father had held, who soon became known for speaking his mind in salty, unpredictable ways.
The new class of eleven Republicans and nine Democrats represented a group large enough to be noticeable. During the transition period, the newly elected senators bonded, and they decided to continue meeting for lunches, on a bipartisan and nonpartisan basis, when they arrived in Washington. These lunches continued for several months, and led to some lasting friendships across party lines. Neither Robert Byrd nor Howard Baker ever became comfortable with the bipartisan lunches, regularly asking, in all seriousness, what was going on. Before too long, the new senators had discontinued the lunches.
Any election that brought Bradley, Tsongas, and Levin to the Senate could not be portrayed as a Republican landslide, and even the Republicans Cohen, David Durenberger, and Rudy Boschwitz seemed likely to be moderates. But the nature of the 1978 campaign, with its unprecedented focus on single-issue politics—particularly, the Panama Canal, guns, and abortion—changed the mood of the Senate and left a palpable sense of a move to the right. The Republican caucus was only slightly larger, but seemed more significantly changed, with Ed Brooke and Clifford Case, two liberal lights, gone, and Chuck Percy back only because he trimmed his sails dramatically. William Armstrong’s election from Colorado, following the arrivals of Orrin Hatch (Utah), Malcolm Wallop (Wyoming), and Harrison Schmitt (New Mexico) two years earlier, reinforced the impression of a strong New Right Republican wave in the western states. Ted Stevens, the Republican whip, had been a regular participant in the Wednesday Club, a breakfast group of the moderate-to-liberal Republicans. Before long, Stevens stopped attending the group’s breakfasts, shifting his allegiance to the much more conservative Senate Steering Committee. The Wednesday Club shrank dramatically after that.
At the same time, Baker and Bob Dole were beginning to lay the groundwork for seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. Dole had already shown little moderation in 1978, particularly during the Panama Canal debates. Baker would, predictably, be tacking to the right to catch up with the shifting center of the Republican Party, and to make up for his heresy—supporting the Panama Canal treaties—if it was possible to do so.
In his own way, Carl Levin represented the new political mood in the country. Educated at Swarthmore and Harvard Law School, the son of a respected Michigan Supreme Court justice, Levin vaulted from the Detroit City Council to the Senate by upsetting Bob Griffin, who never recovered from having remarked that he did not want to run for reelection and then changing his mind. On issues of war and peace and constitutional rights, Levin looked to be every inch a liberal. But what animated his campaign, and his first years in the Senate, was a passionate commitment to reining in the federal bureaucracy.
Levin came to Washington to impose a legislative veto on federal regulatory agencies to bring the bureaucratic “monster” to heel. As a Detroit city councilman, he had battled with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which in the mid-1970’s refused to either repair or demolish thousands of empty, federally owned houses in Detroit. At one point, frustrated to the limit, and politically aware of what made good local television, Levin rented a bulldozer and went to a vacant house with the intent of demolishing it. As a new Senator, Levin warned that if well-intentioned federal programs were not run more effectively, they would lose public support. His message differed somewhat from the antigovernment rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and other right-wing conservatives intent on dismantling the federal government, but sometimes one had to listen very carefully to make the distinction.
The 1980 Senate campaigns started almost immediately. Paul Brown, the leader of Life Amendment PAC (LAPAC), took aim at what his group called the “deadly dozen.” Boasting that his group had been instrumental in defeating pro-choice senators Dick Clark, Floyd Haskell, and Tom McIntyre, Brown said: “We’ve proven our point. There’s a pro-life vote. We’ve come of age as a political force.” Birch Bayh headed the group’s “Deadly Dozen” list, followed by George McGovern, Frank Church, and Representative Morris Udall. Also targeted were John Culver and Patrick Leahy, and, for good measure, one Republican—Bob Packwood, who had been the most outspoken Senate advocate of abortion rights.
Birch Bayh, facing tragic circumstances, probably didn’t even notice his LAPAC ranking. His wife, Marvella, one of Washington’s best-liked and most impressive women, had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1971, at the age of thirty-eight. Marvella Bayh battled the disease and had become a full-time advocate for the American Cancer Society, giving more than 175 speeches about cancer and its prevention. But her cancer had returned in 1978, in an invasive form that was in her bones. Her doctors had said it was inoperable, but that she might live five or six years. On March 28, she was scheduled to receive the Hubert H. Humphrey Inspirational Award but could not appear because she was hospitalized. Accepting the award for his wife, Birch Bayh, near tears, had to struggle to regain his composure. Marvella Bayh died on April 24 at the age of forty-six.
For Senate Democrats, one exciting transition took center stage: Ted Kennedy’s long-awaited ascendancy to the post of Judiciary Committee chairman. The symbolism of Kennedy, the Democrats’ best-known liberal, taking the gavel from the reactionary James Eastland was a profound political and ideological transition, even though Eastland had maintained his power by providing generous budgets over the years to support the liberal activities of subcommittee chairmen Kennedy, Bayh, Phil Hart, John Tunney, and Joseph Tydings. Kennedy would take on the full spectrum of the Judiciary Committee’s responsibilities, which included the volatile issues of civil rights, criminal law, gun control, and proposed constitutional amendments relating to busing, abortion, and school prayer. He had just captured the attention of all Democrats, with his full-throated defense of liberalism and criti
que of Carter at the Democratic midterm convention in Memphis.
Speculation that he would challenge the president for the Democratic nomination was rising. Suddenly, seemingly every ambitious Democratic lawyer wanted to be part of the powerhouse Judiciary Committee staff. Before long, Kennedy’s team included staff director Stephen Breyer, a future Supreme Court justice; Chief Counsel David Boies, who would later become the most famous litigator in the United States; Ken Feinberg, who would become the country’s leading mediator, specializing in the handling of mass torts; Ron Brown, later the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the secretary of commerce during the Clinton years; and Susan Estrich, who combined a great legal mind with impressive effectiveness as a political operative. Kennedy was building a powerhouse Judiciary Committee staff, which could also bolster his presidential campaign, if he made the decision to challenge Carter.
With the retirement of John Sparkman, Frank Church finally achieved his long-awaited dream of being chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Congratulations on your chairmanship,” said a note supposedly from William Borah, the long-deceased senator and former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who had been Church’s boyhood idol. “What took you so long?” In the four years since the departure of its famous chairman, J. William Fulbright, the Foreign Relations Committee had lost some of its influence—it had become considerably less prominent than the Armed Services Committee and even somewhat supplanted by the new Intelligence Committee. Church sought to restore the committee’s luster, by getting it to focus on issues of long-term importance, rather than just responding to the crises of the day. He planned to do so in part by bringing back the staff resources that had been dispersed to the subcommittees, in large part because of his own relentless lobbying for the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations. Unfortunately for Church, the subcommittee chairmen had grown accustomed to their power and resources and fought against returning them to the full committee. Within a short time, Church’s effort to claw back the resources had antagonized several committee Democrats. He and John Glenn were barely on speaking terms.
