Crisis and Global Tension Held Harvard Hostage

In Tehran, two Harvard alums were among the 53 Americans held captive by a group of student revolutionaries in 1980. In Cambridge, Iranian students witnessed America’s furious reaction to this standoff and worried that they would become scapegoats. The 444 tense days of the Iranian hostage crisis marked the political climate of the Class of 1981’s four years at the College and shaped the social atmosphere they would enter after graduation.

Every night during the crisis, Americans tuned in to ABC’s “The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage” to listen to Ted Koppel’s analysis of the situation. That broadcast “helped keep the issue front and center at Harvard and across the nation,” IBM Professor of Business and Government Roger B. Porter says.

The crisis would play an enormous role in the 1980 presidential campaign and would jeopardize Carter’s chance at reelection. But even at Harvard, events taking place thousands of miles away sometimes hit particularly close to home.

DON’T SAY YOU’RE IRANIAN

Shahrokh Rouhani was an Iranian graduate student in the Department of Applied Sciences at the University during the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis.

“The nation in general was completely galvanized against Iranians and the Iranian regime,” Rouhani says.

Aga Khan professor of Iranian emeritus Richard N. Frye says he counseled several Harvard Iranian students during the crisis.

“Just don’t talk about it,” he says he told them. “Don’t advertise the fact that you are Iranian. You might be beaten.”

But, Rouhani says, “In Cambridge, I never even felt the slightest sense of hostility or insecurity.”

The Harvard administration made a special effort to meet the needs of Iranian students, Rouhani says. He recalls meeting with 13 other Iranian students in the Holyoke Center to discuss dealing with immigration officers and financial difficulties.

“Some of the Iranians there were the children of the previous regime’s officials, and they were afraid,” Rouhani says.

One of his classmates, for instance, was the daughter of a former minister who was then in prison.

“They wanted to make sure she could continue studying without any financial issues,” Rouhani says.

He also remembers that University President Derek C. Bok sent him a personal letter advising him to contact the president’s office with any problems.

AN UNCERTAIN STATUS

But University support could not smooth over all of the Iranian students’ worries. “They didn’t know what happened to their country,” Frye says. “Most of them thought this was going to be a new democratic Iran. They didn’t realize that the mullahs, the religious people, were going to take over.”

In late 1979, when Carter ordered Iranian students to report to U.S. immigration officials to verify their status, approximately half of the Iranian students at Harvard and MIT signed an open letter refusing to comply.

Protesting the government’s “selective harassment,” the students wrote in the letter—which was published in The Crimson—that “the imminent deportation proceedings...represent a classic case of bending the legal system to suit the prevailing political mood of the day.”

For Rouhani, however, the policy did not result in significant difficulties. He recalls going to the immigration office, where hundreds of other Iranian students were lined up, and having his status checked and approved without incident.

No Iranian students at Harvard faced deportation, The Crimson reported.

444 DAYS IN LIMBO

Meanwhile, in Tehran, Elizabeth Ann Swift ’62, and John W. Limbert ’64, both U.S. State Department diplomats, waited helplessly to be released.

In the first days of captivity, the hostages were tied to chairs, Swift told The Crimson in 1982. Later, Swift, one of the two women not released during the first two weeks, was held for a time in isolation. Every day, she heard bursts of gunfire and the sounds of demonstrations outside the embassy. Even after Swift was eventually allowed contact with other hostages and some visitors, her captors censored her reading material to keep her disconnected from the outside world, she said.

The hostages were at the mercy of a group of disorganized and sometimes capricious student revolutionaries. One of Swift’s guards wanted to force her to play Russian roulette, she told The Crimson. And Frye says that Limbert, a former student, told him after he was released that he used to hear the revolutionaries “complaining they couldn’t go to class because they had to guard.”

After 14 months in captivity, the hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, the day of President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

Harvard students, in the middle of their exams at the time, scrawled “The hostages are free!” in their blue books in celebration, The Crimson reported.

“Nobody was hurt, nobody was killed. There was a great sigh of relief,” Frye says.

Both Limbert and Swift accepted positions at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs in the 1981-1982 school year, where they each kept a low profile.

As a fellow, Swift avoided speaking publicly about her experience as a hostage. Her time at Harvard was a period of “getting back to normal,” she told The Crimson.

THE REAGAN REVOLUTION

Carter’s presidency was significantly undermined by the crisis, which was still underway during the 1980 presidential campaign. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56 emerged as a strong challenger to Carter for the Democratic nomination.

Paul V. Holtzman ’83 says “there was certainly a lot of hometown support” for Kennedy at Harvard.

But after Carter secured the Democratic nomination, many of Harvard’s intellectual heavyweights endorsed him, including John Kenneth Galbraith, Samuel P. Huntington, and Richard E. Neustadt.

But in November, Ronald Reagan won the presidency by a landslide.

That was an outcome few Harvard students had anticipated.

There were only about 100 Reagan supporters on campus, Robert O. Boorstin ’81 says. And, on a predominately liberal campus, they were something of a “silent minority,” Richard L.A Weiner ’81 says.

“I think there was a lot of shock through the student body when Reagan was elected president,” Weiner says. Reagan, a former actor, was “seemingly nothing more than a guy who could read the teleprompter.”

“It was a particularly Harvard way of looking at Reagan,” Boorstin says. “He was a dummy.”

For some at Harvard, however, Reagan’s election was particularly welcome news. Porter and Baker Professor of Economics Martin S. Feldstein ’61 were among those summoned to Washington, DC to serve in the Reagan administration.

Porter received a call two days after the election asking for his help in crafting Reagan’s policy for the first weeks of his term, Porter writes in an e-mail.

Without ever missing one of his classes, he writes, Porter “shuttled down to Washington.”

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.