Shah Enters U.S.: Iran Hostage Crisis Triggered

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the deposed ruler of Iran, landed in New York on October 22, 1979, ostensibly for emergency treatment of lymphatic cancer at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. The decision to admit him, debated for months within the Carter administration, triggered the single most damaging foreign policy crisis of Jimmy Carter's presidency and reshaped American relations with the Middle East for decades. The Shah had fled Iran in January 1979 after months of revolutionary turmoil that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. He wandered through Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, and Mexico, seeking permanent refuge while his health deteriorated. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller mounted an intense lobbying campaign to bring the Shah to the United States for medical treatment, arguing that America owed its longtime ally basic humanitarian care. Carter administration officials, including the State Department's Iran desk, warned that admitting the Shah could endanger the American embassy in Tehran. Carter himself reportedly asked, "What are you guys going to advise me to do when they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?" The warnings proved prescient. Thirteen days after the Shah's arrival, on November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized 52 American diplomats and staff. The hostage crisis lasted 444 days, consuming the final year of Carter's presidency and dominating American politics. A failed rescue mission in April 1980 killed eight American servicemen in the Iranian desert, deepening the sense of national humiliation. The Shah left the U.S. in December 1979 and died in Egypt the following July. The hostages were released minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981. The decision to admit one dying man had consequences that reverbeate through U.S.-Iran relations to this day.