Freeing the Hostages Wouldn’t Have Gotten Jimmy Carter Re-Elected

Recent press accounts indicate that Republican intermediaries—including former Treasury Secretary and Texas Gov. John Connally—meddled in the Iranian hostage crisis to benefit Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.

This reporting has raised anew one of the major “what if” questions in recent American political history: would Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday, Dec. 29, 2024, aged 100, have gotten re-elected if he had secured the release of the hostages? As always, historical counterfactuals are impossible to prove or disprove. But in this instance, while it’s tempting to think that freeing the hostages would have upended the race, a closer look at history reveals that Carter’s political troubles ran far deeper than the Iran crisis.

One the best contemporaneous narrators of Carter’s political struggles turned out to be Peter Jay, the British ambassador to the United States for two years of the 39th president’s term. Jay—a journalist by training—was an acute observer, so his secret dispatches back to London ably illuminated Carter’s political rise and fall.

Jay’s initial cables from Washington in 1977 described unique historical conditions that had permitted an unknown southern governor to win the presidency. For more than a decade, dating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, a constant stream of blows—from race riots to assassinations to Vietnam to Watergate had “shaken profoundly” what Jay called “the pillars of American self-esteem—morality, invincibility, stability, and growth.”

In Jay’s mind, Carter’s election expressed “as clearly as anything the yearning of the American people for a fresh start.” After years of unrelenting calamity, Americans were ready for something new and different.

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Jay recognized that the new president brought to the White House a unique combination of personal attributes: spotless ethics, “a subtle, penetrating and ice-cold mind” and a commitment to tackling hard problems head-on—all of which stood in stark contrast to the failings of his immediate predecessors from both parties. Carter’s chief virtue was “his boldness” in identifying big policy problems and proposing solutions guided largely by “his perception of the national interest, with little regard to short-term or narrow sectional political considerations.” When presented with conventional wisdom to avoid political pain, Carter’s standard rejoinder to those around him was, effectively, “Don’t chicken out.”

Jay lauded Carter’s assessment of “the bankruptcy of pressure group politics … and his commendable determination to take the high road of national leadership.” If given an array of options ranging from “the most immediately unpopular but, on the merits, correct” to “the most popular, but, on merits, wrong,” Carter could be reliably counted upon to choose the former.

Perhaps the best manifestation of this trait came in September 1977, when Carter’s aggressive lobbying secured ratification of the Panama Canal treaties. The president was convinced that the national interest was best served by conveying control of the canal to Panama—despite vigorous opposition to what conservative critics called a “giveaway.” His opponents were by Carter’s lights either ill-informed or ill-intentioned. While he sensed that their arguments were potent politically, any price he had to pay at the polls was an acceptable consequence of doing the right thing.

A mere two months later, however, Jay began to detect significant unease with the president’s unique approach. In a confidential cable to London titled “Is Mr. Carter in Trouble?”, the ambassador observed increasing doubts about the president’s capacity to translate his high aspirations into political reality.

This cable remarked how quickly Carter, as president, had become buffeted by problems that, ironically, emerged from those very forces that brought him into office. He came to the presidency at a moment when it was an impaired institution. “The abuses of the Vietnam War, the scandal of Watergate, and the changing structure and attitudes of the Congress” all combined to “hamper the work of the would-be active President.”

A huge class of independent legislators elected in 1974—the “Watergate babies”—was intent on reasserting the authority of Congress in governing the nation. This surge of legislative independence included members of the president’s own party, who seemed more comfortable in opposing the White House than in doing Carter’s bidding on Capitol Hill. According to Jay, some of Carter’s aides privately acknowledged that when they came to the White House “they had no idea … how deeply the [institution of the] Presidency has been damaged.”

But Jay also acknowledged subsequently that Carter’s problems weren’t all structural. Instead, there was “a muffled and uncertain quality” about how he handled “people and problems,” which left “even those who are best disposed to him puzzled, disappointed, and occasionally irritated.”

The president lacked “the imagination to see how things will affect and look to others” who didn’t share Carter’s habit of considering “all sides of every issue.”

Carter exacerbated this lack of perceptiveness with what Jay termed a “dangerous proclivity” for seeing truth as “its own messenger.” Rather than explaining himself or selling his policies, Carter thought it was “enough to have a good reason [for policy].” In sum, Carter had “proved [to be] a better statesman and a worse politician than could have been expected.”

These observations came while Americans were enduring a constant parade of negative news, especially on the economy. Significant successes for Carter, capped by the Camp David Accords in September 1978, at best merely interrupted this steady stream. What Reagan started calling the “misery index”—a sum of the inflation and unemployment numbers—reached an all-time high in Carter’s term. The president seemed increasingly powerless to reverse the misery.

In July 1979, Carter’s most famous speech confirmed Jay’s tepid assessment of his political instincts. While the president’s main focus was supposed to be energy policy, he chose to delve simultaneously into a deeper “crisis of confidence” among the American people (later lampooned as a national “malaise”). Although the speech was received far better than history remembers, Carter, in his own words, “frittered away” any advantage he might have gained from it by immediately insisting that his entire Cabinet resign, which communicated instability. Once again, he had miscalculated political optics in such a way as to undermine his policies.

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Jay’s outlook by the end of his term as ambassador had considerably darkened. Carter was “not much loved in America," Jay admitted. "Nor has he yet inspired full confidence in other world leaders, friendly or otherwise.” Carter’s insular, “highly unconventional style of Government,” plus his lack of sensitivity to politics, were at the root of these problems. In over two years as president, he had failed “to win sufficiently widespread understanding of the virtue and necessity of this radical departure.”

Carter’s approval rating when Jay filed this final cable sat at 29%. Importantly, this was five months before the hostages were seized in Tehran. Carter’s polling numbers remained in that rough neighborhood for the balance of his presidency—except for a temporary jump, just after the hostages were taken, when Americans rallied around the flag.

Massive interest rates (the Federal Reserve’s painful antidote to inflation), rising gas prices, and a primary challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) all also hurt Carter in 1980. But as Jay had observed, the president was plagued by increasing doubts about his unconventional leadership and his ability to combat any of these problems in a way that would satisfy the public.

So, would the hostages’ return have made a difference? The evidence suggests probably not. A more persuasive case might be made that had the Republican efforts to interfere become public, it would have generated sufficient outrage to torpedo Reagan’s chances. But whatever did happen in those secret conversations, the Reagan campaign made every effort, successfully, to preserve deniability.

On his way out the door, after being replaced by new prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Jay predicted that even if Carter lost, the United States “is most certainly not going to disappear … Give it only a visible enemy and a fast horse, and you will still see all that old American ‘can-do.’” This prediction proved prescient. Carter lost in 1980 to a man who specialized in fast horses and visible enemies.

Russell L. Riley is the White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and cochair of the Presidential Oral History Program. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.