April 15, 2023 | The Dispatch
Smears and Myths—The October Surprise Revisited
The New York Times revives the claim that Reagan won in 1980 by conspiring to prolong the Iran hostage crisis.
April 15, 2023 | The Dispatch
Smears and Myths—The October Surprise Revisited
The New York Times revives the claim that Reagan won in 1980 by conspiring to prolong the Iran hostage crisis.
Excerpt
Historical myths work in peculiar ways. A new revelation promises to shed new light on a familiar episode in tantalizing fashion. Nuance and context fall away. A certain ideal colonizes our imagination. Revisionism becomes orthodoxy.
The left excels at this kind of intellectual gerrymandering, and one of its prized myths is that Ronald Reagan may have won the 1980 election because his campaign team conspired with Iranian revolutionaries to prolong the captivity of American officials held hostage. The New York Times took a stab at reviving this canard last month, touting the revelation of a “four-decade secret” about a trip with a “clandestine agenda.” The Reagan fantasy is just the most recent to use Iran as backdrop.
Eric Edelman is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at FDD. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.