In August 1976, just before the decisive stage in the presidential election campaign between incumbent Gerald Ford and challenger Jimmy Carter, Iran's ambassador to the United Kingdom wrote in his diary that the Shah of Iran was uneasy about the prospect of a Carter administration. According to Gary Sick, author of All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi would have preferred to see Ford reelected because he was concerned about Carter's push for human rights and for the reduction of U.S. arms sales. Four years later, in an ironic twist of history, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the Islamic revolution that drove the Shah from power, refused to expedite the release of fifty-two Americans held hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and thereby spoiled President Carter's already precarious reelection chances.

The Iran Hostage Crisis

What came to...