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A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election, 3.19.23

 

Today is the Spring Equinox in the northerm hemisphere. The first day when just a tiny bit more light than dark occurs in the day, and which will keep increasing in light over dark until the day with the most light in the year, the Summer Solstice.

We’ve used these moments as metaphors for reality in momentous ways more than once.

This may be one as momentous as any.

The front page story in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times could not be more explosive or potentially history-altering.

A witness to attempts to influence Iran in 1980 to refuse to make a deal with then President Jimmy Carter to release American hostages until after the election between him and Ronald Reagan makes clear this may have lost Carter the election.

The source of the story, Ben Barnes, is nearly universally considered to be as credible as it gets.

“With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record,” the article states.

We will have much more to say about President Carter soon.

For now, suffice it to say that had he been re-elected to a second term, the entire arc of history would have been changed in ways and to degrees impossible to overstate on every important issue which has and does face the nation and the world.

For now, the article follows:

“A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election”

By Peter Baker, Cover Story, March 19, 2023, Sunday New York Times

A prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine agenda.

Ben Barnes standing with his arms crossed in a room with bookshelves, wearing a blue suit and striped tie.
“History needs to know that this happened,” Ben Barnes now says of his trip to the Middle East in 1980.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.

It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.

His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.

Mr. Carter sitting at a desk in the Oval Office, looking down.
The hostage crisis in Iran hampered Mr. Carter’s effort to win a second term.Credit…Associated Press

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.

Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.

William J. Casey with President Ronald Reagan, who is smiling and waving. Both are wearing suits.
William J. Casey, left, went on to become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Reagan administration.Credit…Getty Images

Mr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.

“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.

Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last five presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He is the author of seven books, most recently “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” with Susan Glasser.