He had Casey, Secord & Oliver North arrange to sell then ship weapons to Iran and then use the money to buy weapons for the Nicaragua counter revolutionaries.

...traditions of Republican cheating and Republican disregard for the lives of their fellows.

A very decent man and effective President, who was sabotaged by very indecent men.

Every day during the entire campaign, the networks reminded voters that Carter was unable to secure release of the hostages. Many suspected, but for years the evidence was dismissed as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Now the evidence strongly suggests that it was all true.

It started with Nixon, when he intervened to prevent a peace agreement in Vietnam. Since then this strategy has been standard procedure when a Republican is running against a Democratic incumbent. Trump was almost certainly doing this in Israel.

Thinking they’d get more support and a better deal from him than they were getting from LBJ or would get if Humphrey became President.

have saved at home: to the Vietnamese the release of POWs was always tied to money. Nixon promised $4 billion, knowing that congress would never authorize the payment. So approximately 1740 POWs were left behind.
Just shows what the common person is worth to the republican elite and I don’t understand why any military veteran worth their salt would vote for them.
The article also says that McCain spent some time on the committee investigating POWs and knew about this. Wonder why he seemed so unpredictable and “mavericky”? Now you know.

What an awful person he was.

Or were they determined to humiliate the incumbent American President regardless.

Carter was already facing an uphill battle for re-election because of the economy, which had both high inflation and unemployment. And Rick Perlstein’s book “Reaganland” points out that of voters in the 1980 election who had the hostages in Iran as a top issue, around two-thirds of them voted for Carter.

I really think Reagan won because of the bad economy, along the white backlash in Northern cities focused on “law and order” and hostility to civil rights in the South, as well as the mobilization of the white evangelical “Moral Majority.” To the extent that foreign policy played a role in his victory, it was the perception that he was tougher on the Soviet Union than Carter. I’m not convinced that the hostages in Iran were that important compared with these other issues.

That GOP operatives committed TREASON to aid their campaign is almost certain.

It is not enough to debate whether getting the hostages released would have won the election for Carter. Two points:

1) The American public would not have spent a generation regarding his Presidency as a failure if they had known that Regan's goons deliberately encouraged the Iranians not to release the hostages.

2) Even after the election, if voters had known what really happened, it would have stained Reagan and his legacy very badly. If the scandal had been properly investigated in the early 80s,, he would have had a a hard time winning re-election in 1984, and perhaps we would have been spared the Bush family.

when he failed to die from John Hinkley's bullet. On the day, the CNN pundits were saying it was religious miracle.

It was Reagan's second miracle, the first being the release of the hostages on inauguration day. Statistically St. Ronnie's presidency was quite mediocre, as I don't need to tell anybody here. Famously sold arms for hostages (to fund illegal operations in Central America), tripled the national debt, made an immigration deal with Democrats, pushed Social Security ages back, and with his deregulating ministers destroyed the entire savings and loan sector.

St. Ronnie''s third miracle was that relentless and disciplined messaging has convinced everybody the wrongdoing in his thoroughly corrupt administrations (in which 138 Reagan officials were investigated, indicted or convicted) didn't occur at all. Poppy Bush pardoned almost everyone, but suffered from an odd sort of fiscal responsibility which prevented his reelection.

So, yes, the hostages remaining captive made him look what his folksy manner suggested to people: He was an outsider that looked like he was too far outside and not smart enough to overcome others misusing government power.

Saturday Night Live did a skit mocking his style on the issue of inflation.
"Wouldn't you like to own a $600,000 car?"
"I would."

Those two lines. I remember them to this day.

NOTE: Neither Ford nor Nixon were successful stopping inflation.
Reagan spent us out of it increasing the national debt by a factor of FOUR. Four times what it was.

That paid for us losing the war in Vietnam.

And we're still paying that and interest on that.

... what made him look like an attractive candidate in 1976 was now a liability as he looked naive and overwhelmed by the situation. It's unfortunate but yeah he was completely kneecapped by that perception.

something like:

"If you blame everything for everything that's shitty, you'll be right way more often than you're wrong."

If anyone knows the source, please share!

Saw that written on a pillow so I know it's true

What's worse is this side deal was made in 100% broad daylight and nobody gave a shit 👎

that the meeting was corroborated by a Soviet intelligence source. However since in those times the USSR was the “evil empire” their opinion didn’t really carry any weight and the story didn’t go any further.

What I think was a huge factor in Carter losing was the failed rescue operation and subsequent images of the crash sight and the body of a dead American being poked with a stick which played to criticism of Carter’s seeming incompetence and disrespect from from foreign governments. I mean if the rescue operation was a success and Carter brought the hostages home, the election’s outcome would’ve been much different.

I think that was common knowledge back in the day. One of presidential history's ugliest chapters, for sure.