Brzezinski was awakened at three in the morning by [his military assistant William] Odom, who told him that some 220 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. Brzezinski knew that the President’s decision time to order retaliation was from three to seven minutes after a Soviet launch. Thus he told Odom he would stand by for a further call to confirm a Soviet launch and the intended targets before calling the President. Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back and told Odom to confirm that the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back, he reported that he had further confirmation, but that 2,200 missiles had been launched—it was an all-out attack. One minute before Brzezinski intended to telephone the President, Odom called a third time to say that other warning systems were not reporting Soviet launches. Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour. It had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system. When it was over, Zbig just went back to bed. I doubt he slept much, though.74
The dangerous incident, which was leaked to the press, caused alarm in the Kremlin. Ambassador Dobrynin conveyed Brezhnev’s “extreme anxiety” over what happened. Brzezinski and the Defense Department drafted the response, which senior State Department advisor Marshall Shulman characterized as “gratuitously insulting and inappropriate for the Carter/Brezhnev channel.” Shulman considered it “kindergarten stuff—not worthy of the United States” and wondered, “Why do we have to be so gratuitously snotty?”75
Beset by a struggling economy and a series of poorly handled foreign policy crises, Carter appeared weak and out of touch as the 1980 election approached. Perhaps the final nail in his coffin came in April 1980, when the United States completely bungled a hostage rescue attempt, leaving eight Americans dead in the Iranian desert after a helicopter collided with a refueling plane. The Iranian government triumphantly displayed the charred bodies, adding to the humiliation. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had consistently opposed this harebrained scheme, resigned in protest—something no secretary of state had done since William Jennings Bryan. He wrote his letter of resignation four days before the ill-fated raid. Columnist Mary McGrory noted that Vance had served in the Johnson administration during another war he had come to oppose and knew full well that his resignation would be divisive at a critical time. In fact, she wrote, “He apparently intends it to be. He found out a long time ago that keeping your mouth shut during discussions of madness is often the greatest disservice you can do your country.”76 Carter’s approval rating plummeted to 40 percent.
Although widely recognized as the most respected member of the administration, Vance had been increasingly marginalized for quite some time as Brzezinski’s hawkish views drowned out Vance’s efforts at diplomacy. Vance’s influence had steadily waned and, by the late 1970s, virtually disappeared. The Washington Post observed, “Mr. Vance had fallen out of phase with the president. The secretary, and the early Carter, spoke for a benevolent and rationalistic world in which the United States, by accommodating certain legitimate imperatives of others, would find its proper place. The world to which Mr. Carter, much more than Mr. Vance, has sought to adjust recently is one in which factors of power and perversity loom large.”77 As the Wall Street Journal noted, the motivating force behind Vance’s decision was “the increasingly hawkish tone in the administration’s foreign policy,” beginning in 1978 with the president “buying the case put by… Brzezinski.”78 Vance weighed in a few days later, telling an interviewer that the national security advisor should act as the coordinator of different views, “But he should not be the one who makes foreign policy or who expresses foreign policy to the public.”79
Carter himself entered the fray a few days later. In what seemed a very petty reaction, he told a Philadelphia town meeting that his new secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, would be “a much stronger and more statesmanlike senior citizen figure who will be a more evocative spokesman for our nation’s policy” than Vance had been. For Carter, who had been holed up in the White House throughout the Iran hostage crisis, a symbolic hostage of his own making, it was the first major public address outside Washington in over six months.80
Following the Iranian Revolution, U.S. officials cozied up to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whom they saw as a regional counterweight to the hostile Iranian regime. They feared that Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism could threaten pro-American regimes in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Brzezinski strategized ways to sever Iraq from the Soviet orbit. In September 1980, Saddam, with at least tacit U.S. approval, invaded neighboring Iran, attacking across the Shatt al-Arab waterway leading to the Persian Gulf. Iraq, however, did not secure the easy victory that U.S. intelligence sources had predicted. Within a week, the United Nations called for a cease-fire. In late October, Carter, playing both sides, announced that if the Iranians released the U.S. hostages, the United States would send the $300 million to $500 million in arms that had been purchased by the prior regime. Reaganites smelled an “October surprise” that would hand Carter the election. In what Carter White House Iran aide and Columbia University political scientist Gary Sick called “a political coup,” a group of Reagan supporters were alleged to have cut a deal with the Iranian government. At the time, the presidential race was still tight. Some mid-October polls even had Carter in the lead. The details are murky and impossible to confirm, but it appears that Reagan campaign officials met with Iranian leaders and promised to allow Israel to ship arms to Iran if Iran would hold the hostages until Reagan won the election. In response to a 1992 query from Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, the Supreme Soviet’s Committee on Defense and Security Issues reported that a series of secret meetings had taken place in Europe between top Reagan campaign officials and Iranian officials. The Soviet report identified Reagan campaign manager and future CIA Director William Casey, vice presidential candidate and former CIA Director George Bush, and NSC staffer and future CIA Director Robert Gates as attending and offering substantially more military supplies than the Carter team was offering.81 Iran released the embassy personnel on January 21, 1981, Reagan’s first day in office. The United States continued arms sales to Iran via Israel, often channeled through private dealers, for several years. An early chance to end the war, which Saddam offered to do in return for Iraqi control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and an Iranian promise not to interfere in Iraq, was also squandered. With the United States helping fuel the conflict, the Iran-Iraq War would continue for eight years, leaving, some estimate, over a million dead and costing over a trillion dollars.