Ronald Reagan's "October Surprise" Plot Was Real After All

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

31 January 20

A batch of quietly released documents confirms what many have long suspected: Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign worked behind the scenes to delay the release of US hostages in Iran, for the benefit of Reagan’s election campaign. It raises the question: When was the last time a Republican won a presidential election without the help of dirty tricks?

he 2020s began with such a hair-raising blitz of Iran-related news that you probably missed the bombshell revelation about US-Iranian relations that came with the end of the 2010s. Rather than a potential US-Iran war today, this particular story transports us back to a more innocent time, when politics was about principles and Republican presidents were decent men: the beginning of the Reagan era.

At question is the 1980 presidential election between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, specifically the “October Surprise” that is alleged to have handed Reagan the election, long dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The whole saga is lengthy and convoluted, but the core allegation is this: that in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis, the Reagan campaign made a secret deal with the new rulers of Iran to delay the release of the hostages until after the election, dooming Carter’s chances of victory.

The allegation, doggedly pursued by the late investigative journalist Robert Parry, spawned books and even a 1992 congressional investigation, which determined there was “no credible evidence supporting any attempt or proposal to attempt by the Reagan Presidential campaign .?.?. to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran.” Parry and others looking into the case were attacked in the media, with much of the issue revolving around whether or not Reagan’s campaign manager and (later) free press–hating CIA director William Casey had traveled to Madrid on a particular date to meet with Iranian government representatives.

Well, nearly seventeen years after the House October Surprise Task Force concluded that the whole idea was bunk, an outlet no less venerable than the New York Times has turned that conclusion on its head. Just three days out from a new decade, the Times published what in any other era would have been a bombshell story based on documents donated to Yale from the offices of David Rockefeller, the former chairman of Chase Manhattan Corporation.

Ostensibly a story about how Rockefeller and Chase worked behind the scenes to win their client, the repressive Shah of Iran, safe haven in the United States, this nugget appears about halfway through:

[T]he team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.

The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.

“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.

“Mr. Reed” was Joseph Reed Jr, Rockefeller’s chief of staff, who mandated that the documents should stay sealed until Rockefeller’s death, which came in 2017. It’s not hard to see why.

Critics will quibble that these documents don’t prove the actual specifics of the long-alleged “October Surprise.” This is true. According to the Times, they don’t show Reagan striking a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election, but simply working behind the scenes to thwart negotiations to free them. Perhaps someone out there exists who thinks this is better.

Of course, these weren’t the only shenanigans Reagan got up to during that election. His campaign also famously got hold of Carter’s debate strategy papers in advance of their one and only debate in 1980, and less famously was alleged to have used retired CIA officials and a mole within the Carter administration to gather information about its foreign policy — mostly, as the Times reported in 1983, in relation to the Iran hostage crisis.

For those counting, that’s now at least four of the last six Republican presidents who have won elections with the assistance of some sort of pre-election skulduggery, including Richard Nixon’s torpedoing of peace in Vietnam, the George W. Bush campaign shenanigans in Florida and the later use of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” and Donald Trump’s boost from Russia’s hacking of Democratic Party emails (even if that wasn’t coordinated) — not to mention the use of voter suppression that unites them all. And that’s not counting George H. W. Bush getting help from John Major’s government in the UK in his bid to beat Bill Clinton in 1992.

The story is also a perfect example of the way the worlds of capital, politics, and foreign affairs blur together: the head of one of the country’s largest banks helping his right-wing political allies unseat their opponent and saving the skin of one lucrative foreign dictator, all while drawing on the expertise of a team of political elites, from Henry Kissinger and a former CIA director to a member of one of the country’s most prominent political families. Big business and the political establishment have long worked together; they just used to do it more quietly.

As understated as it was, it’s remarkable this story has received as little attention as it has — a hallmark of the Trump era, where even the New York Times publishing secret government files on UFOs barely makes a blip.

Republicans Are Prepared to Go Down With Trump

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic

31 January 20

Or to triumph with him.

ust four years ago, the GOP’s leaders were almost uniformly reacting to Trump with horror. Today, Republican officeholders have made their calculation: They will either go down with President Donald Trump, or they will rise with him.

The GOP has in recent years been the more disciplined of America’s two major political parties, and although Trump likes to complain that his fellow Republicans aren’t as regimented as Democrats, the Senate impeachment trial shows otherwise.

We won’t know until this evening exactly how many Republicans will vote in favor of witnesses in the Senate—whether Mitt Romney and Susan Collins will be joined by Lisa Murkowski, in other words—but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is now confident he has the votes to defeat witnesses. That vote is now just a way station on the road to Trump’s inevitable acquittal, which could come as soon as tonight.

That outcome will be the latest evidence of Trump’s hold unshakeable hold over the Republican Party. If there were a group of GOP officials who might still resist the president’s style and approach, it might have been found in the Senate. Senators are temperamentally institutional; jealous of their own prerogatives; and comparatively insulated from the most intense electoral demands on other officeholders. In the end, though, GOP senators got in line.

Trump still doesn’t inspire the same level of cultish devotion among Republican officeholders as he does among Republican voters. Time and again during his political career, he has said or done something that has appalled, mortified, or scandalized GOP politicians: There was the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016. There was the week in May 2017 when he fired FBI Director James Comey, then shared classified material with Russian leaders. There was his obsequious appearance with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018. Each time, the initial reaction has been horror and even condemnation from Republican officials, followed—within a few short days—by acquiescence and acceptance.

This happened twice during the impeachment drama. In the early stages of the scandal, Republicans criticized Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Senator Lindsey Graham said he’d be very disturbed if Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo. But eventually the GOP settled down, and Graham now says the quid pro quo is perfectly fine.

The second example arrived this week. After news of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book, which confirmed the factual case alleged by House Democrats, Republican senators seemed to be reeling. Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and is apparently very naive, predicted that as many as 10 Republicans would vote to hear witnesses. Reports said that McConnell didn’t have the votes to block witnesses. Now, of course, it seems obvious that witnesses are out, leaving things right where they were before the Bolton revelations.

Why is it that these moments bend but never break Republican support? This is politics, and the simplest answer is probably political. Vulnerable senators like Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona are risking their seats by lining up behind Trump. Both face tough races in November. Gardner will run against the popular former governor John Hickenlooper. McSally lost an election last November, was appointed to fill another Senate seat, and is struggling against the Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly.

Yet it’s not clear that going against Trump would help either Gardner or McSally, and the opposite is more likely. Candidates occasionally try to run away from presidents of their own party who are unpopular in their state, and it almost never works. Such a maneuver is unlikely to win over Democrats and moderates who dislike Trump—especially for first-termers like Gardner and McSally, who don’t have a long-standing relationship with voters—while it might alienate Republican voters the senators desperately need to hold.

In 2010, for example, some moderate Democrats attempted to distance themselves from Barack Obama, and they were almost entirely swept out of office. Then again, other Democrats tried to stay close to Obama, and many of them were swept out of office too.

Running away from the president is even less likely to work in 2020 than it did in 2010. Not only is the election more nationalized than in previous years, but Trump himself is on the ballot. Although he is historically unpopular, Trump remains wildly popular with Republican voters—hence the bind for endangered senators. If Trump wins reelection, his coattails may save the Gardners and McSallys of the world, but if he is defeated, they’re probably doomed anyway.

While Gardner and McSally offer a particularly dramatic example, this simple political calculation explains the discipline within the Republican ranks: Trump is a fact of life, and if there’s little to gain from backing him, there is much to lose by breaking with him. This is true even for senators who are retiring and don’t plan to face voters again. Republicans who cross Trump risk harming their post-office career prospects, and they risk social ostracism, as Politico’s Tim Alberta notes.

What these calculations leave out is any consideration of the actual charges facing the president and what they mean for rule of law and the future of the American government. Perhaps some Republicans believe that Trump really did nothing wrong, but that hardly speaks well for their judgment, and it is difficult to imagine them feeling similarly about a Democratic president who did the same.

While few Republicans are willing to say so out loud—see above, on the benefits of breaking from Trump—many do seem bothered by his behavior. Some believe that Trump acted inappropriately but that his conduct doesn’t merit removal, the position taken by Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee yesterday, when he announced that he would not vote in favor of calling witnesses. But Alexander is retiring, and nearly 80 years old; his younger colleagues mostly don’t dare say that aloud.

Still, the brief, frantic reaction to the Bolton news this week shows that, contrary to what some critics would claim, the Republican Party hasn’t lost its moral sense. What it has lost is any inclination to let that moral sense weigh on its political decisions.