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GQ: As a correspondent and later an anchor, what was different about this story from others you’d reported?
TK: The public passion for it. It struck people as so outrageous, and they were angry about it. They were angry about seeing pictures of the hostages blindfolded and pushed around the US embassy. And when you think about it, the US embassy is, in fact, US territory. So this was an invasion.
GQ: In the thirty years since, the crisis is often referred to as America’s first battle with Islamic extremism. Is that your perception of it?
TK: I think we did a number of stories that reflected that, over the months, but I don’t think that was the public perception of what was going on. I mean, the public perception—if you’ll forgive the language—was: "Those ******* ragheads have taken American diplomats and American citizens, and by God they’d better give them back, or else." There wasn’t really a profound appreciation in much of the country, that the United States didn’t have access to many "or else’s."
There was a lot of blame both afterward and during the crisis that the press made it more sensationalistic and ultimately may have made negotiations more difficult.
Part of the criticism, which I think is a perfectly valid, is that night after night after night we tended to show the screaming crowds in front of the embassy. And people who were in Tehran would say later, "You know something? You walk two blocks away from the embassy, and everything is peaceful. Everything is perfectly quiet; there are no demonstrations going on in the rest of the city. These are just sort of rent-a-crowds that they put out there." And after that was brought to our attention, we did try to limit and not show as many pictures of that, and when we did we put it into the proper context, that this wasn’t going on all over Iran.
But look, I ran into Jimmy Carter many, many years later at some event at the White House, and he said, "You know, there were only two people who really benefited from all of that—you and the Ayatollah Khomeini."
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GQ: You’ve since traveled to Iran, you’ve covered the country extensively since ’79. As you’re watching and reading about what’s going on there now, tell me what direction you see US-Iranian relations going.
TK: Well, the tragedy is that there is a huge segment of Iranian society, mostly the well-educated, who really love the United States and love American culture--and much of what we have seen these last few weeks [in June 2009] in Iran is a reflection of those people who feel smothered by the conservative mullahs, and by the Revolutionary Guard, which has turned into a really corrupt bunch of thugs, who are now almost Mafia-like in the way they control the building industry, the construction industry, all kinds of industries throughout Iran. There is an internal rift, but the intelligentsia, the people who would love to kiss and make up with the United States, are not in power, and the people who are in power are fundamentalists for the most part.
And as such, they look upon our culture and society as being corrupt; they look upon the way the United States has treated Iran over the last sixty years as being duplicitous, and dangerous, and murderous, and they are not wrong! The United States, together with Britain’s MI6 and the CIA helped overthrow the government of Prime Minister Mossadeq in 1953 and installed the shah. There are a lot of things that they have done to us that are contemptible, but there are also a lot of things that we have done to them that are contemptible. We, in our culture, tend to be of the "Oh, forgive and forget, let’s put it behind us, can’t we all be friends, let’s make a new start." They are still a nation divided; the whole Muslim world in many ways is still divided because of events that took place 1100 years ago, and the idea that they’re going to quickly forget and forgive—it’s not likely to happen. I would love to see a renewal of relations with Iran, but it’s just not likely to happen anytime soon.
