Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter With Radical Islam (review)

In recent years, scholars have come to recognize the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–1981 as a significant watershed in the history of U.S.-Middle East relations and the history of U.S. nationalism since 1945. In Taken Hostage, David Farber builds on these dual insights. Drawing on memoirs, media sources, and newly declassified documents from the Jimmy Carter Library, Farber provides a lively, blow-by-blow account of the hostage crisis, traces its origins to the complex history of U.S.-Iranian relations in the twentieth century, and asks what the American public's obsession with the crisis reveals about U.S. political culture in the 1970s. In five neatly organized chapters, Farber situates the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in several interrelated domestic and international contexts. On the domestic front, Farber analyzes the crisis in relation to both the presidency of Jimmy Carter (which was doomed in part, he argues, because of the administration's failure to swiftly resolve the crisis) and the climate of pessimism that dominated American political life in the late 1970s (a pessimism that deepened, he maintains, as the crisis wore on). Internationally, Farber illustrates that the hostage crisis had its origins in longstanding U.S. policies in Iran, including American support of the Shah, the U.S. role in the overthrow of prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, and the willingness of policy makers to turn a blind eye to repression within the country, particularly as Iran became vital to U.S. interests in the Middle East in the 1970s. Throughout the book, Farber argues that policy-makers underestimated growing Iranian resentment toward the United States and that, once the hostages were captured, they erroneously viewed the unfolding crisis through a Cold War paradigm rather than as the turning point that Farber believes it was: the nation's first encounter with radical Islam.

A sense of frustration surrounded the hostage crisis. But the event also unleashed feelings of patriotism in the United States. This patriotism, argues Farber, reveals the extent to which Americans in the 1970s yearned for the bonds of national community even as they expressed a growing cynicism of national government. In making this important point, Farber's argument falters a bit. Farber is correct that the crisis unleashed expressions of nationalism that had been suppressed over the previous decade. But he never adequately explains why the crisis elicited such strong emotions among the American public. In particular, his assertion that the media "traded in emotionalism" (7)—and thus made the crisis meaningful to so many Americans—is never fully developed. This critique notwithstanding, Farber has written a vivid account of the hostage crisis that will be valuable to both students and scholars in the field of post-1945 U.S. history.