‘He Saved Our Lives’: Former Hostages Recall Carter’s Quest to Free Them

As they sat locked in the same room day after day, week after week, month after month, listening to “death to America” chants and wondering when the bullet might come, the 52 American hostages being held in Iran had no idea what President Jimmy Carter was doing or if he even cared.

All they knew was that he had not gotten them out.

Only later, after the handcuffs and the blindfolds came off, after the plane carried them out of Iranian airspace, after the threat of show trials and summary executions finally vanished, did the hostages held for 444 days fully realize just how much Mr. Carter had done, and how driven he had been to free them — perhaps, he later admitted, even too much.

Of all the people around the world mourning the death of Mr. Carter at age 100 this week, few could say that he changed the course of their lives more directly and consequentially than the Americans taken captive by Iranian militants at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979. For them, the swirl of emotions is complicated but bone deep as memories flood back from those dark days.

“There’s no doubt about it in my mind that if it weren’t for President Carter, I don’t think I would be here now,” Barry Rosen, 80, the press attaché at the embassy during the takeover, said in an interview from his home in New York. “He took the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on our behalf, and he saved our lives.”

To history, the Iran hostage crisis remains the emblem of a failed presidency, a grievous wound to American stature around the world and a proximate cause of the electoral tidal wave that swept Mr. Carter out of the White House after a single term.

But to at least some of those who lived it, Mr. Carter remains a figure worthy of respect and admiration for his relentless determination to bring them home, even at the expense of his own political career.