In March, The New York Times confirmed a long-ignored story that in the summer of 1980, Casey persuaded former Texas Governor John Connally to embark on a secret mission to the Middle East, where Connally and his associate, Ben Barnes, asked various Arab leaders to urge the Iranians not to release the 52 hostages. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 had been released before the 1980 election.īut Bill Casey was determined not to let that happen. He said that he believed then-and now-that Carter might have won if the American hostages seized at the U.S. In April, the four of us interviewed Stuart Spencer, who was a chief strategist and architect of Reagan’s 1980 general election campaign. We think there’s now enough evidence to say definitively that Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, the late William Casey, ran a multipronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election-and that these acts of betrayal might have affected the outcome. Forty-three years after the climactic events of 1980, the four of us-all steeped in the history of the Carter administration-believe that it’s time to move past conspiracy theories to hard historical conclusions about the so-called October Surprise.
0 kommentar(er)
