Moorhead Kennedy Jr. ’52 Survived to Recount the Iranian Hostage Crisis

Five days before the Iranian revolution burst into the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, beginning the central trauma of Moorhead “Mike” Kennedy Jr. ’52’s life, he met with two officers from Bankers Trust who were visiting from New York. Kennedy, then the embassy’s top economics officer, stuck to the party line about the political situation.

“I pulled a five o’clock follies, to use the old Embassy Saigon expression, and said, ‘Oh, yes, everything is under control … we’re not worried.’ And as I said these platitudes to these two bankers … I just felt sick to my stomach.”

What Kennedy really believed was far more dire, according to an account he gave soon after his release: “There was a definite apprehension that we would be torn limb from limb.”

On Nov. 4, 1979, when Kennedy and his 51 fellow embassy workers were taken hostage, “there was this great huge sea of faces coming in — ardent, ecstatic,” he recalled. At that moment, Kennedy was on the phone to Washington, D.C., where it was 4 a.m. on a Sunday, and the voice on the line was a familiar one: Harold Saunders ’52, Kennedy’s Princeton classmate, then assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. In that frantic moment, Saunders could only encourage the Americans to shred as many sensitive documents as possible.

Kennedy was soon blindfolded, manacled, and marched to a meeting room, as the terrorists whispered “Vietnam, Vietnam,” into the ears of their hostages. Kennedy responded by leading the Americans in whistling “Rally ’Round the Flag,” the American Civil War song also known as the “Battle Cry of Freedom.”

Over the next 444 days, Kennedy would debate the hostage-takers, live in constant fear (“Anytime we were led out of our rooms, we assumed we were going to be executed”), survive a mock execution, rely on the Ottoman history and Arabic language courses he’d taken at Princeton, and, as he later wrote, begin “to question some of the assumptions under which I had to operate … . Captivity freed me of the necessity to think like a Foreign Service officer.”

On the last day of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the hostages were freed. Kennedy came home to a ticker-tape parade, long nights in which he’d wake up screaming, and a government that seemed utterly uninterested in his experience. In his first three months back, Kennedy was stunned that no one from the State Department asked him about his captors, their names, their behaviors. “Nobody gave a damn,” he said. “They wanted to bury this whole thing.”

Kennedy took it upon himself to tell his story, in lectures, TV interviews, and a book, The Ayatollah in the Cathedral. Although some fellow hostages spoke bitterly about their captors, Kennedy offered a more measured reflection. He said the terrorists were acting out as adolescents, having violent tantrums to make the world see their plight.

When a fellow hostage said Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini “was taking his people back to the 13th century,” Kennedy later recalled, “I shot back, ‘Well, what’s so great about the 20th?’”

He had come to believe that “there are things about our society the rest of the world doesn’t like. We must re-examine our own values.”

The U.S. government initially offered the hostages $12.50 for each day spent in captivity. A 35-year-long legal battle ensued, with the hostages finally winning $4.4 million each. But as of this writing, the families had received only 18% of their compensation.

Kennedy became one of the best-known hostages, mainly because his wife, Louisa, was on TV constantly, speaking for the families as they pushed for resolution of the crisis. Once home, Kennedy, through swimming and psychotherapy, slowly rebuilt his body and mind. “You recover,” he said in 1990. “Except for nightmares.”

“I began to find myself again, after years of conforming to what others … had expected me to be,” he wrote in 1986. “Captivity became my liberation.”

He never returned to the State Department, instead moving on to run two peace institutes and lead role-playing games, such as “Hostage Crisis,” putting high school and college students in simulations to strengthen their problem-solving skills.

In an essay for his 50th-reunion yearbook, Kennedy concluded that “terrorism is theater. It is a superb way of publicizing a cause. ‘You don’t know it,’ one of our Iranian jailers told us, ‘but we’re on prime time!’”

Kennedy, who died in May at age 93, was damaged by his captors, but “he was also freed,” one of his four sons tells PAW.

“Some people come out of a trauma stronger,” said Moorhead “Mark” Kennedy III ’79, the fourth generation in his family to attend Princeton. “My dad’s priorities shifted from ego and power to heart, family, and good work. Because he knew so much about Islamic history and law, he could understand why the Iranians did what they did. But he also understood that they needed to pay for what they did.”

Marc Fisher ’80 is an associate editor at The Washington Post.