March Surprise

In his 1991 book "October Surprise," former U.S. National Security Council member Gary Sick said he had reason to believe that the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign made overtures to Iran to prevent the Islamic revolutionary government from releasing the American hostages they had been holding since November 4, 1979 before Election Day - which, coincidentally, was one year to the day after the Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were seized - so as to continue to hurt President Jimmy Carter's chances for re-election.  Sick, however, didn't have a smoking gun to prove his thesis unreservedly, and he admitted as much, so the idea of a plot against President Carter was mostly hearsay.    

Until now.

Ben Barnes (shown above, in his younger days, with President Lyndon Johnson) was a political wunderkind who became Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives in 1965, when he was only 26 years old.  Barnes, who later became Lieutenant Governor of Texas, received counsel from then-Governor John Connally while he was Speaker; both were Democrats but later became Republicans.  Connally, who had spent a million dollars on his campaign for the 1980 presidential nomination only to receive one delegate, hoped to get an appointment as Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense in a Reagan administration.

In an interview with the New York Times, Barnes says he accompanied Connally on a trip to the Middle East, where Connally told Arab leaders, “Look, Ronald Reagan's going to be elected President and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter. It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over."

Barnes also says that he and Connally also met with former Securities and Exchange Commission director William Casey, who was managing Reagan's 1980 general election campaign, to report the trip.  While Connally did not get either Cabinet position he was hoping for (and declined the post of Secretary of Energy, which went to - I am not making this up - a dentist), Casey became Reagan's CIA director; he eventually got involved in another scandal involving Iran - the Iran-contra affair - by a[proving illegal diversion of funds from Iran arms sales the Nicaraguan contras, being implicated by General Richard Secord in the Iran-contra hearings less then 24 hours before Casey died.

There are three conclusions to this story:

• Reagan's outreach to Iran in his second term was tainted not by its secrecy but by his campaign's underhanded rigging of the 1980 election, so what I said in January 2020 no longer applies. 
• This is as equally horrible as the story about Nixon rigging the 1968 election by telling the South Vietnamese not seek a deal to end the war in Vietnam with the Johnson administration with the promise of a better deal from a Nixon administration, because of the 42 years and counting of the far-right hold on the country's affairs.
• We should be glad John Connally was never elected President.