ARABIAN NIGHTMARE

I'm not sure Lou or I ever had any "scenes" wherein we were a Scherherazade or any other Persian princess. It was too foreign to our way of life. We knew where Persia was. The old Loughboro school globe had it located, in purple. And I remember reading, at an early age, something in the "Book of Knowledge" about the Garden of Persia where daisies, lilies and irises grew so tall one could easily get lost in them. A description like that would stick in my mind. Our irises were only a little over knee high. Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba were stuck there too, strange fellows in a strange land.

Somewhere in the post "scenes" years when I was occupied with aforementioned things, Persia became Iran and Iraq. In the late 1970s news began to trickle into my consciousness about shahs, the Peacock throne, revolutions and wars where old purple Persia had been.

A white bearded, turbaned fellow called the Ayatollah Khomeini was on the TV screen almost nightly, having replaced Shah Pahlavi as the Iranian ruler. I never followed the affairs closely. Teheren and Baghdad -- so far away. But suddenly, at least it seemed suddenly to me, there it was passing before me like some more ugly stitches on the unrolling tapestry of time. Because we didn't want our Cold War enemy, Russia, to get control of Iran and to keep the oil flowing (we are dependent on Mideast oil), we got mixed up in wars between Iran and Iraq, way over there where irises grew so tall and where, once upon a time, men tried to build a tower to reach heaven.

Late in 1979 the chilling news came over the air waves that Iranian militants had climbed over the tall gates of our embassy in Teheran and within ninety minutes had taken possession of it and were holding fifty-two Americans as hostages in protest of our letting the deposed Shah Pahlivi enter the United States.

Nothing like this to jerk you fast forward through the decades from purple Persia to present day Iran and Iraq. I sat slumped on the old green couch, watching, by myself now, and wondering if we were going to have another war. I was running out of fingers on one hand to count the wars I had been through.

Jimmy Carter was now our president and America became obsessed with how to get the hostages freed. Every night when CBS anchorman, Walter Cronkite, and later Dan Rather, came on with the evening news, there in the upper left hand corner of the TV screen was the number of days the hostages had been held. At the beginning, I thought it would be sixty days or somewhere near that. But as the days marched on, days full of political intrigues and machinations, botched attempts and failure to rescue, the thoughts of Scheherazade's 1001 nights began to nibble at my estimation.

There was a lot of maneuvering of the political insiders, both Iranian and American, to make sure the hostages weren't released during Carter's administration. So, for 440 days they were held.

Five minutes after Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Carter as president, was inaugurated came the news of the release of the hostages.

Many books have subsequently been written and congressional inquiries made about the tangled affairs and covert operations of this era.

My reaction to the release of the hostages and simultaneous inauguration of Reagan was entered in my daily journal in this manner:

Jan. 20, 1981 -- Up early to watch the inauguration and the near return of the hostages. The inauguration was absolutely superb. Nancy Reagan wore a red coat and a little braided circlet of the same material for a hat.

All during the scenes of the President-elect going from the White House to the capital, escorted by Carter, the taking of the oath, the parade, interruptions of the broadcast were being made to trace the progress of the hostages out of Iran.

When the last unit in the parade, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, stopped before the reviewing stand and sang, "Battle Hymn of the Republic," I suspect there were few dry eyes of those watching all over America, including mine. There was a great feeling of unity across the land.

When the planes carrying the hostages landed at Algiers and took off again, there was an indescribable feeling of happiness and good will.

Reagan's day was so good and unmarred, he said it was like a dream from which he didn't want to awaken.

He said, "It's a great New Beginning for the American people!"

Regan's statement, "It's a new beginning," became somewhat of a theme of his administration. Although his administration was bogged down by congressional inquiries of secret deals to supply Iran with arms in exchange for the hostages, such inquiries known as the Iran-Contra Affair, his eight years in the president's office picked America up from "Dismal Swamp" and gave her renewed energy to go onward.