American Values Held Hostage : Concern for Individual Inhibits U.S. Crisis Moves

“We are a government of citizens,” says historian David McCullough. “When you take an American citizen hostage, you are not just taking a human being. You are taking a member of our government.”

McCullough’s observation goes a long way toward explaining why President Reagan, for all his earlier vows to meet terrorism with swift retribution, has ended up approaching the Beirut hostage crisis with the patient, restrained style and pragmatic reliance on diplomacy that marked Jimmy Carter’s handling of the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis.

And this similarity in presidential behavior points to an important truth about the American system--that this country’s response to a crisis as personal as the seizure of its citizens is influenced less by the personality traits of any particular chief executive than by the fundamental values of American society.

Deep-Rooted Values

For better or worse, historians and other experts point out, the United States operates within a structure of government designed to inhibit swift--and possibly precipitous--action by its chief executive.

And all Presidents, they say, are accountable to a set of deep-rooted cultural values and standards that sometimes make the lives and welfare of individual citizens the nation’s highest concern, inhibiting any government action that might imperil them.

The heart of the President’s dilemma, says Daniel Pipes, a Mideast specialist and professor of strategy at the Naval War College, is that “Americans are so emotionally involved in the fate of these individual hostages. That creates enormous tension.”

“The underlying problem in resolving a hostage situation is the value we Americans place on individual human life,” agrees Warren M. Christopher, Carter’s deputy secretary of state and a key negotiator in the Iran crisis. “If you are a society that does not have this emphasis, you could deal much more vigorously with the terrorists.”

For Reagan and some of his advisers, this stricture has not always been easy to accept. Reagan’s natural inclination is to bridle against any inhibitions on U.S. power when American citizens are in danger.

Long before he entered the White House, Reagan liked to recall the celebrated response of the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt to the kidnaping of an American millionaire, Ion Perdicaris, by the Moroccan bandit Ahmed Raisuli.

“This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,” was the U.S. ultimatum to the kidnapers.

‘Effective Retribution’

No sooner had Reagan been sworn in than he greeted the returning Iranian hostages with a pledge of “swift and effective retribution” against future terrorists. And, outraged at the suicide truck bombing that claimed the lives of 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut in October, 1983, Reagan approved a policy directive endorsing the principle of preemptive strikes as well as retaliatory raids against such terrorism.

Still, the terrorists have continued to strike. And last fall, in the wake of another bombing--this time against the U.S. Embassy-annex in a Beirut suburb--Secretary of State George P. Shultz publicly warned that the United States must be willing to answer such violence with violence even if the result might be “the loss of life of some innocent people. . . . We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond.”

Several times, Administration officials say, Reagan has considered specific proposals for reprisal raids against terrorists in Lebanon--against the same radical group Hezbollah (Party of God) that is believed to hold some of the TWA hostages. But each time, much like the gloomy Dane of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the President has stayed his hand--for what officials describe as both moral and practical reasons.

The moral problem is the difficulty of attacking terrorist bases in civilian areas without harming innocent bystanders. “If you just aim in the general direction and kill some people, well, then you’re a terrorist too,” Reagan noted in his June 18 news conference.

The practical problem, as some Administration officials have observed, is that a retaliatory raid may simply prompt more terrorism in response unless it eliminates the terrorists’ leadership.

By ruling against all but the most restrained maneuvering in the 16-day ordeal, Reagan has subjected himself to bitter criticism from his own political allies on the right.

Yet Reagan has thus far shrugged off such criticism. The reality of terrorism in the case of TWA Flight 847 has created a choice between the satisfaction of military retaliation and the possible sacrifice of innocent lives. And for an American President, whether a Carter or a Reagan, that has turned out to be no real choice at all.

“You can talk about retaliation in the abstract and in general and not really be held responsible for what you are saying,” says Larry Smith of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “But when you get down to actual cases it makes a difference.”

The burden on Reagan is heightened by the structure of the American political system, which forces the President to develop his own personal bases of public support rather than rely on the notoriously weak political parties, according to Pipes of the Naval War College.

“In Great Britain,” he says, “the prime minister is chosen by the political parties and so doesn’t have to depend as much directly on public opinion.”

The public absorption with the drama in Beirut has been both reflected and reinforced by the intensive news media coverage, which in the view of some critics has played into the hands of the captors.

“International publicity is the mother’s milk of terrorism,” declares Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio). “It’s what they’re after.”

But if the hostages’ captors welcomed the attention, so apparently did their victims. When hostage Jimmy Dell Palmer was freed last week because of a heart ailment, he reported that the low point for him and his fellow captives came when the crash of an Air India plane off Ireland with 329 aboard temporarily overshadowed the worldwide coverage of their predicament. This made them fear that they would be forgotten by the public and neglected by their government.

They need not have worried on that account. Their story quickly regained its prominence, and some analysts found it hard to fault the media under the circumstances. “There is really a story in this,” Pipes said, “because there is tremendous public interest.”

Although the level of public interest is to some extent a product of network cameras focusing on the drama in Beirut, the national tendency to be absorbed with the predicament of imperiled individuals clearly antedates the advent of the living-room television screen.

In 1925, an obscure young man named Floyd Collins became trapped in an underground passage near Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, and the ultimately futile two-week effort to rescue him became a national obsession. Crowds at the scene had to be held back by barbed wire and bayonets. Collins’ death was recorded under a three-column headline on page one of the New York Times.

53 Lives Unnoticed

A few weeks later, as social critic Frederick Lewis Allen pointed out in his book “Only Yesterday,” a North Carolina mine cave-in claimed 53 lives, but “it attracted little attention.”

Families of some of the seven Americans who had been missing in Beirut some for more than a year before the TWA hijacking have felt much like the equally innocent victims of the mine cave-in. The Reagan Administration belatedly took note of their situation late last week when it made the release of the seven, as well as that of the hijack victims, a condition for any arrangement with the kidnapers.

But if the national tendency to zero in on the fate of particular Americans in spectacular and dramatic straits sometimes seems disproportionate and capricious, it also has a loftier aspect. It reflects the belief that any individual’s life is precious, an article of faith that many Americans consider a distinguishing part of their national ethos.

Shultz has complained to aides that the tendency to focus on the safety of individuals, to the exclusion of such concerns as the national security and the safety of thousands of future air travelers, cripples the Administration’s ability to take the tough action he wants.

Hostages Not Expendable

Reagan appears to have decided that the hostages in Beirut are no more expendable than Iranian hostages were. No one yet knows what the decision will cost him in political credibility or the country in international prestige.

And some analysts feel that the experience, however painful and frustrating, may have taught both the President and his fellow Americans a lesson. Judging from Reagan’s comments during the Iranian hostage crisis, says Robert Kupperman, a specialist in counterterrorism at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, “it seems to me that he had less appreciation of the difficulties of dealing with terrorism than he does now. Now he has matured.”

What Reagan has done, contends historian McCullough, who wrote a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, is what any of his predecessors, including TR, would have done. “If you could convene a jury of distinguished former Presidents to pass on Reagan’s performance,” says McCullough, “they would say he is doing the right thing.”