On November 4, 1979, it would all seem trivial. A few days earlier, 3,500 Iranian students had marched toward the American Embassy in Teheran, threatening to overtake it.

Narrator: The anti-Shah movement which had begun in early 1978 had grown into a full-fledged Islamic Revolution. The Shah was driven into exile, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, became the leader of a new and mysterious, Islamic republic.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I never had any illusions about Khomeini. I didn't have much familiarity with fundamentalist Islam. But I knew he would be a menace.

GADDIS SMITH: If Carter had been more critical of the Shah, conceivably it would have been a little more difficult for the Ayatollah Khomeini to identify the United States as the great Satan, and to say everything that is wrong in Iran is basically the fault of the United States. Maybe the fact that the United States had been a significant player in Iran since 1945 was such that it was too late for Carter or anybody to change the deeply hostile nature of the Iranian revolution. But it might have made a difference.

Narrator: In the first few months of the revolution, Carter had worked to build a relationship with the Khomeini regime. But the history of U.S.-Iranian relations would soon catch up with him.

For months, the deposed Shah of Iran had wandered the Middle East, then Latin America. Ill with cancer, he asked permission to come to the United States for medical treatment.

WALTER MONDALE: There were several of us sitting around the table, talking about whether the president should permit the re-entry of the Shah. We had people tell us that if we let the Shah in, there could be a real negative repercussion in Iran. But the Shah was sort of pathetically flying around the world. And here's this great country saying, "Well, we won't even let you come to one of our hospitals." He went around the room, and a lot of the people said, "Let him in."

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I argued that he should be allowed in because we treated him as an ally in good times and I felt it was our responsibility to treat him as a former ally, but a friend in bad times. I felt American credibility was at stake.

WALTER MONDALE: And he said, "And if then this revolution moves in a way to take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?" And the room just fell dead.

The Shah arrived in the United States on October 22. Two weeks later, Iranian students seized the American Embassy. Fifty-three Americans were to be held hostage until the United States returned the Shah to Iran.

Everyone awaited word from Khomeini. Seeing an opportunity to consolidate his revolution, the Ayatollah gave his blessing, calling the U.S. Embassy "a den of spies."

Carter: The United States of America will not yield to international terrorism or to blackmail.

PAT CADDELL: It was a defining event. This is the entire United States government captured, and held illegally under international law and being taunted everyday.

ROGER WILKINS: The whole world saw these images of these people burning American flags, stomping on images of Carter and the most rancid sort of disrespect and hatred of the United States, on television, around the world, all the time.

Narrator: "I would ... lie awake at night, trying to think of ... steps I could take to gain the [hostages'] freedom, without sacrificing the honor and security of our nation," the president wrote.

Carter rejected all military options as too risky. "The problem," he said, "is that we could feel good for a few hours -- until we found that they had killed our people."

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: He was determined to bring every one of those men back alive. You see the moralism of Carter: the Christianity affecting his foreign policy making; his belief in each human life having a great sanctity to it; his not wanting to have blood on his hands.

ROGER WILKINS: Successful statesmen have to balance risks, and sometimes, sometimes a risk to a relatively limited number of lives, down the road saves many, many more lives.

JODY POWELL: To react in a way that was strong and powerful would have set us off down a road that no man could say where it might lead. People have a hard time remembering that this was before the Cold War was over. And the possibility of a superpower confrontation in and about Iran had always been there. And now, under these circumstances, it was much higher.

Narrator: The dangers of the Cold War were driven home when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan Christmas Day, 1979. Three years earlier at Notre Dame Carter had declared the United States, "free of that inordinate fear of Communism." But Soviet-American relations had soured, Afghanistan was the final blow.

Frank Reynolds: Have you changed your perception of the Russians in the time that you've been here? You started out, it seemed to a good many people, believing that if you expressed your good will and demonstrated it that they would reciprocate.

Carter: My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week than even the previous two and a half years before that. It's only now dawning upon the world the magnitude of the action that the Soviets undertook in invading Afghanistan.

GADDIS SMITH: I think he had learned that moral affirmation by itself didn't necessarily get very far. I think he felt that events had built up and conspired against him, as they had; and that the Soviet Union was indeed a real threat.

Carter : I've cut Soviet access to high-technology equipment and to agricultural products. I've limited other commerce with the Soviet Union.

Narrator: Carter leveled sanctions against the Soviets, boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow, and withdrew his Salt II Treaty from the Senate floor.

Encouraged by Carter's new toughness Cold warriors who had organized into the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, arranged a meeting at the White House

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK, Coalition for a Democratic Majority: There was a quite high powered delegation of the leaders of CDM, who at that point included Jean Kirkpatrick, who was still a loyal Democrat.

People went into the meeting thinking he'd say there's a threat to world peace that requires an American response and I know you are the kind of people who will give me your support because you've been saying this about the Soviet Union all along. Instead Carter came in and sort of gave the group a lecture. He said that he understood this group was interested in human rights and that was great, and he supported human rights. We were all terribly disillusioned and I think that almost all of our group either publicly or in the privacy of the voting booth decided we were going to vote for Reagan.

Walter Cronkite (archival): Good Evening the 100th day of captivity for Americans in Teheran.

Narrator: As spring 1980 approached the hostages had grown into a national obsession. Their memory kept alive by millions of yellow ribbons. After 100 days the hostages are still in captivity and the nation shares their ordeal.

Narrator: No stone was left unturned trying to bring them home. While Secretary of State Cyrus Vance dealt with Iranian government officials, Hamilton Jordan met secretly with anyone, who held out hope.

"Our lives became a seesaw of emotions as scheme after scheme fell apart," Rosalynn later recalled. "Every time we saw [the hostages] on television, I counted [them].

ROSALYNN CARTER: No one can know how much pressure there was on Jimmy to do something about that. And I would say, "Why don't you do something?" And he said, "What would you want me to do?" I said, "Mine the harbors." He said, "Okay, suppose I mine the harbors, and they decide to take one hostage out every day and kill him. What am I going to do then?"

ELIZABETH DREW: Fairly or not, it came to symbolize the question of whether Carter was a leader, whether he was competent, whether he was strong.

Narrator: By April pressure was growing intense and the situation increasingly hopeless. "We could no longer afford to depend on diplomacy," Carter was forced to conclude. "I knew from an intelligence report that there was little prospect of the hostages' release for the next five or six months ... I decided to act."

It was called "Desert I." It required six C-130 transport planes, a ninety-man rescue team, two C-141 Starlifters, eight helicopters, and nearly impossible logistics.

BETTY GLAD: It was a highly risky operation. The CIA even talked about the number of people, including the hostages, who might be killed. But it was doing something.

Narrator: South of Teheran, in the Iranian desert, the rescue mission turned into a disaster. Two helicopters failed, another crashed into a C130 in a sandstorm.

Eight men died in Desert 1. Three more were severely burned.

Carter: It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed. The responsibility is fully my own.

JODY POWELL: I sort of thought at the time, "Well, people will give the president credit for trying." But I also realized that now the chances of being able to get those people out anytime in the near future was very, very slim and that from a political standpoint that was going to be a heavy burden to bear.