Nation: Cynical, Self-Serving, False

It was less a foreign policy debate than an explosion of name-calling unusually bitter even for a presidential campaign. Unusually misleading, too. Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter fought over the credit for a promising idea for release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran, though actually the idea seems to have been mainly the brainchild of U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

Kennedy began the row. In a speech at Georgetown University on Jan. 28, he had proposed an international commission to investigate Iran's grievances against the U.S. as a quid pro quo for release of the hostages. His suggestion drew little attention, and last week he suddenly sharpened his rhetoric. In a speech at Harvard, Kennedy boomed: "For months, the White House rejected a commission on Iranian grievances—which could have freed the hostages sooner. Now, at last, the President is about to agree to it. But the Administration stubbornly resisted this solution until I and others made the proposal."

An angry White House immediately launched a counterattack. Press Secretary Jody Powell termed Kennedy's attack "cynical, self-serving, irresponsible and false." Secretary of State Cyrus Vance accused Kennedy of "misstatements ... both numerous and serious," and State Department Spokesman Hodding Carter III asserted that Kennedy had got the commission idea from confidential briefings that Vance and Waldheim had given him. Finally, Carter himself said at his press conference that Kennedy's remarks had been "very damaging to our country."

The germ of the idea actually first appeared in a letter to Waldheim from Abolhassan Banisadr, then Iran's Foreign Minister. It was published on Nov. 13, only nine days after the hostages were seized. Banisadr asserted that "the American Government should at least accept the investigation of the guilt of the former Shah." He did not say who should investigate, but, according to a U.N. spokesman, Waldheim privately broached the idea of an international inquiry commission to U.S. and Iranian officials on Nov. 17. He pursued it on a year-end trip to Iran and on a visit to Carter in Washington Jan. 6; the same day he finally made it public in a television interview: It had already been widely discussed in the press.

By week's end Kennedy conceded, quite lamely, that he could not "claim authorship" of the commission proposal and indeed that it had "been around for months" before his Georgetown speech. But he continued to insist that the Administration had rejected the proposal until he began prodding. That appears at best an overstatement.

It is true that the Administration long seemed dubious. Though Carter now stresses that the White House has been "discussing" the commission idea with Waldheim "since mid-November," he indicated serious reservations at a press conference Nov. 28. And after Carter's Jan. 6 talk with Waldheim, Powell told reporters that the White House had rejected what was even then being called a package deal—though he insisted the next day that it had not turned the proposal down flat but was still "exploring" it. What the White House objected to then, and still does, was any idea that Iran could continue to hold the hostages while the commission deliberated.