Moorhead C. Kennedy Jr., 93, captive in Iran hostage crisis
As Iranian students gathered outside the Us Embassy in Tehran, chanting “Death to America” and carrying posters of Islamic revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, moorhead c. Kennedy Jr. was in his secondfloor office there.
“I remember standing in a window and looking down on all the noise and anti-American anger,” he recalled much later. “And I wondered to myself what it would be like to die.”
later that morning, on nov. 4, 1979, demonstrators breached the compound’s walls, seized the embassy, and took dozens of Americans hostage. mr. Kennedy, the mission’s thirdranking diplomat, had been planning to celebrate his 49th birthday the next day. Instead he spent it in captivity, blindfolded and tied to a chair at the outset of a 444-day ordeal that would hobble the carter administration, transfix the nation, and leave lasting scars for the 52 hostages and their families.
“I don’t think any of us will recover totally” from the crisis, he told The new York Times in 2003.
mr. Kennedy, who died may 3 at 93, was one of the best-known captives, partly because his wife, louisa livingston Kennedy, became an eloquent spokeswoman for the hostages’ families, giving frequent interviews as a founder of the family liaison Action group, or flAg.
While she appeared on television and met with world leaders — British prime minister margaret Thatcher, pope John paul II — her husband endured mock executions in Tehran.
he returned home with posttraumatic stress disorder, as well as a determination to transform his life. Retiring from a two-decade career in the foreign service, he became a writer and educator, lecturing and leading seminars and role-playing games while seeking to help teenagers and college students develop problem-solving skills and better understand foreign cultures.
“When you’ve been through a death-threatening experience, you are suddenly confronted with your real self,” he told the Times. “most of us go through life chasing after a person who never really exists: our idea of ourself.”
A princeton- and harvardeducated diplomat with a specialty in economics, mr. Kennedy was halfway through a threemonth assignment in Tehran when a marine came charging down the embassy hallway, shouting about a “break-in” at the compound.
Demonstrators had been protesting the carter administration’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed monarch, the shah, to enter the United states for cancer treatment.
The building had been briefly occupied earlier in the year, and mr. Kennedy initially believed that the latest intrusion would be similarly short.
Then he saw what he remembered as “a sea of fanatical faces.” he and other staffers went to an embassy vault room, shredding government documents before they were taken into custody. mr. Kennedy was moved with some of the hostages to an elegant home in the suburbs, where he was barred from talking and was interrogated for just a few minutes — his captors seemed to lose interest when they realized his focus was economics — and was able to pass the time reading books and magazines.
Within a month, he said, he and other hostages were brought back to the embassy. The captives were terrorized by men in white masks who barged in and ordered the group to line up in their underwear, prodding them with automatic rifles.
“gradually, like a cancer victim, you develop a numbness to the presence of death,” he said.
Daily routines offered a comfort. mr. Kennedy recalled that he found stability and a kind of therapeutic relief through sweeping the floors and putting up family pictures whenever he was moved to a new location, and he said he scrubbed his toilet so carefully that even his captors began to use it.
When hostage negotiations were completed — a breakthrough that followed the death of the shah, Iraq’s invasion of Iran, and carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election — mr. Kennedy and the other captives were “stacked like cordwood” in buses and taken to the airport, where Iranians chanted anti-American slogans as they boarded an aircraft home. They were released Jan. 20, 1981, the day of Reagan’s inauguration.
mr. Kennedy was greeted with a ticker-tape parade in manhattan, where he was born, and went on to head the new York-based cathedral peace Institute, a new center studying the intersection of religion and foreign policy. he later led a successor organization, the council for International Understanding.
The original institute had been based out of the cathedral of st. John the Divine in manhattan until 1983, when mr. Kennedy, an Episcopalian, clashed with church leaders and peace activists over his refusal to embrace calls for a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze.
The oldest of four children, moorhead cowell Kennedy Jr. was born in manhattan on nov. 5, 1930. his mother was a teacher and his father was a banker who became president of the new York branch of goodwill Industries.
mr. Kennedy, who was known to friends and family as mike, spent summers on mount Desert Island in maine and graduated in 1948 from groton, a private boarding school in massachusetts.
he received a bachelor’s degree in Oriental studies from princeton University in 1952, deepened his interest in the middle East while assisting on an archeological dig in Iran, and served a stint in the Army in West germany, taking advantage of his proximity to northern Africa to spend his military vacations in Algeria, where he worked on his Arabic.
After graduating from harvard law school in 1959 with a specialty in Islamic law, he joined the foreign service, with postings in Yemen, greece, lebanon, and chile. he served as the first director of the state Department’s Office of Investment Affairs while in Washington in the early 1970s.
Aside from his time in Tehran, mr. Kennedy was accompanied overseas by his wife, louisa, whom he married in 1955. The couple retired to mount Desert Island, where mr. Kennedy designed an expansive hilltop garden, complete with large stones that he arranged with help from a backhoe.
“Whatever trauma he had in captivity, he kind of worked it out as a gardener,” his son mark said. “That was his sanctuary.”
mr. Kennedy died at an assisted-living center in Bar harbor, maine, according to his son, who said the cause was complications from dementia. his wife died in 2007. he later found a companion in Ellen Kappes, a mount Desert Island artist. she died in 2022.
In addition to his son mark, of Oak park, calif., mr. Kennedy leaves three sons, philip of Rye, n.Y., Andrew of Washington, and Duncan of san francisco; a sister; and 10 grandchildren.