The voice of calm in the Iran hostage crisis
Hodding Carter III 1935–2023
Only once did Hodding Carter III lose his cool with the press. A Mississippi journalist who championed civil rights and spoke with a Southern drawl, he was the Carter administration’s assistant secretary of state for public affairs when the Iranian hostage crisis began in November 1979. He masterfully answered— or evaded—difficult questions during the many months that 52 Americans spent as hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. But one day, annoyed by persistent questions from one reporter during a press conference, he threw a rubber chicken at him. “The briefing is a form of ritualized combat,” Carter said in 1980. “I like the give-and-take.”
“Progressive politics ran in his family,” said Politico. William Hodding Carter III was the oldest child of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Hodding Carter Jr., a crusading newsman. He grew up in Greenville, Miss., where his father had founded The Delta Star newspaper. After graduating from Princeton University in 1957 and spending two years in the Marine Corps, Carter returned to Greenville as a reporter for the paper, now called The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times. He stayed for 17 years, following his father as editor and publisher and pushing an anti-segregationist line, particularly after the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964 shone a national spotlight on race relations in Mississippi. He left to work on the 1976 presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter (no relation), a fellow “white liberal from the South,” said The Washington Post. After he helped deliver Mississippi’s electoral votes, President Carter appointed him to the State Department.
Carter resigned that post after the failure of a military attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, said The New York Times. He returned to journalism and became “a prominent television political commentator, correspondent, analyst, and anchor,” doing a four-year stint at PBS’s Inside Story and winning multiple Emmys. In 2006, he turned to teaching, lecturing in public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He remained committed to upholding his father’s legacy of progressive Southern journalism. “I never knew a time when he wasn’t afraid of the consequences of what he was writing and doing,” Carter said in 1981. “I learned from my father what courage was really about—it was being afraid, but doing what you had to do.”