Moorhead Kennedy, who has died aged 93, was among the most senior of the 52 American diplomats and military personnel captured during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.
Kennedy had been economic counsellor at the US embassy in Tehran just a month when, as he prepared to leave for a lunch meeting on November 4, a crowd of ecstatic young Iranian students broke past the marines guarding the diplomatic compound. As the embassy offices were ransacked of classified files, the diplomat and his colleagues were tied up and blindfolded.
The young militants, emboldened by the year-old Iranian Revolution, seemed as surprised as the Americans that they had got so far – “as if, having done what they set out to do, they had no idea what to do next,” Kennedy recalled. What followed was his 444-day captivity, the hostages moved from location to location by supporters of Iran’s theocratic regime as a demand that America hand over the refugee Shah for probable execution was stonewalled by Washington.
In February 1980, stripped to his underwear, Kennedy suffered a mock execution; however his enduring antipathy was not to his captors, but the American government. In his cell, “I began to question some of the assumptions under which I had to operate, problems to which, in my efforts to conform to the system, I had closed my eyes,” he wrote in The Ayatollah in the Cathedral, his 1986 memoir. “Captivity freed me of the necessity to think like a Foreign Service officer.”
With their release brokered by Algeria in January 1981, the hostages received a tickertape welcome back home in America, but Kennedy’s disillusionment stayed, exacerbated by a decades-long battle for compensation. Pivoting from diplomat to peace campaigner, he maintained: “Middle East terrorism is a reaction against colonialism which in effect says that since the Middle East needs the West to govern it properly, its institutions and values… are of no particular consequence.”
Moorhead Cowell Kennedy Jr was born in Manhattan on November 5 1930 to Moorhead Kennedy, a banker, and Anna Scott, a teacher. In a debating championship at Groton, a private boarding school in Massachusetts, he was told to argue against the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. He lost, but the debate inspired a lifelong interest in Arab culture.
He embarked on a bachelor’s degree in Oriental Studies from Princeton University in 1949, travelling the length of Iran in his first summer holiday in 1950. “I ate onions in the shade of village archways, and in many other ways gained a glimpse of the magic of Iran which captivity could never dispel,” he recalled.
On graduation in 1952 Kennedy joined the army and was posted to West Germany. He spent his leave in Algeria, where “relations with my camel were never the best”, but he worked on his Arabic. He was discharged two years later, and on his first night back in civilian life, in New York, he met Louisa Livingston, proposing that night and marrying her in June 1955. She would later become the principal spokesperson for the hostages’ families, leading meetings with the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.
Taking advantage of the Korean GI Bill, Kennedy entered Harvard Law School in 1957, but was bored until a professor suggested Islamic law. He interrupted his studies with a year at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies in Shemlan, Lebanon, leaving as the 1958 civil war broke out.
In March 1960 Kennedy joined the Foreign Service as an administration officer to Yemen. He and Louisa would play tennis on a court that doubled as the country’s execution ground, the heads of despotic Imam Ahmad bin Yahya’s enemies still on the posts as the couple practised their serves.
A three-year posting in the visas office of Greece followed in 1962, with a promotion to the economic section of the embassy in Lebanon for four years from 1965. Returning to a Washington desk job at the Economic and Business Bureau of the State Department left him “utterly lost”, and he felt no more at home in his posting to Chile in 1975, a year into the US-backed dictatorship of General Pinochet, nor during a fraught year back in Beirut in 1978.
Tehran was “an embassy where not many wanted to serve” under the rule of Ayatollah, but Kennedy recalled: “I was very interested in seeing a revolution in progress.”
After his release he left the service, establishing various Christian peace initiatives, but was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Under the terms of the Algiers Accord the hostages were barred from suing Iran for compensation, so Kennedy took the fight to the federal government. In 2016, $4.4 million was awarded to each of the 37 surviving hostages.
Louisa died in 2007 and Moorhead Kennedy is survived by their three sons.
Moorhead Kennedy, born November 5 1930, died May 3 2024
