On April 21 that year, he handed Carter a letter informing him that he would be stepping down. In his memoir, “Hard Choices,” Vance recalled how the president “started to put it away.”

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“I asked him to read it,” he wrote. “He did, and then slowly put it in his pocket.”

“I told him that I wanted to make it clear that I would resign whether or not the mission was successful,” he wrote, but he asked that his resignation not be made public until after the rescue operation was complete.

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When his resignation went public a week later, The Washington Post reported that Vance’s resignation prompted everyone involved to try to “reassure the public and America’s allies that steps were being taken to keep the policy wheels turning in an orderly and consistent fashion.”

Sound familiar?

This week, nearly four decades later, in another stunning moment in Washington, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned from the Trump administration. He will leave his post in February. His high-profile resignation directly rebukes the president and offers a modern parallel to Vance’s sudden departure.

In his resignation letter, Mattis said that his “views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed over four decades of immersion in these issues."

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He believed it was time to step down, he wrote to Trump, “because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects.”

His letter was broad but came shortly after Trump announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, a move that shocked many in Washington and abroad.

As The Post reported on Friday, Mattis’s resignation caused unease even among U.S. adversaries, who fear “that President Trump will direct U.S. foreign policy without the last of his once-vaunted trio of generals to rein him in.”

Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at Georgetown University and a senior editor of The Post’s Monkey Cage blog, said that in Carter’s administration, Vance had some grievances and “had come to feel that he didn’t have much of a place anymore.” But his resignation was ultimately over a “very specific policy disagreement,” she said.

Mattis certainly had specific policy grievances as well, but what makes Mattis’s letter extraordinary, she said, is “its breadth of disagreements and the scope of the critique of Trump’s national security policy.”

Three days after Vance submitted his resignation, a number of mechanical mishaps occurred during the attempted raid to rescue the American hostages. A U.S. helicopter collided with another U.S. aircraft, killing eight service members. None of the hostages were rescued. Instead, the controversial attempt to free them resulted not only in the deaths of eight Americans, but a loss of U.S. prestige around the world. In a macabre spectacle directed by an Iranian ayatollah, Revolutionary Guards put the Americans' remains on display at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

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On April 28, 1980, Carter formally accepted Vance’s resignation, and Vance later held a news conference to announce his departure.

As The Post wrote at the time: “The resignation is a stunning embarrassment to Mr. Carter and deprives him of a trusted counselor in the middle of his most difficult passage. One wonders at the least why Mr. Vance could not have found another time to leave.”

The hostages were not released until the following January — just after Carter left office.