One of the helicopters, with no reasonable explanation since then, turned back to the aircraft carrier, which left us seven. Another one was forced down in the desert by an unexpected sandstorm, which left us six, which was fine. And so our whole rescue operation assembled there in the desert. And then one of the helicopters developed a hydraulic leak and couldn't fly. So I had to abort the rescue operation. We couldn't have afforded to extract five-sixths of our people and leave one-sixth of our people in Iran to be executed, so we had to terminate the exercise.

So it was not sending a large enough squad of helicopters?

If I'd sent one more helicopter, there's no doubt in my mind we would have had a successful operation. The Iranians never knew we were there until after we all left. But we would have had the hostages rescued, I would probably have been reelected, and so forth. So that was a bit of a turning point.

Gary Sick, your national security advisor for the Middle East, and a number of others have written convincingly that Reagan's campaign staff were conspiring against you to keep the hostages held for fear you'd win reelection if they were released. Do you believe that? Does that resonate with you?

I never have taken a position on that because I don't know the facts. I've seen both sides. I've seen the explanations that were made by George H. W. Bush and the Reagan people, and I've read Gary Sick's book and talked to him. I don't really know.

The thing that I do know is that after they [the Iranians] decided to hold the hostages until after the election, I did everything I could to get them extracted, and the last three days I was president, I never went to bed at all. I stayed up the whole time in the Oval Office to negotiate this extremely complex arrangement to get the hostages removed and to deal with $12 billion in Iranian cash and gold. And I completed everything by six o'clock on the morning that I was supposed to go out of office. All the hostages were transferred to airplanes and they were waiting in the airplanes. I knew this--so they were ready to take off--and I went to the reviewing stand when Reagan became president. Five minutes after he was president, the planes took off. They could have left three or four hours earlier.

But what, if any, influence was used on the Ayatollah to wait until I was out of office, I don't know.

When you look back at the Crisis of Confidence speech, do you feel vindicated? And secondly, it seems to me that in 1980, voters made a choice between your assessment that outlined making sacrifice and moving this nation down one path toward energy independence and living more humbly, and another path that said we can continue this, that there's nothing wrong with the American way of life. Are we particularly bad as a nation at making the right decisions that are hard?