Obit watch: July 20, 2019.

NYT obit for Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum. (Previously.)

L. Bruce Laingen. He was the senior diplomat in Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, and was taken hostage.

Mr. Laingen and two aides who had been with him at the ministry remained separated from the other hostages during the long ordeal, Mr. Laingen having the odd role of continuing to act as a diplomat while being a hostage. He was a point of contact to the outside world, sometimes meeting with diplomats from other countries and even occasionally being allowed a phone call with the West.
But if he had a somewhat easier time than the hostages at the embassy, he in no way soft-pedaled his experience. In 2001, when a conservative faction in Iran set up an anti-American exhibition on the grounds of the former embassy, Mr. Laingen, in a letter to the editor printed in The Times, suggested that the site needed a plaque. He proposed this wording:
“Here is the former American Embassy in Tehran, where occurred the most egregious violation in recorded history of all standards and precepts of diplomacy: the seizure of an embassy and its staff by student terrorists, an act endorsed by their government, the hostages used as pawns for 444 days to further the political purposes of the Islamic Republic.”

“We are there to find out how people are thinking and why they are thinking that way and behaving that way,” he said in the oral history. “And if we get too comfortable in believing something that sort of fits our purposes, well, we are in hellish trouble.”

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