Answer:
Terence Smith, a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The Times, was the paper's chief White House correspondent during the Iranian crisis. By Terence Smith hen the evening packet of documents from the White House arrived at Camp David that Indian summer weekend, it included a memorandum from Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance that required an immediate Presidential decision. Jimmy Carter could not know it at the time, but that decision would set in train an extraordinary series of events that would preoccupy the nation for the next 15 months and profoundly affect his own future.
The issue posed by the memo on Oct. 21, 1979, had been nagging the Administration for months: Should Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, the exiled Shah of Iran, be allowed to enter the United States? Despite the risks such a move would entail, especially for the skeleton crew of Americans manning the embassy in revolutionary Teheran, most of Carter's advisers were for it. The President himself had been adamantly opposed and had lost his temper more than once on the subject. But now a new and urgent development had changed the situation and Vance was on the telephone from Washington asking for a
