PASADENA (California): Bombing Tehran would have kept Jimmy Carter in the White House for a second term. Or so his communications director, Gerald Rafshoon, believes.

Rafshoon was part of a panel of Carter administration veterans and documentary producers who took questions from reporters on behalf of “Jimmy Carter,” the seventh in a series of “American Experience” profiles of modern US presidents, due on the PBS TV channel in November.

By way of anecdotal evidence, Rafshoon recalled going to Pennsylvania to film campaign spots for Carter the week after the “debacle” of the Desert One attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.

“People rushed up to me on the street saying, Right on. He did the right thing. Tell him to do it again,” Rafshoon said. “Our (poll) numbers went up about 10 points after that failed mission, just like John Kennedy’s went up after the Bay of Pigs. Had we bombed Tehran, it would have ended the hostage crisis.

“We would have had casualties, but we would not have had that (hostage crisis) hanging over us for the rest of the campaign. People perceived the gentle way he was doing it, and the measured way he was doing it, as a weakness.”

And why didn’t Carter authorize bombing? Rafshoon said, one school of thought is that Carter’s “biggest mistake was meeting the families of the hostages. In about the second week, he met everyone, and they all became personal for him. Their faces were in his head.”—Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.