444 days died last week—one of them among the best known hostages and the other among the most obscure.
Gary Lee died last Sunday after a long battle with colon cancer. He was 65. He received little attention as a hostage and lived on afterward in relative obscurity.
Richard Morefield died the next day of pneumonia. He was 81. He was among the best known of the hostages because his wife, Dorothea, was one of the most vocal spouses in assuring that the hostages were not forgotten.
Lee was an administrative officer at the embassy. He tried to escape when the students poured into the embassy, but said he stopped and surrendered when someone starting firing at him as he ran down an alley.
He rarely ate chicken after the hostage episode, telling friends that he lost the taste for it when his captors made him eat chicken raw.
Like many of the hostages he underwent mock executions with his captors putting a gun beside his head and then pulling the trigger on an empty chamber. “I bought it,” he said. “I thought I was a dead man.”
He retired to Corpus Christi, Texas, where he spent his days on a bar stool at the 301 Bar & Grill. After he died, friends draped a flag over that stool and left an ice cold scotch on top of the bar in his memory.
Morefield also endured mock executions. He remembered each of the three very clearly.
His family waited for him in Tierrasanta, California, near San Diego. His wife, Dorothea, became a nationally known spokeswoman for the families of the hostages.
Morefield, who grew up in San Diego, didn’t regret his career and continued his diplomatic service after his release.
Morefield died of pneumonia in a hospital in Raleigh, N.C., where he and his wife had retired a few years ago.
Morefield was named consul general of the US Embassy in Tehran at a time of turmoil in that country because “he was someone who could go in and make sense out of the chaos,” said his daughter, Elizabeth Morefield. “He was the go-to guy. He was good at getting organizations up and running … and running smoothly.”
Before Iran, Morefield had been assigned to Colombia during a time of massive drug violence there. “He was unflappable,” Morefield said of her father.
In interviews after his release in 1981, Morefield said he never gave up hope during the ordeal. He also said the hostage experience was not the worst thing in his life. His eldest son, Richard Jr., had been killed in a Roy Rogers restaurant robbery in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1976. He and three others were forced to lie down in a walk-in freezer and shot repeatedly. The son was a college freshman.
In a 1986 PBS documentary on the hostage crisis, Morefield said his son’s murder “forced me to make the decision that I was going to cope. There was nothing more they could do emotionally to me.”
“Life is not a bowl of cherries,” Morefield said. “We all, at one time or another, worry about what our breaking point is.… People are stronger than they give themselves credit for being.”
After his 1981 release, Morefield flirted with the possibility of running for Congress but instead returned to the State Department. He was consul general in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the 1980s when US Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena was killed by drug traffickers. “That was really difficult for him,” Elizabeth Morefield said.
Morefield was overweight at 210 pounds when he was taken hostage. Every day in captivity he did push-ups, sit-ups and an hour of jogging in his prison cubicle. He weighed 178 when he left Iran. “This might have added 10 years to my life,” he said afterward.