The Peace Corps is a vital idea. Long overdue. It can do more to protect the future of freedom in our time than anything we’ve tried to do so far. It can, if what it does is geared not only to where Iranians, Indians, and Indonesians are in history (back where we once were), but geared also to what those people are.

What the people are, for example, who heard that man, when he spoke from a balcony overlooking a central square in Teheran, in Iran, back in April 1951. [Mossadegh shown] It was an important speech. It could have changed the future for freedom in the world against us. But few Americans know this to this day.

Not that we didn’t get Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh’s message that April day 10 years ago, when he was the Premier of Iran. Kick the foreign exploiters of our land out, was the message. Take over the oilfields now run by foreigners. Nationalize the oil industry. Why let Englishmen, or Americans, or any Europeans milk Iran of this wealth, these resources? Iran’s wealth for the Iranians. Out with the foreign domination. That was the message, and things went that way.

The Azerbaijan [Abadan] refinery there was taken away from the British, England and Europe, using a great deal of the oil turned out by this place, were hit by the crisis. Crises that affected everything there from factories to battleships. Great powers, remember, are great powers because of oil today. Without it, they are not.

We got the message, but, as the newspaper clippings which tell about that event make clear, we found it very hard, dangerously hard, to take Dr. Mossadegh seriously. [Newspapers shown] This clipping calls him a ham, a clown. This one pokes fun at him for what it calls his histrionics, mainly bursting into tears, weeping and wailing in public during his speeches. This news story describes him as a plain fraud, and his actions as soap opera stuff. The man, according to these reports, was obviously a phony. Anybody could see that.

Anybody, that is, who had never heard of Hassan and Hussain — the prophet Mohammad’s two grandsons. To all Shiite moslems, they’re martyrs to the faith. There wasn’t much in the training of Americans like these newsmen to prepare them for one of Dr. Mossadegh’s speeches — which to the average Shiite Iranian was the surest sign of a man’s conviction and sincerity — carried over from the religious services of the Shiites during which public weeping and wailing shows honest and sincere grief over the martyrdom of Hassan and Hussain.

The same kind of carryover from religion in our civil affairs, as we go through to show our sincerity and honesty in swearing-in ceremonies. The same, but different — in ways that made Americans underestimate Dr. Mossadegh’s power in Iran, completely. From newsmen to readers, we hadn’t been prepared for the facts of life in that part of the world.