University Times

On Jan. 23, 1980, White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan boarded a military jet in Washington and flew to Pittsburgh. He came to the city, he explains in his book "Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency," hoping to gain new perspective on the Iranian Revolution, and with it to possibly find a way to free the 52 Americans being held hostage in Tehran.

Jordan made the trip in secret without telling other presidential advisers or even President Jimmy Carter. He landed at the National Guard base at the old Pittsburgh International Airport and was directed to a room where Richard Cottam, a professor in Pitt's Department of Political Science, waited. Jordan had sought out Cottam, whose first book in 1964 was "Nationalism in Iran," because he was one of the few Americans who understood the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. The Pitt professor's friends included Khomeini's Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and former Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazd. He also had interviewed Khomeini when the Iranian leader was in exile in France.

"Funny thing," Jordan reports Cottam telling him when they met, "I spent a lot of time trying to offer Washington my advice on Iran, but no one listened. Now I have the President's top man coming to me asking for my opinion. President Carter inherited a flawed policy and continued it. You may not think you continued it, but you did." According to Jordan, everything Cottam told him about Khomeini that day – "his deep religious faith, his total disdain for the West, and how he goes into a trance to make a decision" – matched what he had heard from others who knew the ayatollah.

Cottam also informed Jordan that the only way out of the crisis was to let Khomeini believe he had humiliated the United States. Jordan replied: "That's impossible." Cottam answered: "I know." Jordan left Pittsburgh that day wondering: "How in the world do you negotiate under those circumstances?" Cottam returned to his classroom and his study of the Middle East. Eventually, Cottam would produce two more works on Iran, "Khomeini, The Future and U.S. Options" in 1987 and "Iran and the United States: A Cold War Case Study" in 1988. He retired from Pitt in 1990 and died of multiple organ failure brought on by cancer Aug. 29, 1997, in Montefiore Hospital. He was 72 years old.

"He was one of the great men in the department," said Raymond Owen, chair of Pitt's political science department. "There is no question about it. He came here in the 50s and was consequential in raising the standards of this department and making it into a national level political science department. He helped define the standards of the department.

"One of the interesting things about him," Owen continued, "was that any time he was involved in State Department work or secret negotiations for the State Department, he made it a point not to miss any of his classes here. He was such a terrific teacher, a charismatic guy who looked at the world a little differently and forced the students to look at the world a little differently from the way they normally did." Paul Hammond, a professor in Pitt's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, knew Cottam since the two were students at the University of Utah in the late 1940s. He said most of Cottam's work, including his approach to the Iranian hostage negotiations, reflected his friend's interest in perception and cognitive analysis in a political context.

"He was interested not just in bargaining with people, but how they think and what ideas they're carrying in their heads when the two sides come together," Hammond said. "He used psychology and cognitive analysis to cross cultural bounds from American culture to Arab culture." Hammond added that he felt Cottam's recent collaboration with his daughter, Martha, a political science professor at Washington State University, on a book about nationalist movements around the world was "a kind of dramatic ending to his life" for the way it brought the father and daughter together. The book has not yet been published.

Bert Rockman, another close friend and colleague in the political science department, said Cottam always forced people to re-think the world and themselves, which made him particularly effective in teaching undergraduates.

"He was someone who was very distinctly his own person," Rockman said. "He often served as an adviser to policy-makers, at least covertly, and in doing so was never someone to cater to what they wanted to hear, but rather to provide them with what they needed to hear as he understood it." Jordan's report of his meeting with Cottam, in which the Pitt professor bluntly lets the White House chief of staff know the Carter administration was wrong in its approach to Iran, was "classic Dick Cottam," according to Rockman.

"He not only was very much interested in what we might call theory, but in its applications," Rockman said. "There were two sides of him. He was the social science theorist, but he also felt that theory had to be used. He was interested in both of those things and very much interested in affecting the world, particularly in the areas he knew best like the Middle East, especially Iran." Rockman said that in international relations Cottam was committed to peace and negotiations, and to "de-demonizing" the world. He tried to make Americans see the world from the other side without any preconceptions.

In this age of celebrity and desire for a quick dollar, Cottam also remained "understated and had almost an old fashioned sense of dignity," according to Rockman. Even though he had many opportunities to market himself, he was not interested, Rockman said. He wanted to sell his ideas, not himself. "I argued with him a lot," Rockman added. "But I found that in the long run he was usually right, even if in the short run it didn't appear to me that he was. They don't make too many people like him, unfortunately." Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Cottam earned a B.A. in political science from the University of Utah in 1948 and an M.A. from Harvard University in 1951. He studied under a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Tehran in 1951-52, then obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1954. From 1953 to 1958, Cottam served in the U.S. Foreign Service in the Middle East. He joined the Pitt faculty in 1958 and remained at the University until 1990, retiring with the title of University Professor.

During his tenure at Pitt, Cottam became a widely recognized authority on the Middle East long before the Iran hostage crisis. He frequently was quoted in the national media about events in the region. He also testified before Congressional committees and spoke at international forums about the Middle East.

After Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy and took Americans hostage on Nov. 4, 1979, Cottam quickly sought to use his contacts in Iran to obtain their release. He became an intermediary between the State Department and high level figures he knew in the Iranian government.

In the classroom, Cottam was known as a dynamic teacher. His teaching talents were recognized in 1970 with the College Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He was among the first recipients of that honor.

Cottam is survived by his wife, Patricia; two sons, Russell of Cleveland and Douglas of Philomath, Ore.; two daughters, Martha of Moscow, Idaho, and Carolyn of Redmond, Wash.; two brothers, George of Squirrel Hill and Grant of Madison, Wis.; a sister, Fae of Portland, Ore., and seven grandchildren.

Memorial contributions can be sent to the Gritman Foundation, Gritman Medical Center, 700 S. Main St., Moscow, Idaho, 83843.