The American and Iranian decision-makers, as we have seen, overwhelmingly drew upon the experiences and analogies known to them personally, reflecting the greater cognitive availability of these events. The Entebbe analogy – a then very recent political and policy success – played an enhanced (if only partially visible) role in the policy discussions of the Carter administration, and probably influenced Carter's eventual decision to mount a rescue operation, while other analogies exerted an impact at various stages of the crisis. Jimmy Carter and those surrounding him clearly considered various analogous situations and searched through them for cause and effect patterns. The president and his advisers seem to have made an early effort – albeit perhaps an informal one – to gather together potential precedents, and to search these for usable lessons which could then be applied to the current case. According to Brzezinski's recollection, ‘at some point early on, we simply collected previous cases in order to see what happened and how they were handled, so either my staff or I gave it to him ... I doubt whether he would have known of all these cases himself’. As Carter himself put it at a press conference on 21 April 1980, ‘I have studied all the previous occurences in my lifetime where American hostages have been taken ... to learn how they reacted and what the degree of success was’.