So Steve resigned from the State Department on November 7th, 1979, because he was upset with the handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. Yeah, go home and tell your mothers you're brilliant. I'm out of here. Apparently, he wasn't happy that he wasn't called in to resolve the situation, telling reporter Georgie Ann Geyer, quote, I had to walk into the operations center on my own after 72 hours. This is a little confusing to me, because here we have a guy who's revolutionized the entire world of hostage negotiation, who's called in whenever there's a big crisis unfolding, who's considered a genius in high-pressure situations, and no one calls him when the big game is starting here with this Iranian hostage situation. That just doesn't track. If the people in the State Department knew that they had the king of hostage negotiators at their disposal, there's literally no reason they wouldn't use him when a potentially explosive hostage situation breaks out. I'm guessing Alex might want to write this off as the State Department secretly not wanting the crisis to be diffused. So they keep Steve away from it, knowing that he would easily be able to set things straight. A more real-world explanation may be that they didn't trust Steve, and that maybe that has something to do with his most recent, at that point, high-profile job.