WASHINGTON — When President Obama met recently with the mother of James Foley, theAmerican hostage beheaded last August by the Islamic State, she said, he told her that freeing her son and the other American hostages held with him had been his top priority.

“With all due respect,” Diane Foley said she answered, “that may have been the intention, but in practice, it certainly wasn’t.”

Mr. Obama, she said, also conceded that his administration had failed her. “That was the least he could do,” Mrs. Foley said in an interview this week. “That was hopeful. I recognize that the administration feels badly it was not handled well and it was not given the priority it should have had.”