The Shah (review)

Abbas Milani, the Iranian-American director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University as well as research fellow at the Hoover Institution, has written an insightful and timely biography of the last shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The shah, who ruled despotically from 1941 until 1979, was portrayed in the West as an enlightened, if not constitutional, monarch. His so-called White Revolution implemented in 1963 was supposed to modernize Iran through measures such as land reform, enfranchisement of women, improvement of the nation's education system, and provision of school lunches for children. Yet the shah was vilified by both leftist nationalists and traditional religious groups who accused him of "violating the Iranian constitution, political corruption, and . . . political oppression by the SAVAK (secret police)."

The shah's collapse came completely unexpectedly, at least as far as the Central Intelligence Agency was concerned, on 11 February 1979. It was a bloodless revolution by millions of street protesters, among them the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been in exile for years, first in Iraq and subsequently in France.

So why a new biography of the shah now? Milani says that the recent opening of diplomatic and other official archives in Iran, the United Kingdom, and the United States can set the record straight. Milani believes these documents make an objective biography of the shah possible for the first time since his downfall. He intends The Shah to be neither a diatribe nor a glorification, but rather an honest, scholarly portrayal of a complicated but weak human being.

Today most Americans remember little about the last shah. They may recollect that he was briefly forced into exile in 1953 by the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq, the populist leader who nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (changed to British Petroleum Company in 1954). They may recall the shah was put back on the throne of the Peacock Kingdom by a coup d'état masterminded by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Theodore Roosevelt's grandson (who years later became a prominent influence peddler in Washington and Tehran). Perhaps the most unforgettable memory was the shah's Thousand-and-One-Nights gala in 1971 to celebrate twenty-five hundred years of the monarchy in Iran. Unquestionably the largest bash of the twentieth century, it cost over $100 million. Near Persepolis a sybaritic tent city spread over some 160 acres to accommodate the VIP guests who were feted by Maxim's de Paris. The final drama was the sudden and disgraceful exit of the shah, his family, and entourage from Tehran in 1979. The shah had never had a strong stomach when faced by determined, if not violent, opposition; by this time racked by cancer, he sought asylum piteously but unsuccessfully in Morocco, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Panama. No one wanted to be tainted by the former despot. Finally Anwar Sadat, president and strongman of Egypt, welcomed the shah and provided him a final resting place in March 1980. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was buried in the Al Rifai Mosque in Cairo, where the last king of Egypt and the shah's brother-in-law was also buried. Years earlier, his father and predecessor had initially been buried there.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi succeeded his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi — the founder of modern Iran — in 1941. Reza Shah was deposed in that year by invading allied British and Soviet troops; they believed he favored Hitler over the Allies and so threatened Iranian oil supplies. Not yet twenty-two, the new shah had trained as a soldier only after returning to Iran. He had spent his high school years abroad at the exclusive Swiss boarding school La Rosey. "His childhood was marred by the strictures of his father's unbending military discipline," writes Milan, "and further cramped by the starchy solemnities of an upstart Court."

"Not surprisingly," continues his biographer, "he turned out to be a shy and timid man, one who rarely looked anyone in the eye. In his youth, as in much of his...