The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  On the night of October 11, in his speech at the state dinner in Paris, the Shah began by talking about his own “special affinity for France, and the lofty place the French language has held in Iran’s educational curriculum.” The Shah praised the long history of friendship between Iran and France, “going back to the age of ‘Philip le Bel’‡ who was the recipient of the first letter from an Iranian king.” Iran, the Shah said, “owes the first translation of our classics to your countrymen. Teaching Persian in Europe first began in Paris in [the] late 18th century. The first relics of our antiquity were discovered by French anthropologists.”55 The next day, André Malraux, De Gaulle’s revered minister of culture, who had traveled to Iran before and had a keen interest in the history of Iranian art, hosted a gala in honor of the Shah and the Queen and invited many of the French intellectual royalty to the party. More importantly, he developed a close relationship with the Queen. In an inscription in a book he had earlier given the Queen, he had written of his delight that Iran’s enchantments are now “associated with your destiny.”56 This time, he took her “through the great museums of Paris.”57

  When the royal family returned to Tehran after what had been a personally and politically successful trip, the Shah found the country awash with rumors of increasing tensions between him and his obviously frustrated prime minister. The British Embassy captured the Shah’s precarious position, and the double bind he found himself in when it wrote, “if the Shah gets rid of Dr. Amini on his return [from America], this will be an indication that he will henceforth take his orders direct from his American masters. If on the other hand he retains Dr. Amini, this will be because his American masters have told him to do so.”58 Not just the Shah and Amini, but the nation, awaited the meeting between the young Prince of Camelot and the tired Peacock Prince in April 1962.

  * In a strange twist of fate, the son of the same Ayatollah would, thirty years later, become the chief ally of the Iranian regime in its attempt to gain influence in Iraq

  † In those days in Iran, the didactic trinity written on walls everywhere—from barracks and bazaars to classrooms—was God, Shah, country. In Morocco, another Muslim monarchy at the African end of the Islamic world, the trinity, no less prevalent, is God, country, and king. In Iran, then, the country exists for the king while in Morocco, the king exists for the country

  ‡ Philip le Bel, or Philip the Fair (or the Handsome) ruled France from 1268 to 1314. In spite of his apparent good looks, his critics said of him, “he is neither man nor beast. He is a thing.

  Chapter 15

  THE BRIGHT SIDE OF CAMELOT

  Thou art the midwife of my woe.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 2.2.63

  The idea of a modernizing monarch is almost an oxymoron. Monarchy, one of the oldest forms of governance and often seen as ancient Persia’s contribution to the political legacy of humanity, is, by definition, a traditional form of rule. Its legitimizing narrative is invariably based on the traditional idea of divine right—whether it was the ancient Persian and Zoroastrian notion of “Farrah Izadi” (divine aura) or the Islamic concept of “Zellollah” (shadow of Allah). Modernity, on the other hand, is founded on the idea of popular sovereignty and natural rights. People of the modern polity are citizens instead of subjects; they have inalienable natural rights; in a traditional feudal society, the rights of the subjects are only those the king deigns to give them. The constitution of 1905, in an effort to make Iran into a democratic polity, combined these two incongruent concepts by making monarchy both a divine gift and an institution predicated on the support of the people.

  Machiavelli is regarded as the first political theorist of the modern age. He was the first philosopher to understand that the age of inherited legitimacy had ended. A modern prince, Machiavelli said, must develop his own language of legitimacy wherein the rights of self-assertive citizens are recognized and respected. The Shah, in this sense, was a historical anomaly, if not an anachronism—a man of contradictory affinities, a prince who had inherited his power but did little to develop a theory to legitimize it, a ruler who promoted social and economic policies that hurled Iran into the modern age, yet was insistent on ruling the country like a nineteenth-century Oriental despot. Events in the life of the Shah during the first years of the 1960s captured this contradiction.

  The Shah’s rule also coincided with what scholars call the “third wave” of democratization when, in less than fifty years, more than fifty countries chose the path of democracy. Maintaining and consolidating an authoritarian regime in the age of democracy was doubly difficult, and the Shah’s response to a student demonstration in January 1962, a few months before he left Iran for his visit to the United States, captures his many ironic inconsistencies.

  On the afternoon of a day when student demonstrations at Tehran University were brutally suppressed, when one student was killed and an estimated two hundred injured and arrested, the Shah was chairing, as was his wont, a meeting of the Supreme Economic Council. Before the meeting began, the Shah paced the large room with his hands clasped behind his back—a sure sign of anguish to those who knew him. Then he angrily said, “What do these students want?” After a brief pause, invoking the royal “we,” he continued, “We have given them everything. What else do they want?”

  His was a rhetorical question, intended only to register dismay. One man in the room took the road less traveled, and instead of the safe silence of acquiescence, he chose to talk—even dared to disagree. His name was Mehdi Samii. By then, he had established an impeccable reputation as an honest banker, a diligent manager of men and policies, a close confidante of the Shah, a man always willing to speak the truth.

  That day, Samii was already anxious because he intended to raise with the Shah the case of Fereydoon Mahdavi, a distant relative, and a young leader from the ranks of the National Front who had been arrested along with other student demonstrators. Samii asked for permission to speak and then said, “Your Majesty, the problem is that the things you say you have ‘given’ them they simply consider parts of their inalienable rights. What they object to is being told they are ‘given’ these rights and being deprived of other rights they also think they have.”1

  When the Shah was still the crown prince and had just returned to Iran from his years in Switzerland, he tried to surround himself with men of intelligence and erudition. When, for example, he heard from Dr. Ghasem Ghani, himself a physician, scholar, and diplomat, of a weekly meeting of some of the country’s leading literary lions—people like Mohammad Gazvini and Zoka al-Mulk Foroughi—he asked them to hold their meetings in his presence at the Court.2 Anxious to learn, he quietly listened to their erudite discussions. Even as a king, many of his early advisors and courtiers were seasoned, thoughtful men of politics. But by the time he was on his way to America in 1962, the Shah had less and less interest in the company of the types of men who attended those literary gatherings. The preparations for the trip to the Kennedy White House were, in a sense, the harbinger of a crucial change in the quality of the men the Shah picked as aides and as office holders. He was beginning to lose patience with men of Amini’s generation—men who had seen him in his dark and defeated hours, men like Court Minister Hussein Ala, who had a paternal sort of regard for him. Not long after his American journey, the Shah began the process of changing not just the fabric of Iranian society but the quality of the people who surrounded him. He called it a “house cleaning.” Gradually and inexorably, he brought to the center of power a new class of technocrats.

  Before long, even the advice of men like Samii would no longer be welcomed by the Shah. He never shunned Samii, and though he eventually stripped him of political posts, he made sure he did not suffer economically. Moreover, the ascendance of technocrats had for the Shah the added advantage of matching at least one element of the new U.S. strategy on Iran. At the same time, the men who surrounded the Shah in his private life were a combination of his childhood friends and a coterie of unsavory char
acters who used their proximity to the King to illicitly enrich themselves. With a few exceptions, when picking friends the Shah was a poor judge of character.

  In fact, even before going to the April 1962 meeting with Kennedy, the Shah had made a major move in expediting the rise of an aggressively ambitious young man who took pride in his plans to arrive at the pinnacle of power with the help of his “American friends.” His name was Hassan-Ali Mansur, and he came from a family with a long, controversial, political pedigree. Mansur’s father, Ali Mansur, had been a prime minister with a badly tarnished reputation as an Anglophile and a crook. Now his son took pride in having Gratian Yatsevich, the CIA station chief in Tehran, as a tenant and as an enthusiastic ally and supporter.

  Mansur had worked in Iran’s Foreign Ministry since graduating from Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science. In his first assignment in Europe in the months after the end of World War II, he met a colleague named Amir Abbas Hoveyda, and the two became lifelong friends. By 1957, Hoveyda had left the Foreign Ministry and accepted a job with the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, and Mansur had decided that the slow pace of rise in the stultified hierarchy of the Foreign Ministry was ill-suited to his ambitions. He returned to Iran and also convinced Hoveyda to come back, telling him of the promise of his “American friends” to help him become prime minister. Together Mansur and Hoveyda worked to create what they called the “Progressive Circle.”3 With the Shah’s support, Mansur soon had membership in the High Economic Council and a ministerial portfolio.

  The late 1950s have been called the era of dowrehs in Iran—informal but regular gatherings of like-minded men (and a few women) who met to talk about the political situation in the country and plan for the future. The dowrehs would have been de facto embryos of political parties had they ever been allowed to simply follow the “natural” progression of their ambitions. The Progressive Circle was just such a dowreh, and with the Shah’s blessing, it did eventually grow into the Iran Novin (New Iran) Party that was to dominate Iranian party politics for much of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. Mansur’s meteoric rise to power in Iran, no doubt spurred on by the Shah’s public support, was nothing if not a subtle nod to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations about the Shah’s own intent to bring about reforms in Iran. As dispatches from the American Embassy in Tehran show, diplomats stationed there clearly understood the meaning of the Shah’s gestures.

  There was one last detail the White House wanted to take care of before the Shah left Iran for his visit to the United States. Aware of the problem of the Iranian students and of the Shah’s intense sensitivity to critical comments in the American press, the White House took a preemptive step to lessen the likelihood of bad press for the Shah. The American Embassy in Tehran was instructed to convey to the Shah “the following list of things which should be avoided in order to maximize favorable public impression of visit. 1) Wearing of uniforms by Shah—except at Washington arrival, departure and wreath laying ceremonies; 2) Purchasing or ordering of expensive clothing, jewels, or automobiles, 3) Lavish distribution of gifts.”4

  On Tuesday, April 10, the Shah, accompanied by the Queen and an entourage of ten, arrived at New York’s Idlewild Airport aboard Pan Am Flight 115. On some occasions, even before he had his own jet, if the Shah flew on the Iranian airline, Homa, he would go to the cockpit and pilot the plane part of the way, particularly during takeoff and landing. But this time the Shah was not at the controls. The royal couple arrived in New York at around five o’clock in the afternoon and was taken directly to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the Presidential Suite, the famous suite 35A, was set aside for them.

  The Presidential Suite at the Waldorf is a three-bedroom apartment with a big living room and a dining room that can seat more than forty guests. In one corner is the desk used by General MacArthur; Kennedy’s rocking chair is in another. A beautiful Cartier clock adorns one of the walls. The East River and the Hudson as well as the UN buildings are all visible from the windows of the suite. Outside the entrance, today there hangs a silver plaque with elegantly engraved names of the heads of state who have stayed in the apartment. Since 1931, every U.S. president has stayed there at least once; other heads of state mentioned as past residents include Queen Elizabeth, King Hassan, Emperor Hirohito, Nikita Khrushchev, and even Nicolae Ceausecsu, the Romanian despot.5 In 1962, and every other time the Shah stayed at the hotel, particularly after Iran’s oil revenues suddenly jumped and the Shah’s entourage grew bigger and more extravagant, he was afforded an even more ostentatious royal treatment—but today, for reasons that are not clear, the name of the Shah is missing from the silver royal register.

  At ten o’clock on the morning of April 11, the royal entourage left New York for National Airport in Washington, where they were met by President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline. The Shah, dressed in a dark suit, had recently had a haircut and looked more like a military cadet than a head of state. Kennedy stood behind the podium, with the Shah, the Queen, and Mrs. Kennedy standing behind him, and, looking into the cameras, he welcomed the Shah and the Queen to the United States, suggesting that the two leaders shared much, as they both wanted freedom, peace, and a better life for their people.

  When it was the Shah’s turn to speak, he read from a prepared text and seemed nervous. His English was correct but had something of a novice in its locution. Instead of looking at the cameras and the microphones, he stood at an angle and had his eyes fixed on President Kennedy and his wife. He talked of the “magic meaning” that the word “America” had come to have around the world. After the brief welcoming comments, the Shah and the President rode in the presidential limousine while Mrs. Kennedy and Queen Farah followed in the next car. They drove to Blair House, the official state guest house used by foreign dignitaries. The Shah gave the President the gift he had brought him, “a tenth century ceramic bowl, eight and a half inch in diameter,” in “off-white glaze, decorated with bird and scroll designs.”6 After a private lunch and a visit to an Islamic center, and after placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, at eight o’clock that night, the King and Queen of Iran, both dressed in formal attire, attended the state dinner given in their honor by President and Mrs. Kennedy. The Shah wore a blue royal sash across a white shirt and a tuxedo jacket. The Queen wore a long yellow gown, a white fur cape, and a matching bejeweled tiara and necklace. Mrs. Kennedy was dressed in a long pink and white gown, with long white gloves that extended well above her elbows.

  Aside from the meetings with President Kennedy and others in his administration, the Shah had three big speeches to give on that trip—the first was the night of the state dinner. The second was his talk before a joint session of Congress, and the third was his appearance before the National Press Club. He seems to have followed a common strategy in all three. He wanted to point to Iran’s rich history and its shared values with the West. He wanted to argue for more military assistance and a bigger Iranian army. Most important of all, the Shah wanted to highlight his own legitimacy as a reformer. It was a measure of the value he placed on this trip that, before leaving for America, he had hired a tutor to improve his English. His impeccable command of French had always been a great asset, and from then on, his ease with English would also become part of his international identity and a subject of repeated praise by the Western media.

  By then, Shojaedeen Shafa had been the Shah’s speechwriter for about four years, and two of the Shah’s American speeches, with their repeated references to Iran’s past poets and thinkers and their influence on the West, were evidence of his influence. During the White House state dinner, Kennedy began his brief welcoming remarks by observing, “[I]t has never been easy to be a Persian, from the oldest times in history till today.” Were the words meant to conjure echoes of Montesquieu and his treatise on the difficulties of being a Persian in the modern age? Kennedy then talked about how “the Shah has carried the burden” of ruling his countr
y for twenty years already “and might carry it for another twenty years.” As it happened, he was wrong by only three years. In an effort to show his support for Amini, Kennedy praised the Shah “for surrounding himself with able, and dedicated Ministers.” Yet the President avoided, as much as possible, mentioning Amini’s name. Finally, reflecting the many references in his briefing papers to the Soviet threat, Kennedy ended his talk by referring to the fact that Iran lived “in the belly of the bear” and then commended the Shah for keeping his country safe from the Soviet threat. When it was the Shah’s turn to speak, he began by referring to the history of the strong and amicable relationship between Iran and the United States. He talked of the first American missionaries who came to Iran, and he praised the work of men like Dr. Samuel Jordan, who gave “his life and youth to promoting culture and education in Iran.” He conjured the memory of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the quintessential American intellectual and poet, citing his lyrical eulogy of the Persian poet Sa’di and his virtues of honesty. The Shah then quoted Kennedy’s own Profiles in Courage, concluding from it that he had hitherto been able to stand up to the malicious attacks on him only because justice was on his side. The pomp and ceremony of the state dinner and the Shah’s attempts to underscore his pedigree as a genuine reformer were all a prelude to his much-anticipated discussions with Kennedy scheduled to begin the next day.

  At 9:30 the next morning, the Shah walked into the Cabinet Room of the White House for the first round of his meetings with Kennedy. The American and Iranian delegations were already seated around an oval table. They had been informally discussing Soviet machinations in the Middle East—an issue on which both sides were in complete agreement. On each side of the table, the center seats were left empty, designated for the Shah and the President. But before being seated, Kennedy led the Shah into a small private room off the Oval Office where the two talked alone for fifteen minutes. No notes of this meeting were taken.