By the early 1960s, the Shah of Iran, the monarchical ruler of the country, was dealing with his fourth American President. Muhammad Reza Pahlavi would have preferred Richard Nixon, whom he had met and liked, but instead faced a John F. Kennedy preoccupied with places like Cuba and Vietnam. Luckily for the Shah, it was the thick of the Cold War.
Scholar April R. Summitt details how the Shah “used America fears of Communism to gain increased financial aid, military support, and influence in the United Nations.” He “mostly sought to bolster his faltering regime by exaggerating the external threats to his power.” And, despite “Kennedy’s resolve to change the American approach to the Middle East, the Shah managed to pose as a reformer, thus assuring a steady flow of dollars.”
The Shah was becoming more and more autocratic and out-of-touch with Iranians. A large demonstration against cuts to teachers’ pay in May 1961 resulted in a change of Prime Ministers. The new PM had Washington’s support, but his anti-corruption and reform moves were blocked by the Shah. (Iran’s Prime Ministers would be figureheads after this.)
But, continuously pressed both internally and externally to reform, the Shah launched his “White Revolution” in early 1963. A big part of this was land-redistribution, breaking up giant estates and giving the land to landless peasants. But start-up costs and access to water weren’t figured into the redistribution; peasants quickly fell into serious debt. Shiʿi Muslim clerics, meanwhile, opposed land reform because big landowners were their primary funders.
The Shah’s effort to enfranchise women was also anathema to the most fundamentalist of mullahs.
“The very popular Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini saw this move as one more example of Western, cultural imperialism and the destruction of an authentic, Iranian identity,” writes Summitt. (“Ayatollah” is a title for a Shiʿite Muslim religious leader.) Khomeini and his circle were formalizing ideas about a state run on Islamic lines, as they defined them.
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Attempting to silence Khomeini, the Shah’s forces stormed a seminary in Qom in March 1963. One student was killed. In response, Khomeini “accused the Shah of being an enemy of Iran” in early June. Khomeini was arrested the day after his speech, sparking riots throughout the country. Shoot-to-kill orders against the demonstrators were issued in Tehran: hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, Summitt writes. Khomeini was exiled in 1964.
In Washington, one official argued “that we’re paying too much attention to the tail and not enough to the dog.” But the loudest voices said the Shah was going a great job at reform. As Summitt summarizes, “the US wanted to believe that the Shah was sincere, and chose to ignore evidence to the contrary, such as ongoing unrest among the Muslim clergy, and dissatisfaction among government officials and the middle class in general.” Money and arms flowed in—and in the other direction, oil flowed out.
“[The Shah] blamed any vocalization of dissatisfaction on Communists. [He] thus increased his control over Iran with constant US support. After Kennedy, no one in the US questioned the Shah’s rule.”
In 1967, the Shah installed himself as Shahanshah. By the early 1970s, this “King of Kings” was on his sixth US President—and it was finally his old pal Richard Nixon. Nixon wanted to make the Shah the US’s chief proxy in the region, a bulwark against the USSR to the north and radical Arabs states to the south, regardless of the growing discontent against the Shah’s now iron-bound rule.
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In the early 1970s, this second member of what was often referred to as the “Pahlavi dynasty” (his ex-solider father had ruled as Shah from 1925 to 1941) was riding high. In October 1971, the Shah anointed himself as the culmination of 2,500 years of Persian history with an extravagant birthday party for the Persian Empire. He had fewer than eight more years of rule.
In January 1979, ill with cancer that would soon kill him, the Shah fled Iran (ostensibly on “vacation”) amidst massive demonstrations and strikes against his reign. Two weeks later, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his decade and a half of exile. One autocracy was over, another was just beginning.
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