The Rise And Fall Of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

Neville Teller

Rare is the nonfiction work that can be described as gripping, but King of Kings, by Scott Anderson, more than 400 pages though it is, earns the accolade. Of course, it is not practicable to stay glued to a book of that length from beginning to end, but the reader returns to take up the story each time with pleasurable anticipation.
The event that Anderson has investigated in depth, and what he uncovered in doing so, is encapsulated in his subtitle: The Iranian Revolution: A story of hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation. Hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation are the elements one expects to find in a Cold War spy thriller, perhaps by John Le Carré. Readers will find King of Kings equally enthralling.
Based on deep and meticulous research, Anderson delves into the background and then recounts in detail the rise and fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shahanshah (“king of kings”) of Iran for 28 years. Pahlavi occupied the Peacock throne from 1941, when his father Reza was forced to resign, until he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1979.
In the 27 pages of notes that Anderson appends to his chronicle, he provides readers with the source of every conversation he records and every statement he makes. For example, he interviewed Farah Pahlavi, the former empress of Iran, in her Washington home.
He tells us that he asked her about “the cascade of events that, in a mere five years, propelled her and her husband from the height of imperial splendor to a grim and fugitive exile.” He quotes her as saying, “I think we were about to achieve everything we wished, but that we spoke too loud,” but he believes there is much more to the real story than that.

Shah portrayed as complex, Shakespearean figure — arrogant but weak, ambitious yet blind to growing unrest

Collapse on the magnitude of what occurred, he writes, “simply cannot be attributed to the actions of one king or even one royal couple alone. Rather, it required incompetence or cowardice of a great many actors” and, incident by incident, Anderson proceeds to analyze how the accumulation of these failures led finally to the downfall of the Iranian monarchy.
Scott Anderson, born in the United States in 1959, is a seasoned journalist and author. His early years were spent in East Asia, where his father served as an agricultural adviser for the U.S. government, and he was educated in the U.S. A veteran war correspondent, Anderson has reported from most of the major conflict zones.
He has published a number of fiction and nonfiction books, achieving notable success in 2013 with his Lawrence in Arabia, widely praised for his masterly combination of deep and detailed research with brilliant storytelling.
This attractive writing style is in evidence throughout King of Kings, making it a compelling read as he delves into the dramatic fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Anderson presents the Iranian Revolution as a pivotal event in world history, on a par with the French and Russian revolutions, with repercussions that still shape Middle East and global politics. He believes that it set a precedent for the subsequent rise of both religious nationalism and populist uprisings against secular elites.
Anderson portrays the shah as a complex, Shakespearean figure — arrogant but weak, ambitious for his country yet blind to the growing unrest among his people. “A soft man masquerading as a hard one,” he writes.
He is equally uncompromising in his criticism of the many missteps by U.S. governments, highlighting a series of miscalculations that led to the shah’s downfall and the ensuing hostage crisis.
Over his long reign, Pahlavi met with seven American presidents, but it was his relationship with Jimmy Carter that was seminal. The shah’s wife, Farah, was offended by Carter from their first encounter, repelled by his constant flattery of her physical beauty to the exclusion of her political influence.
Her husband, however, was delighted with Carter’s bonhomie and goodwill, though they proved a poor substitute for some sound advice and strong support that might have turned around the deteriorating political situation.
In fact, Anderson finds that the Carter administration was deeply divided about how to respond to the growing unrest in Iran and proffered the shah conflicting advice, leaving him paralyzed politically.
While the State Department advised him to undertake political reforms and liberalization, believing this would quell dissent and stabilize the country, then-National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski urged the shah to reestablish order through a forceful crackdown on opposition. The result was to leave him unsure as to which course to follow.
This conflicting advice may have been partly due to the failure of the U.S. security services to read the reality of Iran’s internal politics.
Anderson finds that U.S. intelligence and diplomatic reporting consistently underestimated both the scale and the religious nature of the opposition. The CIA and State Department assumed that the shah’s regime was stable because of its economic modernization and the apparent fragmentation of opposition groups.
As proof of this assumption, Anderson quotes from a secret CIA report, produced just five months before the Islamic Revolution that swept the shah from his throne forever: “The Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s… There will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.”
This failure was compounded by the inability of the U.S. security services to appreciate the growing influence of Khomeini and the unifying power of religious symbolism in mobilizing mass protest.
Even as intelligence pointed to the shah’s growing weakness, U.S. diplomats alternated between warnings and reassurances. The result on the vacillating shah was to suspend his taking action to counter the mounting danger.
Moreover, Anderson believes, America’s policy of unconditional support for the shah was rooted in Cold War strategy and the need to contain Soviet influence. This rigid approach, he believes, prevented a timely reassessment of policy, even as the shah’s position became untenable.
As an epilogue to the shah’s unhappy history, Anderson recounts the event triggered on November 4, 1979, which would, he writes, “become known as the Iranian hostage crisis — although ‘crisis’ seems an odd word to employ in describing an ordeal that was to stretch out for the next 444 days.”
Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage. Meanwhile, the shah had been admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment, a situation that enraged the Iranian regime led by Khomeini. The return of the shah and his assets to Iran formed part of its demands for the release of the hostages until the shah died in July 1980.
It was not until January 1981, just minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, that the hostages were released.
“Even today,” writes Anderson, “two controversies surrounding the 1979-’81 hostage crisis remain unanswered.”
First, he wonders whether Khomeini approved the embassy takeover in advance — and concludes that he did not; and second, whether Ronald Reagan’s election team sabotaged earlier efforts to release the hostages, “thereby scuttling Carter’s chances for reelection.” He appears to believe that, on balance, they probably did.
Toward the end of the book, Anderson poses a series of questions about the events he has presented in so readable a fashion. “Why did the shah so utterly fail to act to save himself as the walls closed in?” Anderson asks.
“Why did the United States … not see the danger to one of its most vital allies until it was too late?” To this, he provides an answer uncompromisingly critical of successive American governments.
He has another query. To what extent did the Iranian Revolution “spawn the rise of militant religious fundamentalism”? This, he fully believes to be the case.
King of Kings is a brilliant narrative history that not only provides a thoroughly readable account of one of the seminal events of the past half-century but also sheds a bright light on how the religio-political Middle East of 2025 came about. It is highly recommended.
Neville Teller is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. His latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020.