TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80capmil.1

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                                                            August 4, 1980

The Emperor Who Died an Exile

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi: 1919-1980


Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph
through Persepolis?

--Tamburlaine the Great, Christopher Marlowe

He ended fearing for his life, On the pinnacle of nothingness.

--Owhadi, Persian poet

Not even Scheherazade could have conceived the splendid scene
beside the ancient ruins of Persepolis. The occasion was the
2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by
Cyrus the Great, and the Shah of Iran had decided to throw a
party that would dazzle even the most jaded of his guests:
Kings and Queens, Presidents and Premiers, sheiks and sultans.
More than $100 million was spent on tents lined with silk and
furnished with Baccarat crystal and Porthault linens, banquets
laden with roast peacock stuffed with foie gras, magnums of
Chateau Lafite-Rothschild.

The year was 1971. Yet even then, to those who looked beyond
the grandeur, there were signs that all was not well in the
Shah's realm. The party grounds were sealed with barbed wire;
troops armed with submachine guns stood guard. The University
of Tehran was closed to forestall embarrassing signs of protest.
By 1978, resentment against the imperial arrogance of
Persepolis had ignited a revolution that spread from mosques to
merchants to the remotest villages of the country. When
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi died in a Cairo hospital last week at the
age of 60 of lymphatic cancer complicated by a hemorrhage of the
pancreas, it was after 18 months of exile.

No longer was he the Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans) and
Shahanshah (King of Kings), a absolute ruler of the remnant of
the Persian Empire that his father had renamed Iran. Since
fleeing the country in January 1979, he had been a man without
a country, a man with a price on his head, placed there by the
Muslim fundamentalists who overthrew him. His search for a home
took him initially from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas to
Mexico. Last October he requested permission to enter the U.S.
for medical treatment. Despite warnings that his admission
could irreparably damage relations with the new government in
Tehran, the Carter Administration, encouraged by Henry Kissinger
and David Rockefeller, decided to admit the Shah on humanitarian
grounds.

Iranian anger at what was seen as American protection of the
ousted dictator boiled over. Militants seized the U.S. embassy
in Tehran, took everyone present hostage, and demanded that the
Shah be returned to stand trial for various "crimes."
Washington refused. There was no indication, how his death
would affect the 52 Americans who are still being held captive
after eight months.

After his recover, the Shah briefly found a haven in Panama.
In March, fearful of extradition proceedings and again in need
of surgery, he went to Cairo at the invitation of Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat, who offered his "good friend" a home and
medical treatment there.

It was a measure of the manner in which he had ruled that in
death, as in life, the former shah was remembered more
generously by foreigners than by his own people. Some of the
harshest judgments had been pronounced by those who had
faithfully, and sometimes servilely, worked under the Shah. "He
was essentially a weak man who played the role of the dictator,"
said Fereydoun Hoveida, who for seven years was the Shah's
Ambassador to the United Nations.

Despite his dynastic pretensions, the Shah was not to be the
monarchy born. His commoner father Reza Khan, a hot-tempered
colonel in the Persian Cossack cavalry, seized power in a
bloodless coup in 1921. He forced parliament to dissolve the
decadent, 129-year-old Qajar dynasty in 1925 and proclaim him
Shah. He took Pahlavi--an ancient Persian language--as his
dynastic name. Following his coronation, his first-born son
Mohammed Reza, then seven, was designated crown prince. The
elder Shah paraded the child around in gold-encrusted uniforms,
groomed him in sports and, when he was twelve, packed him off
to Le Rosey, an exclusive Swiss boarding school. By then, as
the Shah wrote in his 1961 autobiography, he already had a
mystical sense of mission and was convinced by visions that he
had been "chosen by God" to save his country.

In 1941, when the Allies needed a secure route to ship war
supplies to the Soviet Union, Reza Shah, a Nazi sympathizer, was
forced into exile. His son, then 21, initially was little more
than a figurehead. At war's end he confronted his first crisis
when Soviet forces, refusing to leave the country, set up a
puppet regime in the northern province of Azerbaijan. Iran took
the issue to the United Nations and with considerable support
from the U.S., succeeded in having them expelled.

His next serious test began in 1951, when the popularly elected
government of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the
Anglo- Iranian Oil Co. In 1953, right wing monarchists in the
army unsuccessfully attempted to depose Mossadegh; the Shah was
forced to flee to Rome. A few days later, however, a
countercoup sponsored by the CIA restored him to the throne.
The Shah launched a ruthless purge, particularly of remnants of
the Communist Tudeh Party, which had been outlawed in 1948. He
also organized a secret-police network, SAVAK, that was to
become one of the most notorious in the world.

The Shah set about trying to transform his feudal nation into
a modern state. In the early 1960s, he informed his ministers:
"I am going to go faster than the left."  His dream of economic
and social reforms was shared by a new generation of
intellectuals, who also believed, mistakenly as it turned out,
that political reforms would follow. The Shah's ambitious
reform program--the so-called White Revolution--included a
number of laudable aims:  a literacy corps, equal rights for
women, nationalization of forestry and water resources,
profit-sharing schemes for workers, and land reforms designed
to break up huge feudal estates.

In practice, however, many of the reforms were ineptly
administered; others were deeply resented. The Shah, like his
father before him, soon found himself at odds with the country's
powerful Muslims clergy. After a series of violent riots, the
Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, one of the most prominent spiritual
leaders in Iran, was arrested and sent into exile, where he laid
the groundwork for the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime and
eventually became the leader of the revolution.

"Tragically," writes Hoveida in his highly critical book, The
Fall of the Shah, "the Shah's reforms were eclipsed within a few
years by his increasing authoritarianism. In his consuming
passion for what he conceived of as his divine mission, he came
to believe in his own infallibility."  Some observers sensed
elements of megalomania when, in his long-delayed formal
coronation in a lavish 1967 ceremony, he placed the crown upon
his own head as a symbol of his absolute supremacy.

Throughout his life, the Shah sometimes seemed to be conducting
a kind of psychological battle against what he apparently feared
was his own weakness. He became an accomplished pilot, a
versatile sportsman, a reputed womanizer--and an insensitive
despot before whom even Premiers were expected to bow. "Nobody
can influence me, nobody," he once told Italian Journalist
Oriana Fallaci, adding contemptuously:  "Still less a woman."

In 1975, he dissolved various throne-directed political
parties--the only ones allowed to operate--and created the
Rastakhiz (National Resurgence) Party. All Iranians were
instructed to join it. Those who disagreed with the party's
ideology, in essence a civil religion based on Shah worship,
were blasted as "traitors" and told to leave Iran and renounce
their citizenship. The jails filled with thousands of political
prisoners, and SAVAK was universally reviled for its tactics of
terror and torture. "No country in the world," concluded
Amnesty International in 1975, "has a worse record in human
rights than Iran."

The Shah's dreams of glory were fueled by Iran's oil wealth.
In 1973, the Shah's voice had been the decisive one at the
Tehran conference that vastly increased the price of oil. Over
the next year, the country's revenues from its wells and
refineries shot up from $2 billion to more than $20 billion a
year. Rather like a child who has suddenly won big at Monopoly,
the Shah dreamed of transforming Iran into a new industrial
power, a kind of West Germany of the Middle East. Western
visitors were subjected to stern lectures by the Shah on the
profligacy of industrial nations, which wasted "the noble
product" on heating homes and fueling factories. As with his
early promises of reform, the dream of rapid industrialization
went awry. Inflation ran wild, and so did corruption,
especially among members of the royal family. Billions of
dollars were wasted on misconceived, mismanaged,
prestige-oriented development projects.

Staunchly anti-Communist, the Shah dreamed of making Iran a
military power, the protector of the Persian Gulf. Convinced
that he was a reliable and unassailable ally, Washington--most
notably the Nixon Administration--encouraged him to build up his
arsenal. He did--to the tune of $36 billion. By 1978, Iran had
one of the world's most sophisticated collections of advanced
weaponry, including F-14 jet fighters and a variety of
guided-missile systems. Meanwhile 63,000 of Iran's 66,000
villages had neither piped water nor electricity. The capital
of Tehran (pop. 5 million) lacked a sewer system.

Throughout 1978, riots and protests were harbingers of the
coming revolution. By and large, Western leaders accepted the
Shah's assurances that his opposition was merely a gaggle of
"Islamic Marxists," abetted by "foreign agents and traitors."
Eventually, the Shah made some concessions to placate his
critics; he lifted press censorship and released some political
prisoners. By then it was too late.

Caught up in his dream, the Shah worked hard, putting in 15
hours a day at his desk in Niavaran Palace in Tehran. He
seemingly found little happiness in either his public or his
private life. He seldom smiled, and his voice lacked warmth or
expression. His first marriage, to Egypt's Princess Fawzia,
King Farouk's sister, ended in a 1948 divorce when the Shah
concluded that she could not give him a male heir (a daughter,
Princess Shahanaz, is now 39). Three years later, the Shah
married Soraya Esfandiari, a beautiful Iranian commoner. He
divorced her in 1958, again because the union failed to produce
an heir. In 1959, he married Farah Diba, then a 21-year-old
architecture student in Paris. Sensitive and compassionate,
Farah sought to soften the harsh policies of her husband when
possible. She is the mother of his four other children:  Crown
Prince Reza, 19, Princess Farahnaz, 17, Prince Ali Reza, 14, and
Princess Leila, 10.

The Shah's end was far from princely:  the hasty flight, the
uncertain wandering, the last hours in a hospital far from
Tehran. Those images make it hard to assess history's ultimate
verdict. "He ruled as a lion and a fox," concludes Professor
James Bill, an Iran specialist at the University of Texas, "but
in the process he forgot the needs of his people. He insulated
and isolated himself from them, and in the end failed to build
the political institutions and social trust they needed."  He
steered his country into a revolution, only to find that, as it
gathered force, his people decided that they would no longer
allow him to steer his country anywhere.

By  Marguerite Johnson