Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi
Iran's last shah, the US-backed monarch whose modernizing but repressive rule collapsed in the 1979 revolution, leaving him to die in exile.
In October 1971, in a tent city pitched beside the ruins of Persepolis, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi hosted what may have been the most expensive party of the century. Waiters and chefs flown in from Maxim's of Paris served a dozen visiting kings and twenty presidents; at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the Shah declared, 'Rest in peace, Cyrus, for we are awake.' Eight years later he was on a plane out of Tehran, never to return. The distance between those two moments is the story of Iran's last king.
The borrowed throne
He inherited the crown in 1941, at twenty-one, when British and Soviet troops pushed his father off it. Reza Shah, the old soldier who had built the modern Iranian state, was suspected of leaning toward Nazi Germany; the Allies, who wanted Iran's railways and oil, replaced him with his pliable son. For a decade he reigned weakly, overshadowed by parliament and by Prime Minister Mosaddegh. The 1953 coup that restored his authority also defined it: from then on the Shah ruled as a real autocrat, but one whose throne had been steadied by Washington and London, a dependence his enemies never let him forget. Oil money, especially after prices quadrupled in 1973, paid for jet fighters, dams, and a swelling army that made him the West's policeman in the Gulf.
Reform from above
His answer to Iran's poverty was the White Revolution, launched in 1963: land redistribution, votes for women, a literacy corps sent to the villages. Much of it worked, and Iran modernized fast. But it was reform handed down, not shared, and it made enemies at both ends. Landlords and clergy resented it; an obscure cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini denounced it and was exiled. The bazaar merchants, the students, and the poor swelling Tehran's slums found no political voice, because the Shah had gutted real parties and let SAVAK, his secret police, watch and torture dissent.
The fall
By the late 1970s the grievances had fused. Secular liberals, Marxist guerrillas, and Khomeini's followers, who agreed on almost nothing else, agreed the Shah must go. In 1978 the confrontation turned bloody: on 8 September, troops fired on a huge crowd in Tehran's Jaleh Square, a day remembered as Black Friday, and every round of killing brought larger crowds to the next funeral. Strikes shut the oil fields; soldiers would no longer keep firing on crowds. On 16 January 1979 he left, weakened by the cancer he hid from the world. Khomeini flew in two weeks later. The Shah wandered from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas to Mexico; when Washington admitted him for treatment, students seized the US embassy and held 52 Americans for 444 days, demanding he be handed back. He was not. He died in Cairo in July 1980, buried far from the 2,500-year monarchy he had toasted, and helped end.