In Iran’s post-revolutionary history, where vilification of the Pahlavi monarchs has been elevated to an art form, Abbas Milani’s “The Shah” is a welcome exception. And in the ugly atmosphere where the tragic deaths of two innocent Pahlavi siblings are shamelessly called “self-slaughter” and portrayed as “payment” for their father’s “sins,” Milani’s measured narrative is a return to human decency and civility in public discourse.
“The Shah” is a massive volume covering the life and times of 
Mohammad Reza Shah from his birth in Tehran in 1919 to his death in Cairo in 1982. The book’s 20 chapters — with innovative as well as borrowed titles, each captioned with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard II — traces the 37-year reign of the second Pahlavi monarch from 1941 to 1979.
It deals with the king’s tumultuous childhood, his aborted Swiss education, his military training under his father’s supervision, his shaky accession to the Peacock Throne, his vulnerable early kingship, his storied marriages, his peak of power and prestige, and finally his terminal illness and “last ride.”
The Shah, in the author’s own words, is the product of a 10-year endeavor relying on (1) domestic and foreign primary sources; (2) interviews with some 500 people “who knew the shah or whose lives were touched by his policies”; (3) discussions with informed librarians and archivists; (4) help from a handful of friends and family members; and (5) 12 frequently cited works written by the shah himself or by others close to him.
The innumerable references cited in the book indeed show the author’s vast familiarity with the literature on the subject. One cannot help but marvel at the blood and sweat that went into amassing such a trove of information, seldom found in other biographies.
Milani’s most copious sources of information, however, are the declassified diplomatic cables, dispatches, reports and documents found in 10 major official depositories, including the British Public Records Office, the US National Archives, the presidential libraries of Carter, Kennedy, Nixon and FDR, and other non-Iranian sources. Ironically enough, here also lie some of the book’s basic weaknesses (for example, in the longest footnoted chapter, 9 — dealing with the daily tug-of-war between the shah and Premier Mossadeq — more than 70 percent of cited sources are foreign-based, without a single reference to local daily newspapers).
These documents are obviously of enormous value in clarifying many behind-the-scenes events, discussions and decisions affecting Iran’s destiny. They should be required reading for every politically minded Iranian. Yet a wholesale and uncritical reliance on them in the absence of corroborative evidence tends to diminish their significance.
Some of these dispatches clearly reflect purely personal views, impressions and reflections of eager foreign diplomats trying to impress their governments. They are not always the undeniable truth. A cursory reading of these cables —particularly those from certain arrogant or contemptuous British ambassadors (e.g., Herman Norman, Reader Bullard and Dennis Wright) or some inept and naïve U.S. envoys (e.g., Julius Holmes, Bill Sullivan) — reveal not only an uninformed, condescending and at times even colonialist mentality, but also often a baseless or prejudicial interpretation of events and policies.
The Shah’s other reference sources suffer from similar shortcomings. Of Milani’s 500 claimed interviews, for example, no more than 30 names are mentioned, leaving the reader with no opportunity to gauge the others’ contributions. Furthermore, not all cited interviewees are of a stature or in a position that would have enabled them to report or interpret relevant events impartially. The same is true for friends, family members, archivists and others who are said to have been consulted.
Milani’s account of the electrifying drama of the Shah’s life is nevertheless both interesting and informative — albeit not flawless, and at times diminished by exasperating minutiae. The description of major events is often uneven and highly selective — with details of some seminal cases sacrificed in favor of mundane stories.
However, significant internal and external factors leading to the 1979 revolution and the Shah’s exile are appropriately discussed. On the domestic scene, the Shah’s misconceptions, inconsistencies and political errors are traced. The worsening internal sociopolitical climate at the end and the circumstances leading to the ultimate debacle are conventionally recounted.
On the foreign front, too, President Carter’s deplorable leadership and vacillations, the pernicious bureaucratic infighting between the National Security Council and the State Department, and the hostile machinations of a notorious anti-shah cabal at State are traced. The West’s lack of honor in abandoning a friend and ally in his dying days is laid bare.
Yet, as far as the roots of the Iranian revolution are concerned, nothing new — except for myriad small details — is added to what has already been known, reported and published. In fact, there is little here that other writers have not said before and perhaps better. None of the lingering mysteries of the 1979 revolution or those of the Shah’s life and death is solved.
The weakest segment of the book is indeed its Epilogue, where the author tries to expound his own “alternative” thesis of why the Shah fell. Accordingly, the culprit was his “inconsistent and miscalculated” policy of simultaneously pursuing an “eclectic modernization” drive while supporting the clergy and Islamic religion as an antidote to Marxism.
This hazardous posture, Milani argues, was compounded by strategic inconsistencies in Washington’s Iran policy — oscillating between the Kennedy-Carter administrations’ pressuring the Shah to democratize versus the Johnson-Nixon-Ford governments’ relaxing of the pressure.
This “new” thesis, however, does not add much to the old and widely accepted belief that by depoliticizing his friends (i.e., denying his loyal supporters basic political rights) and politicizing his enemies (i.e., allowing hundreds of new mosques and hossainiyehs to serve as anti-regime propaganda platforms), the Shah contributed to his own downfall. The disarray in Washington and vacillations in US policy are also widely known and duly deplored.
What sets “The Shah” clearly apart from a half dozen other standard biographies of the second Pahlavi monarch is its engaging prose, combining serious historical events with innuendos, rumors and gossip. Thus, such tectonic events as Crown Prince Mohammad Reza’s shaky accession to the throne after Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941, Moscow’s support of Iranian insurgents in 1946, Prime Minister Mossadeq’s challenge to the Shah’s rule from 1951 to 1953, the monarch’s strained relations with the Kennedy brothers during 1961-62, his role in OPEC’s triumph in oil-price setting in 1973, and the political tsunami of 1978-79 are all seasoned with trivia.
Such banal tidbits include the Shah’s new haircut in a formal ceremony, his false teeth, and his favorite scotch; the diameter of the gift bowl given to President and Mrs. Kennedy; the furniture arrangements in the Waldorf Astoria suite; Queen Farah’s dress color at the White House and her neurotic dog; the value of Queen Soraya’s auctioned jewels; and the vintage of the champagne served at the 1971 Persepolis celebrations of Iran’s 2500-year monarchy! The outcome is a curious mixture of biography, history, retrospective psychoanalysis, and tales of gaiety and despair.
In an undertaking of this magnitude, dealing with minute details of events and stories, the risk of factual errors abounds. But, in this case, the author’s lack of personal and firsthand experience in internal Iranian politics and his total reliance on outside sources, have substantially increased this chance.
Milani never had direct or personal access to the Shah himself; and, while in Iran, he did not even closely connect with the monarch’s political inner circle or social entourage. Nor did anyone among his own family or close friends, who are said to have read the manuscript and advised him, know the Shah personally.
As a consequence, “The Shah” is replete with errors and inaccuracies in names, historical dates, geographic sites, individuals’ official positions, interpretations of major events, and even English translations of Persian words and expressions. Some of these errors, such as inaccurately spelled words, mixed-up names and inaccurate dates, are self-evident and too numerous to be mentioned in a brief review.
A few are more significant and worth noting. The “Law of Identity and Personal Status,” for example, which Milani cites as Reza Shah’s initiative (p. 25), was neither proposed nor passed during Reza Shah’s administration but enacted in a previous government (of Hassan Pirnia). The claim (p. 29) that, under the 1828 Turkemanchai Treaty with Moscow, “a good third of Iran was ceded to Tsarist Russia” is without merit; that lost territory was barely a tenth of Iran at the time.
The foreign minister who accompanied Prime Minister Foroughi to the British Embassy in Tehran (pp. 81-82) was not Ambassador Mohammad Saed (who was at the time in Moscow serving as Iran’s ambassador to the Soviet Union) but Ali Soheili.
The statement attributed to the Shah in 1946 (p. 124) regarding the fate of monarchies in Greece and Spain could hardly be believed, due to the differences in dates and circumstances. Contrary to Milani’s assertion that Iran’s Tudeh Party had been dissolved by the time of the assassination attempt on the Shah on February 4, 1949, (p. 133), the party was outlawed only after that attempt.
The statement about Kermit Roosevelt (the CIA agent in charge of the coup against Mossadeq) controlling Iran’s wheat monopoly (p. 177) is baseless, as the country had no such monopoly.
The reported Supreme Economic Council meeting chaired by the Shah, where a high government official challenged the monarch (p. 280), is meritless, as no such council was ever convened during the Amini government, and there was no such meeting chaired by the king.
The statement that Reza Shah built palaces for his brothers and sisters in Saadabad (p. 343) is a canard; the old Shah had no siblings.
The quote from a former prime minister (p. 384) is not from him, but from another source.
A critical statement attributed to a former finance minister (p. 467) has no basis in fact.
The book’s major flaws, however, are of much greater historical significance and should not be left unmentioned. For example, as an obstacle to the marriage of Princess Fawzia of Egypt and Mohammad Reza Shah, Milani writes about an Iranian “constitutional requirement” mandating that only an Iranian citizen could become Iran’s queen (p. 63).
In reality, there is no such impediment in Iran’s 1905 Constitution. The actual “obstacle” was that, according to the Constitution, Iran’s crown prince had to be born of a native Iranian mother (Irani-ol-Asl). Thus, no son born to Queen Fawzia could have become Iran’s future king, a fact that the Egyptian royal family could not be expected to accept.
The legal solution that was found was for the Majlis to “interpret” the constitution (not simply pass a law, as Milani states, since the Majlis could not amend the constitution). Thus, astonishingly, Irani-ol-asl was “interpreted” to mean a son either born to a native mother or a mother to whom the Majlis may grant such a title!
Milani’s claim that the Amini cabinet was “a coalition of lapsed communists, socialists and independent critics and opponents of the Shah” (p. 258) is unfounded. In reality, of Dr. Amini’s 19 cabinet ministers, only two — Nouraldin Alamooti and Hassan Arsanjani — had certain left-leaning tendencies but no affiliation with any known communist or socialist parties. The three ministers assigned by the shah himself were staunch royalists.
The cabinet secretary was the scion of a well-known landholding family, having valiantly fought against Soviet-backed Iranian communist insurgents in Zanjan. Others were mostly technocrats loyal to the monarch. With the arguable exception of the National Front’s Gholamali Farivar, there was no minister even mildly critical of the Shah’s rule.
Milani’s account of Amini’s resignation is also distorted and somewhat inaccurate (p. 289). As the text of the midnight cable from Tehran to Washington (cited in the endnotes) clearly shows, there was no mention of any “$35 million budget deficit” or any request for “US emergency assistance” in the discussion between the finance minister and the American ambassador. The visit was simply a courtesy call.
The “Status of Forces Agreement” (exempting US military personnel stationed in Iran from local prosecution) is said by Milani to have been a “royal preoccupation” during the Mansur government and a cause for which Prime Minister Hassanali Mansur paid with his life (p. 307). The matter actually had a much different and longer history.
This agreement, routinely signed by all sovereign governments in every country where the United States stationed forces, was originally submitted to the Amini government for ratification. It failed to get approval because of its perceived resemblance to the “capitulation” rights enjoyed by foreigners during the Qajar period — a privilege abrogated by Reza Shah with much fanfare. The document was resubmitted to the Alam government and was passed by a ministerial law (a resolution by the Council of Ministers during the Majlis recess). It was put into effect at once.
Prime Minister Mansur simply submitted the approved ministerial decree, along with tens of other such resolutions, to the newly elected Majlis for final ratification, as required by the constitution. The agreement was neither the Shah’s nor Mansur’s favored project, but a US condition for an impending military loan.
Finally, on more than one occasion, Milani talks about Iran’s pre-1979 economic “crisis” being caused by “a sharp decline in the price of oil” (pp. 375, 383, 438). In reality, at no time after the 1971 OPEC meeting in Tehr did the price of crude oil ever actually fall. The crude price was steadily on the rise throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.
Apart from these various errors and omissions, “The Shah” could have been better edited, and perhaps reduced to three-fifths of its current length, by eliminating trivial details, esoteric passages and philosophical lore — without reducing its essential arguments and valuable points. A candidate for substantial pruning, if not deletion, is the whole of Chapter 18 about a Russian mole in Iran’s military-intelligence service. It minutely details his capture without explaining the nature or significance of his transgression or the effect of his arrest on subsequent Tehran-Moscow relations.
There are also innumerable passages dealing with Reza Shah’s politics and policies that are hardly relevant to Mohammad Reza Shah’s “political picture.”
A final note: Contrary to the Iranian royalists’ expectation that, as a lapsed anti-Shah revolutionary, Abbas Milani could not make an impartial assessment of the monarch’s time and life, the book’s treatment of the second Pahlavi king is by no means biased. Staunch Pahlavi loyalists may still dislike the book’s unflattering passages about the Shah and his father, and the author’s former fellow travelers may also resent the book’s positive passages about the shahs. It would be difficult, however, to argue that Milani has been an unfair chronicler of both shahs’ strengths and weaknesses.
All in all, despite its rich tapestry, “The Shah” is neither a “definitive” biography of Mohammad Reza Shah — as its publicist claims — nor an “authoritative” history of the Pahlavi dynasty — as it undoubtedly aspires to be. The book’s considerable strength lies not so much in its basic thesis or main conclusions, but in the enormous variety and wealth of new information. All histories and biographies by nature contain some fiction; Milani’s, too, has its share.
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Dr. Jahangir Amuzegar is an economist and a pre-revolution minister of both commerce and finance. This book review first appeared in Middle East Policy, Vol. XVIII, No.2, summer 2011.
