Fundamentally the Iranian Revolution was a simple grasp for power by the religious elite, which had lost authority over Iran’s political, cultural, and social spheres as a result of the Shah’s liberal reforms. But the rebels, because they shouted the rhetoric of the left, were romanticized by the news media, particularly television, and the Ayatollah played the networks for patsies. The Shah soon lost his western support and eventually lost his country; Iran lost its freedom, its prosperity, and all the progress the Shah and his father had made. The Shah died a broken, bitter man—bitter not for himself, but for his people.
During the odyssey of his exile, while he was still living in Mexico in 1979, I went down to visit him. We had been friends for twenty-six years. I had first met him in 1953, when he was only thirty-four years old. I was impressed by his quiet dignity and his eagerness to learn. He was then reigning but not ruling; political power was in the hands of his enormously able Prime Minister, General Fazollah Zahedi, whose son, Ardeshir, was the Iranian Ambassador to the United States during my administration. But the Shah asked probing, astute questions, and I believed that he would be a gifted leader once he began to guide his country personally.
A quarter-century later the Shah had the same regal dignity, but his youthful eagerness was gone. In its place was an almost desperate frustration. His power had been wrenched from his hands by the leaders of a movement that was sworn to reverse all that he had done and plunge Iran back into medieval darkness. The Ayatollah’s crimes against his people seemed to pain the Shah personally. He was a man who had been misjudged, misunderstood, and misused, and his knowledge of this was eating away at him as devastatingly as his physical illness. So, too, was knowledge of the fate that had befallen so many who had worked with him.
And yet, in spite of his spiritual and physical agony, he was a gracious host. I was deeply touched when he said proudly over lunch that his son, Crown Prince Riza, had made the salad himself. We talked not just of Iran but of a wide range of world issues; as usual he displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of the international scene.
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Some leaders need power to give purpose to their lives. Others live for a purpose so compellingly strong that they crave power in order to advance that purpose.
The Shah lived for his country. He identified with it—not only modern Iran, but the ancient Persia of Xerxes and Darius and Cyrus the Great, an empire that once comprised much of the known world. Like these ancient emperors he lived luxuriously, with all the trappings of imperial splendor. But luxury was not why he clung to the Peacock Throne. He clung to it because, for him, it represented Iran and the hope of a better life for Iran’s people. Building on foundations laid by his father, he had used his power to wrench his country out of the Middle Ages and into the modern world by teaching the illiterate to read, emancipating women, working an agricultural revolution, and building new industry.
Those who complained about the excesses of his secret police forgot how many enemies he had made in the process of remaking his country from the bottom up. He was despised by mullahs, traditional merchants, the landowning aristocracy, entrenched bureaucrats, blue-blooded socialites, and Communists. Ironically his bitterest enemies included young intellectuals, many of whom he had sent abroad for study. They came home wanting even more reform even faster than the Shah was willing to go. The women he had emancipated demonstrated against him. These impatient Iranians became, unwittingly, the fodder for the mullahs’ coup d’etat. In rallying behind the Iranian revolution, they imagined they were moving the Shah’s drive for modernization and liberalization into high gear, but instead they helped the ambitious clerics throw it into reverse.
The Shah could have avoided making enemies by doing nothing—by continuing to preside over an impoverished, backward Persia, living splendidly off the income of his royal estates, and establishing cozy, status quo relationships with the powerful at the expense of the powerless. But the Shah chose action over inaction. As he suggested to me when I saw him in Mexico, he may have tried to do too much. He had wanted to turn Iran into a major economic and military power with an educated populace and a landowning peasantry. Many in the West who have seen photographs of the Shah resplendent on his be jeweled throne may be surprised that most of his time was spent poring over paperwork in his relatively modest office, wearing a business suit, and that he greeted visitors by standing up and shaking their hands. He put little trust in advisers and refused to delegate much authority, preferring to work fifteen hours a day and do as much as he could himself.
He filled his mind with the most minute details of Iran’s economic development. Under the Shah, Iran’s GNP and per capita income rose dramatically. By the time of the revolution two-thirds of his people owned their own homes.
With the help of the United States, the Shah built a powerful military force and became a key American ally in the Mideast and a force for stability from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan. During the late 1970s, when his domestic difficulties escalated, the U.S. began to equivocate in its support for him. Many viewed his dependence on the U.S. as a fatal weakness. In fact these critics had it backward. In the modern era few smaller countries have managed to enter the international first rank without the support of major powers. The security agreement between the U.S. and Japan is an example of such an alliance. In the case of Iran the fatal weakness was America’s. If the U.S. had wavered at the first sign of domestic unrest in Japan during the postwar years, the result could have been similarly catastrophic. In Iran we let a friend down when he needed us the most.
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The instant verdict on a leader is often overturned by appeal to the higher court of history. Some shrink and some grow after they leave the scene. Allende in Chile, Nasser in Egypt, and Mao in China are examples of those who are canonized at death, but whose shortcomings become more apparent as time passes. The Shah died engulfed in controversy, but I am certain that he will be one of those who increase in stature as the years pass.
The modernizing monarch faces an unusually difficult balancing act. The traditional ways he is trying to change are also those that support his right to rule. To be successful he must carefully monitor the pulse of his people; his reforms must be steady but not too sudden. But if those who have the most to lose from reform and modernization do resist him, he must swiftly assert his full authority. Once he has chosen the path he intends to follow, he must be very cautious about making concessions to his critics. If he makes too many, he may never find his way again.
Contrary to popular myth, the Shah’s fall came not because he was a heartless tyrant; quite the contrary. One reason was impatience; he may have tried to do too much, too quickly. But a second, also important reason was that he was not ruthless enough in quashing those who threatened his nation’s stability. A well-timed crackdown on his enemies, rather than the ill-advised concessions he made to them as the crisis unfolded, would have been the best thing the Shah could have done to save Iran from the darkness that has now engulfed it. As we have seen so tragically since, the Shah’s enemies were also the enemies of freedom and progress for the Iranian people.
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Faisal Ibn Abdul-Aziz al Saud, the King of Saudi Arabia from 1964 to 1975, was, like the Shah, an absolute monarch who set out to reform a nation steeped in ancient values and practices. Faisal, however, did not fall into the trap of offending the powerful Muslim fundamentalists. He was so obviously devout himself, and he led such a simple life, that he was above personal reproach. His enforcement of Islamic law was just as rigid as his predecessors’. But at the same time, he went about reforming and modernizing his country. Faisal’s life demonstrates the potential for a society in which the advantages of the modern world exist in harmony with devotion to the God of Islam. “Like it or not,” said Faisal soon after he took the throne, “we must join the modern world and find an honorable place in it. . . . Revolutions can come from thrones as well as from conspirators’ cellars.” Like Yosh
ida in Japan, Faisal was a leader who encouraged helpful western influences but was careful to make sure they did not disrupt the traditional—in Faisal’s case, Islamic—essence of his country.
I first met Faisal in the early 1960s at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. He was then Crown Prince under his brother, King Saud, and he struck me as a sophisticated, far-above-average diplomat who felt completely at home in western surroundings. He spoke impeccable English. At that time Saudi Arabia was eager for American support against Nasser-backed rebels on its southern flank in Yemen. Though not the least bit obsequious, Faisal’s manner was low-key and conciliatory.
Years later, in 1974, I visited Saudi Arabia as President. By then Faisal was King, and the international scene was strikingly different. Nasser was gone, Faisal’s friend Sadat ruled in Egypt, and Saudi Arabia and its Mideast allies had just demonstrated the economic leverage their oil gave them over the West. He dealt with me in his own manner and on his own terms. He met me at the airport, wearing layers of traditional black-and-white robes in spite of temperatures in excess of 100 degrees. He was accompanied by a retinue of sheikhs and Bedouin guards, their long swords gleaming in the sun. His austere private office in Jidda contrasted sharply with the elegant hotel suite in which I had first met him.
During our 1974 talks Faisal never spoke English, and he exhibited a clear awareness of the enormous power he now wielded and a clear intention to use it to the hilt in pursuit of his objectives. He proved to be a skilled negotiator. He relayed requests from some of his Mideast and Muslim allies for American arms, and was diplomatically noncommittal in response to my urging that the oil producers should act to reverse the rapid rise in prices that had recently taken place. Nonetheless, I was honored at the departure ceremonies when he broke with both tradition and protocol to issue an indirect but unmistakable attack on my administration’s domestic opponents.
Under Faisal and his successors, Saudi Arabia has been an important anchor in a tempestuous region. During my talks with him I found that in his otherwise impressive grasp of foreign policy he had one conspicuous shortcoming: a persistent, pervasive belief that communism and Zionism were fundamentally linked. At our meeting in 1974, his very first point was about the designs the Communists had on the Arabian peninsula and the connection he saw between these plots and the Zionist movement. It was impossible to disabuse him of this strange obsession. I assured him that, despite our firm support of Israel, the U.S. had no illusions about Soviet motives. Finally I was able to guide the conversation toward our hopes for encouraging the moderate, responsible governments in the Mideast. Faisal was one of our greatest hopes in this regard, and in this area he showed real statesmanship. He had helped turn his friend Sadat away from the Soviets and also was a quiet but firm supporter of our diplomatic efforts in the region. Except for his obsession about the linkage between Zionism and communism, Faisal had a well-balanced and nonparochial view of the international scene, and I came away from our 1974 talks convinced that he was one of the most impressive statesmen then in power in the world.
Faisal spoke evenly and quietly. He used words sparingly, both in his conversations with me and with his advisers. He was an attentive listener, however, who liked to say, “God gave man two ears and one tongue so we could listen twice as much as we talk.” By speaking in Arabic and using a translator, Faisal, like de Gaulle, could hear each of my questions and comments twice and therefore take twice as long to form his responses.
Again like de Gaulle, Faisal was a soldier-statesman who took political power on his own terms. And he had a powerful vision of his nation and its mission in the world.
Ibn-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s founding father, once said of his most able son, “I only wish I had three Faisals.” Faisal was groomed for power almost from birth. At fourteen he was sent on his first diplomatic mission. He soon became a dashing and expert desert horseman, and his father made him commander of one of his armies. By 1932, with the help of his son, Ibn-Saud had welded a ragtag band of Bedouin tribes into a new nation.
When Ibn-Saud died, his oldest son, Sa’ud, succeeded him as King. Sa’ud’s profligacy nearly bankrupted the kingdom. He spent extravagantly for his own pleasure and bestowed ill-planned public-works projects on his people as manna from on high. Legend has it that when Crown Prince Faisal took over the day-to-day operations of the government in 1958, he found less than a hundred dollars of ready cash in the treasury. Faisal cracked down hard on royal spending and started the kingdom on the road to a balanced budget. King Sa’ud’s jealousy of his brother’s administrative skill caused rising tensions that were capped by Sa’ud’s ouster from power by the Saudi elders in 1964.
As King, Faisal initiated an education program for women, abolished slavery, and built roads, schools, and hospitals. He channeled his massive oil revenues into new industries and foreign investments designed to provide wealth in the future, when the oil is gone.
Faisal seldom smiled; when he did, as one observer remarked, it was as if he had bitten a lemon and found it sweet inside. His face was gaunt and wrinkled, his eyes tired-looking, his eyelids heavy. He worked sixteen hours a day, and his youthful aides said they had trouble keeping up with him. Like Italy’s de Gasperi, he was often the one who turned off the lights in the government offices at the end of the day.
Faisal was troubled by ulcers and could eat only the blandest foods. At the state dinner he gave for us in 1974, his guests were served delicious roast lamb. He had only rice, peas, and beans, which he mashed with his fork and ate with a spoon. His busy schedule and his ascetic nature left little room for recreation. The leadership of nine million Saudis, and his spiritual responsibilities toward millions of other Muslims, sat heavy on his shoulders.
At a time when other conservative Arab states were establishing legislatures, Faisal’s authority was absolute. He ruled through a network of several thousand princes spread throughout the kingdom. He surrounded himself with able advisers, listened to them carefully, and then did what he chose. Many Saudis who approved of the broad outlines of his program were still among his critics because of his refusal to delegate authority.
While rejecting democracy, Faisal remained close to the people he ruled. Soon after he took the throne, his wife showed him through his newly redecorated palace at al Ma’ather. When he saw the lavish royal bedchamber, he asked her, “Whose room is this? It’s too grand for me.” Instead he chose a tiny room down the hall and furnished it with a single bed. He disliked being kissed on the hand or called “Your Majesty”; he preferred “brother” or even “Faisal.” The traditional Saudi majlis were an integral part of his government. During these weekly royal audiences he would listen patiently while his subjects complained about stolen livestock or property disputes.
The circumstances of Faisal’s death were particularly ironic. In our talks in 1974 he had expressed deep concern about the loyalty of some of the junior officers in his air corps. They had been trained in the U.S. and he feared that they might have been infected by the revolutionary left-wing virus that was later to plague Iran. He did not realize that his fatal danger would come from the right rather than the left. One of his more controversial reforms was to allow television in his kingdom, though he saw to it that programming was strictly regulated. In 1965 a dissident Prince, believing television was an evil influence, led an unsuccessful raid on a broadcasting station in Riyadh. The Prince retreated to his palace, where he was killed by security forces. Ten years later Faisal was assassinated by the Prince’s brother; many believe it was an act of revenge. In his talks with me Faisal had indicated that he considered television and the media generally to be, at best, necessary evils in the modern world. In the end he became probably the only leader to have lost his life because of television.
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When Faisal was assassinated, one newsweekly said that the murder “demonstrated anew the instability of the Mideast oil states,” even as power was being quietly and peacefully passed to Faisal’s
brother, Khalid, who became the fourth Saudi King since 1932. Similarly, when President Sadat was assassinated in the fall of 1981, many said the United States should not sell weapons to “unstable” Mideast governments, even as power passed quietly and peacefully to Sadat’s handpicked successor, who became the third President of Egypt since 1956. In each case the transfer of power was no less orderly than that which followed the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
Many Mideast governments are indeed “unstable” when measured against American standards. While Egypt has constitutional provisions for an orderly succession, Saudi Arabia does not. Nonetheless comparatively few of the world’s nations have dependable succession procedures. No Communist country does. Most who label the Saudi regime unstable are using code words to communicate their abhorrence of the idea of absolute monarchy. Their attitude is understandable in view of the long history of democracy in the West. But they overlook the realities of Saudi Arabia, which has no such history. Monarchy is a form of government that the Saudis are used to and are, for the moment, comfortable with. Jordan and Morocco also are monarchies, and under King Hussein and King Hassan respectively they are among the best-governed nations of the Arab world. In Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba had himself named President for life. While his benevolent authoritarian leadership has its critics, it is doubtful that western-style democracy would have produced the progress and stability he has provided for Tunisia.
Inevitably, as more Saudis are educated, they will clamor for western-style government. This development, however, will occur as a result of the reforms of the Saudi monarchy, not in spite of them. Though it may eventually be discarded in favor of a new form of government, the monarchy will have accomplished what Faisal intended it to accomplish: the carefully paced, peaceful transformation of Saudi Arabia into a modern nation.
Leaders Page 41