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There was no longer any doubt. The atmosphere had changed completely. The Shah's appearance was stunningly worse ... Clearly he had obstructive jaundice. The odds favored gallstones, since his fever, chills and abdominal distress suggested an infection of the biliary tract. Also he had a history of indigestion. Besides the probable obstruction—he now had been deeply jaundiced for six to eight weeks—he was emaciated and suffering from hard tumor nodes in the neck and a swollen spleen, signs that his cancer was worsening, and he had severe anemia and very low white blood [cell] counts. |
The Shah suffered from gallstones that required prompt surgery. He was offered treatment in Switzerland but insisted on treatment in the United States. President Carter did not wish to admit Mohammad Reza to the U.S. but came under pressure from Henry Kissinger, who phoned Carter to say he would not endorse the SALT II treaty that Carter had just signed with the Soviet Union unless the former Shah was allowed into the United States, reportedly prompting Carter more than once to hang up his phone in rage in the Oval Office and shout "Fuck the Shah!". Because many Republicans were attacking the SALT II treaty as a U.S. give-away to the Soviet Union, Carter desired the endorsement of a Republican elder statesman like Kissinger to fend off this criticism. Mohammad Reza had decided not to tell his Mexican doctors he had cancer, and the Mexican doctors had misdiagnosed his illness as malaria, giving him a regime of anti-malarial drugs that did nothing to treat his cancer, which caused his health to go into rapid decline as he lost 30 pounds (14 kg). |
In September 1979, a doctor sent by David Rockefeller reported to the State Department that Mohammad Reza needed to come to the United States for medical treatment, an assessment not shared by Kean, who stated that the proper medical equipment for treating Mohammad Reza's cancer could be found in Mexico and the only problem was the former Shah's unwillingness to tell the Mexicans he had cancer. The State Department warned Carter not to admit the former Shah into the U.S., saying it was likely that the Iranian regime would seize the U.S. embassy in Tehran if that occurred. Milani suggested there was a possible conflict of interest on the part of Rockefeller, noting that his Chase Manhattan Bank had given Iran a $500 million loan under questionable conditions in 1978 (several lawyers had refused to endorse the loan) which placed the money in an account with Chase Manhattan; that the new Islamic Republic had been making "substantial withdrawals" from its account with Chase Manhattan; and that Rockefeller wanted Mohammad Reza in the US, knowing full well it was likely to cause the Iranians to storm the U.S. embassy, which in turn would cause the U.S. government to freeze Iranian financial assets in America—such as the Iranian account at Chase Manhattan. |
Treatment in the United States |
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On 22 October 1979, President Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah into the United States to undergo surgical treatment at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. While there, Mohammad Reza used the name of "David D. Newsom", Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs at that time, as his temporary code name, without Newsom's knowledge. The Shah was taken later by U.S. Air Force jet to Kelly Air Force Base in Texas and from there to Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base. It was anticipated that his stay in the United States would be short; however, surgical complications ensued, which required six weeks of confinement in the hospital before he recovered. His prolonged stay in the United States was extremely unpopular with the revolutionary movement in Iran, which still resented the United States' overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddegh and the years of support for the Shah's rule. The Iranian government demanded his return to Iran, but he stayed in the hospital. Mohammad Reza's time in New York was highly uncomfortable; he was under a heavy security detail as every day, Iranian students studying in the United States gathered outside his hospital to shout "Death to the Shah!", a chorus that Mohammad Reza heard. The former Shah was obsessed with watching news from Iran, and was greatly upset at the new order being imposed by the Islamic Republic. Mohammad Reza could no longer walk by this time, and for security reasons had to be moved in his wheelchair under the cover of darkness when he went to the hospital while covered in a blanket, as the chances of his assassination were too great. |
There are claims that Reza's admission to the United States resulted in the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the kidnapping of U.S. diplomats, military personnel, and intelligence officers, which soon became known as the Iran hostage crisis. In the Shah's memoir, Answer to History, he claimed that the United States never provided him any kind of health care and asked him to leave the country. From the time of the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of the embassy staff as hostages, Mohammad Reza's presence in the United States was viewed by the Carter administration as a stumbling block to the release of the hostages, and as Zonis noted "... he was, in effect, expelled from the country". Mohammad Reza wanted to go back to Mexico, saying he had pleasant memories of Cuernavaca, but was refused. Mexico was a candidate to be a rotating member of the UN Security Council, but needed the vote of Cuba to be admitted, and the Cuban leader Fidel Castro told President José López Portillo that Cuba's vote was conditional on Mexico not accepting the Shah again. |
He left the United States on 15 December 1979 and lived for a short time in the Isla Contadora in Panama. This caused riots by Panamanians who objected to the Shah being in their country. General Omar Torrijos, the dictator of Panama, kept Mohammad Reza Shah as a virtual prisoner at the Paitilla Medical Center, a hospital condemned by the former Shah's U.S. doctors as "an inadequate and poorly staffed hospital", and in order to hasten his death allowed only Panamanian doctors to treat his cancer. General Torrijos, a populist left-winger, had only taken in Mohammad Reza under heavy U.S. pressure, and he made no secret of his dislike of Mohammad Reza, whom he called after meeting him "the saddest man he had ever met". When he first met Mohammad Reza, Torrijos taunted him by telling him "it must be hard to fall off the Peacock Throne into Contadora" and called him a chupon, a Spanish slang term for "someone who is finished". |
Torrijos added to Mohammad Reza's misery by making his chief bodyguard a militantly Marxist sociology professor who spent much time lecturing Mohammad Reza on how he deserved his fate because he had been a tool of the "American imperialism" that was ostensibly oppressing the Third World, and charged Mohammad Reza a monthly rent of US$21,000, making him pay for all his food and the wages of the 200 National Guardsmen assigned as his bodyguards. The interim government in Iran still demanded his and his wife's immediate extradition to Tehran. A short time after Mohammad Reza's arrival in Panama, an Iranian ambassador was dispatched to the Central American nation carrying a 450-page long extradition request. That official appeal alarmed both the Shah and his advisors. Whether the Panamanian government would have complied is a matter of speculation amongst historians. |
In January 1980, the Shah gave his last television interview to British journalist David Frost on Contadora Island, re-broadcast by ABC in the U.S. on 17 January. The Shah talks about his wealth, his illness, the SAVAK, the torture during his reign, his own political mistakes, Khomeini and his threat of extradition to Iran. |
The only consolation for Mohammad Reza during his time in Panama were letters from Princess Soraya saying that she still loved him and wanted to see him one last time before he died. Mohammad Reza, in the letters he sent to Paris, declared he wanted to see Soraya one last time as well but said that the Empress Farah could not be present, which presented some complications as Farah was continually by his deathbed. |
CIA assassination conspiracy and Morocco |
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While the Shah was in Panama, one of Ruhollah Khomeini's close advisors, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, had a meeting with Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter's Chief of Staff. Ghotbzadeh requested that the CIA kill the Shah while he was in Panama. Fearing for his life, the Shah left Panama, delaying further surgery. He fled to Rabat, Morocco, where he stayed with King Hassan II, and then to Cairo, Egypt, with his condition worsening. |
Asylum in Egypt and botched operation |
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After that event, the Shah again sought the support of Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat, who renewed his offer of permanent asylum in Egypt to the ailing monarch. He returned to Egypt in March 1980, where he received urgent medical treatment. Michael DeBakey, an American heart surgeon, was called to perform a splenectomy. Although DeBakey was world-renowned in his field, his experience performing this surgery was limited. On 28 March 1980, Mohammad Reza's French and U.S. doctors finally performed an operation meant to have been performed in the fall of 1979. During the operation, the tail of the pancreas was injured. This led to infection. Dr. Kean recalled: |
The operation went beautifully. That night, however, was terrible. The medical team–U.S., Egyptian, French–was in the pathology lab. The focus was on the Shah's cancerous spleen, grotesquely swollen to 20 times normal. It was one-foot long, literally the size of a football. But I was drawn to the liver tissues that had also been removed. The liver was speckled with white. Malignancy. The cancer had hit the liver. The Shah would soon die ... The tragedy is that a man who should have had the best and easiest medical care had, in many respects, the worst. |
By that point, it was arranged by Sadat that Soraya would quietly visit Mohammad Reza on his deathbed in Egypt without Farah present, but Milani noted the two were "star-crossed lovers." Soraya was unable to come to Egypt in time from her home in Paris. |
Death and funeral |
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The infection caused by the splenectomy operation led to the final decline of Mohammad Reza. In his hospital bed, the Shah was asked to describe his feelings for Iran and its people and to define the country. The Shah, a fervent nationalist, responded "Iran is Iran." After pausing for minutes, he said "Its land, people, and history," and "Every Iranian has to love it." He continued on to repeat "Iran is Iran" over and over. Shortly after, the Shah slipped into a coma and died at 9:15 a.m. on 27 July 1980 at age 60. He kept a bag of Iranian soil under his death bed. |
Egyptian state funeral |
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Egyptian President Sadat gave the Shah a state funeral. In addition to members of the Pahlavi family, Anwar Sadat, Richard Nixon and Constantine II of Greece attended the funeral ceremony in Cairo. |
Mohammad Reza Shah is buried in the Al Rifa'i Mosque in Cairo, a mosque of great symbolic importance. Also buried there is Farouk of Egypt, Mohammad Reza Shah's former brother-in-law. The tombs lie to the left of the entrance. Years earlier, his father and predecessor, Reza Shah, had also initially been buried at the Al Rifa'i Mosque. |
Criticism of reign and causes of his overthrow |
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American inaction |
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The U.S. State Department drew criticism for doing little to communicate with Tehran or discourage protest and opposition to the Shah. The intelligence community within the US has also been subject to criticism particularly for reporting to President Jimmy Carter, "Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a 'pre-revolutionary' situation." Carter was also blamed for his lack of support for the Shah while failing to deter opposition. Within Iran, the revolution is widely believed to have been a British plot to overthrow the Shah. This theory would come to be known as the 1979 Iranian Revolution conspiracy theory. The notion was supported by the Shah of Iran, who believed his increasing control over oil markets and his 1973 nationalization of Iranian oil prompted international oil companies to unseat him. The Carter administration in the US also refused to sell non-lethal tear gas and rubber bullets to Iran. |
An Amnesty International assessment on Iran for 1974–1975 stated: "The total number of political prisoners has been reported at times throughout the year to be anything from 25,000 to 100,000". |
At the Federation of American Scientists, John Pike wrote in 2000: |
In 1978 the deepening opposition to the Shah erupted in widespread demonstrations and rioting. Recognising that even this level of violence had failed to crush the rebellion, the Shah abdicated the Peacock Throne and fled Iran on 16 January 1979. Despite decades of pervasive surveillance by SAVAK, working closely with CIA, the extent of public opposition to the Shah, and his sudden departure, came as a considerable surprise to the US intelligence community and national leadership. As late as 28 September 1978 the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the Shah "is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years." |
Explanations for the overthrow of Mohammad Reza include his status as a dictator put in place by a non-Muslim Western power, the United States, whose foreign culture was seen as influencing that of Iran. Additional contributing factors included reports of oppression, brutality, corruption, and extravagance. Basic functional failures of the regime have also been blamed—economic bottlenecks, shortages and inflation; the regime's over-ambitious economic programme; the failure of its security forces to deal with protests and demonstrations; and the overly centralised royal power structure. |
International policies pursued by the Shah in order to increase national income by remarkable increases in the price of oil through his leading role in the Organization of the Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) have been stressed as a major cause for a shift of Western interests and priorities, and for a reduction of their support for him reflected in a critical position of Western politicians and media, especially of the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter regarding the question of human rights in Iran, and in strengthened economic ties between the United States of America and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. |
Change of Calendar |
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In October 1971, Mohammad Reza celebrated the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the Iranian monarchy; The New York Times reported that $100 million was spent on the celebration. Next to the ancient ruins of Persepolis, the Shah gave orders to build a tent city covering 160 acres (0.65 km2), studded with three huge royal tents and fifty-nine lesser ones arranged in a star-shaped design. French chefs from Maxim's of Paris prepared breast of peacock for royalty and dignitaries from around the world, the buildings were decorated by Maison Jansen (the same firm that helped Jacqueline Kennedy redecorate the White House), the guests ate off Limoges porcelain and drank from Baccarat crystal glasses. This became a major scandal, as the contrast between the dazzling elegance of the celebration and the misery of the nearby villages was so dramatic that no one could ignore it. Months before the festivities, university students went on strike in protest. Indeed, the cost was so sufficiently impressive that the Shah forbade his associates to discuss the actual figures. However, he and his supporters argued that the celebrations opened new investments in Iran, improved relationships with the other leaders and nations of the world and provided greater recognition of Iran. |
Other actions thought to have contributed to his downfall include antagonising formerly apolitical Iranians—especially merchants of the bazaars—with the creation in 1975 of a single-party political monopoly (the Rastakhiz Party), with compulsory membership and dues, and general aggressive interference in the political, economic, and religious concerns of people's lives; and the 1976 change from an Islamic calendar to an Imperial calendar, marking the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus as the first day, instead of the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. This supposed date was designed so that the year 2500 would fall on 1941, the year when his own reign started. Overnight, the year changed from 1355 to 2535. During the extravagant festivities to celebrate the 2500th anniversary, the Shah was quoted as saying at Cyrus's tomb: "Rest in peace, Cyrus, for we are awake". |
It has been argued that the White Revolution was "shoddily planned and haphazardly carried out", upsetting the wealthy while not going far enough to provide for the poor or offer greater political freedom. In 1974, Mohammad Reza learned from his French doctors that he was suffering from the cancer that was to kill him six years later. Though this was such a carefully guarded secret that not even the Americans were aware of it (as late as 1977, the CIA submitted a report to President Carter describing the Shah as being in "robust health"), the knowledge of his impending death left Mohammad Reza depressed and passive in his last years, a man no longer capable of acting. |
Unemployment |
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Some achievements of the Shah—such as broadened education—had unintended consequences. While school attendance rose (by 1966, the school attendance of urban seven- to fourteen-year-olds was estimated at 75.8%), Iran's labour market was slow to absorb the high number of educated youth. In 1966, high school graduates had "a higher rate of unemployment than did the illiterate", and the educated unemployed often supported the revolution. |
Legacy |
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In 1969, Mohammad Reza sent one of 73 Apollo 11 Goodwill Messages to NASA for the historic first lunar landing. The message still rests on the lunar surface today. He stated in part, "we pray the Almighty God to guide mankind towards ever increasing success in the establishment of culture, knowledge and human civilisation". The Apollo 11 crew visited Mohammad Reza during a world tour. |
Shortly after his overthrow, Mohammad Reza wrote an autobiographical memoir Réponse à l'histoire (Answer to History). It was translated from the original French into English, Persian (as Pasokh be Tarikh), and other languages. However, he had already died by the time of its publication. The book is Mohammad Reza's personal account of his reign and accomplishments, as well as his perspective on issues related to the Iranian Revolution and Western foreign policy toward Iran. He places some of the blame for the wrongdoings of SAVAK, and the failures of various democratic and social reforms (particularly through the White Revolution), upon Amir Abbas Hoveyda and his administration. |
Recently, Mohammad Reza's reputation has experienced something of a revival in Iran, with some people looking back on his era as a time when Iran was more prosperous and the government less oppressive. Journalist Afshin Molavi reported that some members of the uneducated poor—traditionally core supporters of the revolution that overthrew the monarchy—were making remarks such as, "God bless the Shah's soul, the economy was better then", and found that "books about the former Shah (even censored ones) sell briskly", while "books of the Rightly Guided Path sit idle". On 28 October 2016, thousands of people in Iran celebrating Cyrus Day at the Tomb of Cyrus, chanted slogans in support of him, and against the current Islamic regime of Iran and Arabs, and many were subsequently arrested. |
Religious beliefs |
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