You’ve earned another fresh podcast episode. This week my guest is Scott Anderson, the leading war correspondent who’s written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, Esquire and a bunch of others. His ninth and latest book is King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation. (Anderson has, himself, sometimes commented on his fondness for long subtitles.) King of Kings tells of the 1979 fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the hands of an Iranian population whose resentment and hunger for change the Shah never understood, and the ascension to power from long exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The book opens with a smashing personal anecdote — Anderson, still a student, was in the crowd when the Shah’s last visit to Washington in 1977 was obscured by billows of tear gas and the crack of billy clubs — and a bold claim: “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
This is unusual subject matter for my podcast. But to say the least, Iran is still in the news, and I had a hunch that an author this experienced would serve up quite a tale. It was obvious early in my reading that I was right. It’s mostly a tale of almost wilful incompetence in two capitals, the Shah’s Tehran and Jimmy Carter’s Washington.
Anderson’s not particularly a critic of Carter in general, but he shows how a freshman President with a stacked foreign-policy agenda was always distracted by something else while Iran tilted closer and closer to uprising. And Carter was terribly served by a US nationl-security apparatus in which senior officials knew nothing of Iran outside the Shah’s palace — and systematically ostracized junior officials who tried to learn. You’d think that people entrusted with heavy responsibility would act responsibly. When it came to US-Iran relations through the 1970s, you’d have been wrong.
This is big history with big consequences that ring down to the current day. I’m grateful to Scott Anderson for coming on the show to talk about it.
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