Word: evens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such imperial hauteur contrasted powerfully with the Shah's beginnings. Though he took great pains to present his reign as a continuation and fulfillment of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, his dynasty had not even been founded when he was born on Oct. 26, 1919. His father, Reza Khan, was a soldier's son who did not learn to read and write until he was an adult. Reza Khan started as a noncommissioned officer in the Persian army, rose to colonel, and in 1921 led a military revolt that finally ousted the last Shah of the Qajar...
...charges Empress Farah with taking $5 billion. But it offers no evidence and indeed admits that the sums are pretty much a guess. The Shah's own figure for the size of his fortune, given to Barbara Walters of ABC, is $50 million to $100 million. Even that would represent a spectacular increase over the years...
Khomeini's demagoguery notwithstanding, even after that slaughter, the total number of the Shah's victims simply cannot be compared to the millions killed by Hitler and Stalin; nor can the tenor of his regime be likened to that of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. Even among contemporary despots, the Shah is not the worst. One prominent member of the International Commission of Jurists classifies the Shah as in a "second league" of tyrants, below Uganda's Idi Amin, Cambodia's Pol Pot and Central African Emperor Jean Bokassa...
...Even in this grim area, rational distinctions must be made. Is there justification for calling the Shah a criminal and treating him as one? If so, the same would have to apply to scores of other rulers, rightist or leftist. Moreover, Iran, like many developing countries, has never known any really free institutions. And cruelty, by whatever regime, has always been a fact of life there and in many other countries the U.S. must live with. These considerations do not exonerate the Shah, but they must be kept in mind by the U.S. as it tries to cope with...
...face of that challenge." But what caused resentment were other remarks that seemed to question the Administration's wisdom and will. "The biggest foreign policy debacle for the United States in a generation was the collapse of the government and of the Shah of Iran without support or even understanding by the United States of what was involved." Kissinger derided the use of "impotence" as "the ruling principle of our foreign policy" and said that the response of Americans to the seizure of the embassy showed that "they are sick and tired of getting pushed around and they...