Seven Presidents praised him; now he's condemned. How bad was he?
He once was a rather shy and indecisive young princeling, installed on his throne by the foreigners who had forced his humbly born father to abdicate. He became an enormously wealthy monarch, Shah of Iran, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, who dreamed of creating an economic and military superpower that would recall the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great. He developed an imperial ego to match his vision, placing his crown on his own head like Napoleon, dismissing all opposition as "the blah-blahs of armchair critics" and boasting that "nobody influences me, nobody!"
Today Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is a man of 60, battling cancer, unwelcome in most countries of the world, and bearing a price on his head (an all-expenses-paid pilgrimage to Mecca, offered by the revolutionaries who overthrew him to anyone who succeeds in killing him). Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini and his aides are filling the air with tirades against the Shah as a "U.S. puppet," a Hitlerian "criminal" who tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his subjects, a thief who looted Iran of untold billions. At the other extreme, the Shah's defenders cite the praises heaped on him by seven U.S. Presidents, beginning with Harry Truman, who lauded the Shah's "courage and farsightedness," and ending with Jimmy Carter, who told the Shah in 1977, "Iran is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect, admiration and love which your people give to you."
The truth about the Shah is far more complex. He was indeed a staunch U.S. ally, restored to his throne by a CIA-organized military coup after a six-day exile in 1953. Yet he damaged the U.S. economy by leading a quadrupling of world oil prices in 1973-74, something that no mere puppet would ever dare do. He was a despot whose secret police did use torture, as he once admitted to TIME, and who eventually earned the passionate hatred of his people. But his repressions were hardly on the same scale as those of this century's worst tyrants. Probably the Shah's greatest failing was a megalomania that led him to think he could haul Iran from the camel age to the heights of industrial and military technological power in one lifetime, while retaining the political structure of an absolute feudal monarchy.
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 dynasty in 1925. Even before he had seized the bejeweled Peacock Throne— for himself, he chose Pahlavi, one of the ancient languages of Persia, as his dynastic name.