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Reza Shah was a stern figure of whom his son once wrote, "Strong men often trembled just to look at him." Though the Shah often said that he was raised with kindness, some associates suspected that his later imperiousness masked a basic insecurity caused by his father and by some of his own early experiences. Sent to study in Switzerland, the Shah-to-be once walked into the school lounge and proclaimed, "When I enter a room, everybody rises"; his classmates merely looked at each other in amazement. At the start of World War II, Reza Shah declared neutrality, but the British suspected him of pro-Nazi sympathies. In 1941, Britain and the U.S.S.R. jointly occupied Iran (an ancient name for Persia that Reza Shah restored in 1935) to secure a land bridge between their armies. The British sent the King off to South Africa and installed his son, then 21, on the throne.
In the early days of his 37-year reign, the Shah acquired a reputation as a playboy fond of women, card games and any amusement involving speed—flying a plane, driving racing cars, skiing. With American backing, he sent troops in 1946 to the province of Azerbaijan to throw out a pro-Soviet regime that had been set up by the withdrawing Soviet army. But in 1953, when Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran's British-run oil wells, stirred the Tehran crowds to a frenzy, the Shah fled. In Rome, where he had stopped for some shopping on the Via Veneto, he received news that a coup organized by the CIA had deposed Mossadegh and made it safe for him to return.
The chastened Shah thereafter became a far stronger ruler. By 1960 he had launched what he called a "White [e.g., non-Red] Revolution" to distribute land to the peasants. According to government figures, 20 million acres were eventually distributed to 2.3 million families, though critics charged that only relatively well-off peasants, not the poorest ones, benefited. The Shah also began educational programs that reduced the illiteracy rate among Iran's 35 million people from 95% at the beginning of his reign to around 60% toward the end. His father had freed women from having to wear the veil and opened the universities to them; the Shah gave them the vote and the right to divorce their husbands. In the late 1970s some 38% of the students in Iran's universities were women.
That might seem strange, since the Shah, though he married three times,* had no great regard for women. In 1973 he exploded at Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci: "Does it seem right to you that a King, that an Emperor of Persia, should waste time talking about such things —talking about wives, women? Women are important in a man's life only if they're beautiful and keep their femininity. You're equal in the eyes of the law but not, excuse my saying so, in ability."