To try to save his throne, he appoints a civilian government
It was, finally, the week in which the once proud and orderly kingdom of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi seemed almost beyond recall. The streets of Tehran rocked with pitched battles. More than 20 demonstrators lay dead, hundreds were wounded in battles with the Shah's soldiers. A crippling strike by oilfield workers shut off the Iranian petroleum spigot and plunged the economy into chaos. Banks, schools and stores were closed. Iran Air, the national airline, canceled all flights. Bus service halted. The nation was on its knees and, were nothing done, would soon be prostrate. His earlier attempts to establish a civilian government having failed, the embattled Shah made one more desperate effort to mollify his enemies through compromise. It might or might not succeed, but it bought a little time. After hours of intense bargaining, the Shah yielded, by asking one of his leading critics to form a civilian government that would replace the military regime that has ruled Iran for two months.
The man the Shah turned to was Shahpour Bakhtiar, 63, an outspoken opponent of the regime and a prominent member of the anti-Shah National Front. He too seemed to have compromised. Denying rumors that this was the first stage of a plan for the Shah to give up all his powers and abdicate the throne, a close confidant of the Shah declared: "There is absolutely no question of the Shah stepping aside or stepping down. His decision is to enforce the constitution."
Because the months of increasing violence have so hardened the positions of the Shah's enemies, the compromise could prove to be too little too late. The plan required him to accept the dictates of the long ignored 1906 Iranian constitution, and, in effect, begin to restore Iran to the constitutional monarchy it once was on paper. He would turn over control of the national budget to an appointed Cabinet. A panel of Shi'ite mullahs, his most vociferous critics, would be given the power to veto new laws that were not in conformity with Muslim doctrine. The Shah, however, would retain command of his 280,000-man army, and this was a condition that few Shi'ites, or few other Iranians, for that matter, would now readily accept.
In an obvious attempt to reassure his opponents, the palace announced that "it is possible that after the installation of a civil government the Shah may go with his family on his routine annual winter vacation." This was calculated as yet a further concession to skeptics, since the monarch earlier had balked at the suggestion that he take a "temporary absence" from Iran so that order could be restored. The skeptics were not impressed, since there was no way that they could be assured that the Shah would keep his word.
They could also be confident that the Shah knew that he would not be permitted to return once he had left the country.