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It was a measure of the manner in which he had ruled that in death, as in life, the former Shah was remembered more generously by foreigners than by his own people. Some of the harshest judgments had been pronounced by those who had faithfully, and sometimes servilely, worked under the Shah. "He was essentially a weak man who played the role of the dictator," said Fereydoun Hoveida, who for seven years was the Shah's Ambassador to the United Nations.
Despite his dynastic pretensions, the Shah was not to the monarchy born. His commoner father Reza Khan, a hot-tempered colonel in the Persian Cossack cavalry, seized power in a bloodless coup in 1921. He forced parliament to dissolve the decadent, 129-year-old Qajar dynasty in 1925 and proclaim him Shah. He took Pahlavi—an ancient Persian language —as his dynastic name. Following his coronation, his first-born son Mohammed Reza, then seven, was designated crown prince. The elder Shah paraded the child around in gold-encrusted uniforms, groomed him in sports and, when he was twelve, packed him off to Le Rosey, an exclusive Swiss boarding school. By then, as the Shah wrote in his 1961 autobiography, he already had a mystical sense of mission and was convinced by visions that he had been "chosen by God" to save his country.
In 1941, when the Allies needed a secure route to ship war supplies to the Soviet Union, Reza Shah, a Nazi sympathizer, was forced into exile. His son, then 21, initially was little more than a figurehead. At war's end he confronted his first crisis when Soviet forces, refusing to leave the country, set up a puppet regime in the northern province of Azerbaijan. Iran took the issue to the United Nations and, with considerable support from the U.S., succeeded in having them expelled.
His next serious test began in 1951, when the popularly elected government of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. In 1953, right-wing monarchists in the army unsuccessfully attempted to depose Mossadegh; the Shah was forced to flee to Rome. A few days later, however, a countercoup sponsored by the CIA restored him to the throne. The Shah launched a ruthless purge, particularly of remnants of the Communist Tudeh Party, which had been outlawed in 1948. He also organized a secret-police network, SAVAK, that was to become one of the most notorious in the world.
The Shah set about trying to transform his feudal nation into a modern state. In the early 1960s, he informed his ministers: "I am going to go faster than the left." His dream of economic and social reforms was shared by a new generation of intellectuals, who also believed, mistakenly as it turned out, that political reforms would follow. The Shah's ambitious reform program —the so-called White Revolution—included a number of laudable aims: a literacy corps, equal rights for women, nationalization of forestry and water resources, profit-sharing schemes for workers, and land reforms designed to break up huge feudal estates.