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Staunchly antiCommunist, the Shah dreamed of making Iran a military power, the protector of the Persian Gulf. Convinced that he was a reliable and unassailable ally, Washington—most notably the Nixon Administration—encouraged him to build up his arsenal. He did—to the tune of $36 billion. By 1978, Iran had one of the world's most sophisticated collections of advanced weaponry, including F-14 jet fighters and a variety of guided-missile systems. Meanwhile 63,000 of Iran's 66,000 villages had neither piped water nor electricity. The capital of Tehran (pop. 5 million) lacked a sewer system.
Throughout 1978, riots and protests were harbingers of the coming revolution. By and large, Western leaders accepted the Shah's assurances that his opposition was merely a gaggle of "Islamic Marxists," abetted by "foreign agents and traitors." Eventually, the Shah made some concessions to placate his critics; he lifted press censorship and released some political prisoners. By then it was too late.
Caught up in his dream, the Shah worked hard, putting in 15 hours a day at his desk in Niavaran Palace in Tehran. He seemingly found little happiness in either his public or his private life. He seldom smiled, and his voice lacked warmth or expression. His first marriage, to Egypt's Princess Fawzia, King Farouk's sister, ended in a 1948 divorce when the Shah concluded that she could not give him a male heir (a daughter, Princess Shahnaz, is now 39). Three years later, the Shah married Soraya Esfandiari, a beautiful Iranian commoner. He divorced her in 1958, again because the union failed to produce an heir. In 1959, he married Farah Diba, then a 21-year-old architecture student in Paris. Sensitive and compassionate, Farah sought to soften the harsh policies of her husband when possible. She is the mother of his four other children: Crown Prince Reza, 19, Princess Farahnaz, 17, Prince Ali Reza, 14, and Princess Leila, 10.
The Shah's end was far from princely: the hasty flight, the uncertain wandering, the last hours in a hospital far from Tehran. Those images make it hard to assess history's ultimate verdict. "He ruled as a lion and a fox," concludes Professor James Bill, an Iran specialist at the University of Texas, "but in the process he forgot the needs of his people. He insulated and isolated himself from them, and in the end failed to build the political institutions and social trust they needed." He steered his country into a revolution, only to find that, as it gathered force, his people decided that they would no longer allow him to steer his country anywhere.