The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

There would always be a way, too, in which the Shah was somehow an outsider. At age six, he was entrusted to a French governess; at age twelve, he was sent off to school in Switzerland. His education and experience engendered a certain distance from Iranian society. “It might, of course, be,” mused the American ambassador in 1950, “that he is a little too Westernized for an Oriental country.” That possibility would dog him for almost four decades. Yet, whatever the Shah’s own anxieties, he had been plunged at a very young age into treacherous circumstances, which would have mightily challenged even the most self-assured and practiced of politicians. The legitimacy of his dynasty was problematic; the role of the monarchy in Iran, a totally unresolved question. He had to contend with chronic intervention by foreign powers, as well as direct Soviet pressure on the country’s territorial integrity and a highly visible British economic presence. He was forced to struggle to assert his authority in a political system riven by every kind of division—class, regional, religious, and modern versus traditional. On one side were the Islamic fundamentalists, led by the fiery Ayatollah Seyed Kashani, who were outraged by every intrusion of the modern world—be it the presence of foreign advisers or the fact that Reza Shah had allowed women to dispense with the veil. On the other side were the communists and the Tudeh, a well-organized leftist party tied to Moscow. In between were reformer...