EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from the late Peter Rodman’s Presidential Command, examining a previous Democratic administration’s handling of a crisis in Iran.

When the shah stood with Jimmy Carter on the South Lawn of the White House for the welcoming ceremony for his state visit on November 15, 1977, mounted police in the distance were trying to contain a group of anti-shah demonstrators outside the White House grounds. Wafts of tear gas reached the South Lawn and the shah, the president, their wives, and other dignitaries found themselves mopping or rubbing their eyes to contain the tears. Carter saw it as an augury of the hostage crisis to come: “The tear gas had created the semblance of grief. Almost two years later, and for 14 months afterward, there would be real grief in our country because of Iran.” But the visit was an augury for a deeper reason — because what the president said to the shah during the visit reflected the contradictions in U.S. policy that would help bring that crisis about. In the public greeting on the South Lawn, Carter repeated the strong statements of U.S. solidarity with the shah and his country that every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt had expressed. Once they repaired safely inside, after a larger meeting in the Cabinet Room, Carter took the shah aside to a small private room near the Oval Office and expressed his concerns about human rights in Iran; he urged the shah to consider reaching out to dissident groups and “easing off” on police actions against them. This kind of pressure from an American president on his internal policies was new to the shah; he responded politely but firmly that he would enforce his country’s laws.

As the domestic unrest within Iran grew to engulf the shah, this was to be the pattern of U.S. policy over the next 14 months — expressions of support, coupled with recommendations for political concessions to his opponents — a pattern that confused the shah and contributed to his hesitations; it had the same effect on the Iranian military, who we were expecting to be a stabilizing factor. In the context of the upheaval that was taking place, this U.S. posture was full of contradictions, reflecting divisions within the Carter administration and, in the end, a conflict within the president’s own mind.

The upheaval in Iran was the product of many causes and disparate forces. The shah failed to accompany the country’s rapid economic modernization with a political modernization that could have co-opted the middle classes into the system. He dealt harshly with his opposition. In 1953, when a leftist government that tried to topple him was itself toppled by the CIA, the shah enjoyed support from many key groups in the society, including the merchant class and the clergy. By 1978, his political rigidity had alienated them. Thus the revolution against him at first appeared to be a broad-based coalition embracing the merchants, students, and many moderate elements, in addition to the reactionary clerics; only gradually did it become clear that, as in Petrograd in 1917, vacuums are often filled by the most ruthless, the most disciplined, the most fanatical. And U.S. policy was helping create that vacuum.

There were two points of view in the U.S. government. One view, strongly held in the State Department, was, in essence, that the shah was a retrograde figure, that we should seize the opportunity to help effect a transition, and that moderate elements in the revolution represented a new order that we could get along with. The opposing view, represented especially by Zbigniew Brzezinski (and also James Schlesinger, whom Carter had appointed energy secretary), was that the shah was a strategic ally in a vital region and that if we undermined him, or the army, we were risking strategic disaster. Carter sided with Brzezinski for much of the period, determined to bolster the shah’s morale and his resistance to the revolutionary tide.

These reassurances were all the more necessary because the shah was highly susceptible to conspiracy theories. His foreign policy through his whole career had been grounded in the solid support of the United States; now he was in unfamiliar territory. From the beginning of the Carter administration he found U.S. policy to be “confusing and contradictory” and he assumed the worst. Henry Kissinger, visiting Iran as a private citizen in June 1978, found the shah convinced that Washington and Moscow were colluding to divide up Iran. Kissinger told him it was impossible. In September, the shah expounded the same theory to visiting Time correspondents, confiding to them his conviction that the CIA was backing the revolution. Unfortunately the head of French intelligence was telling the shah around the same time that the rumors that Carter wanted to replace him were true. And to his dying day he believed it was the American intention all along.

Despite the general view of the shah as a brutal dictator, his problem during this period was a weakness of will, exacerbated not only by these fears of American abandonment but perhaps also by the cancer that he knew (but we did not know) was killing him. During the summer and fall of 1978 he made concessions to his opposition and did not crack down ruthlessly; his police handled some protests brutally but only enough to inflame passions, not suppress them. The shah flirted with different political alternatives — either a coalition government that would seek to co-opt moderate elements from the opposition, or a military government that would restore his authority and allow him to reach out politically from a position of strength. Carter sent him a message in early November assuring him of U.S. support “without any reservation whatsoever, completely and fully,” whatever course of action he chose. Brzezinski conveyed the message to him personally by phone, because he and the president were concerned that the U.S. ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, and the State Department, were not conveying such clear-cut support in their own communications with the shah.