Fulcrum of Past and Future

One day in his early teens Mohammed Reza Pahlevi was walking with his father through the manicured gardens of the Palace in Teheran. The old Shah tried to draw out the reticent lad, to learn what interested him. When the Prince spoke of history and social science, the fierce one-time stable sergeant of a Cossack company, now King of Kings, smote his son on the back, propelling him into a lily pond. “Donkey! Social science! Hah! You will rule this land. Now watch, and learn how to be King of the Persians.”

Apocryphal? Perhaps, but real, nonetheless. It’s hard to be the heir to a ruthless warrior-king. But if being cowed by a tyrant-father was his dialectical thesis, then consider the traumatic antithesis— the old man dethroned in 1941 and packed off by the Russians and British to exile in Mauritius, death in South Africa, and a grave in Egypt. Synthesis? A callow, 21-year-old Prince torn between the recollection of ruthless paternal power and the reality of paternal humiliation, cast up into the powerful Peacock Throne but, in reality, more like a ball of yarn buffeted back and forth by covetous Persian cats, not to mention a few first-class tigers called Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. This was not synthesis. This was the matrix of breakdown.

NH

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Norman B. Hannah

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One day in his early teens Mohammed Reza Pahlevi was walking with his father through the manicured gardens of the Palace in Teheran. The old Shah tried to draw out the reticent lad, to learn what interested him. When the Prince spoke of history and social science, the fierce one-time stable sergeant of a Cossack company, now King of Kings, smote his son on the back, propelling him into a lily pond. “Donkey! Social science! Hah! You will rule this land. Now watch, and learn how to be King of the Persians.”

Apocryphal? Perhaps, but real, nonetheless. It’s hard to be the heir to a ruthless warrior-king. But if being cowed by a tyrant-father was his dialectical thesis, then consider the traumatic antithesis— the old man dethroned in 1941 and packed off by the Russians and British to exile in Mauritius, death in South Africa, and a grave in Egypt. Synthesis? A callow, 21-year-old Prince torn between the recollection of ruthless paternal power and the reality of paternal humiliation, cast up into the powerful Peacock Throne but, in reality, more like a ball of yarn buffeted back and forth by covetous Persian cats, not to mention a few first-class tigers called Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. This was not synthesis. This was the matrix of breakdown.