The World

On Ashura, 3 June 1963, Khomeini denounced the ‘wretched miserable’ shah, comparing him to the Umayya caliph Yazid who had killed the first imam Husain on that day. The shah turned to his trusted premier, Asadollah Alam, a debonair landowner who had given away his estates and prosecuted corrupt officials. ‘Guns and cannon are in my hand … I’ll tear their mothers apart.’ On 5 June, Alam arrested Khomeini, sparking days of riots that were suppressed by the army, which shot 400 dead. Temporarily moving his trusted Alam aside, the shah appointed a new premier, Hassan Ali Mansur, who berated Khomeini and slapped his face. Dispatched into exile in Iraq, Khomeini ordered Mansur’s assassination. Yet the shah had triumphed. Khomeini was irrelevant and obsolete.

The shah, appointing his friend Alam as court minister, a job more important than premier in an absolute monarchy, had won time to put his revolution into practice. His aims were admirable, his execution flawed, yet the shah successfully promoted Iran as ‘the key to a vast region’, receiving massive US armaments, while supporting western allies Morocco, Jordan and Israel.^* Iran countered a radical Iraq by backing a rebellion by its Kurds.

The shah was admired by Alam as ‘a determined, demanding reformer’, a meritocrat who liked to say, ‘Where did the Pahlavis begin? My father was a simple soldier from the provinces.’ Negotiating everything himself, the shah trusted no one, and complained of the stress. His recreation was hardly different from that of any other potentate, but Alam’s diaries reveal the details. The marriage with Farah was happy, yet he and Alam enjoyed flying in ‘visitors’ – Madame Claude’s call girls, who were paid in jewels. Sounding exactly like JFK, he said sex was his ‘only relaxation … If it weren’t for this little indulgence of mine, I’d be an utter wreck.’ Queen Farah, intelligent, sensitive, ‘a moderating influence’, disliked Alam, knowing that ‘her husband and I go philandering together’.

At home, the shah’s policies had created a literate middle class, and millions of peasants moved to the cities to work. Yet the shah offered no participation in government, the oil money was frittered away on luxury, corruption and armaments instead of alleviating poverty, while SAVAK resorted to torture to crush dissent. But as his friend the duke of Edinburgh, who stayed with him, told this author, ‘The shah shows it is dangerous and difficult if you try to do everything yourself.’ The shah, spoiled by success and ever more grandiose, felt his rise was providential – a view confirmed when his enemy in the White House went on campaign to Dallas.

EXIT KENNEDY: LBJ AND MLK

In Dallas, on 22 November 1963, JFK, riding in an open limousine with Jackie, chic personified in a pink Chanel suit, was shot in the skull and throat by an assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, probably operating alone. As sections of his brain spattered her suit, Jackie crawled out of the back of the limousine and was rescued by a bodyguard as the convoy sped to the hospital, where the president was declared dead. His successor Lyndon Johnson, a Brobdingnagian tough, self-made Texan machine-politician and congressional maestro who had hated the vice-presidency (‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’, said LBJ, quoting one of FDR’s veeps) and the smug Kennedys, took the oath of office on Air Force One beside Jackie in her bloodied Chanel.

LBJ ordered the hotline used for the first time to inform Moscow of the assassination. Khrushchev, who feared the Soviets would be blamed, believed that JFK had been killed by conservatives to stop any detente with Moscow. Khrushchev sent Mikoyan, who had been a bearer of Lenin’s coffin in 1924, to Kennedy’s funeral.

LBJ, whose style of leadership was ‘If you can’t fuck a man in the ass, then just peckerslap him – better to let him know who’s in charge than to let him get the keys to the car,’ proved a surprise, determined to force through civil rights. He resented the respect he owed the Kennedys. Now Bobby mourned Jack in a romance of grief with his widow Jackie. LBJ hated Bobby and his ‘Harvards’; Bobby hated him back. ‘Bobby, you don’t like me,’ Johnson had once said to him. ‘Your brother likes me … Why don’t you like me?’ Bobby admitted that LBJ was ‘the most formidable human being I’ve ever met. He just eats up strong men,’ but he regarded him as ‘almost an animal’. LBJ kept Bobby as attorney-general, in charge of civil rights.