Character as Destiny: The Portrait of the Shah as a young man
Abbas Milani
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He was born a soldier’s son, grew into a reluctant king, and died a woeful pariah.
He seemed forever ready to leave Iran, yet he ruled the country for thirty-seven years. In
1953 his absconding propensities nearly foiled the coup masterminded by British
Intelligence and the CIA on his behalf.


In the West, he was known as “the Shah”: A handsome debonair, a bon vivant, an
enlightened despot, a would-be-modernist, and a minor polyglot, competent in both
French and English. He was also at least partially responsible for the sharp rise in the
price of oil in the 1970s. To his critics, which included many of his countrymen, he was a
frivolous man, a pseudo-modernist, a repressive despot, all too tolerant of financial
corruption in his family and friends, and a ward of the West. In contrast to his mastery of
foreign languages, his Persian was infamous for its stranded articles, its dissonant verbs,
and its incongruent syntax.