Reza Pahlavi was born in a time of tumult. His father, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, stood at one of the most traumatic junctures of his long reign, which began in 1941. In the five years before and after his son’s birth on Oct. 31, 1960, the Shah remarried—driven by dynastic anxiety and the urgent need for a crown prince—while confronting mounting economic pressures and accelerating social change. He was on the cusp of launching the White Revolution, a program of reforms that would irreversibly alter the fabric of Iranian society: land redistribution, women’s enfranchisement, educational expansion, and the systematic weakening of traditional hierarchies.

Opposition to these changes—especially land reform and the political empowerment of women—coalesced around a hitherto obscure cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who mobilized street violence and religious populism to challenge the reforms. It was in this cauldron of expectation and anxieties that the Shah’s new wife, Queen Farah, gave birth to a son. They named him Reza and almost immediately anointed him crown prince.

Reza Pahlavi was born in a time of tumult. His father, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, stood at one of the most traumatic junctures of his long reign, which began in 1941. In the five years before and after his son’s birth on Oct. 31, 1960, the Shah remarried—driven by dynastic anxiety and the urgent need for a crown prince—while confronting mounting economic pressures and accelerating social change. He was on the cusp of launching the White Revolution, a program of reforms that would irreversibly alter the fabric of Iranian society: land redistribution, women’s enfranchisement, educational expansion, and the systematic weakening of traditional hierarchies.

Opposition to these changes—especially land reform and the political empowerment of women—coalesced around a hitherto obscure cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who mobilized street violence and religious populism to challenge the reforms. It was in this cauldron of expectation and anxieties that the Shah’s new wife, Queen Farah, gave birth to a son. They named him Reza and almost immediately anointed him crown prince.

Less than two decades later, that same cleric would overthrow the monarchy and erect an absolutist theocracy in its place. But history, with its occasional macabre ironies, was not finished. With the Islamic Republic now facing an unprecedented threat to its continued existence, in the form of a broad-based nationwide protest movement, Reza has emerged as the most widely embraced symbol of its political future.

Some dismiss Reza’s rising popularity as mere nostalgia. It could just as plausibly be read as defiance among the young—a cosmopolitan, digitally fluent generation furious at the tragic choices imposed on them by history—and basic remorse among older Iranians.

Following the death of his father, Reza announces himself the new Shah of Iran at a news conference in Cairo on Oct. 31, 1980.UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

At the time of the Islamic Revolution, the crown prince was in the United States pursuing education and pilot training. He soon joined his family in exile from Iran. In late 1979, shortly after the Shah had undergone a medical operation in New York, the Pahlavis found themselves—briefly and humiliatingly—in virtual confinement at the very........

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