An Evening at Niavaran: Meeting Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the Unfinished Story of Iran

In 1975, I stood in a large, double-height study in far northern Tehran, face to face with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The room was filled with memorabilia. The Shah was casually dressed, greeting me with reserve and decorum. What unfolded over the course of a long evening conversation would imprint itself on my understanding of Iran, of geopolitics, and of the tragic distance between vision and its fulfillment. Half a century later, that meeting remains an extraordinary lens through which to view both a lost Iran and the nation convulsing toward an uncertain future today.

I had come to Iran on business — conducting market research for a sporting goods company and an architectural firm during the country’s massive building spree of the mid-1970s. Iran had hosted the 1974 Asian Games, and the Shah’s appetite for design, sport, and modernization was reshaping Tehran’s skyline. My interest in Iran and the region was extensive. A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, I had traveled extensively across the Middle East and Europe since boyhood — Moscow, Prague, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel — and I possessed a certain fluency with the region’s fault lines. I had visited the Saudi embassy in Washington, befriended a member of the Saudi royal family at Georgetown, and hosted Iraqi and Saudi friends as house guests. I fully grasped the Sunni-Shia divide and Saudi Arabia’s opposition to the Shah’s rising Iran.

More critically, I recognized early what many Western diplomats failed to see: that multifaceted efforts were underway to destroy the Shah and institute an Islamist state, efforts rooted in the late nineteenth-century exposure of Tehran’s merchant class to Marxism and in centuries of Shia clerical authority. A wise owl I met at a Tehran party explained the deep origins of those forces. Even the ostensibly liberal bourgeois families I encountered were regularly visiting the fundamentalist mullahs at Qom, dire opponents of the reformist Pahlavi dynasty. The leftist Mojahedin, who welded Marxist ideology to Islamic fundamentalism, were playing an increasingly corrosive role. An alliance of religious extremists and political ideologues was gathering force — one that would, within four years, engulf the nation.

The circumstances of my audience with the Shah had the quality of a diplomatic novel. Returning to the Tehran Intercontinental Hotel after a long day at the Grand Bazaar and the Zurkhaneh — the ancient Iranian “house of strength” where I was introduced to Pahlevani, the blend of exercise, music, and song — I discovered my hotel room padlocked. The Shah was hosting a secondary school reunion for his Le Rosey classmates, and event planners had requisitioned rooms. When I explained that I too had attended a school where the Shah studied, the École Nouvelle de la Suisse Romande, a room was promptly found and I was honored at the hotel’s Rotisserie Française. Sometime later, a gentleman often seen at the hotel, one reputed to be affiliated with Iranian intelligence, requested I join him. We were driven through familiar neighborhoods into far northern Tehran, arriving in darkness at what I recall was the Niavaran Palace.

A confluence of connections had aligned to produce the meeting. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, whom I had known since my youth and who had very strongly supported my Massachusetts primary campaign, likely sent a letter of introduction to Richard Helms, then the U.S. Ambassador to Iran and a Le Rosey alumnus who had attended the school with the Shah’s brother. I had informed Senator Barry Goldwater and General William Quinn of my Iran trip during a weekend at the Quinns’ Make Peace Farm on the Maryland Shore. My equestrian friends in Tehran were sons of a Royal Vice Chamberlain. The stars, one way or another, were aligned.

I have always spoken to power with facility. The Shah, though at first reserved and, more than likely, a bit amazed by my ease in engaging him, became more animated as we spoke. We conversed mostly in English, occasionally in French. I complimented his countless achievements and those of his father, Reza Shah, in fostering Iran’s remarkable development. We discussed our shared school, the École Nouvelle, and I rather brazenly recounted the story that he had departed because a Royal Chamberlain insisted he be addressed as “Your Imperial Highness” by faculty and students alike — that broke the ice. Having visited Persepolis, we discussed the Shah’s lavish 1971 celebrations of 2,500 years of Persian history, the victories of Cyrus the Great, and the Shah’s encouragement of Iran’s diverse communities.

We shared thoughts about turquoise, the sacred stone of healing and the national stone of Iran. I described a Grand Bazaar merchant whose display tables were heaped with stones of every color and quality. Either they were sent to me later, or His Majesty gifted me a pair of turquoise cufflinks bearing imperial emblems during our meeting, made in Sweden, possibly commissioned for the 2,500th anniversary. I later lost them in a shirt sent to the dry cleaner, only to find them for sale in a nearby shop, one imperial medallion still loose — a small, poignant emblem of the carelessness with which precious things are lost.

What emerged most powerfully from our encounter was the Shah’s character as a statesman. His forte was insightful, objective assessment of the international scene. He recognized both the good and the problematic in countless situations and did not hesitate to chide both sides of a foreign policy position — Israeli or Palestinian, American or Soviet. Such evenhandedness was not always expedient. He was keen on architecture and urban planning not merely as practical solutions but as manifestations of Iran’s past and ongoing preeminence in world culture. We discussed the Shahyad arch, completed in 1971, which housed the Cylinder of Cyrus — the first declaration of human rights — and celebrated the Shah’s White Revolution as a continuation of that historic text. I came to think of it as the built-world manifestation of Pahlavism: hopeful, assertive, and artistic, a monument celebrating Iranian civilization past and present.

As the evening progressed, I came to sense a kindred spirit in the Shah — measured and reasonable, with a quality of destiny about him. Beneath the pomp of the Imperial Court was a leader genuinely concerned about raising the standard of living of all Iranians, about education, health care, and commerce. He was impressed by my Middle East travels and gave me the impression that he wished I held a position from which my voice could be heard and serve to inform. That assessment was confirmed shortly after, when I found myself seated at lunch next to U.S. Senator William Roth, a former intelligence officer and member of the Trilateral Commission who had never heard of the ayatollahs and was wholly unaware of the mounting forces against the Shah.

The ignorance of Western leadership during this period remains staggering. The Carter Administration, initially supportive, ultimately conspired against the Shah, preferring the extremist mullahs as a bulwark against communism. I personally asked President Carter about this policy; his reply was inadequate. French President Giscard d’Estaing likewise supported the religious and political extremists. By suppressing the Shah’s balanced views — however much he unsettled the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Iraqis — Western leaders helped deliver the Middle East into the hands of a regime dedicated to destroying the global free. The numerous reforms the Pahlavi dynasty had instituted — liberating women, fostering education, eradicating disease, creating a large middle class educated at the world’s finest universities — were swept aside by a coalition of entrenched mullahs and much of the liberal, educated elite who took to the streets demanding theocracy. Ironically, once the revolution was securely in the mullahs’ hands, liberals were the first to be expunged.

Now, nearly half a century later, the consequences of that catastrophic miscalculation are more visible than ever. As I write in early 2026, Iran is engulfed in its deepest crisis since the revolution itself. Protests triggered by acute economic deterioration and the renewed collapse of the national currency erupted across all thirty-one provinces in late December 2025, becoming the broadest mobilization since the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. They differ from previous cycles in their geographic reach, their demographic breadth, and their explicit political character. Protest slogans have shifted compared to 2022, with chants increasingly reflecting monarchist sentiments and the name of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi resonating through the streets.

The regime’s response has followed a grimly familiar pattern: lethal force, mass arrests, and internet shutdowns. The European Parliament has warned that the scale of killings may amount to crimes against humanity. Iranian diplomats have begun requesting asylum from European countries. For many Iranians, particularly the young, meaningful change within the framework of the Islamic Republic is no longer conceivable.

Into this rupture has stepped Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s eldest son, who has lived in exile since 1978. At a January 2026 press conference in Washington, he declared the Islamic Republic close to collapse and outlined a six-step plan for democratic transition — maximum economic pressure on the regime, unrestricted internet access, expulsion of Iranian diplomats, release of political prisoners, and international recognition of a transitional government. He calls for a peaceful transition, insisting that change should occur without violence, and maintains that the form of the next political system must be determined through a free referendum. He describes himself not as a ruler-in-waiting but as a steward of transition.

But a political transition alone will not suffice. The fall of the theocratic state will create a spiritual vacuum — and vacuums, as Iran’s own history demonstrates, are dangerous. What must be nurtured in that space is not the absence of faith but its liberation. Within the broad tradition of Shia Islam there exist voices that the mullahs have long suppressed: the Bektashi, with their centuries-old tradition of tolerance, pluralism, and mystical openness; the Ismaili, whose global community under the Aga Khan has demonstrated that Islam can flourish alongside modernity, education, and civic engagement. These are not marginal curiosities. They represent living proof that Shia thought need not tend toward theocratic absolutism. A free Iran will need to make room for these liberal spiritual currents — not as instruments of state, which is precisely the error the Islamic Republic embodies, but as freely chosen paths of meaning for a people whose civilization has always drawn strength from its spiritual depth. The separation of religion and state that Reza Pahlavi advocates must not become the erasure of religion from society. It must become, instead, the condition under which faith can breathe.

The irony is almost unbearable. The reforms that Reza Pahlavi now advocates — secularism, women’s rights, education, accountable governance — are precisely those his father fought to establish and that the revolution destroyed. The White Revolution’s land redistribution, women’s enfranchisement, and educational expansion were the foundations upon which Iran’s current scientific and engineering capacity was built. The Shah’s vision of connecting Iranians to their five-thousand-year history through architecture, ceremony, and poetry — the vision I witnessed firsthand in that Niavaran study — was not the delusion of an autocrat. It was the aspiration of a leader who understood that national identity, grounded in culture and achievement, was the surest defense against both theocratic regression and ideological extremism.

Whatever mistakes the Shah made — and there were many, in bridging Iran’s societal divide, in the management of courtiers and expenditures, in the excesses of SAVAK — his domestic policies resulted in greater prosperity for millions and his geopolitical insights counseled prudence. A strong Iran under the Shah made for a more peaceful region. That was my conviction in 1975, and it is the verdict that history, with its merciless clarity, is now delivering.

The five-thousand-year Iranian journey is far from having reached a dead end. The Pahlavi reform story, and the story of all constructive, reform-minded Iranians, is not finished — merely stalled. The protesters who flood the streets of Tehran and Isfahan and Shiraz today, who brave live ammunition and internet blackouts, who chant the name of a crown prince many of them were born too late to remember, are proof that the aspiration the Shah embodied has not been extinguished. It has been buried under nearly five decades of theocratic rule, but it endures in the collective memory of a civilization that has outlasted every conqueror and every ideology imposed upon it.

There is enough room in the cul-de-sac to turn. Whether Iran’s turning comes through the peaceful transition Reza Pahlavi envisions, through the slow fracturing of clerical power, or through some convulsion not yet imaginable, the long arc of Persian history suggests it will come. When it does, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — the man I met in that memorabilia-filled study on a dark Tehran evening in 1975 — and the Iranian people from all communities seeking to join the global free, will deserve their long-overdue victory lap in history.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)