‘King of Kings' Review: A Sudden Fall

Wall Street Journal

13 hours ago

In August 1977, five months before the start of the Iranian Revolution, the CIA put out a secret report on Iran. It offered the assessment that the American-allied shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 'will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s.' There would be, it further declared, 'no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.'
Talk about clueless. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah and his family fled by plane for Egypt, abandoning Iran to the medieval-minded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme religious leader of an Islamist revolution that endures to this day—somewhat the worse for wear, no doubt, but just as malevolent toward the West as it was in the startling days of its birth.
Scott Anderson cites this blithe CIA report on the very first page of 'King of Kings,' a book whose title is the English rendition of the Farsi word shahanshah, as Pahlavi called himself. (He was also Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God on Earth.) Mr. Anderson is a first-rate writer of histories, best known for 'Lawrence in Arabia' (2013), about the fabled military adventurer who fought alongside the Arabs against the Ottomans in World War I, and 'The Quiet Americans' (2020), on a quartet of American spies who defined the shape and nature of espionage at the dawn of the Cold War.
'King of Kings' is a sweeping, gripping book, one that makes past times and dead people (often weird, complex and evil) spring to life with its narrative verve and attention to detail. It seeks to tell 'a new version of an old tale'—that of the shah's eclipse and Khomeini's violent triumph—and to 'answer some of the riddles of why the Iranian Revolution played out as it did.' It's an event that ranks among the most seminal in history. If we were to make a list, writes Mr. Anderson, of 'that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works,' we'd place the Iranian Revolution alongside the American, French and Russian ones.