King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation

The outlines of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 are already seared into the American psyche, but this spellbinding book adds fascinating texture and provides a salutary warning for policymakers today. Drawing on the accounts of major players—both American and Iranian—Anderson, a prize-winning journalist and novelist, reconstructs the missteps that contributed to the fall of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the transformation of a major American ally into an apparently implacable enemy. In absorbing detail, he recounts the blinkers and blunders of the shah’s obsequious retinue and, more tellingly, U.S. policymakers as they repeatedly miscalculated the consequences of Washington’s reliance on the shah for the monarch’s domestic support and for American standing in the region. The shah and his spending on U.S. weaponry—when he fell, Iran had the fifth largest military in the world—were so important to the United States that its policymakers grew complacent, blinded to the fragility of the shah’s rule. Anderson writes that the fall of the shah required “determined incompetence or cowardice” in Iran as well as the United States, but he is particularly and persuasively critical of U.S. policymakers who “happily bought into [the shah’s] fictions, both of himself and his nation.”