Shah flees Iran

I don't remember a time when any one topic or event has so overwhelmed or suffocated the rest of the news as the fate of Iran has done in the past week. Come to think of it, of course I can remember a time – the invasion of Poland and the Nazi invasion of Russia, the election of any president, the resignation of Richard Nixon – but it's something, even to have the impression, that the fate, the still-impending fate, of Iran should loom as large as these other tremendous events.

Before I go on, I think it's worth asking ourselves here in America, why this should be so? I put in the passing thought 'here, in America' because I notice, from the one or two foreign papers I see, that Iran, though taken seriously, does not blot out most other domestic and foreign anxieties. And I don't think this comparatively unruffled treatment of Iran in Europe, for example, is due to anybody's taking it lightly. I'm sure the papers of South Africa, which gets almost all its oil from Iran, are not taking it lightly at all. The enormous emphasis on Iran here can be rationalised in the way that, for instance, the enormous emphasis on the Boer War could have been rationalised in England, while other countries reported it as being yet another foreign uprising. 

The United States has had, since the Second War, a stake in Iran as the bellwether, the one constant reliable ally in the Middle East, throughout all the upheavals and shifting loyalties. We've been told that if the Shah went and, especially, if a government friendly, to put it mildly, friendly to the Soviet Union came in, then the huge crescent might be endangered from Pakistan, through Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, on through Ethiopia, the great mineral mine, the whole powerhouse of Western industrial energy. 

And nobody should pooh-pooh this suggestion as a morbid fear. A good many of us, 10, a dozen years ago, pooh-poohed the morbid domino theory in Indochina, the theory that if South Vietnam went to the communists, then Cambodia would go, and Thailand would be threatened, and Singapore, and the neighbours on into India. Well, the domino boys seem to be doing pretty well. 

However, experts can rationalise anything and it's nothing against them that sometimes they turn out to be right. There has to be some more pressing reason for the enormous emphasis on Iran's fate. And I think it has to do with the shift, in the past 30 years, the shift in popular power from newspapers to television. The three main networks here, in the past week, have given over most of their nightly half-hour of world and domestic news to Iran, and sometimes even done special hour and half hour programmes on Iran later in the evening. 

Of course it's an intensely dramatic story. The proclamation, about half a century ago, of a dynasty by a not over-educated Persian soldier, his abdication in favour of a stripling son and the setting up by the son of an absolute monarchy. And his ability, by whatever means, to hold on to it for 38 years through all the political upheavals of our time, simply is an interesting, to put it cold bloodedly, an interesting case of survival against all the trends of the time. It is at least as fascinating as the long, long survival of Franco in Spain. 

And then what could appeal more directly, more melodramatically, to an audience brought up on straightforward violence in the movies and on TV, than the riots, the great, hoarse marches through the streets, the shootings-down, the gunfire, the burnings, the entire country in a leaderless shambles, while off in a Paris suburb, a great brooding, bearded holy man lays down the law and bides his time. Like Gandhi. Like, I had better say, a Gandhi who if not devoted to violence is at least ready to sanction it. 

The whole public drama of it has been as yeasty and forthright as the French Revolution when told by Charles Dickens. And I think it was this combination, the thumping melodrama, combined with the genuine American stake in Iran, that made it irresistible to the television news editors who must decide what are the big stories and what is the biggest. However, the New York Times is not usually seduced by mere violence or by the collapse of one political ally and the morning after the Shah departed the New York Times had twenty-two columns over four pages and 12 correspondents on the job. Of course not all in Iran, but three in Tehran, one in Aswan, where the Shah went with Mr Sadat, another in Paris with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the exiled Muslim leader, one in Lubbock, Texas where the royal children had landed, three in Washington, the rest 'think' pieces by diplomatic trade and business specialists. This is about five times as many correspondents as covered the abdication of Edward VIII. 

So, if you ask what's happening in America this week, you'd have to say, apart from the normal January blizzards and Chicago at 19 degrees below zero, you'd have to say 'Iran'. I'm sure that if the story were over, there would have been an epitaph on the Shah's long reign and one or two final speculations about the political line of the new regime. But nobody here believes that any new regime can last without the blessing of the holy exile in Paris. So, the correspondents and the cameramen, especially, and the big thinkers are all on the alert for what, at best, seems like a Kerensky pause. A brave, but probably doomed, caretaker regime, even as you hear this, it may be toppling or gone beyond recall. 

And what has the President of the United States been thinking through all this? Twenty, even a dozen years ago, that would have been just about the dumbest, the most ridiculous question an otherwise sensible person could ask. The president, from time immemorial, through Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, did not blab aloud, or even speculate aloud to mere newspapermen what was on his mind about the ticklish questions of the day. 

Gerald Ford surprised us at the end of the year he took office by letting a clutch of correspondents, and foreigners at that, come into the White House and be televised answering their questions. But Jimmy Carter has gone far beyond any previous president in being available for a public chat, even in the tensest times. This past week, he's been on the National Broadcasting Company's evening news for five-minute interviews, three nights in a row, talking not on large, vague plans for the future but on the issues, the puzzles posed by that day's news. 

Now this may not sound very remarkable to listeners in parliamentary countries where the prime minister, the chief executive, as we call him, sits in the legislature and simply has to say what's on his mind, every day, about anything he's challenged on. But part of the secret power of the presidency, and the useful air of mystery that surrounded the office, used to be that the president was above and beyond the legislature, the parliament, the Congress, except on foreign affairs and kept his own counsel so that when he made a statement, a speech or even allowed himself to be quoted directly, it had the effect of the oracles being brought from Olympus. 

But, for reasons that I, frankly, have never worked out – I've heard lots of explanations but I've never been convinced – the recent presidents and Jimmy Carter, more than anybody, have chosen to forfeit the mystery and the Olympian stance of the presidency. True, Mr Carter kept making a sharp point all through his presidential campaign of having a presidency, as he put it, 'open to the people'. Of course, he was making the most of the dubious behaviour of Nixon. A month before his election, Mr Carter said, 'We've ignored or excluded the American people and the Congress from participation in the shaping of our foreign policy. It's been one of secrecy and exclusion. I'm not going to exclude the American people from that process in the future as Mr Ford and Kissinger have done. Our policies should be open and honest, shaped with the participation of Congress from the outset.' 

Well, it sounds open and honest. But a few weeks ago what did he do? The headline in Time magazine put it starkly, 'Carter Stuns the World'. He certainly stunned both the Congress and the people, when he suddenly announced that, from 1 January, the United States was going to recognise communist China and cease to recognise Taiwan. This was more Olympian, more imperial, than anything Nixon or Ford ever did in foreign policy. There was no consultation, as the constitution requires, with anybody in Congress, no hint dropped to the people. You have to go back to Kennedy's secret backing of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion for a presidential gesture at once so independent and so unconstitutional. Maybe Mr Carter, getting wind of the storm brewing in Congress about his single-handed abrogation of a treaty, has decided to try and cosy up to the people in these nightly chats. 

Whatever his motive, he's been on hand for network correspondents, for reporters, doing interviews for publication. And what has he said? He's said openly that the Shah couldn't handle the power he'd given himself, that the United States doesn't want to influence the people of Iran, one way or the other, and that he hopes – he hopes – Iran will get a stable government that will trade with the West and will not be pro-communist. He also added that he doesn't believe – and this too may be a hope – that the Soviet Union wants to cause trouble in Iran. It wants, he believes, he hopes, a stable, unaligned government. 

Well, that's not much to go on by way of opening up foreign policy to the people. The fact is, and we've seen it a hundred times in the United Nations, open agreements openly arrived at are an impossible diplomatic method between nations. When he's out in the open, the president has to fence and he does it very adroitly. We saw that in his last Wednesday's press conference. Presidential press conferences, by the way, used to be closed and strict rules governed what might be published. Since Eisenhower, they've been televised and this doesn't mean that we know any more, the fencing has simply to be more artful. The president still minds his own business. 

If you and I knew everything that was on Mr Carter's mind and he said it aloud, every ally, every potential enemy would go into tantrums of doubt and indecision. Still, there's one body that wants to get a glimpse, a hint of what he's up to in foreign affairs. The constitution demands it. And the new Congress, I'm pretty sure, is going to insist on it.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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