name	Allen Welsh Dulles
order	5th
office	Director of Central Intelligence
term start	February 26, 1953
term end	November 29, 1961
president	Dwight D. EisenhowerJohn F. Kennedy
predecessor	GEN Walter Bedell Smith, USA
successor	John McCone
birth date	April 7, 1893
birth place	Watertown, New York
death date	January 29, 1969
nationality	American
spouse	Clover Todd, daughter of a Columbia University professor
children	Allen Macy Dulles, Jr.
alma mater	Princeton University
footnotes	}}

Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was an American diplomat, lawyer, banker and public official who became the first civilian and the longest serving (1953–61) Director of Central Intelligence (de facto head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) and a member of the Warren Commission. Between stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. Allen W. Dulles was one of the directors of the J. Henry Schroder bank. His older brother, John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower Administration.

Early life and family

Allen Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, and grew up in a family where public service was valued and world affairs were a common topic of discussion. Dulles was one of five children born to Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster). He was five years younger than his brother John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State and chairman and senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and two years older than his sister, diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather was John W. Foster, who was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. His paternal grandfather, John Welch Dulles, had been a Presbyterian missionary in China. His uncle (by marriage) Robert Lansing also was a U.S. Secretary of State. His nephew, Avery Dulles, was a Roman Catholic cardinal, Jesuit priest and noted theologian who taught at Fordham University.

Allen Dulles graduated from Princeton University, and in 1916 entered the diplomatic service. Dulles was serving in Switzerland and was responsible for reviewing and rejecting Vladimir Lenin's application for a visa to the United States. In 1920 he married Clover Todd, daughter of a Columbia University professor; their only son, Allen Macy Dulles Jr., was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War when a mortar fragment penetrated his brain.

In 1921, while at the US Embassy in Istanbul, Dulles exposed the infamous Protocols of Zion as a forgery, providing the story to ''The Times'' in London, whose article was reprinted by the ''New York Times''. In 1926 he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, becoming the first new director since the Council's foundation in 1921. He was the Council's secretary from 1933.

Background in intelligence

After Allen Dulles graduated from college he became a diplomat and during his posts in different European countries he started to gather intelligence information. During the First World War, he was actually working as an intelligence officer. After the war, in the 1920s, he served five years as chief of the Near East Division of the State Department. In 1926 he joined the New York firm where his brother was a senior partner to start working as lawyer. From time to time, during the late twenties and early thirties, he served as legal adviser to the delegation at the League of Nations on arms limitation. There he had the opportunity to meet with Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Maxim Litvinov, and the leaders of Britain and France.

Dulles was transferred from Britain to Bern, Switzerland, where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of the war. He was assisted in intelligence-gathering activities by a German emigrant Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz. Dulles notably was heavily involved in the controversial and secret Operation Sunrise (secret negotiations in March 1945 to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy). He was featured in the classic Soviet TV series ''Seventeen Moments of Spring'' for his role in that operation. Dulles became the station chief in Bern, Switzerland, for the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA). Dulles supplied The U.S. government with much sensitive information about Nazi Germany.

Many of his ideas were born during family retreats at the Henderson Harbour on the southeaster shore of Lake Ontario with his paternal grandfather, John W. Foster, who had been Secretary of State in 1892 under President Harrison; Robert Lansing a person related by marriage to his family, who was Secretary of State from 1915 to 1920 under President Woodrow Wilson; and his older brother, John Foster Dulles, who would be Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

When First World War was over some military and intelligence services remained, as Allen said, in “skeleton form”, such as the G-2, CIC, and the Naval ONI. It is fair to remember here that the “marines” were always the force threaten to be sent out, or actually sent out, to intimidate Central and South America government if a USA corporation was to lose any business or land.

After Pearl Harbour, December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) decided to create an Intelligence group to combat the Japanese threat and set William J. Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer, for the job. Donovan worked with Allen Dulles, a Wall Street Lawyer too. The office was initially called Coordinator of Information which was set up in Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center, taking over offices staffed by Britain's MI6 and by June 1942 was renamed Office of Strategic Services.

In 1943 Frank Wisner was called in to join them. Frank Wisner was a Wall Street lawyer who has been working at the Carter Ledyard and Milburn, a Franklin Roosevelt’s firm dedicated to corporate law, and would become the mad man of the Clandestine Service who would keep the CIA doing daring and dubious cover operations that demonstrated the agency were capable of changing governments in the Third World Countries almost at will. Wisner became the right hand of Dulles to overthrow Iranian’s President Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 because of Oil business, to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 for its intent to expropriate four hundred thousand acres from the United Fruit Company and later, in 1973, the Chilean’s democratically-elected President Salvador Allende for nationalizing several USA companies.

Dulles worked on intelligence regarding German plans and activities. Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers (who linked him, through Hans Bernd Gisevius, to the tiny but daring opposition to Hitler in Germany itself). Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 missiles.

Dulles also received valuable information from Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat and a foe of the Nazis. Kolbe supplied secret documents regarding active German spies and plans regarding the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. In 1945, he played a central role in negotiations leading to the unconditional capitulation of German troops in Italy. After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin station chief.

Dulles played an active role in connection with the formulation of the legislation setting up the CIA: The National Security Act of 1947. In 1948, he and two more people appointed by President Truman presented some recommendation to the president to reform the CIA which eventually would make him director of it.

In the 1948 Presidential election, Allen Dulles was Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey's chief advisor. The Dulles brothers and James Forrestal helped form the Office of Policy Coordination. Under President Eisenhower, Dulles became CIA director.

Dulles is considered one of the essential creators of the modern United States intelligence system and was an indispensable guide to it in the critical period before the Cold War as well as the early part of the Cold War. He served to establish intelligence networks worldwide to check and counter Soviet and eastern European communist advances as well as international communist movements.

Financial ties with Nazi Germany

Investigative authors John Loftus and Mark Aarons have described Allen Dulles "as one of the worst traitors in American history, an economic version of Benedict Arnold." They suggest Dulles was instrumental in financing Nazi Germany. Dulles, according to these authors, created a financial network among Nazi corporations, American oil, and Saudi Arabia. Together with his brother, John Foster Dulles, and Jack Philby, Allen Dulles established an international financial network for the benefit of the Third Reich. Near the end of World War II, Dulles successfully directed the smuggling of Nazi money back to his Western clients, carefully evading Allied surveillance. Like Jack Philby, Allen Dulles is also believed to be an "archetypical upper-crust" anti-Semite.

Other scholars have a completely different take on Allen Dulles than Loftus and Aarons. They point out that in 1935 Allen Dulles returned from a business trip to Germany appalled by the Nazi treatment of German Jews, and despite his brother, Senior Partner John Foster Dulles' objections, lead a movement within Sullivan and Cromwell to close the Berlin Office. As a result of Allen Dulles' efforts, the Berlin Office of Sullivan and Cromwell was closed and the firm ceased to conduct business within Nazi Germany.

In the years preceding World War II, Allen Dulles became increasingly concerned with the threat that Nazi Germany posed to Western democracies and world peace. As the Republican Party began to divide into Isolationist and Interventionist factions, Allen Dulles became an outspoken Interventionist, running unsucessfully in 1938 for the Republican nomination in the Sixteenth Congressional District of New York,on a platform calling for a strengthening of U.S. defenses. Allen Dulles collaborated with Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the Editor of Foreign Affairs, on two books, Can We Be Neutral? (1936), and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939) where they concluded that diplomatic, military and economic isolation, in a traditional sense, were no longer possible in an increasingly interdependent international system. Allen Dulles also helped a number of German Jews, such as the banker Paul Kemper, escape to the United States from Nazi Germany.

CIA career

In 1953, Dulles became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence, which had been formed as part of the National Security Act of 1947; earlier directors had been military officers. The Agency's covert operations were an important part of the Eisenhower administration's new Cold War national security policy known as the "New Look". Under Dulles's direction, the CIA created MK-Ultra, a top secret mind control research project which was managed by Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles also personally oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a program which influenced American media companies as part of the "New

At Dulles's request, President Eisenhower demanded that Senator Joseph McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. In March, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential communist subversion of the Agency. Although none of the investigations revealed any wrongdoing, the hearings were still potentially damaging, not only to the CIA's reputation but also to the security of sensitive information. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and intentionally fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him. In fact, the CIA had been seriously compromised and "duped by Soviet and Chinese intelligent services" from its inception. Dulles discredited McCarthy, knowing that revelations of these facts would lead to the agency's destruction as well, presumably, as that of his own career and reputation.

In the early 1950s the U.S. Air Force conducted a competition for a new photo reconnaissance aircraft. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's Skunk Works submitted a design number called the CL-282, which married sailplane-like wings to the body of a supersonic interceptor. This aircraft was rejected by the Air Force, but several of the civilians on the review board took notice, and Edwin Land presented a proposal for the aircraft to Dulles.

The aircraft became what is known as the U-2 'spy plane', and it was initially operated by CIA pilots. Its introduction into operational service in 1957 greatly enhanced the CIA's ability to monitor Soviet activity through overhead photo surveillance. Ironically, the aircraft eventually entered service with the Air Force.

Involvement in coups against governments of Iran and Guatemala

In 1953, Dulles was also involved in the covert operations that led to the removal of Mohammad Mossadeq, prime minister of Iran, by the Shah. Rumors of a Soviet takeover had surfaced due to the recent nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In actuality, British diplomat Christopher Woodhouse had pitched the idea of a coup d'état to President Eisenhower to try to regain British control of the oil company. Woodhouse would later say, "Not wishing to be accused of using Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire, I decided to emphasize the communist threat [to Iran].

Dulles found success in his participation with the CIA's first attempts at removing foreign leaders by covert means. Notably, the elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran was deposed in 1953 (via Operation Ajax), and President Arbenz of Guatemala was removed in 1954. The Guatemalan coup was carried out under the CIA code-name Operation PBSUCCESS. Dulles was on the board of the United Fruit Company. Dulles saw these kind of clandestine activities as an essential part of the struggle against communism.

Sabotage against Cuba: Operation 40

At the direction of President Eisenhower, Dulles established Operation 40, comprising 40 officials and agents whose primary area of operations was the Caribbean region, including Cuba. On March 4, 1960, ''La Coubre'', a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay. It was loaded with arms and ammunition destined for the armed forces of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The explosion killed 75 people and over 200 were injured. Fabian Escalante, an officer of the Department of State Security (G-2), later claimed that this was the first successful act carried out by Operation 40.

Operation 40 not only was involved in sabotage operations but also, in fact, evolved into a team of assassins. One member, Frank Sturgis, claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents... We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time."

Over the next few years Operation 40 worked closely with several anti-Castro Cuban organizations including Alpha 66. CIA officials and freelance agents such as William Harvey, Thomas G. Clines, Porter Goss, Gerry Patrick Hemming, E. Howard Hunt, David Sánchez Morales, Carl Elmer Jenkins, Bernard Barker, Barry Seal, Frank Sturgis, William Robert Plumlee ("Tosh" Plumlee), and William C. Bishop also joined the project.

During the Kennedy Administration, Dulles faced increasing criticism. The pro-American but unpopular regimes in Iran and Guatemala that Dulles had helped put in place were widely regarded as brutal and corrupt.

Several failed assassination plots utilizing CIA-recruited operatives from the Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans directly against Fidel Castro undermined the CIA's credibility. However, the reputation of the agency and its director declined drastically after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco and Allen Dulles and his staff (including Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and Deputy Director Charles Cabell) were forced to resign in September 1961. President Kennedy reportedly said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

George H. W. Bush was a fund raiser and eventually a recruiter for Operation 40.

Later life

Dulles published the book ''The Craft of Intelligence'' (ISBN 1-59228-297-0) in 1963.

On November 29, 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of the U.S. President John F. Kennedy, though Kennedy had bitterly fired him. The appointment was later criticized by some historians, who have noted that Kennedy had fired him, and he was logically unlikely to be impartial in passing the important judgements charged to the Warren Commission. Despite his knowledge of the several assassination plots by the CIA against Castro, he is not documented to have mentioned these plots to any investigating authorities during the Warren Commission.

In 1969 Dulles died of influenza, complicated by pneumonia, at the age of 75. He was buried in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.

In the media

Allen Dulles was portrayed by Vyacheslav Salevich in the Soviet TV miniseries ''Seventeen Moments of Spring'' (1973).

In the film ''The Good Shepherd'', William Hurt portrays the fictional head of the CIA, Phillip Allen, who appears to be based on Dulles.

In the film ''JFK'', Jim Garrison suspects Dulles of participating in the cover-up surrounding John Kennedy's assassination and attempts to subpoena him.

Bibliography

Complete bibliography at WorldCat search

See also

Dulles' Plan

Operation Mockingbird

References

Further reading

Dulles, Allen. ''Craft of Intelligence'' (New York: Harper & Row, 1963; Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2006)

Dulles, Allen. ''The Secret Surrender'' (New York: Harper & Row, 1966; Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2006)

Dulles, Allen. F''rom Hitler’s Doorstep : The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942-1945'' / edited with commentary by Neal H. Petersen. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)

Grose, Peter. ''Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles'' (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1994)

Mosley, Leonard. ''Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles.'' (New York: The Dial Press, 1978)

Srodes, James, ''Allen Dulles: Master of Spies'' (Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1999)

Audio stream of lecture given by Dulles: 'The Role of Intelligence in Policy Making' (RAM format)

External links

Allen Dulles - Political Friendster

Allen Dulles Papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University

Category:Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency Category:New York lawyers Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:American spies Category:American anti-communists Category:Members of the Warren Commission Category:Rockefeller Center Category:People of the Office of Strategic Services Category:Princeton University alumni Category:George Washington University Law School alumni Category:1893 births Category:1969 deaths Category:Dulles family

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name	Timothy Leary
birth name	Timothy Francis Leary
birth date	October 22, 1920
birth place	Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
death date	May 31, 1996
death place	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
nationality	American
occupation	Psychologist Author
employer	UC Berkeley Kaiser Family Foundation Harvard
known	Psychedelic therapy
spouse	}}

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an influential American psychologist and writer, known in particular for advocating the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs. A controversial figure during the 1960s and 1970s, he defended the use of the drug LSD for its therapeutic, emotional and spiritual benefits, and believed it showed potential in the field of psychiatry. Leary also popularized the phrases "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and "Set and setting". Both proved to be influential on the 1960s counterculture. Due to his influence in this field, he was attacked by conservative figures in the United States, and described as "the most dangerous man in America" by President Richard Nixon.

Early life and education

Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of an Irish American dentist who abandoned his wife Abigail Ferris when Leary was thirteen. Leary graduated from Springfield's Classical High School.

Timothy Leary attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts from September 1938 to June 1940. Under pressure from his father, Leary enrolled as a cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point. In his first months he acquired numerous demerits for rule infractions and then got into serious trouble for failing to report infractions by other cadets when on supervisory duty. He was alleged to have engaged in a bout of drinking and then failed to be forthright about it. For violating the Academy's honor code, the Honor Committee asked him to resign. When he refused, he was "silenced", that is, shunned and ignored by his co-cadets as a tactic to pressure him to resign. Though acquitted by a court-martial, the silencing continued as well as an onslaught of demerits for minuscule infractions of the rules. When the treatment continued in his second year, his mother appealed to a family friend, U.S. Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who conducted a personal investigation. Behind the scenes, the Honor Committee revised its position. The Honor Committee announced that it would abide by the court-martial verdict and then Leary resigned and received an honorable discharge. Almost fifty years later, Leary said that it was "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law".

Leary transferred to University of Alabama where he received a B.A. degree in psychology in 1943. His obituary in the ''New York Times'' said he "finally earned his bachelor's degree in the U. S. Army during World War II," when he was a sergeant in the Medical Corps. He received an M.S. degree in psychology at Washington State University in 1946, and his Ph.D. degree in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. The title of Leary's Ph.D. dissertation was "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process." He became an assistant professor at Berkeley (1950–1955), director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation (1955–1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959–1963). He was fired from Harvard for failing to conduct his scheduled class lectures, though he claimed that he had fulfilled all of his teaching obligations. The decision to dismiss him was allegedly influenced by his role in the popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and faculty members.

Leary's early work in psychology expanded on the research of Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney regarding the importance of interpersonal forces in mental health. Leary focused on how the interpersonal process might be used to diagnose disorders and patterns found in human personalities. He developed a complex and respected interpersonal circumplex model, published in ''The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality'', which offered a means by which psychologists could use MMPI scores to determine a respondent's characteristic interpersonal modes of reaction.

Leary married Marianne Busch in 1945, who gave birth in 1947 to their first child, Susan, while he was working on his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. Susan was followed two years later by a son, Jack. In 1952 the Leary family spent a year in Spain, subsisting on a research grant awarded to Leary. A Berkeley colleague of Leary's, Marv Freedman, later recounted that "…Something had been stirred in him in terms of breaking out of being another cog in society…".

In 1955, Leary's wife committed suicide, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone. He described himself during this period as "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."

Psychedelic experiments and experiences

On May 13, 1957, ''Life'' magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson that documented the use of psilocybin mushrooms in the religious ceremony of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, experienced psychedelic (or entheogenic) Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms during a trip to Mexico, and related the experience to Leary. In August 1960, Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico with Russo and ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. In 1965, Leary commented that he "learned more about... (his) brain and its possibilities... (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than... (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying and doing research in psychology."

Upon his return from Mexico to Harvard in 1960, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects (in this case, prisoners, and later, students of the Andover Newton Theological Seminary) using a synthesized version of the then-legal drug—one of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms including Psilocybe mexicana. The compound was produced according to a process developed by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, famous for synthesizing LSD.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg asked Leary to participate in the experiments after hearing about the Harvard research project. Leary was inspired by Ginsberg's enthusiasm and the two shared an optimism in the benefit of psychedelic substances to help people ‘turn on’ (discover a higher level of consciousness). Together they began a campaign of introducing other intellectuals and artists to psychedelics.

Leary argued that psychedelic substances, used at proper dosages, in a stable set and setting could, under the guidance of psychologists, alter behavior in beneficial ways not easily attainable through regular therapy. Leary's research focused on treating alcoholism and reforming criminals. Many of Leary's research participants reported profound mystical and spiritual experiences, which they claim permanently altered their lives in a very positive manner. According to Leary's autobiography, ''Flashbacks'', LSD was given to 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers and 75 percent of the test subjects reported the experience as one of the most educational and revealing experiences of their lives.

The Concord Prison Experiment was designed to evaluate how the effects of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy would rehabilitate prisoners upon being released. After being guided through the psychedelic experience ('trips') by Leary and his associates, 36 prisoners allegedly repented and swore to give up future criminal activity. For prisoners in USA, the average recidivism rate is 60 percent; the recidivism rate of the subjects involved in Leary's project dropped to 20 percent. The Concord Prison experiment concluded that long-term reduction in overall criminal recidivism rates could be achieved with a combination of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy (inside the prison) along with a comprehensive post-release follow-up support program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. The results of this experiment were later largely contested by a follow-up study, citing several problems, including time differences monitoring the study group versus the control group, and other methodology factors, including the difference between subjects re-incarcerated for parole violations versus those imprisoned for new crimes. The study that contested Leary's research concluded that only a statistically slight improvement could be shown by using psilocybin (as opposed to the significant improvement Leary reported).

Leary and Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was run by Lisa Bieberman (now known as Licia Kuenning), a disciple of Leary and one of his many lovers. Their research attracted a great deal of public attention and, as a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments, but were unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for psychedelics developed near the Harvard University Campus.

According to Andrew Weil, Leary was fired for not showing up to his lecture classes, while Alpert was fired for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment. This version is supported by the words of Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, who, regarding Leary's termination, released the following statement on May 27, 1963:

On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted, because Timothy F. Leary, lecturer on clinical psychology, has failed to keep his classroom appointments and has absented himself from Cambridge without permission, to relieve him from further teaching duty and to terminate his salary as of April 30, 1963.

In 1963 he had a televised debate with Jerry Lettvin of MIT.

Leary's activities interested siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates acquire the use of a rambling mansion on an estate in the town of Millbrook (near Poughkeepsie, New York), where they continued their experiments. Leary later wrote:

We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.

Later, the Millbrook estate was described by Luc Sante of ''The New York Times'' as:

the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy.

Others contest this characterization of the Millbrook estate; for instance, in ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'', Tom Wolfe portrays Leary as only interested in research, and not using psychedelics merely for recreational purposes. According to "The Crypt Trip" chapter of Wolfe's book, when Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters visited the residence, the Pranksters did not even see Leary, who was engaged in a three-day trip. According to Wolfe, Leary's group even refused to give the Pranksters acid.

In 1964, Leary co-authored a book with Alpert and Ralph Metzner called ''The Psychedelic Experience'', based upon the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In it, they wrote:

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key—it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Regarding a 1966 raid by G. Gordon Liddy, Leary told author and Prankster Paul Krassner: "He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life. I have never had and never will have a gun around."

On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents, based on a "freedom of religion" argument. (Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual leader, The Brotherhood did not evolve out of IFIF International Foundation for Internal Freedom.) On October 6, 1966, LSD was made illegal in the United States and controlled so strictly that not only were possession and recreational use criminalized, but all legal scientific research programs on the drug in the US were shut down as well.

In 1966, Folkways Records recorded Leary reading from his book ''The Psychedelic Experience'', and released the album, ''The Psychedelic Experience: Readings from the Book "The Psychedelic Experience. A Manual Based on the Tibetan...".''

During late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses presenting a multi-media performance "The Death of the Mind", which attempted to artistically replicate the LSD experience. Leary said the League for Spiritual Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its membership limit, but he encouraged others to form their own psychedelic religions. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called ''Start Your Own Religion'', to encourage people to do so (see below under "writings").

Leary was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In by Michael Bowen the primary organizer of the event. Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered the famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary added that Marshall, "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that's a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"

At some point in the late 1960s, Leary moved to California. He made a number of friends in Hollywood. "When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of ''Bonanza''. All the guests were on acid."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leary (in collaboration with the writer Brian Barritt) formulated his circuit model of consciousness, in which he claimed that the human mind/nervous system consisted of seven circuits which, when activated, produce seven levels of consciousness (this model was first published as the short essay, "The Seven Tongues of God"). The system soon expanded to include an eighth circuit; this version was first unveiled to the world in the rare 1973 pamphlet "Neurologic" (written with Joanna Leary while he was in prison), but was not exhaustively formulated until the publication of ''Exo-Psychology'' (by Leary) and in Robert Anton Wilson's ''Cosmic Trigger'' in 1977. Wilson contributed significantly to the model after befriending Leary in the early 1970s, and has used it as a framework for further exposition in his book ''Prometheus Rising'', among other works.

Leary believed that the first four of these circuits ("the Larval Circuits" or "Terrestrial Circuits") are naturally accessed by most people in their lifetimes, triggered at natural transition points in life, such as puberty. The second four circuits ("the Stellar Circuits" or "Extra-Terrestrial Circuits"), Leary claimed, were evolutionary off-shoots of the first four that would be triggered at transition points that we will have when we evolve further, and would equip us to encompass life in space, as well as the expansion of consciousness that would be necessary to make further scientific and social progress. Leary suggested that some people may "shift to the latter four gears" (i.e. trigger these circuits artificially) by utilizing consciousness-altering techniques such as meditation and spiritual endeavors such as yoga, or by taking psychedelic drugs specific to each circuit. An example of the information Leary cited as evidence for the purpose of the "higher" four circuits was the feeling of floating and uninhibited motion experienced by users of marijuana. In the eight circuit model of consciousness, a primary theoretical function of the fifth circuit (the first of the four developed for life in outer space) is to allow humans to become accustomed to life in a zero or low gravity environment.

Legal troubles

Leary's first run-in with the law came on December 20, 1965. Leary decided to take his children and Rosemary to Mexico for an extended stay to write a book. During a border crossing with his girlfriend Rosemary Woodruff and two children Jack and Susan from Mexico into the United States, marijuana was found in his daughter Susan's underwear. They had crossed into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico in the late afternoon and discovered they would have to wait until morning for the appropriate visa for an extended stay. They decided to cross back into Texas to spend the night and were on the bridge when Rosemary remembered she had a very small amount of marijuana in her possession. It was impossible to throw it out on the bridge so Susan put it in her underwear. After taking responsibility for the controlled substance, Leary was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Act on March 11, 1966, and sentenced to 30 years in jail, given a $30,000 fine and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Soon after, however, he appealed the case, claiming the Marihuana Tax Act was, in fact, unconstitutional, as it required a degree of self-incrimination. Leary claimed this was in stark violation of the Fifth Amendment. On December 26, 1968, Leary was arrested again, in Laguna Beach, California, this time for the possession of two roaches of marijuana, which Leary claimed were planted by the arresting officer. He was later convicted of this offense. On May 19, 1969, The Supreme Court concurred with Leary in ''Leary v. United States''. The Marihuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional, and his 1965 conviction was quashed. On the day his conviction was overturned, Leary announced his candidacy for Governor of California, running against Ronald Reagan. His campaign slogan was "Come together, join the party." On June 1, 1969, Leary joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal Bed-In and Lennon subsequently wrote Leary a campaign song called "Come Together".

On January 21, 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added later while in custody, for a previous arrest in 1965, twenty years in total to be served consecutively. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of the tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening. As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped. Leary claimed his non-violent escape was a humorous prank, and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone. For a fee, paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, out of the United States and into Algeria. He sought the patronage of Eldridge Cleaver and the remnants of the separatist USA Black Panther party's "government in exile." After staying with them for a short time, Leary claimed that Cleaver attempted to hold him and his wife hostage.

In 1971, the couple fled to Switzerland, "where they were sheltered and effectively imprisoned by a large-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an 'obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers,' but mostly had a film deal in mind." In 1972, President Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, persuaded the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did for a month, but the Swiss refused to extradite him back to the U.S. In that same year, Leary and Rosemary separated. Leary became involved with Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a stepdaughter of financier Árpád Plesch. Leary "married" Harcourt-Smith at a hotel two weeks after they were first introduced; she used his surname until their breakup in early 1977. They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut and finally went to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1973. "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners", Luc Sante wrote in a review of a biography of Leary. That interpretation of the law was used by U.S. authorities to capture the fugitive. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."

At a layover in the United Kingdom, as Leary was being flown back to the United States, he requested political asylum from Her Majesty's Government, but to no avail. He was then held on five million dollars bail ($21.5 mil. in 2006). President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled him "the most dangerous man in America." The judge at his remand hearing remarked, "If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas." Facing a total of 95 years in prison, Leary hired criminal defense attorney Bruce Margolin and was put into solitary confinement in Folsom Prison, California.

Leary made somewhat of a pretense of cooperating with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen and radical attorneys, by giving them information that they already had or that was of little consequence; in response, the FBI gave him the code name "Charlie Thrush".

Leary would later claim, and members of the Weathermen would later support, that no one was ever prosecuted based on any information he gave to the FBI.

The Weather Underground, the radical left organization responsible for his escape, was not impacted by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the escape for which they proudly took credit. Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was "we understand".

While imprisoned Leary remained a productive writer, sowing the seeds for his incarnation as a futurist lecturer with the StarSeed Series. In ''Starseed'' (1973), ''neurologic'' (1973), & ''Terra II: A Way Out'' (1974), Leary transitioned from Eastern philosophy and Aleister Crowley to a belief that outer space was a medium for spiritual transcendence as his principal frame of reference. ''Neurologic'' also added the idea of "time dilation/contraction" available to the activated brain through the cellular, DNA, or atomic level of reality. ''Terra II'' is his first detailed proposal for space colonization. Leary's muse peaked with ''Exo—Psychology'', ''Neuropolitics'', and ''Intelligence Agents''.

Last two decades

Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976, by Governor Jerry Brown. After briefly relocating to San Diego, Leary established residence in Laurel Canyon and continued to write books and appear as a lecturer and (by his own terminology) "stand-up philosopher." In 1978, Leary married filmmaker Barbara Blum, also known as Barbara Chase, sister of actress Tanya Roberts. Leary adopted Blum's son and raised him as his own. Leary and Blum divorced in 1992.

Leary cultivated a friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy, the notorious Watergate burglar and conservative radio talk-show host. They toured the lecture circuit in 1982 as ex-cons (Liddy having been imprisoned after high-level involvement in the Watergate scandal) debating about different social and fiscal issues from gay rights and abortion to welfare and the environment with Leary generally representing the voice from the left and Liddy representing the voice from the right. The tour generated massive publicity and considerable funds for both figures. Along with the personal appearances, a successful documentary called ''Return Engagement'' that chronicled the tour, and the concurrent release of the autobiography ''Flashbacks'', helped to return Leary to the spotlight. In 1988, Leary held a fundraiser for Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.

While his stated ambition was eventually to cross over as a mainstream Hollywood personality, reluctant studios and sponsors made certain that it would never occur. Nonetheless, constant touring ensured that he was able to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle by the mid-1980s, while his colorful past made him a desirable guest at A-list parties throughout the decade. He also attracted a more intellectual crowd, which included John Frusciante (Leary appeared in Johnny Depp's and Gibby Haynes' 1994 film ''Stuff'' which showed the squalid conditions that Frusciante was living in at the time), Robert Anton Wilson, David Byrne, science fiction ''wunderkind'' William Gibson, and Norman Spinrad amongst its ranks.

While he continued to use drugs frequently on a private basis, rather than evangelizing and proselytizing the use of psychedelics as he had in the 1960s, the latter day Leary emphasized the importance of space colonization and an ensuring extension of the human lifespan while also providing a detailed explanation of the eight-circuit model of consciousness in books such as ''Info-Psychology'', among several others. He adopted the acronym "SMI²LE" as a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I² (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension). Leary credited L5 co-founder Keith Henson with helping develop his interest in space migration.

Leary's colonization plan varied greatly throughout the years. Because he believed that he would soon migrate into space, Leary was opposed to the ecology movement. He dismissed many of Earth's problems and labeled the entire field of ecology "a seductive dinosaur science." Leary stated that only the "larval," intellectually and philosophically backward humans, would choose to remain in "the fouled nest." According to his initial plan to leave the planet, 5,000 of Earth's most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities. This idea was inspired by the plotline of Paul Kantner's concept album ''Blows Against The Empire'', which in turn was derived from Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long series. In the 1980s, he came to embrace NASA scientist Gerard O'Neill's more realistic and egalitarian plans to construct giant Eden-like High Orbital Mini-Earths (documented in the Robert Anton Wilson lecture ''H.O.M.E.s on LaGrange'') using existing technology and raw materials from the Moon, orbital rock and obsolete satellites.

During the 1980s, Leary became fascinated by computers, the Internet, and virtual reality. He established one of the earliest websites in existence and referred to the Web as "the LSD of the '90s" He became a promoter of virtual reality systems, and sometimes demonstrated a prototype of the Mattel Power Glove as part of his lectures (as in ''From Psychedelics to Cybernetics''). Around this time he cultivated friendships with a number of notable people in the field, including Brenda Laurel, a pioneering researcher in virtual environments and human–computer interaction. With the rise of cyberdelic counter-culture, Leary became a consultant to Billy Idol in the production of the latter's 1993 album, ''Cyberpunk''.

In 1990, Leary's daughter, Susan, committed suicide after years of mental instability. After separating from Barbara Leary in 1992, Leary formed a new entourage of Baby Boomer and Generation X artists and cultural figures that included people as diverse as actors Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon and Dan Aykroyd, and his granddaughters, Dieadra Martino and Sara Brown; grandson, Ashley Martino; son, Zach Leary; author Douglas Rushkoff, publisher Bob Guccione, Jr., and goddaughters: actress Winona Ryder and artist/music-photographer Hilary Hulteen. In spite of his declining health, Leary maintained a regular schedule of public appearances through 1994.

From 1989 on, Leary had begun to reestablish his connection to unconventional religious movements with an interest in altered states of consciousness. In 1989 he appeared with friend and book collaborator Robert Anton Wilson in a dialog entitled ''The Inner Frontier'' for the Association for Consciousness Exploration, a Cleveland-based group that had been responsible for his first Cleveland, Ohio appearance in 1979. After that, he appeared at the Starwood Festival, a major Neo-Pagan event run by ACE, in 1992 and 1993 (though his planned 1994 WinterStar Symposium appearance was cancelled due to his declining health). In front of hundreds of neo-pagans in 1992, he declared, "I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan." He also collaborated with Eric Gullichsen on ''Load and Run High-tech Paganism: Digital Polytheism''. Prior to his passing on May 31, 1996, Dr. Timothy Leary recorded the "Right to Fly" album with Simon Stokes. It was released in July 1996.

Death

In early 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. He did not reveal the condition to the press upon diagnosis, but did so after the death of Jerry Garcia in August.

Leary authored an outline for a book called ''Design for Dying'', which attempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying. Leary's entourage (as mentioned above)—updated his website on a daily basis as a sort of proto-blog, noting his daily intake of various illicit and legal chemical substances, with a predilection for nitrous oxide, cigarettes, his trademark "Leary Biscuits" (a snack cracker with cheese and a small marijuana bud, briefly microwaved), and eventually heroin and morphine. His sterile house was completely redecorated by the staff, who had more or less moved in, with an array of surreal ornamentation. In his final months, thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him in his California home. Until the final weeks of his illness, Leary gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of embracing death.

For a number of years, Leary was reported to have been excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension, and Leary publicly announced in September 1988 that he had signed up with Alcor. Leary had appeared at Alcor's grand opening a year previously. He did not believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he believed that cryonics had important possibilities and stated the chance was "one chance in 1,000". He called it his "duty as a futurist", and helped publicize the process and hoped it would work for his children and grandchildren if not for him, although he said he was "light-hearted" about it. Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, originally Alcor and then CryoCare, which delivered a cryonic tank to Leary's house in the months before his death. However, Leary subsequently requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family.

Leary died on May 31, 1996 at the age of 77. His death was videotaped for posterity at his request, capturing his final words. During his final moments, he said, "Why not?" to his son Zachary. He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations, and died soon after. His last word, according to Zachary Leary, was "beautiful."

The film ''Timothy Leary's Dead'' (1996) contains a simulated sequence in which Leary allows his bodily functions to be suspended for the purposes of cryonic preservation, and his head is removed and placed on ice. At the end of the film is a sequence showing the creation of the artificial head used in the film.

Seven grams of Leary's ashes were arranged by his friend at Celestis to be buried in space aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 24 other people including Gene Roddenberry (creator of ''Star Trek''), Gerard O'Neill (space physicist), Krafft Ehricke (rocket scientist), and others. A Pegasus rocket containing their remains was launched on April 21, 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burnt up in the atmosphere.

Influence

Leary is often considered one of the most prominent figures during the counterculture of the 1960s, and since those times has remained incredibly influential on pop culture, literature, television, film; and especially music.

Timothy Leary's ideas heavily influenced the work of Robert Anton Wilson. This influence went both ways and Leary admittedly took just as much from Wilson. Wilson's book ''Prometheus Rising'' was an in depth, highly detailed and inclusive work documenting Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness. Although the theory originated in discussions between Leary and a Hindu holy man at Millbrook, Wilson was one of the most ardent proponents of it and introduced the theory to a mainstream audience in 1977's bestselling ''Cosmic Trigger''. In 1989, they appeared together on stage in a dialog entitled ''The Inner Frontier'' in Cleveland, Ohio hosted by the Association for Consciousness Exploration, (the same group that had hosted Leary's first Cleveland appearance in 1979). Wilson and Leary conversed a great deal on philosophical, political and futurist matters and became close friends who remained in contact through Leary's time in prison and up until his death. Wilson regarded Leary as a brilliant man and often is quoted as saying (paraphrase) "Leary had a great deal of 'hilaritas', the type of cheer and good humour by which it was said you could recognise a deity".

Owsley Stanley, one of the pioneers of the era, would later write of him:

Leary was a fool. Drunk with "celebrity-hood" and his own ego, he became a media clown—and was arguably the single most damaging actor involved in the destruction of the evanescent social movement of the '60s. Tim, with his very public exhortations to the kids to "tune in, turn on and drop out", is the inspiration for all the current draconian US drug laws against psychedelics. He would not listen to any of us when we asked him to please cool it, he loved the limelight and relished his notoriety... I was not a fan of his.

Author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey remained a supporter and admirer of Leary throughout his career,

Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking.

World religion scholar Huston Smith was turned on by Leary after the two were introduced to one another by Aldous Huxley in the early 1960s. The experience was interpreted as deeply religious by Smith, and is captured in detailed religious terms in Smith's later work ''Cleansing of the Doors of Perception''. This was Smith's one and only entheogenic experience, at the end of which he asked Leary, to paraphrase, if Leary knew the power and danger of that with which he was conducting research. In ''Mother Jones Magazine'', 1997, Smith commented:

First, I have to say that during the three years I was involved with that Harvard study, LSD was not only legal but respectable. Before Tim went on his unfortunate careening course, it was a legitimate research project. Though I did find evidence that, when recounted, the experiences of the Harvard group and those of mystics were impossible to tell apart—descriptively indistinguishable—that's not the last word. There is still a question about the truth of the disclosure.

The slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out", signified a conceptual way of thinking wherein a person would turn on to their own way of thinking, tune in to themselves, and drop out of society. This constituted a concept of inward self reliance.

In popular culture

''The Psychedelic Experience'' was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" on The Beatles' album ''Revolver''. Leary once recruited John Lennon to write a theme song for his California gubernatorial campaign (which was interrupted by his prison sentence), inspiring Lennon to come up with "Come Together", based on Leary's theme and catchphrase for the campaign. Leary was also present when Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono recorded ''Give Peace a Chance'' during one of their bed-ins in Montreal and is mentioned in the lyrics of the song. He appears in the world television broadcast of "All You Need is Love" as well. The Moody Blues also recorded a track about Leary, ''Legend of a Mind'', on their 1968 album ''In Search of the Lost Chord'' in which the refrain is "Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in".

While in exile in Switzerland, Leary and British writer Brian Barrett collaborated with the German band Ash Ra Tempel, and recorded the album Seven Up. He is credited as a songwriter, and his lyrics and vocals can be heard throughout the album. For some reason he left this experience out of his autobiography.

Works

Leary authored and co-authored over twenty books and was featured on more than a dozen audio recordings. He had an acting career that included over a dozen appearances in movies and television shows, over thirty appearances as himself in the same, and produced and/or collaborated in both multi-media presentations and computer games.

In June 2011 The New York Times reported that the New York Public Library had acquired Leary's personal archives, including papers, videotapes, photographs and other archival material from the Leary estate, including correspondence and documents relating to Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and other prominent cultural figures. Following an archiving period of up to two years, the material will be open to scholars.

See also

8-Circuit Model of Consciousness

References

External links

TimothyLeary.us – biography, archives, links and more

Lectures from the Leary Archive in audio format

References in Richard Alperts book, "Be Here Now!" which is his transformation into Baba Ram Dass and his life in India with Baba's Guru and LSD experience.

Category:1920 births Category:1996 deaths Category:People from Springfield, Massachusetts Category:American neopagans Category:American occultists Category:American psychologists Category:American people of Irish descent Category:Cancer deaths in California Category:Chicago Seven Category:College of the Holy Cross alumni Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Converts to Hinduism Category:Deaths from prostate cancer Category:Drug policy reform activists Category:Harvard University faculty Category:American writers of Irish descent Category:LSD Category:People associated with the Human Potential Movement Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Psychedelic drug advocates Category:Psychedelic researchers Category:Space burials Category:University of Alabama alumni Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Washington State University alumni Category:ESP-Disk artists Category:Expatriates in Algeria bs:Timothy Leary bg:Тимъти Лири cs:Timothy Leary da:Timothy Leary de:Timothy Leary el:Τίμοθι Λίρι es:Timothy Leary eo:Timothy Leary fr:Timothy Leary hr:Timothy Leary it:Timothy Leary he:טימותי לירי la:Timotheus Leary hu:Timothy Leary nl:Timothy Leary ja:ティモシー・リアリー no:Timothy Leary pl:Timothy Leary pt:Timothy Leary ro:Timothy Leary ru:Лири, Тимоти simple:Timothy Leary sk:Timothy Leary sr:Timoti Liri sh:Timothy Leary fi:Timothy Leary sv:Timothy Leary tr:Timothy Leary zh:蒂莫西·利里

Name	J. Edgar Hoover
Order	1st
Office	Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Term start	March 22, 1935
Term end	May 2, 1972
President	Franklin D. RooseveltHarry S. TrumanDwight D. EisenhowerJohn F. KennedyLyndon B. JohnsonRichard Nixon
Predecessor	Office created(was BOI director)
Successor	L. Patrick Gray
Deputy	Clyde Tolson
Order2	6th Director of the Bureau of Investigation
Term start2	May 10, 1924
Term end2	March 22, 1935
President2	Calvin CoolidgeHerbert HooverFranklin D. Roosevelt
Predecessor2	William J. Burns
Successor2	Himself(as FBI Director)
Birth date	January 01, 1895
Birth place	Washington, D.C.United States
Death date	May 02, 1972
Death place	Washington, D.C.United States
Religion	Presbyterian
Signature	J Edgar Hoover Signature.svg}}

John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.

Late in life, and after his death, Hoover became an increasingly controversial figure. His critics have accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of the FBI. He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods. It is because of Hoover's long and controversial tenure that FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.

Early life and education

J. Edgar Hoover was born on New Year's Day 1895 in Washington, D.C., to Anna Marie (née Scheitlin; 1860–1938), who was descended from a line of Swiss mercenaries, and Dickerson Naylor Hoover, Sr. (1856–1921), of English and German ancestry. Annie's uncle had been the Swiss honorary consul general to the United States. Hoover grew up near the Eastern Market in Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood. He worked at the Library of Congress during his law school years and obtained a law degree from George Washington University in 1916, and an LLM in 1917 from the same university. While a law student, Hoover became interested in the career of Anthony Comstock, the New York City US Postal Inspector, who waged prolonged campaigns against fraud and vice, including pornography and information on birth control, a generation earlier.

FBI career

During World War I, immediately after getting his LLM, Hoover was hired by the Justice Department. He was soon promoted to head of the Enemy Aliens Registration Section. In August 1919, he became head of the new General Intelligence Division of the Bureau of Investigation within the Justice Department (see the Palmer Raids). From there, in 1921, he rose in the Bureau of Investigation to deputy head, and in 1924, the Attorney General made him the acting director. On May 10, 1924, Hoover was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to be the sixth director of the Bureau of Investigation, following President Warren Harding's death and in response to allegations that the prior director, William J. Burns, was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal. When Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, it had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents.

Hoover was noted as sometimes being capricious in his leadership; he frequently fired FBI agents, singling out those who he thought "looked stupid like truck drivers" or he considered to be "pinheads". He also relocated agents who had displeased him to career-ending assignments and locations. Melvin Purvis was a prime example; he was one of the most effective agents in capturing and breaking up 1930s gangs and received substantial public recognition, but a jealous Hoover maneuvered him out of the FBI.

Hoover often hailed local law-enforcement officers around the country and built up a national network of supporters and admirers in the process. One that he often commended was the conservative sheriff of Caddo Parish, Louisiana, J. Howell Flournoy, for particular effectiveness.

Gangster wars

In the early 1930s, criminal gangs carried out large numbers of bank robberies in the Midwest, They used their superior firepower and fast getaway cars to elude local law enforcement agencies and avoid arrest. Many of these criminals, particularly John Dillinger, who became famous for leaping over bank cages and repeatedly escaping from jails and police traps, frequently made newspaper headlines across the U.S. That these robbers operated across state lines made their crimes a federal offense and gave Hoover and his men the authority to pursue them. Initially, the FBI suffered some embarrassing foul-ups, in particular with Dillinger and his side-kicks / conspirators. A raid on a summer lodge named "Little Bohemia" in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, left an FBI agent and a civilian bystander dead, and others wounded. All the gangsters escaped. Hoover realized that his job was now on the line, and he pulled out all stops to capture the culprits. In late July 1934, Special Agent Melvin Purvis, the Director of Operations in the Chicago office, received a tip on Dillinger's whereabouts which paid off when Dillinger was located, ambushed and killed by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater.

In the same period, there were numerous Mafia shootings as a result of Prohibition, while Hoover continued to deny the very existence of organized crime. Frank Costello helped encourage this view by feeding Hoover, "an inveterate horseplayer" known to send Special Agents to place $100 bets for him, tips on sure winners through their mutual friend, gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Hoover also helped to expand the FBI's recruitment and create the FBI Laboratory, a division established in 1932 to examine evidence found by the FBI.

Investigation of subversion and radicals

Hoover was concerned about subversion, and under his leadership, the FBI spied upon tens of thousands of suspected subversives and radicals. According to critics, Hoover tended to exaggerate the dangers of these alleged subversives and many times overstepped his bounds in his pursuit of eliminating that perceived threat.

The FBI investigated rings of German saboteurs and spies starting in the late 1930s, and had primary responsibility for counterespionage. The first arrests of German agents were made in 1938, and continued throughout World War II. In the Quirin affair during World War II, when German U-boats set two small groups of Nazi agents ashore in Florida and Long Island to cause acts of sabotage within the country, the members of these teams were apprehended after one of the would-be saboteurs contacted the FBI, confessed everything, and then betrayed the other seven men. President Harry Truman wrote in his memoirs: "The country had reason to be proud of and have confidence in our security agencies. They had kept us almost totally free of sabotage and espionage during World War II".

The FBI participated in the Venona Project, a pre–World War II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States. It was not initially realized that espionage was being committed, but due to multiple wartime Soviet use of one-time pad ciphers, which are normally unbreakable, redundancies were created, enabling some intercepts to be decoded, which established the espionage. Hoover kept the intercepts—America's greatest counterintelligence secret—in a locked safe in his office, choosing not to inform President Truman, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, or two Secretaries of State—Dean Acheson and General George Marshall—while they held office. He informed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the Venona Project in 1952.

In 1946, US Attorney General Tom C. Clark authorized Hoover to compile a list of potentially disloyal Americans who might be detained during a wartime national emergency. In 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War, Hoover submitted to President Truman a plan to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain 12,000 Americans suspected of disloyalty. Truman did not act on the plan.

COINTELPRO years

In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute people for their political opinions, most notably, Communists. At this time he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO.

This program remained in place until it was revealed to the public in 1971, and was the cause of some of the harshest criticism of Hoover and the FBI. COINTELPRO was first used to disrupt the Communist Party, and later organizations such as the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s SCLC and others. Its methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations. Some authors have charged that COINTELPRO methods also included inciting violence and arranging murders. In 1975, the activities of COINTELPRO were investigated by the "''United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities''" called the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and these activities were declared illegal and contrary to the Constitution. Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed Deputy Attorney General in early 1974, FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley thought such files either did not exist or had been destroyed. After ''The Washington Post'' broke a story in January 1975, Kelley searched and found them in his outer office. The House Judiciary Committee then demanded that Silberman testify about them.

In 1956, several years before he targeted King, Hoover had a public showdown with T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI's failure to thoroughly investigate the racially motivated murders of George W. Lee, Lamar Smith, and Emmett Till. Hoover wrote an open letter to the press singling out these statements as "irresponsible."

Response to Mafia and civil rights groups

In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover's unwillingness to focus FBI resources on the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors. His moves against people who maintained contacts with subversive elements, some of whom were members of the civil rights movement, also led to accusations of trying to undermine their reputations. The treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr. and actress Jean Seberg are two cited examples.

Hoover personally directed the FBI investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, just days before Hoover testified in the earliest stages of the Warren Commission hearings, President Lyndon B. Johnson waived for Hoover the then-mandatory U.S. government service retirement age of seventy, allowing Hoover to remain the FBI Director "for life." The House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report in 1979 critical of the performance by the FBI, the Warren Commission as well as other agencies. The report also criticized what it characterized as the FBI's reluctance to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president.

Late career and death

Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson each considered dismissing Hoover as FBI Director, but all of them ultimately concluded that the political cost of doing so would be too great.

Hoover's FBI investigated Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti, a special assistant and confidant to President Lyndon Johnson, in 1964. Despite Valenti's two-year marriage to Johnson's personal secretary, the investigation focused on rumors that he was having a gay relationship with a commercial photographer friend.

Hoover maintained strong support in Congress until his death at his Washington, D.C., home on May 2, 1972, from a heart attack attributed to cardio-vascular disease. His body lay in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where Chief Justice Warren Burger eulogized him. President Nixon delivered another eulogy at the funeral service in the National Presbyterian Church. Hoover was buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., next to the graves of his parents and a sister who died in infancy.

Operational command of the Bureau passed to Associate Director Clyde Tolson. On May 3, President Richard Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray, a Justice Department official with no FBI experience, as Acting Director, with W. Mark Felt remaining as Associate Director.

Legacy

Hoover was a consultant to Warner Brothers on a 1959 theatrical film about the FBI, ''The FBI Story'', and in 1965 on Warner Brothers' long-running spin-off television series, ''The F.B.I.'' Hoover personally made sure that Warner Brothers would portray the FBI more favorably than other crime dramas of the times.

In 1979 there was a large increase in conflict in the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) under Senator Richard Schweiker, which had re-opened the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, reported that Hoover's FBI "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President". The HSCA further reported that Hoover's FBI "was deficient in its sharing of information with other agencies and departments".

The FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC is named after Hoover. Because of the controversial nature of Hoover's legacy, there have been periodic proposals to rename it. In 2001, Senator Harry Reid sponsored an amendment to strip Hoover's name from the building. "J. Edgar Hoover's name on the FBI building is a stain on the building", Reid said. However, the Senate never adopted the amendment.

Personal life

Since the 1940s, rumors have circulated that Hoover was gay. It has been suggested that Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the FBI who was Hoover's heir, may have been his lover.

Hoover hunted down and threatened anyone who made insinuations about his sexuality. He also spread unsubstantiated rumors that Adlai Stevenson was gay to damage the liberal governor's 1952 presidential campaign. Hack additionally reports that during the 1940s and 1950s, Hoover so often attended social events with Lela Rogers, the divorced mother of dancer and actress Ginger Rogers, that many of their mutual friends assumed the pair would eventually marry. while others have described them as probable or even "confirmed", and still others have reported the rumors without stating an opinion. Hoover described Tolson as his alter ego: The men not only worked closely together during the day but also took meals, went to night clubs and vacationed together.

Summers also said that the Mafia had blackmail material on Hoover, which made Hoover reluctant to aggressively pursue organized crime. Although never corroborated, the allegation of cross-dressing has been widely repeated. In the words of author Thomas Doherty, "For American popular culture, the image of the zaftig FBI director as a Christine Jorgensen wanna-be was too delicious not to savor." Skeptics of the cross-dressing story point to Susan Rosenstiel's poor credibility and say recklessly indiscreet behavior by Hoover would have been totally out of character, whatever his sexuality. Most biographers consider the story of Mafia blackmail to be unlikely in light of the FBI's investigations of the Mafia. Truman Capote, who helped spread salacious rumors about Hoover, once remarked that he was more interested in making Hoover angry than determining whether the rumors were true.

Freemasonry

Hoover was a devoted Freemason, being raised a Master Mason on November 9, 1920, in Federal Lodge No. 1, Washington, DC, just two months before his 26th birthday. During his 52 years with the Masons, he received many medals, awards and decorations. Eventually in 1955, he was coroneted a Thirty-Third Degree Inspector General Honorary in the Southern Scottish Rite Jurisdiction. He was also awarded the Scottish Rite's highest recognition, the Grand Cross of Honour, in 1965. Today a J. Edgar Hoover room exists within the House of the Temple. The room contains many of Hoover's personal papers and records.

Honors

In 1938, Oklahoma Baptist University awarded Hoover an honorary doctorate during commencement exercises at which he spoke. In 1939, the National Academy of Sciences awarded Hoover its Public Welfare Medal. In 1950, King George VI of the United Kingdom awarded Hoover an honorary knighthood in the Order of the British Empire. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower gave Hoover the National Security Medal.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson bestowed the State Department's Distinguished Service Award on Hoover for his service as director of the FBI.

The FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., is named the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Congress voted to honor Hoover's memory by publishing a memorial book. ''J. Edgar Hoover: Memorial Tributes in the Congress of the United States and Various Articles and Editorials Relating to His Life and Work'' appeared in 1974.

Portrayals

J. Edgar Hoover has been portrayed many times in film and on stage. Some notable portrayals include:

In the 1971 Woody Allen movie ''Bananas'', J. Edgar Hoover was portrayed by actress Dorothi Fox.

Broderick Crawford and James Wainwright portrayed Hoover in the Larry Cohen film ''The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover'' (1977).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Dolph Sweet in the TV miniseries ''King'' (1978).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Ernest Borgnine in the TV-movie ''Blood Feud'' (1983), as well as in ''Hoover'' (2000).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Vincent Gardenia in the TV-movie ''Kennedy'' (1983).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Jack Warden in the TV-movie ''Hoover vs. The Kennedys'' (1987).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Treat Williams in the TV-movie ''J. Edgar Hoover'' (1987).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Kevin Dunn in the movie ''Chaplin'' (1992).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Pat Hingle in the TV-movie ''Citizen Cohn'' (1992).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Richard Dysart, both in the TV-movie ''Marilyn & Bobby: Her Final Affair'' (1993) and in Mario Van Peebles' 1995 film ''Panther''.

Hoover was portrayed by actor Bob Hoskins in the Oliver Stone drama ''Nixon'' (1995).

Hoover was portrayed by actor David Fredericks in two episodes of ''The X-Files'', as well as on its sister show ''Millennium''.

Hoover was portrayed by actor Kelsey Grammer with John Goodman as his lover, in the Harry Shearer comic musical "J. Edgar!" on L.A. Theatre Works' "The Play's the Thing" (2001).

Hoover was originally portrayed by Eric Jordan Young in the musical ''Dillinger, Public Enemy Number One''.

Hoover was portrayed by actor Billy Crudup in the Michael Mann film ''Public Enemies'' (2009).

Hoover was portrayed by actor Enrico Colantoni in the TV-movie ''The Kennedys'' (2011).

Hoover is to be portrayed by actor Leonardo DiCaprio in the Clint Eastwood film ''J. Edgar'' (2011).

See also

Anti-communism

Federal Bureau of Investigation

G-Man (slang)

McCarthyism

Writings

J. Edgar Hoover was the nominal author of a number of books and articles. Although it is widely believed that all of these were ghostwritten by FBI employees, Hoover received the credit and royalties.

References

49."Frontline ; The Secret File on J. Edgar Hoover (#11.4) 1993

Sources

External links

StraightDope.com – 'The Straight Dope: Was J. Edgar Hoover a crossdresser?'

FBI file on J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover Appointment and Phone Logs

"''American Gangster:'' J. Edgar Hoover & COINTELPRO" by Alan Kurtz (Blogcritics)

Time.com - 'The Truth about Hoover', December 22, 1975

Wall Street Journal – 'Hoover's Institution', Laurence H. Silberman, July 20, 2005

Assassination Records Review Board – Final Report: 1998

Zpub.com – 'J. Edgar Hoover Biography'

J. Edgar Hoover's Watching You - slideshow by ''Life magazine''

Category:Articles with inconsistent citation formats Category:1895 births Category:1972 deaths Category:American anti-communists Category:American Presbyterians Category:Burials at the Congressional Cemetery Category:Directors of the FBI Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in Washington, D.C. Category:American people of English descent Category:American people of German descent Category:George Washington University Law School alumni Category:Honorary Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire Category:McCarthyism Category:People from Washington, D.C. Category:American people of Swiss descent Category:National Academy of Sciences laureates

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John Joseph Loftus (February 12, 1950, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American author, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer. He is a president of The Intelligence Summit and, although he is not Jewish, a president of the Florida Holocaust Museum. Loftus also serves on the Board of Advisers to Public Information Research. He currently resides in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Early career

Son of a Boston firefighter, Loftus is a graduate of Boston College (BA, 1971) and Suffolk University (JD, 1977). He served in the U.S. Army from 1971 to 1974, attaining the rank of First Lieutenant. He began working for the US Department of Justice in 1977 and in 1979 joined their Office of Special Investigations, which was charged with prosecuting and deporting Nazi war criminals in the US. Loftus' now-expired Web site claimed, "As a young U.S. Army officer, John Loftus helped train Israelis on a covert operation that turned the tide of battle in the 1973 Yom Kippur War."

Author

John J. Loftus is the author and co-author of several controversial books on Nazis, espionage, and similar topics including ''The Belarus Secret'' (1982), ''Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets'' (1992), ''The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People'' (1994), ''Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks'' (1998). Although Loftus' first book, "The Belarus Secret," is nonfiction, it was adapted into a TV-film, Kojak: The Belarus File (1985), with Telly Savalas reprising his role from his television series, Kojak.

Radio talk show host

Loftus has a radio show on the Talkline Communications Network that broadcasts live every Monday and Tuesday from 11 pm to midnight EST in New York City; northern New Jersey; southern Connecticut; Miami, Florida; and Pompano Beach, Florida.

Loftus' friend, John Batchelor, is a co-host on the radio show.

Social critic

Loftus serves as a media commentator, appearing regularly on ABC National Radio and Fox News.

On August 7, 2005, he provided the United States address of an alleged terrorist named Iyad K. Hilal on Fox News. Only afterwards was it revealed that Hilal had left the address three years previously and the home was now owned by a family, which was then subjected to threats and vandalism and required police protection as a result of Loftus' words. Fox terminated Loftus's contract to commentate after the event. Loftus said "I thought it might help police in that area now that we have positively identified a terrorist," but he did not say why he did not contact police in a more direct manner. Loftus apologized for the mistake and expressed frustration about "one federal [agencies]" inaction on an earlier tip he had given them years ago due to the same address.

References

External links

Intelligence Summit

Unofficial Audio Archive of The John Batchelor Show and The Loftus Report commenced February 18, 2008

''Muslim Brotherhood,(Bana) Nazis And Al Qaeda''

Category:United States Department of Justice lawyers Category:United States Army officers Category:American writers Category:American radio personalities Category:Boston College alumni Category:People from Boston, Massachusetts Category:1950 births Category:Living people

name	Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlaviمحمد رضا شاه پهلوی
succession	Shahanshah and Aryamehr of Iran
reign	26 September 1941 – 11 February 1979 ()
coronation	October 26, 1967
predecessor	Rezā Shāh
successor	Monarchy exiled; Islamic republic declared
spouse	Fawzia of Egypt (m.1939 ; div.1948)Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari (m.1951 ; div.1958)Farah Diba (m.1959 ; wil.1980)
succession1	Head of ''House of Pahlavi''
reign1	26 September 1941 – 27 July 1980 ()
predecessor1	Reza Shah
successor1	Farah Pahlavi
issue	Princess ShahnazCrown Prince RezaPrincess FarahnazPrince Ali-RezaPrincess Leila
house	Pahlavi
royal anthem	Sorood-e Shahanshahi Iran
father	Reza Shah
mother	Tadj ol-Molouk
birth date	October 26, 1919
birth place	Tehran, Persia
death date	July 27, 1980
death place	Cairo, Egypt
place of burial	Al-Rifa'i Mosque, Cairo, Egypt
religion	Shia Islam
Religion	Islam
signature	Mohammadreza pahlavi signature.svg

Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, Shah of Persia (Persian: محمدرضا شاه پهلوی ; ; 26 October 1919 – 27 July 1980), ruled Iran from 16 September 1941 until his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979. He was the second and last monarch of the House of Pahlavi of the Iranian monarchy. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi held several titles: His Imperial Majesty, Shahanshah (King of Kings, Emperor), Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans) and Bozorg Arteshtārān (Head of the Warriors, Persian: بزرگ ارتشتاران).

The young prince came to power during World War II after an Anglo-Soviet invasion forced the abdication of his father Reza Shah. During his reign, the Iranian oil industry was nationalized under Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and Iran marked the anniversary of 2,500 years of continuous monarchy since the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great. The Shah's White Revolution, a series of economic and social reforms intended to transform Iran into a global power, succeeded in modernizing the nation, nationalizing many natural resources, and extending suffrage to women.

A secular Muslim himself, the Shah gradually lost support from the Shi'a clergy of Iran, particularly due to his strong policy of modernization, secularization, conflict with the traditional class of merchants known as bazaari, and recognition of Israel. Various additional controversial policies were enacted, including the banning of the communist Tudeh Party, and a general suppression of political dissent by Iran's intelligence agency, SAVAK. Amnesty International reported that in 1978 Iran had as many as 2,200 political prisoners, a number which multiplied rapidly within the closest years as a result of the revolution.

Several other factors contributed to strong opposition to the Shah among certain groups within Iran, the most notable of which were the U.S. and U.K. backed coup d'état against Prime Minister Mosaddegh in 1953, clashes with Islamists, and increased communist activity. By 1979, political unrest had transformed into a revolution which, on 16 January, forced the Shah to leave Iran. Soon thereafter, the Iranian monarchy was formally abolished, and Iran was declared an Islamic republic. Facing likely execution should he return to Iran, he died in exile in Egypt, whose President Anwar Sadat had granted him asylum.

Early life

Born in Tehran to Reza Pahlavi and his second wife, Tadj ol-Molouk, Mohammad Reza was the eldest son of the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, and the third of his eleven children. He was born with a twin sister, Ashraf Pahlavi. However, Mohammad Reza, Ashraf, Ali Reza, and their older half-sister, Fatemeh, were born as non-royals, as their father did not become Shah until 1925. Yet Reza Shah was always convinced that his sudden quirk of good fortune had commenced in 1919 with the birth of his son who was dubbed ''khoshghadam'' (bird of good omen)

By the time the Crown Prince attained 11 years of age, his father deferred to the recommendation of Abdolhossein Teymourtash to dispatch his son to Institut Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school for further studies. Mohammad Reza Shah would be the first Iranian prince in line for the throne to be sent abroad to attain a foreign education and remained there for the next four years before returning to obtain his high school diploma in Iran in 1936. After returning to the country, the Crown Prince was registered at the local military academy in Tehran where he remained enrolled until 1938.

Early reign

Deposition of his father

In the midst of World War II in 1941, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This had a major impact on Iran, which had declared neutrality in the conflict.

That year British and Soviet forces violated Iranian neutrality and occupied Iran via military invasion, forcing Reza Shah to abdicate. His son, Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, replaced his father on the throne on 16 September 1941. Subsequent to his succession as Shah, Iran became a major conduit for British and, later, American aid to the USSR during the war. This massive supply effort became known as the Persian Corridor, an involvement that would continue to grow until the successful revolution against the Iranian monarchy in 1979.

Much of the credit for orchestrating a smooth transition from Reza Shah to his son was due to the efforts of Mohammad Ali Foroughi. Suffering from Angina pectoris, a frail Foroughi was summoned to the Palace and appointed Prime Minister when Reza Shah feared the end of the Pahlavi dynasty once the allies invaded Iran in 1941. When Reza Shah sought his assistance to ensure that the Allies would not put an end to the Pahlavi dynasty, Foroughi put aside his adverse personal sentiments for having been politically sidelined since 1935. The Crown Prince confided in amazement to the British Minister that Foroughi “hardly expected any son of Reza Shah to be a civilized human being” but Foroughi successfully derailed thoughts by the Allies to undertake a more drastic change in the political infrastructure of Iran.

A general amnesty was issued two days after Mohammad Reza Shah's accession to the throne on September 19, 1941. All political personalities who had suffered disgrace during his father’s reign were rehabilitated, and the forced unveiling policy inaugurated by his father in 1935 was overturned. Despite the young Shah's enlightened decisions, the British Minister in Tehran reported to London that "the young Shah received a fairly spontaneous welcome on his first public experience, possibly rather [due] to relief at the disappearance of his father than to public affection for himself.” Reza Shah's years of terror, from the start, would mar the new Shah's prospects of success.

Despite his public professions of admiration in later years, the young Shah had serious misgivings about not only the coarse and roughshod political means adopted by his father, but also his unsophisticated approach to the affairs of the state. The young Shah possessed a decidedly more refined temperament, and among the unsavoury developments that “would haunt him when he was king” were the fates visited on Teymourtash; the dismissal of Foroughi by the mid-1930s; and Ali Akbar Davar’s decision to commit suicide in 1937. An even more significant decision that cast a long shadow was the disastrous and one-sided agreement his father had negotiated with APOC in 1933, one which compromised the country's ability to receive more favourable returns from oil extracted from the country.

Oil nationalization and the 1953 coup

By the early 1950s, the political crisis brewing in Iran commanded the attention of British and American policy leaders. In 1951 Dr. Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister and committed to nationalizing the Iranian petroleum industry controlled by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Under the leadership of the democratically-elected nationalist movement of Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq, the Iranian parliament unanimously voted to nationalize the oil industry – thus shutting out the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which was a pillar of Britain's economy and provided it political clout in the region.

At the start of the confrontation, American political sympathy was forthcoming from the Truman Administration. In particular, Mossadegh was buoyed by the advice and counsel he was receiving from American Ambassador in Tehran, Henry F. Grady. However, eventually American decision-makers lost their patience, and by the time a Republican Administration came to office fears that the Communists were poised to overthrow the government became an all consuming concern (these concerns were later dismissed as "paranoid" in retrospective commentary on the coup from US government officials). Shortly prior to the 1952 presidential elections in the US, the British government invited Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., of the CIA to London to propose collaboration on a secret plan, code-named "Operation Ajax", to force Mosaddegh from office. This would be the first of three "regime change" operations led by Allen Dulles (the other two being the successful CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba).

Under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and grandson of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, the American CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) funded and led a covert operation to depose Mosaddegh with the help of military forces loyal to the Shah. Referred to as Operation Ajax. The plot hinged on orders signed by the Shah to dismiss Mosaddegh as prime minister and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi – a choice agreed on by the British and Americans.

Despite the high-level coordination and planning, the coup initially failed, causing the Shah to flee to Baghdad, then Rome. After a brief exile in Italy, the Shah returned to Iran, this time through a successful second attempt at a coup. A deposed Mosaddegh was arrested and tried. The King intervened and commuted the sentence to one and a half years. Zahedi was installed to succeed Prime Minister Mosaddegh.

Before the first attempted coup, the American Embassy in Tehran reported that Mosaddegh's popular support remained robust. The Prime Minister requested direct control of the army from the Majlis. Given the situation, alongside the strong personal support of Eden and Churchill for covert action, the American government gave the go-ahead to a committee, attended by the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, Ambassador Henderson, and Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson. Kermit Roosevelt returned to Iran on 13 July 1953, and again on 1 August 1953, in his first meeting with the Shah. A car picked him up at midnight and drove him to the palace. He lay down on the seat and covered himself with a blanket as guards waved his driver through the gates. The Shah got into the car and Roosevelt explained the mission. The CIA provided $1 million in Iranian currency, which Roosevelt had stored in a large safe – a bulky cache, given the exchange rate at the time of 1000 rial to 15 dollars.

The Communists staged massive demonstrations to hijack the Prime Minister’s initiatives. The United States had announced its total lack of confidence in him; and his followers were drifting into indifference. On 16 August 1953, the right wing of the Army reacted. Armed with an order by the Shah, it appointed General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. A coalition of mobs and retired officers close to the Palace attempted what could be described as a coup d’état. They failed dismally and the Shah fled the country in humiliating haste. Even ''Ettelaat'', the nation’s largest daily newspaper, and its pro-Shah publisher, Abbas Masudi, published negative commentaries on him.

During the following two days, the Communists turned against Mosaddegh. Opposition against him grew tremendously. They roamed Tehran raising red flags and pulling down statues of Reza Shah. This frightened the conservative clerics like Kashani and National Front leaders like Makki, who sided with the Shah. On 18 August 1953, Mosaddegh hit back. Tudeh Partisans were clubbed and dispersed.

Tudeh had no choice but to accept defeat. In the meantime, according to the CIA plot, Zahedi appealed to the military, and claimed to be the legitimate prime minister and charged Mosaddegh with staging a coup by ignoring the Shah’s decree. Zahedi’s son Ardeshir acted as the contact between the CIA and his father. On 19 August 1953, pro-Shah partisans – organized with $100,000 in CIA funds – finally appeared and marched out of south Tehran into the city center, where others joined in. Gangs with clubs, knives, and rocks controlled the streets, overturning Tudeh trucks and beating up anti-Shah activists. As Roosevelt was congratulating Zahedi in the basement of his hiding place, the new Prime Minister’s mobs burst in and carried him upstairs on their shoulders. That evening, Ambassador Henderson suggested to Ardashir that Mosaddegh not be harmed. Roosevelt gave Zahedi US$900,000 left from Operation Ajax funds.

To many, U.S. actions further solidified sentiments that the West was a meddlesome influence in Iranian politics. In the year 2000, reflecting on this notion, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright stated:

"In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."

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The Shah returned to power, but never extended the elite status of the court to the technocrats and intellectuals who emerged from Iranian and Western universities. Indeed, his system irritated the new classes, for they were barred from partaking in real power.

The Shah was a strong supporter and patron of the Iran Scout Organization. A stamp showing the Shah in Scout's uniform was issued in 1956. In 1960 during a state visit the Shah was awarded the highest award of Pfadfinder Österreichs (''Silberner Steinbock am rot-weiß-rotten Band''), the National Scout Organisation of Austria.

Assassination attempts

The Shah was the target of at least two unsuccessful assassination attempts. On 4 February 1949, the Shah attended an annual ceremony to commemorate the founding of Tehran University. At the ceremony, Fakhr-Arai fired five shots at the Shah at a range of ten feet. Only one of the shots hit the Shah and his cheek was grazed. Fakhr-Arai was instantly shot by nearby officers. After an investigation, it was determined that Fakhr-Arai was a member of the Tudeh Party, which was subsequently banned. However, there is evidence that the would-be assassin was not a Tudeh member but a religious fundamentalist member of Fada'iyan-e Islam. The Tudeh was nonetheless blamed and persecuted.

The second attempt on the Shah's life occurred on 10 April 1965. A soldier shot his way through the Marble Palace. The assassin was killed before he reached the Shah's quarters. Two civilian guards died protecting the Shah.

According to Vladimir Kuzichkin – a former KGB officer who defected to the SIS – the Shah was also allegedly targeted by the Soviet Union, who tried to use a TV remote control to detonate a bomb-laden Volkswagen Beetle. The TV remote failed to function. A high-ranking Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa also supported this claim, asserting that he had been the target of various assassination attempts by Soviet agents for many years.

Later years

Foreign relations

The Shah supported the Yemeni royalists against republican forces in the Yemen Civil War (1962–70) and assisted the sultan of Oman in putting down a rebellion in Dhofar (1971). Concerning the fate of Bahrain (which Britain had controlled since the 19th century, but which Iran claimed as its own territory) and three small Persian Gulf islands, the Shah negotiated an agreement with the British, which, by means of a public consensus, ultimately led to the independence of Bahrain (against the wishes of Iranian nationalists). In return, Iran took full control of Greater and Lesser Tunbs and Abu Musa in the Strait of Hormuz, three strategically sensitive islands which were claimed by the United Arab Emirates. During this period, the Shah maintained cordial relations with the Persian Gulf states and established close diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. Relations with Iraq, however, were often difficult due to political instability in the latter country. The Shah was distrustful of both the Socialist government of Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Arab nationalist Baath party. He financed Kurdish separatist rebels, and to cover his tracks, armed them with Soviet weapons which Israel had seized from Soviet-backed Arab regimes, and then handed over to Iran at the Shah's behest. The initial operation was a disaster, but the Shah continued attempts to support the rebels and weaken Iraq. Then in 1975, the countries signed the Algiers Accord, which granted Iraq equal navigation rights in the Shatt al-Arab river, while the Shah agreed to end his support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels. The Shah also maintained close relations with King Hussein of Jordan, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and King Hassan II of Morocco.

On July 1964, Shah Pahlavi, Turkish President Cemal Gürsel and Pakistani President Ayub Khan announced in Istanbul the establishment of the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD) organization to promote joint transportation and economic projects. It also envisioned Afghanistan's joining some time in the future.

The Shah maintained close relations with Pakistan also. During the Second Indian-Pakistani war of 1965 between Pakistan and India, the Shah provided free fuel to the Pakistani planes, which landed on Iranian soil, refueled and then took flight.

The Shah of Iran was the first Muslim leader to recognize the State of Israel, although when interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes by reporter Mike Wallace, he criticized American Jews for their presumed control over US media and finance.

Modernization and Evolution of Government

With Iran's great oil wealth, Mohammad Reza Shah became the pre-eminent leader of the Middle East, and self-styled "Guardian" of the Persian Gulf. In 1961 he defended his style of rule, saying "when Iranians learn to behave like Swedes, I will behave like the King of Sweden."

During the last years of his government, the Shah's government became more centralized. In the words of a US Embassy dispatch, “The Shah’s picture is everywhere. The beginning of all film showings in public theaters presents the Shah in various regal poses accompanied by the strains of the National anthem... The monarch also actively extends his influence to all phases of social affairs...there is hardly any activity or vocation which the Shah or members of his family or his closest friends do not have a direct or at least a symbolic involvement. In the past, he had claimed to take a two party-system seriously and declared “If I were a dictator rather than a constitutional monarch, then I might be tempted to sponsor a single dominant party such as Hitler organized”.

By 1975, he abolished the multi-party system of government in favor of a one-party state under the Rastakhiz (''Resurrection'') Party. The Shah’s own words on its justification was; “We must straighten out Iranians’ ranks. To do so, we divide them into two categories: those who believe in Monarchy, the constitution and the Six Bahman Revolution and those who don’t.... A person who does not enter the new political party and does not believe in the three cardinal principles will have only two choices. He is either an individual who belongs to an illegal organization, or is related to the outlawed Tudeh Party, or in other words a traitor. Such an individual belongs to an Iranian prison, or if he desires he can leave the country tomorrow, without even paying exit fees; he can go anywhere he likes, because he is not Iranian, he has no nation, and his activities are illegal and punishable according to the law”. In addition, the Shah had decreed that all Iranian citizens and the few remaining political parties become part of Rastakhiz.

Achievements

The Shah made major changes to curb the power of certain ancient elite factions by expropriating large and medium-sized estates for the benefit of more than four million small farmers. In the ''White Revolution'', he took a number of major modernization measures, including extending suffrage to women, in accordance to the Islamic Law, the participation of workers in factories through shares and other measures, the improvement of the educational system through new elementary schools and literacy courses set up in remote villages by the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces. The latter step was called "Sepāh e Dānesh", "Army of Knowledge". As part of the White Revolution, the Armed Forces were engaged in infrastructural and other educational projects throughout the country ("Sepāh e Tarvij va Âbādāni") as well as in health education and promotion ("Sepāh e Behdāsht"). Moreover, he instituted exams for Islamic theologians to become established clerics. As a further step, in the seventies the governmental program of a free of charge nourishment for children at school ("Taghzieh e Rāigān") was implemented. Under the Shah's reign, the national Iranian income showed an unprecedented rise.

In the field of diplomacy, Iran realized and maintained friendly relations with Western and East European countries as well as the state of Israel and China and became, especially through the close friendship with the United States, more and more a hegemonial power in the Persian Gulf region and the Middle East. The suppression of the communist guerilla movement in the region of Dhofar in Oman with the help of the Iranian army after a formal request by Sultan Qaboos was widely regarded in this context. As to infrastructural and technological progress, the Shah continued and developed further the policies introduced by his father. As part of his programs, projects in several technologies, such as steel, telecommunications, petrochemical facilities, power plants, dams and the automobile industry may be named.

In terms of cultural activities, international cooperations were encouraged and organized, such as the Shiraz Arts Festival. Many Iranian students were sent to and supported in foreign, especially Western countries and the Indian subcontinent. The Aryamehr University of Technology was established as a major new academic institution.

As part of his various financial support programs in the fields of culture and arts, the Shah, along with King Hussein of Jordan donated an amount to the Chinese Muslim Association for the construction of the Taipei Grand Mosque.

Criticism of reign and causes of his overthrow

At the Federation of American Scientists, John Pike writes:

In 1978 the deepening opposition to the Shah erupted in widespread demonstrations and rioting. Recognizing that even this level of violence had failed to crush the rebellion, the Shah abdicated the Peacock Throne and departed Iran on 16 January 1979. Despite decades of pervasive surveillance by SAVAK, working closely with CIA, the extent of public opposition to the Shah, and his sudden departure, came as a considerable surprise to the US intelligence community and national leadership. As late as 28 September 1978 the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the Shah "is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years."

Explanations for why the Shah was overthrown include that he was beholden to a non-Muslim Western power, (the United States), whose foreign culture was seen as influencing that of Iran. Additional contributing factors included perceptions of oppression, brutality, corruption, and extravagance. Basic functional failures of the regime have also been blamed — economic bottlenecks, shortages and inflation; the regime's over-ambitious economic program; the failure of its security forces to deal with protest and demonstration; the overly centralized royal power structure.

In October 1971, the Shah celebrated the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the Iranian monarchy. ''The New York Times'' reported that $100 million was spent. Next to the ancient ruins of Persepolis, the Shah gave orders to build a tent city covering , studded with three huge royal tents and fifty-nine lesser ones arranged in a star-shaped design. French chefs from Maxim’s of Paris prepared breast of peacock for royalty and dignitaries around the world, the buildings were decorated by Maison Jansen (the same firm that helped Jacqueline Kennedy redecorate the White House), the guests ate off Limoges porcelain china and drank from Baccarat crystal glasses. This became a major scandal as the contrast between the dazzling elegance of celebration and the misery of the nearby villages was so dramatic that no one could ignore it. Months before the festivities, university students struck in protest. Indeed, the cost was so sufficiently impressive that the Shah forbade his associates to discuss the actual figures.

However the Shah and the supporters of the Shah argue that the celebrations opened new investments in Iran, improved relationships with the other leaders and nations of the world, and provided greater recognition of Iran. Other actions that are thought to have contributed to his downfall include antagonizing formerly apolitical Iranians — especially merchants of the bazaars — with the creation in 1975 of a single party political monopoly (the ''Rastakhiz'' Party), with compulsory membership and dues, and general aggressive interference in the political, economic, and religious concerns of people's lives; and the 1976 change from an Islamic calendar to an Imperial calendar, marking the birth of Cyrus as the first day, instead of the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. Overnight, the year changed from 1355 to 2535.

Some achievements of the Shah — such as broadened education — had unintended consequences. While school attendance rose (by 1966 the school attendance of urban seven to fourteen year olds was estimated at 75.8%), Iran's labor market could not absorb a high number of educated youth. In 1966 high school graduates had "a higher rate of unemployment than did the illiterate," and educated unemployed often supported the revolution.

Revolution

The overthrow of the Shah came as a surprise to almost all observers. The first militant anti-Shah demonstrations of a few hundred started in October 1977, after the death of Khomeini's son Mostafa. A year later strikes were paralyzing the country, and in early December a "total of 6 to 9 million" — more than 10% of the country — marched against the Shah throughout Iran.

On 16 January 1979, he made a contract with Farboud and left Iran at the behest of Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar (a long time opposition leader himself), who sought to calm the situation. Spontaneous attacks by members of the public on statues of the Pahlavis followed, and "within hours, almost every sign of the Pahlavi dynasty" was destroyed. Bakhtiar dissolved SAVAK, freed all political prisoners, and allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to return to Iran after years in exile. He asked Khomeini to create a Vatican-like state in Qom, promised free elections, and called upon the opposition to help preserve the constitution, proposing a "national unity" government including Khomeini's followers. Khomeini fiercely rejected Bakhtiar's demands and appointed his own interim government, with Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister, stating that "since I have appointed him, he must be obeyed." In February, pro-Khomeini revolutionary guerrilla and rebel soldiers gained the upper hand in street fighting, and the military announced its neutrality. On the evening of 11 February, the dissolution of the monarchy was complete.

Exile and death

During his second exile, the Shah traveled from country to country seeking what he hoped would be temporary residence. First he flew to Assuan, Egypt, where he received a warm and gracious welcome from President Anwar El-Sadat. He later lived in Morocco as a guest of King Hassan II, as well as in the Bahamas, and in Cuernavaca in Mexico near Mexico City, as a guest of Jose Lopez Portillo. He suffered from gallstones that would require prompt surgery. He was offered treatment in Switzerland, but insisted on treatment in the United States.

On 22 October 1979, at the request of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, President Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah into the United States to undergo surgical treatment at the New York–Weill Cornell Medical Hospital. While in Cornell Medical Center, Shah used the name "David D. Newsom" as his temporary code name, without Newsom's knowledge.

The Shah was taken later by U.S. Air Force jet to Kelly Air Force Base in Texas and from there to Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base . It was anticipated that his stay in the U.S. would be short; however, surgical complications ensued, which required six weeks of confinement in the hospital before he recovered. His prolonged stay in the U.S. was extremely unpopular with the revolutionary movement in Iran, which still resented the United States' overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddeq and the years of support for the Shah's rule. The Iranian government demanded his return to Iran, but he stayed in the hospital.

There are claims that this resulted in the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the kidnapping of American diplomats, military personnel, and intelligence officers, which soon became known as the Iran hostage crisis. According to the Shah's book, ''Answer to History'', in the end the USA never provided the Shah any kind of health care and asked him to leave the country.

He left the United States on 15 December 1979 and lived for a short time in the Isla Contadora in Panama. The new government in Iran still demanded his and his wife's immediate extradition to Tehran. A short time after the Shah's arrival, an Iranian ambassador was dispatched to the Central American nation carrying a 450-page extradition request. That official appeal greatly alarmed both the Shah and his advisors. Whether the Panamanian government would have complied is a matter of speculation among historians.

After that event, the Shah again sought the support of Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat, who renewed his offer of permanent asylum in Egypt to the ailing monarch. The Shah returned to Egypt in March 1980, where he received urgent medical treatment, but nevertheless died from complications of Waldenström's macroglobulinemia (a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma) on 27 July 1980, aged 60. Egyptian President Sadat gave the Shah a state funeral.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is buried in the Al Rifa'i Mosque in Cairo, a mosque of great symbolic importance. The last royal rulers of two monarchies are buried there, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran and King Farouk of Egypt, his former brother-in-law. The tombs lie to the left of the entrance. Years earlier, his father and predecessor, Reza Shah Pahlavi had also initially been buried at the Al Rifa'i Mosque.

Legacy

In 1969, the Shah sent one of 73 Apollo 11 Goodwill Messages to NASA for the historic first lunar landing. The message still rests on the lunar surface today. He stated in part, "...we pray the Almighty God to guide mankind towards ever increasing success in the establishment of culture, knowledge and human civilization." The Apollo 11 crew visited the Shah during a world tour.

Shortly after his overthrow, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi wrote an autobiographical memoir ''Réponse à l'histoire'' (''Answer to History''). It was translated from the original French into English, Persian (''Pasokh be Tarikh''), and other languages. However, by the time of its publication, the Shah had already died. The book is his personal account of his reign and accomplishments, as well as his perspective on issues related to the Iranian Revolution and Western foreign policy toward Iran. The Shah places some of the blame for the wrongdoings of SAVAK and the failures of various democratic and social reforms (particularly through the White Revolution) upon Amir Abbas Hoveyda and his administration.

In the 1990s and the decade following 2000, the Shah's reputation has staged something of a revival, with many Iranians looking back on his era as a time when Iran was more prosperous and the government less oppressive. Younger generation of Iranians find it "impossible to understand what their parents were so passionate about." Journalist Afshin Molavi reports even members of the uneducated poor – traditionally core supporters of the revolution that overthrew the Shah – making remarks such as 'God bless the Shah's soul, the economy was better then;' and finds that "books about the former Shah (even censored ones) sell briskly," while "books of the Rightly Guided Path sit idle."

Women's rights

Under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's father, the government supported advancements by women against child marriage, polygamy, exclusion from public society, and education segregation. However, independent feminist political groups were shut down and forcibly integrated into one state-created institution, which maintained many paternalistic views. Despite substantial opposition from Shiite religious jurists, the Iranian feminist movement, led by activists such as Fatemah Sayyeh, achieved further advancement under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. His regime's changes focused on the civil sphere, and private-oriented family law remained restrictive, although the 1967 and 1975 Family Protection Laws attempted to reform this trend. Specifically, women gained the right to become ministers such as Farrokhroo Parsa and judges such as Shirin Ebadi, as well as any other profession regardless of their sex.

Marriages and children

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi married three times:

Fawzia

Dilawar Princess Fawzia of Egypt (born 5 November 1921), a daughter of King Fuad I of Egypt and Nazli Sabri; she also was a sister of King Farouk I of Egypt. They married in 1939 and were divorced in 1945 (Egyptian divorce) and 1948 (Iranian divorce). Together they had one child, a daughter:

HIH Princess Shahnaz Pahlavi (born 27 October 1940).

Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari

His second wife was Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari (22 June 1932 – 26 October 2001), the only daughter of Khalil Esfandiary, Iranian Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, and his wife, the former Eva Karl. They married in 1951, but divorced in 1958 when it became apparent that she could not bear children. Soraya later told ''The New York Times'' that the Shah had no choice but to divorce her, and that he was heavy hearted about the decision.

He subsequently indicated his interest in marrying Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy, a daughter of the deposed Italian king, Umberto II. Pope John XXIII reportedly vetoed the suggestion. In an editorial about the rumors surrounding the marriage of "a Muslim sovereign and a Catholic princess", the Vatican newspaper, ''L'Osservatore Romano'', considered the match "a grave danger," especially considering that under the 1917 Code of Canon Law a Roman Catholic who married a divorced person would be automatically, and could be formally, excommunicated.

Farah Diba

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi married his third and final wife, Farah Diba (born 14 October 1938), the only child of Sohrab Diba, Captain in the Imperial Iranian Army, and his wife, the former Farideh Ghotbi. They were married in 1959, and Queen Farah was crowned Shahbanu, or Empress, a title created especially for her in 1967. Previous royal consorts had been known as "Malakeh" (Arabic: Malika), or Queen. The couple remained together for twenty years, until the Shah's death. Farah Diba bore him four children:

HIH Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi (born 31 October 1960), heir to the now defunct Iranian throne

HIH Princess Farahnaz Pahlavi (born 12 March 1963)

HIH Prince Ali-Reza Pahlavi (28 April 1966 – 4 January 2011)

HIH Princess Leila Pahlavi (27 March 1970 – 10 June 2001)

Honors

Grand Cordon of the Order of the Crown of Persia (1926) Grand Collar of the Order of Pahlevi of Persia (1932) Collar of the Order of Muhammad Ali of Egypt (1939) Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) (1942) Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion, 1st Class w/ Collar of Czechoslovakia (1943) Croix de Guerre w/ Palm of France (1945) Grand Cordon of the Order of the Propitious Clouds of the Republic of China, special grade (1946) Chief Commander of the Legion of Merit of the United States (1947) Knight of the Order of the Golden Spur of the Vatican (1948) Royal Victorian Chain (RVC) (1948) Grand Cordon of the Order of the Zulfiqar of Iran (1949) Collar of the Order of Hussein ibn Ali of Jordan (1949) Grand Cordon of the Order of the Renaissance of Jordan (1949) Order of the King Abdul Aziz Decoration of Honour, 1st Class of Saudi Arabia (1955) Grand Cordon (Special Class) of the Bundesverdienstkreuz of West Germany (1955) Grand Cordon (Special Class) of the Order of Merit of Lebanon (1956) Grand Collar of the Order of the Yoke and Arrows of Spain (1957) Grand Cross w/ Collar of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy (1957) Grand Cordon of the Order of Idris I of Libya (1958) Collar of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum of Japan (1958) Grand Star of the Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria (1958) Knight of the Order of the Elephant of Denmark (1959) Grand Cross of the Order of the Netherlands Lion (1959) Order of Pakistan, 1st Class (1959) Order of Ojaswi Rajanya of Nepal (1960) Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer of Greece (1960) Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold of Belgium (1960) Grand Cross w/Collar of the Order of St Olav of Norway (1961) Grand Collar and Chain of the Order of Solomon of Ethiopia (1964) Grand Cordon of the Order of the Supreme Sun of Afghanistan (1965) Grand Cordon of the Order of the Nile of Egypt (1965) Grand Cordon of the Order of the Liberator General San Martin of Argentina (1965) Grand Cordon w/Collar of the Order of Independence of Tunisia (1965) Grand Collar of the Order of the Southern Cross of Brazil (1965) Grand Cordon of the Order of Muhammad of Morocco (1966) Order of al-Khalifa of Bahrain (1966) Order of Independence of Qatar (1966) Order of the Badr Chain of Saudi Arabia (1966) Order of the Chain of Honour of the Sudan (1966) Grand Cordon of the Grand Star of Yugoslavia (1966) Collar of the Order of the Seraphim of Sweden (1967) (Knight–1960) Order of the Crown of Malaysia (DMN) (1968) Knight of the Order of the Royal House of Chakri of Thailand (1968) Commander Grand Cross of the Order of the Lion of Finland (1970) Military Order of Oman, 1st Class (1973) Grand Collar of the Order of Charles III of Spain (1975) Collar of the Order of the Aztec Eagle of Mexico (1975)

Gallery

See also

History of Iran

Human rights in the Pahlavi Dynasty

Middle East Theatre of World War II

Monarchism in Iran

National Car Museum of Iran, showcases the cars of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr.

Nuclear program of Iran

Tehran Conference

Trans-Iranian Railway

References

Further reading

Abbas Milani. ''The Shah'' (Palgrave Macmillan; 2011) 488 pages; scholarly biography

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ''Answer to History'', Stein & Day Pub, 1980, ISBN 0-8128-2755-4.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ''The Shah's Story'', M. Joseph, 1980, ISBN 0-7181-1944-4

Farah Pahlavi, ''An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah – A Memoir'', Miramax Books, 2004, ISBN 1-4013-5209-X.

Gholam Reza Afkhami, ''The Life and Times of the Shah'', University of California Press, 2009, ISBN 0-520-25328-0

Stephen Kinzer, ''All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror'', John Wiley & Sons, 2003, ISBN 0-471-26517-9

William Shawcross, ''The Shah's last ride: The death of an ally'', Touchstone, 1989, ISBN 0-671-68745-X.

Ardeshir Zahedi, ''The Memoirs of Ardeshir Zahedi '', IBEX, 2005, ISBN 1-58814-038-5.

Amin Saikal The Rise and Fall of the Shah 1941–1979 Angus and Robertson (Princeton University Press) ISBN 0-207-14412-5

David Harris, "The Crisis: the President, the Prophet, and the Shah—1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam" New York: Little, Brown &Co;, 2004. ISBN 0-316-32394-2.

Kapuściński, Ryszard (1982). ''Shah of Shahs''. Vinage. ISBN 0-679-73801-0

Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran since 1921 ISBN 0-582-35685-7

Ahmad Ali Massoud Ansari, Me and the Pahlavis, 1992

History of Iran, a short account of the 1953 coup – IranChamber.com

External links

Youtube.com, "LIBERATION", a Major Motion Picture about the Shah of Iran

IranNegah.com, Video Archive of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

YouTube.com, Video: I knew Shah

Aryamehr.org, A web site in Persian and English dedicated to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi

Rezashah.nl, A web site in Persian dedicated to Reza Shah including video clip and photos March 2007

Ardeshirzahedi.eu, A web site in Persian dedicated to Ardeshir Zahedi including video clip of marriage with Princess Shahnaz and photos of Shah March 2007

Nomullas.com, The Shah's last interview (conducted by David Frost in Panama)

Interview with Mike Wallace – YouTube video

Iranian.com, ISNA interview with Dr. Mahmood Kashani

Iranian.com, Mosaddeq saved the Shah, by Fereydoun Hoveyda

NYtimes.com, James Risen: Secrets of History: The C.I.A. in Iran – A special report.; How a Plot Convulsed Iran in '53 (and in '79) ''The New York Times'', 16 April 2000.

Stephen Fleischman. CommonDreams.org, Shah knew what he was talking about: Oil is too valuable to burn, 29 November 2005.

Roger Scruton. FortFreedom.org, In Memory of Iran by Roger Scruton, from 'Untimely tracts' (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 190–1

PayVand.com, Brzezinski's role in overthrow of the Shah, Payvand News, 10 March 2006.

Iranian.com, 'Free elections in 1979, my last audience with the Shah', by Fereydoun Hoveyda, The Iranian

ParsTimes.com, Shah of Iran and US Presidents

ParsTimes.com, Toasts of the President and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, at a State Dinner in Tehran: May 30, 1972

Zahedi.info, relevant historical pictures

YouTube.com, A History Channel video, presented in the context of comments made during a recent debate

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