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“The controversy and confusion that surrounded the Shah’s human rights record overshadowed his many real accomplishments in the fields of women’s rights, literacy, health care, education, and modernization. Help in sifting through the accusations and allegations came from a most unexpected quarter, however, when the Islamic Republic announced plans to identify and memorialize each victim of Pahlavi ‘oppression.’ But lead researcher, Emad al-Din Baghi, a former seminary student, was shocked to discover that he could not match the victims’ names to the official numbers: instead of 100,000 deaths, Baghi could only confirm 3,164. Even that number was inflated because it included all 2,781 fatalities from the 1978-1979 revolution. The actual death toll was lowered to 383, of whom 197 were guerilla fighters and terrorists killed in skirmishes with the security forces. That meant 183 political prisoners and dissidents were executed, committed suicide in detention, or died under torture. … The lower numbers do not excuse or diminish the suffering of political prisoners jailed or tortured in Iran in the 1970s. They do, however, show the extent to which the historical record was manipulated by Khomeini and his partisans to criminalize the Shah and justify their own excesses and abuses.”

Quote by Andrew Scott Cooper

Book:The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
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The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran

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Andrew Scott Cooper

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“Tourists enter Tehran from the south on a carriageway built by order of the Shah. On the city’s outskirts they pass through the green belt he envisioned would protect Tehran from the twin scourges of desert wind and dust. In the central city visitors pass by the government ministries, hospitals, universities, schools, concert halls, monuments, bridges, sports complexes, hotels, museums, galleries, and gleaming underground metro that were among his many pet projects. … He championed the social welfare state that today provides Iranians with access to state-run health care and education. He raised the scholarship money that allowed hundreds of thousands of Iranian university students, including many luminaries of the Islamic Republic, to study abroad at leading American and European universities. The Shah ordered the fighter jets that made Iran’s air force the most powerful in southwestern Asia. He established the first national parks and state forests and ordered strict water, animal, and conservation measures. Perhaps it is no surprise that Iran today has the look and feel of a haunted house. The man who built modern Iran is nowhere to be seen but his presence is felt everywhere. The revolutionaries who replaced the Shah may not like to hear it, but Iran today is as much his country as it is theirs.”

Shah
Book:The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
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“By the time the Shah staged his belated coronation … Iran’s rate of economic growth outstripped those of the United States, Great Britain, and France. Critics who had once dismissed Iran’s King as a callow playboy now applauded his achievements and acumen. ‘We are delighted to salute the Shah of Iran on the day of his Coronation,’ declared Britain’s ‘Daily Mail. ‘During his 26-year reign he never once involved his country in war. He has shown the way to beat hunger, want, squalor, and disease by methods from which other countries could learn.”

Shah
Book:The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
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“You know, all this is speculating. I don't think any of us really know what's going on. I think there's always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there's going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by '76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in '72.”

WatergateNixon1972 Presidential CycleGeorge Mcgovern1976 Presidential Cycle
Book:Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
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“The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives”

NixonPendulum1972 Presidential Cycle
Book:Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
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“HST: Wasn't there a Harris Poll that showed that only 3 percent of the electorate considered the Watergate thing important? McGovern: Yeah. That's right. Mistakes that we made seemed to be much more costly. I don't know why, but they were. I felt it at the time, that we were being hurt by every mistake we made, whereas the most horrendous kind of things on the other side somehow seemed to--because, I suppose, of the great prestige of the White House, the President's shrewdness in not showing himself to the press or the public--they were able to get away with things that we got pounded for.”

Nixon1972 Presidential CycleMcgovern
Book:Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
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