“I feel as though I were beginning my second
reign,” announced Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi five weeks ago when he
flew back to Teheran and to the throne of Iran. “I am older and more
experienced, and [now] I know what I must do.”Two weeks ago, when the young Shah went out to Mehrabad airport to
greet his Queen, returning from Rome, his step was firm, his shoulders
back. He had given up sleeping pills, taken up tennis again and was
working hard. He was spending long hours in his Saadabad Palace office,
conferring daily with his new Premier, Fazhollah Zahedi, and with U.S.
Ambassador Loy Henderson.A stream of orders and exhortations has begun flowing from the royal
palace. The Shah sent crackling orders to Premier Zahedi to complete
immediately an Isfahan irrigation project planned to bring thousands of
acres into cultivation. He put pressure behind other reforms: a
combined water supply-hydroelectric scheme for Teheran, completion of
the much-needed Teheran-Tabriz railroad, low-cost workers' housing. He
told Zahedi and Finance Minister Ali Amini to speed the return of the
royal family estates, taken by Mohammed Mossadegh four months ago to
thwart the Shah's plans to parcel out the land to landless peasants.
Under the Shah's scheme, the peasants will make a small payment for the
land, work it with the help of loans financed by the Shah.At his right hand, counseling speed and firmness, was Iran's ablest and
most respected statesman, Court Minister Hussein Ala. Onetime Premier,
Foreign Minister, Ambassador to the U.S. and the U.N., shrewd,
69-year-old Ala was ousted from the court post last April by Mossadegh,
resumed his old job after the Shah returned from his brief exile. One
result: today, the old, meddling palace camarilla which made and unmade
Premiers in backstairs intrigues is gone. Its leaders—Princess Ashraf
and the Queen Mother—have not returned to Iran.But aside from Ala and a few others, the Shah is painfully short of
talented manpower he needs. Many of the best Iranians are standing on
the sidelines and frowning at the new Zahedi Cabinet; they complain
that its few able, honest men are outweighed by many unproven ones and
a scattering of ministers whose honesty and objectives are, to say the
least, questionable. “Perhaps,” said one Iranian, “there are enough
honest men in the Cabinet to restrain the dishonest ones.”The Shah, a shy and gentle young man, repeatedly says that he intends to
be a conscientiously constitutional monarch, not an authoritarian like
his famed father, Reza Shah Pahlevi, father of modern Iran. But the
vast reforms needed to ease Iranians' poverty and the decisive acts
necessary to check the underground plotting of the Red-led Tudeh and
the supporters of old Mossadegh, must be accomplished fast to save Iran
from fresh rebellion and capture by Russia. The new Shah's most
immutable enemy is time.
