IRAN: The New Shah

“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 (33) 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.