Abstract
On 11 April 1962, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, landed in Washington, DC, stepping off his plane to be greeted by the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Accompanied by his wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, it was only the Shah’s second official visit since a CIA-orchestrated coup d’état had restored him to the Peacock Throne in 1953. Forced by the inclement weather to welcome his royal guest inside an airport hangar, JFK joked, “This is one of our wonderful spring days, for which we are justly celebrated.”1 Turning to the business at hand, the president told the Shah, “On your shoulders hang heavy burdens and heavy responsibilities”; not least due to Iran’s strategic location, “sur-rounded…by vital and powerful people,” but also because of his desire “to make a better life for your people.”2
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Notes
On JFK’s foreign policy see Thomas G. Paterson, Ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 13–44; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 197–271; George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 702–729; Barrett, Roby C., The Greater Middle East and the Cold War: US Foreign Policy Under Eisenhower and Kennedy (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp.190–313; Stephen G. Rabe, John F. Kennedy: World Leader (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010); Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965).
Charles Kimber Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001).
On the role of ideology in US foreign policy, see Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
Simpson, Economists with Guns. Also see Thomas C. Field Jr., “Ideology as Strategy: Military-Led Modernization and the Origins of the Alliance for Progress in Bolivia,” Diplomatic History, 36.1 (Jan., 2012), pp. 147–183.
Frank Costigliola has emphasized the impact of emotions and friendship — genuine and perceived — on international diplomacy in his recent book Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012).
In his sweeping history of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis gives Iran barely one paragraph, reducing US–Iranian relations in this period to a direct path from coup to revolution; John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Allen Lane, 2005), pp. 166–167.
James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American–Iranian Relations (London: Yale University Press, 1988); Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1981).
April Summitt, “For a White Revolution: John F. Kennedy and the Shah of Iran,” Middle East Journal, 58.4 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 560–575; James F. Goode, The United States and Iran: In the Shadow of Musaddiq (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997), pp. 167–181; Idem., “Reforming Iran during the Kennedy Years,” Diplomatic History, 15.1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 13–29.
Stephen McGlinchey, U.S. Arms Policies towards the Shah’s Iran (Oxon: Routledge, 2014); Idem., “Lyndon B. Johnson and Arms Credit Sales to Iran 1964– 1968,” Middle East Journal, 67.2 (Spring, 2013), pp. 229–247; Idem., “Richard Nixon’s Road to Tehran: The Making of the U.S.–Iran Arms Agreement of May 1972,” Diplomatic History, 37.4 (2013), pp. 841–860.
Andrew Warne, “Psychoanalyzing Iran: Kennedy’s Iran Task Force and the Modernization of Orientalism, 1961–3,” The International History Review, 35.2 (2013), pp. 396–422; Roham Alvandi, “Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The Origins of Iranian Primacy in the Persian Gulf,” Diplomatic History, 36.2 (Apr., 2012), pp. 337–372; Idem., Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 396.
Matthew Connelly, “Rethinking the Cold War and Decolonization: The Grand Strategy of the Algerian War for Independence,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33.2 (May, 2001), p. 239. Nathan Citino also emphasizes the need to consider the role of non-US actors in questions of modernization; Nathan J. Citino, “The Ottoman Legacy in Cold War Modernization,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 40 (2008), pp. 579–597.
Richard Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964; 1979), p. 362.
On Iranian concepts of modernity, see Cyrus Vakili-Zad, “Collision of Consciousness: Modernization and Development in Iran,” Middle Eastern Studies, 32.3 (Jul., 1996), pp. 139–160.
Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1972); Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss, Eds., Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); Kylie Baxter and Shahram Akbarzadeh, US Foreign Policy in the Middle East: The Roots of Anti-Americanism (London: Routledge, 2008).
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Offiler, B. (2015). Introduction. In: US Foreign Policy and the Modernization of Iran. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137482211_1
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