Iranian Revolution (fb36a6e5)

The Iranian Revolution appears in the diary not as a continuous account of events in Iran but as a political upheaval arriving through television, newspaper reports, and a New York dinner at the Iranian embassy. Across those glimpses, the Shah’s imminent abdication becomes his departure, and the revolution’s fall of the old regime makes political instability feel suddenly close to home.

The embassy dinner

On December 22, 1978, the narrator went with Bob and Paulette Goddard to the Iranian embassy, where a report in the papers said the Shah would abdicate and his son would ascend. The political news was already present at the dinner table: Paulette kept calling the evening morbid because the Iranians were looking for new jobs, a small social observation that registered the consequences of an order beginning to unravel.

The evening’s unease became physical when a gust of wind blew open the doors. Paulette rose and tried to flee the dining room toward the buffet room; when Amir Abbas Hoveyda asked where she was going, she said she wanted to hide. Her alarm, described by the diarist as peculiar and as part of what he saw as her erratic behavior, gave the embassy gathering an unsettled edge. The scene does not explain the revolution’s politics, but it places its looming consequences among people gathered for dinner.

The Shah leaves Iran

On January 16, 1979, television reported that the Shah had left Iran. The diary follows his projected route in the broadcast: a stop in Egypt, then Texas, where his son was training for the air force, and then a reported stay with the Walter Annenbergs in California. The narrator was struck by the exposure involved, remarking that television had practically shown a road map, complete with aerial views of the place.

That broadcast turns the Shah’s departure into a public itinerary. Rather than describing events inside Iran, the entry records how international news reached a New York viewer: the monarch’s movement was mapped and televised, making political flight part of ordinary domestic viewing.

Revolution on television

By February 1979, the narrator wrote that Iran had “really fell,” reacting to the change as something strange to watch on television and adding that it could happen here. The brief remark links the revolution’s apparent completion to an anxious sense of political possibility at home. Its force lies in the jump from distant footage to local vulnerability: television does not make the upheaval feel remote, but supplies the comparison that brings it nearer.

In the surrounding diary, political news shares space with art-business concerns, magazine discussions, and stories encountered through other people. The revolution is registered through these abrupt crossings into everyday life: a dinner at an embassy, a televised route out of Iran, and the narrator’s startled recognition that upheaval elsewhere might not remain elsewhere.