Political turmoil after the Iranian Revolution

Political turmoil after the Iranian Revolution enters the diary not as a continuous account of political events but as a sequence of images and encounters: the Shah’s departure, a television report that makes upheaval seem imaginable in the United States, news that a former prime minister has been executed, and a memorial in New York. The movement from screen to social conversation to an embodied ceremony shows how political violence reaches the diarist in fragments, then gathers force in the people and rituals around it.

The Shah’s departure on television

On January 16, 1979, the diary notes that the Shah had left Iran. Television reports traced his route through Egypt and Texas, where his son was training for the air force, and then said that he would stay with the Walter Annenbergs in California. The report supplied more than a destination: it showed aerial views of the place where the Shah was expected to stay. The diarist’s attention turns to the exposure built into the broadcast, which seemed to disclose the geography of a private refuge as readily as it announced a political departure.

That response makes television part of the event’s meaning. The Shah’s movement is presented as a series of stops, made legible through a map-like itinerary and images from above. The diary does not explain the political circumstances of his departure or speculate about what would follow. Instead, it registers how the news arrives: as a public spectacle that makes a distant crisis suddenly concrete. The viewers are shown where a displaced ruler may go, while the diarist notices the unsettling intimacy of being shown the place itself.

Revolution imagined close to home

By the later entry describing Iran as having fallen, the crisis has acquired a more immediate emotional charge. The diarist writes of watching it unfold on television and thinks that something similar could happen in the United States. This is not a developed political forecast; it is a spontaneous comparison prompted by the televised spectacle. Its force lies in the collapse of distance: events in Iran no longer appear safely confined to another country, even though the diary gives no further account of American political conditions.

In the same entry, Brigid Berlin recounts a separate item from the news: a boy whose mother had died and who kept her in the house for eight months without telling anyone. The story is not identified as a consequence of the revolution, and the diary does not connect the boy’s circumstances to Iranian politics. Its placement nevertheless records the disturbing material that accompanies the diarist’s television-fed view of the world. Political collapse and a private domestic horror sit beside one another in the day’s account, joined not by an asserted cause but by the medium through which they become news and by the diarist’s attention to how unbelievable events can occur close to ordinary life.

Execution and the New York response

On April 9, the diary reports that the brother of Fereydoun Hoveyda, identified as the prime minister under the Shah, had been hanged in Iran over the weekend. The brief entry makes the execution a sudden fact within the diarist’s New York social calendar. At a dinner for Cy Twombly’s opening, the diarist had been surprised not to receive an invitation; later, he went to the Whitney Museum of American Art for another Twombly-related gathering. These details place the news amid the routines of openings, dinners, and invitations without suggesting that the art-world events caused or resolved the response to it.

At the Whitney gathering, Lily Auchincloss said that she had sent Mr. Hoveyda flowers because of what had happened to his brother and asked whether the diarist had done anything. He had not: Bob was away, and he did not know what to do. The admission is modest but consequential. It records not indifference so much as uncertainty about how to act, and it contrasts a concrete gesture of condolence with the diarist’s inability to find one. Political violence is registered here through the social question it leaves behind: what, if anything, should a person in this circle do for someone touched by it?

A memorial without a body

On April 19, the diarist attended a memorial service for Ambassador Hoveyda’s brother, again described as having been executed in Iran. The ceremony took place on Riverside Drive. Those present removed their shoes; a rug lay in the middle of the floor, but no one wanted to step on it because doing so felt like stepping on a body that was not there. Iranian music played. The diary’s account centers the absent body rather than reconstructing the execution: the rug gives the gathering a material focus, while the missing remains make that focus impossible to treat as ordinary flooring.

The service also resists a simple separation between mourning and social gathering. The diarist likens it to the best cocktail party, but without drinks. The comparison catches the event’s unusual mixture of company and grief: people are assembled in a familiar social form, yet the empty rug and the music mark a loss that cannot be reduced to conversation or hospitality. Read alongside the earlier admission of not knowing what to do, the service is a change in the diarist’s proximity to the tragedy. He moves from hearing about flowers and execution to attending a communal ritual shaped by absence.

The diary’s scale of political witness

Across these entries, the revolution is conveyed through changes in scale rather than political explanation. A television broadcast turns the Shah’s departure into an itinerary and aerial view; another news report brings the prospect of upheaval imaginatively near; the execution reaches the diarist through social news and a question about condolence; the memorial makes the loss present through music, removed shoes, and an untouched rug. Each setting offers a different kind of access, but none gives the diarist a comprehensive account of events in Iran.

That limitation is also the record’s particular strength as a diary. It preserves the uneven way public catastrophe enters an individual’s days: first as images, then as conversation, then as an occasion requiring physical attendance. The empty place at the memorial does not explain the political history behind the death, and the diary does not claim to. Instead, the remembered particulars show how a distant revolution becomes legible through the people who leave, the people who are executed, and the uncertain gestures by which their loss is acknowledged elsewhere.