Abstract
In June 1964, the Shah returned to the United States to meet with the new American president, Lyndon Johnson. It was a welcome opportunity for Johnson to reacquaint himself with the Shah, having met him as vice president when he visited Tehran in 1962. Overall, the visit went much better for the Shah than when he had met JFK, with Johnson agreeing to sell Tehran sophisticated military equipment in addition to continuing its Military Assistance Programme through until 1969. However, as the Shah was collecting an honourary degree from University of California, Los Angeles, his satisfaction quickly turned to irritation. During the ceremony, a plane hired by a dissident Iranian student group flew over the area carrying a banner that read, “If you want a fix, see the Shah.” Initially confused, the Shah asked his companions, “What is a fix?” Upon being told it was a reference to the drug heroin, he bitterly remarked, “If I am involved in heroin…one should say that I am a terribly poor salesman and that I am working against my ‘sales interest.’”1 Despite all the positives of the visit, this incident ended it on a slightly sour note.
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Notes
“Military Modernization Discussions with the Shah of Iran,” 12 Jun. 1964. Nina D. Howland, Ed., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol-ume XXII: Iran (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1999), p. 84 (hereafter referred to as FRUS 1964–1968 XXII).
Desmond Harney interview with Habib Ladjevardi, 15 Oct. 1985, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, Tape No. 1, p. 35 (hereafter referred to as HIOHP). Harney is actually referring to the role of British ambassadors in Iran, debunking the belief of British omnipotence in Iran. I believe, however, that his phrase is equally apt in describing Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with the Shah at this time.
Mitchell Lerner, “‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice’: The Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson,” Diplomatic History, 34.2 (Apr. 2010), p. 357.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p. 16.
A small selection of the best books on Johnson’s Vietnam policies include Larry Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (London: W. W. Norton, 1989); Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 235–271; Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997); George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (London: McGraw-Hill, 2002); Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); David E. Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).
Joseph A. Califano, Jr., The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 10. For early appraisals of Johnson — by former colleagues and historians — that focus on his personality, see Philip Geyelin, Lyndon B. Johnson and the World (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966); Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (London: Macdonald and Company, 1969); Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (London: Andre Deutsch, 1976); Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975).
Robert Divine provides a useful overview of the early efforts to reassess Johnson; Robert A. Divine, “The Maturing Johnson Literature,” in Robert A. Divine, Ed., The Johnson Years, Volume Three: LBJ at Home and Abroad, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), pp. 1–17. For examples of the “Beyond Vietnam” literature, see Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008); H. W. Brands, Ed., The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999); John Dumbrell, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Mitchell B. Lerner, Ed., Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Jonathan Colman, A ‘Special Relationship’?: Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Anglo-American Relations ‘at the Summit,’ 1964–1968 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Idem., The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson: The United States and the World, 1963–1969 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Michael Lumbers, Piercing the Bamboo Curtain: Tentative Bridge-Building to China During the Johnson Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Andrew Priest, Kennedy, Johnson, and NATO: Britain, America, and the Dynamics of Alliance (London: Routledge, 2006). In his two excellent biographies, Robert Dallek offers a balanced portrayal of LBJ; Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Idem., Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). H. W. Brands finds much to praise in Johnson’s foreign policy — his handling of European issues, the Middle East, the crisis in the Dominican Republic, and tensions between Greece and Turkey and India and Pakistan — and argues that “the only major area of Johnson’s policy that falls clearly into the negative category is Vietnam”; H. W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 259.
Irving Bernstein, Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 537.
Armin Meyer, Quiet Diplomacy: From Cairo to Tokyo in the Twilight of Imperialism (New York: iUniverse, Inc, 2003), p. 137.
James A. Bill, “The Politics of Student Alienation: The Case of Iran,” Iranian Studies, 2.1 (Winter, 1969), pp. 8–26.
Matthew Shannon, “‘Contacts with the Opposition’: American Foreign Relations, the Iranian Student Movement, and the Global Sixties,” The Sixties, 4.1 (2011), p. 3.
“Background Paper Prepared in the Department of State,” 27 May 1964. FRUS 1964–1968 XXII, p. 54.
Mehdi Bozorgmehr, “From Iranian Studies to Studies of Iranians in the United States,” Iranian Studies, 31.1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 6–7.
Hossein G. Askari and John Thomas Cummings, “The Middle East and the United States: A Problem of ‘Brain Drain,’” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 8.1 (Jan., 1977), p. 67.
Lebanese students comprised the next largest contingent at 8,000 students. Iranian students approximately equalled in number those from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, and Kuwait combined. Ibid., p. 79.
Susannah Aquilina, “Common Ground: Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah on the US/Mexico Border,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 32.4 (Aug., 2011), pp. 321–334.
Jerrold D. Green, “Pseudoparticipation and Countermobilization: Roots of the Iranian Revolution,” Iranian Studies, 13.1 (1980), p. 36.
Askari and Cummings, “A Problem of ‘Brain Drain,’” p. 73.
Green, “Pseudoparticipation and Countermobilization,” p. 37. On Iranian student groups and activism see Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999); Afshin Matinasgari, Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2002). On student movements outside the United States during the 1960s see Bryn Jones, “All Along the Watershed: Sixties Values as Defence of Community Lifeworlds in Britain, 1968–2008,” in Bryn Jones, and Mike O’Donnell, Eds., Sixties Radicalism and Social Movement Activism: Retreat or Resurgence? (London: Anthem Press, 2010), pp. 3–22; Kevin McDonald, “May’s Tensions Today: France, Then and Now,” Ibid., pp. 23–38; Miguel Cardina, “The War Against the War: Violence and Anticolonialism in the Final Years of the Estado Novo,” Ibid., pp. 39–58; Helen Lunn, “From Sartre to Stevedores: The Connections between the Paris Barricades and the Reemergence of Black Trades Unions in South Africa,” Ibid., pp. 59–72; Riaz Ahmed Shaikh, “1968 — Was it Really a Year of Social Change in Pakistan?,” Ibid., pp. 73–88; Leo Zeilig, Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 1–4, 21–48. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) places American and international student unrest in the 1960s in a global context, tracing the links between activism and diplomacy; pp. 164–212.
Khaibar Gudarzian accused members of the Iranian royal family, including the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf, and court of corruption and misappropriation of aid funds. The Johnson administration’s inability to resolve the issue angered the Shah greatly, creating serious tension between the two. US offi-cials viewed the situation as so dire that at one point Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the Shah that the “only other matter which had recently been taking up more of his time than this affair was Vietnam.” The Shah, however, could not believe that Johnson was unable to simply dismiss the case, seeing as it involved an important ally. “Telegram from Secretary of State Rusk to the Department of State,” 8 Apr. 1965. FRUS 1964–1968 XXII., p. 135.
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Offiler, B. (2015). Lyndon Johnson, the Shah, and Iranian Opposition. 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_5
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