Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Republic of Iran, right up until the point Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini threw him into the street.
In one of the 20th century’s most spectacular political collapses, the shah fled Iran on Jan. 16, 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini, who had directed the revolution from exile, returned home two weeks later. In the broad-based government that the ayatollah installed, Mr. Bani-Sadr served as deputy minister of finance, then minister of finance, and finally as minister of foreign affairs. With the ayatollah’s blessing, Mr. Bani-Sadr easily won the presidential election of Jan. 25, 1980. The ayatollah, however, had secured approval of a constitution giving him power to dismiss presidents at will. Over the next 18 months, he directed Mr. Bani-Sadr’s rise and fall.
In his first weeks in power, Mr. Bani-Sadr worked to bring order to the shambles that had been left by the collapse of the shah’s government. However, he was quickly was distracted by the hostage crisis.
“The takeover of the U.S. embassy was wholly in line with Khomeini’s strategy of focusing hostility abroad,” he later wrote. “It was at this moment that the idea of a religious state became viable. He also realized that he could now silence people at will, by threatening them with the accusation of being pro-American.”
In the venomous political climate of post-revolution Tehran, enemies rose against Mr. Bani-Sadr. Several of his associates were convicted on trumped-up charges and executed. After war with Iraq broke out, militants criticized him for relying more on the regular army, which they associated with the shah’s monarchy, than on revolutionary guards and other political forces. In the summer and fall of 1980, he survived two helicopter crashes.
The combination of the hostage crisis and the war created a hyper-radical atmosphere in which a tweedy, mustachioed intellectual like Mr. Bani-Sadr could hardly hope to survive. On June 10, 1981, Ayatollah Khomeini removed him from his post as commander in chief. On June 21, parliament ruled him “politically incompetent” and voted to impeach him as president. Ayatollah Khomeini signed the bill the next day.
Several years ago, when I was immersed in the Iranian Revolution, I read Mr. Bani-Sadr’s book. It is like many of the books that came out of revolutionary Iran: “We hated the Shah. We thought Khomeini would be a change for the better. Boy, we got played for suckers.”
Abdul Qadeer (A.Q) Khan, “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Patrick Horgan. He had a long run as “Dr. John Morrison” on “The Doctors”, and did a few movies: “Zelig” and “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion”. Other TV credits include an episode of a minor 1960s SF television series.
Interesting to me: he was “Major Strasser” in “Casablanca”.
“Casablanca”, the 1983 TV series starring David Soul as Rick Blaine, that is. Anybody remember that? I have a vague memory of seeing commercials for it, but I can’t blame you if you don’t remember it: it was cancelled after three episodes, and NBC burned off the remaining two during the summer.
Granville Adams, of “Oz” and “Homicide: Life on the Street”.