This weekend, television for serious readers. [inaudible conversation] good evening. Good evening, my name is john movroydis, welcome to the washington president ial library. A few announcementsbefore we introduce our special guest. Please join us for the reopening of the new Nixon Library on the weekend of october 14, 15th and 16th, it will be spectacular. The exhibits will be a must see. They tell president nixons story in a very dramatic way utilizing the latest in cuttingedge technology and it will surely be an unforgettable experience for visitors of all ages. Please check out for that mixon. H. Org. Now on to our distinguished speaker. President Richard Nixon and Mohammmad Reza shah pahlavi were important Strategic Partners during the cold war, working to keep the soviet union from dominating the middle east and the persian gulf which was the source for the Worlds Energy needs. In a toast of the shot at the white house in 1973, nixon had the following about irans place in the world. The words are timeless because they aptly describe why around is so top of mind for us policymakers. He said, when we think of where iran is in history going back 2500 years, its placed geographically where the bridge betweeneurope and asia, the opening to the indian ocean and south asia and also the middle east. And we think also of the strategic role that iran occupies in that critical area of the world. Many believe is the most explosive parts, the whole area of the middle east and the indian ocean i can only say that those who want peace as you want it and as i wanted and as all of us in this room want it, those of us who believe in peace, we are fortunate that your majesty occupies the place of leadership you occupy today. Those are the words of president nixon in 73. Our distinguished beaker is here to discuss with us brands tragic importance in the world, specifically during the reign of the shot. Andrew scott cooper is an adjunct professor at Columbia University, a commentator on iran relations and his research at puritan news outlets across the world including the New York Times and the guardian. Hes the author of two very important books, one is called the oil kings how us, iran and saudi arabia changed the balance of power. His newest book which he will talk about and sign copies of is called the fall of heaven the pahlavis and the final days of imperial iran. Ladies and gentlemen, its my honor to introduce Andrew Scott Cooper. [applause] jonathan, thank you very much for that warm introduction. This is amazing, its very president ial and any historian standing here would be flattered to be in this wonderful room. Im delighted to join you, thank you so much for driving such long distances to come tonight. Earlier i had an opportunity to view the magnificent new exhibition space. The Nixon Library, the nixon family, the nixon foundation, National Archives and everyone associated with this wonderful project. To be commended for their efforts to preserve our historical record of finding creative new ways to make the nations history accessible and relevant to a new generation of americans. In the introduction to her pulitzer prizewinning history book stillwell and the American Experience in china, Barbara Chapman wrote, i am conscious of the hazard of venturing into the realm of America China policy. China is the ultimate reason for our involvement in southeast asia. The subject is worth a venture even though the ground is hot. And i think its safe to say judging my barbecued posterior that the ground is as hot today writing about ran as it was for tuchman 45 years ago when she wrote about china. There has been an intense reaction to the publication of my second book, the fall of heaven which recalls the final days of pahlavi in iran. The book had been available in stores for only three days when my amazon page flooded with messages of personal abuse. Anonymous trolls accuse me of being a cia agent, a center of rightwing fastest dictatorships and an apologist for human rights abuses. When my laptop was disabled by a virus, i wasnt sure if it was coincidence or something more sinister. As a precaution against hacking, i felt compelled to close my social media accounts and i also had to cancel a scheduled trip to iran next year. My employer kept me on the policy that Columbia University has in place to deal with investment and threats. Now all these things happened before anyone and really had time to read my book or fully digested content. And indeed, some of the people trolling me admit. They had not read it. I suspect they never intended to read the book. In fact, what they were reacting to was not my work but instead a book review that appeared in the New York Times review. The review was written by an american journalist of iranian heritage. She decided i presented a bar to sympathetic portrait of the late shah of iran, Mohammmad Reza shah pahlavi and that i was too critical of the Islamic Republic of iran. In particular, my reviewer accused me of showing quotes, reflexive hostility towards islamism which is a particularly sweeping generalization and incendiary phrase to use against anyone at the time of rising sectarian and religious tensions. The reviewer did not inform her readers that in order to better understand islam as it had been practiced before the revolution, i had traveled to iran on a sabbatical to study shiism at alamo stop at university in the theological city of ball. Nor did my reviewer informed her readers that earlier in my Career Research at United Nations and at human rights watch. In fact, my training made me more qualified than most on the highly sensitive issue of human rights in iran in the 1950s. Now, you wouldnt have known it from reading the times. But my book was the product of research and scholarship that entailed travel to iran but also to lebanon, egypt , france and several other countries. During my travels, i met with or interviewed more than 100 people. In addition, i located and analyzed thousands of pages of newly declassified documents and many others that had never before appeared in print. As readers of the review could be forgiven for assuming i had decided to sit one down one day and write a book on the shop cause i felt like it. Now, this tells you something about how the time we are living in. The book review was posted that at the times site on a friday. By saturday morning , the abuse was such that my publisher intervened with amazon and asked them to take immediate measures. Amazon agreed immediately to their credit and the issue was sent to the companys special Committee Established to monitor and respond to abuse, harassment and threats. I dont know if many of you were at the committee, i didnt know the committee existed. We have a system in place to help people like me. By then of course the review had gone viral and by sunday morning, brewster post had carried a report that said my book was causing profound embarrassment to has bullock in lebanon. As you can see, things are getting worse. What my reviewer had done was misrepresented the part of the book that dealt with the disappearance of imam facade, a prominent cleric who disappeared from libya in on august 1978. According to her, depicted Ayatollah Khomeini as personal involvement in the disappearance of most of, during the revolution. If you read the book carefully and closely, you will see i lay out several plausible explanations to describe what may have happened to this man. But in tehran, iranian journalists began rounding up his family members with the accusation and the New York Times was correct. The next thing i knew, copies of my book were on their way into iran. Clearly some people decided to book could be used to embarrassthe iranian authorities. Now, the words historian and contraband are usually mentioned in the same sentence. And i admit, i was flattered to learn that my book was now in the same illicit category as crates of whiskey and blue movies. Without knowing it, i had in fact produced a work of subversive literature. Controversy sells. Thats what i was told by my editors, my agent and my friends. They congratulated me. You have achieved something very few historians have achieved notoriety. But i did not speak out notoriety. I was appalled to see myself reduced in the public eye to a caricature and my work completely misrepresented. I have spent the past decade working seven days a week, long hours and with great care to produce new books totaling over 1000 pages. During that same time period, pops was undergoing spinal surgery, i had completed the second masters degree and phd in order to develop a respectable level of scholarly expertise. The whole experience of this book initially left me feelingdispirited. Yes, controversy sells was my reply. What about my reputation . What about my professional integrity. Even as i uttered those words, i realized that i sounded as though i had crept out of it hogarth painting from the 21st century. Today, when scandal is seen as the fastest way to the top , concerns about personal reputation and integrity sound positively elitist. Several weeks ago, the novelist tamara jana wits who wrote slaves of new york along time ago was asked by the guardian paper how she dealt with criticism and poor reviews of her work. But its like andy said to me, she said, that andy as in andy warhol. Its like andy said to me and he said it much cleverer if i get a bad review, its not what they say, its how many inches they jabbed you. In 1980 jimmy carter was president , the berlin wall was still standing, and the bee gees ruled the music charts. Millions of words, thousands of articles and hundreds of books have been written about the shah and the revolution. What was it about me and my book in particular that provoked such an intense reaction . Well, the simple answer, one answer, is that for iranians, the revolution never really ended. For many, it remains an open wound and very much unfinished business. What outsiders regard as simple history, they view as deeply personal. Everyone has their own opinion about why the revolution happened and how it turned out. There are iranians, especially on the intellectual left, who have never forgiven the shah for his mistakes. And i suspect their criticisms can be partly explained as a response to my work. Yet almost four decades later, far more iranians have grown weary of the black and white historical narrative that casts the shah as the villain and khomeini as irans great liberator from oppression. This was a narrative essentially shaped by the baby boomer generation of scholars who carried over the struggles and grievances of the 1960s and 70s into their scholarly work. They remain deeply invested in this narrative, and i think it is fair to say have profited from it. Thats just how it works. But that narrative is now collapsing beneath the weight of its own contradictions. Though my critics would have liked you to believe that i am personally trying to rehabilitate the shah and the pahlavi era, the fact is that scholars are only now catching up to where many in the Iranian Community have been for some time. In the last decade in particular, many younger iranians have become interested in learning about what life was like before the 1979 revolution. For them the crackdown on the Green Movement in iran in 2009 was a watershed event. It led them to question the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. Stunned by the brutality of the crackdown that followed, many young people and students withdrew from active politics. In their search for answers to how iran got to where it is at today, they became interestedded and began studying their countrys history before the revolution. Now, i encountered this phenomenon myself three years ago when i visited iran. Islamic scholars in an Islamic University told me that their students had so many questions about the shah and the pahlavi era that they felt obliged to offer special history classes to educate them on the faults and failings of the monarchy and especially the shah and to remind them why the revolution had been necessary in the first place. The literature on the shah and the pahlavi era was bound to change, if only it had become stagnant. The first wave of books written about the revolution appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. They were written by political scientists, diplomats, former officials, journalists and idealogues. Some were good, others not so much. Most authors reflected the orthodoxy of the cold war period, and almost without exception were harshly critical of the shahs rule. Except for a few exceptions, these books and their authors portrayed the shah as either an american puppet, as a blood thirsty dictator or as a weak and corrupt ruler who was completely out of touch with his people. Professionallytrained historians tend not to get involved in historical debates until we are confident we have located new materials with which to write our own investigations and reach our own conclusions. So for a long time, most historians stood back. That started to change in 2009. Since then several books have been published that seem to suggest the revisionistaway of literature revisionist wave of literature on the pahlavi era was finally on its way. The authors of these books were less judgmental and, i think, more sympathetic to the challenges the shah faced in trying to modernize his country at a very difficult time. My first book, the oil kings, was published five years ago. Its portrait of the shah as a staunch nationalist and hardnosed negotiator with u. S. Officials including president nixon shocked and intrigued iranians who were used to the conventional narrative of him as an american puppet. Now for the first time, with the help of the new documentation we had from the National Archives and the president ial libraries, they were able to gain a more nuanced understanding of the particular challenges faced by the shah in trying to preserve irans sovereignty and steer his country through the treacherous currents of the cold war. Some iranians who had lived through the revolution refused to accept the books scholarship. They considered it such a radical departure from what they had known and read about that they decided i must be part of some organized conspiracy to rehabilitate the shahs image. For the first time, i began hearing rumors that a noniranian couldnt possibly have written such a book, let alone someone from new zealand. And rumors began circulating that either i was a cia agent or that the declassified u. S. Government documents i used in my research were elaborate forgeries produced by institutions such as this one. From writing about conspiracy theories, i became one myself. [laughter] it is the ultimate accolade in a way. I always wanted to write a book about the shahs last days in power. I was 9 years old when the revolution happened, and i still remember watching the crisis unfold on television in wellington, new zealand, where i grew up, and it left an impression. Nine years old, think about it. Think about what our children are watching today and how thats going to affect them later on. As a teenager, i read hundreds of history books. That was my shtick. Big books, the bigger the better. [laughter] and i was particularly enamored with robert massies nicholas and alexandra, which i still regard as perhaps one of the best written and most evocative narrative history books of the past 50 years. The the oil kings opened the door to the sequel that i hoped would take readers behind the scenes to help them understand how the shah lost power in 1979. I also wanted to recreate what life was like in iran and especially tehran on the eve of the revolution. I thought younger iranians in particular would enjoy learning more about how their parents and grandparents had lived before the revolution changed iran forever. Like the first book, this one was also helped by timing with the declassification of thousands of pages of new documents from the carter presidency. So now for the first time we understand what u. S. Officials in 197879, how they were responding to the emergence of this crisis in iran. And this is important. Now, i imagine for some iranians i know for some iranians there is something strangely compelling in the spectacle of a new zealandborn historian coming under fire for writing a book on the shah of iran. Some iranians are surprised and suspicious, they tell me, so i know this is how they feel, that a foreigner and especially someone from as far afield as new zealand shows so much interest in their history. But you have to consider where i come from. New zealanders have a reputation for curiosity about the world around them. Our personal interests often become obsessions which may have something to do with the fact that not much happens in new zealand. [laughter] fortunately, this has not been broadcast in new zealand [laughter] i hope. New zealand, new zealand and its people tend to be very quiet especially when compared to iran and iranians. But we live vicariously through you. [laughter] were also, from what i can tell, very singleminded people. I dont think its a coincidence that a new zealand mountain climber was the first to climb Mount Everest or that a kiwi scientist was the first to split the atom. Consider the bizarre con trappings in contraptions invented by New Zealanders over the years. Egg beaters, hairpins and referee whistles. Where would you be without them . Where would you be without us . [laughter] we have a role to play. [laughter] seven years ago a new zealand teenager living on an isolated farm built the Worlds Largest piano in a wool shed with no help or instructions from anyone on the outside. Thanks to the New Zealander who invented the zorb, you can now strap yourself into a giant, hollow plastic ball and go spinning down the hillside at 50 kilometers an hour. [laughter] why wouldnt you want to do that . [laughter] and dont forget we invented bungee jumping. Nor am i the only New Zealander in recent months to come under fire for g