Editor's Letter

Death of an Emperor

Mohammad Reza Pahiavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, was once the supreme power of his world. He died a man without a country, betrayed by friends and tortured by a disease that no one could agree on how to treat. William Shawcross, the London-based foreign correspondent, spent three years researching and writing The Shah's Last Ride (to be published by Simon and Schuster in October), and we have waited impatiently to preview it for V.F. readers. Now, on page 112, you can read his account of the harrowing odyssey that took the Shah from the excesses of the Peacock Throne to his miserable death in an Egyptian hospital after eighteen months of desperate flight from Ayatollah Khomeini's avengers (who, it was rumored, were even trying to have him killed on the operating table).

What Shawcross reveals, among other things, is the irony that the richer and more powerful you are, the more the right medical treatment is likely to elude you: eight successive teams of doctors tormented the Shah with conflicting diagnoses as he was shunted between Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, New York, Panama, and Egypt in search of asylum. It was such a lamentable sight that General Torrijos, his host in Panama, thought the Shah should "take a helicopter or a

beautiful white horse and ride into Persia and die like a king on a sword.''

Shawcross portrays the Shah as a weak, muddled man who lacked the fiery decisiveness of his formidable twin sister, Princess Ashraf. But he believes that history will look more kindly on the Shah than the current conventional wisdom supposes. While it

is true that his government was corrupt and his court was decadent, it is also true that the horrors wreaked on his country by religious fanatics after he left were more horrible than what had gone on before. And, as is seen in our pages, the Shah behaved bravely, and with dignity, during the months that he was buffeted around by such sleazy operators as Manuel Noriega, who was placed in charge of his security in Panama.

To compile his story Shawcross interviewed scores of people in Europe, the Middle East, and America, including the Shah's widow, other members of the Iranian royal family, and many of the doctors who attended the Shah. The drama of his tale, with its scenes of midnight flights and political intrigue, is tragic and memorable.

Editor in chief