One thoughtful review of King of Kings—by Arash Azizi in The Atlantic (August 5, 2025)—is entitled “The Islamic Republic Was Never Inevitable.” That title is a good summary of Anderson’s main thesis. He is quite correct, though the thesis could have been even stronger had he included additional information from an Iranian perspective, rather than focusing so heavily on how U.S. actions—and inactions—were affecting developments in Iran.
Anderson gives a damning account of U.S. incompetence. That said, his account of why the U.S. government missed the Iranian Revolution is very much the story as told by one side. As he describes in the acknowledgments, he talked for many hours with two officials bitterly opposed to Washington’s policies (Michael Metrinko and Gary Sick), and he frequently cites a third (Henry Precht, who died in 2022). By contrast, he makes essentially no use of the exhaustive and detailed CIA study of why the agency got it wrong. Author Robert Jervis finally declassified and published the study in 2011 (see Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War [Cornell University Press]).
In keeping with his narrow vision about who was right and wrong on developments in Iran, Anderson is weak in shedding light on how U.S. academic experts on Iran were at least as blinkered and off-base as government policymakers. To his credit, his final chapter does highlight how the U.S. media repeated the nonsense peddled by Iranian revolutionaries. For instance, despite the image painted of the shah as a cruel murderer, independent human rights organizations concluded after the revolution that the shah’s secret police had killed fewer than a hundred people over more than a decade.
Anderson gives detailed descriptions of the shah’s moods and motivations. In doing so, he relies on interviews, often citing the shah’s widow Farah Pahlavi. What he writes certainly has the air of verisimilitude and tells a convincing story, but this reader was often left wondering how much of the descriptions were 20–20 hindsight rather than the events as they unfolded.
Although he criticizes the CIA for not translating Khomeini’s words, Anderson himself does not refer to any translations of the vigorous Iranian press and post-revolution publications, which analyzed in detail what happened and why. For instance, the SAVAK reports on the opposition, published in multiple volumes, tell us much about what the opposition was doing and thinking. That said, Anderson does offer many revealing and interesting stories about the mood in Iran, including, for example, the various rumors (pro- and anti-shah) that swept the country in late 1978.
King of Kings is a good read. Anderson is a skillful writer who has assembled much useful information to tell his story. Yet his account is very much that of one side—a fact the reader should bear in mind before being swept away.
Patrick Clawson
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
