Fresh Air - How The 1979 Revolution Transformed Iran

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

For decades, Iran has been an adversary of the United States. Scott Anderson examines the Iranian revolution of 1979, the upheaval that deposed the reigning monarch and transformed the country from a U.S. ally to an Islamic Republic. He says blunders by American policymakers played a key role in the outcome. Anderson's new book is King of Kings.Later David Bianculli reviews the new HBO documentary, Billy Joel: And So it Goes.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

There's a lot of news happening. You want to understand it better, but let's be honest, you don't want it to be your entire life either. Well, that's sort of like our show, Here and Now Anytime. Every weekday on our podcast, we talk to people all over the country about everything from political analysis to climate resilience, video games. We even talk about dumpster diving on this show. Check out Here and Now Anytime, a daily podcast from NPR and WBUR. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. For decades, Iran has been a major preoccupation of U.S. policymakers for its nuclear program, its threats to Israel, and its backing of armed extremist groups in the Middle East. But go back a half a century, and Iran was a very different

place. Our guest today, journalist Scott Anderson, has taken a close look at the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the violent upheaval that transformed the country from one of America's closest allies into the Islamic Republic that regards the United States as the great Satan. Before that, the country was governed by the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a monarch who ruled with political repression while seeking to modernize his nation's economy and social relations. In a new book Anderson writes that the Iranian Revolution had far-reaching effects contributing to the rise of Islamic extremism. He says it

marked the modern world's first successful religious counter-revolution against the forces of secularism and was in some ways as significant as the American, French, and Russian revolutions. His gripping account of the conflict suggests that the outcome was far from inevitable, and that many factors, including the Shah's personal failings and the inattention and poor decisions of American policymakers, contributed to the victory of Ayatollah Khomeini. Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent who's reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia, and other countries. He's the author of seven previous books. His latest is King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution,

a story of hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation. I spoke to Scott Anderson last week. Well, Scott Anderson, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you, Dave. It's good to be back. I have to congratulate you on this book. It really is just a terrific gripping read. There is so much fascinating detail here, and I just want to let the audience know there's

more than we can get to, but there's plenty there. You know a lot about the Middle East, I mean you traveled through it with your dad who worked for the State Department when you were a kid and you opened this book with a scene from Washington DC in late 1977 when the Shah of Iran on the throne for decades came to America's capital for his first visit with the new president Jimmy Carter. You happened to be there because you were a low-level Treasury Department and you witnessed some events outside the White House. You want to just share this little scene with us? Sure, yeah. So it was mid-November of 1977 that the Shah

came on a state visit and some 4,000 anti-Shah demonstrators, mostly Iranian students studying in the United States, arrived in Washington to protest his visit. And meanwhile, the Iranian government had shipped in pro-Shah demonstrators to kind of face off with them. And so when the Shah arrived and he had just reached the White House, all of a sudden there was a pitch battle on the ellipse, the ellipse being this great lawn just below the White House. And I happened to be there. I was kind of wandering around.

I was stationed at the Treasury headquarters, which is right next door to the White House. And I had just wandered over, and I was kind of in no-man's land between these two groups, the anti-Shah and the pro-Shah demonstrators. And all of a sudden, the two sides broke through the snow fencing that was keeping them back and charged each other.

And I happened to be at ground zero. I got knocked to the ground. Well, a lot of people got knocked to the ground. It turned out to be the most violent day of civil unrest in Washington. You see it almost a decade. And the thing about this day was, unfortunately for the Shah, it was being shown on live TV back in Iran. And the way a lot of people interpreted this event, and there was tear gas, the Shah and

President Carter were tear gassed on the South Lawn. A lot of Iranians saw this as a move by the Americans to distance themselves from the Shah, because why else would they let the Shah be humiliated in the American capital? Right. In their country, if something like that happened, surely the Shah would have organized it. So they assumed Jimmy Carter was sending a message here. In fact, he was quite humiliated to have this tear gas flowing into his event. Yeah, absolutely.

So running the country in Iran in the 1970s was the Shah, who had been in power since 1941, installed by the British and the Soviets, who were active then. This was during World War II. Give us a sense, you know, by the 1970s of what his style was like, how he ruled the country, kind of what powers he exercised and what the country's economy and social norms were? So he spent a long time early in his reign from 41 to probably the mid-60s. First of all, really trying to cozy up to the Americans. He saw the Americans as the superpower that would protect him from the encroachment of

the Soviet Union on his northern border. He was always afraid of communists within Iran. He tried to do something very difficult, which was to be socially and economically progressive. He gave women the right to vote. He went on this very ambitious land reform program, but at the same time became more and more politically in control of the entire country. There was a parliament, it was a rubber stamp, it was really the Shah and his generals who ran the country.

But I think it's important to note that the Shah's Iran was never as repressive or as brutal as, say, Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Assad's father and son, Syria. He tended to buy people off. So there was within Iran, there was a political opposition. Occasionally some would be arrested, occasionally some would be exiled. There was certainly the clerics didn't like him because they saw him secularizing the society but a lot of them were on sinecures from the state also. So it was kind of a regime where if you had a certain amount of power, a certain amount

of clout, you were more likely to be bought off than thrown in prison. Right. And of course there was a lot of oil money, I guess, starting in the 60s and 70s. They nationalized the oil production. So that had a lot of effects, major changes, dramatic contrasts, I guess, in wealth and poverty. Oh, yes, absolutely. I was in, as you mentioned, I was traveling with my father through Iran in 1974. And what I remember from being in Tehran and in the countryside. In Tehran, it was a modern, smoggy city.

You saw women in miniskirts, clogged with traffic. And literally 10 miles outside of Tehran, people were living in mud huts and using cow dung, drying cow dung to use as fuel. So there was a tremendous disparity between the haves and the have nots. And what would also happen with this huge influx of money in the early 70s, oil money, you had this huge movement of poor from the countryside moving into the city, mostly young men, largely

uneducated. If they could find work, they were working at these really menial jobs, but more significantly, they came from very religious backgrounds. And they were, I think, a lot of them were just kind of stunned at what they saw as the cosmopolitan nature of Tehran and the other Iranian cities. Right. You write about a guy, a minor character in the book, who was a religious missionary from the United States, George Braswell, but he revealed something really meaningful about

the society. Yes. George Braswell, but he revealed something really meaningful about the society. Yes. George Braswell is fascinating. He went to Iran with his family, wife and three kids in 1968 as an evangelist. He was the first Southern Baptist evangelist to go back into Iran after about 50 or 60 years. He quickly realized that the government was not going to let him proselytize. He was really kind of at a loss of what to do until he met the dean of the School of

Religion at Tehran University. The dean hired him on to teach comparative religion at the University of Tehran. Everybody else on the faculty of religion were Muslim. George was the only Christian, but he's a very friendly guy, very affable, very curious about Iranian society. So people really opened up to him. And in particular, after he'd been there for a while, one of his graduate students said, would you like to seek a special kind of service?

And George didn't know what that meant, but he said, well, sure, yeah. I'm fascinated by Islam. So the graduate student took him in the middle of the night to this hut out in the southern suburbs. And it was all these younger clerics, mullahs, gathered around a tape cassette player and they played this tape where the person on the tape was saying, we have to start organizing for the revolution and that voice was Ayatollah Khomeini from sending the tape in from exile in Iraq. George Braswell had never heard of Khomeini before. This was in 1968, and it would be another about seven years before he would even be

mentioned in any State Department cables from Tehran, you know, back to the States. He was utterly invisible to the Americans. Braswell just assumed that the CIA, which had a very large station in Tehran, that they knew all about Khomeini, and certainly people in the State Department. He tried to meet with people at the State Department, and they just ignored him. Right. So there was this churning force among the poor of Iran that a lot of them, that a lot of people just didn't know about, but it was led by Khomeini. The Shah faced a critical confrontation in 1963

with Khomeini, which was an important moment. Tell us about this. Yeah, so in 1963, the Shah initiated what he called his White Revolution. And it was a total of 19 reforms in his mind. And it was to sort of propel Iran into the 20th century. It was a real grab bag of things, everything from reforestation to collectivization to giving landless peasants, of which a majority of Iran's rural population did not own their

land, to break up the big land holdings in Iran and also to give women the right to vote, to empower women. This immediately caused a backlash among the conservative clergy in Iran, especially led by one of the most vehemently and arch-conservative Ayat arresting Khomeini and that sparked riots throughout Iran. The Shah's prime minister then decided to declare martial law. There was shooting in the streets of a number of Iranian cities, probably about 150 people were killed. They arrested, they again grabbed Khomeini and Khomeini then was quiet for a little while and he started up again with his agitation. And so the second time the Shah sent him into exile, he first went to Turkey and then ended

up in Iraq, in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq. Right. So for the next couple of decades, Khomeini was active but outside the country, sending cassette tapes of his sermons in and still a force. That's right. And I think one of the things to understand about Khomeini's power over, once the revolution started, again, a lot of people had never heard of Khomeini within Iran when the revolution started in

78. He'd been airbrushed out of history by the Shah's regime. But once the revolution got started in earnest, he became this sort of symbol of incorruptibility. He was a man who could not be bought while he was in exile. So there's no way to buy him anyway. And so even though there's a lot of other Ayatollahs who were in opposition to the Shah they none of them had quite the moral authority that Khomeini did because you know they over the years a lot of them had been on stipends from the regime so Khomeini had this image of the pure, uncorrupted religious leader,

and that I think was really a source of a lot of his power. So, you know, back in the 70s, I mean, Iran was a critical ally for the United States. They had provided him with great weaponry, and thus it had a fairly large staff in its embassy in Tehran as well as a significant CIA station. But you write that both the State Department and the intelligence community's knowledge of the country was shockingly shallow. How was this evident in your research? I'll tell a great story about that. When the first major riots happened, the anti-Shah riots happened, and it was in February of 1978, and it was in a provincial city called Tabriz in northwestern Iran, and there was an American consul there, a man named Mike Matrinko.

They gutted the city center. There's a path of destruction about eight miles long and about five miles wide. They just completely gutted the new kind of commercial center of Tabriz, which is a major city. This was such big news. By far the biggest civil disturbance in decades that even if the regime had tried to downplay it, it was impossible. So it was the Tabriz riots in which probably over 100 people were killed.

They were the headlines on every Iranian newspaper for days. It was, of course, the lead story on national news, the television news. And so Matrinko had been the only American there. He reported back what was happening to the embassy. And after about four or five days after the riots, he hears that a CIA officer is coming up to, and wants to meet with him. He's coming up to DeBrice.

And Matrinko's was, wow, great, finally. You know, the CIA has done such a horrible job of reporting on this country, but now finally somebody is coming to take a look on the ground of what's really happening. So the CIA officer arrives, Matrinko picks him up at the airport and they start driving into the city center. And all of a sudden the CIA officer kind of sits up and looks out at the destruction and

goes, what the hell happened here? He was coming to see Matrinko on a completely different matter. So even though the riots were... He was stationed at the... He was in the CIA station in Tehran. Even though it was the lead story on national news for four or five days, he hadn't even heard of it. That to me is... Just personifies what the CIA was doing there. They were under what their whole focus was. The CIA in Iran was spying on the Soviet Union, southern Soviet Union. So they had listening posts along the Iranian border.

They never were doing any sort of domestic intelligence gathering. Even more remarkably, anything they were getting from domestically was handed to them by the Shah's secret police, SAVAK. And SAVAK said, everything's going great. So there was no intelligence gathering. And this was, as you said, this was one of our – the United States' most important allies anywhere in the world and nobody was paying

any attention to what was happening internally. Yeah, it's really remarkable how this mandated group think that this is our ally and everything's great and he's got it under control reigned. This fight that you mentioned, Michael Matrko, is a fascinating character and there are two other cases in the book where you point out that he gave reports about stuff that should have been very troubling signs of the Shah's weakness. In one case a lot of people that he knew were cashing in their life savings and leaving the country because things were bad.

In another case there was a kind of a mutiny happening among some Air Force pilots and when he sends this and it in some cases actually gets passed along to the State Department headquarters, what's the reaction of his superiors? The reaction of his superiors is not only to ignore it but to reprimand him for it. That you know he is he's seeing problems where problems don't exist. He's the hysteric out in the provinces. And just roundly ignored. Significantly, Trinko was one of the only people at the embassy who actually spoke Farsi, who

could understand what was happening locally. Virtually everybody else did not speak Farsi. So he had a very wide social circle, a very gregarious guy. And so he saw disaster coming long before anybody else. He had served in Iran in the early 70s. He came back in 1977 when the revolution was just starting to kind of perk up a little bit. And this is when he saw people just bailing out of the country, including the wealthy

class and people saying, this place is going down the tubes. And when he tried to tell people that, he was completely ignored, most incredibly with Matrinko. After the revolution, the revolution, Khomeini came to power in February of 1979. And so for the next year, nine months, the Carter administration tried to make nice with the Homeni regime, tried to repair this anti-American feeling. And the people at the embassy were kind of replicating what they'd said with the Shah. They said, yeah, everything's going good.

You know, they're not really anti-American. They have to be allies with us because of all their weaponry is American. And again, Matrinko was the one person who was saying, no, this place is about to blow up. And so in September of 79, this is about six weeks before the American hostages are taken, Matrenko takes a brief home vacation. He comes back to the states and somebody at the state department, hears he's in town and says, look, Mike, you know, I've been reading your reports from the field and they're different from what everybody else is saying. And, you know, you're

really painting a very grim picture of what's happening. Will you come in and talk to the senior policy people in the State Department about what you see? And so, Matrinko agrees to do that. They arrange to have a – they take over a conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department the next afternoon. Matrinko arrives a bit early and is going over his notes. And a State Department security officer comes into the conference room, kind of taps him on the shoulder and leads him outside and says, yeah, you know, this meeting has been given a security classification higher than your clearance to attend.

And Metrinko says, do you realize that this meeting is being held because of what I've been reporting in the field? And the guy says, yeah, doesn't matter. So the meeting doesn't take place. Matrinko goes back to Iran a couple weeks later and a month after that, he and everybody else in the embassy are taken hostage. Let's take another break here.

We are speaking with Scott Anderson. His new book is King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution, a story of hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation. We'll hear more of our conversation after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. These days, there's so much news, it can be hard to keep up with what it all means for you, your family, and your community. The Consider This podcast from NPR features our award-winning journalism. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a news story

and provide the context and analysis that helps you make sense of the news. We get behind the headlines. We get to the truth. Listen to the Consider This podcast from NPR. As 1978 unfolded and there was increasing chaos in the country, riots, strikes, and such, a lot of it supported by Khomeini.

There were a group of men around Khomeini, and one of them was a pharmacology professor living in Texas, an Iranian fellow who had spent a lot of years in the opposition movement. His name was Ibrahim Yazdi, right? That's right. He realized that it was important for Khomeini to convince the United States that his ascent to leadership in Iran should be welcomed and not feared. How did he do this? One thing that really surprised me when I started looking at this story was how much of the focus of it, even

the Carter administration, was still on the Cold War, was still about the Soviet Union. And so, you know, the mindset of the Cold War was that everything was a zero-sum game. If we lose, then the Soviets win and vice versa. So at first, when the revolution started, of course, the Americans were kind of panicking. But what Yazdi managed to figure out was what their biggest fear wasn't losing the Shah, but was losing Iran to the Soviets. And of course, that was kind of absurd when you look at Khomeini because of it. He was a rabid anti-communist. At the same time, he kind of moderated Khomeini's speeches and what he would say in press conferences.

First of all, he was instrumental in moving Khomeini from Iraq to Paris in October of 78. So, all of a sudden, Khomeini is available to the entire world's media. Again, because very few journalists speak Farsi, Yazdi was acting as his interpreter, and he would modify and moderate what Khomeini was saying to make him sound like more reasonable. At the same time this was going on, Yazdi was sending out the message that you have nothing to fear about a communist takeover if Khomeini comes to power. It's anathema to Khomeini communism.

So what you start seeing about October, November within the Carter administration is, of course they want the sh Shah to stay on. But all of a sudden, they're looking at Khomeini and going, well, if he comes in, that's not the worst thing. The worst thing would be if the Reds take over. And really, by about November of 79, about two months before the Shah went into exile, the Americans were kind of already distancing themselves from

him because it wasn't, you know, Khomeini wasn't going to be the worst thing. What's fascinating about it is this guy Yazdi, is they're translating Khomeini's words to Western journalists, but he's deliberately getting them wrong. I mean, didn't some people around them realize to say, hey, wait a minute, do you know what this guy's saying? You know, it goes back to this thing about the level of communications at the time. Even some of the people who were in Khomeini's camp, some of the kind of Westerners who rallied around and were congregating around him in Paris, a few journalists who did speak Farsi

or were translating stuff, and they would show things that Khomeini had written back in the 50s and 60s that all governments in the world are illegitimate except that one's appointed by God. And when they saw these writings, they assumed that they were Savak forgeries. They said, no, no one can actually believe this. These are forgeries. And that happened even in Paris. There was a couple of journalists who said, you know, what he's saying is really incendiary and he's talking about, you know, rivers of blood to flow.

And people like Yazdi, who were around him, were going, no, no, no, he didn't say that. That's not what that means. You know, this is Savak disinformation. And what is striking about this, and I remember this moment in the book where this representative Yazdi would say, no, no, he never said torrents of blood. It turns out the State Department had all the countless cassettes of Khomeini's sermons in their possession, which were filled with rhetoric that would have cast him in a very different light. But they somehow never listened to them? That's right. That's right. When the MS embassy was taken over by the hostage takers in November of 79, they were going

all... They were rifling all through the embassy safes and file cabinets looking for incriminating information. They just found stacks and stacks and stacks of cassettes of Homeni sermons. They had been collected both by the CIA and by the State Department. Nobody had listened to them. Nobody who spoke Farsi had listened to them. Nobody transcribed them. So you're absolutely right. It was a roadmap to what Khomeini was going to do if he took over. And they never listened to him. They didn't even have one of the local workers at the embassy listen to them.

Yeah. So they were kind of flying by in terms of what was going to happen. You know, there's a fascinating period as the end approached and it was clear that the Shah was in deep trouble. And at this point, I mean, the State Department had dispensed with this idea that, you know, the Shah is in control and everything's fine. But you say that they pursued, the Carter administration pursued a dual track approach to the crisis whose incoherence and guaranteed futility had few parallels in modern diplomatic history. This is quite something. So what were these two approaches carried out by different people? So one idea was that we should continue to support the Shah or at least his caretaker

regime behind it. And then the second was to make overtures to Homanian people around him. Where it really became quite bizarre was in the very last days when the Shah was there, they sent an American general to Iran to meet with the Shah's generals. And at this point, the Shah's generals were about,

they wanted to bail out of the country right along with the Shah. This general convinced them to stay, but they had this very complicated- The American general convinced them to stay. I'm sorry, the American general, yeah, convinced them to stay, but they had this very complicated program that they were supposed to follow.

Number one, they were supposed to stay loyal to the interim government, the caretaker government that the Shah was leaving behind. And two, if that proved impossible, they were to stage a military coup. The military was supposed to take over. The problem was that you were dealing with a group of generals who had never worked with each other.

The general worked with four generals and one admiral in the Iranian Armed Forces. Those were the five who were supposed to be in control of everything. Some of those men had never met each other because the Shah was so paranoid of losing power that he met with his generals individually. He never met with them as a group. He didn't want one to know the other. And so he would send different messages, different orders to different people. So these generals had spent a whole career, their careers just following orders and not having an original thought of their own. So the idea that these men were going to somehow organize a coup,

Mike Metrenko famously said, he knew a lot of these generals. He said, these guys couldn't maneuver their way through a grocery checkout line, let alone stage a coup. And of course they didn't. And they, by staying behind, most of them were executed by the Khomeini regime. We are speaking with Scott Anderson. He's a veteran journalist. His new book is King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution, a story of hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation.

We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air. So in the end, the country's military declares its neutrality. Discipline falls apart, a lot of soldiers desert, militants break into bases, they get weapons and the country is taken over by these semi-organized forces loyal to the Ayatollah. President Carter immediately recognizes the Islamic Republic, hoping for a friendly relationship and some moderation, but as it all takes shape there are hundreds, thousands of executions eventually without trials. A new constitution gives the Ayatollah complete control,

affirming that the supreme leader's views and actions are guided by God. And of course, hostages are eventually taken from the US Embassy and held for over 400 days. Death to the US becomes the mantra of the regime, exactly what the US had hoped to avoid, wasn't it? Right. Yeah. And there's another little detail to this that I think is really remarkable. So in the run-up to the hostages being taken, what really precipitated, the catalyst for the hostages being taken was when the Carter administration allowed the shah to come to the United States for medical treatment. And he'd been trying to get into the States for months and months ever since he'd gone

into exile. David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were lobbying on his behalf and telling Carter, you have to do this. It's a matter of national honor. Then all of a sudden, the Shaw becomes deathly ill and doctors around him saying, oh, he can only be treated in the United States. The Carter administration's first reaction is, what convenient timing. He's been trying to get here forever, and now all of a sudden it's a life or death thing.

But it looked like he was very seriously ill. And famously, in late October, Carter convened all his closest foreign policy advisors in the Oval Office, Vice President Mondale, National Security Advisor, Secretary of State. And as Carter often did, he went around the room and asked each person in the room what they should do. Should they let the Shah in?

And everybody in the room said, yeah, we have to let him in. It's a matter of national honor. We have to stand by a former ally. And Carter looked at him and said, what are you guys going to tell me to do when they attack our embassy and take our people there hostage? And nobody said a thing.

And then Carter said, yeah, that's what I thought you were going to say. So he saw it coming. And it was just kind of powerless to stop it. That is quite a moment. And I think the officials at the embassy in Tehran had warned them, look, if you let the Shah into the country, they're going to send us back in boxes.

That's right. They warned them again and again. And Carter had listened to them up through until October of 79. And that's then when all of a sudden it looked like the Shah was close to death and needed to be seen by American doctors. That's when he finally relented and disaster unfolded. You say that this revolution led directly to some of America's greatest missteps in the region. Which one and what's the connection? So, I mean, starting kind of right off the bat with the Khomeini regime,

they immediately started to militarize their allies throughout the region, famously Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon. So when Lebanon blew up again in 82, 83, it was Hezbollah units that blew up the American embassy and then blew up the American Marine compound in 1983. Started taking Americans hostage and then going forward from that, I mean if you look at the invasion of Iraq, who benefited from that were the Iranians because in the power vacuum that that created, they now have enormous influence over, certainly over southern Iraq, which is the Shiite heartland. And throughout the region, these groups that have been squashed in the last year or so by the Israelis, these were all the regime's mischief makers out in the region.

ISIS was Sunni, but by Iran supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria, an absolutely murderous regime, if you look at what was happening in the Middle East four, five, six years ago, you would have to say that the Iranians had far more influence than the Americans had. They were, you know, the Americans had, as they're want to do, they had involved themselves in a region, you know, come in, they were going to be the peacekeepers, they had the liberators and then things went south and they jumped out. And that has only changed very recently. You raise the question in the book that this was not inevitable, that there were a lot

of missteps that made this come out the way it did. And you say, some officials say that if the Shah were just more decisive, if he hadn't failed to act at critical junctures, he could have survived. And I think a lot of people would say, you know, then and probably now, that's not exactly a desirable outcome to have this absolute monarch there. I mean, what about that? No, I think that's true.

I think that people always say, you know, he would be hard for a while, then it goes soft and back and forth, you'd oscillate. But in fact, he did even worse than that. He did both simultaneously. So he declares martial law, but then tells the generals that, you know, only under the most dire circumstances are soldiers to fire live ammunition. So he kind of tries to do both things at the same time. I think if the Shah had, if he had taken a Saddam Hussein or an Assad approach, if he

had just machine gunned his people in the streets, he might have lasted a bit longer. Conversely, if I think that there was a time when if he had pushed for reform and agreed to lose a lot of his power and to have more of a parliamentary democracy where he had very limited power, I think he might have survived. But I think by trying to do both at the same time, it was kind of impossible. And it's curious now, now his son, Crown Prince Reza, amidst the disturbance or the bombings lately, he's gone around to the media and kind of presented himself as the alternative and supposedly there's this royalist resurgence in restoring the monarchy. I just find it

a bit laughable. 80% of Iranians have been now have been born after the revolution. So there's very little memory of the Shah's time. What memory there is is probably quite hostile under the education system of the Islamic Republic. I don't think that there's any chance that the monarchy is reinstated. You know, I know from notice from the acknowledgement section of the book that you spoke to people who are still in Iran as part of your research. The current regime is, I think, known to be unpopular. Do you see prospects for change? You know, that's a great question and I actually sense the Israeli and American bombing of Iran. I've talked to several of the people I know in Iran.

Most of them frankly are not fans of the regime, but what they've all said is that the bombings gave the regime just a new lease on life. It's produced this rallying around the flag effect inside Iran. It's a general rule. People don't like being bombed by foreign armies. They feel the idea of this regime getting toppled or reformed in a significant way have just been pushed off a lot by the actions of the Israelis and the Americans at this point.

I think something else to keep in mind about Iran, yes, it's a brutal regime, it's a repressive regime, but there's certain openings in it. There's an element of freedom. There's elections and sometimes the elections are honest. You're allowed a certain degree of dissent. Not all women know where veils. I think they've been quite clever in giving people just enough so that things don't blow up. It kind of reminds me of, say, late day

Soviet Union or late day East Germany. Certainly, they weren't as repressive as they had been 20 years before. But again, it's the question of when you start opening the lid a little bit, how can you control it? How do you keep the lid just slightly ajar and keep it from coming off completely? But I think thus far, one of the reasons the regime is very selective of who they crush and they do allows a sort of a degree of freedom that creates a hope that maybe some more will come. Scott Anderson, it's an interesting book.

Thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it. Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent. His new book is King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution, a story of hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation. Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the new two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel and So It Goes. This is Fresh Air. Singer-songwriter Billy Joel is the subject

of a new two-part five-hour documentary on HBO. It's called Billy Joel and So It Goes, and it looks at his life and career to date in a way our TV critic David Bianculli says is both insightful and unflinching. Here's his review. When I was young, I worked on an oyster boat. I used to look up at this mansion on the hill and wonder what would it be like to live in a house like that. I used to think they're rich b******, they never had to work a day in their life. Well, I own that house now.

It's not finished yet, but neither am I. The full title of HBO's new Billy Joel documentary reveals a lot about the approach that co-directors Susan Lacey and Jessica Levin, who also collaborated on Jane Fonda in Five Acts, are taking. The program is called Billy Joel and So It Goes. And the subtitle refers to one of the singer-songwriter's most introspective and intricate compositions.

Structurally, And So It Goes taps into Joel's lifelong love of classical music. It's a challenging piece, intentionally sprinkled with dissonant notes and unresolved chords. Joel sees his life that way. That's why I wrote it, he says of the song. And Lacey and Levin present their artistic biography of Billy Joel the same way. A lot of attention is paid to process. What inspired certain songs

and how they were written and recorded. But the dissonance of Joel's personal life is not shied away from. Multiple marriages and divorces, repeated visits to rehab centers for alcoholism, serious conflicts with managers and fellow musicians, it's all included. Not just from Joel's point of view either. We hear from his sister and stepbrother, his now grown daughter, his ex-wives, his former bandmates and managers, and even from a series of rock critics whose career assessment of Joel's musical output

often was less than kind. And we also hear from such musical peers as Paul McCartney, Garth Brooks, and Sting. All of those interviews are anything but perfunctory and certainly aren't presented just to make Joel look better in retrospect. How he met and eventually married his first wife Elizabeth is a story dramatic enough for a daytime soap opera. She

provides her account of their relationship in honest, direct, and ultimately fond terms and so does he. His second wife, supermodel Christy Brinkley, is similarly candid, so much so that Brinkley, is similarly candid. So much so that at several points she fights back tears. Joel though, tells his own story with a certain emotional distance. Acknowledging his own mistakes, but also noting and often forgiving the mistakes of others. His biggest unresolved issue has to do with his own father, a classical musician who abandoned the family early, leaving Billy and his sister to be

raised by a single mom. But before he left, Billy's father did notice young Billy's creative approach to piano lessons. One thing I remember, I was supposed to be playing the Moonlight Sonata. Must have been about eight years old. Rock and roll was around at that point, and I started playing, instead of playing... ["Moonlight Sonata No. 1 in C major, Op. 16"] I started playing... ["Moonlight Sonata No. 1 in C major, Op. 16"] started playing. He came down the stairs, bam!

I got whacked. And I got whacked so hard, he knocked me out. I was unconscious for like a minute. And I remember waking up going, well that got his attention. Susan Lacey, whose other credits include running the outstanding PBS arts biography series American Masters, knows a good story when she sees one. And as producer, knows how to tell it. Some parts of the narrative are built around his biggest hits.

For example, a dispute with his first manager led Billy Joel to book himself into a piano bar under an assumed name, Bill Martin, because Martin was Billy's middle name. That experience led directly to the early breakout hit Piano Man, a song that became so familiar that in his later concert days, he could stop singing it at any point

and the audience would take over. We learn the inspirations for New York State of Mind, Just the Way You Are, Vienna, Baby Grand, and others. The billboard sales of songs and albums is charted, but so is the often lukewarm or dismissive critical response. We see him fighting back from near bankruptcy after being swindled by his manager and establishing long-running concert runs with Elton John and as a solo act at Madison Square Garden. We're shown his creative bursts and his destructive behaviors and watch as he retires from writing lyrics then

performing before he's lured back to appear at a benefit concert after Hurricane Sandy, which devastated his beloved community of Long Island. The reception to that 2012 appearance led Billy Joel on a new path and more than a decade of concert appearances followed. So did such awards as the Gershwin Prize for Songwriting and the Kennedy Center Honors and the record-setting Madison Square Garden Residency that ran off and on for 10 years. The documentary ends with Joel performing Piano Man at one of those concerts but that footage is interspersed with film from 1973 of Joel at the piano singing the same song the day he signed his recording contract at Columbia Records. As Joel says in this documentary of his life to date, it is not a finished story.

But as told in Billy Joel and So It Goes, it is a very revealing one. David Bianculli is professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the new HBO documentary, Billy Joel, and so it goes. On tomorrow's show, comic, actor, and writer Sarah Silverman, whether it's talking about sex, abortion, being Jewish, racism, or just daily life, she's willing to take risks to make a point and make it funny.

We'll talk about her comedy special, Postmortem, which is funny and emotional. It's about the death of her father and stepmother nine days apart. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Meyers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Faya Challener, Anna Bauman, and John Sheehan.

Our digital media producer is Molly Sivi Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Susan Yakundi directed today's show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davis.