The Hoveyda Years (1965–1977)

The Hoveyda years were the twelve and a half years, from January 1965 to August 1977, when Amir-Abbas Hoveyda served as Mohammad Reza Shah’s prime minister, the longest premiership in Iran’s history. They were years of fast economic growth, new industry and a swelling state, but also of a political system in which real decisions rested with the shah and opposition was shut out. Hoveyda, the urbane manager of that system, was arrested on the shah’s orders in 1978 and executed after the revolution.

An accidental prime minister

Hoveyda was born in Tehran in 1919 and spent much of his youth in Beirut, where he attended a French school while his father served as a diplomat in the region. He studied in Brussels, joined the foreign ministry, worked for the UN refugee agency and, from 1958, on the board of the National Iranian Oil Company. With his friend Hassan Ali Mansur he belonged to the Progressive Circle, a group of Western-educated technocrats that became the Iran Novin party. When Mansur became prime minister in 1964, Hoveyda was his finance minister. After Mansur was shot in January 1965, the shah chose Hoveyda to replace him, expecting a caretaker.

How the system worked

Hoveyda lasted because he understood the limits of his office. Foreign policy, the army, oil and SAVAK reported to the shah directly. The prime minister ran the ministries, managed parliament through the Iran Novin majority and took the blame when things went wrong. His biographer Abbas Milani portrays him as a cultivated, witty man who read French literature and wanted to modernise the administration, but who chose to stay at the centre of an authoritarian regime and swallowed humiliations to do so. He was known for his pipe, cane and the flower in his lapel, and for living modestly by the standards of the elite.

The two-party system of these years, with the Mardom party as a tame opposition, was replaced in March 1975 when the shah announced a single party, Rastakhiz, and said those who did not wish to join could leave the country. Hoveyda became its first secretary-general. Many historians, among them Ervand Abrahamian, treat the creation of Rastakhiz as one of the regime’s costliest mistakes, since it pulled the bazaar and the clergy into direct conflict with the state.

Growth and its strains

From the mid-1960s Iran’s economy grew at high rates, often given as around 8 to 10 per cent a year before the oil price rises of 1973. The development plans, drawn up by the Plan Organisation, funded dams, roads, ports and electricity. State and private investment produced a steel mill at Isfahan built with Soviet help, a machine-tool industry at Arak and Tabriz, petrochemical plants, and the Paykan car, assembled in Tehran from 1967 and soon a symbol of the new middle class. Universities, schools and the civil service expanded, and the number of Iranians with a modern education grew quickly.

The strains were real too. Industry clustered around Tehran, incomes became more unequal, and agriculture lagged behind after land reform. Corruption around state contracts was widely talked about, and Hoveyda’s campaigns against it came to little. After 1973 the flood of oil money, described in the oil boom of the 1970s, brought inflation, shortages and bottlenecks that the government could not control.

The fall

By the summer of 1977 Tehran had power cuts, high rents and rising prices, and the Carter administration was talking about human rights. The shah replaced Hoveyda with Jamshid Amouzegar in August 1977 and made him minister of court. As the revolution gathered pace in 1978, Hoveyda lost that post too. On 7 November 1978, in an attempt to appease the protesters, the shah had him arrested along with other former officials.

When the shah left in January 1979, Hoveyda was still in custody; in February, as his guards melted away, he did not flee and gave himself up to the revolutionaries. He was tried in April by a revolutionary court under Sadegh Khalkhali on charges including “corruption on earth”, without a real defence, and shot on 7 April 1979. For many Iranians the trial became a symbol of the new regime’s justice; for others he was a fair target as the face of the old one. Milani’s biography, published in English in 2000, did much to restore a fuller picture of him.

How the period is judged

Admirers of the Pahlavi state look back on the Hoveyda years as a time of stability, rising living standards and growing opportunities, especially for women and the educated middle class. Critics argue that the same years built a political system with no outlet for dissent, so that when economic trouble came after 1975 there was no way to channel it except into the street. Both views appear in the work of historians such as Milani and Abrahamian, who differ less on the facts than on the weight they give them. For the opposition of these years, see intellectuals and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s.