David McCloskey

was sitting atop a government that in the late 1970s was sort of increasingly unpopular for a whole host of reasons that will probably sound like they kind of are similar to today.

The Shah's regime had kind of managed this massive modernization program that had frayed a lot of its support among large numbers of Iranians.

The Shah's regime at the time was a close ally of the United States.

It pursued these kind of ambitious social and economic reforms called the White Revolution.

It had disrupted traditional society.

It had made the Iranian system more unequal.

It had alienated portions of the elite, including clergy, bazaar merchants.

There was a massive number of urban poor that were obviously seeing no benefits from this.

The regime was deeply repressive, enforced by its secret police.

And opposition to the regime really coalesced in the mid to late 1970s because there was also an economic slowdown.

significant inflation, rising unemployment, and you had a cycle that began on these kind of mass protests.

regime would crack down, but in some cases, not as effectively as it probably should have if it wanted to suppress the unrest.

And you ended up with this cycle of mass protests, some violence, more mass protests that the regime was never quite able to figure out the answer to.

Now, amid all of that,

You had Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been in exile since the 1960s.

He emerges as really the symbolic leader of the opposition, the protest movement.

There's sermons and smuggled recordings that get into Iran.

He kind of articulates this powerful critique of the Shah and proposes a very...

revolutionary concept for government, which is the idea of this sort of Shia Islamic theocracy, right, and the rule of the cleric over the system of government in Iran.

Now, by late 1978, there's nationwide strikes, especially in the oil sector, really crippling Iran's oil sector and creating, I think, a level of paralysis in the state that we're