Word: roosevelt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...July 6, 1953 a young American stepped off the plane at Qaar-E-Shirim, Iran, and passed through customs. His name was Kermit Roosevelt '38, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt '81 and the cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt '04. The customs officer let him pass without hindrance unaware that Roosevelt had just received instructions from Allen Dulles, the new head of the CIA, to topple the regime of the Iranian nationalist Dr. Muhammed Mossadeq. The fledgeling CIA had taken considerable interest in Iran during the preceding years, as previously unpublished documents show. Alarmed by the continuing Soviet threat to Iran...
...Kermit Roosevelt seemed a natural choice to organize the covert operation. He was a historian by training (his doctoral dissertation was on "Psychological Techniques in the English Civil Wars") and during the war he was assigned to the Near East where he served in army intelligence. Later he was recruited by the CIA and in early 1953 was station chief at Beirut in the Lebanon. Roosevelt's Eastern manner was a perfect facade to hide his role as a covert operator--"the last person you would expect to be up to his neck in dirty tricks" as Kim Philby...
After arrival in Tehran Roosevelt set up headquarters in the basement of the U.S. military mission. He was visited there by General Fazhollah Zahedi, Mossadeq's disaffected Minister of the Interior once described by Soroya, the Shah's second wife, as "half swashbuckler and half Don Juan." Zahedi swashbuckled but was finally compelled to agree with Roosevelt that the prospects for a successful coup were poor. The Shah was depressed and dispirited, incapable of taking any decision, while the armed forces seemed increasingly behind Mossadeq...
...serious as each of the issues Carter confronted was, no monumental crisis arose against which the newcomer from Georgia could truly define himself. He could not single-mindedly fight the Depression and the Axis as did Franklin Roosevelt. He could not push through a major civil rights act and wage a war on poverty as did Johnson. Few unexpected gestures seemed to offer themselves. The first opening to China gave Nixon an aura of authority in foreign affairs, and the Cuban missile crisis offered John Kennedy the chance to prove his courage...
Because of the vast Rockefeller holdings in Latin America, Nelson became familiar with the area and sensitive to its needs. When World War II broke out, President Roosevelt put him in charge of a new agency, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, which countered Nazi pressures and propaganda in the Southern Hemisphere. Appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs in 1944, Rockefeller persuaded the countries of the continent to sign a mutual security treaty. But when Harry Truman succeeded Roosevelt, Rocky's days as an administrator in a Democratic government were over...