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Get real. He was the second Shah in the lineage. His father, a general who seized power and then called himself Shah was the only other one. The indisputable historic fact is that there never was a great lineage leading to the Shah of Beverly Hills.
Read the CIA AAR on Operation Ajax. It is very clear and downright insulting in its description of the Shah's cowardice. It calls him 'pathologically afraid' and describes how they used his sister to shame him into action. The report was written by Genral Schwarzkopf's father, one of the coup's authors.
You may have fond childhood memories of having seen him but I think I'll take the CIA's report (which was never meant to be seen by the public) over your emotional assessment of his character.
The CIA was a just born organisation and Ajax was the first big operation. The CIA, to gain a good profile had to inflate it's role and influence to impress upon Eisenhower.
Kermit Roosevelt, the head of the CIA operation, was notoriously exaggerating his involvement in the coup in his account of the events. Some of that stuff is downright ridiculous and factually wrong (like Roosevelt supposedly riding on the tank conquering Mosaddeq's house...). The CIA report is choke full of self-serving revisionism and possibly partly plagiarized of an Persian article based on an interview with Ardeshir Zahedi, the son of Prime Minister General Zahedi and later Ambassador to the US, both central parts of the coup to reinstall the Shah.
Eisenhower himself voiced his disbelief over the reliability of the CIA account of events. In the word's of Ike the CIA account read more like a "dime novel" than fact (writes so in his diary).
The young CIA had to prove it's worth and mettle to the US government. Exaggerating it's role in Iran, and deminishing the role of Iranians and the Shah, was transparently part of that effort.
He was constitutionally made Shah by the Parliament. He wasn't after the Crown, but intended to make Iran a Republic (like Turkey under Kemal Ataturk). However the clergy and influential landlords feared a Republic and made the prospect of a system change impossible. Therefore merely the dynasty was changed, instead of the whole system.
Ironically enough it was the Mullahs and Mossadeq who wanted to cling on the Qajar Dynasty and opposed a republic. Several decades later these two forces would seek to replace the Pahlavis with their versions of a republic.
Funny... 1946, when North Iran was occupied by Communist forces (Soviet troops, Azeri Soviet militias and a Soviet-equipped separatist Army armed to the teeth), the Iranian Prime Minister Qavam was trying to find a "political solution" by making risky compromises with the Soviets and their communist proxies in Iran. Iran was about to lose all of it's North to Stalin, and the British, fearful of losing also the South of Iran to the Soviets, tried to instigate separatism among the Southern nomadic tribes in Iran.
The "oh so cowardly" Shah was the one pressing for a military solution and ordered his Army (armed with pre-war Czech and some US lend-lease stuff) to liberate occupied Azerbaijan and Kurdistan.
Within a week he crushed the Communists. It was the only time after 1945 that Stalin lost territory.
As further evidence for his "shameful cowardice" the Shah was personally flying alone on reconnaissance missions over enemy territory, at the risk of being shot down, and was observing the Battle of Mianeh (10 December 1946) from air.
Please name me another contemporary Head of State risking his own rear on the front line.
BTW the CIA report draft was written by Donald Wilber, not Schwarzkopf.