examines

For over 40 years, Scott Anderson has been one of America’s most incisive foreign correspondents, filing dispatches from trouble spots around the world with a novelist’s eye and a talent for disentangling complex issues. The author of seven previous books, Anderson’s latest is “King of Kings,” an immersive history of the events that led to the 1979 downfall of the shah of Iran and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theocratic republic. Anderson traces the roots of the Iranian revolution to the U.S. government’s sponsorship of the 1953 coup that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. A creeping co-dependency between the U.S. and Iran followed, abetted by massive military and oil contracts, at the same time that U.S. representatives in Iran turned a blind eye to the shah’s abuses of power and, later, Khomeini’s anti-Western jihadism.

I spoke with Anderson about his book, and the long tail of missteps that led to the occupation of the United States Embassy by Khomeini’s followers on Nov. 4, 1979.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

✍️ Author Chat

Author Scott Anderson.

(Nanette Burstein)

The overall feeling I get reading the book is fecklessness and foot–dragging on the part of the American government in the service of protecting our oil sales and military contracts with Iran. There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of, well, just about everything.

Even after the revolution when Khomeini had come in — that nine month period before the hostages were taken — the Americans pretty much replicated the mistakes they’d made with the shah. There’s this whole idea of like, well, they’re going through this revolutionary anti-American fervor right now, but they need us. They’re going to come back around because our economies are so intertwined. All their weapons are American, so they’re going to need us to service them. So there’s just this manner that everything was going to work out and, of course, that became institutionalized.

With a few exceptions, none of the U.S. officials in Iran even spoke Farsi. You talk about how they had all those cassettes of Khomeini’s speeches in the drawers at the CIA and no one bothered to translate them.

So Khomeini comes back from exile on Feb. 1, 1979, with 4 million people greeting him. He goes to the cemetery to give his inaugural speech and the Americans don’t even send an embassy worker. They don’t even send a local out to the cemetery to hear the speech. They didn’t know whether it is a pro- or anti-American speech. It was just astonishing.

Do you feel like 1972 is the turning point? This is the year that President Nixon lifted all restrictions for arms sales to Iran.

I really do. And for what I think is a pretty interesting reason. The shah was a congenitally insecure man. He could never be affirmed enough. And it doesn’t matter how many presidents said, “You’re our man,” he always needed to hear more and more. So what happened in ’72 was the shah’s dream came true. He had knelt at the feet of FDR in 1943. Kennedy was dismissive of him. He had always been trying to push in the door with the Americans. He’d been humiliated again and again. And now he’s got carte blanche from Nixon and Kissinger. This is when you saw the huge escalation in arms purchases and the catapulting of the Iranian military into the first tier of militaries around the world.

Do you think the revolution could have been prevented?

I spent a lot of time studying the revolution as it unfolded, and what struck me was how mysterious the whole thing was, how it came to be. There were so many moments where the outcome might have been different. If the shah’s confidante Asadollah Alam hadn’t died in the early days of the revolution, for example, because he was decisive and the shah was not. There were so many odd quirks that took things down a certain path.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Justin Currie, lead singer of Scottish rock band Del Amitri, chronicles his struggle with Parkinson’s in the book “The Tremolo Diaries.”

(Colin Constance)

“Helen Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way,” Ilana Masad writes about the author’s new novel, “A New New Me.” “Such whimsy … could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer … that you know you are in good hands.”

R.F. Kuang’s new novel, “Katabasis,” is “a dark academic fantasy” that is “more mature and less showy” than the author’s earlier works, according to Valorie Castellanos Clark.

David Baron has written a book called “The Martians” about the frenzy over extraterrestrial life that gripped America at the turn of the 20th century, and Chris Vognar approves. Baron “approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive,” he writes.

Finally, Stuart Miller talked with Justin Currie of the band Del Amitri about his new book, “The Tremolo Diaries,” about Currie’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Malibu Village Books is the only general interest bookstore in Malibu. We spoke to owner Michelle Pierce about the beachside literary hub.

(Malibu Village Books)

Malibu Village Books is the first new bookstore to arrive in the beach city in 15 years. A small yet inviting space with a well curated selection of books, the store has had its share of challenges over the past year. I spoke to the store’s owner, Michelle Pierce, about it.

This is the first new bookstore to open in Malibu in quite some time. How did you come to open it?

I also own Lido Village Books in Newport Beach, and the owners of the Malibu Village Mall came by and liked what I was doing there, so they asked me if I wanted to open a store in their mall.

What is selling right now?

“My Friends” by Fredrik Backman, “The River’s Daughter” by Bridget Crocker and a big preorder for “By Invitation Only” by Alexandra Brown Chang.

How have the fires affected business?

The fires have affected us enormously. With the Franklin fire, we lost so much of our holiday book sales, and then the Palisades fire shut down PCH for six months. So our sales are definitely down, and the summer tourism traffic has not been what it should be, so yes, we are definitely in a challenging period.

What about the locals? Are they shopping in your store?

Local residents are really excited that we’re here. We have a lot of active book clubs, and we’re working with the library on a lecture series at the Soho House, where we will bring in authors to speak. We’re still fighting, and the community is definitely supporting us. It’s true what they say — bookstores are all about community.

Malibu Village Books is located at 23359 Pacific Coast Highway #23359, Malibu, 90265.

In the early 20th century it was widely thought that there was intelligent life on Mars, and that we actually knew something about the inhabitants. Fringe theorists and yellow journalists spread this view, but so did respected scientists and the New York Times. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world had Martians on the brain. The mania could be summed up by the philosophy of Fox Mulder, the paranormal investigator played by David Duchovny on “The X-Files”: “I want to believe.”

How this came to pass is the subject of “The Martians.” David Baron’s deeply researched and witty book explores what happened when “we, the people of Earth, fell hard for another planet and projected our fantasies, desires, and ambitions onto an alien world.” As Baron writes, “This romance blazed before it turned to embers, and it produced children, for we — the first humans who might actually sail to Mars — are its descendants.”

Well before there was Elon Musk, there was Percival Lowell. A disillusioned, admittedly misanthropic Boston Brahmin, Lowell came to see himself as a scientist with the soul of a poet, or a poet with scientific instincts. He was also filthy rich, and he poured much of his money into equipment and research that might help him prove there was life on Mars.

David Baron, a Colorado-based science writer, approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive.

(Dana C. Meyer)

He was hardly alone. Other movers and shakers in the Martian movement included French astronomer and philosopher Camille Flammarion, who brought missionary zeal to the task of convincing the world of extraterrestrial life; and Giovanni Schiaparelli, the colorblind Italian astronomer who observed “an abundance of narrow streaks” on Mars “that appeared to connect the seas one to another.” He called these “canali,” which in Italian means “channels.” But in English the word was translated as “canals,” and it was quickly and widely assumed that these canals were strategically created by agriculturally-inclined Martians. Lowell, Flammarion and Schiaparelli collaborated and communicated with one another throughout their lives, in the interest of spreading the word of life on Mars.

Baron, a Colorado-based science writer, approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive, focusing on the social currents and major figures of his story rather than scientific concepts that might go over the head of a lay reader (including this one). The Mars craze unfolded during a period defined by the theory of evolution, which expanded our conception of gradualism and inexorable progress, and tabloid journalism, which was quick to present enthusiastic postulation and speculation as fact, whether the subject was the Spanish-American War or life on other planets. Science fiction was also taking off, thanks largely to a prolific Englishman named H.G. Wells, whose widely serialized attack-of-the-Martians story “War of the Worlds” piqued the Western imagination. All of the above contributed to Mars fever.

One by one Baron introduces his protagonists, including Musk’s hero Nikola Tesla. An innovator in wireless communication and what would now be called remote control, Tesla won over the press and public with his enigmatic charm, which led his pronouncements to be taken seriously and literally by those who should have known better. “I have an instrument by which I can receive with precision any signal that might be made to this world from Mars,” he told a reporter. Tesla briefly had a powerful benefactor in Wall Street king J.P. Morgan, who funded Tesla’s wireless research before deciding the Mars obsession was a bit much and cutting him off.

Baron comes not to bury the Mars mania, but to examine the reasons why we choose to believe what we believe. Lowell, spurned in his romantic life and treated as a black sheep by his dynastic family, found in Mars a calling, a raison d’être. As Baron writes, “Mars gave his life purpose; it offered him the means to prove himself a success worthy of the Lowell pedigree.” The Mars believers were dreamers and misfits, all with something to prove (or, in the case of some publishers, papers to sell).

As Baron points out, the scientific method often fell by the wayside amid the hullabaloo. An acquaintance of Lowell’s bemoaned the habit Lowell had of “jumping at some general idea or theorem,” after which he “selects and bends facts to underprop that generalization.” Lowell himself once advised an assistant, “It is better never to admit that you have made a mistake.” Or later, as he sought photographic evidence of the Mars canals: “We must secure some canals to confound the skeptics” — which, today, carries eerie echoes of “Find me the votes.”

None of which should denigrate the dreams of space exploration. Nobody, after all, imagined we would actually walk on the moon. Carl Sagan, the great science popularizer and member of the Mariner 9 team that captured groundbreaking images of Mars in 1971, concluded that those canals were, as Baron puts it, “mere chimeras, an amalgam of misperceptions due to atmospheric distortion, the fallible human eye, and one man’s unconstrained imagination.” But that imagination, Sagan added, had value of its own: “Even if Lowell’s conclusions about Mars, including the existence of the fabled canals, turned out to be bankrupt, his depiction of the planet had at least this virtue: it aroused generations of eight-year-olds, myself among them, to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility, to wonder if we ourselves might go to Mars.”

L.A. Times contributor Vognar recently joined the staff of the Boston Globe.

Published on 08/07/2025 – 13:04 GMT+2•Updated
13:13

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The EU and the US are preparing for a trade deal involving the US imposing a baseline 10% tariff on EU goods, according to several sources briefed by EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.

A preliminary agreement is expected to be concluded by Wednesday, with legal implementation by 1 August — the new deadline set by US President Donald Trump before additional tariffs come into effect if no deal is signed, sources said.

“The US will not drop the baseline tariffs, because they’re a revenue source,” the Parliament’s trade committee head MEP Bernd Lange (Germany/S&D) told reporters on Tuesday.

He said that aircraft and spirits would be exempted from the baseline 10% tariffs. Whether wines are included remains unclear.

The US currently apply 25% tariffs on EU cars, 50% tariffs on steel and aluminium and 10% tariffs on all other EU imports.

Lange said negotiations are ongoing on attempts to remove tariffs on cars, with much at stake for the German automotive industry, which is highly exposed to trade with the US.

“There are already estimates that up to 50,000 jobs could be at risk,” Lange added.

Germany and Italy — the largest EU exporters of goods to the US along with Ireland — remain concerned by US proposals not to exempt key sectors such as cars, steel and aluminium or pharmaceuticals, according to an EU diplomat.

EU retaliatory measures remain on the table but have not yet been finalised by the Commission. The EU must still decide when to use them.

“There is no immediate plan to do anything with the list,” Commission spokesperson Olof Gill said on Monday.

A first list of measures covering €21 billion worth of US products has been suspended until 14 July.

A second list, reduced following lobbying by industries and EU member states from €95 billion to €72 billion worth of US products, according to the French news agency AFP, has yet to be submitted for final approval by EU member states. 

There is no single figure in television history whose longevity and influence match Barbara Walters’.

She became a star on NBC’s “Today” in the early 1960s, raising the stature of the morning franchise. She opened doors for women as a network anchor and turned newsmaker interviews into major television events — 74 million tuned into her 1999 sit-down with Monica Lewinsky. She created one of daytime TV’s longest-running hits with “The View,” which evolved into a major forum for the country’s political discourse.

“The audience size that Barbara was able to capture and harness is unmatched in today’s world,” said Jackie Jesko, director of the new documentary “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything,” debuting Monday on Hulu after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month. “Everything she did sort of made a difference.”

Jesko’s feature — produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries and ABC News Studios — is the first in-depth look into Walters’ storied career. The film also serves as a sweeping historical review of the decades-long dominance of network news that made figures such as Walters a gatekeeper of the culture, as Jesko describes her.

Before the advent of social media and podcasts that allowed celebrities to control their messages, going through the X-ray machine of a Barbara Walters interview delivered exposure on a massive scale. David Sloan, a longtime ABC News producer who worked with Walters, recalls how the screen images of her specials flickered through the windows of Manhattan apartment towers.

“Tell Me Everything” came together not long after Walters died at the age of 93 in 2022. Sara Bernstein, president of Imagine Documentaries, approached Betsy West, executive producer and co-director of the Julia Child documentary “Julia,” about taking on a Walters project. Sloan, who oversaw an Emmy-winning tribute after Walters’ death, also wanted a deeper exploration into the impact of her career. West, also a former Walters colleague, and Sloan became executive producers on the film. “Tell Me Everything” taps deeply into the ABC News archives, which contain thousands of hours of interviews Walters conducted over her 40 years at the network.

Former President Richard M. Nixon during an interview with Barbara Walters in 1980 for ABC.

(Ray Stubblebine / AP)

Imagine not only gained access to program content but also outtakes that give parts of the film a cinema vérité-like look at Walters on the job. The newly unearthed footage provides some surreal moments, such as Walters — in a pink Chanel suit — exploring the damaged palace of Libya’s deposed leader Moammar Kadafi.

“The archive gave us a the perfect canvas to relive her scenes and her moments,” Bernstein said.

Walters’ story also gives a guided tour of the obstacle-ridden path women faced in the early days of TV news when it was dominated by patriarchy and self-importance. Female reporters were relegated to writing soft features and kept at a distance from hard news. But Walters shattered those barriers through her grit and wits. She toiled as a writer in local TV and a failed CBS morning program before landing at NBC’s “Today” in 1961. (“They needed someone they could hire cheap,” she said.)

Walters went from churning out copy for the program’s “Today Girl” to doing her own on-air segments, including a famously beguiling report on a Paris fashion show and a day-in-the-life look at being a Playboy bunny. More serious assignments came her way.

The morning viewing audience loved Walters even though she didn’t believe she was attractive enough to be on camera. Her career trajectory was slowed down only by male executives unwilling to embrace the idea that a woman could be the face of a network news operation.

Harry Reasoner with Barbara Walters during her first broadcast as co-anchor of ABC Evening News on Oct. 4, 1976.

(Associated Press)

By 1971, Walters was the main attraction on “Today” when she sat alongside host Frank McGee every morning. But she was denied equal status.

A respected journalist with the demeanor of an undertaker, McGee insisted to management that he ask the first three questions of any hard news subject who appeared on “Today” before Walters could have a chance.

The restriction led to Walters going outside the NBC studios to conduct interviews where her subjects lived or worked. The approach not only gave her control of the conversations but added a level of intimacy that audiences were not getting elsewhere on television.

Walters also had written into her contract that if McGee ever left “Today,” she would be promoted to the title of co-host. NBC brass agreed to the provision, believing McGee was not going anywhere.

But McGee was suffering from bone cancer, which he had kept secret. He died in 1974 and Walters was elevated to co-host, making her the first woman to lead a daily network news program. (Or as Katie Couric candidly puts it in the film, “She got it literally over Frank McGee’s dead body.”)

Walters made history again when she was poached by ABC News in 1976. She was given a record-high $1-million annual salary to be the first woman co-anchor of a network evening newscast, paired with Harry Reasoner, a crusty and unwelcoming veteran. Walters was mistreated by her colleague and roasted by critics and competitors such as CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid, who, with disgust in his voice, described her as “a lady reading the news.”

The evening news experiment with Reasoner was a short-lived disaster, but Walters found a supporter in Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports impresario who took over the news division and had an appreciation for showmanship. He recognized Walters’ strengths and made her a roving correspondent.

Barbara Walters arranged a joint interview with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977.

(ABC Photo Archives / Disney General Entertainment Con)

Walters scored a major coup in 1977 when she was the first TV journalist to speak jointly with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem.

“She was a household name in the Mideast,” Sloan said.

Over time, Walters would become known for her prime-time specials, where lengthy interviews with world leaders aired adjacent to conversations with movie stars. She could be a blunt questioner in both realms, asking Barbra Streisand why she chose not to get her nose fixed and former President Richard M. Nixon if he wished he had burned the White House tapes that undid his presidency (“I probably should have”).

News purists clutched their pearls, but the audience welcomed it. “She had a vision back then that celebrities are news,” said Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger in the film. “She was practicing the art of journalism when she was interviewing them.”

The film explains how Walters developed an understanding of celebrities after growing up around her father’s nightclub, the Latin Quarter, a hot spot in Boston. Sitting in the rafters above the floor show, she observed how audiences responded as well.

Barbara Walters with Barbra Streisand, whom the journalist interviewed for a special in 1976.

(ABC Photo Archives / Disney General Entertainment Con)

Even though Walters’ programs earned significant revenue for ABC News, she still had detractors, including the network’s star anchor Peter Jennings. A clip from the network’s political convention coverage in 1992 shows Jennings surreptitiously flipping his middle finger at her following an on-air exchange.

But Walters was unstoppable, and as the 1980s and 1990s progressed, she became a mother confessor for perpetrators and victims of scandal. During a memorable jailhouse meeting with the Menendez brothers in which Eric describes himself and Lyle as “normal kids,” a stunned Walters replies, “Eric, you’re a normal kid who murdered his parents!”

As always, she was speaking for the person watching at home.

“She always wanted to ask the question that was percolating in the brain of someone who didn’t have the opportunity or was too afraid to ask,” said Meredith Kaulfers, an executive vice president at Imagine Documentaries.

Walters became a pioneer for women broadcasters out of necessity. While in her 20s, her father’s nightclub business collapsed and she became the sole source of financial support for her family, which included her mentally disabled older sister. The terror of the insecurity she felt during that period never left.

President Barack Obama speaks to Barbara Walters during his guest appearance on ABC’s “The View” in 2010.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

“There was a survival instinct in her that drove her,” said Marcella Steingart, a producer on the film. “Not necessarily on purpose, but in her wake, she opened doors for people.”

“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” is not a hagiography. The film explores her fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Jacqueline, who did not sit for an interview. Walters’ unhealthy obsession with colleague and rival Diane Sawyer is covered, too, as is her willingness to use the social connections she developed through her career, and not just to land big interviews.

Walters had a friendship with unsavory lawyer Roy Cohn, who pulled strings to make her father’s tax problems go away. She carried on a secret romance in the 1970s with a married U.S. senator — Edward Brooke — while she was a fixture in national political coverage.

While the film draws on interviews where Walters laments not being able to have both a successful career and a family life, Jesko sensed no regrets. “I think if she could live her life over again, she wouldn’t change anything,” Jesko said.