Follow the Leader

In 1978, just prior to the revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran, I spent a couple of weeks there on a business trip. Outside my hotel window at night, I saw dozens of young men studying under the lamps in a small park. When I went down to talk to them, I found they had all studied English and ALL professed a strong desire to come to the United States. They bought me tea and pastries and were the most hospitable people I’d met anywhere in the world.
Less then two years later, the Shah was out, Ayatollah Khomeini was in and a mob of students stormed the U. S. embassy and imprisoned our people for 444 days. I watched in amazement as young people who looked exactly like the ones who had befriended me in the park were shaking their fists and chanting, “Death to America.” It was a dramatic example of the collective mentality overcoming individualism in the Middle East.