With the goal of harnessing the untapped potential of Iranian-Americans, and to build the capacity of the Iranian diaspora in effecting positive change in the U.S. and around the world, the Iranian Americans’ Contributions Project (IACP) has launched a series of interviews that explore the personal and professional backgrounds of prominent Iranian-Americans who have made seminal contributions to their fields of endeavour. We examine lives and journeys that have led to significant achievements in the worlds of science, technology, finance, medicine, law, the arts and numerous other endeavors. Our latest interviewee is Maryam Panahy Ansary.
Maryam Panahy Ansary has been a Trustee of Institute of International Education Inc. since 1985. She has been a Member of the Board of Directors of the World Rehabilitation Fund since 1982. During the past two decades, she has been an active member of many leading charitable organizations in West Asia and the United States, and has served as the Chairman of the Museum of Modern Arts in Teheran. She received her degree from George Washington University and since then has devoted much of her time to the promotion of the arts. She was educated in France and the United States.
Please tell us about your background and your formative influences growing up.
I was born in 1941 in Tehran. My father, Abolghassem Panahy, was born in Tabriz, Iran, in 1907. His father, Mirza Agha Panahy, a noted businessman who had helped establish the banking and gold coining system in the country, had sent him to study in France along with his two brothers when my father was six. My grandfather, having sponsored the education of Ali Akbar Davar in France (Davar would later become a senior advisor to Iran’s Reza Shah and the intellectual originator of the modern judiciary in Iran), had asked Davar to serve as guardian and tutor for my father in France. In his memoirs, Davar acknowledges the significant influence of my grandfather over his career.
My mother was Farangis Khabir, born in 1912 in Tehran. Her father, Ali Khabir (known by the title Khabir-Olsaltaneh), was a noted diary and record keeper to the royal court; and hence his title. He regularly accompanied Reza Shah and was known for his copious note taking and elegant handwriting. He was a man of modern values who had counseled his daughters to delay marriage until 20 to develop as individuals, which was very rare in those days.
My mother attended the American School in Tehran, founded by Samuel Jordan, for her entire primary and secondary schooling. She attended the school for 12 years during the 1918–1930 period, and her teacher was the noted Ms. Doolittle. From my mother and her extensive exposure to America from a young age, I learned the ways of charity and straightforwardness. She walked, swam and did other types of exercise on a daily basis, and preferred a diet of fruits, vegetables and grilled fish, and made her own yogurt.
After finishing Ecole Polytechnique, my father returned to Iran at the age of 26 and married my mother. In 1941, when I was a month old, we moved to Bombay where my father was appointed as Iran’s Consul General. In 1945, he was appointed as Iran’s Consul General in New York and, in 1947, he served as Iran’s first Acting Ambassador to the newly-created United Nations, until Ambassador Nasrollah Entezam arrived to assume the post.
My father returned to Iran as undersecretary of Iran’s ministry of foreign affairs, while my sister Mina (born in New York in 1946) and I were enrolled in a convent in Nice, France by the name of Jeanne de France, while my brother Faradj Panahi entered a boarding school in London. He was born in 1934 in Tehran and would later hold numerous diplomatic posts in Europe.
My father later became the deputy to Prime Minister Hossein Ala, and resigned his position when Mohammad Mossadegh became Prime Minister. When Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to Iran after a brief hiatus in 1953 (enabled by General Fazlollah Zahedi, who became prime minister), my father was one of five leading people in Zahedi’s inner circle and he was appointed as the minister of labor. Due to the deepening of Iran’s ties with the United States at this time, and the U.S. policy of aiding Iran’s economic development, with American help, my father created the country’s first seven-year development plan, and was instrumental in laying the foundations of Iran’s Planning and Budget Organization, which remains in existence today. The main purpose of the seven-year plan was to expedite Iran’s industrialization.
Tragedy struck when my father suffered a major heart attack and died at the age of 47 in 1954, at the peak of his career. It took since months after his passing for the Shah to appoint Abolhassan Ebtehaj as the director of the Plan and Budget Organization.
I owe so much of who I became in my life to the short 13 years I had with him. Although my family led a privileged and comfortable life, the void left by my father’s untimely passing was crippling, especially to my mother, who bore the scars of his absence until she passed away at the age of 86 in 1997 in Sausalito, CA. Theirs was a true tragic love story.
My mother and the American Ambassador’s wife, Ms. Grady, formed the International Women’s Club in Tehran in 1950–51, Their friendship was also largely responsible for the design of the first park in Tehran called Park Sangelaj, also known as Parke-Shahr.
After my father’s passing, at my mother’s behest, we moved back to America, where my mother had numerous friends. Julia Helms and Jane Ickes helped her buy a house near them in Bethesda, MD. Along with Polly Roosevelt, they arranged a weekly bridge game at the Chevy Chase Country Club, and my mother volunteered at Walter Reid Hospital three days a week. These ladies also swam together once a week and had lunch at the club. One of my most cherished memories as an adolescent in the mid-late 1950s was riding the Ickes’ horses at their farm near Washington, D.C.
Given that so much of your life and career were entwined with the reign of the Pahlavis in Iran (1925–1979), what are your views about the Shah?
“The Shah,” the title for His Imperial Majesty, can be summed up in one sentence: He had the greatest love for his country and the kindest heart for all. He was a builder, not a warrior in that, building on the legacy of his father, Reza Shah, he brought his country into the 20th century from “the Middle Ages,”
He was a forgiving man, and left his beloved Iran for exile in 1979 to avoid bloodshed. It is from personal experience that I say these words, having worked for His Imperial Majesty and having had the honor of, on a personal level, socializing with the royal family. When some of us would say that he had given too much to soon to his subjects, he would say, “Don’t you want everything for your children? So do I.”
When foreign dignitaries would come to Iran, His Majesty would often ask me to host a dinner for them at home so they would experience home cooking. I was one the people on whom he relied to establish a personal friendship with foreign visitors, which I did with great pleasure, and I have kept those relationships to the present.
Tell us what it was like returning to Iran from America, having spent your teenage years in the Washington, DC area.
Returning to Iran in 1960 at the age of 18, it was as though I was falling in love with my broader family and country for the first time. This prompted my mother, brother, and sister to come “home” as well. Seeking work led me to His Excellency Abbas Aram, who was foreign minister and a close friend of our family. As the first woman to work as an official in the foreign ministry, I rose to become his chief of staff. I was on a high for six and a half years. I loved my job and surroundings; I knew everyone personally, including the support staff and caterers. My routine involved being at work at 7 am until 3 pm, and then going home for a nap and getting ready to attend evening functions with large group of friends, often dancing and celebrating the buoyant mood.
It was at the foreign ministry that I met my husband, Mr. Hushang Ansary, with whom we have two children. He was a friend and colleague of Foreign Minister Aram from the latter’s previous role as Ambassador to Japan. We got married in 1965, and when my husband was posted in Pakistan as ambassador, it was helpful that I knew H.E. Prime Minister Zulfaghar Ali Bhutto and his Iranian wife, Nusrat Ispahani, with whom he had four children. We also became close to President Ayub Khan and his family.
In the mid-1960s, my husband was named Ambassador to Pakistan to attempt mediating between then-warring India and Pakistan since they had expelled the American ambassador and burned part of the embassy. Ambassador Ansary later became Minister of Information, then ambassador to Washington, then Minister of Finance and Economy and the last president of the National Iranian Oil Company during the Pahlavi era.
Given your deep exposure to numerous international leaders, whom did you get to know the best?
Throughout our careers in the Iranian government, the head of state with whom we became the most personally acquainted was President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1966, we were sent to Washington, D.C. to befriend Democrats who weren’t as close to the Shah as their Republican predecessors had been. During our three years in Washington, when my husband Ambassador Hushang Ansary was serving as Iran’s top envoy in the U.S., I established a deep friendship with Lady Bird Johnson as well as first daughter Lynda Johnson Robb, with whom we have remained friends to the present day.
It is very rare for U.S. Presidents to visit foreign embassies. However, the depth of our personal relationship superseded that rule and President Johnson and the First Lady visited the Iranian Embassy on several occasions involving the Shah and Prime Minister Hoveyda. Among the most memorable events at our embassy was a post-wedding dinner I hosted in late 1967 for Lynda Johnson and her groom, Chuck Robb, who would later become Virginia’s governor and U.S. Senator.
My friendship with Lynda traced its roots to an official visit she had made with her parents to Iran in the summer of 1962, when I had the pleasure of hosting her during her visit. Towards the end of that decade, on the occasion of my son’s birth in Washington, D.C. President Johnson sent us two unique paintings of the White House, which he inscribed with much affection.
During our time in government, we also became personally acquainted with President Valerie Giscard d’ Estaing of France (whom I had known from his time as economy minister), and with President Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore what it is today.
One of our most memorable trips was to China in 1972 to meet with Premier Zhou Enlai. Impressed that I was educated partially in France, speaking the language fluently himself, we were invited along with my husband to arrive an hour before dinner to spend time in his private apartment. He was a man of deep reflection and an impressive philosopher who played a key role in building modern China.
Another outstanding individual with whom I established a deep personal relationship was Dr. Henry Kissinger, who visited Tehran several times and stayed in our home. He remains a close friend and confidant to this day.
What was your role in launching the Tehran Museum of Modern Art?
Under the auspices of Her Majesty Queen Farah Pahlavi, the Museum of Modern Art in Tehran was designed and built by her cousin, Kamran Diba. To this day, it contains one of the world’s best collections. Her Majesty asked me to serve as the chairwoman for the Museum, and thus I formed a board which included prominent Americans, including David and Nelson Rockefeller. I helped establish a program to host leading artists to showcase their work and for students to receive arts education at the museum.
Tell us about your activities in the U.S. after the revolution.
When we returned to the U.S. after the revolution in 1979, I became more actively involved in political and charity work, and our family played a significant supportive role in the campaigns of both Bushes, as well as Chuck Robb, Jay Rockefeller, and others. Through the Hon. Dean Rusk, I joined the board of the World Rehabilitation Fund, whose president was his cousin Howard Rusk. Through the Honorable Angier Biddle Duke (chief of protocol in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations) and his wife Robin, I joined the board of the International of International Education, where I still serve after 30 years, and continue to work on facilitating the enrollment of Iranian and other students in the leading American universities.
About a dozen years ago, I was asked by Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani to assist in starting Nowruz dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, given my experience in organizing cultural and charitable events. The Nowruz dinner at the Met has been a success and is now an established annual event which draws leading Iranians and Americans, and has led to the establishment of a section for Persian art at the Met.
I shall always cherish my friendships with those deceased and living: Senators Charles Percy, Howard Baker, Stuart Symington, Mark Hatffield, Birch Bayh, and others who had come and stayed with us in Tehran. The roots of our ties were in my parents’ friendships with the Bush, Roosvelt, Helms, Ickes and Henderson families, among other notable Americans, many of whom came to Iran at our invitation, went to Shiraz and Isphahan, and discovered the splendor of the Iranian world. They especially enjoyed shopping for Iranian antiques and handicrafts, which I had helped in setting up. These included Persian silver doves, jewellery, glass and pottery, batik silks, lamb jackets and, of course, carpets. Through they are now in much depleted quality after over four decades, those stores still exist and send me greeting cards.
What cultural commonalities do you see between Iranians and Americans?
Especially for those acquainted with the Iranian world, Americans love our culture, food, art, history, and especially our hospitality when visiting old cities such as Isfahan and Shiraz. The current political and economic isolation of Iran represents a tragedy for this great and civilized country. Even so, Americans still enjoy visiting Iran and Iranians still yearn to come to the U.S. to study. In the youth of both countries I see hope and deep caring for each other. I have the hope of seeing our two countries uniting in friendship once again.
The editorial input of Dr. Alidad Mafinezam is gratefully acknowledged.
