Abolhassan Banisadr, 88, first Iran president after Islamic Revolution, dies

Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran’s first president after the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution who fled Tehran after being impeached for challenging the growing power of clerics as the nation became a theocracy, died Saturday. He was 88.

Among a sea of black-robed Shiite clerics, Banisadr stood out for his Western-style suits and a background so French that it was in philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that he confided his belief he’d be Iran’s first president some 15 years before it happened.

Those differences only isolated him as the nationalist sought to implement a socialist-style economy in Iran underpinned by a deep Shiite faith instilled in him by his cleric father.

Banisadr (photo) would never consolidate his grip on the government he supposedly led as events far beyond his control — including the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis and the invasion of Iran by Iraq — only added to the tumult that followed the revolution.

True power remained firmly wielded by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom Banisadr worked with in exile in France and followed back to Tehran amid the revolution. But Khomeini would cast Banisadr aside after only 16 months in office, sending him fleeing back to Paris, where he would remain for decades.

“I was like a child watching my father slowly turn into an alcoholic,” Banisadr later said of Khomeini. “The drug this time was power.”

Banisadr’s family said Saturday he died in a hospital in Paris after a long illness. Iranian state TV followed with a bulletin on his death. Neither elaborated on the illness Banisadr faced.

Earlier exiled to Iraq by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Khomeini ended up having to leave for France in 1978 under renewed pressure from the Iranian monarch. Arriving in Paris and speaking no French, it was Banisadr who initially gave the cleric a place to live after moving his own family out of their apartment to accommodate him.

Khomeini would end up in Neauphle-Le-Chateau, a village outside the French capital. There, as Banisadr once told The Associated Press, he and a group of friends fashioned or vetted the messages Khomeini delivered — based on what they were told Iranians wanted to hear.

Tape recordings of Khomeini’s statements were sold in Europe and delivered to Iran. Other messages went out by telephone, read to supporters in various Iranian towns. Those messages laid the groundwork for Khomeini’s return after the shah, fatally ill, fled Iran in early 1979, though the cleric remained unsure he had the support, Banisadr once said.

That return saw Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution sweep the country. Banisadr became a member of the cleric’s Revolutionary Council and became the head of the country’s Foreign Ministry just days after the Nov. 4, 1979, seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by hard-line students.

In an echo of what was to come, Banisadr served only 18 days in that role after seeking a negotiated end to the hostage crisis, pushed aside by Khomeini for a hard-liner.