This thesis examines the nature and dynamics of U.S.-Iran relations during the Cold War under the leadership of U.S. President Richard Nixon, his adviser Henry Kissinger, and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran. This revisionist account critically examines the popular view of Mohammad Reza Shah as a mere instrument of American strategies of containment during the Cold War. Relying on recently declassified American documents, British government papers, and the diaries, memoirs and oral histories of Iranian actors, this thesis restores agency to the shah as an autonomous Cold War actor and suggests that Iran evolved from a client to a partner of the United States under the Nixon Doctrine. This partnership was forged during Nixon’s first term in office between 1969 and 1972, as the United States embraced a policy of Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf region. Thanks to a long-standing friendship with the president, the shah was able to exercise extraordinary influence in the Nixon White House. This partnership reached its peak during Nixon’s second term as the United States supported Iran’s regional primacy against the challenge from Iraq. The shah drew Nixon and Kissinger into Iran’s secret war against Iraq in Kurdistan in 1972, by portraying Iran’s long-standing regional conflict with Iraq as a Cold War confrontation with the Soviet-backed Ba’th regime in Baghdad. When the shah unilaterally decided to abandon the Kurds in a deal with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 1975, Kissinger had little choice but to acquiesce, despite the personal embarrassment and domestic recriminations that followed. The U.S.-Iran partnership declined following Watergate and Nixon’s resignation in 1974. In spite of the best efforts of the shah and Kissinger, between 1974 and 1976 the United States and Iran were unable to reach an agreement on U.S. nuclear exports to Iran. President Gerald Ford tried to impose a discriminatory nuclear agreement on Iran that was rejected by the shah because it violated Iran’s national sovereignty. Under Ford, the United States reverted to treating Iran as a client rather a partner of the United States.

The diploma thesis named "Nixon-Brezhnev Summits in 1973 and 1974 in Czechoslovakian Press" deals with the presentation of summits between Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon in contemporary Czechoslovakian dailies. It analyzes texts published by the media concerning the meetings in 1973 and 1974 in Washington and Moscow in the set period of more than one month around the meetings. Not only does the thesis research the degree of bias of the media content due to the ideological inclination towards the Soviet Union. It also analyzes the way in which the media in Czechoslovakia dealt with the presentation of both the enemy superpowers as partners. The theory part provides in introduction of the topic and basic historical context of the events. Furthermore it characterizes the respective meetings and the analyzed dailies. The practical part covers detailed qualitative content analysis of the selected representatives of the contemporary Czechoslovakian press, namely Rudé právo, Svobodné slovo, Mladá fronta and Lidová demokracie. Then the thesis compares the presentation of the respective summits and attempts to find the causes of the differences and trends in the in the presentation. As an addition the thesis also provides a comparison with similar meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev,...

The diploma thesis The depiction of the Watergate scandal in the movies: Comparison of feature films and documentaries focuses on portrayal of journalists and the Watergate scandal on film. It illustrates this on examples of specific feature films and documentaries, which have been made about this topic. These particular movies are All the President's Men (1976), Frost/Nixon (2008), Watergate (2018), Our Nixon (2013) a Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words (2014). In the first part of the thesis summarises the general history of the portrayal of journalists and media on film. It also contains the introduction of the key players in the Watergate scandal, which are Richard Nixon, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Furthermore, this part also describes the history of the newspaper The Washington Post and the Watergate scandal itself. The next part focuses on defining the basic terms used in the thesis, such as for example feature film, documentary, investigative journalist etc. The third and the last part, then concentrates on comparing and analysing the six aforementioned chosen films with the help of comparative method, which should lead to the final results. The primary question, in which this thesis focuses, is how (and if) the portrayal of the Watergate scandal differentiates in feature films and...