By 'gently', do you mean he could have listened to the State Department, the US ambassador to Iran, the Pentagon, their senior advisor in Iran and the Iranian Prime Minister, all of whom told him point blank and without any ambiguity that allowing the former Shah into the United States would be "disastrous to US-Iranian relations" - the America's most important relationship in the Middle East - and would be guaranteed to "generate a violent reaction" against US citizens (58,000 were in Iran at the time), businesses and symbols of the United States government including the US embassy (at the time the largest US embassy in the world)?
Would 'gently' also include not sending General Robert E. Huyser to Tehran in January 1979 with orders to engineer a coup against the new revolutionary government, then only days old, which at the time included a strong liberal faction and that had just sent representatives to reestablish good relations with the United States? Huyser, by the way, knew it was a fool's errand as soon as he touched down in Tehran and promptly left the country.