THE EDEN-EISENHOWER CORRESPONDENCE, 1955-1957. By Peter G. Boyle, editor. 230pp. University of North Carolina Press. $45; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £29.95 0 8078 2935 8
How the intimacy of letter-writing deceived Anthony Eden
As a boy in 1956 I remember my father listening on the radio to "Rule Britannia" from the Last Night of the Proms. He shouted, "I hope Nasser hears that". He was anything but a jingoist and I recall being shocked. Did this mean war? I asked, echoing the dread of all post-war childhoods.
It was the year Britain experienced the death rattle of the British Empire. The country's rulers had fought well in the war against Hitler and supported the Americans and the United Nations in Korea. The Empire might be in retreat but Britain still counted for something. Her armed forces could still pack a punch.
Just let someone try.
When, in July that year, an upstart Egyptian dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, unilaterally nationalized the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company, the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was not the only Briton to be outraged.
He saw a threat to the free transit of ships through the Canal, and thus to Britain's oil supplies and to the 1955 Baghdad Pact securing the southern flank of the Soviet Union. More than that, Nasser's action was an affront to British prestige and to Eden personally, who had negotiated the most recent Suez Canal treaty with Egypt in 1936. Nasser's action was not to be tolerated. Eden became a man obsessed, shouting to aides, "I want him destroyed".
In retrospect, these threats were as overstated as have been so many emanating from the region ever since. Nasser was a modernizing tyrant rather than a monster.
He certainly was no Saddam. Indeed he emerges from Said K. Aburish's recent biography, Nasser (reviewed in the TLS, January 28), as a secular nationalist, idealistic and, by Middle East standards, neither cruel nor seriously corrupt, more an Egyptian Ataturk. He was eager for the West to help finance the Aswan Dam and even paid compensation to Canal Company shareholders. America was broadly supportive of him.
