Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975)

by William Manchester

  Major Salem’s agreement with the tribesmen became public on January 10, and the same day Sir Ralph gave Naguib a reply to his note of November 2. The British still had doubts, but Ambassador Caffery privately advised them that if they couldn’t strike a bargain with Naguib they might not have another chance to deal with a decent Egyptian government. Sir Ralph, who had become an admirer of Naguib, agreed. The ensuing treaty, which was signed by Englishmen and Egyptians in Princess Shewkar’s old palace on February 12, provided for a Sudanese plebiscite. The ceremony was badly managed, as ceremonies were likely to be in Cairo, and for that reason it had a high flavor. Fezzed Arabs who had no business being there rushed in and out embracing one another and, when they could reach them, hugging Naguib and Salem, too. An Egyptian army officer, his face streaked with tears, held a trembling red candle aloft, pooling sealing wax on the treaty. After Sir Ralph and his entourage had left, Naguib brandished his pen, bowed to Salem, and winked at the crowd. Later he said that he would fly south soon to visit relatives—his mother was Sudanese—but that he wouldn’t go “as Saleh did.” An aide explained that the general caught cold easily.

  ***

  There was a sense of urgency in the Sudan negotiations. Naguib needed a solution on his terms to satisfy the Egyptian chauvinism which had kept the Wafd in power, and Sir Ralph wanted the treaty out of the way so they could get on with talks about Suez. Five minutes after the pact was signed Naguib told Stevenson that he would like to start Canal Zone negotiations immediately. Sir Ralph replied with a weary smile that the sooner they tackled them, the better. In this matter, Nahas unwittingly did Naguib a favor, for although the rioting after the Ismailia massacre gave Zuzu’s husband a black eye, it weakened the British base and sharply cut its value.

  Until then, Suez had possessed the three essentials of a major military base. The docks at Port Said, the city of Suez, and Adabaya could hardly have been improved upon. Internal communications were superb, with the canal itself running north and south, the Sweetwater Canal running east and west, and road and railroad networks stretching in all directions. Finally, the zone had a splendid labor force of 60,000 Egyptians, for which the English paid a wage bill of a half-million pounds sterling every month.

  After Ismailia most of the 60,000 vanished, which was the chief reason the British were anxious to settle their differences with Cairo and get out. Nahas forcibly evicted eighty-five percent of the work force and dumped the laborers in upper Egypt, where it was almost impossible for them to return. A year later they were drifting back into the zone at the rate of 500 a month, and some 10,000 Royal East African Pioneers had been brought in to supplement them, but that wasn’t nearly enough. The British reinforced their garrison to 60,000 men, interpreting in the broadest possible fashion the 1936 treaty, which allowed them 10,000 combat troops, 400 pilots, and “the necessary ancillary personnel for administrative and technical duties.” They could struggle along with those in peacetime, but military bases have to be prepared for war. If the Russians had started south, which in those years seemed possible, the zone would have needed a quarter-million workers right away, and clearly they weren’t going to get them from a hostile Egypt. The only answer was to cooperate with Naguib.

  The general knew this, and he was making his own ground rules. The Suez Canal Zone, he said in speeches delivered for home consumption, was Egyptian territory; the British had to leave, and that was all there was to it. There could be no package deals, no conditions for withdrawal. Nasser, then just beginning to show his hand, threatened the English with guerrilla warfare if they didn’t go. Privately Naguib took a different line, however. He was, he reminded those around him, a military man. He knew that neutrality in the Cold War was impossible then, and he had decided long ago to cast his lot with the West, provided the British would do things his way.

  Already, in that first year after Farouk, it was obvious that the Suez dilemma would remain unresolved for a long time. Essential to NATO’s defense plans, the Canal Zone was a gigantic military storehouse manned by a corps of technicians, including several thousand radar experts. Naguib agreed that he couldn’t replace those experts, and British officers said they couldn’t withdraw them and leave their equipment in strange hands. However, most Egyptians, including Naguib, had developed a tendency to talk of the canal as an internal waterway. Sometimes, in fact, they did more than talk. Since 1948 they had confiscated a lot of cargo bound for Israel, including some which could scarcely be called military.

  None of the correspondents then living in Cairo foresaw the day when gigantic tankers would render Suez obsolescent, but even the dullest among us realized that a resolution of the Israeli problem would be the greatest possible boon to Mideast peace. It was also, of course, the least likely. John Foster Dulles was grandly assuring Israelis that they would be welcome to join the Middle East defense organization he was trying to put together, but the Arabs, with 95 percent of the region’s population, didn’t feel that way at all. “Egyptian recognition in Israel is about as likely as American recognition of China,” I cabled home that winter. As we discovered two decades later, it was actually less likely. Compared with what had gone before and what would come later, Israel’s relations with her neighbors were serene in the early 1950s, yet U.S. ships were being routinely blacklisted in Cairo for carrying cargoes to Tel Aviv, and Egyptian authorities, including Naguib, found it necessary to assure the Palestinian refugees from time to time that they would all go home someday.

  The center of anti-Zionist sentiment in Cairo then was the Arab League, the federation which Anthony Eden had encouraged and afterward learned to detest. Ostensibly the League was devoted to the study of “major problems in the social and cultural spheres,” but it was also interested in the Zionist atrocity sphere, and one poisonous little pamphlet which I picked up at its headquarters described the desecration of Moslem mosques, the bayoneting of pregnant Arab women, and the Israeli use of bacteriological warfare, which, it charged, had been responsible for cholera epidemics in Egypt and Syria during the 1948 war. The leaflet concluded that “a people who can commit such outrages upon innocent human beings and show contempt for the houses of God have placed themselves once and for all time outside the pale of humanity.”

  ***

  Cairo continued to be a nervous city under Naguib, partly because of the city’s history, partly due to the Egyptian national character, and partly, I suspect, because paranoia is endemic among the makers of revolutions. There were plainclothesmen in every bar, listening; cables and foreign mail were censored; phones were tapped; and any foreigner walking up the Nile to the British embassy could expect to be shadowed. Suspicion is infectious; at least one correspondent cultivated the habit of taking the second, not the first, cab to drift by his hotel. A lot of others wondered whether all the intrigue was really necessary. Clearly Naguib was a militant democrat, and highly esteemed by his people. The Wafd was broken. All the key Communists were in jail. Apart from the embittered landlords and the fanatics in the Moslem Brotherhood who objected to the drafting of a new constitution because “the Koran is our constitution”—some two hundred of them forced their way into the first meeting of the drafting committee, shouting just that—the moderate regime appeared to have no enemies of consequence at large.

  Its most dangerous enemy, as the passage of time revealed, lay within its own leadership. In retrospect General Naguib has taken on the aspect of an Egyptian Kerensky, while Nasser seems to have been more of an Arabian Lenin. Like Lenin, Nasser allowed his predecessor to take the first steps toward the future. Naguib was a stronger man than Kerensky, however, and more of an activist. He ended the brief reign of little Fuad II, declared Egypt a republic with himself as chief of state, put corrupt members of the previous regime on trial, and outlawed the Moslem Brotherhood. Then Nasser prepared his big move. In February 1954 he came out of the closet to take over the premiership. That November he put Naguib under house arrest, and in 1956, the same year the Sudanese opted for i
ndependence, he promulgated a new constitution, with himself as president.

  The history of modern Egypt, with all its agonies, dates from then. Looking back, one cannot avoid concluding that events in the Middle East might have followed a different course if Naguib had remained in power. The man was wise, learned, temperate, fair, and, above all, decent. That, of course, was precisely the trouble with him. That was why he, and that entire region, was foredoomed to the Mideast madness of today.

  Envoi

  My Old Man

  The Last Years of H. L. Mencken

  “The cooks here do a swell job with soft-shell crabs,” Mencken said in a gravelly voice, peering at me over his spectacles. Beneath the old-fashioned center part of his white hair his pot-blue eyes gleamed like twin gas jets. “They fry them in the altogether,” he rasped. “Then they add a small jockstrap of bacon.”

  It was June 2, 1947. We were in the dining room of the Maryland Club. The meeting was our first—I had just flown in from a Midwestern graduate school, where I was writing my dissertation on his early literary criticism—and it was the beginning of a seven-year friendship, an April-December relationship which I cherished, and cherish still, despite the dirty tricks fate began to play on him eighteen months after it began.

  “This is a very high-toned club,” he said over the crabs. “Nothing but men. Any member who suffers a heart attack must be carried outside to the front steps before a nurse can attend him.”

  He was in fine form that Monday noon. The thought that he himself might fall the victim of a seizure and wind up in the hands of nurses was very far away. At sixty-six he was still at the height of his remarkable powers and had, in fact, just completed the most productive period in his career. Since 1940 he had been feuding with his paper, the Baltimore Sun, as a result of the Sun’s support of what he had called “Roosevelt’s War.” Holed up in his study at 1524 Hollins Street, he had written Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days, A Christmas Story, A New Dictionary of Quotations, and two massive supplements to The American Language and was, when we met, at work on A Mencken Chrestomathy. His machete was still long and sharp and heavy, and he had never swung it with greater gusto.

  Face-to-face with the man himself, I was enormously impressed. Alistair Cooke once observed that Mencken had “the longest torso on the shortest legs in the entire history of legmen,” and Mencken himself said there would be no point in erecting a statue to him, because it would just look like a monument to a defeated alderman, but actually he was a man of great physical presence. To be sure, his torso was ovoid, his ruddy face homely, and his legs not only stubby but also thin and bowed. Nevertheless there was a sense of dignity and purpose about all his movements, and when you were with him it was impossible to forget that you were watching a great original. Nobody else could stuff Uncle Willie stogies into a seersucker jacket with the flourish of Mencken, or wipe a blue bandanna across his brow so dramatically. His friends treasured everything about him, because the whole of the man was manifest in each of his aspects—the tilt of his head, his close-fitting clothes, his high-crowned felt hat creased in the distinct fashion of the 1920s, his strutting walk, his abrupt gestures, his habit of holding a cigar between his thumb and forefinger like a baton, the roupy inflection of his voice, and, most of all, those extraordinary eyes: so large, and intense, and merry. He was sui generis in all ways, and the instant I saw him I wanted to write his biography.

  After reading my thesis the following summer, he agreed. (“I marvel at the hard work you put into it,” he wrote me. “It tells me many things about my own self that I didn’t know myself…. You will be rewarded in Heaven throughout eternity.”) He did more. Swallowing his pride, he asked the Sun to give me a job, so that I could support myself while working on the book. My journalistic career was launched that September, and while I was unlikely to match the trajectory of his soaring star—at my age, twenty-five, he had been a managing editor—it did give us something else to talk about.

  Beginning that autumn, we talked a great deal, sometimes at the Sun, which he now began visiting with growing frequency; other times in his club, his home, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Miller Brothers’ restaurant, and on long walks through downtown Baltimore. There was, of course, no pretense to conversation between equals; I regarded him with the special deference of the fledgling writer for the master. The high-ceilinged Hollins Street sitting room, with its cheery fireplace, dark rosewood furniture, and Victorian bric-a-brac became a kind of shrine to me. I treasured his letters to me, which were even more frequent than our talks, for he loved correspondence, always preferring the written word to the telephone. And I kept elaborate notes on all our contacts, which, he being Mencken, really were notable.

  One warm day I covered a fire in his neighborhood. He appeared friskily at the height of it, carrying a pencil and perspiring happily. “I’m like the hippopotamus,” he said in greeting, “an essentially tropical animal.” Like the hippo, he was also a creature of exaggeration. He never asked me just to join him for a beer; I was invited to “hoist a schooner of malt.” He couldn’t order sweetbreads at Miller’s without explaining that they were taken from “the pancreases of horned cattle, the smaller intestines of swine, and the vermiform appendix of the cow”—thereby causing me to choose something else. Anthony Comstock hadn’t merely been a censor; he had been “a great smeller.” Mencken was forever stuffing letters to me with advertisements for chemical water closets, quack-remedy broadsides, and religious pamphlets. Once, while showing me his manuscript collection in the Pratt Library, he said he was worried about its security; the stack containing it was locked, but he wanted a sign, too. “Saying ‘KEEP OUT’?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Saying: ‘WARNING: TAMPERING WITH THIS GATE WILL RELEASE CHLORINE GAS UNDER 250 POUNDS PRESSURE.’”

  By the spring of 1948 he was a daily visitor to the Sun. In the paper’s morgue he advised a man updating the Mencken obituary to, “Leave it as it is. Just add one line: ‘As he grew older, he grew worse.’” One afternoon on Charles Street we encountered two sedate women from the Sun’s library coming the other way, and Mencken cried out heartily, “Hello, girls! How’s the profession?” Later one of them said to me, “Of course, he didn’t mean it the way it sounded.” I knew that was exactly how he had meant it. By then, though, it was clear that he was yearning for a consummation of his rapprochement with the paper. The feud formally ended the following summer, when he arrived in Philadelphia to join the Sun men covering that year’s presidential nominations and write happily of “the traditional weather of a national convention… a rising temperature, very high humidity, and lazy puffs of gummy wind from the mangrove swamps surrounding the city.” Of the three political parties then taking the field, he preferred the Progressives, because they were the most preposterous. After Wallace had been nominated, he received a delegation of young Progressives in the hotel suite housing the Sun delegation and proposed that they join him in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He deliberately picked the impossible key of F Major. After crooning a few bars in his rasping tenor, he dropped out, waiting to hear his guests crack up, as was inevitable, on the impossible high E. When it happened, they looked appealingly to him for help. He just stuck his cigar in his mouth and beamed back at them.

  My best recollection of the campaign which followed is of a Wallace rally in Baltimore’s Fifth Regiment Armory which I covered with Mencken. By then everyone in the audience had read the old man’s Sun articles taunting their hero, and they knew the old man would be there that night. After the speeches, a mob of them crowded around the press bench, where, incredibly, he had unsheathed his portable typewriter and set to work. He had decided to knock out his piece with them watching. I know of no other writer who could have performed under the circumstances. There were perhaps a score of hostile, humorless men and women in an arc behind him, peering over his shoulder, and behind them were others who were calling out, “What’s he saying about us?” The outrageous phrases were called b
ack, the crowd growled—and the old man hunted and pecked on, enjoying himself hugely. He even hummed that catchy little ditty, “Friendly Henry Wallace.”

  Mencken was immensely amused, as the Sun hierarchy was not, by Truman’s unexpected victory. He felt that it justified his assessment of democracy as a comic spectacle. He returned to Hollins Street, refreshed, to tackle a new book. Meantime I had written the opening sections of my biography, and he had read them. On September 27 he had written me, “It seems to me that, as they stand, the first two chapters are excellent. Some of your generalizations surprise me, and even horrify me, but they are yours, not mine. Don’t let anyone tell you how to write it. Do it in your own way. You are obviously far ahead of most young writers, and I have every confidence in you.” Thus we were both busy with thickening manuscripts as winter approached. On Wednesday, November 24, we were to take a break. A luncheon reservation had been made at the Maryland Club for four—Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, a Jesuit priest, and me. Waugh and Mencken had never met; the priest and I had arranged everything, like seconds before a duel. The encounter never took place, however, because disaster struck the old man the evening before.

  ***

  Mencken was fascinated by the frailties of the human body, his own and everybody else’s. He was constantly studying medical journals, reading up on diseases of the bronchial tubes, gall bladder, etc., and he was the most considerate visitor of the sick in Baltimore. Acquaintances who, in health, would not see him for weeks, found him at their hospital doors each evening, as long as they remained bedridden, fascinated by their progress, or, even more, by their lack of it. His letters to me and to others reflected his preoccupation with illness and anatomy. “Imagine,” he wrote typically, “hanging the stones of a man outside, where they are forever getting themselves knocked, pinched and bruised. Any decent mechanic would have put them in the exact center of the body, protected by a body envelope twice as thick as even a Presbyterian’s skull. Moreover, consider certain parts of the female—always too large or too small. The elemental notion of standardization seems to have never presented itself to the celestial Edison.”