The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Double Cross at Suez

  “I’ve just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things.”

  I

  ADLAI STEVENSON BUILT HIS 1956 campaign on one basic message: that Eisenhower had failed to govern well because he spent too much of his first term either on the golf course or in a hospital bed, leaving the nation adrift and in need of firm direction. Eisenhower found this an insulting and infuriating charge; but there was a kernel of truth in Stevenson’s critique. In mid-1956, as he endured his intestinal ailments, Eisenhower had delegated a crucially important decision to John Foster Dulles that led directly to one of the biggest crises of his presidency.

  The case concerned Egypt and the vital waterway that ran through its commercial heart: the Suez Canal. On July 26, 1956, Egypt’s dashing 38-year-old leader Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser shocked the Western powers and delighted the Arab world by declaring the nationalization of the canal. He did not desire to close this crucial sea lane; rather he sought to take ownership of it away from the international consortium—mainly the British and French governments—that had financed and built the canal and collected tolls from its waterborne traffic. Nasser, who had led a military coup against Egypt’s monarchy in 1952 and who had only just declared himself Egypt’s president in June, saw the nationalization of the canal as a declaration of Egypt’s independence from the colonial powers. Egypt, not the Europeans, had a right to control its own sovereign territory, Nasser believed, and that included the passageway from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

  Nasser’s action struck at the jugular vein of the British Empire. For almost a century Egypt had been a zone of British influence because of its strategic importance in the eastern Mediterranean. The opening of the canal in 1869 only enhanced Britain’s desire to maintain its presence in Egypt, for the canal offered a strategically valuable route to the Red Sea, East Africa, and India. Over the years since, Suez had become a highway of world trade and allowed Britain to project global economic and naval power. A third of the ships that transited the canal each year were British, and the British government held a 44 percent stake in the Suez Canal Company, making it the largest shareholder. Some 70 percent of Western Europe’s oil passed through the canal; along with Gibraltar and Malta, Suez formed a chain of outposts that projected British influence across the Mediterranean and into the Middle East.1

  In light of Nasser’s overthrow of the once-pliant Egyptian monarchy, Britain found itself suddenly needing to curry favor with the new regime. In 1954 the British agreed to evacuate their massive military base in the Canal Zone, hoping that this gesture would build up some credit with Nasser’s government. Britain also offered loans to Nasser’s government for the construction of a new hydroelectric dam along the Nile River at Aswan, a modernization project that Nasser saw as epitomizing his new, technologically ambitious plans for his developing country. However, Britain could not fund the project alone. Anthony Eden, the long-serving foreign secretary who had become prime minister in April 1955, appealed to the United States for help. Eisenhower and Dulles, aware that Nasser was also bidding for Soviet aid, agreed to open discussions to help finance the dam project. Eisenhower understood Nasser’s game but concluded that the United States should “go all out for the Dam in Egypt.” In December 1955 the United States made a preliminary offer of $56 million to support the massive engineering project.2

  Britain and America hoped the generous offer would earn Nasser’s loyalty to the West. Instead of demonstrating his gratitude for the financing of the dam project, however, Nasser continued to hurl epithets at the British for their colonial pretensions in the Middle East. He championed the cause of Arab unity, pressured the Jordanians to rid themselves of their British military advisers, and worked to sabotage the Baghdad Pact, a regional security arrangement among Britain, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan that Eden saw as essential to his Middle East policy. Egypt offered diplomatic recognition to communist China and, perhaps most damning, signed a deal with Czechoslovakia for the purchase of arms and aircraft.

  To Dulles such behavior could not be rewarded with generous financial assistance. In late March 1956 he proposed to Eisenhower that the United States slow the discussions with Egypt over financing the Aswan Dam while awaiting an improvement of Nasser’s attitude toward the Western powers. Dulles wanted to make it plain that Nasser “cannot cooperate as he is doing with the Soviet Union and at the same time enjoy most-favored-nation treatment from the United States.” Dulles proposed that the Eisenhower administration hold up loans, credits, humanitarian aid, and approvals of export licenses and also start to “tilt” toward Saudi Arabia as a way to isolate Egypt’s leadership in the region. Eisenhower, also growing anxious about Nasser’s defiance of the West and chumminess toward the Soviets, approved Dulles’s proposals.3

  But Nasser refused to be bullied. He openly courted the USSR, seeking its aid to build his dam should the Western powers renege on their promises of support. Dulles had backed himself into a corner and had no way out. He could hardly restore an American offer of aid without some sign of contrition from Nasser, yet none came. Aware that Congress too was growing increasingly critical of Nasser and would be unlikely to approve an American aid package to such a headstrong nationalist, Dulles now began to contemplate an outright break with the Egyptian leader.

  Unfortunately, at the crucial moment of decision, Eisenhower was sidelined by illness. From June 8 to July 16 he was either in Walter Reed Hospital or recovering in Gettysburg from his intestinal surgery. Just three days after returning to the Oval Office—thin, still in pain, and irritable—Eisenhower met with Dulles to discuss the Egyptian issue. On July 19, in a 10-minute conversation, Dulles outlined his proposal to withdraw financing from the Aswan Dam project. Eisenhower, who for two months had been out of touch with this issue, accepted his recommendation. That afternoon Dulles told the Egyptian ambassador that the United States would withdraw its offer of financial support for the project. In his memoirs Eisenhower admitted the matter had been handled poorly. In a rare criticism of Dulles, he wrote, “We might have been undiplomatic in the way the cancellation was handled.”4

  A week later the world heard Nasser’s reply: speaking to a crowd of 100,000 in Liberation Square in Alexandria, he announced his decision to nationalize the Suez Canal and use the toll profits to build the Aswan Dam. (In fact Nasser later received enormous amounts of aid from the USSR to fund the project.) “We shall industrialize Egypt and compete with the West. We are marching from strength to strength.” The crowds in the street roared their approval.5

  Political leaders in London, Paris, and Jerusalem reacted with outrage at Nasser’s actions. In British eyes, Nasser looked like a small-time thug who dared challenge the might of the British Empire in a region of vital strategic interest. To allow an upstart Arab colonel to place a choke hold on Europe’s oil supplies was intolerable. More than that, Nasser struck a very tender nerve in the British psyche. To many Britons, Nasser sounded a good deal like the European dictators of the 1930s, and the memory of Britain’s weak-kneed appeasement of those men hung like a shadow over the Suez affair. Indeed in February 1938 the British foreign minister Anthony Eden had resigned in frustration over Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. Now Eden was prime minister, and he would show the world that Britain had learned the lessons of appeasement: aggression must be checked early and with firmness.

  In drawing this conclusion Eden was supported by the majority of his advisers, who also read the Suez Crisis through the lens of World War II. Harold Macmillan, then chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to Nasser in his diary as “an Asiatic Mussolini.” By attaching this stigma to Nasser, the British raised the stakes of the crisis to enormous heights. Eden’s colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, wrote to the prime minister, “If Nasser wins or even appears to win we might as well as a government (and indeed as a country) go out of business.” Eden wasted no time in alert
ing President Eisenhower: Britain was prepared “to use force to bring Nasser to his senses.”6

  The French government, also a shareholder in the Suez Canal Company, had been equally outraged by Nasser’s behavior and just as prone to resort to specious analogies from the 1930s. To France, however, Nasser presented a more concrete and immediate danger. France was in the midst of a bitter colonial war in Algeria, and Nasser’s pan-Arab rhetoric had inflamed the Algerian liberation movement. More galling, the Egyptian leader had been sending arms to the Algerian rebels. France wanted Nasser destroyed every bit as much as Britain did. And alongside Britain and France, Israel saw Nasser as a serious threat. Under Nasser’s rule, border skirmishes between Israel and Egypt had spiked and Nasser had moved to unite the Arab states of the region into a hostile anti-Israel bloc under his leadership. Thus no sooner had Nasser made his announcement on July 26 than three determined states, Britain, France, and Israel, lined up together in hopes of forcing a confrontation that might weaken and even destroy the defiant Egyptian colonel.

  II

  The tangle over Suez presented Eisenhower with one of the most complex problems of his eight years in office. Since the spring of 1956 he and his closest advisers had been grappling with the problem of how to win friends among nonaligned nations in the developing world. Eisenhower understood instinctively that in the coming years the world would be shaped by the yearning of millions of people in the Third World to be free of the shackles of colonial rule. Indeed the very term third world emerged at just this moment, coined by a French economist in 1952 to describe the great majority of nations that had not yet found their place between the developed “first” world and the socialist bloc “second” world. Eisenhower spent a great deal of time worrying about which way the emerging nations would turn. His national security team felt that the Soviets had been more effective in using offers of technology, development aid, and of course weapons to seduce Asian and African nations to join their cause. The NSC concluded that the United States had not yet created “an affirmative sense of community of interests with the underdeveloped countries.” To make matters worse, in the confrontation with Nasser America’s closest allies had set a course for war that would inflame the Arab world and turn Nasser into a hero. It would certainly open the door to greater Soviet influence in the region.7

  In his initial reaction to the canal’s nationalization, Eisenhower stressed that Nasser’s behavior, while unforgivable, was not strictly speaking illegal. Nasser wanted to assert Egyptian sovereignty but had not threatened to close the canal to shipping traffic. As Eisenhower instructed Dulles over the phone on July 30, the United States would demand that Egypt “operate the Canal efficiently” but would not get “hysterical” over the issue: “We are not going to war over it.” Eisenhower understood better than his British and French counterparts that Nasser “embodies the demands of the people of the area for independence and slapping the white man down.” Any use of force against Nasser now would “array the [Muslim] world from Dakar to the Philippines against us.” When Eisenhower learned from his special envoy Robert Murphy that the British cabinet had already decided to “drive Nasser out of Egypt,” he responded by writing immediately to Eden, whom he had known well since the Second World War. But that old friendship did not soften Eisenhower’s tone now. The president expressed his “personal conviction . . . as to the unwisdom of even contemplating the use of military force at this moment.” Eden could have no doubt: the United States opposed any British military action toward Egypt.8

  Eisenhower dispatched Dulles to London. There the secretary of state found top British officials in a state of extreme bellicosity. In a discussion with Macmillan, Dulles heard the anguished cry of an injured lion. Macmillan was a thrice-wounded veteran of the Great War, a Conservative member of Parliament throughout the interwar years, and a protégé of Churchill’s. During the war, as British minister in Algiers, he was Churchill’s man in North Africa and worked closely with American military leaders, especially Eisenhower. He spoke with authority but also a certain end-of-days sentiment about the Suez Crisis. To Dulles, Macmillan prophesied that Nasser’s seizure of the canal would trigger successive acts of defiance toward Britain across the Middle East and lead to “the destruction of Great Britain as a first-class power and its reduction to a status similar to that of Holland.” Macmillan bitterly declared that it would be better to be “destroyed by Russian bombs now” than to be “reduced to impotence” by Nasser. “No one wanted to see another Munich. They would rather die fighting than slowly bleed to a state of impotence.” This was the voice of imperialism on its deathbed.9

  It is possible that British policy was influenced not just by a romantic attachment to the colonial past but by the poor health of the prime minister. Unbeknownst to the Americans, Eden was an ill man. In April 1953, while undergoing an operation to remove his gallbladder, the surgeons had damaged his bile duct. For years afterward Eden endured recurrent infections and fevers and constant abdominal pain. His doctors prescribed a drug called Drinamyl to treat the pain; it contained both a barbiturate and an amphetamine—rather like taking a sleeping pill with six cups of strong coffee. For three years Eden popped these pills that, after prolonged use, left him a nervous and exhausted wreck, prone to mood swings and outbursts of euphoria followed by depression. Added to his physical ailments, the tension of the Suez Crisis pushed Eden to the brink of collapse.10

  Only with the greatest effort did Dulles and Eisenhower manage to persuade the British to agree to a series of conferences, first with a large group of maritime nations that used the canal, then with the Egyptians themselves, to try to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis. In August these nations worked out a proposal for the international control of the canal and some sharing of the canal’s revenue with Egypt. Nasser had no reason to accept such a plan, however, as any concession would be perceived as a defeat for him. Nor did the British and French really want a negotiated settlement. Instead Eden repeated to Eisenhower his belief that Nasser had become a dangerous pawn of the Soviets, who wished to expel Western influence from the Middle East. “Nasser must not be allowed to get away with it,” Eden wrote.11

  In an exchange of remarkably frank letters with Eden in September, Eisenhower alerted the British prime minister to his firm opposition to war. The use of force against Egypt, he insisted, would rally Arab opinion to Nasser, certainly lead to a cutoff of oil shipments to Europe, and open the door to wider Soviet influence. Yes, Nasser must be deflated, Ike agreed, but Suez was “not the issue on which to do this by force.” Eden, however, refused to accept such counsel. He had made up his mind. Writing to Eisenhower on September 6, Eden insisted that Nasser’s actions exactly mirrored Hitler’s “carefully planned movements” between 1936 and 1940. Hitler’s brazen aggression was “tolerated and excused” by the Western governments, leading to catastrophe. Similarly Nasser’s seizure of the canal was “an opening gambit” in a plan to expel the West from the Middle East. “Nasser can deny oil to Western Europe and we here shall all be at his mercy.” Eden refused to let his country be “held to ransom by Egypt acting at Russia’s behest. . . . It would be an ignoble end to our long history.”12

  On the phone with Dulles on the morning of September 7 Eisenhower said Eden’s sentimental cries about the end of the British Empire were “strongly reminiscent of Churchill,” who was prone to utter equally mawkish prophecies. In any case, the British were “in a box” and were “choosing the wrong place to get tough.” Ike spent much of the day drafting a response to Eden that coolly brushed aside the comparison of Nasser to Hitler. “You are making of Nasser a much more important figure than he is,” he wrote. Because Nasser thrived on controversy, the Western powers must “let some of the drama go out of the situation.” Above all, Britain must avoid war, Ike warned. Any use of force against Nasser would not only fail to solve the immediate problem, but it would also “cause a serious misunderstanding between our two countries.” Eisenhower deployed every
argument he could to deter Britain from making a fatal mistake.13

  During October the Great Powers worked through the United Nations to devise a plan acceptable to both Egypt and the Europeans that would restore international control of the canal. Eisenhower stayed fixed on one basic point: the United States would not support the use of force, overt or covert, against Nasser. Such an action would be “dead wrong.” Dulles conveyed this message to his British and French counterparts when they met in New York, stressing the damage that a war over Suez would cause. “The sympathies of all the Middle East, Asian and African peoples would be irrevocably lost,” and they would rapidly turn to the Soviet Union. “War would be a disaster.” Conversations at the UN continued, but Dulles began to suspect the British and French did not truly desire a negotiated settlement. He confidentially told his brother, Allen, that he had no idea what the British and French were up to: “They are deliberately keeping us in the dark.”14

  Tragically Eisenhower could not alter Eden’s fixed intent to destroy Nasser. Even as the British and the French kept up a pretense of negotiations with Egypt through the United Nations, they moved secretly to prepare an invasion. Meeting at the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers, on October 14, British and French leaders conceived of a devious and illegal scheme to bring about Nasser’s downfall. Israel should be prevailed upon to attack Egypt; Britain and France would intervene, ostensibly to separate the warring sides; in the process the Canal Zone would be occupied, and the Egyptian Army and Air Force destroyed. Nasser would be so humbled by the defeat that his ouster would naturally follow. The French arranged for the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to attend a secret meeting in the Paris suburb of Sèvres with the British foreign minister Selwyn Lloyd and the French foreign minister Christian Pineau. There, from October 22 to 24, they worked out the contours of the plan. Israel would attack Egypt on the evening of October 29. The next morning the British and French governments would call on Egypt and Israel to stop military action and withdraw their forces from the Suez Canal Zone, and Egypt would be told that it must accept an Anglo-French occupation of the zone so as to ensure freedom of passage through it. The plotters expected Egypt to refuse this condition, whereupon Anglo-French forces would attack Egypt early the next day.15