Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace
By Alex von Tunzelmann, Harper, 560 pages, $32
In the mid-19th century, the historian Thomas Carlyle popularised the Great Man Theory, arguing that history was made by the heroism of soldiers and statesmen. The Great Man Theory has long since been junked by academics, if not popular historians. The course of history, the scholars say, owes more to impersonal forces and serendipity than to the efforts of some dead white males. That is true enough, but from time to time, at critical instances, great men have made a difference, for better or for worse.
The Suez crisis of 1956 was one of the moments. It began as a last gasp of colonialism, a plot by Britain and France, working with Israel, to reclaim the Suez Canal, recently nationalised by Egypt. The scheme was the fruit of human folly, principally and most notably that of the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.
The grand conspiracy was doomed to fail. The canal was blocked for months, causing a crippling oil shortage in Europe. The Arab-Israeli conflict worsened, and the Muslim world was inflamed against its old overlords in the West with lasting consequences. The botched invasion occurred just as the Soviet Union was crushing a rebellion in Hungary, its Eastern bloc satellite. When the Kremlin, seeing the opportunity to divert international attention from its own outrages, issued a letter widely interpreted as a threat to attack London and Paris with nuclear weapons, the great powers seemed for an instant to be lurching towards the Third World War.
The turmoil and danger created by the Suez crisis and the Hungarian rebellion have largely faded from popular memory. With “Blood and Sand”, Alex von Tunzelmann, an Oxford-educated historian with an eye for human detail as well as a sure-handed grasp of the larger picture, does a marvellous job of recreating the tension and bungling that swept up Cairo, London, Moscow, Budapest, Paris and Washington during the harrowing two weeks of October 22 to November 6, 1956.
The background of the crisis was complex, and some readers may get slightly dizzy as the author corkscrews back in time from her gripping narrative. But the ultimate reward is a deeper understanding of the forces at work, as well as a wild ride down a zigzag trail left by the flailing of men with bloated and broken egos.
Von Tunzelmann begins her yarn with an arresting anecdote related by Anthony Nutting, a minister in the British Foreign Office. It was March 1956, and Nutting had been working on a plan to lessen the influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic president of postcolonial Egypt. Interrupted at dinner at the Savoy Hotel, Nutting took a call from Prime Minister Eden. “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him, as you call it?” Eden said, shouting over the phone. “I want him murdered, can’t you understand?” Nutting (in his own telling) began to protest but Eden insisted: “I don’t want an alternative. And I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.” Then the prime minister hung up.
Eden is a tragic if rather unappealing figure in von Tunzelmann’s account. Bred to his class at Eton and Oxford, he looked the part of a perfect gentleman. He took first-class honours in Persian and Arabic at Oxford, and during his career at the Foreign Office, he had shown sensitivity to the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East. He had served bravely on the Western Front in the First World War and capably as Winston Churchill’s foreign secretary during the Second World War.
But he was not well. “His flashes of temper and fragile nerves led some to wonder about his genetic inheritance,” von Tunzelmann writes. “His baronet father had been such an extreme eccentric — complete with episodes of ‘uncontrolled rages’, falling to the floor, biting carpets and hurling flowerpots through plate-glass windows — that even the Wodehousian society of early-20th-century upper-class England had noticed something was up.”
As prime minister, Sir Anthony took to calling ministers in the middle of the night to ask if they had read a particular newspaper article. “My nerves are already at breaking point,” he told his civil servants. In October 1956, he collapsed physically for a few days. According to one of his closest aides, he used amphetamines as well as heavy painkillers, and a Whitehall official said he was “practically living on Benzedrine”.
He was obsessed with Egypt’s Nasser, the leader of a group of nationalist army officers who had deposed the pro-British monarchy in 1952 and seized the British- and French-controlled Suez Canal in July 1956. About two-thirds of Europe’s oil was transported through the canal; Nasser had his “thumb on our windpipe”, Eden fumed. Eden made Nasser “a scapegoat for all his problems: the sinking empire, the sluggish economy, the collapse of his reputation within his party and his dwindling popularity in the country at large”, von Tunzelmann writes. Resentment sharpened into vendetta. Over the summer and autumn, Eden concocted a cockamamie scheme, called Operation Musketeer, to stage an Israeli invasion of Egypt, followed by an Anglo-French peacekeeping force for the “protection” of the canal. The Israeli and French conspirators had their own foolish reasons for going along; significantly, the United States was kept in the dark.
Fortunately, when the crisis broke, Eden’s recklessness was foiled by the calm resolve of the American president, Dwight Eisenhower. Genial in public and so fond of golf that he installed a putting green outside the Oval Office, Eisenhower was easy to underestimate. But having liberated Western Europe as supreme allied commander and seen firsthand the waste of war, he was determined as president to keep the United States out of armed conflict. He also had an “instinctive sympathy with the postcolonial predicament”, von Tunzelmann writes.
Eisenhower was not always well served by the rhetoric of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles or the machinations of his brother, Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence. And Eisenhower had a temper. “Bombs, by God,” he shouted when the British began striking Egyptian air fields. “What does Anthony think he’s doing? Why is he doing this to me?” But Eisenhower was shrewd and he could be coldly calculating. Understanding that the British would need to buy American oil, he quietly put Britain into a financial squeeze, forcing Eden to back off the invasion.
Eisenhower was also, unusually for an American president, willing to say no to Israel. The Suez crisis blew up just as America went to the polls to vote on a second term for the president. His staff secretary, Andrew Goodpaster, recorded: “In this matter, he does not care in the slightest whether he is re-elected or not. He feels we must make good on our word [to defend Egypt]. He added that he did not really think the American people would throw him out in the middle of a situation like this, but if they did, so be it.”
When others were losing their heads, Eisenhower kept his. Though never explicitly stated, the take-away from von Tunzelmann’s book is obvious: when it comes to national leadership in chaotic times, temperament matters. Which makes her book not only exciting and satisfying but also timely.
–New York Times News Service
Evan Thomas, the author of “Ike’s Bluff” and “Being Nixon”, is working on an authorised biography of Sandra Day O’Connor.
