Driven Man

(See Cover)

The grave men gathered in the Cabinet room at 10 Downing Street were confronted with a problem unique in the proud history of Britain: they were afraid that Egypt and Israel would stop fighting and peace would break out in the Middle East. All Monday afternoon, as British paratroops ground down on Port Said and a Franco-British fleet hovered off the canal's mouth, Britain's Cabinet debated tensely. One member pointed out that the man who stepped in to referee a fight would hardly be justified in attacking the boxers if they stopped fighting. There was a murmur of uncomfortable assent. But Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden had gone too far to stop now. Only a matter of a few hours, he argued, separated them from full control of the Suez Canal and perhaps the downfall of Egypt's Nasser.

It was a curious position for the man whom the Opposition only ten months before was calling "the boneless wonder," who only 17 months ago had won a triumphal election on a platform of "working for peace." Elegant, unruffled, a good party man, priding himself on the quiet adjustment and the deft compromise, Eden had built a reputation as a diplomatic technician par excellence. But last week the diplomatic technician had plunged recklessly for force, the popular Prime Minister was under a shattering hail of critical fire unequaled in violence since the time of Neville Chamberlain.

War Aims. Within the quiet Cabinet room differences were minimized. Richard Austen Butler, who is in effect deputy premier though his title is only Lord Privy Seal, did not quarrel with the desirability of Eden's objectives in wanting to fight on. But, said "Rab" Butler pointedly, he himself had just made a speech, which he had thought was in line with Eden's views, saying that Britain had intervened in Egypt only to stop the fighting. How could he go back to the House and say now that Britain refused the cease-fire even though the other combatants had stopped? If Britain kept fighting after Egypt and Israel had stopped, he added, the rupture with the U.S. might become irreparable.

On this unresolved note, the Cabinet adjourned. In the House of Commons, the Opposition hammered at the government on the difference between what Eden said and what he did. Eden had said Britain was protecting the canal; but the British broadcasts from Cyprus were telling Egyptians: "You have committed a sin, that is, you placed your confidence in Nasser and his lies." Said Labor's Nye Bevan: "Here you have not a military action to separate Israeli and Egyptian troops. Here you have a declaration of war against the Egyptian government in the most terrible terms."

Laborites charged bitterly that "Russia would not have dared to take this action in Hungary but for the action of this government in Egypt." Eden stood his ground, unyielding, uncommunicative.

To Bed at 5. In the three months since Nasser seized the Suez Canal Co., Anthony Eden has averaged less than five hours' sleep a night. He did not get much that night. At 1:30 he was roused by a secretary carrying the hectoring threat from Russia's Bulganin: "We are fully determined to crush the aggressors and restore peace in the East through the use of force." Minutes later, a worried Guy Mollet called from Paris. Then a message arrived from U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjold announcing that both Egypt and Israel had agreed to a ceasefire. Eden summoned some of his advisers, did not get back to bed until 5.

But by 9 that morning, Eden was up, faultlessly dressed, soundly breakfasted. All morning he met with his Cabinet. There was no dispute about how to ans'wer the Russian note. Cabinet members were cheered by the U.S.'s prompt reply that it would oppose Russian intervention and agreed that Bulganin should be told to mind his own business. But the members disputed long over the ceasefire. Butler reiterated his argument that further gains by British arms would not compensate for U.S. and world disapproval. One worry was that protracted fighting might provide the Russians with a pretext to send volunteers in massive numbers to Egypt, with untold consequences to the balance of power in the Middle East. By 1 p.m. Eden yielded. He advised Mollet: "We've practically won. Nasser cannot last long now, anyway."

Ignominious End. That afternoon Eden told the House of Commons: "Her Majesty's government are ordering their forces to cease-fire at midnight tonight." The Labor benches broke into a spontaneous cheer. Moments later, the Tories realized that, if Eden had ordered it, a cease fire must be Tory policy, and they too began belatedly to cheer.

Then Eden made a blunder. He fol lowed right on by reading his reply to Bulganin's note. Inescapably, the world was left with the impression that only Bulganin's threat had scared Eden into capitulation--an impression that the Russians successfully exploited among the Arabs of the Middle East.

So ended, ignominiously, one of the shortest and most controversial wars in Britain's history. Tories got what consolation they could out of the renewed prospect of solidarity with the U.S. Scarcely had Eden finished speaking than he got a phone call from President Eisenhower, who interrupted his Election-Day concerns to express his approval of Eden's decision. Cried Mollet in Paris: "When the Soviet Union thought it saw a crack in the free world and wanted to threaten, we at once found the U.S. at our side."

Eden's internal troubles were far from over. No sooner had he issued his cease fire promise than he began to hedge it: the British-French forces would not leave until an "effective" U.N. police force was on hand, and Britain's view of effective was one that included the British. Eden wanted to have his assaulting forces deputized into law-enforcing U.N. policemen. Britain only did "what the U.N. without a police force could not do in time," was Eden's argument.

Trouble Behind. Such hedging left many a Tory deeply uneasy. Brilliant young (33) Sir Edward Boyle, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, resigned from the government. Boyle was widely respected, and his resignation was far more of a blow than the earlier departure of mercurial Minister of State Anthony Nutting. Two Tory backbenchers resigned. A revolt was visibly in the making.

Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd hurried to a meeting of Tory backbenchers. Threatening open defection, they demanded the unconditional withdrawal of British forces, and acceptance of a U.N. police force without insistence on a British com ponent. Reluctantly Lloyd acquiesced.

Lloyd's concession repaired what might have been a serious breach. At division time, on a motion to censure the government, a handful of younger Tories still remained stubbornly in their places. Chief Government Whip Ted Heath bent over them, arguing earnestly like a schoolmaster with wayward children. At the last minute, two of them got up and headed for the Tory lobby, to side with the government.

The revolt had subsided.

For the moment, Eden seemed to have weathered the worst. The impatient were glad that Eden had done something at last; the embarrassed were glad that he had stopped doing it. Most Britons were at least delighted to see Nasser taken down a peg. Attending the Lord Mayor's banquet in the Guildhall at week's end, Eden was applauded by crowds on the sidewalk, applauded again when the waiting dignitaries broke precedent to cheer him and Lady Eden as they entered on a flourish of trumpets. In pubs and farms, the reaction of many a normally loyal Labor voter was: "Thank heaven Eden had the guts to take firm action." Though Labor M.P.s harangued crowds from Newcastle-on-Tyne to Southampton on the theme of "law not war," their impact seemed to be diminishing. A worried Tory campaign manager thought that Eden seemed to have most people with him "but this thing could change any moment." Though the Archbishop of Canterbury had condemned the government, the Archbishop of York found that the "policy of the government, no less than the policy of the opposition, can be supported by Christian convictions." Some 240 of Cambridge's most distinguished scholars wrote a letter to the Times protesting Eden's intervention. More than 350 dons at Oxford filed a similar protest, but a rival group of 30, led by 90-year-old Greek Classicist Gilbert Murray, supported Eden.

Several influential journals--the Manchester Guardian, the Economist, the Observer-- called bluntly for Eden's resignation. Already people were calling it "Eden's war."

Waiting Man. Because of this division in the country, Eden will undergo in the next few weeks a searching re-examination of a sort to which few other men have ever been subjected outside a court of law. But his deeds are more easily judged than the man, who has always remained curiously elusive. A classical product of a classical British education (Eton, Oxford and the Somme), Eden was an aristocrat by birth, the third son of irascible Sir William Eden, an unlovable country eccentric whose baronetcy dates back to the 17th century.

A captain of artillery in World War I, Eden returned to Oxford to take firstclass honors in Persian and Arabic, which he still speaks fluently. Soon, with the aid of an influential father-in-law (Sir Gervase Beckett, director of the Yorkshire Post), he was launched on a career as a young Tory comer. At 38, he was the youngest Foreign Secretary in a century, and the glamour boy of Britain's slick-paper magazines. Mussolini complained that the British government "sent a little boy to deal with me," and Hitler's newspapers called him "The Eden Boy.". But one day in 1938 Eden stood up in the House of Commons to protest Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's overriding the Foreign Office. With that instinctive sense for the undramatic, he declared: "I do not believe ... in appeasement," and resigned. Churchill remembered: "There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal drawling tides of drift and surrender. Now he was gone."

For 17 long years, Eden hovered in Churchill's shadow, just one step below the top. He waited so long and so patiently that it became a kind of joke and gibe. In those years as heir apparent he was a man of devices, not decisions; Churchill made the decisions. When EDC came to an undignified end in the French Assembly, Eden thought of using the 1948 Brussels pact as the basis for Western European Union--"a diplomatic miracle," said John Foster Dulles. In 1954 he negotiated with a young military reformer-dictator named Nasser for the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt, and 74 years of British occupation came to a quiet end.

Wrong Place, Wrong Foot. U.S. diplomats were often exasperated at Eden's infinite patience, his insistence on compromise and limited solutions, his willingness to concede rather than fight (as in Indo-China). But on the whole, they were anxious to see him succeed the aging Churchill, whose erratic flights in his last months in power often gave U.S. policymakers the jitters.

But from the day of his triumphant election in 1955, Eden has been dogged with ill luck. Three days after his election the nation was hit by the first major railroad strike in 29 years. Three months later the economy went into a sag so sudden that Eden was forced to introduce an unpopular emergency budget. Then came the Cyprus problem. Eden's successfully impersonal handling of the Bulganin-Khrushchev visit was spoiled almost before Eden could take a bow by the news that an inept British frogman had disappeared while inhospitably snooping around the visitors' ships in Portsmouth Harbor.

Even friends conceded that Eden, so long a second in command, seemed unable to make decisions until goaded into them, then lashed out erratically to prove he was strong. They cite the unhappy attempt to rush Jordan into the Baghdad Pact that resulted in the ejection of Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb. Under stinging criticism for this blunder, Eden retaliated by abruptly ordering the arrest and exile of Cyprus' Archbishop Makarios. Last week critics offered the same diagnosis of his sudden decision to intervene in Egypt. Wrote Punch: "A weak, vain man, riled at continual attacks on his indecision, when he makes up his mind to show the world that he is firm and to put his obstinate foot down, usually puts it down in the wrong place."

Case by Case. Some who know Eden well argue that this picture of the dithering, indecisive man is less than fair to him. Eden is a great proponent of the clean desk. A diplomatic telegram arrives from an embassy; he deals with it. An attack is made in the House of Commons; he chooses his line of defense without hesitation. At the level of specific answer to specific questions he is far more decisive and less of a procrastinator than Churchill. (When he was waked from a sound sleep to receive Bulganin's note, his first reaction was to begin drafting a reply-not to call experts for an assessment of Russian intentions or to check on Brit ain's defense capabilities.)

In the past, a trained Foreign Office man acted within the huge framework of law, administration, private contracts and trade that was the British Empire. The Tightness of his specific decisions depended merely on relating them to that structure. But now the structure is gone, and a sounder criticism of Eden is that he seems incapable of visualizing a new structure to replace it. British common law is made case by individual case, but it would be chaotic if those cases did not build up into a coherent structure. In foreign affairs, Eden is still a case-by-case man.

For months, the only case he could see in the Middle East was whatever would lead to dumping Nasser. In his difference with Dulles over Suez. Dulles again and again made the point that the West, as the canal's users, must impress the Arab world that its long-range interests lay with the West, and if the Arabs wanted the West's capital and technical aid they must have the West's confidence. Eden could see only one need. All his plans were aimed at bringing about Nasser's downfall, and he refused to look beyond to the shape of the Arab world that might result.

Butler's Praise. Though dissatisfaction with Eden's performance is real, there seems no immediate likelihood that he might be overthrown by a revolt of Tory backers in the House. The Tories have a 59-vote majority; no large body of Tories wants to bring down the government in such a way as to bring the Labor opposition to power. Tories do not do things that way. The Tory way is quiet talk at the Carlton Club, little conferences in House offices, and an agreement that Anthony needs a rest.

If Eden were to be replaced, the leading contender would be the cold and talented Rab Butler, who all through the crisis managed skillfully to convey his aloofness from Eden while at the same time publicly expressing his loyalty. Privately, he let it be known he had not been consulted on many points. Publicly he exclaimed: "I have never known, under any Prime Minister I have served, the qualities of courage, integrity and flair more clearly represented than in our present Prime Minister." Commented the Economist: "Remembering, as one was meant to remember, that Mr. Butler's last Prime Minister was Sir Winston, [this is] an example of how to damn a leader by praise that nobody will believe."

Butler, though he has established a useful position for the future, is still in no position to challenge Eden for the leadership, knows that he would lose if he did. Said one Conservative old hand: "You must understand how strong is the spirit of unity among Conservative leaders. We remember how much damage has been done by splits in our leadership--Fox and Pitt, Peel and Disraeli. The only reasonable way for Butler to express such differences as he may have with Eden is within the party, within the government. That way, he may have some influence and only that way. Why should Butler do anything else? He has time."

History Lesson. At the moment, in fact, Eden's standing is probably higher in his own country than it is in the rest of the world, which by and large has returned a massive verdict of disapproval. Not the least of that disapproval stemmed from the palpably hypocritical versions of history Eden has disingenuously tried to foist on the world.

P: Eden's first announced purpose in invading Egypt was to 1) keep the belligerents apart, 2) protect Suez shipping from the threat of Israeli invasion. In fact.

Britain's twelve-hour ultimatum demand ed that the Egyptians, but not the Israelis, retreat 100 miles from their own frontier.

British forces neither engaged the attacking Israelis nor drove them back; instead, they bombed and assaulted the defending Egyptians.

P: Eden pleaded that faced with Israel's sudden action the British and French had to act too swiftly for "the inevitably cumbrous processes" of the U.N. But the British had known of the Israelis' in tentions earlier, with France doing most of the dirty work in linking the three nations in conspiracy (TIME, Nov. 12).

P: Eden pleaded that Britain wanted to keep the canal open. The day of Israel's invasion a record northbound convoy of 36 ships moved through the canal. By the time British-French troops landed, the canal was blocked and will be for "several" months.

P: Eden argued later that Britain had acted only on behalf of the U.N. But the U.N. protested the British action 64-5. Vice Admiral Pierre Barjot, deputy allied commander, was more blunt in acknowl edging the allies' true motive: "Soldiers, sailors and aviators," he declared in an order of the day, "at the moment when you were about to enter as conquerors of the principal city of the Suez Canal, a cease-fire was ordered. But your efforts and your courage have wiped out the affronts."

P: At week's end, Eden's government was propounding a new line: Britain had intervened to foil a Russian plot to take over the Middle East. Said President of the Board of Trade Peter Thorneycroft: "We intervened to stop the war, and we have perhaps stopped it in the nick of time before the Egyptian air force, organized by Russia, ran amok in the Middle East." Eden's Foreign Office had apparently not had the political word. The Foreign Office told inquiring reporters that stories of massive Russian moves came from Russian propaganda, which was systematically exaggerating what Russia has done or will do for its Arab friends.

Half Success. In time, what might most seriously jeopardize Eden's political standing and stature at home is not the morality of his action, or the morality of his defense of it. It will be the judgment that his policy failed to achieve what it was designed to achieve, and that the cease-fire agreement was the final, inconclusive half-measure of a series of mis calculations. He had taken only half the canal, and Nasser was still in power. The canal was blocked, the Iraq pipeline sabotaged, and Britain faced a winter of cold homes and industrial shutdowns. Not for this should he have risked the good will of Britain's most powerful ally, outraged the Commonwealth, aroused the Arab world to outspoken hostility, incurred the opprobrium of the world, and divided his own country.

His miscalculations began with Nasser. Indications are that Eden never expected and certainly never prepared his nation for all-out war with Egypt. Instead, Eden apparently believed that Nasser was a straw sphinx who would crumble at the first threat of military action against him. Eden may also have underestimated the depth and vigor of the U.S. response, and of the amount of moral indignation toward aggression still left in the world.

Among many of his own countrymen Eden basked in momentary approval as a man who had made a good try. When the consequences are measured, including the damage to Britain's moral reputation and to the Middle East's security, Anthony Eden might in time look something less of a hero to his countrymen.

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