Eden's Version

In the first installments of his published memoirs, Britain's Sir Anthony Eden portrayed the late John Foster Dulles as an international plunger who was only prevented from rushing the world into war over Indo-China by Eden's superior wisdom and diplomatic skill (TIME, Jan. 25). Last week, as Eden carried his story (in the London Times and McCall's Magazine) up to the 1956 Suez crisis, the roles were reversed. Now it was Dulles the hesitant, Dulles the appeaser, bent on preventing Sir Anthony from boldly slaying a totalitarian dragon.

The Undercutting. In the rise of Egypt's Nasser, who "followed Hitler's pattern even to concentration camps," Eden thought he saw a Middle Eastern version of the fascist dictators (though Nasser "impressed me as a fine man physically").

Though he admits that he did not give either the U.S. or the Commonwealth countries explicit advance notice of the French-British armed attack on Egypt, Eden insists that the U.S. should have known that it was coming. "I did not wish to conceal anything from Mr. Dulles, and I told him that the U.S. Naval Attache had been asking for information about our military preparations. I said that we were quite ready to give this, but that I wanted first to make sure that the U.S. Government really wished to have it. Mr. Dulles replied that ... it was preferable that the U.S. Government should not seek detailed information." And by implication he charges that Dulles drove Britain to use force by deliberate and "cynical" undercutting of British efforts to undo Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal by diplomatic and economic pressure.

Dulles, Eden argues, "strung [Britain] along over many months of negotiation from pretext to pretext, from device to device and from contrivance to contrivance." First he proposed a new international convention governing use of the canal, then dropped that idea in favor of a Users' Association, which would collect the canal tolls that Nasser yearned for, finally wound up by publicly declaring that the Users' Association scheme had "no teeth in it." "My great difficulty in working with Mr. Dulles," writes Eden, "was to determine what he really meant and in consequence the significance to be attached to his words and actions."

The Missing Story. Determined not to reopen old wounds, State Department officials last week would only comment that Eden's account so far seemed a sincere attempt to set forth his version of events as they happened. In fact, Eden's sincerity was only partial: he had not given his readers what many of them were hoping for--the inside story of how much collusion there was between Britain, France and Israel on the Suez landings. But he did offer some lively footnotes to history. Items:

P: On the 1955 election of Hugh Gaitskell as leader of Britain's Labor Party: "I had no doubt that this was a national misfortune."

P: On Bulganin's private 1955 explanation to Eden at Geneva, as to why Khrushchev & Co. could not then agree to German reunification: The new Khrushchev regime was "reasonably solidly based in the country," but if they had gone home proclaiming the reunification of Germany, "neither the army nor the people would understand, and this was no time to weaken the government. The people would say that this was something Stalin would have never agreed to."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.