He Changed the Tide of History

By Thomas A. Sancton

Anwar Sadat: 1918-1981

His life was a skein of contradictions.

Long a bitter foe of the Jewish state, he became Israel's only declared friend in a hostile region. A self-styled defender of the Palestinians, he was cursed as a traitor by the leaders of their cause. He preached the unity of Arab nations, but his policies shattered such fragile fraternity as existed, and isolated his country.

A onetime revolutionary firebrand and career military man, he died in a hail of bullets--yet history will remember Anwar Sadat, above all, as a man of peace.

It was the search for peace that led the Egyptian President, in November 1977, to travel to Jerusalem and embrace his former enemies. Not only did he break a 29-year Arab ban on direct dealings with the Israelis, he went straight to the rostrum of the Knesset to proclaim his willingness "to live with you in permanent peace and justice." More dramatically than any event since the birth of Israel in 1948, that courageous gesture transformed the political realities of a region bloodied and embittered by continual hate, war and violence. As it is given to few individuals, with a single, personal stroke he altered the landscape of history.

Until Sadat's pilgrimage, no leader on either side of the Arab-Israeli blood feud had shown the courage, vision and flexibility to seek a radical solution to the festering problem. His hosts were at first surprised, then exalted, by his unexpected overture. As Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin then put it: "We, the Jews, know how to appreciate such courage."

So did the tens of thousands of Egyptians who, upon his return, greeted their smiling President with chants of "Sadat! The man of peace" as his open limousine slowly made its way from the airport to his home in Giza.

The peace process initiated by Sadat ultimately bore fruit at Camp David the next year. Over a period of 13 days, Sadat, Begin and Jimmy Carter remained cloistered in that Maryland mountain retreat while they hammered out their historic "framework for peace." (Their joint efforts brought Sadat and Begin the Nobel Peace Prize for 1978.) The Camp David principles were embodied in a formal treaty that was signed by the three leaders in an emotional White House ceremony on March 26, 1979. For the first time in 31 years, Egypt and Israel were no longer in a state of war.

Sadat could not know it, but that day also marked the pinnacle of his career, the closest he would come in his lifetime to realizing what he called his "sacred mission" for peace in the Middle East.

Said he: "This is certainly one of the happiest moments of my life. In all the steps I took, I was merely expressing the will of the nation. I am proud of my people and of belonging to them."

That sense of belonging was one of the guiding forces of Sadat's life. "I can never lose my way because I know that I have living roots in the soil of my village," he wrote in his 1978 autobiography, In Search of Identity. One of 13 children, Sadat was born on Christmas Day, 1918, in the Nile Delta village of Mit Abu el Kom. His father was a military hospital clerk, his mother an illiterate Sudanese. He spent his early years working in the fields and attending the village kuttab, an Islamic school where he learned to read and write and studied the Koran. It was the beginning of the lifelong religious faith that, in later years, left the familiar Muslim mark on his forehead from touching the floor in frequent prayer.

Sadat grew up with a hatred of Egypt's colonial British rulers and an almost fanatical admiration for Mahatma Gandhi. Confides Sadat's sister Sekeena: "When he was a little boy, he used to dress like Gandhi and pretend to be him." But if Sadat showed something resembling Gandhi's spiritual dimension in his later years, his early attempts to bring political change to Egypt were anything but nonviolent.

Sadat was admitted in 1936 to the Royal Military Academy, where he first learned the value of bold, decisive action along with the uses of power and force. After graduating in 1938, he joined a group of young officers, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, who plotted an armed revolt against the British presence. At that time, Sadat was the hothead talking of blowing up British installations; the cooler Nasser dissuaded him.

During World War II, Captain Sadat collaborated with the Germans in several anti-British plots, which landed him in jail in 1942. Arrested again two years later in connection with the assassination of a pro-British Egyptian aristocrat, Sadat remained in prison until his trial and acquittal in 1948. Shortly after his release, he divorced his first wife and married Jehan Raouf, a beautiful Anglo-Egyptian girl who eventually gave him four children (he had three by his first marriage).

Reinstated in the army in 1950, Sadat joined Nasser in the coup that toppled King Farouk two years later. Sadat held a variety of posts under Nasser, distinguishing himself mainly by a slavish obedience that led colleagues to dub him "Nasser's poodle." Nasser apparently appreciated his docile loyalty and named him Vice President in 1969. A year later, Nasser was dead of a heart attack and the little-known Sadat became President.

Most observers then saw Sadat as a feckless transitional figure. He soon proved them wrong by warding off an attempted coup, jailing its instigators and consolidating his power. At the same time, he boosted his popularity by abandoning the most repressive trappings of Nasser's socialist state, although he would never give the country more than a semblance of democracy under his own effective dictatorship. He also turned away from his predecessor's obsessive pan-Arabism in favor of a more nationalistic concern with Egypt's welfare. In his most significant break with Nasser's policies, Sadat in 1972 abruptly abandoned Egypt's longstanding alliance with Moscow and expelled some 17,000 Soviet military advisers from his country. The way was now clear for Sadat's new course: a strategic rapprochement with Washington that could help Egypt end its wasteful confrontation with Israel.

Paradoxically, the key step in Sadat's peace plan was a new war. With all diplomatic channels to peace apparently blocked, Sadat launched a surprise attack across the Suez Canal into the Israeli-occupied Sinai on Oct. 6, 1973. His goal: to bolster Egyptian morale, prove that Israel was not invincible and force Jerusalem to return the lands seized in the Six-Day War of 1967. Stunned and driven back at first, the Israelis counterattacked strongly and reversed the tide. But it was enough for Sadat to claim a moral victory. With the restoration of Egyptian self-respect, he began a series of peace initiatives.

Enter Henry Kissinger, whom Sadat greeted as his "dear friend Henry," and whose painstaking shuttle diplomacy produced two Sinai disengagement agreements by 1975. But that was as far as Kissinger could take the peace process.

In January 1977, just as the new Carter Administration was taking office, violent food-price riots in Cairo and Alexandria put new pressures on Sadat to channel Egypt's resources into peaceful priorities. From that seeming dead end, Sadat made the historic leap of imagination that sent him to Jerusalem with an olive branch--and ultimately produced the 1979 peace treaty.

The pact brought gradual but dramatic changes in the Middle East equation.

For the first time, the two countries exchanged ambassadors and opened their borders; Israel promised to return the occupied Sinai to Egypt, a process due to be completed by next April; and talks were begun on the thorniest of questions --Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank and Gaza. But autonomy continued to remain the most formidable obstacle to a broader Middle East peace, with the Begin government defining the concept with excessive narrowness and the Palestinians boycotting the process altogether. The treaty enraged other Arab leaders, who accused Sadat of treachery for abandoning the struggle against Israel.

Eighteen Arab nations imposed economic and political sanctions against Cairo.

Meanwhile, Egypt was becoming more and more dependent on U.S. support.

Sadat was also faced with increasing sectarian opposition within Egypt during the last months of his life. In September he cracked down hard, jailing 1,600 opponents, mostly Islamic militants, in the wake of bloody rioting between Muslims and Coptic Christians. The mosques were "nationalized," police details were bolstered on university campuses and an investigation of the state bureaucracy began. Following these moves, Sadat declared in a tough speech that "lack of discipline in any way or form" had ended in his country. This time, however, the visionary statesman and consummate strategist had fatally misjudged the situation: his killers emerged from a cauldron of seething unrest and fanaticism.

"In Egypt," Sadat once wrote, "personalities are more important than programs." Nothing illustrated that point better than his own career. If his programs changed markedly over the years, he always pursued them with the relentless force of his own personality. Those who met him were usually dazzled by the charm, grace and warmth of his manner. Recalls former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin: "He immediately created a relationship of sincerity, friendship, frankness and warmth, and in this way he was like a member of the family."

Yet the ready embrace and winning smile could also mask his inner thoughts. Says William Quandt, a former Middle East expert on the National Security Council: "Sadat was a hard man to read. He didn't always communicate what was on his mind so he would catch you by surprise." He could be intentionally devious on occasion. At the first Camp David session, Sadat read a list of hard-line demands that almost broke up the talks on the spot. His strategy, Quandt later concluded, "was to manufacture a crisis that would force the U.S. to step in and start offering proposals." The gambit worked: while Sadat retired to virtual seclusion in his cabin, Carter began suggesting compromise positions to both sides.

In spite of his seeming amiability, Sadat was not a gregarious man and had few intimate friends. One of them, wealthy Egyptian Contractor Osman Ahmed Osman, recalls that Sadat would remain with him "for two or three hours without saying a word, just chewing his pipe and thinking." A favorite Sadat pastime was a contemplative afternoon walk along the Nile near one of his ten residences.

Sadat enjoyed the comforts and perquisites of his rank, but hardly to excess. Apart from a weakness for fine English suits and imported Dunhill pipe tobacco, his tastes and habits were simple. He usually ate only one light meal each day. A devout Muslim, he never drank wine or liquor. He liked to spend quiet evenings at home watching private movie screenings, usually of American westerns.

No workaholic, Sadat slept eight hours a night, rarely awoke before 9 a.m. and insisted on a three-hour nap each afternoon. He avoided paperwork, preferring to deal with the broad picture and leave the details to his subordinates. He was so averse to reading official documents that when Cyrus Vance brought him Jimmy Carter's invitation to Camp David, Sadat asked Vance to read it to him aloud.

But what some might call a lazy man's schedule gave Sadat a chance to think, and that made an enormous difference to the world. It took a lot of patient walking and pipe chewing to reach his crucial decisions. His longtime counselor Sayed Marei, who was wounded in last week's shooting, once observed that, "he takes a long time to make up his mind, but once he makes it up, it never changes."

That quality of decisiveness, followed up by action, is what distinguished Sadat from his peers. "A leader of the Arab world usually waits for something to happen, then he counterpunches," says L. Carl Brown, director of Near East studies at Princeton University. "What was fascinating about Sadat was that he took initiatives. That's not the usual Arab style. Sadat was in a class by himself." Says Harvard University Professor Nadav Safran, a Cairo-born Jew: "Sadat broke away in order to lead. He broke away in order to explore the road ahead, at great risk to himself. He proved that his instinct and vision were correct, that if he moved ahead far enough and reached at least one oasis, he could point the way of the caravan out of the wilderness."

Anwar Sadat believed so completely in his mission that he was prepared to perish rather than change direction. And from that faith came the courage to face the dangers before him with his oft-repeated dictum: "This is my fate. I have accepted my fate." --By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Dean Brelis/New York and Wilton Wynn/Cairo

With reporting by Dean Brelis/New York, Wilton Wynn/Cairo

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