Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton

Author:Jim Newton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Presidents & Heads of State, 20th Century, General, United States, Biography & Autobiography, History
ISBN: 9780385534536
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2011-10-04T05:00:00+00:00

12

On the Edge

The trouble began, as it would so often, in the Middle East. Its origins in some ways resembled the Iran crisis that greeted Eisenhower when he first took office. Britain found itself in escalating conflict with a charismatic statesman in a struggle involving Communism, imperialism, and access to resources and shipping. In Iran, oil was the commodity, and Mossadegh was the adversary. This time, the battleground was Egypt, the issue was the Suez Canal, and the threat to Britain’s hegemony was Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Stern, brave, literally and figuratively scarred by his struggle against British imperialism, Lieutenant Colonel Nasser was a galvanizing figure in the Middle East, a uniting leader who sought for decades to ally Arab nations in a struggle against foreign domination. Even Eisenhower was grudgingly impressed by Nasser, describing him as dynamic and personable, a tip of the cap to a fellow military man who puzzled Ike but interested him, too. The son of a postal inspector raised in southern Egypt, Nasser lost his mother as a young boy; she died giving birth to his brother. His father remarried, and Nasser went to live with relatives, eventually joining the rising student movement directed against the presence of British troops on Egyptian soil. Literate, articulate, and dashing—Nasser’s broad face and grin belied his ferocious will—he eventually landed a place in the Egyptian military academy (one of his classmates was Anwar Sadat). Driven to expel the British from his homeland, Nasser conferred with Italian leaders during World War II on a plan to overthrow his government and expel the British forces. The coup plans were dropped, but Nasser’s ambition burned.

By the 1950s, he had orchestrated the fall of King Farouk and helped General Mohammed Naguib assume the mantle of Egyptian authority, though it was Nasser who commanded genuine power in the new government. An attempt on Nasser’s life in 1954 gave him the excuse to sentence Naguib to house arrest—as well as to authorize a brutal repression of rivals and dissenters. From that point on, Nasser ruled Egypt.

His ouster of Naguib, however, left Nasser with bitter enemies inside Egypt, making his hold on power uncertain. To solidify his base, establish his leadership over the Arab world, and modernize his nation, Nasser proposed the construction of the Aswan High Dam in southern Egypt. The mammoth undertaking would, he believed, control flooding of the Nile, boost Egyptian agriculture, and raise his nation’s international stature. Eisenhower supported the plan and offered American assistance, reasoning that the project would aid Egypt, and that American backing would help win friends in the region, tightening the United States’ grasp on oil flowing from the Middle East.

Eisenhower had another objective as well: to foil Soviet influence. The administration insisted that in return for its loans for the dam, Nasser refuse offers of Soviet assistance. That pushy attempt to force Nasser into the Western orbit offended the Egyptian leader, steeped as he was in anti-colonialism and determined as he was to strike a neutralist position akin to that of India’s Nehru.

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