NASSER OF EGYPT The Search fo r Dignity An Egyptian view of pre-Revolutionary Egypt: shackled by poverty, blinded by ignorance, bound by disease. ARLINGTON BOOKS, Inc. Cambridge, 1959 OF EGYPT The Search fo r D ignity WILTON WYNN By Introduction by LOUIS LYONS © 1959 by Wilton Wynn Library of Congress Catalog number: 59-8082 Printed in the United States of America By The Colonial Press Inc., Clinton, Mass. Contents Introduction, by Louis Lyons vii 1. The Fertile Soil of Nasserism 1 2. The Young Revolutionary 21 3. The Last Days of King Farouk 36 4. The Man Behind the Scenes 53 5. The Nagib 68 6. The End of Nagib 96 7. The Czech Arms Deal 110 8. Leadership of the Arab World 133 9. Suez Crisis 155 10. The Suez War 179 11. Egypt Becomes Egyptian 194 12. Nasserism and the Future 203 Introduction This account of the rise of Nasser, which changed the cur­ rents of power in the Middle East, is a reporter’s work. It is great reporting and a byproduct of years of serious journalism in the Arab world. The high competence of the book, the ease and clarity of its recital, the depth of background that comes through, are nothing accidental. Wilton Wynn was a scholar and resident of the area, with his roots established there, before he began to report on it. This, of course, reverses the usual process of the training of a correspondent. He had learned his people and their politics and had become a student of their ways before he ever filed a story to the Associated Press. He had taught Arab university students for six years in Cairo when he was appointed Associated Press correspond­ ent. Now when assignments take him to Yemen or Iraq he finds old students who can be his eyes and ears. One of his old students is now his wife. Here is a correspondent equipped to know what he is writing about. There are never enough such to go around. But here, in his Nasser of Egypt is a demon­ stration of what it means to have this kind of correspondent serving the American public. Wynn’s informed reporting has no relation at all to that of the correspondent who flies in on the heels of a headline and flies out to the next crisis on another continent. It is no cousin to the news that comes from the Ritz bar or the press club lounge. There’s a facile theory in too many news offices that a quick and clever lad who’s hot on following up police tips can re­ port anything, anywhere; that if you leave a good reporter too long in a country he’ll "go native’’ and lose the headline touch. That is the trouble with too much of our information on too many places, any of which, like Nasser’s Egypt, may become crucial to our status as a world power and our under­ standing of the world situation. Theodore White, a great corre­ spondent himself, has observed that a fast pencil and a good vii VIII INTRODUCTION pair of legs are not enough for a foreign correspondent. Strange that this needs to be said. The great tradition of the foreign correspondent was a man long resident in a country who had become an authority on it and could file authoritative dis­ patches. “Chinese" Morrison, long the Far East correspondent of the London Times, had earned his nickname from the au­ thority of his reports. In his day it was said that the German chancellery was more concerned about the information dis­ patched by the Times correspondents than that of the British Foreign Office. Is America, with all its resources and its vaunted press enterprise, as well served today, in its turn of world power? Adlai Stevenson returns from Russia to say we are un­ informed and misinformed about the Soviets. Barbara Ward begs us to learn something of the churning forces in Africa and Asia, to meet the challenge of Communism as the pattern of the newly forming societies. Only half a dozen American news­ papers have their own foreign services. Clifton Daniel of the New York Times, which has the greatest of these, says the editor who has no foreign service of his own has abdicated his right to have ideas about foreign policy, for all he can print is what comes in to him without any direction of his own. Most papers depend wholly on one or the other of our two wire services. Some of their service is as informed as Wilton Wynn, and some of it is as deficient as on Canada, where the Associated Press has nobody, but just rewrites the Canadian press service. Latin America rarely yields us news unless a government blows up or our vice president is stoned. Castro asked from Cuba: “Where was the American press when Batista was murdering and torturing?” and the question has not been answered. News from China comes to us from the Peiping radio or spills over from a British or French news agency. The quality of the information we have on other peoples determines the images of them we have in our heads. A recent book by Harold Isaacs, called Scratches on Our Minds, shows how our public image of China and India has fluctuated with the changes in our relations with their governments, from ix INTRODUCTION black to white, or vice versa. This suggests the forces that influence public opinion and distort the images in our heads. It indicates both the importance and the problem of the for­ eign correspondent: that he keep the realities right side up for us. Christopher Rand, one of the ablest of our foreign corre­ spondents on Asia, has described the problem of the American foreign correspondent. Americans, Rand says, are too self- centered to be detached in reporting on a foreign people. If a reporter really learned to see the foreign scene with detach­ ment and reported things as he saw them, the man in the street would be the first to be disappointed, because he was not being stirred up about something. The correspondent’s editor would want to bring him home to be reindoctrinated. So Rand concludes that reporting is not going to get better until everything else does. Wilton Wynn illustrates that in a passage in this book. In the Suez crisis, the British public was stirred up against Nasser. But he was smart enough to provide no provocation in the treatment of British subjects in Egypt. Wynn writes: I pitied the British correspondents in Cairo at that time. Their editors were demanding copy on the desperate plight of British nationals endangered by infuriated mobs stirred up by their demagogic dictator. And there simply was noth­ ing to report. Cairo was strictly business as usual. One editor wired his correspondent in Cairo: WE CERTAIN THERE BETTER COLOR STORY ON STATUS BRITISH CIVILIANS EGYPT THAN YET BEEN FILED STOP THIS IS MOMENT IN HISTORY WHICH YOU PRIVILEGED TO REPORT AND WE EXPECT YOU UPCOME WITH PHRASEMAKING PACESETTING HEARTRENDING COPY SOONEST. Alas, the correspondent failed to produce. Even the most imaginative newsmen could not paint a picture of danger for the British community in Cairo during the hot days of August, 1956. X INTRODUCTION To provide accurate, reliable and adequate information, the correspondent cannot do the job by himself. He must have the backing of a home office that wants to do an honest factual job of informing its readers. This is the responsibility of our publishers, and a problem for all their readers. For we surely cannot afford to have in our heads any but the most factual, realistic understanding of events that may be crucial to the decisions we must share in the crisis of our times. In the communications of a world power in a world crisis, the foreign correspondent is clearly a key man; and the ade­ quacy of his correspondence is clearly a key to our correct assessment of the vital issues we must face. The training, the background, the perception, the integrity and the total quality of our foreign correspondents determine our information. There is no lack of talent, and the experience it takes. Our country is full of lecturers and authors and consultants and professors who have been great foreign correspondents and have given it up because the publishers refused to take their work seriously enough to supply the space, the resources and the freedom to do the job. The blind localism of much of our press keeps the readers in blinders about the world situation and feeds them only echoes of official statements. The almost total absence of an opposition or a critical press has largely eliminated any urge to go beyond the State Department press conference and see for themselves what is actually going on in the world. This large vacuum in our communications is one of the most serious dangers in the way we live. So an informed and strategic book like Wilton Wynn’s that is both solid background and brilliant narrative, should be a stimulus to our news editors and wire services, to see what it takes and what it can mean to have an adequate correspond­ ent serving in a key spot. Louis M. Lyons Nietnan Foundation Harvard University