Nasser of Egypt: The Search for Dignity

223 Pages·1959·4.331 MB·English

by  Wilton Wynn

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