Anthony Eden: a biography.

Anthony Eden: A Biography

by Robert Rhodes James (McGraw-Hill, 665 pp., $22.95)

EDUCATED AT ETON and Oxford (where he took a first in Oriental languages), Anthony Eden was at twenty the youngest brigade major in the British army in the First World War, at 26 a member of Parliament, and a bit more than a decade later the youngest British foreign secretary since the eighteenth century. In addition, he was a handsome man and a natty dresser, who had a well-cultivated taste for paintings and Shakespeare.

But Eden also suffered his share of adversity. He fought valiantly in the trenches in a war that claimed two of his brothers; his finances until late in his life were always unsteady; he lost a son in the Second World War; his first marriage ended in divorce; because of a botched medical operation, he was plagued for the second half of his life with poor health. But through it all he held up remarkably well.

The Great War, for all its bloody horror, did not make Eden a pacifist. Only six years out of the trenches, he made his maiden speech in support of a Conservative motion arguing for a strong air defense. As foreign secretary, he would become Chamberlain's bete noire, and eventually Churchill's understudy. Yet even under Churchill, Eden was for taking a tougher line against Stalin than either the prime minister or the Americans. The Americans, Eden wrote before Potsdam, "would gladly give Russia all Europe --except perhaps us--so that America might not be embroiled. All the errors & illusions of Neville C., substituting Russia for Germany.'

Still, it is not so much Eden's stand against Hitler and Stalin that is remembered today, as his stand against Nasser at Suez--a stand that led to Eden's downfall, and to which Robert Rhodes James devotes roughly a quarter of this biography.

When the news arrived that Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal, Eden, by then prime minister, was hosting an official dinner in honor of King Feisal II of Iraq. The reaction of the Iraqi prime minister was also Eden's--the British "should hit Nasser hard and quickly.' Eden knew that Nasser's menace went far beyond his fierce anti-British rhetoric. Nasser was threatening pro-Western Arab governments with insurrection and was moving increasingly into the Soviet orbit.

If the British were angry, the French were incensed. As James puts it:

Thousands of Frenchmen had shares in the Canal Company . . . and Nasser's involvement in the Algerian war had made him even more hated in France than in Britain. Prime Minister Guy Mollet and Foreign Minister Christian Pineau shared these emotions entirely; Nasser must be brought down, and force would be needed. They [were] . . . supported by every shade of political opinion in France, from de Gaule in retirement to the Communist Party.

The British and the French geared up to strike at Nasser and occupy the Canal. On the American side, Admiral Burke, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, was for supporting the British and the French. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's position was ambiguous. He detested Nasser but also realized that Eisenhower was vehemently opposed to an Anglo-French invasion of Egypt because it "might well array the world from Dakar to the Philippine Islands against us.' It is heartbreaking to relate that, early in the crisis, when Dulles went to meet Eden at Downing Street, the people cheered him, thinking that the old wartime relationship still survived. They were in for a rude shock.

While the British planners plotted their invasion in painful slow motion, Nasser began to spout off about the Canal being "the Arabs' Canal' and threatened that its nationalization was only the first step in the creation of an enormous Arab empire that would in time ensure the destruction of Israel. The French, furious at British delays, went in search of a more enthusiastic ally. They found one: Israel.

Foreign Minister Pineau pointed out that under the terms of the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian treaty, the British were permitted to return to the Canal in an emergency. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was skeptical, but General Moshe Dayan welcomed the opportunity to strike at one of Israel's enemies with European support, and the deal was cut: Israel would attack. But in adopting this pretext, the British and French lost their opportunity to topple Nasser and occupy the Canal out of clear national interest and were put in a somewhat shady position. As James notes: ". . . it is clearly one thing to use the threat of force "as a last resort' to buttress diplomatic and political pressure and quite another actually to use it as part of what was plainly a conspiracy. It may well have been a justified conspiracy, but there was no doubting what it was.'

The Israelis struck, advancing rapidly toward the Canal. The British and the French also went into action. The British submitted their ultimatum that the Egyptians withdraw ten miles west of the Canal and the Israelis ten miles east within 12 hours. The time limit passed, and the Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground by French and British air power. When the British and French troops arrived in the Canal Zone, they did so as putative peacekeepers. The Americans argued that peacekeeping was a job for the United Nations.

Suez should have been part of a great victory for the West. This was autumn 1956: ". . . Budapest was in chaos, Poland was ominous, and now it seemed that [the Soviets'] great hope of a major client state in the Middle East was being destroyed, and Nasser with it.' But Eisenhower threw it all away. Not only would the United States not defend the Hungarians it had encouraged to rebel, but Eisenhower bullied the British into withdrawing from the Canal unconditionally. The United States even voted in favor of a motion in the UN General Assembly to censure Great Britain and France and demand an immediate withdrawal of their forces, and abstained from a vote on a Belgian proposal that would have deleted the motion of censure and asked for a gradual withdrawal of forces. The French felt betrayed by the British and by the Americans; the British felt they had no choice but to succumb to America's will; and Nasser and the Soviets emerged unexpectedly triumphant. The lesson of Suez is that we should all be Gaullists now.

Although Eden never doubted that he had acted properly at Suez--the Six Day War, among other events, vindicated him, he felt--it was the end of his political career. His health had broken, and by the end of the crisis he had had to retreat to Ian Fleming's home, Goldeneye, in Jamaica. On his return to London, he was not even permitted to make his own public statement at Heathrow airport. His colleagues had prepared a bland, anodyne speech for him, which he reluctantly accepted, though he had intended to deliver a much more robust defense of his actions.

Eden was an honorable man, who was dogged by lamentable bad luck. We might well wish that we had more European leaders like him today. That we don't is partly our own fault. Robert Rhodes James's biography tells his story admiringly and well.