Word: nasser
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...dictating letters and memos on every subject of government. He is a tireless reader of the newspapers, and cons the entire Arab world press daily, down to the last movie review. It is one of the world's" misfortunes that, never having lived in a free country, Nasser does not grasp how Western policy is made, and tends to read all sorts of secret motivations and nonexistent attitudes of governments into the comments of the foreign press. He has become excessively sensitive to personal criticism, and maintains a tight censorship over his own press...
...Nasser, says one caustic Englishman, "displays that unmistakable mark of the second-rate, the belief that human affairs can be reduced to simple, single causes." In a safe in his office he keeps a neat file of all his main problems, with the essentials of each summarized as briefly as his staff can get them down. When the dictator has to face a problem, he writes down the considerations in three columns on a piece of paper. In one column he sets down what he wants to do, in the next the obstacles, in the third his possible courses...
Pact Trouble. The U.S. and Nasser got off to a fine start when John Foster Dulles visited Cairo in 1953 and listened to Egypt's dynamic young leader argue earnestly that the country's troubles lay, not in Palestine, but at home−where a misgoverned and exploited population, grown from 10 million to 22 1/2 million in 50 years, needed land, three square meals, and some intimation of human dignity. With every intention of basing its Middle East policy on a revitalized Egypt, the U.S. poured $25.9 million in economic aid into Nasser's development program...
...Nasser declined to sign a military aid agreement with the U.S. "Too much like 'colonization,' " he said. He did not like the anti-Communist Baghdad Pact, either. But it was Israel's 1955 Gaza Strip raid, in which 38 of his soldiers were killed, that Nasser called "the turning point." "Until that moment," said Nasser later, "I felt the possibility of real peace was near." He counterpunched. He had to have more arms, he said...
While the U.S. hesitated, anxious not to start an arms race in the Middle East, the Russians saw the chance they had been looking for. The Nasser who found Chou En-lai's coexistence charter at Bandung "quite convincing" sounded to Communists like their kind of neutralist−a soldier, a conspirator with a smoldering sense of anticolonial vengeance. By offering arms to Nasser, the Communists could strike hard at the Baghdad Pact. They could also win a foothold at last in the Eastern Mediterranean...