Word: nasser
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...army he learned to hate the corpulent corruption of King Farouk and his senior officers. Wounded in the Palestine fighting, outraged at the army's wretched performance and sleazy equipment, Nasser went back to Cairo to conspire his way to power. Of the Free Officers' movement he says simply: "I am the original." On the night of July 22, 1952, the plotters struck. Victorious, Nasser ruled through General Mohammed Naguib for two years, then through a junta of which he was the Premier...
When he first came to power, Nasser's knowledge of how to run a country was close to zero, and he said so. In 1953, when he was negotiating with the British for the evacuation of their Suez base, he suddenly broke off the talks one day, explaining to the astounded British that they were making things too complicated for him. "The British are too clever," he told a friend. "I think I'll take some time out." The talks were resumed some weeks later. Today Nasser still plays the role of youthful amateur, frank and quickwitted...
...Suspicious." This may have been as inevitable as his success. From the day of the revolution, he set out to be boss, and chafed at the delays in getting decisions inside the old Free Officers' junta. Of the 14 members of Nasser's first junta, four in top jobs survived when Nasser finally dissolved it and became constitutional President this summer. A friend once asked the strongman why he was so reluctant to delegate authority. "Show me ten men I can trust," he replied, "and I will delegate authority." Recently a visiting diplomat, who had been doing...
Closest to Nasser is the man to whom he first confided his conspiratorial ambitions in 1942: Army Chief Abdel Hakim Amer, 36. He still plays chess with Nasser ("A fox," says Amer), and is in on all the big moves. Ali Sabri, 36, whom Nasser sent to London to keep watch on the Suez conference, is his political fixer, and probably sees him most frequently. Sabri is also Nasser's most frequent tennis opponent (Sabri usually wins−;Nasser has gained weight of late). These and other close advisers are smart, dedicated−and obedient...
...Everything." His trip last spring to the Bandung conference, where Nehru and Chou En-lai made much of him, helped convince Nasser that he had become a world figure. His pressagents, exuberantly whooping up the cult of the Cairo hero, seem to have influenced him at least as much as their readers. Two years of almost unbridled authority have also left their mark. "I know everything that goes on in this country," he told a U.S. newsman recently. "I run everything myself...