Word: nasser
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While he expands his personal power, Nasser is coming closer to the day next January when he has promised to transform his military rule into representative government and give Egyptians a parliament. Not even Gamal Nasser himself seems certain that he will keep that promise. "Throughout my life," he confesses, "I have had faith in militarism." The army is the only sector of power he so far has found it possible to trust, and even there he fears that unless he can provide more equipment, morale will fall and officers will weaken to subversion from the Communist left...
...earnestness were enough-which it is not-Nasser and Egypt would be making fast progress toward that goal. The Premier himself lives with remarkable austerity in a five-room, sand-colored house inside the army compound in Cairo's Abbasiya military district. He allows himself almost none of the personal privileges now within his means. "I did not go there before," he once explained to an associate who wondered why the Premier refused to go inside the fashionable Semiramis Hotel. In the first days of power he liked to wear a military bush tunic, open at the neck, with...
...Egyptians and fewer foreigners have met the Premier's wife who, in the Egyptian tradition, takes no part in public affairs, but devotes herself to their family: three boys and two girls. Nasser, while he smokes, has never been known to drink anything stronger than Coke. His favorite beverage is a cup of tea, a habit learned from British officers...
Impatiently, he insists that his own moral standards apply to his government, and he reacts with feeling to suggestions that this is a hopeless wish. "All right," says Nasser impatiently, "they are corrupt; they are dishonest; they are venal. But they will be incorrupt and they will be honest...
Another quality of Nasser's character, somewhat disguised by the disarming candor with which he speaks of himself, is his resourcefulness. His friend, Major General Abdel Hakim Amer, put it this way: "He is very good at chess. If he tries to win, he does. He is a fox. It's never easy to know his intentions." Says ex-U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, who was in Cairo when the Nasser forces took over: "He's been a plotter all his life; he's a master...