2300 (Oct. 30) Washington DC // 0400 London // 0500 Paris // 0600 Cairo
At around three thirty that morning Cairo and Tel Aviv time, the Egyptian destroyer Ibrahim el-Awal (formerly, before Britain sold it to Egypt, HMS Cottesmore) began to shell the Israeli port of Haifa. It was fired on by a French ship and captured by the Israelis. “As the ship approached the harbor, most of her crew could be seen crowded at the rails smoking and staring glumly at Mount Carmel,” reported the London Times correspondent in Tel Aviv.1 The twelve hours of the Anglo-French ultimatum were not yet up—but the French had already engaged and put themselves visibly on Israel’s side.
At six o’clock that morning, Cairo time, the ultimatum expired. It was four a.m. in London, and eleven p.m. on October 30 in Washington, DC. In Malta, British marine commandos were embarking. In Cyprus, British and French air transports were landing. A fleet of British and French battleships, including five aircraft carriers, was in the eastern Mediterranean. The order to attack was given at four thirty a.m. London time. “Thank God we’re off!” the chief of the imperial general staff, General Sir Gerald Templer, told MI6 chief Dick White. “If anybody pulls us back now, I’ll have his balls.”2
In London, Chester Cooper received Washington’s announcement that the American Sixth Fleet, also based in the Mediterranean, would be reinforced by what was called a “hunter-killer group”: an aircraft carrier, two submarines, eight destroyers, and a tanker. “There was a rumor that the Sixth Fleet had orders to intercept British and French warships sailing toward Egypt,” Cooper remembered. “At the Pentagon in Washington maps of the Middle East were in such demand that they had to be rationed.”3
The Israelis at Mitla Pass struggled on without British air cover. Four Egyptian jets flew overhead. “We watched them for a horrified instant as they arranged themselves in attack formation and roared in toward us,” remembered Ariel Sharon. “By that time the drivers were gunning their vehicles away from the convoy line and everyone else was digging in the sand like madmen, myself along with the rest.”4 Two Israeli Meteor planes swooped in to fight off the Egyptians.
Sharon was given permission to send a reconnaissance mission into the pass. “You can go as deep as possible,” he was told by his commanding officer, “just don’t get involved in a battle.”5 Though the Israelis were not expecting resistance inside the pass, they were shot at as soon as they went in—losing two half-tracks and a driver. They then proceeded to get involved in a battle. According to Sharon, who was always ready with an excuse when he stepped over the mark, this happened because he had told his men not to leave any dead or wounded in the field. Sharon remembered that one officer moved in. “And as he did he was drawn into battle with an entire Egyptian infantry battalion that had dug themselves into the ledges and caves of the cliff walls and had not been noticed by our planes.”6
More planes arrived overhead, this time British-made Vampires. These were Egyptian planes, though Sharon pointed out that they had markings similar to the British: green, white, and red concentric circles as opposed to blue, white, and red. “I was so distrustful of British motives that even while we were shooting at these planes I was not convinced they were Egyptian,” he wrote.7
“I would welcome direction at what stage or in what degree it is visualised we fight as the Allies of the Israelis,” the commander of Operation Musketeer, General Keightley, telegrammed to the chiefs of staff that day. “The French are doing a lot covertly and are proposing to increase their effort.”8 But while the French were not especially concerned about being seen as allies of Israel, the whole British plan had rested on this fact remaining secret.
In Cairo, Nasser summoned the American ambassador, Raymond Hare, and asked him to pass on to Eisenhower a request for American support against Anglo-French aggression. If they attacked him militarily, he said, he would want military support. “He said his government had carefully considered the alternatives of turning to the USSR or the US and had decided on an appeal to the US,” reported the State Department summary. Hare told Nasser that American military intervention was unlikely: Britain and France were still American allies. Nasser indicated that he understood this.
“In asking for our assistance, are you asking it in the hopes that there may be a favorable reaction, reciprocation,” said Hare, “or are you doing it in anticipation that there will be an unfavorable answer and that you will be then at liberty to turn to the Soviet Union for assistance?”
“Nasser was at first somewhat taken aback at the directness of this approach,” recorded the State Department notes.
“Please understand,” said Hare. “This is really a very serious question, and it would be very helpful to me.”
Nasser relaxed. “No,” he said. “This is a serious thing, I mean it.”
According to the notes, Nasser confirmed that the decision to ask for American intervention was “reached after careful consideration and with no discussion of turning to the USSR.” He further added that he would neither surrender nor run away.
Nasser did not receive the military response he hoped for. The United States confirmed that it would pursue the issue through the United Nations. “Nasser thanked me very politely, but with a considerable lack of enthusiasm,” remembered Hare.9
0900 London // 1000 Bonn; Budapest // 1100 Cairo // 1200 Moscow // 1330 New Delhi
That morning, American diplomatic staff drove around Budapest to survey the situation. “In dramatic overnight change, it became virtually certain in Budapest this morning that this Hungarian revolution [is] now [a] fact of history,” the legation officer wrote delightedly. Soviet troops had gone. Two bridges across the river were clear. Rebels walked the streets freely. The Hungarian army appeared to be distributing food and running essential services. “Legation was doubtful that what has happened could be achieved without strong Western support,” the officer went on. Yet it “appears logical premise that Soviets, having unilaterally decided to abandon military position in city without guarantee of ultimate nature of government that springs up behind must be seriously considering departure from Hungary within relatively short period.”10 The London Times reported that the withdrawal of Soviet troops appeared to have been completed without incident. “It was announced to-day that the big red star that has dominated the roof of the Parliament building will take some time to remove,” it warned. “Meanwhile it is to be draped with the Hungarian national colours—red, white, and green.”11 (The similarity to Egyptian colors was coincidental.)
This seemed too good to be true, and it was. “I could not sleep,” said Nikita Khrushchev of the previous night. “Budapest was like a nail in my head.”12 Having issued the declaration in favor of a political solution in Hungary and more liberal and equal relations with the Soviet bloc—a declaration that appeared in millions of copies of Pravda that morning—he had been faced with two alarming pieces of news. First, Imre Nagy had brought up with Mikoyan and Suslov the question of Hungary leaving the Warsaw Pact. While Nagy had in the past frequently raised the possibility of Hungary following Yugoslavia to neutrality, the prospect of this happening at such a sensitive moment horrified the Soviet leaders in Moscow.13 Second, Khrushchev heard the news that Hungarian rebels had the day before lynched a dozen or more AVH officers who were loyal to Soviet rule. The lynching stoked in Khrushchev’s mind fears of what the Soviet leaders called another “White Terror,” after the violence carried out against Russian rebels by the White Army of imperial Russia during the civil war of 1917–23. Suddenly, the Hungarian revolutionaries looked to him exactly like the “shock troops” of “fascists and imperialists” whom hard-liners like Ivan Serov had been warning about.
The massacre of the AVH men had made for a grotesque spectacle, and its images changed the minds both of Khrushchev and of Mao Tse-tung. The previous day, both of them had been inclined to let the Hungarians deal with the rebellion themselves. When Mao’s agents reported to him that the atmosphere was turning anti-Communist, though, Mao sent word to Moscow that the Soviets must act.14 After his sleepless night, Khrushchev was inclined to agree.
There was another significant factor in Khrushchev’s thinking: Suez. Khrushchev’s response to the invasion of Egypt—which had so far been minimal, apart from offering some moral support—had been seen as too soft by some in the presidium. Inside the bubble of Soviet leadership, where comrades could move in or out of favor as abruptly and dramatically as schoolgirls in a clique, Khrushchev was by the morning of October 31 being perceived as weak. “As a result of the outbreak of armed conflict in Hungary the situation over Suez has suddenly worsened,” wrote Yugoslav ambassador Veljko Mićunović. “Britain and France appear to think that the Russians are now busy with their very pressing worries in Hungary, are interested only in preserving the ‘socialist camp,’ and that they can’t be bothered now to help Nasser over Suez.”15
When the presidium met that day, Khrushchev took immediate action to forestall any mutiny. He asked his comrades straight off to reverse their decision to withdraw troops from Hungary.
“We should take the initiative by re-establishing order in Hungary,” he told them. “If we leave Hungary, this will give a boost to the Americans, the English and the French—the imperialists. They will take this for weakness on our part, and they will launch a major offensive. In that way we would be laying bare the weakness of our positions. If we do that, our party won’t accept it. The imperialists will then add Hungary to Egypt. We have no alternative.”16
It is possible that Khrushchev would eventually have crushed the Hungarian rebellion anyway, but the situation in Suez pushed him. His mistaken belief that the United States was engaged in a major Western colonialist war in Egypt along with Britain and France informed his decision to act firmly and immediately. One member of the presidium, Maksim Saburov, raised the concern in the meeting that reversing the previous day’s position might “vindicate NATO” and make the Soviets look bad.17 But the emergency in Budapest, exacerbated by the attack on Egypt, won out. No matter what, Hungary had to be retaken. János Kádár and Ferenc Münnich, two reliable Hungarians, were considered for the leadership; Khrushchev thought Imre Nagy could be permitted to stay on as deputy if he cooperated. The committee asked Marshal Zhukov to plan a campaign to retake Hungary by force. It was code-named Operation Whirlwind.18
The United States was not collaborating with Britain and France as Khrushchev believed. By that morning, “diplomatic relations were virtually broken between Washington and London,” wrote Chester Cooper. Officers at the embassy were told to stay away from Whitehall. Cooper, as a CIA link, was to stay and maintain contact with British intelligence: “Moreover, I would be the channel to Her Majesty’s Government for whatever other business could not wait until the skies cleared.”19 From the embassy in London, American diplomats reported that “a number of [British] Foreign Office officials personally deplore the British action on Suez because the eyes of the world are being distracted from the brutality of Soviet imperialism.”20
Foster Dulles spoke to Vice President Richard Nixon that day, and told him that the fact that Suez and Hungary were happening at the same time created a pivotal historical moment. Two things were important. The first: “It is the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Empire—the second is, the idea is out that we can be dragged along at the heels of Britain and France in policies that are obsolete. This is a declaration of independence for the first time that they cannot count on us.”21
As the rift running down the Atlantic deepened, another opened up between Britain and the Commonwealth. The Indian government issued a statement calling both the Israeli attack on Egypt and the Franco-British ultimatum “a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter,” and warned that it could lead to a much larger war.22 The former Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett was in Delhi that day, meeting Nehru on the way to a conference of Asian socialists in Bombay. Sharett stated that he was “absolutely certain” that what he called the “drastic retaliatory action” taken by Israel was an Israeli initiative alone, without British or French collusion. He blamed Egypt for Israel’s invasion of its territory, claiming that the Arab states’ prolongation of the Arab-Israeli conflict was “a standing invitation to outside intervention.”23
In France, too, there was talk that this must have been collusion. “For weeks now, M. Mollet and M. Pineau have been defending themselves against criticisms of their failure to live up to their first promises to bring Colonel Nasser to heel, with assurances that the game is not played out,” reported the London Times correspondent in Paris. “This has led to a crop of rumours about a secret diplomatic weapon.” The minister of defense, Bourgès-Maunoury, had been telling anyone who would listen that Israel would be a “splendidly effective” weapon to use. The correspondent also noted that Mollet’s speech in parliament that day had been given in praise of Israel and condemnation of Nasser—with little mention of the necessity to ensure freedom of navigation in the canal or the need to restore peace between Egypt and Israel. “These different factors, added together, have led many people, well outside the ranks of the Communists and their sympathizers, to suppose that the Israelis’ aggression against Egypt was neither unwarranted nor discouraged by the French Government,” wrote the correspondent.24
That morning, Anthony Nutting went into the Foreign Office to send his letter of resignation to Eden. Eden asked him to come to the House of Commons after lunch to talk.
Nutting went, and told Eden, “What we were doing now seemed to me to be contrary to everything which he had always stood for—and hence taught me—during his political life.”
Eden replied that he thought Nutting would be more worried about Israel’s threat to Jordan than its attack on Egypt: “But when I pointed out that the threat to Jordan had been invented by us to cover our tracks, he did not pursue the argument.” Nutting looked Eden in the eye. Eden looked away: “Already, I felt, he knew that he was beaten, having tried and failed to act out of character.” Eden asked Nutting to keep his resignation secret for the time being. They agreed that the press would continue to be told the story that he was bedridden with asthma.
The two men shook hands. “Tout casse sauf l’amitie,” said Eden—everything breaks except friendship. “I hope, in spite of all this, that we shall see something of each other in the future.”
“I have never seen him since that day,” Nutting wrote, eleven years later.25
Even some of those in the Conservative Party who did believe Britain was morally justified in attacking Egypt were considering their positions. The junior Foreign Office minister Douglas Dodds-Parker—a right-winger who loathed Nasser—remembered that he thought about resigning that day, “not because the action was ‘dishonourable,’ whatever that meant in all the circumstances, but because it just could not work.”26
Despairing at Britain’s behavior in the United Nations overnight, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell considered a dedicated campaign of opposition to Eden’s war. The parliamentary Labour Party met to discuss it. “Eden has broken every pillar of British foreign policy—the Charter, the Commonwealth, the Atlantic Alliance,” said Denis Healey. He stated that the Israeli invasion of Egypt was “a put-up job” and a “tragic blunder by Israel for Eden will use her and then destroy her.” Another member, Fred Lee, suggested that British trades unions should take industrial action against the government.27
Since Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal Company in July, Eden had always assumed that the opposition and the nation would unite behind him if he invaded Egypt. He had ignored countless signals to the contrary. Now the opposition was uniting against him—and it was by no means certain that he would be supported by everyone in his own party.
0730 Washington DC // 1230 London // 1430 Tel Aviv; Gaza City
In Washington, Eisenhower was up early for a breakfast meeting with his advisers. The air in the meeting, according to Emmet Hughes, “seems thick and heavy with the righteous wrath against Britain that is beginning to suffocate the White House. And the righteousness even seems petty—as if the real crime of London has been to contrive so thoughtlessly to complicate [the] President’s re-election or at least whittle down his majority.” Hughes remembered one adviser suggesting that an American plane fly over the Middle East with an atomic bomb, and threaten to drop it “if they all don’t cut this nonsense out.” The response from the rest of the meeting was a stony silence.
“I just don’t know what got into those people,” Eisenhower said, meaning the British and French. “It’s the damnedest business I ever saw supposedly intelligent governments getting themselves into.”28
Foster Dulles was now considering imposing “economic limitations” on Israel. He asked the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, to clarify Israel’s intentions regarding withdrawal from Egyptian territory. Eban spoke to Ben-Gurion, and then reported back: “It is not the Prime Minister’s intention to seize or hold Egyptian territory.” Furthermore, he said, Ben-Gurion was ready to withdraw “if he receives certain reciprocal undertakings from Colonel Nasser from any source and commitments to refrain from hostile acts.”29 This was a bluff. The Israelis’ operation specifically aimed to seize half the Sinai and open the Straits of Tiran. Moreover, from early afternoon on October 31, Israel’s national radio station began broadcasting announcements in Arabic telling inhabitants of the Gaza Strip to keep their radios tuned for further instructions. The IDF was about to embark on a part of its operation aimed at ensuring Israel’s longer-term security—but at the cost of the Palestinians as well as the Egyptians. It aimed to sever the tiny, refugee-packed enclave of the Gaza Strip from its protector, Egypt.30
1400 London // 1500 Budapest
In Budapest that afternoon, Imre Nagy stood to address a joyous mass demonstration in front of parliament. “My friends, the revolution has been victorious,” he told them. “We have chased out the Rákosi-Gerő gang. We will tolerate no interference in our internal affairs.”31 Political prisoners started to be released in their hundreds, and soon thousands.
János Kádár, one of Nagy’s fellow liberalizers, saw the Soviet observers Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov to their armored vehicle. They were going back to Moscow. The goodbyes were not unfriendly. Afterward, Kádár went to Imre Nagy’s office.
“Imre, have we done it?” he asked.
“We’ve done it, János,” replied the prime minister, warmly.32
In London, Eden again addressed an angry House of Commons, posing as the guardian of Israeli security. “The Security Council resolution simply called upon the Israeli Government to withdraw within their frontiers,” he said. “That seems to us in all the circumstances that have preceded these events to be a harsh demand, if it is to stand alone.”33 He told them that Israel had accepted the ultimatum, but Egypt had rejected it. “What did you expect?” cried members from benches. The fighting, he alleged, was now nearing the canal.
“In the light of all these facts [sic], can anyone say that we and the French Government should have waited for a satisfactory resolution by the Security Council authorising definite action to stop the fighting?” he asked.
“Yes,” roared the members in reply.
Hugh Gaitskell stood to describe the looming Suez invasion as “an act of disastrous folly whose tragic consequences we shall regret for years.” He also raised the question of “an even worse story which is going around. . . . It is the story that the whole business was a matter of collusion between the British and French Governments and the Government of Israel.”34
The speed with which Gaitskell had found out about the collusion demonstrates how foolhardy it was that Eden had believed he could keep something like this secret at all, let alone in perpetuity. A French senator had spent an indiscreet evening in a Paris nightclub showing off his inside knowledge in front of a Lebanese businessman. The Lebanese businessman had gone to William Yates, a young Conservative MP who was unusual in having sympathy for Nasser, and told him the whole story: Ben-Gurion had been to Paris, a plan had been agreed with the British and French governments to invade Egypt, and it was all about grabbing the Suez Canal. Yates took the Lebanese businessman to the Conservative chief whip, Edward Heath, but was rebuffed. So he took him to Gaitskell instead.35 A week after the supposedly top-secret agreement was made, all the significant information had leaked out. It could just as easily reach Britain’s enemies. Even more worryingly, bearing in mind Britain was deceiving most of them, it could just as easily reach Britain’s allies.
The story spread on both sides of the House of Commons. The Conservative MP Nigel Nicolson had heard the evening before from Eden’s press secretary “that it is all a deep-laid plot. The ultimatum was worked out beforehand. The Jews would accept, the Egyptians refuse, and then we would have the excuse to attack Egypt, depose Nasser, and sail away, leaving friendly governments in Cairo and Tel Aviv.” He told this to his influential colleague Bob Boothby, who was shocked. “Eden would never try such a trick,” Boothby said. “He’d be found out, and then he’d either have to resign, or lie.”
“He chose to lie,” said Nicolson. “We anti-Suez Conservatives could say nothing publicly about our suspicion, because in view of Eden’s denial, it would simply not be believed, and we feared demoralising our servicemen as they were about to go into action.”36 The conspiracy limped on, making more and more people complicit in its deception.
1115 Washington DC // 1615 London // 1815 Tel Aviv; Jerusalem; Cairo
That afternoon, Ben-Gurion sent a desperate cable to Paris. “I am cast down and confused by the fact that at this hour we are still without news of an Anglo-French operation against the Egyptian airfields,” he wrote. “We have parachuted battalions close to the Canal with the sole aim of serving your purposes, for this was not designed to serve ours.”37 Shortly afterward, British warplanes finally left the tarmac.
An American U-2 spy plane took off from the United States’ base at Adana in Turkey. Its routine reconnaissance mission was to fly over specific points of interest and take photographs. This one flew over the eastern Mediterranean and down to Egypt. It was usual to fly over the targets twice. On its itinerary was Cairo’s airport. The pilot flew over it, taking pictures. Ten minutes later, he flew over it again, taking more pictures. The plane returned to Adana.38
At six fifteen p.m., Nasser was at home in Cairo, meeting the ambassador from Indonesia. A series of dramatic explosions outside signaled the arrival of British warplanes. Nasser rushed up to the roof to watch. “Their target was supposed to be Al-Maza, the military aerodrome,” noted Heikal, “but in fact the bombs fell on the nearby international airport.”39 The original British plan had been to bomb Cairo West, the airfield where many of Nasser’s Soviet Ilyushin bombers were kept. At the last minute, though, when planes were already in the air, word had been received in London that 1,300 American civilians were being evacuated along the road that ran alongside Cairo West. The prospect of accidentally killing hundreds of innocent Americans loomed. Eden hastily ordered that the planes change their target. Now, they were to aim for Al-Maza. Given only ten minutes to change their plans, though, the poorly briefed pilots mistook the nearby civilian airport for the military airfield.40
“We saw the lights of Cairo in the distance,” one air gunner told a journalist from the Daily Mirror when he returned to base. “The airfield we attacked was beautifully lit up. There were many planes on it. We came in high, dropped our bombs and watched them explode.”41 According to the New York Times, Cairo was completely blacked out with all traffic stopped: “Flares from the attacking planes, however, lit up the big white and sand-colored buildings of this metropolis brighter than if there had been a full moon.”42
“I still couldn’t believe it,” Nasser said later. “I quickly ran to the roof of my house. I had to see for myself. But it was true. British planes bombing Cairo’s International Airport.” The misdirected bombing raid was a useful warning: Egyptian Ilyushins were moved to Luxor and to Syrian and Saudi airfields, saving them from subsequent raids.43 Nasser and his aides had doubted that the Anglo-French ultimatum was serious. Now they could see that it was.
“I felt that suddenly we were overcome by confusion and many of us were paralysed,” remembered the Free Officer Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi. Fully aware that they had no real chance of winning a war against two of the world’s most heavily militarized powers, many began to consider radical alternatives. The CIA had predicted they would fall back to guerrilla tactics, and this was discussed. As Baghdadi put it, they wondered whether “to save our country from ruin by surrendering and going underground in order to maintain the struggle against this conquest which would be thrust upon us.”44
In Adana, the photographs taken by the American U-2 spy plane were developed. Most of them came out as expected. The only exceptions were the two photograph sets the pilot had taken of Cairo airport. The first set, as usual, showed aircraft on the ground. The second, from ten minutes later, was quite different. A field of fire engulfed the planes, the airport, and everything else around it. The U-2’s flyover had been remarkably timed: the British Royal Air Force had bombed the site in the ten-minute gap between its two visits.45
The CIA used a wirephoto machine to transmit the U-2 pictures to the RAF in Britain for comment. According to a source inside the CIA, the RAF replied with a brief, blithe cable, perhaps not realizing the extent of their two governments’ estrangement: “Warm thanks for pix [sic]. It’s the quickest bomb damage assessment we’ve ever had.”46
Late that afternoon, Ariel Sharon’s Israeli forces had finally been able to withdraw from the Mitla Pass. After nightfall, two small groups were sent back in. “Moving slowly along the cliff face, they attacked one Egyptian cave and firing hole after another in hand-to-hand fighting,” Sharon remembered. For two hours the sounds of battle reverberated through the pass before finally giving way around eight o’clock to an ominous silence.”47 The Israelis had taken the pass—leaving, by Sharon’s estimate, 260 Egyptians dead in addition to 38 of his own paratroopers.
1500 Washington DC // 2200 Cairo
News spread through Washington that British planes had been bombing Egyptian—but not Israeli—airfields. This, said Emmet Hughes, triggered “total crisis in White House.”
“Bombs, by God,” Eisenhower shouted. “What does Anthony think he’s doing? Why is he doing this to me?”48 There had been nothing in the Anglo-French ultimatum about air strikes; it had merely talked of a “temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal.” According to the London Times, “The air in official Washington to-day is thick with cries of ‘Perfidious Albion!’” Questions were being seriously asked in Washington as to whether Britain and France were still considered American allies. “Every official voice here, it seems, is raised to-day against a ‘dangerous and desperate gamble’ that is bound to fail, at the risk of provoking the Muslim world into a ‘holy war’ that will involve Britain and France from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf,” reported the paper. It added that American officials were predicting oil pipelines would be cut and the Canal would be blocked, “and the point that constantly recurs amid this dire speculation is that the United States will remain militarily aloof from it all.”49
With the American presidential election campaign entering its final week, Eisenhower’s political opponents tried to spin what was happening against him. Former president Harry S. Truman claimed that the American people “had been misled by the Eisenhower Administration.” The Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, claimed that the Republicans’ policy in the Middle East had “plunged the world to the brink of war.”50
“I have done my best [to stop the British],” Eisenhower wearily told the leader of the Republicans in the Senate. “I think it is the biggest error of our time, outside of losing China.”51
A heavy atmosphere hung over the United Nations Security Council as it met to hear members condemn the British and French action as “aggression.” Following Yugoslavia’s suggestion that the Middle East crisis be referred to the General Assembly, there was a tense debate. Seven votes were cast in favor of Yugoslavia’s proposal, including those of the Soviet Union and the United States, with two abstentions. Only Britain and France voted against—though they were, on this point, powerless to veto the decision. “It was at once apparent that a section of opinion in the council impugned the good faith of Britain and France in their present action and accused them of having been in collusion with Israel,” noted the London Times correspondent. This was “an accusation which [British representative] Sir Pierson Dixon repudiated effectively, but without convincing the sceptics.”52
Eisenhower was due to address the nation on television at seven p.m. Foster Dulles wrote him what Hughes called an “impossible” speech: “It recites and rambles, with no force of argument.” Eisenhower sent Hughes off to rewrite it. Hughes sat in the cabinet room, from where he could see—to his considerable annoyance—the president relaxing outside, putting golf balls around on the White House lawn.
In London, the American ambassador Winthrop Aldrich spoke at a dinner celebrating British and American friendship. Amid the usual platitudes on the subject, his speech sounded a sharp note. “One of the little ironies of life is that I am here to propose this toast at a difficult moment of very grave anxiety, when our two Governments for the first time have just cast opposed votes in the Security Council. That is really a tragic thing,” he said. “We now have a difference of opinion over a grave and difficult situation in the Middle East and how it should be approached, but I would certainly hope, and I feel perfectly confident, we shall reach an agreement on a position which we can both conscientiously support.”53
Aldrich was trying to make the best of the situation, but many in London did not feel so confident. “There was need for speedy decision, certainly,” said an editorial in the London Times. “It is also very true that Mr. Dulles’s tactics have been both surprising and disappointing at many times; and agreement for action—especially on the eve of the Presidential elections—would not have been reached. Yet was the need for speed really so great that President Eisenhower had to hear about the Anglo-French ultimatum from Press reports?”54
At midnight Cairo and Tel Aviv time, French ships—escorted by Israeli destroyers—began to bombard army bases around Rafah at the extreme southern end of the Gaza Strip. Moshe Dayan and Mordechai Bar-On were there to watch. “The camps became an inferno,” Bar-On wrote in his diary, though he complained that the difficulty of coordinating an international joint operation meant that some barrages were “rather unimpressive” and there were long gaps between them.55 Dayan was even more disappointed. “We all expected that the pounding from the destroyers would be carried out on a European scale, and we conjured up familiar scenes from war-films of powerful shells exploding on the coast on the eve of a landing,” he wrote in his diary. “But the leviathan gave forth a sprat.”56 The shelling of Rafah may not have been effective, but it was important to Israel for a different reason: the French armed forces had cooperated openly in a major preplanned operation with the IDF. It would be significant to the rest of the world for that reason, too.
1800 Washington DC
In Washington, Hughes continued to work on the president’s speech, with Dulles at his side. “He is ashes-gray,” wrote Hughes, “heavy-lidded, strained. His shoulders seem to sag.”
“I’m just sick about the bombings,” Dulles explained, “the idea of planes over Cairo right now!” He changed a sentence on Hungary from “There seems to appear the dawn of hope . . .” to “There is the dawning . . .”
Hughes took the final draft into Eisenhower’s bedroom so the president could read it through as he dressed.
“I want to be sure we show clearly in here how vital we think our alliances are,” Eisenhower said before he began. “Those British—they’re still my right arm!”
He approved the text with minimal changes, and Hughes raced off to add the emphatic underlines to the large-text reading copy with a grease pencil. At 6:45 p.m., Eisenhower came into the Oval Office wearing a gray suit, and read through as Hughes pushed the pages over the desk to him. He finished the last at 6:56.
“Boy, this is taking it right off the stove, isn’t it?” the president said.
The lights came up and the camera began to roll. Eisenhower sounded strong, assured and, above all, sensible. He avoided all of Britain and France’s tidy euphemisms, like “police action” and “peacekeeping,” and called what they had launched on Egypt an “armed attack.”
“The United States was not consulted in any way about any phase of these actions,” he said. “Nor were we informed of them in advance. As it is the manifest right of any of these nations to take such decisions and actions, it is likewise our right—if our judgment so dictates—to dissent. We believe these actions to have been taken in error. For we do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes.”57 He spoke of his belief in the United Nations as the proper body to handle disagreements between nations.
Almost everyone in the room, from press and politicians to camera technicians, seemed tense, Hughes remembered. “No moment since Korea has seemed so charged with war peril.” The only man who seemed calm was the president himself.
He finished at precisely 7:14, and the broadcast ended on schedule. As he left, he said to Hughes with a grin, “I had been thinking maybe I’d have to have you hidden under the desk to hand me page after page as I talked! Went fine, though.”
Hughes had been skeptical of the president’s leadership during the crisis so far, but found himself alone in this opinion. The assembled reporters were profoundly impressed by the president’s speech: “So maybe, in all this fantastic frenzy, we stumbled upon some way at least to articulate a United States position that has some perspective, and dignity . . .”58
The relief and hope would not last. Half the world away, on the borders of Hungary, Soviet forces were beginning to gather for the next stage—and a desperate Soviet moderate, Anastas Mikoyan, got back on a plane to Moscow to try to stop them.