0700 Moscow
Before dawn in Moscow, an emotional Anastas Mikoyan returned from Budapest and went in person to Khrushchev’s house in the Lenin Hills. He hoped to make a last attempt to persuade the Soviet leader not to smash Hungary.
“Do you think it’s any easier for me?” Khrushchev said. “We have to act. We have no other course.”
“If blood is shed, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself,” shouted Mikoyan.
“That would be the height of stupidity, Anastas,” replied Khrushchev, who apparently thought his comrade had just threatened suicide (Mikoyan recalled later that he was merely threatening to resign). “You’re a reasonable person. Think it over, take all the factors into account and you’ll see we’ve made the right decision. Even if there is bloodshed, it will spare us bloodshed later on. Think it over and you’ll understand.”1
The Soviet leader got into his limousine and drove away.
0600 London // 0800 Cairo
“I woke up early to the sound of exploding bombs,” wrote the Egyptian politician Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi.2 Over the night of October 31 to November 1, British planes bombed four Egyptian airfields—belatedly fulfilling their agreement with the Israelis to knock out Nasser’s air cover. Early on the morning of November 1, nine more airfields were hit. The British government claimed these hits were accurate and avoided any civil damage,3 which was not true: they were wildly inaccurate. They did have a small positive effect from the point of view of the Anglo-French operation, for they helped demoralize the Egyptian air force.4 “The affairs of Britain seem now to be in the hands of a madman,” read the editorial in the Egyptian Gazette that morning.5
Nasser was in a better mood, “even lively,” wrote Baghdadi.6 He declared general mobilization and martial law. “We shall fight and we shall not surrender,” he said in a broadcast. “We shall fight from village to village, from place to place.”7 That same morning, Nasser and Abdel Hakim Amer called off Operation Beisan—the planned attack on Israel by Jordan and Syria. The Syrian forces that had turned up in Jordan following the call for mobilization were poorly trained and equipped. The Jordanian chief of staff, Ali Abu Nawar, had not thought them up to slicing Israel in half. Most in the Jordanian government were intensely relieved not to have to invade Israel—apart from King Hussein himself, who had been raring to go. According to Nasser’s friend Mohamed Heikal, King Hussein telephoned Nasser that day and told him that he would go ahead with Operation Beisan without Syrian help. “But Nasser begged him not to, saying that they were facing something much bigger than an Israeli attack and that it was essential for the Jordanian Army to be kept intact.”8
Some years later, Abu Nuwar remembered “when Nasser said ‘stop’ and the King was urging me every minute to attack, I said ‘no, Your Majesty, this would be suicide.”9 Nasser eventually managed to get the king to agree to an indefinite postponement of the operation. Abu Nuwar still feared Israel might attack Jordan. He told the British ambassador that Jordan’s decision not to attack Israel must be kept secret: “If this became public he would be obliged to attack.”10
Nasser had now heard snippets from his own intelligence contacts in the Syrian Deuxième Bureau about Operation Straggle/Wakeful, the British-American coup planned for Syria. With treason swirling around Damascus, he did not want to do anything that might destabilize Syria to threats from within or without. He feared Britain and France might rally to Israel’s side there as they had in Egypt—and could perhaps even take the opportunity to invade and occupy Syria. The New York Times reported that Nasser “is said to be trying to persuade the Iraqis and Syrians to blow up foreign oil installations in their countries in retaliation for attacks on Egypt.”11 In fact, the opposite was true. On Kermit Roosevelt’s urging, Nasser sent a message to the Syrians telling them “not to destroy oil pipelines as this is injurious to the interests of other countries not implicated”—meaning specifically the United States. This message arrived too late. The Syrians had already blown up three pumping stations, interrupting the flow from Kirkuk in Iraq to Tripoli in Lebanon—one of Europe’s essential supply routes.12
0900 London // 1000 Budapest // 1300 Moscow // 1330 Delhi
The British ambassador to Moscow, William Hayter, telegraphed to London that the Soviet government “regard Suez as a heaven-sent distraction from Hungary.” Things were even worse now that it was clear Britain and France were acting separately from the United States, though the Soviet press was still alleging that Washington was secretly involved in the collusion.
Hayter did not think the Soviets wanted to send troops to Egypt. They might consider doing so, though, if they were eventually convinced that the Americans were not involved. They might even “try to get together with the United States at our expense.” A joint Soviet-American military action against Britain and France might have sounded far-fetched, but everything that was going on was far-fetched.
In any case, Hayter said, the Soviets would certainly give the Egyptians all possible aid: “Their prestige is heavily engaged with Nasser, and they will do all they safely can to avert another blow to it such as they have just suffered in Eastern Europe. . . . In either event, I fear we are in for a bad time in our relations with this country.”13
The presidium met again to discuss Hungary. “We should enter into negotiations,” said Anastas Mikoyan, still trying to press for a moderate course. “We should wait another 10–15 days and support this government.” Yet he accepted that the Soviets would have to draw a line somewhere: “If the regime slips away, we’ll need to decide what to do. We simply cannot allow Hungary to be removed from our camp.”
“The danger of a bourgeois restoration has reached its peak,” said Mikhail Suslov, who had returned from Budapest with Mikoyan but took a harder line. “Only by means of occupation can we have a government that supports us.”14 Mikoyan was now the only man arguing against immediate intervention. He lost. The order was given: Operation Whirlwind went into action.
That morning in London, American diplomat Chester Cooper’s two young daughters complained of headaches and said they could not go to school. Gently, their parents extracted from them the real reason: “On the previous day their schoolmates had berated Joan and Susan for being ‘beastly’ to England.”15 While in Washington the feeling was that the United States had been betrayed by Britain, in London it was the opposite. Nasser had not taken early reports of collusion or British action seriously because he could not imagine that the British would behave dishonorably. Many Britons felt the same as they started to hear rumors of collusion. It did not seem possible. They were accustomed to trusting their government.
The British government confirmed that Egypt had broken diplomatic relations but insisted that this did not mean Britain and Egypt were at war. The government in Cairo issued an order to seize all British and French property, including the Anglo-Egyptian oilfield, a subsidiary of Shell, and the French Société Egyptienne Pétrole.16 Shocked by the news of the French openly fighting with Israel to shell Rafah the previous evening, as well as other incidents of French forces acting in close consort with the Israelis, Eden telegraphed to Mollet. “Actions of this sort, which cannot possibly remain secret, are extremely embarrassing,” he wrote. “I hope you will agree that in our common interest they must be discontinued. Nothing could do more harm to our role as peacemakers than to be identified in this way with one of the two parties.”17 Mollet assured Eden that joint actions with the Israelis would be discontinued.
The British cabinet met at ten o’clock. A radical suggestion had been made by Lester Pearson, the Canadian minister for external affairs. When he flew in the Royal Flying Corps in World War I, Pearson became known as Mike; his instructor did not consider Lester a manly enough name for a fighter pilot. He had headed the United Nations committee that had drawn up the plan for the partition of Mandatory Palestine into Israel and a Palestinian state and had been the Canadian representative at the founding of NATO, serving as its chairman in 1951.
Pearson’s suggestion was that the United Nations itself could compose a fighting force, which could be sent to police Israel’s borders in place of Britain and France. Sending international peacekeeping forces to a conflict zone was a new idea. The United Nations had sent military observers to Israel and the Palestinian territories in 1948, and to Kashmir in 1949. It had never before established a force under its own command to separate warring states. The League of Nations, the predecessor organization to the United Nations between the wars, was widely considered to have failed on account of having no “teeth”: it commanded no army and could not enforce its decisions against strong countries.18 If Britain and France were able to ignore the United Nations now, this would mean the world’s second attempt at an international parliament might founder just as the first had.
Many in the British Conservative Party were strongly in favor of the United Nations. Eden had been its public champion, though he frequently expressed irritation with it in his private notes. If Eden was already beginning to regret attacking Egypt, the possibility of a United Nations force might have offered a way out. Had it been true that Britain and France had intervened for peacekeeping purposes, it would have made sense to give way to an internationally sanctioned alternative.
But there was pressure on Eden from the right of his party to go on with Operation Musketeer. William Clark, Eden’s press secretary, remembered that “[Antony] Head kept reminding us that the first objective of this whole operation was to get rid of Nasser, and that would never be done by the UN.”19 The prime minister was persuaded by this, and may have been influenced by opinion polls that day—53 percent of British voters surveyed said they supported the November 1 invasion. Dr. Henry Durant of the pollsters Gallup explained to the BBC that there was a significant right-left divide. Of Conservatives, 89 percent supported Eden, while 63 percent of Labour supporters opposed him: “You see, that is a very sharp split indeed.”20 There was pressure from the French, too. Eden “was embittered by what he called Eisenhower’s ‘betrayal,’” remembered Christian Pineau—using the French word trahison. Pineau told Mollet he was worried about Eden’s health: “It is not yet a ‘breakdown’ but we’re not far off.”21
Following their meeting the previous day, Hugh Gaitskell and some Labour Party leaders went to see the American ambassador, Winthrop Aldrich. They praised the United States’ action at the United Nations and “strongly urged that we not relax our firm opposition to the ‘Eden-Mollet folly,’” according to the report sent back to Washington. Calling Eden’s policy “monstrous,” Gaitskell told Aldrich that “continued strong US action in the UN was the only way to heal the injury being inflicted on the Anglo-American alliance by Eden.”22
There was even a suggestion that opposition to Eden existed at the highest level. Queen Elizabeth II kept her political opinions to herself but, according to some members of her staff, she doubted her prime minister. Unusually, she requested top-secret daily reports on the progress of military operations and intelligence to be delivered to her from November 1. These would continue to be delivered until November 22.23 She also received messages from Commonwealth governments—which Eden himself did not always see. As a result, according to Martin Charteris, one of the queen’s private secretaries, the monarch “in some ways was better informed than many members of the cabinet.” Another adviser added, “Nothing was kept from her. She knew about the secret deals beforehand.”24
Lord Louis (“Dickie”) Mountbatten, admiral of the Fleet and an opponent of the Suez offensive he was supposed to be helping to lead, was a cousin to the queen. He had brokered the marriage between his nephew, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, and the then Princess Elizabeth in 1947. Their son Prince Charles, just coming up to his eighth birthday, would refer to Mountbatten as his “honorary grandfather.” During the Suez crisis, “Dickie was talking to her [the queen],” said Charteris. “He wanted her to know what he thought about it—he was saying something like ‘I think they are being absolutely lunatic.’ He was typically devious. He didn’t mean it as a message to be conveyed directly to Eden, but he hoped she would pass it on to him as her own thoughts.”
There is a tradition of confidentiality between monarch and prime minister. It is, therefore, impossible to say whether the queen did pass these thoughts on to Eden or not. Charteris thought she may have said something gently doubting; he imagined it along the lines of “Are you sure you are being wise?”25 In 1976, the London Sunday Times Magazine published an article by Robert Lacey, suggesting that the queen had been passionately against the Suez intervention but could not stop it. Anthony Eden, who was then seventy-nine years old and still vainly attempting to defend his reputation, suspected that Mountbatten was one of the two sources Lacey claimed.
“I did not attempt to deny it,” wrote Mountbatten in his diary. “I said I had been asked officially . . . to see this man to help him, and had answered all his questions.”26 Charteris also remembered the queen’s impression of Eden during the crisis. “I think the Queen believed Eden was mad,” he told a biographer. When the prime minister came for his weekly meetings with the queen, he “ranged up and down and wouldn’t sit still. He was edgy, jumpy.”27
The world was still learning of the bombing of Cairo, but international reactions—including those from Commonwealth leaders and from Baghdad Pact allies—were damning. Frosty reports arrived at the Foreign Office from India, Pakistan, and South Africa.28 Jordan severed political relations with France and recalled its ambassador from Paris. “The present battle is not Egypt’s battle alone but the battle of all Arab nations,” said King Hussein. “The aggression on Egypt is being carried out by world Zionism, enemy of peace, and world Judaism, supported and incited by Britain and France.” The only messages of support for Britain and France that the London Times could find to print were from the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, though New Zealand’s prime minister expressed concern that Eisenhower had not been informed.29
The problem with efforts to convince Britain’s allies of British innocence was all the evidence to the contrary. Britain was attacking Egypt and leaving Israel alone. William Clark went on to a government public relations meeting that day. There was much concern about the effect of any collaboration with Israel on relations with Iraq. “It was agreed that anything we could do to play down Israeli collaboration with Britain was to be done,” Clark remembered, “but the more extreme suggestions, e.g. that we should drop just one bomb on Tel Aviv, were agreed to be impracticable.”30 This idea appears to have been toyed with only by the public relations department.
That same morning, the leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church, Cardinal József Mindszenty, was released from eight years of imprisonment and returned to Budapest. He went to his old chapel to pray and then talk to the press. “Thank God I am in good health,” he said, “both physically and mentally, though I was very seriously ill when I was in prison.” One of the reporters told him that he, too, had been in prison, to which Mindszenty replied, “It seems that everyone who is honest has been in prison at one time or another.” Tanks were posted at either side of his palace and soldiers patrolled the courtyard, armed with grenades and tommy guns.31
Inside Budapest, the possibility that the Soviets might back off was now beginning to be believed by the general population. Some shops, offices, and factories reopened. Imre Nagy was aware that new Red Army units were crossing the border into Hungary from Ukraine. Two Soviet divisions would soon surround Budapest, with another five stationed elsewhere in Hungarian territory. This was a violation of the Warsaw Pact, the treaty that held the Soviet bloc together. If the Soviets did not withdraw the troops, he told the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov, he would denounce the pact.
Andropov was unflusterable. The new units, he said, were only being sent to relieve those that had been fighting before, to protect their retreat and to protect the Russian population in Hungary. This was not, he insisted, a new aggression. Indeed, the Soviets were ready to negotiate a “partial” withdrawal.
Unconvinced, Nagy awaited further information.32 Some of his cabinet were clearly unnerved: one of János Kádár’s aides observed Kádár looking “white as a sheet, his lips were trembling and he fell into some sort of hysterical fit.”33
Remarkably, Nagy managed to keep news of the Soviet troops arriving in Hungary secret from the people in Budapest. He hoped to resolve the situation diplomatically without causing panic. As a result, the mood in Budapest was cheerful. “The rebels, having just achieved a victory over the former régime, despite Soviet intervention, were scarcely worried by the clouds on the horizon,” wrote the Hungarian historian Miklós Molnár, who was there at the time. “For them the sky was blue. . . . Neither the shadow of events in the Near East nor the perplexing nuances of American statements influenced the attitude of the Hungarians.”34
Meanwhile, Nikita Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov had embarked on a grueling schedule of flights to meet Warsaw Pact leaders and inform them of Operation Whirlwind. They had already been that day to Brest, on the border with Poland, to meet Władysław Gomułka and other representatives of the new Polish administration. Gomułka objected vociferously to the idea of military intervention. They were unable to talk him around. Now they had moved on to Bucharest, where they found a more positive reception from the leaders of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria—all of whom were Communist hard-liners, worried that the spirit of rebellion might infect their countries next. Todor Zhivkov, the leader of Bulgaria, encouraged the Soviets “to adopt every appropriate measure, including military intervention, as soon as possible” to defeat “imperialist intrigues” and “preserve the system of people’s democracy in Hungary.”35 The Soviets appreciated his enthusiasm, but they needed little encouragement.
0800 New York // 1300 London // 1400 Budapest // 1500 Cairo
By two p.m., Nagy was receiving definite reports that more and more Red Army troops were streaming across his border. He telephoned Yuri Andropov back and formally withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. His ministers unanimously approved his action. Hungary was now a neutral nation. The rebels and their supporters were thrilled. They did not realize that Nagy had done this because Soviet troops were heading straight for them. They believed the prime minister was finally aligning himself with the rebellion’s first demand: to get Soviet troops out of the country.
At that same moment, the British government’s Egypt Committee assembled in Rab Butler’s office in the House of Commons to address the drying up of Britain’s oil supply. It agreed to a 10 percent cut in oil consumption throughout Britain, to be put in place on November 7, with tighter restrictions and formal rationing to follow as soon as possible. The situation was worse than the Egypt Committee had anticipated before the invasion. It had been foreseen that some rationing might be necessary, but the committee had assumed that the government would have recourse to additional supplies from the Americas. It had also not anticipated that the oil pipeline from Iraq to Lebanon would stop functioning. “In present circumstances, there must inevitably be doubts about these assumptions and the reduction in oil imports might well be more serious,” the minutes admitted.36
Later that afternoon, William Clark saw Macmillan. He told him he was worried about the deep divisions in public opinion and how all this would affect the economy. “Macmillan said that the trouble was that the people thought oil just came out of taps,” he remembered.37
As the Egypt Committee was meeting in London and Nagy was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, a correspondent for the London Times in the Gaza Strip watched thousands of people—some lifelong residents of the Strip, and some refugees from the 1948 war—escape into Egypt. The route “was choked with fleeing Arab refugees, bare-footed or riding distracted donkeys,” he reported. “Many of the refugees had taken to the sea in frail little boats.” The IDF had dropped leaflets from planes calling for Egyptians to surrender. Trapped in a battleground between two nations, many Gazans fled.38
An hour and forty minutes later—8:40 a.m. in New York—Foster Dulles telephoned Eisenhower in Washington. Neither knew what was happening in the Gaza Strip. The United Nations General Assembly would be meeting at five p.m. Eastern time, and the American delegation was wrestling with the question of whether they should put sanctions on sales of arms to Israel. According to the telephone minutes, Eisenhower said that the United States “should not do anything that makes us look as if we are trying to get an excuse to pick on Israel. If we do anything against them, then we have to do something against Fr and Br.” Dulles replied, referring to Eisenhower’s statement about adhering to the Tripartite Declaration, “If we give aid to Israel when she is an aggressor it makes a mockery of everything.”39
1000 Washington DC // 1600 Budapest
Imre Nagy informed all the foreign diplomats in Budapest of Hungary’s new neutral status and appealed to the United Nations to defend that status against the oncoming Soviet invasion. He spoke on national radio, attempting to inspire fortitude among the people without scaring them.
“We appeal to our neighbours, countries near and far, to respect the unalterable decision of our people,” he said. “It is indeed true that our people are united in this decision as perhaps never before in their history. Working millions of Hungary! Protect and strengthen with revolutionary determination, sacrificial work and the consolidation of order, our country, the free, independent, democratic and neutral Hungary.”40
1100 Washington DC // 1700 Paris; Budapest // 1800 Gaza City
As the sun sank low toward the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, the mosques, minarets, white houses, and date palms of Gaza City presented a sedate picture to the Times correspondent watching from a viewpoint on a nearby hillside. There was no sound except for the tweeting of sparrows. “Here and there, in the dry grasses, a slight movement could be detected, perhaps of a steel helmet, perhaps of the muzzle of some weapon,” he wrote. The IDF was preparing to strike.
“Then, just as the red sun brushed the surface of the sea, the pretty scene exploded,” he reported. “Aircraft had come out of the sky and smoke and dust spouted out of the earth round Gaza like huge, spreading shrubs. There was the sound of bursting bombs, of anti-aircraft fire, of light artillery and mortars.”
A long procession of armored vehicles and half-tracks “appeared from nowhere” and moved toward the city. The Israeli soldiers sang songs, and one addressed the journalist in English. “They were equipped, not as the scrappily armed militia of the 1948 war, but as a modern fighting force able to move into war with all the precision and steady confidence of men trained to perfection and at least as well armed as their enemies,” he wrote.41 The aerial bombardment raged on. The IDF was breaking Gaza’s defenses and cutting off its access to Egypt.
Addressing the National Security Council in Washington, Foster Dulles remarked that “recent events are close to marking the death knell for Great Britain and France.” He argued that the United States must break with its allies or risk losing the whole Cold War. “For many years now the United States has been walking a tightrope between the effort to maintain our old and valued relations with our British and French allies on the one hand, and on the other trying to assure ourselves of the friendship and understanding of the newly independent countries who have just escaped colonialism,” he said. But the United States could not balance on the tightrope forever. “Unless we now assert and maintain” American leadership, he argued, “all of these newly independent countries will turn from us to the USSR. We will be looked upon as forever tied to British and French colonialist policies.” He warned that “the United States would survive or go down” depending on what it decided to do now.42
Eisenhower telephoned Dulles at 12:25 p.m. and said he had drafted another letter to Eden. “It might do some good and it might not but it told of what we are trying to do today in the UN and what they might do to minimize resentment and save face.”43
Foster Dulles telephoned Eisenhower back soon afterward, discussing again the position in the United Nations. Dulles indicated that “substantially the program [of arms sales] he had indicated would be suspended. All this had been done in the case of Egypt already. It would suspend military shipments to Israel.”
Eisenhower asked him whether the rest of the American delegation there agreed with him on this point. Dulles replied, “Yes but they would like to go stronger.”44
The American military was going stronger, at least in terms of sending out warning signals to its supposed allies in the Mediterranean. “That day, American planes were sighted over the [British and French] convoys,” wrote Chester Cooper, “and that night, American warships, lights blazing, passed through the French fleet.”45 One British admiral warned that there was “constant danger of an incident” with American aircraft flying close to British ships, and noted that day: “Have been continually menaced during past eight hours by US aircraft approaching low down as close as 4000 yards and on two occasions flying over ships.”46 General Keightley, the commander of Operation Musketeer, later remarked that the movements of the United States Sixth Fleet “endangered the whole of our relations with that country.”47
Meanwhile, the French were trying an old trick on the Americans: a Red Scare. That evening, Christian Pineau met American ambassador Douglas Dillon in Paris and told him that France had heard from its sources in Syria that the Soviet Union was planning military intervention in the Middle East using Syrian bases. To forestall a wider war, he suggested that the United Nations General Assembly summon the foreign ministers of France, Britain, Israel, and Egypt to appear before it immediately. This would delay Soviet action by two to three days, “by which time he had good reason to hope the whole affair would be finished.”
The Americans were not convinced by Pineau’s scaremongering, for the information coming from their own ambassador in Moscow, Charles Bohlen, contradicted it. Though Bohlen admitted that the Soviets did “not in any way rule out clandestine assistance to Egypt,” he did not believe there was any plan for full intervention. He noted, though, “If the hostilities spread to other parts of the area [i.e., the Middle East] the present declaration is no guide whatsoever to Soviet action.”
To Dillon, Pineau “emphatically denied any intention of extending the Franco-British occupation farther into Egypt.” He hinted at how France and Britain really felt: “He said the position of Nasser was a matter to be left up to the Egyptian people; he hoped that, after seeing the catastrophe which Nasser had prepared for them, they would themselves in due course get rid of him.”48
In the House of Commons in London that evening, an extraordinary spectacle took place when the minister of defense, Antony Head, announced the British raids on Egyptian airfields. Labour members booed and jeered at Eden, who refused to answer the question of whether Britain was at war.
“We knew something very dirty was going on,” one opposition member told Anthony Nutting. “But in the face of the Government’s denials we couldn’t prove it; and so in our frustration we just saw red and all of us completely lost our tempers.”
“A storm of booing would break out as soon as Anthony entered the Chamber, and would rise to a crescendo of hysteria when he actually rose to speak,” remembered Lord Kilmuir. “At one point the chances of fighting actually breaking out between Members was very real, so intense were the passions on each side.”
“It was a deplorable scene, totally unworthy of the Mother of Parliaments,” wrote Nutting. A journalist watching from the press gallery called it “quite the most shattering experience I’ve ever sat through.”49
The Speaker was obliged to adjourn the House for half an hour to let members simmer down. On the Commons record, it is recorded as “Grave Disorder.”50
“Can you stand it?” the prime minister’s horrified wife, Lady Eden, asked the leader of the opposition’s wife.
“The boys must express themselves,” replied Mrs. Gaitskell sharply.51
“I am not in the least attempting to dodge these questions,” insisted Eden when he returned.52 A Labour member moved a motion of censure: “That this House deplores the action of Her Majesty’s Government in resorting to armed force against Egypt in clear violation of the United Nations Charter, thereby affronting the convictions of a large section of the British people, dividing the Commonwealth, straining the Atlantic Alliance, and gravely damaging the foundations of international order.” It was voted down by the Conservative majority, who replaced it with the statement “That this House approves of the prompt action taken by Her Majesty’s Government designed to bring hostilities between Israel and Egypt to an end and to safeguard vital international and national interests, and pledges its full support for all steps necessary to secure these ends.” Yet according to Robert Rhodes James, who was then a clerk in the Commons and later became a Conservative MP, “Even those ministers who remained committed supporters of the operation were becoming severely rattled.” He added, “One felt that the House of Commons was close to a collective nervous collapse, so fraught was the temper of the time.”53
The attacks became personal. “I have not seen from the Prime Minister in the course of the last four or five months, or even longer, any evidence of that sagacity and skill that he should have acquired in so many years in the Foreign Office,” the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan told the House. “Indeed, I have been astonished at the amateurishness of his performance. There is something the matter with him.”54
That night, a conservatively estimated two thousand students marched through the West End to the Houses of Parliament, chanting, “We don’t want war.” They blocked traffic on Charing Cross Road. Outside the House of Commons, a demonstration estimated even more conservatively at two hundred people gathered, shouting, “We want peace,” and “Eden must go.” Inside Parliament, a Labour MP complained that mounted police had charged into the crowd and said he had spoken to two people who had been beaten up: a young lady who was nearly crushed by a horse and a young man who had been thrown over a wall and set upon by several policemen. A Conservative member replied that the protesters were “clearly, both from the banners they carried and from the things they said, organized Communist groups.”55
Another five hundred students marched in Manchester, carrying placards saying “Hands off the Middle East.” There were clashes in Oxford, with two undergraduates arrested. Conservative student protesters pelted antiwar protesters with tomatoes, water bombs, and intriguingly, a red fez.56 A group of dons sent a telegram to Eden, stating, “This meeting of 73 Oxford dons of differing political opinions condemns the Government’s military aggression as foolish and wrong and demands that it should stop now.”57 These people were not all Communists. The public mood was beginning to shift.
1700 New York
Lester Pearson arrived at the United Nations building on Forty-Second Street in New York at five p.m. He found it in turmoil. The secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, was on the brink of resignation over Britain and France breaking the United Nations Charter. Pearson reminded him that the Soviets had done so many times and he had not resigned then.58 In the General Assembly, the United States pushed for a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of all foreign troops.
Pearson wanted to go further. His proposal, as the British cabinet had heard that morning, was for an international force under United Nations command to be sent to the Sinai. He also wanted to have a conference to discuss the future of the Middle East and seek a path to lasting peace.
“If the United Nations were willing to take over the physical task of maintaining peace in that area, no one would be better pleased than the British Government,” said the British representative, Pierson Dixon. This was not true, but the British government had decided to keep saying it because ministers believed the risk of the United Nations getting its force together before they had taken the canal was low. Even if it did, this might not be a problem—for a reason Britain and France did not yet reveal to the United Nations. The two European powers were still arguing that their invading forces were performing a selfless “police action.” Therefore, they hoped to persuade the United Nations that their soldiers already in the field could continue to do their jobs as planned—under a United Nations flag. There would be no need for any withdrawal. The United Nations would merely take a role in commanding the existing Anglo-French operation, giving victory over Nasser an impermeable veneer of legitimacy.59
0100 (Nov. 2) New York
Foster Dulles arrived at the United Nations late after a rough flight from Washington through terrible storms. He was to give the most important speech of the crisis to the General Assembly.
“I doubt that any delegate ever spoke from this forum with as heavy a heart as I have brought here tonight,” Dulles began. “We speak on a matter of vital importance, where the United States finds itself unable to agree with three nations with whom it has ties, deep friendship, admiration, and respect, and two of whom constitute our oldest, most trusted and reliable allies.”
He described the invasion, the ultimatum, the British and French use of the veto in the Security Council. He acknowledged faults: “The United Nations may have been somewhat laggard, somewhat impotent in dealing with many injustices which are inherent in this Middle East situation.” Yet he insisted that Britain and France’s action was unacceptable. “If we were to agree that the existence of injustices in the world, which this organization has so far been unable to cure, means that the principle of the renunciation of force is no longer respected and that there still exists the right wherever a nation feels itself subject to injustice to resort to force to try to correct that injustice, then, Mr. President, we would have, I fear, torn this charter into shreds and the world would again be a world of anarchy.”
Dulles mentioned his own attempts to push Britain and France into the diplomatic route, not missing the opportunity to praise himself: “I doubt if in all history so sincere, so sustained an effort has been made to find a just and a peaceful solution.” He described the long summer of negotiations, conferences, and SCUA—and reminded everyone that peaceful options had not yet been exhausted. He declined to talk in any mincing terms about peacekeeping by Britain or France. Instead, he insisted, “the violent armed attack by three of our members upon a fourth, cannot be treated as other than a grave error, inconsistent with the principles and purposes of the charter and one which if persisted in would gravely undermine our charter and undermine this organization.”
In his peroration, he issued a stark warning about maintaining world peace: “There is great danger that what is started and what has been called a police action may develop into something which is far more grave.” With one eye on Hungary, he warned that even if it did not, “the apparent impotence of this organization to deal with this situation may set a precedent which will lead other nations to attempt to take into their own hands the remedying of what they believe to be their injustices. If that happens, the future is dark indeed.” He concluded with a hint that the Suez crisis could spiral into a nuclear World War III. “We thought when we wrote the charter in San Francisco in 1945 that we had seen perhaps the worst in war, that our task was to prevent a recurrence of what had been, and indeed what then had been was tragic enough,” he said. “But now we know that what can be will be infinitely more tragic than what we saw in World War II.”
He proposed a draft resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire on all sides and withdrawal of invading forces, for the embargo of all military goods into the zone of conflict, and for free navigation of the Suez Canal to be restored.60
The speech was precisely expressed, powerful in tone, and explosive in content. Dulles and Eisenhower had just chosen the United Nations over NATO. Many in the First World, let alone the Second and Third Worlds, had never believed such a thing could happen. Yet the United States had just turned on its own allies in front of all of them, with unmistakable ferocity.
“If that had been my very last act on earth, it would have been exactly as I would have wished it,” Dulles told an aide of his performance. “I would have liked it for my epitaph.”61
An epitaph was not yet required though, after Dulles’s speech, his colleague Herman Phleger thought he looked unusually exhausted. Phleger encouraged the secretary of state to return to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. But Dulles’s colleagues were worried that if Dulles left, other delegates might also bail out before the vote. Dulles stayed.
The vote finally took place at one o’clock in the morning. Dulles had his resolution passed by sixty-four votes to five, with six abstentions. Only Australia and New Zealand could be prevailed upon to vote with Britain, France, and Israel.
To Dulles’s surprise, Canada was among the abstentions. Lester Pearson explained that the cease-fire and withdrawal were not enough without the extra measures of a United Nations force and a peace conference. If Israel and Egypt simply retreated, he pointed out, nothing would change. “What then?” he asked. “What then in six months from now? Are we to go through all this again? . . . [It] would be a return to terror, bloodshed, strife, incidents, charges and counter-charges, and ultimately another explosion.”62
After the vote on Suez, the Italian delegate drew the assembly’s attention to a cable that had just come in from Imre Nagy in Budapest. Soviet troops were returning to Hungary. Nagy reported that he had asked Yuri Andropov to withdraw them and had reminded Moscow that Hungary no longer belonged to the Warsaw Pact. Under the circumstances, Dulles felt he must stay on through another long trawl of speeches. It was five a.m. by the time he arrived back at his hotel. According to Phleger, the secretary of state was tired and out of sorts. He drank a large glass of Overholt whisky and insisted that his colleagues wake him in time for the ten thirty flight back to Washington that morning.63
Late that same night, Hungarian cabinet ministers János Kádár and Ferenc Münnich went in secret to the Soviet embassy in Budapest. They were escorted by the Soviets to the military base at Tököl on Csepel Island, From there, they were flown to Mukachevo in the Ukraine. In Mukachevo, they were greeted by Leonid Brezhnev. The Hungarians boarded separate planes and continued to Moscow. While much of the world slept, Dulles’s fear that other nations might take into their own hands the remedying of their perceived injustices was being fulfilled. The Soviets were already secretly ensuring that a successor government to Imre Nagy’s administration was ready to take over.