14
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1956
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
2320 (Nov. 3) Washington DC // 0520 Budapest // 0620 Cairo
In the early hours of that morning a series of shots rang out, echoing in the separate cells where Pál Maléter and the other Hungarians who had been arrested by Ivan Serov the night before were kept. Each man assumed his fellows had been executed. In fact, these were mock executions—staged by Serov to break his prisoners’ spirits before the KGB started its questioning.1
During his own interrogation some months later, Imre Nagy would tell of how he had slept the night in parliament and was woken early with the news that Soviet troops had begun to occupy Budapest. “While the telephone rang constantly, I was informed of the latest news from the whole country,” he told his interrogators. “The calls came in from everywhere, asking what should happen now, what was to be done. Since I could not answer every call, even when the caller insisted on talking to me, I instructed those taking the calls that there should be no resistance, that provocation must be avoided, and that it was forbidden to shoot at Soviet soldiers.”2
At the behest of his remaining allies, Nagy addressed the nation while it was still possible. Against an audible backdrop of gunfire, his voice crackled over the radio in the dark before dawn. “In the early hours of the morning Soviet troops have started an attack against the Hungarian capital with the apparent purpose of overthrowing the lawful democratic government of the country,” he said. “Our troops are engaged in battle. The government is in its place. This is my message to the Hungarian people and to the whole world.”3
Fifteen minutes earlier, Soviet radio had announced János Kádár as Hungary’s new prime minister. Kádár declared that he had left Nagy’s administration, saying that “reactionary forces” were threatening to bring landowners and capitalists back into power in Hungary. He was therefore forming a new government. He appealed publicly to Soviet forces to oust Nagy and help him.
Later, Kádár said he had pursued this course because it was impossible to stand by while the “White Terror slaughtered, first in Budapest, then in the provinces, intelligentsia and Communists, then all those who sympathized with the Communists and then all patriotic democrats.” Though some members of the previous regime and the AVH had been killed, there was no evidence for a “White Terror.” Yet Kádár insisted that the rebels had planned to hand Hungary over to the “imperialist colonizers.” He had therefore used “every possible force, including the assistance of Soviet units, to prevent the counter-revolutionary war. . . . The interests of the State and the people compelled us to choose this way as the only possible way out of the grave situation. And so we chose it.”4
In the small hours, Cardinal József Mindszenty was driven to parliament. He found what remained of Nagy’s government in chaos. No one could work out what order to give the army: in the end, they were dismissed. “I could no longer bear to see everybody losing his head,” remembered Mindszenty. He left the room and met a friend, who told him his car had been taken and all the bridges across the Danube had been sealed off by Soviet troops. “We concealed our cassocks under our coats and made our way between rows of Russian tanks safely to the embassy of the United States of America,” Mindszenty remembered. Just half an hour after he walked through its doors, a cable arrived from Eisenhower granting him asylum.5
At six a.m., Nagy too left parliament and sought asylum in the Yugoslav embassy. By the end of the day, a few dozen other leading politicians and their families would be in there with him. Only one cabinet member remained in parliament: the political philosopher István Bibó. He issued a statement defending the Hungarian rebellion against all charges of counterrevolution and fascism. He called for “passive resistance” against the invading Soviet army and whatever puppet government it might install.
“I am not in a position to command armed resistance,” he admitted. “I joined the cabinet a day ago, I have not received any information on the military situation, and it would be irresponsible of me to dispose of the dear blood of Hungarian youths. Hungary has paid with enough lives to show its insistence on freedom and justice to the world. It is now the turn of the great powers of the world to show the authority of the principles laid down in the UN Charter and the power of the freedom-loving people of the world.”6 Bibó declared Anna Kéthly, a social democrat minister from Nagy’s administration, Hungary’s representative abroad. On Nagy’s urging, Kéthly had attended the Socialist International in Vienna on November 1. Unable to return to Hungary that day, she had flown to New York to petition the United Nations.
In the Yugoslav embassy, Imre Nagy was listening to the radio. He heard János Kádár’s voice summoning help from Moscow. One of his fellow refugees remembered Nagy’s only comment: “They will execute me.”7
It had been Gamal Abdel Nasser’s turn for a sleepless night. “He admitted that he had wept and that he had apparently lost the state,” remembered Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi, who had breakfast with him in Cairo.8 Egypt accepted Canada’s plan for resolution of hostilities and repeated the offer it had made the day before of a cease-fire. Meanwhile, the British minister Antony Head and the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Gerald Templer, had arrived in Cyprus to reassess the war plan.
Everything was to be reined in so that the operation looked as much as possible like the peacekeeping initiative Eden was trying to pretend it was—and to differentiate it from what Khrushchev was doing in Hungary. Keightley was persuaded to abandon the element of surprise and warn Port Said inhabitants to leave their homes twenty-four hours ahead of the planned assault there. Both British and French battleships would avoid using their big guns: nothing above 4.5 inches would be fired. Following Nasser’s order for Egyptian forces to retreat from Sinai to the mainland, Port Said was sparsely defended. It might be possible for paratroops to be dropped ahead of schedule the next morning, meaning that they might take the town by the evening without a naval bombardment. If so, the bombardment planned for November 6 would be canceled too. Keightley estimated they could take Ismailia by November 8, and Suez itself by November 12.9 Most important, the visitors relieved Keightley of any political objective. There would be no strike against Cairo. Nasser would not be toppled. Operations would now be strictly confined to the Canal Zone.10
Jacques Baeyens, a diplomatic counsel to the French armed forces, recorded a conversation with his military chief in Cyprus after the meeting with Head. “It is clear that Eden’s government faces growing parliamentary opposition . . . while on the international stage Paris and London are the object of general reprobation directed and orchestrated by the Kremlin and the White House,” he wrote. “Conclusion: it is necessary to go as fast and as far as possible, to take our dues.”11
0700 London // 0800 Budapest
For the last few hours, the telephones in Hungary’s parliament had been ringing constantly. The calls came in from regional revolutionary councils and from the industrial districts around Budapest. The Soviets were coming. The Soviets could not be stopped. Valiant rebels put up barricades on the roads and tried to push the Red Army back. For the most part, they were lightly armed and could barely slow the advance. This was not the guerrilla battle of Budapest of the previous week. Operation Whirlwind was a war of conquest.
The Associated Press in Vienna received telex messages from a newspaper office in Hungary, though they were sent by a combatant rather than a journalist. He could hear shells exploding nearby and jet planes roaring overhead. There were, he estimated, about 200 to 250 people in the building, aged from fifteen to forty, around 50 of whom were women. They had rifles, carbines, and machine guns and were making Molotov cocktails and hand grenades as the tanks approached. “People are jumping up at the tanks, throwing hand grenades inside and then slamming the drivers’ windows,” he reported. “The Hungarian people are not afraid of death. It is only a pity that we can’t stand this for long.” Later, he added, “It can’t be allowed that people attack tanks with their bare hands. What is the United Nations doing?”
The United Nations was waiting for the question of Hungary to go to the General Assembly after the Soviet veto in the Security Council. This bureaucracy could not be bypassed. It had no army. It was still trying to work out if it could create one for Egypt. “We will hold out to the last drop of blood,” the man telexed to Vienna. “Downstairs there are men who have only one hand grenade. I am running over to the window in the next room to shoot. But I will be back if there is anything new.” He repeated, “Where is the UN? . . . The Parliament and its vicinity is crowded with tanks. . . . Planes are flying overhead but can’t be counted there are so many. The tanks are coming in long lines.”
He went to shoot, then returned to the telex machine. “They just brought us a rumor that the American troops will be here within one or two hours. . . . Don’t worry about us. We are strong even if we are a small nation. When the fighting is over we will rebuild our unhappy country.”12
American troops were not on the way. By eight a.m., the Soviets had the airfields and roads, the Danube bridges, the central telephone exchange, and parliament. The last words heard on free Budapest radio were spoken by the writer Gyula (Julius) Háy, appealing to the intellectuals of the world to come to Hungary’s aid. “You know all the facts,” he said. “It is useless to comment on them. Help Hungary! . . . Help! Help! Help!” Then, with a snap, the air went dead.13
The people of Britain were agitated that morning, both for and against their government. An excoriating editorial appeared in London’s liberal, middle-class Observer newspaper, written by the former Liberal MP and chairman of the Observer’s board of trustees Dingle Foot, and by the paper’s editor, David Astor. “We had not realised that our Government was capable of such folly and such crookedness,” it said. “Never since 1783 has Great Britain made herself so universally disliked. That was the year in which the Government of Lord North, faced with the antagonism of almost the whole civilised world, was compelled to recognise the independence of the American Colonies. . . .
“In the eyes of the whole world, the British and French Governments have acted, not as policemen, but as gangsters,” it continued. “It is no longer possible to bomb countries because you fear that your trading interests will be harmed.” It called for Eden to go.14 Many readers felt this editorial was disloyal; some canceled their subscriptions. But more yet seemed to agree with it.
Twenty thousand members of the public crammed into Trafalgar Square and Whitehall in a protest organized by the National Council of Labour. The Labour MP Anthony Greenwood—“wearing a strident red tie,” according to the London Times—spoke to the crowd, claiming the British government had imperiled the United Nations “merely to satisfy the conceit and vanity of that foolish man Sir Anthony Eden.” The most prominent politician of the socialist left, Aneurin Bevan, also spoke. “If Eden’s sincere in what he is saying—and he may be—then he is too stupid to be prime minister,” the ebullient Welshman said. “He is either a knave or a fool. In both capacities we do not want him.”15
Chester Cooper was among those in the square. “What I saw that day was a depth of feeling on the part of young university students, of old manual workers, and of many ages and classes in between that I had not realized existed in Britain,” he wrote. “The vast majority was loudly and passionately opposed to Eden and his Middle East policy.” Some of those present were pro-Eden, “but the police removed them from the square when they appeared to be in danger of being drawn and quartered by the angry crowd. The march toward Number 10 had ugly overtones; large scale violence seemed likely if the demonstrators broke through the cordon of police.”16
When he heard about the demonstration, Winston Churchill was horrified—especially when he was told that some in the crowd were foreigners. “I would never have believed that we would allow that gutter-muck to come to insult us and dictate our national policies in Trafalgar Square,” he told his private secretary.17
The semblance of unity behind Eden in the British military and government was falling apart. Lord Mountbatten had not been reassured by the prime minister’s claims that his targets in Egypt were military. He wrote to the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Hailsham, in sharp terms. The situation in Egypt, he said, was extremely bad, and civilian casualties could not be avoided. “However repugnant the task the Navy will carry out its orders,” he wrote. “Nevertheless as its professional head I must register the strongest possible protest at this use of my service; and would ask you as the responsible Minister to convey that protest to the Prime Minister.” There was an explosive final paragraph: “I recognise that a serving officer cannot back his protest by resignation at a time like this, so I must ask you to handle this whole matter on behalf of the Navy. Bearing in mind all the implications I must ask you, after consulting the Prime Minister, to give me an order to stay or to go.”
Hailsham passed this on to Eden, pointing out that it would be “disastrous” to relieve Mountbatten of his duties at this point. He wrote to Mountbatten ordering him to stay at his post. “If anything happens to impair the honour of the Navy I must resign,” he noted. “In the meantime you are entitled to be protected by a direct order from me.”18
Following Eden’s broadcast to the nation the night before, Hugh Gaitskell requested the right to reply. Eden let it be known through his chief whip, Edward Heath, that forces were now committed and therefore it was inappropriate for the opposition to oppose the government. Gaitskell took it up with the BBC: granting a right to reply to any ministerial broadcast considered “controversial” was within its power. The BBC dithered. Gaitskell threatened to accuse it publicly of suppressing the opposition. The BBC permitted him to go ahead.19
Gaitskell used his response to destroy Eden’s case. The invasion could not be about protecting British lives and property, he said, for there was no rescue operation in place; British civilians in Egypt had been put in far greater danger by military action. It could not be about keeping the canal open, for the canal had been blocked. And it was evidently not about separating two armies, for airfields had been bombed and troops landed only on one side, Egypt—and then a hundred miles behind the front.
“I cannot but feel hearing today’s heart-breaking news from Hungary, how tragic it is that at the very moment when the whole world should be united in denouncing this flagrant, ruthless, savage aggression by Russia, against a liberty-loving people, I can’t help feeling how tragic it is that we, by our criminal folly, should have lost the moral leadership of which we were once so proud,” he said. He called for Britain to accept the United Nations resolution for an immediate cease-fire.
Finally, he talked of Eden. “I bear him no ill will,” he said. “We have been personally quite friendly. But his policy this last week has been disastrous. And he is utterly, utterly discredited in the world.
“Only one thing can save the reputation and the honour of our country—Parliament must repudiate the Government’s policy. The Prime Minister must resign.”20
“The week just past has been the worst by far in my life,” wrote Eden’s press secretary, William Clark, in his diary. “The knowledge of collusion, the deception, the hypocrisy . . . I am really getting a bit hysterical myself. It seems to me that the PM is mad, literally mad, and that he went so that day [October 5] his temperature rose to 105º.” Clark felt compassionate toward Eden when he was in his presence, but whenever he left the prime minister, “my violent bitter contempt and hatred for a man who has destroyed my world and so much of my faith burns up again. Then I long to be free as a journalist to drive this government from power and keep the cowards and crooks out of power for all time.”21
1530 London
There was a bleak meeting of Eden’s Egypt Committee at three thirty p.m. Selwyn Lloyd read out a letter from Baghdad. “Today our contacts with Iraqis through the Administration, who were previously our convinced friends, have been closing down,” wrote the British ambassador there. “We shall soon be cut off from sources of contact and co-operation, apart from the risk any moment of violent demonstrations. Almost all we have built up here over many years and with such pains has been shaken nearly beyond repair.”22 A telephone call came through from Pierson Dixon in New York, warning again that a resolution was about to be passed in the United Nations putting sanctions on Britain and France, probably withholding oil.
“Oil sanctions!” exclaimed Harold Macmillan. “That finishes it.”23
A letter from Dag Hammarskjöld at the United Nations demanded that Eden call off the war immediately, in time for Hammarskjöld to announce it to the other parties at eight p.m. London time. Hammarskjöld wrote that he believed the General Assembly would reject outright the prospect of any British and French forces forming part of the United Nations force in Egypt. Until this point, Eden had convinced himself (and apparently many in his cabinet) that British and French forces could be transferred nominally to United Nations control—but would effectively be able to finish their mission and take the canal.
Following the resolution passed overnight, the United Nations would now send troops to Egypt—and Israel had indicated that it might accept a cease-fire. This would have allowed Eden to cancel the British land invasion. Yet at the same time, Head reported from Cyprus that paratroops could be dropped ahead of schedule the following day.
There were three choices. The first was to proceed with the parachute drop at Port Said the next morning as Head suggested, repeating the offer to hand over to the United Nations as soon as the canal was secure. As part of this option, Eden would also insist that the United Nations accept British and French troops as part of its peacekeeping force.
The second was to delay the parachute drop for twenty-four hours until the morning of November 6. This would allow time for Egypt and Israel to accept the principle of a peacekeeping force and for the General Assembly to consider whether to authorize Anglo-French forces as peacekeepers. This second option was a gamble; it risked the military operation’s success but had the potential to look more legitimate.
The third was to call off the war altogether, as Eden put it, “on the grounds that we had in fact put an end to the Israeli-Egyptian conflict.”24 Eden did not admit that he had also started it.
Eden spoke with Lloyd. On the grounds that they did not yet have the canal, both agreed that the show must go on. They prepared themselves to take the case for the first option to the full cabinet that evening.25
1200 Washington DC // 1700 London // 1800 Budapest
Using the discreet series of interconnecting corridors between the Whitehall buildings, which kept him safely out of public view, Eden crept from his office in Downing Street to the Cabinet Office Building. From a corner window, he peeked down at where the protest against his policy was still going on. “I could see a large and angry crowd, in which tempers were evidently running extremely high,” he wrote later. “Opposite Downing Street, near the Cenotaph, the marching stopped. As the crowd grew larger, the shouting grew louder. Some of the most militant demonstrators had clearly resolved to get into Downing Street. The police were equally determined to prevent them, and those on horseback charged the crowd when they began to break down the temporary barriers that had been erected to keep them out. It was a terrifying scene.”
Fireworks and a smoke bomb were thrown among the horses. Mounted police beat demonstrators with batons. “One middle-aged woman, in respectable Sunday navy blue, screamed in terror, ‘Don’t kill me,’” reported the Manchester Guardian, “and her husband took up a defensive posture.” Eight policemen were injured, including one who was dragged from his horse. Casualties among the protesters were not recorded, though the Guardian mentioned that two or three people were taken away in ambulances. Twenty-seven were arrested.26
The police regained control, and the crowd was diverted toward Parliament Square. With hindsight, at least, Eden would be struck by what was happening. “This was not a demonstration organised by a few left-wing extremists,” he admitted in his autobiography. “It was supported by thousands of people who genuinely believed that what was happening was politically, militarily and morally wrong.”27
At five p.m., Clarissa Eden remembered, her husband came into the drawing room at 10 Downing Street with the cabinet secretary. He had dramatic news. Building on their offer of a cease-fire the previous night, the Israelis were now saying that they would negotiate with Egypt and other Arab states immediately—bringing the war, and potentially the Arab-Israeli conflict, to a close. Eden called the cabinet to another meeting, during which he spoke privately to Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan, and Rab Butler.
There are conflicting versions of what happened at that meeting from Lady Eden, Butler, the official minutes, and others present, though the differences may merely be due to the fact that this was a long meeting where lots of conditional variants on the three possibilities Eden set forth were discussed. Broadly, it appears that three or four cabinet members were inclined to call off the war altogether: Walter Monckton, Lord Salisbury, Patrick Buchan-Hepburn, and possibly Butler. “I took the line that were the news [about Israel] correct, we could not possibly continue our expedition,” Butler wrote in his memoirs. “It had not been my idea that we were going in to stop hostilities, but if they had already stopped we had no justification for invasion.” Yet other witnesses suggest Butler opted for the compromise position of the twenty-four-hour postponement, along with Lord Kilmuir, Derick Heathcoat-Amory, and possibly Iain Macleod. The rest of the cabinet agreed with Eden and Lloyd that the paratroop drop should go ahead the following morning. According to the official records, everybody agreed ultimately to support whatever majority view emerged—with the exception of Monckton. Lady Eden claimed that both Monckton and Nigel Birch dissented and wanted to resign; she also claimed Lord Selkirk dissented but “was unintelligible.”
Eden was driven to “consider his position,” according to Butler. Lady Eden records that her husband “told them if they wouldn’t go on he would have to resign. Rab said if he did resign no one else could form a government.”28 Then a message came through from the Israeli minister Golda Meir contradicting the news. The Israelis were not about to start negotiating with Egypt or other Arab countries. “Everyone laughed and banged the table with relief, except Birch and Walter Monckton who looked glum,” reported Lady Eden.29 The war was back on.
The demonstration in Trafalgar Square could be heard through the window. “There was a steady hum of noise,” remembered Selwyn Lloyd, “and then every few minutes a crescendo and an outburst of howling or booing.”30 The cabinet was not put off its stride, and agreed with Eden and Lloyd to pursue the first option: to press on.
By this time, thought Chester Cooper, following the animated telephone call he had received from Robert Amory the previous day and Dulles’s hospitalization, “a reconsideration of policy [was] taking place throughout Washington. By the weekend, the Administration was softening its recriminatory approach towards London, Paris, and Tel Aviv and seemed anxious to close the breach in the Western alliance.”31 In fact, the picture was more complicated. Eisenhower was still angry—but the question of Hungary was now acute, and the United States needed the backing of its allies at the United Nations. The president wrote a strong letter to Bulganin that day, describing himself as “inexpressibly shocked” at Soviet policy. “I urge in the name of humanity and in the cause of peace that the Soviet Union take action to withdraw Soviet forces from Hungary immediately,” he went on, “and to permit the Hungarian people to enjoy and exercise the human rights and fundamental freedoms affirmed for all peoples in the United Nations Charter.”32
Christian Pineau sensed the reconsideration of policy in Washington and attempted to capitalize on it. He made a broadcast declaring that the whole of France would “bow before the courage and martyrdom of a [Hungarian] people ready to die for their independence.” He added sniffily that the United Nations “and certain Governments” should not have bothered to “devote precious hours to saving the face of an Egyptian dictator” instead of focusing on Hungary.33
“For months or years to come it will be a matter of debate whether Britain’s attack on Egypt sparked Russia’s attack on Hungary,” opined the Manchester Guardian.34 Many suspected the timing was opportunistic. At the United Nations, “the Soviet Union was promoting this controversy [in Suez] in order to provide a cover for their own bloody repression in Hungary,” remembered Eisenhower’s adviser Herman Phleger, “and they were constantly using this to test the United States’ determination to stand by the [United Nations] Charter in order to show that, if we didn’t stand up to the Charter with respect to Suez, that then it was no crime for them to violate the Charter in Hungary. There isn’t any doubt that the Hungary situation played a part in this.”35
Hungary “greatly complicated the Suez problem,” continued Phleger. “The revolt was met by the most blood-thirsty Communist repression which immediately called for action by the UN. But it accented the fact that if the UN were to deal lightly with what might turn out to be an Israeli-British-French invasion, it couldn’t condemn as severely as it ought, the action by the Soviet Union in Hungary.”36
From Austria, American diplomats were reporting that Hungarian refugees were streaming over the border—“2000 so far today is latest guess”—in every place the Soviets had not yet set up surveillance. The Austrian government appealed to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for emergency support.37 An American diplomat in Zagreb reported: “Hunted in area around Cakovec near Hungarian border November 4. Plenty rabbits. No (repeat no) Hungarians. However, radio Zagreb reported border crossings without saying where.”38
Clare Booth Luce, the American ambassador to Italy, sent a private note to Eisenhower. “Mr. President, Franco British action on Suez is a small wound to their prestige but American inaction about Hungary could be a fatal wound to ours,” she wrote. “Let us not (rpt not) ask for whom the bell tolls in Hungary today. It tolls for us if freedom’s holy light is extinguished in blood and iron there. . . . And while we wait for the next light to break which surely will then be very ugly and very atomic, we will hear a growing torrent of tongues in many lands turning the deathless glory of Hungary into America’s everlasting shame.” She begged the president to appear in person before the United Nations General Assembly, to call NATO into session, to assist Austria in case of aggression spreading there, to “confine” Soviet diplomats in the United States until American equivalents in Hungary were released, and to break diplomatic relations with Moscow if the Soviet army continued to fire on civilians.39
The United States did nothing. According to the diplomat Robert Murphy, everybody in the State Department “was terribly distressed, considered every possible avenue of the solution, what could be done, and really none of us had whatever imagination it took to discover another solution. We were just boxed.” He went on: “Even some of the Swiss at that point, who have not been noted for their great bravery for entering into risks, said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s show some courage’—well now, what did that mean? How do you show that courage? Because I don’t have the slightest doubt that any intervention on our part would have meant confrontation militarily with the Soviet Union.”40
Inside the CIA in Washington, Frank Wisner was the agent most closely connected to Hungary. Wisner believed passionately in helping the rebels. Yet as the twin crises of Suez and Hungary unfolded, the Dulles brothers had both begun to feel that giving any form of help beyond moral support would be impossible. If they aided Hungarians under threat of invasion by a much stronger power in the form of the Soviet Union, why not aid Egyptians when they were menaced by Britain and France? According to the British writer and historian Leonard Mosley, this was too much for Wisner to take. He lost his temper in one meeting, shouting that everybody present was “a bunch of goddamned Commies,” and was obliged to take several days off. “Soon Polly Wisner was calling up anxiously to say that Frank kept taking out his revolver and talking to it,” wrote Mosley.41
“The hollowness of American political rhetoric suddenly struck me,” remembered CIA agent Wilbur Eveland, then in Beirut. “[O]n October 29, the White House had recommitted the United States to aiding any victims of aggression, but what were we doing to help the Egyptians and the Hungarians? Nothing: trapped now by the perfidy of our own allies, we could do little but make speeches designed to encourage peoples who had taken the United States at its word.”42
Back in 1952, during Eisenhower’s first presidential campaign, Foster Dulles had a series of debates with the Democratic politician Averell Harriman on how best to approach the Soviet bloc. Dulles argued for actively pursuing liberation, though by encouraging rebellion rather than sending American troops. “I violently disagreed with his liberation policy,” said Harriman. “I thought that was a very ill-advised form of playing domestic politics with international problems. I was gravely concerned that the Eastern Europeans would misinterpret it, that they’d consider that we could do something to go in and help them free themselves.”
So it came to pass in Hungary. “I recall quite vividly that I said, ‘Foster, if you follow this policy you’re going to have the death of some brave people on your conscience,’” said Harriman. “That was the way I felt about it. I wasn’t playing politics.”43
“Poor fellows, poor fellows,” said Eisenhower of the Hungarians during the revolution. “I think about them all the time. I wish there were some way of helping them.”44 But the Americans did not help them. The United States government remained wary of gradual change in the Soviet bloc, despite the example of Tito. While the Hungarian rebels opposed the straitened form of Communism that had been imposed on Hungary, as well as Soviet occupation, they were not explicitly antisocialist or pro-American: Imre Nagy remained a Marxist-Leninist and continued to call for incremental reform until it was too late. The Hungarian journalist and historian Charles Gati explained the situation using that most American of all analogies, baseball: “Americans wanted to believe that they did not have to settle for a single because a home run was possible. They wanted to believe that the appeal of freedom was so strong that they would not have to use force and yet the oppressed people would rise—and somehow prevail.”45
0200 (Nov. 5) New York
As news of the crushing of Hungary came through, discussion at the United Nations alternated between the Soviet bloc and the Middle East. Lester Pearson had been lobbying hard from seven p.m., both in the assembly and through intense negotiations with the key players, for his plan to establish a United Nations Expeditionary Force for Suez. Dag Hammarskjöld presented his preliminary proposals on this force. He suggested it be drawn from countries that were not members of the Security Council. He nominated the Canadian General E.L.M. Burns, chief of staff at the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in the Palestinian territories, to head the force. At the same time, Israel declared that it no longer recognized existing armistice agreements and demanded the withdrawal of UNTSO from the Gaza Strip. It seemed that Israel might now be planning to occupy Gaza permanently.46
Hammarskjöld’s plan was supported by fifty-seven countries and opposed by none, with nineteen abstaining. The abstentions included Britain, France, Israel, Egypt, and all the Soviet bloc nations (Yugoslavia supported the plan). Pearson’s resolution was passed as United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1000. At last, the world council had teeth.
The Soviet representative spoke to condemn Britain and France for their “hypocrisy” and “barbarous bombing” of Suez, and for what he called their “rape” of the Egyptian people. Henry Cabot Lodge, for the United States, replied: “God knows, I want to see bloodshed in Egypt stopped. There is cynicism in the Soviet representative’s words while his army is spilling blood in Budapest.” At 3:13 a.m., news arrived of the full Soviet assault on Hungary. The council reconvened, with every member apart from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia condemning the action.47
“It was a night of suspense for all who listened through the small hours to direct broadcasts of the United Nations debate, which were sometimes switched to Vienna for the latest word of the tragedy closing on Budapest,” reported the London Times correspondent in Washington, “and it is this that fires the American mind with horror and distress far surpassing the mixed emotions of resentment and dismay over the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt.”48
Though he had stood strong in public, Gamal Abdel Nasser was now close to cracking under the stress. He was prone to bouts of weeping over the impending loss of Egypt’s freedom. He felt Abdel Hakim Amer had kept him out of military planning, and had weakened too far the defenses in the Canal Zone. He had been listening to a popular song by the singer Abdel Halim Hafiz. The lyrics went: “We have left Egypt a trust in your hands.”
“I have been questioning myself,” Nasser said to Mohamed Heikal. “Have I behaved well towards this trust or not?”
Nasser insisted that Amer strengthen the defenses around Port Said, adding a third battalion of infantry to the two already there, six hundred national guards, several companies dedicated to organizing guerrilla war, and four Soviet SU-100 tank destroyers, which had arrived only on the evening of November 4. He also sent a train loaded with small arms to be distributed among the people. These would arrive just before dawn the next morning.49
Nasser wanted to go to the front himself. “We told him the area was being strafed and bombed and that his car would be seen,” remembered Heikal. “But he refused to listen to us.”50 That night, under cover of darkness and without telling Amer, he traveled to Port Said with his close colleague Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi. They drove past the wrecks of scores of military vehicles, shot to pieces by British, French, and Israeli planes. Nasser’s morale sank lower and lower.
“These are the remnants of a destroyed army,” he observed miserably. In English, he added, “I was defeated by my own army.”
“Don’t give up,” Baghdadi replied.
“You know I never despair,” said Nasser.
Yet Baghdadi feared for his friend. “I felt,” he remembered, “that a broken man was in front of me.”51
They arrived in the small hours to the news that Anglo-French forces were landing. Nasser’s mood was lifted by the high morale of defenders at the front—and there was no time for a private breakdown. The president turned his car around and headed back to Cairo.