During 1957, Guy Mollet’s government faced a worsening situation in Algeria as the rebellion grew. Though there were four hundred thousand French troops on the ground, the rebels would not be defeated—and after Suez, the Arab world was more united than ever against French rule. His government fell in June 1957. The French Fourth Republic collapsed entirely the following year. France reconstituted itself in 1958 as the Fifth Republic under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle. Both Mollet and Christian Pineau continued their political careers, though neither again achieved such high office. Mollet lives on in the French language as molletisme, which means, in politics, pretending to be a left-winger to win an election, but then allying with right-wing forces or becoming an arch-conservative oneself on achieving power.
Ahmed Ben Bella, the Algerian rebel leader kidnapped by French forces on October 22, 1956, was imprisoned in France until 1962. When Algeria won its independence, he was released and became the country’s first president. He was deposed in a coup in 1965 and was kept under house arrest for many years before eventually going into exile. He was finally allowed to return to Algeria in the 1990s, and witnessed the beginning of the Arab Spring before his death in 2012 at the age of ninety-three.
Maurice Challe, the French general who delivered the news of the Franco-Israeli plot to Eden, became disillusioned with the French government when it looked likely to give independence to Algeria in 1961. With three other retired generals, he attempted to stage a coup aimed at toppling President Charles de Gaulle and installing military rule in France and Algeria. It failed. Challe was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He served five and was given an amnesty by de Gaulle in 1968.
On July 14, 1958, a group calling themselves the Free Officers, modeling themselves on Nasser and his associates, overthrew the government of Iraq. King Feisal, Crown Prince Abdulillah, and members of their family were taken into the palace courtyard and shot. Anthony Eden’s friend Nuri es-Said attempted to flee the next day disguised as a woman. He was captured and killed. The naked corpses of Abdulillah and Nuri were “dragged through the streets of Baghdad amid scenes of unmentionable beastliness,” Eden wrote.1 The British embassy in Baghdad was ransacked and burned.2
John Bagot Glubb, “Glubb Pasha,” moved back to Britain with his four children: Godfrey, who converted to Islam and became known as Faris; an adopted Bedouin daughter, Naomi; and two Palestinian refugees, John and Mary. Glubb Pasha wrote twenty books in retirement. He died in 1986. A service of thanksgiving for his life was held at Westminster Abbey, at which King Hussein of Jordan gave a speech praising his integrity and devotion to the Arab world.
Though he was widely seen as an impetuous and insecure young ruler at the time of the Suez crisis, King Hussein of Jordan ultimately became an assured monarch and a force for peace in the Middle East. Jordan became only the second Arab nation to make peace with Israel when he negotiated it in 1994; Egypt was the first, in 1979. When Hussein died in 1999, he was lauded by the leaders of the United States and Britain, as well as those of Israel and the Palestinian territories.
King Saud of Saudi Arabia subscribed to the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, which brought him into conflict with Egypt. Saud attempted to have his former ally Nasser assassinated in 1958, paying a Syrian intelligence officer £1.9 million to do the job. The hit failed and was exposed. Nasser’s popularity was boosted by his survival; Saudi Arabia was deeply embarrassed. There was a lengthy power struggle between Saud and his brother Faisal, which Faisal won. Saud was deposed in 1964. He went into exile and was offered asylum by a forgiving Nasser. Yet he fell out with Nasser again in 1967 and lived his remaining two years in Greece. The United States has continued its close alliance with Saudi Arabia under successive monarchs.
The CIA made another attempt to stage a coup in Syria in April 1957, but it came to nothing. The agency tried once again over the summer of that year, but in August the Syrian authorities discovered the plot and kicked out the conspirators—including the United States military attaché. The Soviets benefited from these failed attempts to undermine Syria’s government.3 Allen Dulles resigned as director of the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. He destroyed most of his papers, excepting a few thin and magnificently uninformative files, which remain at Princeton University.
Following his battle with cancer in November 1956, John Foster Dulles convalesced in Key West, Florida. He recovered and returned to his position as secretary of state. In April 1959, though, his health finally forced him to resign. He died the following month.
Imre Nagy was given a guarantee of safe conduct from the Yugoslav embassy by the new leader of Hungary, János Kádár. This was not honored. When he left on November 23 with his fellow refugees and climbed onto a bus provided, he found it full of Soviet officers—who took them straight to Soviet headquarters. Tito was furious. Khrushchev was unrepentant. “As soon as Nagy was delivered to his apartment, he was put under arrest—as well he should have been!” he remembered.4 In a secret trial, Nagy was found guilty of treason and of organizing the overthrow of the Hungarian state. He was hanged in July 1958, along with Pál Maléter and others. They were buried in a prison yard and later moved to unmarked graves, into which they were dumped facedown. The KGB realized afterward that this had been terrible for the image of Communism. Nagy and his colleagues would be the last people in the Soviet bloc to be sentenced to death after a political trial.5 They were disinterred and reburied with full honors in 1989. It was estimated that two hundred thousand Hungarians attended Nagy’s belated funeral.
Cardinal József Mindszenty, the Catholic leader who had been imprisoned for eight years under Communist rule in Hungary, enjoyed his freedom for just four days in 1956. He remained in the American legation in Budapest for the following fifteen years. Eventually, in 1971, the Hungarian government allowed him to leave the country. He spent his remaining years in exile in Vienna, dying in 1975.
Frank Wisner, the CIA agent who had most wanted the United States to aid the rebellion in Hungary, suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized in 1957. He killed himself with a shotgun in 1965.
Nikita Khrushchev remained leader of the Soviet Union for a few more turbulent years, involving himself in the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis, authorizing the building of the Berlin Wall, and falling out with Mao Tse-tung’s China. In 1964, he was ousted by a consortium led by the chairman of the presidium, Leonid Brezhnev. When Brezhnev died in 1982, he was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who had been Soviet ambassador to Hungary at the time of the 1956 rebellion.
Josip Broz Tito continued liberalizing as president of Yugoslavia, relaxing travel restrictions and allowing the Catholic church to operate. He reduced his active role in government from the mid-1970s, and died in 1980.
By the early 1960s, the Soviets began to realize that they needed to allow Hungary more leeway. Kádár softened the most egregious aspects of Communist rule. There was an echo of the Hungarian rebellion in the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, which was crushed by five invading armies: those of the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria—and Hungary. The Eastern Bloc endured until the 1980s, when the Soviet Union began to weaken and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, began a process of glasnost (openness). From 1989, Communist governments fell mostly peacefully in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, and violently in Romania. These, and the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, ended Communism as a system in Eastern Europe and Soviet-controlled Asia.
Lester B. Pearson, the Canadian secretary of state for external affairs, was credited with creating the United Nations Expeditionary Force on November 4, 1956, ending Britain and France’s claim to be peacekeepers in Suez. In recognition, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1957. John Foster Dulles, who was closely aligned with Pearson but was incapacitated during those crucial days, never received the Nobel Prize he was said to have coveted. Pearson served as prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968.
David Ben-Gurion stepped down from the Israeli prime ministership in 1963 for “personal reasons,” partly to do with continuing political fallout from the Lavon affair. He continued to be involved in politics, notably during the Six-Day War, until he finally retired in 1970 to his kibbutz in the Negev desert. He died in 1973, immediately after the Yom Kippur War.
Ariel Sharon faced an inquiry as to whether he had overstepped his orders during the Suez War by sending a large force into the Mitla Pass on October 31 instead of a reconnaissance group, and whether he had disobeyed orders by engaging in a battle. This further exacerbated his feud with Moshe Dayan, who believed him to have been guilty.6 Such was Sharon’s intimacy with Ben-Gurion that he was soon forgiven and was sent to study military science at the British Army’s Staff College in Camberley, England, in 1957. He returned to Israel and played a commanding role in the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the Lebanon War. He served as Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006, when he was incapacitated by a stroke. Under his leadership, Israel controversially disengaged from the Gaza Strip, withdrawing the IDF and bulldozing Jewish settlements. Sharon died in 2014. Shimon Peres, the key negotiator between France and Israel, served twice as Israel’s prime minister and as its president from 2007 to 2014.
Sir Anthony Eden resigned from the British prime ministership on January 9, 1957. On January 18, he left for another holiday, as far away as possible: the prime minister of New Zealand invited him to spend the rest of Britain’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. To the surprise of some who doubted his health, he lived for another twenty years—and never gave up protesting his righteousness over Suez. Despite the disaster of Suez, Britain did retain some influence in the Middle East. On four further occasions, it considered military action against Nasser again: the 1957 Syrian crisis, the aftermath of the Iraq revolution in 1958, the 1964 Yemen crisis, and in 1967 during the blockade of the Straits of Tiran.7
After Eden’s resignation, Queen Elizabeth II was presented with a choice between Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler as her next prime minister. Macmillan had been a Suez hawk; Butler had been more cautious. Even so, the pressure of right-wing forces within the Conservative party ensured that it was recommended to the queen that she choose Macmillan. “In the myopic eyes of the Tory die-hards, Butler had helped to give India away and had revamped Conservative policy after 1945 so that it was indistinguishable from pale pink Socialism,” wrote Anthony Nutting; “and now he was accused of having given in to blackmail from America and the United Nations and surrendered the last position of strength from which we might have negotiated a settlement of the Suez Canal question on our terms.”8 The queen accepted the party’s recommendation and chose Macmillan. At Eden’s request, the new prime minister destroyed his apparently candid diaries of the Suez crisis, dating between October 4, 1956, and February 3, 1957.9
When his second term as president of the United States ended in 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower retired to his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His vice president, Richard Nixon, lost the election to the Democrat John F. Kennedy. Eisenhower died in 1969. Nixon served as president from 1969 to 1974, his second term ending in resignation and humiliation following the Watergate scandal.
Gamal Abdel Nasser remained a towering figure in Arab and African politics. He led the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria for its brief existence. He resigned as leader of Egypt after his defeat at the hands of Israel in the Six-Day War, but withdrew his resignation the next day. In 1968, he began the War of Attrition against Israel. He died of a heart attack just after an Arab League summit in 1970, prompting mass mourning throughout the Arab world.
The Suez Canal reopened to shipping, except for Israeli vessels, on April 9, 1957. Thereafter, it was managed by the Egyptian Suez Canal Authority, the nationalized successor to the Suez Canal Company. British and French claims that Egyptians would be unable to run the canal themselves proved unfounded. Its revenues now provide the government of Egypt with around $450 million a month. A second Suez Canal was opened in 2015.