However, when the next day dawned, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would remove its weapons from Cuba. Kennedy had negotiated a deal whereby the US missiles in Turkey would be removed in secret. Though few in Moscow, Washington, Cuba or Turkey were entirely satisfied with the outcome, the crisis was over.
Kennedy emerged from the crisis with immense credit. He had been tough but not rash and had called Khrushchev’s bluff. The Soviet leader, by contrast, was criticized for his recklessness and lost face: in 1964 he was overthrown in a Kremlin coup by Leonid Brezhnev. The rest of the world was simply relieved that the greatest nuclear crisis in history had somehow been averted.
Khrushchev backed down over Cuba, but in 1963 there were still great tensions in Germany, where Western and Soviet forces faced each other on either side of the divided country. Kennedy gave one of the great speeches of modern times in Berlin, where the Soviets had recently built the infamous wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West. “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in,” he said. In the same speech, he used the famous phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” calling for solidarity across the Western world.
As well as being involved in a military stand-off, the USA and the Soviet Union were in competition in the space race. In 1961 Kennedy persuaded Congress to vote $22 billion to put an American on the moon before the end of the 1960s. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, it was testament to Kennedy’s far-sighted commitment to space exploration. Less far-sighted was his commitment to increasing amounts of military support for South Vietnam in its battle with the communist North, a policy that was to mire America in a decade-long conflict that in the end it had to abandon. However, there is some evidence that Kennedy, had he lived, planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 election.
On the home front, Kennedy was initially slow to give his complete backing to the civil rights movement. But in 1962 he sent 3000 troops to the University of Mississippi to allow a black student, James Meredith, to enroll for classes. By 1963 he had thrown his whole weight behind civil rights and gave a stirring speech on national television. After his death, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he had proposed, became law.
Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, in 1963 was a moment that stopped the world in its tracks. He was gunned down while being driven through the city in an open-topped car, probably by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself murdered days later by Jack Ruby, a dubious nightclub operator. The wealth of conspiracy theories provoked by Kennedy’s death is testament to the glamorous and optimistic effect that this young and charismatic president had on the world he helped save from annihilation.
NASSER, SADAT, MUBARAK
Egypt and The Arab Spring
1918–70 & 1918–81 & 1928–
I have been a conspirator for so long that I mistrust all around me.
Gamal Abdul Nasser
Gamal Abdul Nasser was the most influential Middle Eastern leader of the mid-twentieth century, the dictator of Egypt, the region’s most powerful country, and perhaps the most popular Arab potentate since Saladin. Yet his career ended in defeat and disappointment and the failure of his secular pan-Arabism opened the door to a new Islamic fundamentalism. Nevertheless for almost twenty years he was for many Arabs El Rais—the Boss.
Born in a village near Cairo, Nasser was the son of a post office worker. He was educated in Alexandria, where he lived with his grandmother and joined the army in 1937. Egypt was then ruled by the Albanian dynasty of kings descended from Mehmet Ali, the Ottoman warlord and pasha who seized control of the county after Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion, becoming first khedives then sultans and finally kings of Egypt. The country was actually run by a hybrid elite of Ottomans and Albanians as well as Egyptians—but even this was under the domination of Britain, which had controlled Egypt since 1882. Reading widely everything from the Koran to Dickens, Nasser was political from an early age, loathing the control of the British over Egyptian life.
Studying at the military academy, he met his political ally Abdul Hakim Amer, a genial, vain, bombastic and flamboyant fellow officer with whom he served in Sudan. Hoping for a Nazi victory to overthrow British rule in Egypt, he and Amer worked to put together a group of like-minded officers. Faced with the UN plan to partition Palestine between Jewish and Arab states, Nasser was tempted to fight on the Arab side and finally got his chance when King Farouk of Egypt, obese, incompetent and debauched, joined the other countries of the Arab League in an attack on the nascent Jewish state of Israel. The Egyptians, including Nasser, advanced fast into the Negev but the young officer witnessed the ineptitude of the king and his officers as well as the lack of equipment and absence of proper preparation.
By August 1948, Nasser was the deputy commander of Egyptian units surrounded by the Israelis in the so-called Falluja Pocket. It was a formative experience: Nasser was humiliated by the disastrous war effort and on his return he formed with his friend Amer and others the Association of Free Officers. Nasser consulted with the Muslim Brotherhood, but concluded early on that their Islamic program clashed with his own Arab nationalism. The Free Officers selected General Muhammad Neguib to be their front man.
When Nasser heard in May 1952 that Farouk was planning to arrest the Free Officers, he launched an almost bloodless coup d’état, allowing the king to depart from Alexandria in his yacht with full honors. The revolutionaries were unsure whether to create a democracy or a military regime. Since Nasser was only a lieutenant colonel, Neguib became president of the new Egyptian Republic, but real power was in the hands of the Revolutionary Command Council, which was effectively controlled by Nasser in his role as deputy chairman.
In 1954, as Nasser pushed land reforms and demanded that the alarmed British should leave the Suez Canal, he clashed with the more moderate Neguib. But he asserted his confidence by taking real power as prime minister. Nasser’s passionate and elegant oratory was already captivating Egyptian audiences. In October, as Nasser addressed a huge crowd in Alexandria, a young Muslim Brother tried to assassinate him but Nasser defiantly and courageously continued his speech:
My countrymen, my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake and die for the sake of your freedom and honor. Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser … Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation.
On his return to Cairo, Neguib was deposed; Nasser became the unrivaled president, a position he retained for the next fifteen turbulent years. He appointed his crony Amer commander-in-chief of the army before launching a massive crackdown on communists and, above all, the Muslim Brotherhood. He arrested 20,000 of their members and had their leader and ideologue Sayyid Qutb executed.
Henceforth Nasser, with his tall good looks and superb oratory, was immensely popular, but it was his embrace of pan-Arabist nationalism that excited not just Egyptians but the entire Arab world, which was emerging from a century of foreign domination. Nonetheless he ruled an effective one-party state with the aid of a growing and brutal secret police, backed by an ever more corrupt and oligarchical military junta who swiftly became rich (though he himself had no interest in material matters).
Nasser committed himself to the nonaligned movement, emerging as its leader alongside Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and Nehru of India. In 1956 Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, outraging British Prime Minister Anthony Eden who, facing the decline of British imperial power, now saw Nasser as a new Hitler. The British responded by putting together a secret deal with the French and the Israelis to attack and destroy Nasser. The Israelis would invade Sinai; the Anglo-French would then “intervene.” The Israelis succeeded in a dazzling campaign to take Sinai but the British intervention was a disaster and US President Eisenhower condemned it. The Israelis were forced to withdraw and it marked the end of British imperial influence in the Middle East.