How It Might Have Been

How would ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson have handled the Suez crisis? He is much too discreet to say publicly, but privately he has been telling his Washington law associates and fellow guests at Georgetown cocktail parties that the Eisenhower Administration was all wrong on Suez. Acheson believes that "fumbling" by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles estranged the British and led them to their decision not to advise the U.S. of their plan to attack Egypt with the French and Israelis. Acheson does not necessarily approve the attack on Egypt, but thinks that once it was begun, the U.S. should have used the threat of its fleet, if necessary, to guarantee that the attack would be successful and bring Nasser's downfall. The U.S., he adds, should never have taken its case against the aggressors to the United Nations until the Suez Canal was in British-French hands, and there, somehow managing not to look like aggressors, the Americans should have backed up the British and French "by skillful and artful means."

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