To Save a Throne

As rumors swirled around his desert kingdom, King Saud sulked in seclusion in the private quarters of his vast, chandelier-festooned palace at Riyadh. He stopped presiding over the grand luncheons and dinners served daily in the palace dining hall to visitors and hangers-on. The loudspeakers, which customarily bellow the latest news during mealtimes, were silenced. The lord of the world's richest oil sands was so strapped for cash that his yacht Monsour had been seized in Genoa for nonpayment of an Italian architect's $600,000 fee. He was under intense pressure from royal family members to take some sort of action to save the regime, i.e., the princes' enormous financial allowances.

In the streets of Riyadh outside the palace, there was open muttering against the King. The keeper of Islam's holy places was being denounced by Nasser's partisans throughout the Middle East as the dog who had plotted to kill their hero. Saud duly appointed a commission of notables to investigate Nasser's charges that he had paid out $5,600,000 for the job. But then Riyadh bankers refused to answer their questions, apparently on Saud's orders, and they indignantly resigned.

The Dynast. This, it seems, was the last straw. Saud called on his brother, Crown Prince Feisal, 54, to take charge of the country, save its finances, and make peace with Nasser. To Feisal, Saud formally granted "full power to lay down the state's internal, external and financial policies." Feisal immediately took over control of the Saudi armed forces, fired the King's two top advisers on defense and the budget. Behind the ancient veil of the remote Arabian capital, change had finally overtaken the proud throne raised to conquest and splendor by the "Lion of the Desert," the late King Ibn Saud.

Hawk-nosed, black-bearded Prince Feisal, second of old Ibn Saud's 40 sons, is at least as stalwart a Saudi dynast as his brother the King, and might well be the chieftain with the stature and ability to save the Saudi regime. He is widely considered abler, more vigorous and more cultivated than his elder brother. In the desert campaigns of the '20s and '30s he fought for his warrior-father with greater flair and daring. While his taciturn brother stayed home holding interminable levees among dusty tribal sheiks, Feisal, majestically robed and daggered, represented his country at international conferences in Europe and America.

It was he who returned from one prewar trip to convince his father that cars had it all over camels--a message that was to cost Saudi millions for air-conditioned Cadillacs. But as Saudi princes go, Feisal lives modestly, restricting himself to a couple of modest palaces and only one wife, to whom he has been married for 22 years.

The Nationalist. Feisal is an impassioned Arab nationalist, who insists that all Arabs dream of becoming "one nation, not simply a federation," and believes that Egypt's Nasser rides the wave of the future. A proud, fiercely uncompromising man, he has never forgotten that the U.S. voted against him when he led his country's U.N. delegation during the 1947 Palestine partition debate, and that Jews spat on his car in Manhattan streets. He has defended Nasser's deals with the Russians by citing Churchill's famed remark about allying with the devil if necessary to survive.

For two decades Saudi Arabia has had closer relations with the U.S. than any other Arab country. Secretary Dulles pointed out after last week's transfer of power that Feisal has always been his brother's titular Premier and Foreign Minister. Feisal himself insists he is not anti-American. Of his eight sons, two are studying at Princeton, one at Swarthmore. Twice he has chosen to come to the U.S. for medical treatment (peptic ulcers).

No change is likely in the outward terms of either the U.S. air base or the

Arabian American Oil Co.'s oil concession. But the hope that King Saud would eventually join with Hashemite Iraq and Jordan in a pro-Western Arab federation appears to have gone glimmering. Along with other foreign financial outlays, King Saud's $7,000,000 subsidy to Jordan's stout anti-Communist King Hussein is certain to come under review; at week's end Feisal was reported to have ordered withdrawal of the Saudi troops stationed in southern Jordan since the Suez crisis.

The outlook is that Feisal will officially maintain Saud's policy of "neutrality" in Arab disputes--but with this difference: Feisal will be neutral on Nasser's side, where Saud's neutrality trended in favor of King Hussein and other Arab supporters of the Eisenhower Doctrine. The unhappy probability is that Saudi Arabia may soon be shifting its weight to the other side in the Middle East lineup.

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