The Unhappy Memory

In London last week the bitterest and most divisive British political controversy of modern times flared into renewed life. Once again Englishmen argued in passionate detail the rights and wrongs of the Suez invasion of 1956. Cause of the furor: publication of Full Circle, the memoirs of former Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden.

In the Observer, Sir William Hayter, who was Britain's Ambassador to Moscow at the time, wrote that Suez "was morally repulsive to many people (myself included)." After World War II, Sir William continues, Britain, though declining as a military power, was gaining a new reputation for "moderation, wisdom, respect for international law . . . Suez blew it all away," and Britain was made to appear "the same old grasping imperialist as ever, but toothless and rather incompetent." If Eden had not resorted to force, "some kind of international element in the control of the canal would have been preserved; the weakness of Great Britain and France would not have been so publicly demonstrated, and many people now dead would be alive."

Labor Pains. Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell, plainly nettled by Eden's statement that he regarded Gaitskell's rise to leadership of the Labor Party as "a national misfortune," said that his own view of Eden as a Prime Minister was "even stronger," and bluntly called Eden's account of the Opposition's role during the Suez crisis "exceptionally misleading." By innuendo, Gaitskell revives the old charge of emotional instability in Eden caused by ill-health: "How it came about that [Eden] behaved in a manner completely at variance with his past is a mystery on which the memoirs throw no light." But Gaitskell himself came in for some digs from his own side, from Lord Morrison of Lambeth, the cockney " 'Erbie" Morrison who still resents being defeated for the party leadership by Gaitskell. As the Suez crisis deepened, wrote Lord Morrison last week, "Mr. Gaitskell and our Labor [leadership] began to take fright, to become very anti--anti-British, anti-French and anti-Israeli--and rather hysterical."

The three years since Suez have clearly not dissipated the distrust of the U.S. and contempt for the U.N. that the crisis evoked in right-wing British breasts. One of Eden's most influential advisers, the stooping, bespectacled Marquess of Salisbury (then Lord President of the Council), scornfully commented: "The fact that other members of the United Nations were not prepared, for whatever reasons, to do their duty [at Suez] was surely no excuse for us not doing ours."

Dulles' Role. In the London Sunday Times, Australia's Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who regrets only that Eden called off the attack "too promptly," calls himself still "an unrepentant supporter of Anthony Eden," though he doubts that John Foster Dulles played quite so villainous a role as Eden suggested. ("In the course of my contacts with him I found him a man of great parts and integrity.") But with a condescension toward U.S. statesmanship worthy of the British Foreign Office of 50 years ago, Drew Middleton, London bureau chief for the New York Times, suggested in a review in the Times of London that Eden's difficulties with Dulles were partly caused by Dulles' "resentment" of "Eden's easy mastery of the intricacies of international diplomacy."

Evidently speaking for most of his countrymen, whichever side they take, ex-Ambassador Hayter declared: "It is with a kind of nausea that one reverts to this disagreeable affair." It is plain that the British, who are prone to cherish the memories of their greatest defeats, have not yet found in Suez the aura of heroism and sacrifice that leads them to take pride in Gallipoli and Dunkirk.

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