RELUCTANT REVOLUTIONARY

THE best hope that the Turkish army's coup marked a step back to democracy instead of away from it lay in the character of the man who is now simultaneously President, Premier and Defense Minister.

General Cemal Gursel (pronounced Jem-fl/ Goor-sell) is a professional soldier whose troops affectionately call him Cemal Aga (Big Brother Cemal). Silver-haired. scrub-mustached and corpulent (5 ft. 10 in., more than 200 Ibs.), he was born of a conservative, middle-class family in Eastern Anatolia 65 years ago, was commissioned a lieutenant in the Ot toman army at 19. As a World War I artillery officer, he fought the British at the Dardanelles and in Palestine.

After the war. when Greece tried to grab off large chunks of defeated Turkey, Gursel joined the forces of the late great Kemal Ataturk, helped to expel the Greek armies and to convert Turkey from an Islamic sultanate to a secular republic.

An earnest, reserved man tabbed by fellow-NATO commanders as a "good rough officer with a fine sense of humor," Gursel's rise through Turkey's army hierarchy was steady: graduating from Turkey's War College in 1929. he got his first star in 1946, his fourth in 1957. A devout believer in Ataturk's dictum that the army must be beyond politics, he shunned publicity, spent most of his spare time with his wife and son, now a com mission broker in Izmir. As a result, he remained almost unknown to the Turkish public until last week.

But as the Menderes government grew more and more oppressive. Good Soldier Gursel began to speak up to the politicians in defense of personal liberties. "I warned them," he declared in his first post-revolutionary speech last wreek, "that they could save themselves only if they followed several steps I pointed out to them." Instead, some months ago. Gursel received orders retiring him as commander of Turkish ground forces before normal retirement age. The general promptly tore the orders up and returned the pieces to the defense ministry. But three wreeks ago, with retirement age upon him, Gursel went on "terminal leave."

In the end, Gursel decided that the only way the army could keep out of politics was to oust the politicians who insisted on using it for political purposes.

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