From Country Boy to Epic Hero

TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn was living and reporting in the Middle East in 1952 when King Farouk was ousted in a coup brilliantly planned by a young Egyptian colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the years that followed, Wynn came to know Egypt's new leader well, and in 1959 published a study of him entitled Nasser of Egypt: The Search for Dignity. Wynn, whose present post is Rome, flew to Cairo a few hours after Nasser's death and cabled these reminiscences:

YOU had to live in Egypt in the 1950s really to understand Gamal Abdel Nasser. He used to read our copy every night before he went to sleep. Even if years went by without direct contact, we always had the feeling that he was reading over our shoulder, chewing rugs because of some of our words. He could be outraged that we didn't give his revolution the support he thought it deserved, but still he would respect us for our honesty. The greatest compliment he could give any newsman came to me in 1962 when he told a visitor, "Wilton Wynn understands me."

If I did, perhaps it was because I am a Louisiana redneck, and I could understand an Egyptian redneck. Nasser was a hick. Though he was born in Alexandria, he was marked as a Saidi, a product of his father's village in upper Egypt, regarded as a vulgar character because his first language was Arabic instead of French.

I never felt I got the point of Nasser's revolution until I dined with a wealthy, French-educated Egyptian who came from the area of Beni Murr, the Abdel Nasser family's home town. I asked the man if he knew the family and he answered. "Of course we knew them. But we never spoke to them. We would never speak to such people."

It was then that I found the subtitle of my book. Nasser symbolized a "search for dignity" throughout the Asian-African world. He emerged from the grass roots, from the silt of the Nile Valley. He was determined to make his people feel proud to be Egyptians instead of posing as carbon copies of Frenchmen or anyone else.

I must say unabashedly that I liked Nasser far more than any other public figure I have known as a newsman. As demagogic as he may have sounded in his speeches, he was always the essence of sincerity and common sense in private talk. He could never understand that friends in the foreign press might sometimes criticize him. Often, after an address, he would call his press officer and ask, "What did Wynn think of the speech?" And sometimes he had to be told that I didn't like it. Yet these reports did not destroy our friendship.-

In Yemen shortly after the Suez War, I heard a black dock porter reciting an epic poem to a group who lounged in the cafe smoking the hubble-bubble pipe and chewing qat (a mildly narcotic green leaf). Normally, he would have chanted verses about heroes of the past. On this occasion his epic hero was a man named Nasser, who stood on the beaches of Port Said and picked up the British tanks and the French planes and hurled them back into the sea. For him, for other black and brown and yellow men, and wherever the cry "Allahu akbar" (God is great) is heard from the minarets, the world has changed because of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

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