West of Suez

By Curtis Prendergast

RIDING THE STORM: 1956-1959 by Harold Macmillan. 786 pages. Harper & Row. $15.

Faithful readers who have already followed Supermac through three volumes of adventures will find him this time at the peak of his powers. The U.S. has let Britain down at Suez. Anthony Eden has quit. But Harold, as Her Majesty's Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, moves in to rebuild the Anglo-American alliance on the basis of his old friendship with Dwight Eisenhower. He also pilots the ship of state through the storms of crisis in Lebanon, an incipient trade war in Europe, a Gaullist coup in France. Soviet ultimatums about Berlin, and assorted parliamentary pothers in Britain.

Diplomatic Switch. Some deck passengers will sail with Macmillan to the very end. Others will drop off at Port Said (page 179), after Macmillan has taken them through the Suez adventure. Even there they may depart dissatisfied. For Macmillan, one of the Cabinet few who probably knew all (he was reputedly a member of an inner ministerial group known cynically as the Suez "Pretext Committee"), chooses not to tell all. Perhaps inhibited by Britain's 30-year rule on state secrets, Macmillan sticks with the official version that Britain and France landed troops only to separate Israeli and Egyptian combatants. No such inhibitions, however, apply to Macmillan's version of the U.S. role at Suez. John Foster Dulles comes off in this book almost as badly as Gamal Abdel Nasser.

For Macmillan. the Egyptian President was a sort of South Shore Mussolini. "In dealing with him [Nasser], every display of timidity or weakness was seized upon and exploited. No action, however generous or fairminded, could reap any reward." As for Dulles, his "vanity more than equalled his talents." At first Dulles told Britain that after seizing the canal, Nasser must be made to "disgorge what he was attempting to swallow." Then the "strange uncertainty of Dulles' own character and the light rein with which the President chose to ride him" began leading American policy along an erratic course. By Macmillan's count, Dulles switched signals at least three times upon taking the canal issue to the TJ.N. He dreamed up the 18-nation Suez Canal Users Association but sabotaged it by admitting publicly that the users would probably go around the Cape rather than shoot their way through the canal.

When the U.K. and France acted, Dulles erupted in '"hostility amounting almost to frenzy. There may have been other reasons. Perhaps the grim disease which was later to prove mortal had affected his psychological and intellectual equilibrium. Perhaps the spectre of Soviet Russia, now armed with the terrible nuclear weapon, had begun to haunt his dreams. He clearly lost his temper; he may also have lost his nerve. In any event, we and our French allies were now to face an attack, skillfully devised and powerfully executed, in which the protagonists were the Russian and American Governments, acting together in unnatural coalition."

"Precious Secrets." Yet shortly, under Macmillan's own premiership, all was smooth again in Anglo-American relations. It was not because Macmillan had grown any fonder of Dulles (although in leaving the dying man in March 1959 Macmillan acknowledges that "with all his faults, he had an element of greatness"). It was simply because Macmillan regarded it as a priority task to "reestablish that alliance which I knew to be essential in the modern world." If Suez was a lesson in the perils of misjudging the mood of Washington (to which Macmillan belatedly confesses), to hear Macmillan tell it, his adroit exploitation of his personal relationship with Eisenhower certainly helped in getting the MacMahon Act amended and in giving Britain a continuing share in the U.S.'s "most precious secrets of nuclear weaponry."

Macmillan writes well enough, and rises occasionally to some fine throw-away lines. Eisenhower "seemed still to regard faith in the U.N. as a substitute for a foreign policy." The Russians, "once they have got a document deal with it like a dog with a bone. They never surrender any bit of it which is in any way to their advantage." One instance of newspaper worrying Macmillan dismisses as "pure Chamberlainism. It is raining umbrellas." He remarks of another press flurry that "it was a storm in a teacup; but in politics we sail in paper boats."

This voyage ends with the close of Macmillan's first term as Prime Minister. His next book, dealing with his final term, which ended in 1963, should be a less cheerful cruise. That period includes De Gaulle's cataclysmic veto of Britain's first Common Market entry bid, the Profumo scandal, and Supermac's somber departure--like Eden's after Suez--for illness. . Curtis Prendergast

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.