Dawn Of A New Era

By SCOTT MACLEOD/AMMAN

Jordan's King of nearly a half-century had always been both a fatalist and an optimist. So after six months of unsuccessful treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Hussein bin Talal abruptly anointed as successor a little-known son, Abdullah, who promised the failing monarch "to follow in your footsteps."

When a final effort to abate his cancer failed last week, the King came home. On Saturday, Abdullah was sworn in as regent with full governing authority. And on Sunday, as the kingdom mingled fears with prayers, Hussein died, leaving Jordanians to confront a future without the only ruler most of them have ever known.

Even at 37, Abdullah looks almost too young for the job, but outwardly at least he is unmistakably Hussein's son. Like his father, he leaned forward on the edge of his seat as he chatted informally last week with half a dozen journalists, displaying the same self-confidence, modesty and British-accented speech. He parried questions as if he had been doing so all his life, instead of literally for the first time. He has stepped smartly into his new role, and insists that Jordan will not alter significantly. "I have my own areas of interest, the economy, things I'd like to concentrate on as things settle down," he said. "But you are not going to see anything different. His Majesty has given me a mission, and I will carry it out to the letter."

That kind of continuity is crucial for his small but strategic country, and for a King who lacks political experience. Abdullah believes his military career has prepared him well, putting him closely in touch with ordinary Jordanians as well as Washington generals. While Hussein's sickbed decision shocked him, he appears unfazed at stepping out to lead the family "team." As Hussein counseled him years ago, "Have I ever steered you guys wrong?" Still, every citizen and friend of Jordan wonders if Abdullah will prove up to the job his father handled with such finesse.

Many will choose to remember the doughty King mainly as a survivor. He succeeded to the Hashemite throne in 1952, at 16, and when he came home last week, at 63, he was the Middle East's longest-serving leader, a ruler of personal courage and political caution who navigated his country through the intrigues of the cold war to the consummation of peace with Israel.

Yet Hussein was always more than merely a survivor. Though he made costly mistakes, he emerged as the region's strongest force for moderation. Though he was frequently betrayed by friend and foe alike, even targeted for assassination, he responded with magnanimity. He molded a modern, cohesive state from a collection of Bedouin tribes and Palestinian refugees, and won something rare in his nasty neighborhood: a lifelong reputation as a man of tolerance.

His disappointments were legion: the vanquishing of Hashemite rule in Jerusalem and the West Bank; the vain efforts to negotiate a permanent Palestinian settlement; the bittersweet peace with Israel; even the falling out with his younger brother Hassan in the last six months of his life. His quiet but unflinching partnership with the West earned him little but trouble from other Arab states. Despite everything, his charisma and unwavering hope created a powerful bond with his subjects and made Jordan one of the Middle East's most respected nations.

Hussein's fatalism could hardly have been anything else. On July 20, 1951, he accompanied his grandfather King Abdullah to Jerusalem to pray at the revered al-Aqsa Mosque. As they entered the enclosure, an assassin shot and killed the King, narrowly missing Hussein. He would survive at least 17 more murder attempts, coup plots, army insurrections and, as if for good measure, a civil war. Such was his generous nature that he would later laugh about some of the more outlandish conspiracies, like the time he discovered that a bottle supposedly containing his nose drops was filled with lethal acid. Even when the plotters were arrested, they didn't pay with their lives, reflecting a unique spirit of forgiveness in a region where the rule is an eye for an eye.

For a man gifted with grace and charm Hussein seldom had an easy family life. His childhood was humble for a member of a royal family that, according to tradition, descended directly from the Prophet Muhammad. In his 1962 memoir Hussein wrote that a sister had died of pneumonia because their home lacked heat in the "bitter cold of an Amman winter." His father Talal reigned briefly but was forced to abdicate because of schizophrenia.

Hussein's youthful marriage to a Hashemite cousin ended in divorce. So did a longer, second union, with the daughter of a British sapper colonel, Toni Gardiner, who gave birth to Abdullah. He was enthralled with his next bride, the Palestinian Alia, but she was killed in a 1977 helicopter crash. In 1978 Hussein made an American his Queen: the former Lisa Halaby, a Princeton graduate and daughter of an airline executive of Arab descent, became the anchor of his personal life--his star, he called her. He had 12 children, but styled himself the father of all Jordanians.

Hussein's long tenure can be credited to his agility and sometimes astonishing courage. He was adept at balancing friends against enemies, and enemies against enemies. At 20, the King stood up to Britain and fired Glubb Pasha, a colonial relic who had commanded Jordan's British-supplied armed forces for decades. In 1958, after his cousin Faisal II and family were killed in a military coup that overthrew a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, he turned around and invited in British troops to ensure his survival.

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Hussein made his biggest mistake. He signed a defense treaty with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the strongman of Arab nationalism, and when the fighting broke out, launched an artillery attack on Israeli forces. Within 72 hours, Israel had captured the West Bank and taken East Jerusalem, ruled by Jordan since the 1948 creation of Israel.

Hussein almost lost the rest of his kingdom after the Palestine Liberation Organization made the East Bank of Jordan its base of operations. A force of terrorists and fighters threatened the King's rule. In Black September 1970, he declared war on the guerrillas, eventually defeating them and forcing the Palestinian organizations into decades of wandering.

The King was not invited to join President Jimmy Carter's 1978 Camp David negotiations, which produced the landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace accord. But for many years afterward, Hussein played a pivotal role, often behind the scenes, in diplomacy to achieve a comprehensive peace. Besides conducting secret negotiations with Israeli leaders for years, he became a crucial partner of the Palestinians at the 1991 Madrid talks that led to the 1993 Oslo accords. In 1994 he fulfilled a long-standing ambition by negotiating Jordan's peace treaty with Israel.

Despite an infusion of international aid, the agreement failed to bring broader peace or local prosperity. Hussein's refusal to join the gulf coalition against Saddam Hussein, for fear of provoking his pro-Iraq citizenry, angered lifelong Western and Arab friends, and the embargo imposed on a defeated Saddam has savaged Jordan's economy as well. The King deeply mourned the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, with whom he had hoped to mold a Palestinian state, and many Jordanians grew embittered at the hard-line policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. In Hussein's lifetime, when Jordan may have had its best chance, the country never developed into a constitutional democracy.

Without his father around for some tutoring, Abdullah will find the going tough as he grapples with Jordan's blighted economy, disenchantment with Israel, and Saddam's dangerous regime. The biggest fear is that in times of trouble the son will lack the authority and skill that enabled his father to straddle the divides.

Stability, prestige and peace for Jordan were Hussein's great achievements. But ever in search of a broader Middle East peace, last October he gamely left his hospital bed in Minnesota's Mayo Clinic to help break a deadlock in U.S.-sponsored negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. "If I had an ounce of strength," the dying King explained, "I would have done my utmost to be there, and to help in any way I can." For that perseverance in the name of peace--and for a lifetime of courage and moderation in a part of the world so lacking in either--the world is in Hussein's debt.