The Man Before Sadat
PACE, ERIC
The Man Before Sadat Nasser: A Biography By Jean Lacouture Translated by Daniel Hofstadter Knopf. 399 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Eric Pace New York Times correspondent; author, "Any War Will...
...Now Nasser may have been two-faced, but he was not two-headed, and the unfortunate Arab must actually have shouted either "head" or "hands...
...And he denounces the 1954 execution of Dr...
...This sort of negligence is unfair to the author, who was probably unable to check the proofs...
...Present, too, are reasonably even-handed and notably swift-moving versions of such set-pieces as thj original coup d'etat against King Farouk's regime...
...Through it all Lacouture weaves in strands of local color...
...Elsewhere, he says Nasser "lied a great deal...
...The coup aroused Nasser "more effectively than [earlier...
...it is even included in the index under that unique spelling...
...Moussa Marzouk, a Jew accused of spying, as legal assassination and "a heinous gesture...
...I can find no reference to the Greek coup as a factor in heightening Cairo tensions before the June War anywhere in the elaborately documented biography published last year by Robert Stephens, an old Arab hand who is the foreign editor of the London Observer...
...He rightly calls Egypt in the early '60s a society "frozen by personal power and the agents of the mukhabarat"-the in-telligence community...
...This accounts for the dramatic character which events assumed for him at that date, and for the nervousness of which he gave so many signs...
...For instance, without citing any evidence, Lacouture says that Nasser interpreted the 1967 military coup in Greece as "the beginning of an anti-Communist counteroffensive in the Mediterranean, of which the Syrians would be the first targets and he the next...
...In describing the anguish of the Cairo crowds at Nasser's funeral, he intones, "This people had invented the victory of stone over death"-a reference to the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt...
...Two of his previous books, Vietnam: Between Two Truces and Ho Chi Minh, were highly acclaimed...
...At another point, he reports that a member of the Moslem Brotherhood who was about to be hanged cried out, "O Gamal, may our blood be upon your heads [sic...
...Describing Nasserite policies in 1954 as "this Left-leaning militarism . . . this petulant populism," he asks, "Did they mask some sort of fascism, were they destined to be subsidized by the Americans...
...Again and again, he chooses inappropriate English cognates for the original French...
...Basically sympathetic to Nasser, Lacouture nevertheless makes the conventional criticisms...
...I suppose Knopf should receive some credit for publishing the book at all, yet in view of the sloppy production, surely it deserves only a two-piaster hurrah...
...Furthermore, Nasser had no reason to he to the British diplomat on this point...
...They are buttressed by telling sketches of Nasser cronies, like the following one of Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, the influential editor of Al Ahram, who has long been Cairo's chief propagandist: "He was a jovial manager, squat, yet supple, somewhat American in his matter-of-fact style, but at the same time very Egyptian...
...He was very typical of the new breed of men, strong in business, sure of themselves, sometimes living it up a bit...
...Moreover, Anthony Nutting, the former British Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, met with Nasser the day before the 1967 war broke out and gives the Greek coup a far different weighting in his recent book on the Egyptian leader...
...Besides missing many typographical errors of the kind I cited at the outset, they allowed the last name of Nasser's perennial culture minister, Sarwat Okasha, to slip by once as "Ikasha...
...He depicts Nasser's lieutenants eating their Arab-style sandwiches at Empire desks left over from the Farouk regime...
...What does the competition say...
...classical' Israeli-Arab escalations," Lacouture continues...
...Given the many cultural and ethnic discontinuities that separate the Pharaohs from the street Arabs of today, it is as though Lacouture had seen American crowds acclaiming astronauts and observed, "This people had invented the wigwam and the tomahawk...
...Whether they are typographical errors or slips of the author's or the translator's pen, the book is full of such lapses, compounding the erratic impression made by some of Lacouture's more arguable judgments...
...For example, where Lacouture speaks of an Army officer, we are given "commander," a Navy title, rather than "major...
...Lacouture's translator, Daniel Hofstadter, has a knack for getting things wrong, too...
...He pulls no punches in reporting the starvation, torture and "cudgel blows" in concentration camps where Egyptian Marxists were interned...
...and, God help us, "large landowner" is rendered as "latifundiary...
...Recounting how Egypt blundered toward the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, he notes that Nasser was enmeshed in "fantasies and myths" and "seduced by the gobbledygook dispensed by his own radio...
...I'm inclined to think that Lacouture simply got things out of proportion...
...he recalls his Cairo barber's remark that Nasser had so little popular support early in his reign, he rated only "a two-piaster hurrah...
...author, "Any War Will Do" By now so much has been written about the late Gamal Abdel Nasser that it is hard for an author to come up with anything fresh and interesting to say about him...
...Such imprecision becomes irritating when historical judgments are involved, even minor ones...
...All of which is a pity, because this is a serious work by a distinguished and hard-working French journalist who has traveled widely for France-Soir and Le Monde, and is quite knowledgeable about the political leadership of underdeveloped countries...
...For better or worse, however, Jean La-couture rises to the challenge in his new biography...
...Yet Lacouture is off the mark now and then...
...But two cheers for Lacouture anyhow, for breathing life, however erratic, into an overworked subject...
...Though Nasser covers familiar ground, to be sure, and is sometimes blurry and skimpy and wrong, it is also warm and pungent, rich in insights and bon mots, and written in a lively style that will charm the jaded specialist and keep the layman turning the pages...
...When word of the Greek coup came a few days later, he explains, Nasser merely "assumed that this represented yet another development of the 'imperialist' offensive in the Middle East...
...The proofreaders did not help either...
...Regarding the Egyptians' sense of achievement about building the Aswan High Dam, he comments, "No one could change the Nile without being changed in the process...
...He maintains it was the Israeli-Syrian air battle in mid-April that left Nasser "thoroughly alarmed," since the Israelis had managed to shoot down six Arab migs after invading Syrian air space as far as Damascus...
...Beyond this, in the best French manner, Lacouture dashes off pithy paragraphs on Nasser's attitude toward Communism and his feelings about the British...
...Having been stationed in Cairo at the time, I must say that the information I received then and afterward supports Nutting's view...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 21
