Avoiding the Real Issues

...The book is of still less value for clarifying ideas...

...Everything revolves around personal attitudes: Nasser "despised" Eden, he was "disgusted" by Johnson...

...The meaning-lessness of this remark is highlighted by the author's quite contradictory cliches elsewhere about Englishmen's love for the Arabs...

...The title, The Cairo Documents, is remarkably dishonest: The only documents presented are a few exchanges of official correspondence, while Heikal's own writing is chatty and superficial in the extreme...

...Heikal purports to be offering "the inside story of Nasser and his relationships with world leaders, rebels and statesmen...

...He quotes the celebrated letter of the Egyptian Chief of Staff to the United Nations Commander in Sinai, requesting him to remove the UN forces from the path of the Egyptian troops, since they had been mobilized...

...England and Israel in 1956—how did he survive...

...Since the full details have never been revealed, Heikal presumably could have made a significant contribution to our knowledge of these events...

...Taking advantage, perhaps unconsciously, of the West's confusion on this issue, he simply lumps everything together...

...Yet Heikal regards the letter as a self-evident triviality, explaining that not all the UN forces were to be moved, only those that stood interposed between the Egyptians and the Israelis...

...For example, he could have examined how Nasser, in the wake of his disastrous mismanagement of the Sinai War...

...This, of course, triggered the Six-Day War and led to Nasser's humiliating defeat...

...After all, it was his second major fiasco, worse than the beating he took from France...

...managed to stay in office...

...Again, Heikal might have had something worthwhile to tell us...

...Heikal's school-boyish piety provides a tidy framework for the rich and of course unintended humor of the "theoretical discussion" between the two leaders...

...Heikal's version of how the late King of Arabia paid nearly 2 million to have Nasser's plane bombed is so absurd that it strains credibility...

...Nor does Heikal help us understand Nasser's evolution from a parochially "Egyptian" leader-which he remained for several years after gaining power—to an "Arab" leader, something none of his countrymen had ever been before...

...Reviewed by Joel Carmichael Author, "The Shaping of the Arabs," and a forthcoming biography of Leon Trotsky Despite the pompous packaging, it is hard to imagine a more tedious, less serious book than this one by Mohamed Heikal, Egypt's leading journalist and a long-time confidant of the late Gamal Abdel Nasser...

...Unfortunately, the hagiographic bias of Heikal's book leaves little scope for such analysis...

...With no better evidence he charges that during the crisis Lyndon Johnson relied on the advice of three "self-confessed Zionists"-the Rostow brothers and Arthur J. Goldberg...

...despite his hindsight knowledge of the expedition's fatal outcome, he presents the plans put forward by Guevara uncritically...

...But the superficiality, the lack of critical judgment, the ignorance and overt distortion that pervade The Cairo Documents are in the end nothing to laugh about...

...For instance, it would be useful to know the real attitude of the Egyptian government toward the Sinai Peninsula—the sources, emotional or intellectual, of Cairo's intransigence about an area that throughout generations of overpopulation never attracted the slightest attention from any Egyptian leader until the Israelis occupied it in 1967...

...An insider like Heikal ought to be able to shed some light on this question...

...Nasser received a free copy from the publishers through the mail...

...planes were seen...

...He even fails to mention Nasser's takeover from his predecessor, General Mohammed Naguib, who was supposed to have led the 1952 putsch that deposed King Farouk...

...Then, after paying a secret agent a large sum for it...

...As the editor of Al Ahram, the most influential newspaper in the Arabic-speaking world, he might have provided us with an illuminating view of Mideast politics...

...He also reports with a perfectly straight face how Nasser, hearing that Eden had written a book about the 1956 Suez affair (Full Circle...

...Capping his coverage of the '67 confrontation, Heikal revives the long discredited line that the Americans gave armed assistance to the Israelis: First, he says Nasser was deceived by his own people, who initially exaggerated both Israeli loses and Egyptian "successes," and later claimed that U.S...

...Instead, he—or rather his American "collaborator," Edward Sheehan—has given us in pure Anglo-Saxon journalese a spate of reminiscential gossip reshaped by the prism of current propaganda...

...Its value as testimony to what actually happened during the years covered, or to what anyone actually was thinking, is virtually nil...

...One can only regret that even a man of Heikal's stature was either incapable or unwilling to offer us a more meaningful assessment of the Nasser years...

...Yet all he provides is a repetition of the standard propaganda line: "How would you Americans like it if some foreigners seized New Jersey...

...Then, without pretending to substantiate these manifestly bogus allegations, he proceeds as if the "American aid" were somehow well established...

...The result is blatant ax-grinding...

...ordered his intelligence service to get him an advance copy at any price...

...Heikal reaches the peak of dis-ingenuousness, though, in his treatment of the 1967 War...

...But his recounting is so sketchy that a "publisher's note" is required to explain that Naguib was "removed" and Nasser "became Premier...

...In one of his more comic chapters, Heikal recalls a meeting between Nasser and Che Guevara, where the ill-fated guerrilla babbled to an apparently approving Nasser about his determination to "carry the revolution" to Bolivia...

...His narrative, however, is riddled with unaccountable gaps...

...Finally, and evidently with full sincerity, he quotes Nasser as saying that Eden's illness and the termination of his career had been brought about by the "curse of the Pharaohs...

...Heikal's superficiality is reflected in his fondness for catch-phrases: "The mutual hatred [of Nasser and Anthony Eden] was both ideological and personal...

...On matters of such importance as the relationship between Islam and the growth of Arab nationalism—or, more concretely, the shifting relations between the various Arabicspeaking states—Heikal is actively misleading...

...When Naguib was replaced by Nasser, with no commotion, it was understood that he had been merely a frontman for Nasser, who reputedly masterminded the coup...

...It had been brewing in each man's background for hundreds of years...