The Education of a King

Seated in the oak-paneled office of his limestone palace on one of the barren hills overlooking his ramshackle capital of Amman, the slim, 21 -year-old King of Jordan spoke slowly, in a voice deep and rich for one so young. "I feel I am stronger than ever now. I have the support of my army and my people, in spite of all the efforts to break up my country. We realize now that the propaganda campaign and the internal crisis were the responsibility of international Communism and its followers." The King paused. In his paper-white face the dark eyes seemed unnaturally large. His slight frame, draped in a rakish tan gabardine suit, was slumped under the heaviness of fatigue; he had scarcely slept in four days. Yet he talked confidently, in the manner of a man who had learned some bitter lessons of human perfidy and folly, but had found that he could make his way. That same day he had gained a historic commitment from the U.S.. and got his security forces ready for devastating street riots that might be hurled against him by men made restless by circumstance, made passionate by Cairo's and Moscow's radios.

Hussein, a boy who became a man in the public enactment of his will for survival, had gambled all to keep his royal inheritance. He was fighting to hold his disintegrating country from crack-up --and last week, by guts, by guile and by fortune's turn, he was winning.

It was a wild enough scrimmage just in Jordanian terms. All the fearful forces of Middle East hatred, fury and greed had taken sides in the struggle; the overshadowing powers of East and West themselves joined in. Hussein was surrounded by foes within and friends without, and by foreign "friends" who were in fact his deadliest menaces because they egged on the domestic foes.

Satchel of Scorpions. Ever since Britain gave up Jordan last year, Hussein's neighbors have crowded close in the name of Arab "unity"--to help themselves. At the time of last fall's invasion of Egypt, Syrian, Iraqi and Saudi Arabian troops moved into Jordan to "protect" it; the Syrians and Saudis are still there.

Egypt's Nasser intrigues with Jordan extremists to join an Arab federation which Nasser would head. The Syrians hanker to see Jordan joined in a Greater Syria. The Saudis lay claim to Jordan's Aqaba area, now being evacuated by the last of the British hussars. The Iraqis, poising 10,000 picked troops at H3, the pipeline pumping station just over the northeastern border, aim to see Jordan merge with its fellow Hashemite kingdom if it merges with anybody. And the Israelis, with the best army and most troublesome border of all the neighbors, stand ready, at the first sound of breaking-up noises from the east, to advance to the Jordan River, a natural frontier some 30 miles beyond their present boundary.

What kept the wolves from gratifying their appetites was the fear that their feast might be disputed, and that in the fight for the spoils someone else might run off with the best chunks. At a certain point last week. Jordan's weakness became its strength: neighbors who coveted it found common cause in recognizing that an artificial nation was better than chaos. But above all. what saved the Kingdom of Jordan was the courage of the young King, an often irresolute monarch who at this crucial moment stood firm.

Hussein, like his people, is a figure caught between two worlds, and inside himself plays out many of the conflicts which rend the Middle East. He is the scion of one of Islam's proudest families, the 41st generation representative of the Hashemite clan in direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed. He is also the Westernized product of a British schooling, who likes nothing better than to tinker over a souped-up Cadillac at the Amman auto club, pilot his personal jet across the desert skies, or dance the Arabian nights out to Latin American jazz rhythms. He has the flashing eyes and the bearing of a highly bred Arab prince; his manners and speech are those of a young Englishman.

Churchill's Land. It was Winston Churchill, Britain's Colonial Secretary after World War I, who created the artificial desert kingdom that Hussein rules. Churchill whacked a hatchet-shaped hunk off the defunct Ottoman Empire, called it Transjordan, and handed it to Hussein's grandfather Abdullah "one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem," as he later said. Churchill was repaying Abdullah's fighting services to Britain in Lawrence of Arabia's desert campaign (another hunk--Mesopotamia, now Iraq--was given to Abdullah's brother Feisal). Thenceforth, while Britain's Glubb Pasha built the British-equipped Arab Legion into Islam's sprucest fighting force, Abdullah ruled the sandy wastes as a Bedouin black-tent state.

Hussein, born in 1935 in dusty Amman, became the King's favorite grandson, receiving a royal schooling in horsemanship and saber fighting, and accompanying the old monarch all over his desert realm. "My boy," said Abdullah. "I want you to come always to me and try to learn what you can from what you witness at my palace. Who knows? The time may come when you will replace me on the throne."

In the eyes of Arab extremists, Abdullah was a British stooge, and insufficiently eager to resist the birth of Israel. They accused him of not fighting hard enough in the 1948 war, in which Israel held off and beat back its Arab neighbors and macje itself at home in a hostile land. When Abdullah accepted the 1949 armistice with Israel, he inherited the territory of the old Arab part of Palestine west of the Jordan River. It was a rugged land full of holy places--Bethlehem, Calvary and Gethsemane--but bedeviled by hatreds. Its inhabitants call themselves Palestinians, not Jordanians. They numbered about 400,000 people, were generally urban, better educated, and felt themselves superior to the 400,000 (mainly Bedouins) in Abdullah's old desert wastes. In addition came some 500,000 Arab refugees from Israel, who were huddled into tents and encampments, fed for 9-c- a day by the U.N., and left to nurse their resentments and stir to Cairo's inflammatory Voice of the Arabs.

In July 1951 an embittered Palestinian refugee waylaid old King Abdullah as he went to pray at Jerusalem's sacred Mosque of the Rock. There was a clatter of shots and the stouthearted old King fell dead. One of the assassin's bullets ripped a medal from the chest of 15-year-old Hussein as he walked beside his grandfather. It was a deed that Hussein can never let himself forget.

A year later, Hussein's unhappy and unstable father. King Talal, was found insane and unfit to rule (now lives in exile, unaware he was ever a King). At 16 Hussein was proclaimed King. After a year at Harrow and six months at Sandhurst, the boy went home to take over a man-size job.

Glubb Must Go. For the first three years, Hussein played at being King. He dashed around the country in his fast cars, went on gazelle shoots, and stayed out so late at parties that finally his pretty Egyptian wife, Cambridge-educated Queen Dina, went off to live in Cairo. When Britain ineptly tried to bring Jordan into the Baghdad Pact, and Glubb Pasha used tanks and troops to smash the bloody riots that followed, the King lightheartedly circled Amman in his plane to watch the show. He too was restless under British tutelage, and his instinctive nationalism was roused. Egypt's new revolutionary regime was broadcasting its message to Arab masses everywhere to throw off the Western yoke. At Hussein's side his playboy aide, Lieut. Colonel Ali Abu Nuwar, whispered in his ear that Glubb must go.

The sacking of Glubb a year ago now seems only one of the acts Hussein had to perform if he was going to live with Arab nationalism. To the British, it was an audacious piece of ingratitude. But to the entire Arab world it was a thrilling declaration of independence which proved even more dramatically than any move of Nasser's that British power had faded in the Middle East.

King Hussein shrewdly followed up by embracing all the tenets of Nasser's nationalism. He granted the first truly free elections in Jordan's short history, though warned in advance that the results would go against him. He accepted a military alliance with Egypt, and when he first heard of the attack on Sinai he had to be restrained from leading an all-out attack on Israel, the outcome of which must have been sure disaster. True or not, the story is universally believed throughout the Arab world that Hussein proposed personally to pilot the first bomber over Tel Aviv. Only the opposition of his Cabinet--and a telephone call from Nasser--are said to have dissuaded him from going to war last October. Thus his bona fides was good in the Arab world: he had avoided his grandfather's error of being regarded as a stooge to the West, or soft on Israel.

The Arab Nation. But there was a limit to what Hussein would do to further Arab nationalism. "Have you ever met a man working against himself like I am?" he asked friends on a visit to Cairo last winter.

The pro-Nasser extremists and Communists from west of the Jordan River who had gained a parliamentary majority in Hussein's free election began openly seeking union with Egypt. In Jerusalem's noisy bazaars there were more pictures of Nasser to be seen on the shop walls than of Hussein. The country's new Premier, Suleiman Nabulsi, sometime soap manufacturer from the refugee stronghold of Nablus, proclaimed flatly: "Jordan's destiny is to disappear."

Opposed to Jordan's continued existence, Nabulsi and his Palestinians set great store instead by Arab unity, believing that only through a strong, unified Arab nation could they regain their lost homes in Israel. Their ambitions reflected a natural loyalty to their land; the Communists rushed in to exploit it unnaturally, identifying the West as the cause of all their troubles, for having thrust the State of Israel into their midst. Shortly before Israel invaded Sinai, Jordan united its armed forces with Syria's and Egypt's, thereby ringing Israel, under the supreme command of an Egyptian. Major General Abdel Hakim Amer. Yet as an Arab wag put it: "How can Jordan unite with Egypt? Tunnels?" Federation with Syria seemed a more practical first step.

Under a compact that Nabulsi made with Syria, schools in Jordan and Syria now give common degrees, follow common courses, and eventually were to use common textbooks (to be produced by Nasser's professors). The Nabulsi government also initialed an agreement with Syria for a customs and currency union that would shortly have shifted Jordan's economic capital to Damascus--an arrangement that Jerusalem's sharp traders were slow in getting wise to. In their first months in office, Nabulsi's leftists brought the Anglo-Jordanian treaty to an end. replaced the British subsidy by a pledge of financial help from Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (which only oil-rich Saudi Arabia has so far honored), and began a systematic purge of pro-Western and royalist elements in the civil service. The overthrow of Hussein himself seemed only a matter of time.

Desperately convinced that Jordan's only way to survive as a kingdom was to qualify for U.S. Eisenhower Plan aid, the young King wrote a blunt letter to Premier Nabulsi: "We now detect the danger of Communist infiltration in our Arab homeland, and the threat posed by those who feign loyalty to Arab nationalism, indulge in hullabaloo, prevarications, falsehood and heroics, thereby seeking to conceal their evil designs against Arab nationalism and the fact that they cooperate with our enemies in misleading the masses and exploiting the people." He demanded that Nabulsi purge his Cabinet of its three most notorious pro-Communist members. The Cabinet replied by voting to establish diplomatic relations with "our good friend the Soviet Union." The Palestinian leftists figured that they had Hussein licked--not so much because they dominated Parliament, controlled the streets and enjoyed the covert cooperation of young Army Chief Ali Abu Nuwar, but because Nasser, the overlord of Arab nationalism, was on their side.

Sleepless Nights. The testing time had come. Caught up in the sand-blown vortex were all the spiraling, competing ambitions that agitate the Middle East. Jordan's real estate might not be worth much, but denying it to someone else mattered a great deal. Seen simply, the issue was between the nations like Iraq and Saudi Arabia which have chosen Washington, and Egyypt and Syria which are playing with Moscow. But nothing is ever that simple in the Middle East. King Saud likes Ike. but does not defy Nasser. Syria's President Shukri el Kuwatly has himself flown to Moscow--but is disturbed by the way his ambitious young army colonel, Abdel Hamid Serraj, is nuzzling up to the Communists. Nasser himself would not want Jordan to deteriorate so rapidly that either of his enemies, Iraq or Israel, might march in. In such confusion, there was a chance for Jordan's young King to maneuver. So began his busy days and sleepless nights. He flew off to Saudi Arabia to see King Saud, the blood enemy of the Hashemites, whose concern over Communist penetration now runs thicker than blood feuds. Saud promised money to the young King. Within the Jordanian army,

Hussein secretly mustered the Bedouins against Abu Nuwar's Palestinians, and beat them to the punch by signaling for a rising at the army's Zerka headquarters. Then, taking the untrustworthy Abu Nuwar with him, he rushed out to confront the rampaging Bedouins, narrowly saved his quaking general from being shot, and won wild cheers from the tribesmen by leaping atop an armored car and shouting: "If you do not want me as your King, I will go!"

As his Bedouins swarmed over Amman, with faces blackened by charcoal as a sign they meant business, Hussein began warily to consolidate his opening triumph. There were, after all, other armies in Jordan. He invited Abu Nuwar to take a fortnight's leave in Syria, and kept on former Premier Nabulsi (known as "the ten-faced man") as Foreign Minister in a new Cabinet. King Hussein carefully proclaimed that Jordan would stick to its policy of "positive neutrality" and reject "imperialism" and foreign alliances. Then he talked Major General Ali Hayari, who comes from Abu Nuwar's home village of Salt, into taking over the army command, promising him a free hand in the job.

Hayari bustled off to Zerka to find out who had set off the previous week's rioting. He fastened the blame on four Bedouin officers and put them under house arrest. He hustled back to report to Hussein--only to find the four Bedouin officers drinking coffee in a palace reception room. "I didn't send you to arrest my boys," explained the King.

When Hayari reminded him of his pledge not to interfere, the King pounded the table and shouted: "I'm King! I do what I want! This is my country. I will join the Baghdad Pact, if I want. I will invite Richards to come here, if I want. This is my country." Hayari saluted and took off by car for Damascus, leaving his letter of resignation behind him, and proclaiming, when he got to Syria, that the U.S. was spending fabulous sums in Jordan "to buy traitors." After naming a more compliant Bedouin to be chief of staff, Hussein ordered a purge of 60 army officers ("Replace them with sergeants who will fight for the King!" he said).

To H-3 & Back. His enemies would counterattack, and the King knew it. On Monday some 200 leaders of the Communist and pro-Nasser parties met at Nablus to compose what amounted to an ultimatum. They demanded: 1) release and reinstatement of all pro-Nasser officers, including Abu Nuwar; 2) dismissal of Hussein's new Cabinet; 3) sacking of Hussein's Court Minister; 4) a promise not to invite to Jordan Roving Ambassador James Richards, President Eisenhower's special representative in the Middle East; and 5) expulsion of U.S. Ambassador Lester Mallory.

Cairo's radio, Voice of the Arabs, strangely muted during the crisis' first week, began talking darkly about plots "in the palace" against the Jordanian people. This was the familiar signal, sounded just before the Baghdad Pact riots in 1955, for Egyptian agents and Communist organizers to lead the mobs into the streets. But before it could begin, King Hussein got into his twin-engine de Havilland Dove, and flew off to a secret rendezvous at H-3 with his Hashemite cousin, Iraq's 22-year-old King Feisal.

Feisal reassured him that Iraqi troops would be at his disposal. That meant that if the Syrians threatened to use their 4,000 troops and 30 Czech tanks in Jordan against the King, he could stop them by threatening to call in the Iraqis. But Israel, which wants no powerful Arab neighbor at its back door, has often warned that its army will enter Jordan whenever Iraqi soldiers do. On his return to Amman. Hussein summoned U.S. Ambassador Mallory to his hilltop palace. The King wanted the U.S. to exert all its influence to keep the Israelis out. Hussein also phoned King Saud. urging him to press Egypt and Syria to abate their inflammatory broadcasts about events in Jordan. That evening the Palestinians were told that the King had decided to reject all their demands.

King of the Streets. Communists and pro-Nasser extremists passed the word to start a nationwide strike against the regime. But long before dawn broke Wednesday, Hussein had sent loyal Bedouin troops with tanks into all the Palestinian strongkolds. Amman itself swarmed with blackened Bedouins in tanks and armored cars. Out came the demonstrators, mostly teen-age schoolboys, their teachers hustling them along like anxious sheep dogs. In the post-office square (which Americans nicknamed Riot Plaza), crowds began rhythmically clapping hands and chanting: "Down with the Eisenhower Plan!" and "Long Live Nasser!" The marchers threw stones at the police, who warded them off with basket-weave shields. After one scuffle ("I've seen worse at Ebbets Field," said one newsman), the police fired a warning shot into the air. By early afternoon it was all over in Amman, and Hussein was king of the streets as well as boss of the army.

That evening he declared martial law. The U.S. had already delivered a stern warning against Israeli intervention in Jordan (and warned other nations too). At 10:30 a.m., as sound trucks rolled through all cities blaring warnings to citizens to stay off the streets, the King went on the air to deliver a bitter attack on Nabulsi and his leftists for having "sold themselves to conspirators from abroad." For the first time he openly charged that Egypt had intrigued with his banished army chief, adding that among the "liberated Arabs" Saudi Arabia seemed to be the only staunch friend he had. "I had hoped the Voice of the Arabs would cease this conspiracy to stir up riots against Jordan and against me," he said.

Knowing what his people wanted to hear, the young King also accused Nabulsi of trying, of all things, to foist the Eisenhower Doctrine on Jordan, and accused him as well of working for the Communists, whose "Middle Eastern headquarters is in Israel." Nobody was going to outdo the young King in denouncing Israel, or in showing himself loyal only to the Arab cause. "I served you as a boy, and now I serve you as a man," he told his people.

Anchors Aweigh. Later that morning Hussein got on the telephone to Syria's President Kuwatly. He asked that Syrian troops be pulled out of Jordan. Kuwatly replied that they could be withdrawn only on orders from the alliance's supreme commander, Egypt's General Abdel Hakim Amer. Hours later, as Kuwatly took off for emergency consultations in Cairo, the U.S. dramatically injected itself into the dispute. The White House, having announced that the U.S. regards the "independence and integrity of Jordan as vital," ordered the Sixth Fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The U.S. had elected to make its first crucial test of the Eisenhower Doctrine by backing young Hussein.

Aboard the 60,000-ton aircraft carrier Forrestal at Cannes, some 200 Belgian and French dignitaries, on board to watch a special air show the next day, were turned out of their bunks at 3:30 a.m. by blaring bull horns, and set ashore with apologies. The big flattop and her escorts were gone by noon.

New Faces. In Jordan, the uneasy silence of martial law settled over the bazaars and brown hills. Out of quiet retirement the King picked 70-year-old Ibrahim Hashim, a respected but decrepit old man, to be the country's new Premier. Hashim, a rebel against the Ottoman Turks in World War I, was an old chess-playing crony of Abdullah's. Vice Premier and real strongman of the new Cabinet was Abdullah's onetime secretary, Samir Rifai, who like Nabulsi is a graduate of the American University at Beirut, but unlike Nabulsi is a good friend of the U.S. Soon some 500 extremists were under arrest, and the week's events were ratified on the walls of Jordan's cities, where pictures of Hussein appeared neatly pasted over portraits of Nasser.

The sleepless young King had carried off his coup shrewdly. But it was also a one-man feat, and it could all be undone by one gunshot. So far, the King had maneuvered to put" all the onus of foreign intervention on his opponents (though they in turn accused him of taking helpful advice from the Americans, the U.S. itself made no such boast).

The country was in the King's hands--if only by martial law, the consent of the army, the backing of the Bedouins, and the help of party hacks and old politicians.

Not everyone was happy. "The whole Jordan nation is in prison," shrilled a Cairo newspaper, though at the same time Nasser's government was piously insisting: "Egypt is more jealous than any other country of Jordan's independence."

When it came down to the crucial moment, Nasser and the Syrians proved unwilling--or unable--to make an all-out effort to destroy Hussein. To do so would have forced an open split with King Saud, perhaps would have compelled him still further toward Iraq and the West. This week there was a flurry of flying to save faces.. Syria's Kuwatly popped in on Nasser; together with Nasser's top political adviser, he went on to Mecca to see Saud. They were all desirous of re-creating that somewhat bogus show of Arab unity proclaimed only three months ago in Cairo. Each for his own reasons, all proclaimed that peace was better. Their words could not disguise the fact that it all added up to a victory for Hussein, a defeat for Nasser, and an improvement for the West.

Start Toward Stability. In proclaiming that the "independence and integrity" of Jordan are "vital," the U.S. had helped to save the day. Yet it is not Jordan's meaningless borders, its desert wastes, its desolate economy, or its restless population that are "vital" to the U.S. What matters vitally is the peace and stability of the area; it was not enough merely to reassemble the unworkable status quo ante--though that is progress of sorts. So long as half a million Palestine refugees have so little to look forward to, so long will Jordan rock. Stability in which to work for better solutions is only the start, but it is a necessary start. The young King who was bringing it about, with some faltering in tactics but with surprising firmness of purpose, has, said one admiring American observer, "completed his sophomore year in the fastest time on record."

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