For months King Saud loafed, moody and myopic, about his vast palaces, in the wreckage of the prestige he had inherited from his mighty warrior father, the late Ibn Saud. Everything he touched had ended in political disaster: his extravagant giving and building exhausted the treasury and debased the currency, his clumsy plots against President Nasser exposed his regime to ridicule and isolation in the Arab world. The crowning blow had fallen when his younger brothers, led by the openly contemptuous Prince Talal, tongue-lashed him last year in private family council.
Only the intervention of Ibn Saud's second son,...
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