World: From Country Boy to Epic Hero

TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn was living and reporting in the Middle East in 1952 when King Farouk was ousted in a coup brilliantly planned by a young Egyptian colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the years that followed, Wynn came to know Egypt's new leader well, and in 1959 published a study of him entitled Nasser of Egypt: The Search for Dignity. Wynn, whose present post is Rome, flew to Cairo a few hours after Nasser's death and cabled these reminiscences:

YOU had to live in Egypt in the 1950s really to understand Gamal Abdel Nasser. He used to read our copy...

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