EGYPT: The Counterpuncher

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"I'm Too Suspicious." This may have been as inevitable as his success. From the day of the revolution, he set out to be boss, and chafed at the delays in getting decisions inside the old Free Officers' junta. Of the 14 members of Nasser's first junta, four in top jobs survived when Nasser finally dissolved it and became constitutional President this summer. A friend once asked the strongman why he was so reluctant to delegate authority. "Show me ten men I can trust," he replied, "and I will delegate authority." Recently a visiting diplomat, who had been doing a lot of business with him, remarked: "Sometimes I think I hardly know you, despite all our talks." Nasser's answer was candid: "Nobody does. I'm too suspicious."

Closest to Nasser is the man to whom he first confided his conspiratorial ambitions in 1942: Army Chief Abdel Hakim Amer, 36. He still plays chess with Nasser ("A fox," says Amer), and is in on all the big moves. Ali Sabri, 36, whom Nasser sent to London to keep watch on the Suez conference, is his political fixer, and probably sees him most frequently. Sabri is also Nasser's most frequent tennis opponent (Sabri usually wins−;Nasser has gained weight of late). These and other close advisers are smart, dedicated−and obedient.

"I Run Everything." His trip last spring to the Bandung conference, where Nehru and Chou En-lai made much of him, helped convince Nasser that he had become a world figure. His pressagents, exuberantly whooping up the cult of the Cairo hero, seem to have influenced him at least as much as their readers. Two years of almost unbridled authority have also left their mark. "I know everything that goes on in this country," he told a U.S. newsman recently. "I run everything myself."

To make good on that boast, he works a ferocious schedule, often staying up till 4 a.m. dictating letters and memos on every subject of government. He is a tireless reader of the newspapers, and cons the entire Arab world press daily, down to the last movie review. It is one of the world's" misfortunes that, never having lived in a free country, Nasser does not grasp how Western policy is made, and tends to read all sorts of secret motivations and nonexistent attitudes of governments into the comments of the foreign press. He has become excessively sensitive to personal criticism, and maintains a tight censorship over his own press.

Nasser, says one caustic Englishman, "displays that unmistakable mark of the second-rate, the belief that human affairs can be reduced to simple, single causes." In a safe in his office he keeps a neat file of all his main problems, with the essentials of each summarized as briefly as his staff can get them down. When the dictator has to face a problem, he writes down the considerations in three columns on a piece of paper. In one column he sets down what he wants to do, in the next the obstacles, in the third his possible courses of action. "He doesn't always recognize all the obstacles," one of his friends concedes.

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