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He is caught in a pragmatic dilemma, a revolutionary without a blueprint of dogma or a road map of ideology. "We began our revolution with principles, not a program," he said once. "We find that sometimes we have to change our methods. I have read much about socialism, communism, democracy and fascism. Our revolution will not be labeled by any of those names . . . We are not trying to copy anybody else's ideology. We are a country of 22.5 million; 18 million are poor farmers . . . deprived of personal liberty for 5,000 years . . . under the domination of landlords. Only when they are liberated from this will Egypt be truly free."
If earnestness were enough—which it is not—Nasser and Egypt would be making fast progress toward that goal. The Premier himself lives with remarkable austerity in a five-room, sand-colored house inside the army compound in Cairo's Abbasiya military district. He allows himself almost none of the personal privileges now within his means. "I did not go there before," he once explained to an associate who wondered why the Premier refused to go inside the fashionable Semiramis Hotel. In the first days of power he liked to wear a military bush tunic, open at the neck, with a couple of rows of ribbons and the insignia of a lieutenant colonel, but now he prefers a plain grey suit.
Few Egyptians and fewer foreigners have met the Premier's wife who, in the Egyptian tradition, takes no part in public affairs, but devotes herself to their family: three boys and two girls. Nasser, while he smokes, has never been known to drink anything stronger than Coke. His favorite beverage is a cup of tea, a habit learned from British officers.
Impatiently, he insists that his own moral standards apply to his government, and he reacts with feeling to suggestions that this is a hopeless wish. "All right," says Nasser impatiently, "they are corrupt; they are dishonest; they are venal. But they will be incorrupt and they will be honest!"
Another quality of Nasser's character, somewhat disguised by the disarming candor with which he speaks of himself, is his resourcefulness. His friend, Major General Abdel Hakim Amer, put it this way: "He is very good at chess. If he tries to win, he does. He is a fox. It's never easy to know his intentions." Says ex-U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, who was in Cairo when the Nasser forces took over: "He's been a plotter all his life; he's a master at it."
In a Hurry. It is easy to read a plot into some of Nasser's recent moves. Cairo's Voice of the Arabs radio pours a stream of anti-French propaganda into Morocco, and Nasser gives warm asylum to old Riff Rebel Abd el Krim, a key North African troublemaker, as well as to Jerusalem's Jew-hating Mufti. In the Gaza strip he allows, if he does not approve, the arming and training of the Al Fedayeen commandos, teams of Palestine Arab refugees which periodically cross the border to raid Israel. At the Bandung Conference last April, where he was hailed as a conquering hero of anticolonialism, he pumped the hands of Nehru and Chou Enlai; he bartered a mass of Egyptian cotton for products from Red China. Last year, he sent a trade mission to Moscow, and next year he plans to go there himself.