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In the warm sunshine, as a swarm of Russian-built MIGs circled overhead, an American-piloted Convair dropped down on Cairo's airport. Erupting from its interior came six fierce-looking bodyguards, their gold daggers glinting beside shiny machine pistols thrust in their black bandoleers. Twenty-one guns boomed ceremonially as a tall, majestically robed Arab King stepped down from the plane, silver-rimmed spectacles gleaming beneath his flowing, gold-banded headdress. Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Arab in a business suit, stepped forward, and kissed him on both cheeks.
His Majesty King Saud ibn Abdul Aziz al Faisal Al Saud, with a 65-man entourage, was on his royal way to Washington for a state visit with President Dwight Eisenhower.
Saudi Arabia's Saud, only six months ago depreciated in most quarters as a well-meaning but confused desert chieftain, has become a much-sought-after man in the Arab world, and a key figure in U.S. hopes for a more stable Middle East.
The Partners. This slow, bespectacled chief of the world's most feudalistic autocracy is a curious associate for the West's greatest democracy. Saud is responsible to no parliament or council, and no Saudi is allowed a vote. The King's air-conditioned palaces rise in a land where one in every three citizens is still a nomad living in black tents and using camel urine for hair dressing, and only five out of 100 have enough education even to write their own names.
But in the swirling passions that have swept the Middle East since Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal Company, Saud has become pivotal just by holding fast to reality. That reality confronts him every time he drives past the flaming gas flares outside Dhahran, where the U.S.-owned Arabian American Oil Co. wells tap fields that are estimated to contain three times as much oil as the whole U.S. Profits from these fields bring Saud a yearly income of $300 million, finance his government, build his palaces and swimming pools, buy him Cadillacs and Convairs. But Saud knows that without U.S. skills and capital, there are not enough technicians and engineers in the whole Moslem world to get Saudi Arabia's oil out of the ground.
Other Arabs have known as much, and let unreasoning hatred of the "exploiters' sweep all reason before them. That Saud has not is a tribute to his own character and to the evolution of a businesslike arrangement as an alternative to colonialism's notorious evils. For the partnership between king and company has been based from the first on strict terms of U.S. noninterference in Saudi Arabia's domestic policies. The royalties Aramco pays provide 90% of the government's revenues. Without Aramco, Saudi Arabia would revert to a black-tent kingdom of camels, date palms and holy places. But no U.S. adviser has his office in the palace compound (as the British ambassador did in Jordan), no company agent issues authoritative suggestions to Saud's government officials (as Anglo-Iranian did in Iran). The result has been that nowhere else in the world, where such a single foreign interest so dominates a nation's economy, is there less rancor between government and company, between host and paying guest.