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A year later, Hussein's unhappy and unstable father. King Talal, was found insane and unfit to rule (now lives in exile, unaware he was ever a King). At 16 Hussein was proclaimed King. After a year at Harrow and six months at Sandhurst, the boy went home to take over a man-size job.
Glubb Must Go. For the first three years, Hussein played at being King. He dashed around the country in his fast cars, went on gazelle shoots, and stayed out so late at parties that finally his pretty Egyptian wife, Cambridge-educated Queen Dina, went off to live in Cairo. When Britain ineptly tried to bring Jordan into the Baghdad Pact, and Glubb Pasha used tanks and troops to smash the bloody riots that followed, the King lightheartedly circled Amman in his plane to watch the show. He too was restless under British tutelage, and his instinctive nationalism was roused. Egypt's new revolutionary regime was broadcasting its message to Arab masses everywhere to throw off the Western yoke. At Hussein's side his playboy aide, Lieut. Colonel Ali Abu Nuwar, whispered in his ear that Glubb must go.
The sacking of Glubb a year ago now seems only one of the acts Hussein had to perform if he was going to live with Arab nationalism. To the British, it was an audacious piece of ingratitude. But to the entire Arab world it was a thrilling declaration of independence which proved even more dramatically than any move of Nasser's that British power had faded in the Middle East.
King Hussein shrewdly followed up by embracing all the tenets of Nasser's nationalism. He granted the first truly free elections in Jordan's short history, though warned in advance that the results would go against him. He accepted a military alliance with Egypt, and when he first heard of the attack on Sinai he had to be restrained from leading an all-out attack on Israel, the outcome of which must have been sure disaster. True or not, the story is universally believed throughout the Arab world that Hussein proposed personally to pilot the first bomber over Tel Aviv. Only the opposition of his Cabinet—and a telephone call from Nasser—are said to have dissuaded him from going to war last October. Thus his bona fides was good in the Arab world: he had avoided his grandfather's error of being regarded as a stooge to the West, or soft on Israel.
The Arab Nation. But there was a limit to what Hussein would do to further Arab nationalism. "Have you ever met a man working against himself like I am?" he asked friends on a visit to Cairo last winter.
The pro-Nasser extremists and Communists from west of the Jordan River who had gained a parliamentary majority in Hussein's free election began openly seeking union with Egypt. In Jerusalem's noisy bazaars there were more pictures of Nasser to be seen on the shop walls than of Hussein. The country's new Premier, Suleiman Nabulsi, sometime soap manufacturer from the refugee stronghold of Nablus, proclaimed flatly: "Jordan's destiny is to disappear."