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One Western intelligence report describes him: "His vices are vanity, obstinacy, suspicion, avidity for power. His strengths are complete self-confidence, great resilience, courage and nervous control, willingness to take great risks, great tactical skill and stubborn attachment to initial aims. He gets boyish pleasure out of conspiratorial doings. Has a real streak of self-pity. While a patient, subtle organizer, he can lose his head."
With increasing power, Nasser grew mercurial, showed signs of quicker arrogance. He wearied of his insurmountable domestic problems and preferred to busy himself with grander international affairs. "I really have no plans; I just react," he liked to say.
Six years after Nasser rose to power, it still appears as if his one dominating goal is to amass strength—but strength to perpetuate his own power rather than strength to carry out the economic and social transformation of his country. He is no man of the people, but prefers to keep the crowd at balcony distance. A remote and shining figure, a man of photographs and broadcasts, he mesmerizes most from afar; Syrians flocked to vote for his presidency last spring before he had ever visited their country.
Cat Feats. "I have been a conspirator for so long that I mistrust all around me," he once said. He has a cat's ability to land on his feet. Twenty-one months ago, only the intervention of the U.S. saved him from being turned out of power by the invading Franco-British-Israeli forces. His proud army, his vaunted Soviet equipment, lay in dismal ruin. Only after measuring the U.S. reaction did the Russians begin to bluster. The U.S. saved his neck, but Nasser credited Moscow, and soon began boasting of the Egyptian "victory" at Port Said, where the British had routed his forces.
The victories on which Nasser has grown so great are often setbacks for his people. Though he has forced the British out of Egypt, his country is poorer, self-deprived of desperately needed Western aid, sapped by retaliatory boycott, and helpless before a rate of population growth so steep that there can be no hope of abating the general misery for years. Though he merged Syria in his United Arab Republic with glowing promises of prosperity in Arab brotherhood, the first consequences for Syrians were a decline in the value of their money, a stiff boost in tariffs, and destruction of their remaining political freedoms.
Nasser was born, an assistant postmaster's son, of Egyptian-Arab land-tilling stock in the Upper Nile Valley in 1918, the year the exhausted European colonial powers won a great war but began to lose their world supremacy. Then:
Age 8—Sent to school in Cairo, he shook his fist at R.A.F. planes flying overhead and shouted: "0 Almighty, may disaster overtake the British!" Two years later the constitution that the British had granted Egypt in 1922 was suspended, and Egypt was governed by decree.
Age 16—A student at Cairo's Al Nahda secondary school, Nasser organized schoolboy riots, about this time ordered an assassination (presumably of an Egyptian political leader) that narrowly failed to come off, and lay awake shuddering on his own salvation. That year the British refused to grant home rule to India; Gandhi went on a hunger strike, and Nehru to jail.