At 7:30 one morning last week, King Farouk's past caught up with him. He looked out of the huge window of his office in the summer palace in Alexandria, saw tanks and cannons of a hostile army —his own—advancing under cover of Egyptian Royal Air Force planes. Farouk had made and unmade Premiers and generals, manipulated the Arab League, and lost $140,000 in a single night of gambling. But last week, at the payoff, he couldn't command a battalion. His order to the bodyguards to resist never reached them because the messenger was intercepted. A few loyal bodyguards shot up three soldiers, and with that the last remnant of Farouk's power evaporated.
Always a realist, he accepted the ultimatum of an obscure general delivered by a turncoat politician. He abdicated, and quit Egypt within the six hours specified. As he stood on the quay to embark, his huge, beefy frame encased in a white naval uniform, tears spilled down his cheeks. Twenty-one guns fired the royal salute, and the royal yacht Mahroussa (meaning Protected) put past the harbor's red and green entrance lights and steamed for Italy. It carried Farouk, his 19-year-old wife, their seven-month-old son, now King Fuad II, and 204 royal trunks.
The Egyptians he left behind laughed and shouted and pumped each other's hands, Alexandria had not seen such a happy outpouring since another day 16 years ago. That day there were also Royal Air Force planes overhead and a 21-gun salute. Tall, handsome, slender King Farouk had come home from school in England (the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich), to replace his recently dead father, plump Fuad I. Wrote the New York Times correspondent: "Farouk has won the hearts of his people by his democratic manner." Last week, the independent newspaper El Akhbar of Cairo updated the story: "Today, history records the name of an oppressive and unjust King ... A King who used the influence of the monarch to flog the backs of the liberals, who imposed misery and slavery on the country and forced the country to call his tyranny justice, his corruption reform, and his immorality piety."*
The Palestine Scandal. The indictment was overdrawn but not incorrect. Farouk, who could have been an uncommonly intelligent and able King (and occasionally was), turned out in the main to be an uncommonly gross and unrestrained one. He gave free rein to all his appetites—from women to power, and treated his Premiers as he did his girl friends, changing them constantly (five Premiers in one six-month period). After the birth of his only son he made a valiant effort to straighten up, and brought in honest Premier Hilary Pasha to purge the corruption that was endangering the government. But inevitably, Hilaly's probings led close to Farouk's palace gang, and the King dumped the honest Premier.
That was his fatal error. For among the dirty deals that Hilaly was tracking down was the Palestine arms scandal.
In 1948, young, alert field officers returned from the Israeli war, having suffered a more humiliating defeat than any country in the 20th century. For their defeat they blamed the inept, lazy officers who ran the War Ministry and also Farouk, for he meddled in the army, promoting the inept officers, including the worst of all, General Mohammed Haidar Pasha, the commander in chief.