GREAT BRITAIN The Chosen Leader (See Cover)
A tired, sick, dispirited man emerged from 10 Downing Street, climbed into his official car, and sped through the chill January darkness to Buckingham Palace. Minutes later, the palace announced that Queen Elizabeth "was pleased to accept" the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden. Swinging out through the palace gates, Eden's black Humber rolled through London's darkened back streets, flashing headlights to warn police of its approach. It stopped opposite the Victorian pile of the Museum of Natural History, where another car waited. A slim, feminine figure in a red cossack hat and pale, loose coat, and carrying a yellow hatbox, jumped out of the waiting car and got into Eden's car. As the door closed, Clarissa Eden opened the hatbox, took out a small cushion and tucked it behind her husband's head. From a following car, newsmen could see Eden's head roll tiredly from side to side on the cushion as the car roared at 60 miles an hour toward Chequers, carrying into retirement and the long shadows of history an exhausted man on whose shoulders rested a burden of disaster few men have had to bear. Thus ended the 642 days of the prime ministry of Sir Anthony Eden—one of the shortest and most melancholy in Britain's proud history.
Next morning, while London pundits predicted almost with one voice that his successor would probably be Lord Privy Seal Richard Austen ("Rab") Butler, curious crowds gathered before the palace gates. At 1:45 p.m. a cry went up when a small, dusty Wolseley entered the palace gates: "Here comes Butler!" Then some one recognized the bareheaded man sitting next to the driver in the front seat, and shouted: "It's Mac, the bookie!" Forty minutes later, Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan, half-American grandson of a Scots tenant farmer, ex-Grenadier Guardsman and wartime friend of President Dwight Eisenhower, walked out of the palace as Her Majesty's Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.
Eden Must Go. Few had anticipated Macmillan's choice: the Economist called it "startling." But for weeks, Tories had known in their hearts that Sir Anthony would have to go; it had only been a question of time. It was not merely that he had miscalculated grievously on a matter of vital national policy—straining the U.S. alliance as it had never been strained before, bitterly dividing his own country, coming within a hairsbreadth of shattering the Commonwealth, blocking the canal he sought to seize. A man of greater flair might have carried off as great a blunder and outlived it. Rather it was that, faced with the consequences of his miscalculations, Eden was not up to rectifying the damage. In the Suez aftermath, nobody hated Eden; he was seen as pathetic. As a leader, Eden could have survived hate. He could not survive pity.
Even before Eden's health collapsed under "severe overstrain" and he flew to Jamaica for three weeks' rest, the talk in St. James's political clubs had been on the choice of the man who should succeed Eden. Eden, fully aware of the talk, was ready to go as soon as the succession was settled.