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To Bed at 5. In the three months since Nasser seized the Suez Canal Co., Anthony Eden has averaged less than five hours' sleep a night. He did not get much that night. At 1:30 he was roused by a secretary carrying the hectoring threat from Russia's Bulganin: "We are fully determined to crush the aggressors and restore peace in the East through the use of force." Minutes later, a worried Guy Mollet called from Paris. Then a message arrived from U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjold announcing that both Egypt and Israel had agreed to a ceasefire. Eden summoned some of his advisers, did not get back to bed until 5.
But by 9 that morning, Eden was up, faultlessly dressed, soundly breakfasted. All morning he met with his Cabinet. There was no dispute about how to ans'wer the Russian note. Cabinet members were cheered by the U.S.'s prompt reply that it would oppose Russian intervention and agreed that Bulganin should be told to mind his own business. But the members disputed long over the ceasefire. Butler reiterated his argument that further gains by British arms would not compensate for U.S. and world disapproval. One worry was that protracted fighting might provide the Russians with a pretext to send volunteers in massive numbers to Egypt, with untold consequences to the balance of power in the Middle East. By 1 p.m. Eden yielded. He advised Mollet: "We've practically won. Nasser cannot last long now, anyway."
Ignominious End. That afternoon Eden told the House of Commons: "Her Majesty's government are ordering their forces to cease-fire at midnight tonight." The Labor benches broke into a spontaneous cheer. Moments later, the Tories realized that, if Eden had ordered it, a cease fire must be Tory policy, and they too began belatedly to cheer.
Then Eden made a blunder. He fol lowed right on by reading his reply to Bulganin's note. Inescapably, the world was left with the impression that only Bulganin's threat had scared Eden into capitulation—an impression that the Russians successfully exploited among the Arabs of the Middle East.
So ended, ignominiously, one of the shortest and most controversial wars in Britain's history. Tories got what consolation they could out of the renewed prospect of solidarity with the U.S. Scarcely had Eden finished speaking than he got a phone call from President Eisenhower, who interrupted his Election-Day concerns to express his approval of Eden's decision. Cried Mollet in Paris: "When the Soviet Union thought it saw a crack in the free world and wanted to threaten, we at once found the U.S. at our side."
Eden's internal troubles were far from over. No sooner had he issued his cease fire promise than he began to hedge it: the British-French forces would not leave until an "effective" U.N. police force was on hand, and Britain's view of effective was one that included the British. Eden wanted to have his assaulting forces deputized into law-enforcing U.N. policemen. Britain only did "what the U.N. without a police force could not do in time," was Eden's argument.