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A captain of artillery in World War I, Eden returned to Oxford to take firstclass honors in Persian and Arabic, which he still speaks fluently. Soon, with the aid of an influential father-in-law (Sir Gervase Beckett, director of the Yorkshire Post), he was launched on a career as a young Tory comer. At 38, he was the youngest Foreign Secretary in a century, and the glamour boy of Britain's slick-paper magazines. Mussolini complained that the British government "sent a little boy to deal with me," and Hitler's newspapers called him "The Eden Boy.". But one day in 1938 Eden stood up in the House of Commons to protest Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's overriding the Foreign Office. With that instinctive sense for the undramatic, he declared: "I do not believe ... in appeasement," and resigned. Churchill remembered: "There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal drawling tides of drift and surrender. Now he was gone."
For 17 long years, Eden hovered in Churchill's shadow, just one step below the top. He waited so long and so patiently that it became a kind of joke and gibe. In those years as heir apparent he was a man of devices, not decisions; Churchill made the decisions. When EDC came to an undignified end in the French Assembly, Eden thought of using the 1948 Brussels pact as the basis for Western European Union—"a diplomatic miracle," said John Foster Dulles. In 1954 he negotiated with a young military reformer-dictator named Nasser for the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt, and 74 years of British occupation came to a quiet end.
Wrong Place, Wrong Foot. U.S. diplomats were often exasperated at Eden's infinite patience, his insistence on compromise and limited solutions, his willingness to concede rather than fight (as in Indo-China). But on the whole, they were anxious to see him succeed the aging Churchill, whose erratic flights in his last months in power often gave U.S. policymakers the jitters.
But from the day of his triumphant election in 1955, Eden has been dogged with ill luck. Three days after his election the nation was hit by the first major railroad strike in 29 years. Three months later the economy went into a sag so sudden that Eden was forced to introduce an unpopular emergency budget. Then came the Cyprus problem. Eden's successfully impersonal handling of the Bulganin-Khrushchev visit was spoiled almost before Eden could take a bow by the news that an inept British frogman had disappeared while inhospitably snooping around the visitors' ships in Portsmouth Harbor.
Even friends conceded that Eden, so long a second in command, seemed unable to make decisions until goaded into them, then lashed out erratically to prove he was strong. They cite the unhappy attempt to rush Jordan into the Baghdad Pact that resulted in the ejection of Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb. Under stinging criticism for this blunder, Eden retaliated by abruptly ordering the arrest and exile of Cyprus' Archbishop Makarios. Last week critics offered the same diagnosis of his sudden decision to intervene in Egypt. Wrote Punch: "A weak, vain man, riled at continual attacks on his indecision, when he makes up his mind to show the world that he is firm and to put his obstinate foot down, usually puts it down in the wrong place."