WHEN Sir Anthony Eden takes over as Prime Minister of Great Britain, he will be, at 57, one of the youngest of the world's political leaders, but by no means a youngster in the long roster of British Prime Ministers.* Anthony Eden has aged considerably since his gall bladder operations in 1953, but despite his silver-grey hair, tired eyes and furrowed forehead, he still wears a boyish air. Yet, when Dwight Eisenhower was an army major in the Philippines, Khrushchev an obscure bureaucrat, Nehru a revolutionary in jail and Mao Tse-tung an outlaw in the Shensi hills, the youthful Mr. Eden was parleying at the summit with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.
Born to Rule. Thirty years an M.P., twelve a Cabinet minister, he is Britain's best-informed diplomat, its most seasoned negotiator. Yet his career has been a narrow one that lacks the human breadth of a Churchill's, a Truman's, or an Eisenhower's. Eden has seldom strayed beyond the polished confines of Westminster and Whitehall, and his public sense does not derive from an easy personal acquaintance with the common man. Far more, it is an inbred instinct, the product of Eden's membership in that unique class of Englishmen who are bred to rule.
The Edens come of Norman stock, and as far back as the 15th century one lusty Robert de Eden carved out a fiefdom close to the Scottish border. Charles II made Sir Robert Eden a baronet in 1672. The family, though seldom conspicuous, won acceptance in the gilded circle of the aristocracy through its large landholdings and its far-flung marriage alliances. Through his mother, Sybil Frances Grey, Sir Anthony is connected with the Earls of Westmoreland, and the Mowbrays, Dukes of Norfolk. His young second wife, Clarissa, is the niece of Sir Winston Churchill.
The Eden family seat for 400 years was Windlestone Hall, a porticoed ocher pile surrounded by lawns, lake and a line of wind-blown beeches, 254 miles north of London. Anthony Eden was born there in June 1897, the third son of irascible Sir William Eden, an eccentric country gentleman who detested children and barking dogs with equal enthusiasm. At Eton, Anthony played a straight bat and pulled a respectable oar; then, like so many of Britain's public-school boys of his day, he went off to fight in Flanders.
Lost Generation. Of the 28 members of Eden's Middle Fourth at Eton, nine were killed. With them died the flower of a generation, including two of Eden's brothers, Timothy and Nicholas.* Anthony, who joined the King's Royal Rifle Corps, at 19 became the youngest adjutant in the British army. In the mud of Ypres, he crawled out under the wire and brought back a wounded sergeant under a hail of German fire. He won Britain's Military Cross. Part of his subsequent appeal to the British electorate stems from Eden's status as one of "the lost generation"—those gallant young schoolboys whom fate and the nostalgic poetry of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen transformed into tragic legend. Years later, in Berlin, Eden was to refight the grim Battle of the Somme on the back of a menu provided by an Austrian-born corporal named Hitler, who had served opposite Eden's outfit.