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Sadat begins to tire noticeably, aides say, late in the afternoon. He has his one big meal of the day, in the American style, between six and seven o'clock: because of his tender stomach, it is normally a dish of simple, boiled food—this time macaroni imported from Italy and rice. Every evening without fail, Sadat schedules two movies, mostly American westerns; he watches them, usually alone, in his pajamas. He leads an ungaudy life, really, but Sadat's comfortable residences and stylish clothes—as well as his glamorous wife—have drawn disapproving mutters from the public.
Sadat, the imaginative thinker, is a poor administrator who shuns details. Although he is tolerant of dissent, the President is impatient with staff work. "I don't want people to organize me," he says. He detests reading reports and prefers to have them delivered orally. Most letters from Jimmy Carter, for example, are read to him aloud by the U.S. Ambassador. Because there are so few able men around him, many of Sadat's own directives seem to melt away when they reach Egypt's swollen bureaucracy. The President keeps the important decisions secret; his ministers, and even his wife, usually hear about them the same time the public does. When Sadat finally does arrive at a decision, it is usually irreversible. "He has a will of iron," says one military officer.
The introspective Sadat is at the same time a dramatist. He likes pomp. After his 1975 decision to reopen the Suez Canal, Sadat dressed up in a white admiral's uniform and rode down the canal for four hours on the deck of a destroyer. As a young man he wanted to be an actor, and for a brief period, he now relates somewhat uncomfortably, he did perform on the Cairo stage. He answered an ad in the newspaper for a theater job and sent in his photograph, declaring that he did both tragedy and comedy but preferred comedy. Even today he sings Egyptian pop songs around the house. In telling a story, he often adds extravagant whispers or growls. "He's still the actor," says a longtime colleague. "No one ever sees his real face."
Sadat's patience and sense of survival run directly back to his village roots. One of 13 children, he was born on Christmas Day 59 years ago in the little (then pop. 2,000) Nile settlement of Mit Abu el Kom. His father was a military hospital clerk who so much admired Kemal Atatūrk, the founder of modern Turkey, that he named his sons after Turkish officers. His mother was an illiterate Sudanese. He grew up hating the colonial British. When the upper-class Military Academy was opened up in 1936 to all Egyptians—a decision that changed the future of the country—Sadat was one of 52 boys picked. So were Nasser and six other Egyptians who later banded together to overthrow King Farouk. During World War II, Sadat, still passionately anti-British, collaborated with the Germans. On one occasion he urged his fellow officers to blow up the British embassy; the cooler Nasser restrained him.