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Sadat was imprisoned twice. At the Barrages, puffing on a pipe in his huge French chair, Sadat recalled his days in Cell 54 of Qurah Maydan Prison. He remembered books he had absorbed, like Lloyd Douglas' The Magnificent Obsession and Jack London's The Sea Wolf. All dealt with the victory of the spirit over adversity. Even in prison, Sadat was a loner who kept silent, remembers Moussa Sabry, one of four inmates who escaped with Sadat from an earlier jailing. They crawled through a hole in the roof of the camp's rabbit hutch. Says Sabry: "Somehow Sadat made us hold the secret from the hundreds of prisoners."
Released from prison in 1948 and cashiered out of the Egyptian army, Sadat took any job he could land: baggage porter, truck driver, used-tire dealer. By now he was divorced from his first wife and in 1949 he married Jihan Raouf, the beautiful, 15-year-old daughter of middle-class Anglo-Egyptian parents.
In 1952 Sadat, reinstated in the army and now a lieutenant colonel, joined in the Nasser-led coup that ousted Farouk; Sadat was chosen to announce the dramatic news to the nation. Nasser himself took power from General Mohammed Naguib two years later.
During Nasser's stormy 16-year reign, Sadat was never taken too seriously. He was judged to be unambitious and even weak, a man who seemed to care more about smart clothes, his home and car, than Cabinet meetings and political responsibility. Colleagues nicknamed him "Nasser's poodle," and even Nasser himself would refer to Sadat as a "black donkey." Characteristically, Sadat the survivalist concealed his feelings and watched and learned. "If you showed ambition with Nasser," he says now, "that was the end." Nearly all of the original Revolutionary Command Council were eventually ousted from office and in 1969 Nasser chose the unmenacing Sadat as his Vice President. Sadat remembers the day well; it was the one time his acting skills failed him. "Anwar's eyes popped," Nasser told his top aide. A year later Nasser was dead.
In 1971, now Egypt's President, Sadat faced his first deadly challenge: an attempted coup by Leftist Ali Sabry and a group of ministers who confronted Sadat with a list of demands. But Sadat has often outwitted his enemies by encouraging them to underestimate him. His poker face showed nothing, and his rivals left unaware of their danger. He swiftly jailed them.
That lightning move solidified Sadat's hold on the country and gave him the confidence to turn away from Nasser's sweeping pan-Arabism and to abandon his predecessor's repressive socialist state. Sadat later felt bold enough to tell colleagues that he felt Nasser had been a disaster for Egypt: the wars, the large Russian presence, the seizure of property, the elimination of the private sector, the concentration camps. In a public ceremony, with Sadat in attendance, the Interior Ministry's large collection of taped conversations was burned. The government began returning private property and Egypt adopted a permanent constitution guaranteeing the rule of law.