The Eden-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1955–1957 (review)

From April 1955, when Anthony Eden became British prime minister, to January 1957, when he was forced to step down ignominiously, Eden kept up a personal and rather one-sided correspondence with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. Eden knew that his illustrious British predecessor, Winston Churchill, had corresponded with two U.S. presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, while in office. Eden wished to have the same high-level and personal line of communication to the White House. The letters between Eden and Eisenhower have been brought together in their entirety by Peter Boyle, who has already published the Churchill-Eisenhower correspondence—see Peter. G. Boyle, ed., The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). This latest collection of letters tell us a good deal about the two protagonists and about the relationship at the top between the United States and Britain, especially during the worst tensions engendered by the 1956 Suez crisis.

Eden initiated the correspondence and was the author of most of the letters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the relative influence of their countries, Eden also emerges as the plaideur. Financial and foreign intelligence questions constitute the bulk of this correspondence, apart from a regular update on the two leaders' birthdays and various health problems. As Boyle points out in his introduction, many of the letters have already been used by historians, and all are now available in the respective national archives. Both men clearly were writing for the record as well as to keep channels of communication open between London and Washington. The foreign intelligence issues, which were withheld from the public until recently, make for some fascinating reading, not least the letters about the early days of the U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union and how their purpose was to be concealed, as well as about the "hairbrained" Genetrix balloon project (p. 192).

Boyle argues that the early correspondence reveals two clear-headed statesmen who were able to communicate easily and honestly with each other. But when the Suez question came to dominate Britain's foreign policy agenda, Eden's faulty judgment undermined him. Eden's letters show that he was driven by a set of dramatic historical parallels that he used in an increasingly hysterical manner. His historical analogies start (in a letter on 5 August 1956) by comparing Gamal Abdel Nasser to Benito Mussolini, rather than Adolf Hitler, and by arguing that it was imperative to remove Nasser from office. In late August 1956, Eden stressed that the bear (the Soviet Union) was using Nasser for Soviet aims, and a few weeks later he told Eisenhower that the West had failed against Hitler in the 1930s and now confronted a Soviet Union that was trying Hitlerian tactics. Eden insisted that if Nasser succeeded, the West could be faced by revolutionary governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq that would be "Egyptian satellites if not Russian ones." All of Western Europe, he argued, could be "held to ransom by Egypt acting at Russia's behest . . . an ignoble end to our history" (6 September 1956). Eisenhower unsuccessfully suggested to Eden that "we let some of the drama go out of the situation and concentrate on the task of deflating" Nasser (8 September).

What is more troubling about Eden's letters is the way he misled Eisenhower by omission and with sophistry. Anyone who knows the story of the three-way Suez collusion cannot help but recoil at Eden's deceit, which extended far beyond a diplomat's economy with the truth, despite his hints about the need to use force early. As the truth about the Suez invasion began to emerge by the end of October 1956, Eisenhower moved from avuncular suggestions to genuine concern and then to angry requests for information. Eden, even as the invasion was collapsing, reverted to pleading that "history alone can judge whether we have made the right decision, but I do want to assure you that we have made it from...