Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower

Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south, Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and in cahoots with the Israelis took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington, D.C., a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things.
     
And where was your intrepid foreign (future high-life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an airplane flying from New York to Bermuda for a tennis tournament. I remember the news being passed back to the cabin from the cockpit about Budapest and Suez and the players on board being far more interested in whether we’d play best of three or best of five and other such petty details. Actually, although I was among the youngest, at 20, we all should have been ashamed of ourselves.

     
The problem with the American quest for happiness is that they sometime ignore what makes other people happy. No one on that flight gave a damn about the Hungarians, among the best people in Europe, who were being slaughtered by T-34 tanks for daring to want to be free. What I should have been doing is what a couple of English girls I met later on did—fill a car with food and medicine and drive from Vienna to Budapest and spread it around to freedom fighters. Instead I went to Hamilton and pursued a beautiful Bermudan lady by the name of Jackie B.
     
My father, who at the time was planning to build a large textile factory in Khartoum once Nasser began to push Europeans around, was on Eden’s side. He immediately branded Ike an idiot, one of the few times the old boy had it very wrong. Ike knew that the game was up. Nasser blocked the canal, an act that made tanker rates shoot past the ozone level, and they stayed on a high for close to a year. Perhaps old Dad had his ships in mind when he was rooting for the hostilities to continue. The oil shortage that ensued made the rates go even higher, with tankers having to go the long way round to deliver the black gold from the Persian Gulf to America. This was the good news for a few of us. The bad was that the Arab-Israeli conflict worsened, and the Muslim world was inflamed against its old overlords in the West. It has progressively gotten worse ever since.
     
For some strange reason I followed British politics even back then. After Eden’s fall, Harold Macmillan’s minister of transport—Marples, I believe, was his name—was asked by my father to head the consortium that built his mega-factory in the Sudan, and he headed the group. Dad felt very sorry for Eden, an obviously sick man living on uppers, whose resentment of Nasser had turned into an obsession. Two or three years ago, in an exhibition for the paintings of my friend Naresh Kumar’s wife, I was introduced to his wife, lady Avon, by the great Indian tennis player. I was a bit under the weather and called her Lady Eden and she laughed and flirted with me. She was in her early 90s and was wonderful. Eden got the wrong end of the historical stick. An impeccable career marred at the end by a personal vendetta against a typical Arab demagogue who promised a lot and delivered zero.