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##### January 15, 1977 OBITUARY ## Career Built on Style and Dash Ended with Invasion of Egypt ##### By ALDEN WHITMAN Robert Anthony Eden spent more than 30 years in public life, but when he finally became Prime Minister in 1955, his tenure lasted only 21 months and ended in a gloomy fiasco for Britain and himself in the failed effort to invade Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. The failure (more diplomatic than military) of the attack in October 1956, drew upon Eden the condemnation of world opinion and tended to obscure his successes as a political leader who had been in the House of Commons since 1923 and who had led his Conservative Party to a notable electoral victory in 1955. The failure also tended to countervail his undoubted gifts as an international negotiator and his achievements as Foreign Secretary, a post he occupied with great diligence and eclat for more than 10 years between 1935 and 1955. Apart from the first three years, when he was Stanley Baldwin's and Neville Chamberlain's Foreign Secretary, Eden served under Winston Churchill, whose forceful omnipresence served to conceal his protege's strengths and weaknesses. Groomed by Churchill for the Conservative leadership and for the Prime Ministership, the publicly popular and photogenic Eden seemed typecast for success; he proved to be a man out of step with history whose pertinacity was to policies and practices 20 years out of date. It was his further misfortune that Britain had waned as a world power and was obliged to trail in the wake of the United States. 'Police Action' Taken Thus, in July 1956, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, Eden reacted by supporting the sort of preventive "police action" that he would have liked to have mounted against Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930's. By identifying the Egyptian nationalist strongman with the prewar Fascists, Eden committed a historical blunder. The invasion, he contended then (and 10 years later in an interview for this obituary article), was aimed at maintaining the sanctity of international agreements and at preventing future unilateral denunciation of treaties. It also, he said, had averted a larger war in the Middle East. Anglo-French troops, he argued, moved in after the Israelis had entered Egypt, and his purpose was to halt the fighting and prevent new clashes "because the United Nations could not do so in time." At the same time Eden faulted the United States for forcing him to withdraw; but he took credit for United Nations action in patrolling the Israeli-Egyptian borders. Intransigent toward Nasser, Eden said of the invasion: "Peace at any price has never averted war. We must not repeat the mistakes of the prewar years by behaving as though the enemies of peace and order are armed with only good intentions." And, recalling the incident in his 1967 interview, he declared: "I am still unrepentant about Suez. People never look at what would have happened if we had done nothing. There is a parallel with the 30's. If you allow people to break agreements with impunity, the appetite grows to feed on such things. "I don't see what other we ought to have done. One cannot dodge. It is hard to act rather than dodge." Earldom in 1961 Eden's defense, warmly delivered in a resonant and ready baritone, carried no regrets for his virtual departure from active politics. In ill health at the time of Suez, he was almost in tears when he resigned the Prime Ministership. After a period of recuperation in which he began to write his memoirs, he accepted an earldom in 1961 and entered the House of Lords as Lord Avon. In his advanced as in his younger years, Eden was impeccably tailored and coiffed. His guardsman's mustache, once black, had been trimmed to medium size, but his eyebrows (a French paper once called him "Lord Eyelashes") were as bushy as ever, although they, like his hair and his mustache, were silvery gray. His distinctively blue eyes were penetrating, and his face was ruddy. His manner was suave and polished, for long experience had equipped him with a fund of ready pleasantries and a capacity for gracious conversation. Eden's popularity, a good deal of which survived Suez, was traceable in part to his glamour. He became Foreign Secretary for the first time at the age of 38. He had been valorous in war and he cut a dash in the tradition of the romantic heroes of fiction. His black homburg (the "Anthony Eden hat") was his trademark; it gave him a touch of youthful freshness, a pleasant contrast to his predecessors, Sir Samuel Hoare and Sir John Simon. As an advocate of rearmament and firmness against the menace of Fascism in the 30's, he acquired the reputation of being the polished diplomat who was getting the better of those bullies on the continent. He personified a generation's striving for peace and European tranquility; and, in World War II, he typified his country's fashioning of Allied unity to defeat Hitlerism. Much a man with a sense of noblesse oblige, Robert Anthony Eden was born in County Durham on June 12, 1897, in the glowing afternoon of the British Empire, of which his ancestors were a part. One was Royal Governor of colonial Maryland; another was Earl Grey, whose Reform Bill of 1832 brought the middle class into electoral politics; and the family baronetcy had been established in 1672 by Charles II. Sir William Eden, Anthony's father, was an eccentric country squire who, besides having an interest in foxhunting and gardening, was a better-than-average amateur painter and a first-rate boxer. His advice to his son, frequently given, was: "There is only one thing in life, and that is to run straight. Don't, for God's sake, play a double game." Anthony's mother, the former Sybil Frances Grey, was a gentle, cultivated woman and a great beauty whose portrait was painted by James McNeill Whistler. Young Anthony entered Eton in 1911, where he enjoyed a mild success as an athlete and won a prize for excellence in divinity subjects. Pictures show a tall, slim, slightly rabbit-toothed youth staring gravely from under an Eton topper. In 1915, at the age of 18, he went to France to fight as a member of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. Years later, when he was dining with Adolf Hitler, a lance corporal in the war, they discovered that they had been opposite each other on the Somme front. Hitler drew a diagram of the position from memory on the back of a menu, which Eden kept as a souvenir. Eden, who concealed his youthfulness behind a very bushy mustache, won the Military Cross for saving a soldier's life and emerged from service as a brigade-major. In the war, his eldest brother, John, had been killed, as was a younger brother, William. Timothy, Eden's surviving elder brother, inherited the baronetcy. "War I hated for all I had seen of it among my family and friends," Eden said afterward, "for the death, muck and misery, the pounding shell-fire and the casualty clearing stations." At Oxford, which Eden entered after the war, he took a first in Oriental languages (Persian was his specialty) and dabbled in painting. He got his start in politics in 1922 by being beaten for the House of Commons. "A year later," he reminisced "a by-election at Warwick and Leamington gave me an unexpected opportunity to defeat my sister's mother-in-law, the Countess of Warwick, who had taken up the cause of socialism. I represented this constituency, or rather it remained faithful to me, for more than 33 years." Wed a Banker's Daughter A fortnight before the by-election, Eden married Beatrice Helen Beckett, daughter of Sir Gervase Beckett, a banker and owner of the politically influential Yorkshire Post. It was a fashionable marriage that promoted his career not only among the peers and squires of Yorkshire, but also among their kind who were running the Conservative Party. Through these associations Eden learned to respect the party's hierarchy, an attitude that was said to have kept him later on from fracturing his relations with the leadership over points of principle. Eden's wife was not so devoted to politics as he, and in June 1950 he won a divorce on the ground of desertion. She had been in the United States for some time. Two sons, Simon and Nicholas, were born to the couple. Simon was killed in World War II, and Nicholas is the heir to the earldom. In the House of Commons or as a campaigner, Eden was a determined but not brilliant speaker. His manner controlled even under sharp attack in the House, he rarely made a fighting comeback or a telling rebuttal. Patient repetition was his rhetorical device. Despite this handicap, Eden's rise was spectacular. After only three years in Parliament he was designated parliamentary private secretary to Sir Austen Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary and a half-brother of Neville Chamberlain. Between 1926 and 1929 Eden acquired his basic training in foreign affairs at a time when Sir Austen was among the strongest champions of the League of Nations. In 1931 Eden was named Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and in 1934 he was put in charge of League of Nations Affairs with full ministerial rank, first as Lord Privy Seal and then as Minister Without Portfolio. As a minister, Eden was frequently Britain's spokesman at League sessions and conferences in Geneva, and he met Hitler for the first time in 1934, about a year after he had become the German Chancellor. "Hitler was an oddly sympathetic character," Eden recalled in his 1967 interview. "He took pains to be reasonable and was extremely well-informed, but intractable in negotiations." Acutely aware of the Nazi menace from the outset, Eden began to counsel British firmness and rearmament, but his private views failed, for some time, to evoke a wide response in a smug British society that was certain Hitler could be contained or should be appeased. Shortly after his visit to Berlin, Eden journeyed to Rome for the first of many meetings with Mussolini. The Italian-Ethiopian War was brewing, and Eden tried in vain to persuade the Italian dictator to submit the dispute to the League of Nations. "Mussolini, contrary to myth, never shouted at me," Eden recalled in 1967. "He was very sober, quiet and depressing. He had a journalist's mind, active and playing with different subjects, with a good deal of knowledge." Mussolini, for his part, scoffed at Eden publicly as "the best dressed fool in Europe." Named Foreign Secretary In December 1935, in the middle of the short and brutal war, Hoare was obliged to resign as Foreign Secretary amid public outcries over a proposal to appease Mussolini. Prime Minister Baldwin picked Eden to replace him. Then only 38, he was the youngest Foreign Secretary in almost 100 years. He was a strict taskmaster, an industrious reader of dispatches and telegrams, an endless negotiator and a tireless conciliator; but he was more the instrument than the arbiter of foreign policy. Thus, in the spring of 1936, when Hitler marched into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland and when France, Belgium and Czechoslovakia urged united action on Britain, Eden could do no more than warn Germany of the consequences of its actions. Similarly, in the Spanish Civil War, he supported a policy of nonintervention, which deprived the Republican Government of its right to buy arms for its defense while permitting Hitler and Mussolini openly to arm Franco. His private attitudes, however, were far more anti-Fascist than his public actions, a circumstance that eventually caused him to resign in 1938. The break with Neville Chamberlain came in early 1938, when the Prime Minister wanted to begin talks with Mussolini on an overall settlement with Italy that would recognize her conquest of Ethiopia. Eden, who favored a policy of obduracy, resigned. At the time Eden's critics charged that he quit over protocol, not principle; that he was miffed because Chamberlain was dealing with Mussolini behind his back. 'I Could Not Agree' "I had resigned because I could not agree with the foreign policy which Mr. Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues wished to pursue," he wrote in his memoirs. Expanding on this in his 1967 interview, Eden said in a tart voice: "It was not over protocol, Chamberlain's communicating with Mussolini without telling me. I never cared a goddamn, a tuppence about protocol. "The reason for my resignation was that we had an agreement with Mussolini about the Mediterranean and Spain, which he was violating by sending troops to Spain, and Chamberlain wanted to have another agreement. I thought Mussolini should honor the first one before we negotiated for the second. I was trying to fight a delaying action for Britain, and I could not go along with Chamberlain's policy." Eden remained out of the Government for 18 months, but he was not inactive in privately promoting opposition to Fascism. For this his popularity was enormous. Despite sharp differences, Eden was recalled to the Cabinet as Secretary for the Dominions at the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. He regarded it as a war assignment, but his position became far more congenial when Churchill stepped in as Prime Minister in May 1940, for Eden was back as Foreign Secretary in December of that year. In this situation his contributions to forging the Grand Alliance against Hitlerism were enormous. Not only did he deal with the Allied envoys in London, but also he traveled to Washington to confer with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to Moscow to negotiate with Marshal Josef Stalin. He was at all the Big Three conferences. Of the statesmen with whom he dealt in the war, Eden liked Roosevelt for his "true charm," but he admired Stalin as "the ablest negotiator I have ever seen in action." "He had a very clear sense of purpose," Eden remarked in 1967. "He was never violent in speech, nor brash, but quiet and [he] insisted on the things that mattered to him. Stalin was ruthless and cruel, no doubt, but remarkable." In his memoirs Eden was less enthusiastic about Roosevelt. "Roosevelt was familiar with the history and geography of Europe," he wrote. "Perhaps his hobby of stamp collecting had helped him to this knowledge, but the academic yet sweeping opinions which he built upon it were alarming in their cheerful fecklessness. "He seemed to see himself disposing of the fate of many lands, Allied no less than enemy. He did all this with so much grace that it was not easy to dissent. Yet it was too like a conjurer, skillfully juggling with balls of dynamite, whose nature he failed to understand." Eden left the Foreign Office when the Churchill Government was defeated by Labor in July 1945, but he retained the post of Conservative Party leader in the House of Commons. In the interval between 1945 and his return as Foreign Secretary in 1951, he had the job of explaining to Conservatives in Parliament and to his party at large the merits of membership in the United Nations and of cooperation with the United States. It was one of the paradoxes of his life that, having spoken out for the United Nations and the United States, he led his Government into the Suez adventure in defiance of both. Compounding the irony were Eden's misgivings about American foreign policy under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eden was irked by Dulles's policy of "brinkmanship," or display of muscle, in relations with the Communist world. He was also critical of the United States decision not to sign the 1954 Geneva accord on Vietnam, of which he was an architect. Eden's private life in the early 1950's was a mixture of great happiness and severe illness. One occasion for happiness was his marriage in 1952 at the age of 55 to Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, 32- year-old niece of his good friend and mentor. Another was the bestowal on him of the Order of the Garter in 1954, which made him Sir Anthony Eden. His illness--a gastric and gall-bladder disorder- -occurred a year earlier and obliged him to undergo surgery at the Lahey Clinic in Boston. On Churchill's resignation as Prime Minister on April 5, 1955, Eden, who had been his deputy as well as Foreign Secretary, succeeded to the post for which his experience and his temperament seemed to have especially and brilliantly prepared him. But an auspicious beginning led rapidly to an inglorious end. A year after attending a summit meeting that created "the spirit of Geneva," he was embroiled in the Middle East. His troubles began building to a climax in July, 1956, when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal Company, in which Britain and France held a major stake. In the House of Commons Eden announced that he could not accept any scheme for the future of the canal that would leave it "in the unfettered control of a single power, which would exploit it purely for purposes of national policy." A Suez Canal Users Association was set up which Nasser quickly denounced as designed to "rob Egypt of the canal." Then, on Oct. 29, Israeli forces invaded Sinai, avowedly to eliminate Egyptian commando bases from which attacks into Israel had assertedly been made. But, as later historical research has made clear, the Israeli invasion was a result of secret collusion with France, in which Eden joined. "Although Eden doubtless did his best to avoid direct commitment," Hugh Thomas wrote in "The Suez Affair," "there now seems little doubt that he did indeed nail Britain's colors to the unfamiliar mast of Franco-Israeli collaboration." Mr. Thomas concluded that Eden's statement to the House of Commons that there was "not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt" was "a straightforward lie." Dealings Acknowledged In his 1967 interview (which he stipulated would not be used until after his death), Eden acknowledged secret dealings with the French and "intimations" of the Israeli attack. He insisted, however, that "the joint enterprise and the preparations for it were justified in the light of the wrongs it [the Anglo-French invasion] was designed to prevent." "I have no apologies to offer," Eden declared. In any event, hard upon the Israeli invasion, Britain and France opened their offensive. It was all over by Nov. 6, when a cease-fire was accepted. By then the United Nations General Assembly had adopted, 64 to 5, a United States resolution calling for a cease-fire. Eden's popularity in Britain dropped, and even Churchill remarked, "I'm not sure I should have dared to begin; but I am sure I should not have dared to stop." His health broken by the strain of failure, Eden resigned on Jan. 9, 1957. Harold Macmillan succeeded him. Between bouts of illness over a bile-duct disorder and the writing of his political memoirs, Eden and his wife vacationed abroad, notably in Barbados, and led a retired country life in Britain. The memoirs, in three volumes, were drawn largely from his official diaries. They were titled "Facing the Dictators," "The Reckoning" and "Full Circle." In 1961 he was elevated to the peerage as the Earl of Avon. He was made a viscount at the same time. His full title was Viscount Eden of Royal Leamington Spa in the County of Warwick, and Earl of Avon. After he took his seat in the House of Lords, Eden continued to comment on foreign affairs. Urged Bombing Halt In a television interview in 1966 he called on the United States to halt its bombing of North Vietnam and to concentrate on developing a peace plan "that might conceivably be acceptable to Hanoi." The bombing of North Vietnam, he argued, would never settle the conflict in South Vietnam. "On the contrary," he declared, "bombing creates a sort of David and Goliath complex in any country that has to suffer--as we had to, and as I suspect the Germans had to, in the last war." In his retirement, Eden turned to painting and gardening for relaxation. "Painting is one of my great interests," he said in his 1967 interview. "Unlike most politicians, I stopped painting when I became a politician, so I take my pleasure in enjoying art, not in creating it. "Although I have never been rich, I have tried to buy pictures that please me. Paintings have been a very pleasant escape for me. When I didn't want to listen to other politicians speaking, I would always think of my paintings. It is essential to have some diversion like that, otherwise you will go mad. "The Foreign Office was a terribly stern taskmaster. The amount of detail and the number of telegrams I was obliged to read left very little time for reading other things, so I have not found it relaxing to read. Of course, if my wife says, 'You must read this,' I try to." Eden smiled. It was the smile of a man who seemed happy to be removed from the world of immediate affairs.
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