Lacking in style

Keith Kyle

• Divided we stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis by W. Scott Lucas
  Hodder, 399 pp, £25.00, September 1991, ISBN 0 340 53666 7
• Blind Loyalty: Australia and the Suez Crisis by W.J. Hudson
  Melbourne University Press, 157 pp, £12.50, November 1991, ISBN 0 522 84394 8

The late Lord Caccia, who had the misfortune to arrive in Washington as British Ambassador in November 1956 just as the ‘special relationship’ hit its all-time low with the abrupt American-driven ceasefire on the Suez Canal, was much given in later years to recalling how flabbergasted he had been by an encounter he witnessed on the 17th of that month. He had accompanied his Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to visit the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had been discovered to have cancer during the week of the Suez war. Towards the end of the conversation, Dulles suddenly asked ‘Selwyn, why did you stop? Why didn’t you go through with it and get Nasser down?’ The British visitors fell apart with astonishment. ‘If you had so much as winked at us ...’ Lloyd gasped. Although there is no American account available of this conversation, the record of a bedside visit by President Eisenhower five days earlier shows his Secretary of State making an almost identical remark.