Glimpses of Suez 1956

Abstract

So much has been written about the steep hill of Suez that anyone presuming to comment after seventeen years is bound to feel a sense of emptiness on the subject. Notwithstanding the miles of speeches in the United Nations record, the tons of newsclippings and of observers' comments, the volumes of documented academic discourse, the memoirs and impure fiction, I suspect that it would take a long and noisy reunion of the entire cast of the crisis to piece together what did happen throughout the days and weeks and eventually months during which the General Assembly dinned on. Many of the principals can no longer be mustered. On television, that Suez spectacle was the Watergate hearing of its day. New Yorkers even forgot for a while to push and yell and claw at each other, so intently were they watching the tube flicker and flash the faces of speakers on the podium, the huddles around national desks, the scampering to and fro of bagmen and arm-twisters. Inside the United Nations Headquarters, the great hall was packed to standing-room-only high in the public gallery, the Secretariat slab blazed with lights night after night, the bar in the North Lounge, where Walter presided over his superb whiskey sours, never closed until the gavel had banged the Assembly silent. It was a time of high drama what with Suez in the Assembly Hall, Hungary in the Security Council Chamber, and, later, the Eleventh Assembly, with all its old standards,