The Boy King

(See Cover)

Jordan is a country that has little or no excuse for existence. A chunk torn from the desert, with boundaries traced on sand, it has no geographical unity, national identity, political history or economic viability. It was created by the British for the British: an armed camp at the crossroads of the world, a watchtower in the center of oil lands they ruled in all but fact.

Last week this bleak land was the pivot and focus for all the tensions of the Middle East. Its 500,000 Arab refugees were the area's most corrosive concentration of hatred for Israel. Its Arab Legion was the Middle East's finest force, whose allegiance could sharply tilt the whole area's precarious balance. Egypt wooed it and played venomously on the bitterness of its refugees. The British, swallowing their pride, strove to maintain their slipping hold on this onetime docile ward.

At the center of these clutching pressures was the slim, short, 20-year-old youngster who is King of Jordan. The British used to call Hussein (rhymes with Biscayne) "a nice little King." Now, since he peremptorily fired Britain's Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb as head of the Arab Legion, they are not so sure. Neither, apparently, is Hussein.

All This Worry. Last week he seemed sobered by his new sense of power, the next moment as youthfully impulsive as the Harrow schoolboy he once was. He spent one typical morning gravely conferring on affairs of state in his palace office, then suddenly ordered his private de Havilland plane made ready, zipped out to the airport in his Lincoln, screeched to a halt, jumped out and asked a saluting R.A.F. officer. "O.K. if I go to Jerusalem?"

Climbing into the pilot's seat, the King took off toward the dark clouds hanging low over the naked hills of the Holy Land to the west, minutes later swooped down to a neat landing in Jerusalem. There he dashed off to confer for two hours with young (34), mustachioed Lieut. Colonel Abu Nawar, his favorite military adviser of the moment, then stopped off briefly at a Legion camp to tell clustering legionnaires: "Work together, observe discipline, and we shall have happiness, Allah willing."

Back over the Amman airport, the plane's nose wheel stuck in the well. For 20 minutes Hussein circled the field, waggling the wings to try to shake the wheel down into position, was finally advised from the ground to use an emergency bottle of compressed air, which slammed the wheel into place with a shock that shook the plane like an explosion. Says the King airily: "All this worry about my flying is silly. I've taken off from the desert at night by the lights of automobile head lamps. I've flown with overweight loads and in all kinds of weather. Flying is safe enough for anyone with a good head and a good aircraft." Then he was off to a party.

Generations of Intrigue. To young King Hussein the complex intrigues of Araby are as familiar as baseball statistics to a U.S. teenager. He is a member of the proud and once mighty Hashemite clan, which held sway over holy Mecca for 38 generations and trace their ancestry to the Prophet's great-grandfather. Ever since the austere warriors of Ibn Saud stormed out of Arabia's deserts in 1919 and drove them into exile, the Hashemites have found intrigue a matter of simple survival amidst ambitious rivals.

When the British were looking for chieftains to rule their Middle East states after World War 1, they found ready at hand the two Hashemite brothers Emir Feisal and Emir Abdullah, who had fought with skill and cunning against the Turks in alliance with Lawrence of Arabia. The British installed Feisal in Iraq, created Trans-Jordan for Abdullah.

Abdullah's country was scarcely bigger than Indiana, a black-tent kingdom populated by nomadic Bedouins. But the Arab Legion, which the British created and supported for him, made Abdullah a power among the ill-organized Arab armies of the Middle East. Abdullah was a strong-minded aristocrat who used to tell his Cabinets: "Do what I say, or I'll get another government in the morning." He dreamed of an Arab "Greater Syria," a state that would include Trans-Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon.

Land of Sodom. But he was well aware that without British subsidy Jordan would starve. It was the Biblical land of Sodom, and some say that the curse has never been lifted. Only 5% of its land was cultivated at all. Among the flints and pebbles on the treeless brown hills around Amman grew scattered stands of wheat. Flanked by rich oil lands, Jordan had no oil of its own, got revenue only from tolls on the two pipelines that cross it from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. "A cement factory and a cigarette plant constitute Jordan's heavy industry," an economist observed wryly. Abdullah accordingly took Britain's advice with its money, accepted British commanders for the Arab Legion, let Britain plant its embassy inside his palace grounds. His Bedouin subjects, flocking to join the colorfully uniformed Legion, made no objection.

Murder at the Mosque. Hussein grew up in this back-country court in a feverish atmosphere of family jealousies. Grandfather Abdullah had three wives, whose offspring schemed to-obtain the succession. His father Talal was an un happy, unstable man who beat Hussein's mother and denounced his own father Abdullah as a British puppet. The old King took to the young princeling. Hussein galloped on his blooded Arabian mare through the hills of his grandfather's summer place near Jericho, and hunted small game with the rifle that Abdullah had given him. One of his grandfather's aides taught him to fence with a scimitar in the slashing Arab style. "My boy," said the King, "I want you to come always to me and try to learn what you can from what you witness at my palace. Who knows? The time may come when you will replace me on the throne."

In 1948, when war broke out between the Arabs and Jews over Palestine, the armies of five Arab nations invaded Israel. Abdullah's Arab Legion moved with them. In the short, sharp fighting that followed, only the highly disciplined Bedouins of Abdullah's Arab Legion stood up to Israeli attacks. Seeing how weak his allies were, Abdullah agreed to a truce and annexed those parts of Palestine that his troops occupied.

For Abdullah and Jordan it was a dubious victory. By greedily biting off the chunk of Palestine bordering on the Jordan River, Abdullah incurred the enmity of all the other Arab countries, and swallowed a poison that may destroy Hussein.

For at one stroke Jordan was converted from a small Bedouin kingdom into a nation of refugees. The ex-Palestinians outnumbered the old Bedouin population two to one. They felt no loyalty to the Hashemite throne or to its British protectors. They were more sophisticated, better educated, more worldly-wise than the desert people. They took over Jordan's trade. They demanded and got the right to vote, the right to elect half the members of Parliament. They growled that Jordan was a slave state, that King Abdullah had sold them out to the Jews. One day in 1951 Abdullah went to pray at Jerusalem's Mosque of the Rock. A Palestinian refugee stepped from behind a pillar, fired a rapid succession of shots at the King. Abdullah dropped dead. One of the assassin's bullets ripped a medal from the chest of 15-year-old Hussein as he walked beside his grandfather.

"Brazen Hussy." Hussein's father, the neurotic Talal, was installed as King. Hussein's strong-minded mother Queen Zain packed him off for a year at Harrow. There, when he was not attending court levees in London, Hussein lingered around the local tuck-shop, sipping Cokes with his cousin and classmate, Iraq's Prince Feisal, also 17. "He was very lonely and, I thought, unhappy," remembers the tuckshop owner. Barely a year later his moody father was deposed and retired to Istanbul. A recent visitor says he has forgotten that he once was King.

Hussein stayed on for a six-month spell at Sandhurst, Britain's West Point, where fellow cadets named him "brazen Hussy" the instant they saw him with his uniform and medals on. ("All he got at Sandhurst was a military bearing," admits one British diplomat.) In April 1953 he went home to take over his job. On the same day his cousin Feisal was installed on the Hashemite throne in Baghdad.

Hussein had already picked a pretty wife for himself. Seven years his senior, serious-minded Dina Abdel Hamid is a member of an Egyptian branch of the Hashemite clan, grew up in Cairo, took an M.A. at Cambridge and returned to teach English literature in Egypt. The royal couple settled down in Hussein's three small hilltop palaces. Two months ago Dina bore Hussein's first child, a daughter, Alia. (The Israelis jeer that the baby's first gurgle was "Glubb-Glubb.")

The Playboy. At first the British treated the new King as a boy and expected him to go play. He dashed around the country in his fast cars, went on gazelle shoots, where servants pitched tents and spread rich Oriental carpets on the desert floor. Hussein organized a Royal Jordanian Automobile Club, outdrove 28 competitors around the hairpin turns of a hill-climbing course. One day he raced his light grey Mercedes-Benz 300-SL at 150 m.p.h. down the Amman airfield's best runway. "I think she could have done better," he grinned, "but the runway isn't quite long enough." At the auto club's Amman garage, Hussein spent days helping mount a Cadillac engine in a racing car chassis. "We call it the flying bedstead," he told a friend. After the British colonel commanding the Royal Jordanian air force taught him to fly, Amman learned to listen for the afternoon roar of the King's Vampire jet buzzing his mother's palace on his way back from a high altitude joy ride. He delighted in sambas and rumbas, danced late at Amman parties, practically never with his wife.

Hussein was content to let others run the government. Glubb Pasha, trusted and devoted servant of old King Abdullah, kept the Israeli border quiet and the Legion hotheads in check. Elderly politicians left over from Abdullah's day swapped ministerial posts like musical chairs, and one ministerial clique won the name in Jordan of "the Mau Mau" for the rapacity of their treasury raids. Young Hussein exercised his royal functions unpredictably, showed up at his office erratically, was royally late for appointments with distinguished visitors. Once he encouraged a "purging committee" to clean up the government, paid surprise visits to ministerial offices. "I saw coffee, newspapers, piled official papers and dirt, but I did not see work and efficient officials. I shall not allow this thing to go on," he declared.

But the purge did not take place, and the King found other interests. He disliked formalities, pleased his subjects by driving through the streets unguarded, in the evenings dropped in on commoner friends without ceremony. He toured frontier villages, listened with tears in his eyes to refugees' stories, told them that his palace was always open to them. His gestures were sometimes generous but misguided. He presented a royal tract to a Bedouin tribe, only to discover the land was already occupied by several hundred Palestinian refugees. What ideas he had were more grandiose than practical. He wanted Jordan, which has not enough money to build its own roads, to equip itself with a first-class jet air force. Once he turned to senior officers and asked: "Why can't we attack? If there's a war, let's march on Tel Aviv." General Glubb patiently took him on a tour of the 350-mile Israeli frontier to show him how much the Legion's 20,000 men had to defend against Israel's 250,000-man army.

Two-Thirds of a Nation. But neither reason nor Glubb Pasha could stem the bitterness in the refugee camps. For seven years the refugees had lived miserably on the UNRWA's 9-c--a-day food ration. They blamed the U.S. for supporting the Israelis, though they knew the U.S. helps pay for their food (70% of UNRWA's $14 million annual budget for the work). Idle, unwilling to accept resettlement, unwanted by other Arab lands, they festered in the squalor of huts and caves. On the rocky hills overlooking the Israeli plains, villagers stared balefully down at fields they tilled as theirs until the 1949 armistice line cut them off. "There is my orange grove, only a short distance away," said one. "I put everything into it and was expecting to send my two boys to study in England. Instead I am a janitor at the school, earning a miserable low wage, and my children are without education."

Around loudspeakers posted in the camps, glowering Palestinians listened to the anti-Western broadcasts of Cairo's Voice of the Arabs. (Amman's Arab broadcasting station they dismissed as a British front.) Agitators of the illegal Baath Party, which worships Egypt's Nasser and hates the West, busily organized schoolteachers, developed a technique for riots.

First move is to turn out the schoolchildren for a "peaceful" demonstration. Marching children attract adults. Baath agitators start up chants of rhythmic slogans in time to handclaps. Soon, with five thousand people chanting, the effect is frenetic. The agitators keep the crowd moving until they reach their objective--a police station, an UNRWA office, a Legion road block, anything that symbolizes authority and therefore the refugees' frustration. Then a picked task force of a dozen young men suddenly emerges from the crowd and attacks the building with kerosene, axes or clubs. The mob follows like cattle in a stampede.

Join with Nasser. The refugees' venom remained undirected until, late last year, the British made a mistake. They sent General Sir Gerald Templer to Amman to pound the table and demand Jordan's adherence to the Baghdad Pact. Nasser, his prestige suddenly grown huge with his acquisition of Russian arms, seized his opportunity. "The aim of the alliance is to destroy the Arabism of Palestine," shrieked the Voice of the Arabs. "Rise up, and at your side will stand the great leaders of Arabdom in Egypt and all other Arab lands!" All over Jordan the refugees rose. In Jerusalem and Amman they stoned and fired U.S. Point Four buildings and British libraries, shouting "Down with the Baghdad Pact!" and "Join with Nasser!" The Prime Minister resigned. Nasser and the rioting refugees had kept Jordan out of the Baghdad Pact.

Savoring their new power, the refugees rioted again when the government tried to forestall new elections which would predictably have installed an anti-British government dominated by Palestinians. The Legion was called out to quell the rioting. It did. But Nasser's insidious voice had reached into the Legion itself. When a Bedouin legionnaire fired on the Amman mob, a young Arab officer jerked the gun from his hands, saying: "If you cannot use this weapon against the Jews, you cannot use it against our own people."

Quickly, the Egyptian radio shifted its attack to Glubb and the British com manders of the Arab Legion. Whenever Hussein appeared, crowds of refugees yelled for Glubb's head. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, venting its ancient hostility against the Hashemites, fed the flames by bribing Jordanian newspapers to print vitriolic attacks on the West. After running a savage attack on General Glubb, an Amman editor called on Glubb, told him with an apologetic smile: "The text came to my office with -L-500 in bank notes pinned to it, from a certain embassy. You've got a wife and family yourself. A man has to live, you know."

Under Glubb's counsels of moderation, Hussein himself was increasingly restive. "He was not entirely at ease with me," Glubb admits. "It is difficult for a young man of 20 to be happy and at ease with a middle-aged subordinate." At Hussein's side every day was hot-eyed young Lieut. Colonel Abu Nawar.

Nawar is one of the few ranking Legionnaires of Palestinian family. Once Glubb banished him (to a military attache's post in Paris) as "too extreme." But when the young King visited Paris for a vacation, Nawar was there to show him the gay sights, and Hussein brought him home to serve as his senior aide. Like many another young Arab legionnaire, Nawar resented British officers holding all the top commands. Then Hussein saw an article in a British magazine headed:

GLUBB RULES THE LEGION WITH AN IRON HAND, AND THE LEGION RULES JORDAN.

Hussein was infuriated.

At Hussein's insistence, Glubb produced a plan for more rapid Arabization of the Legion. His date for changeover to Jordanian command: 1961 or 1962. "And there was nothing at all said about the Arabization of the chief of staff," says Hussein. That afternoon Hussein went for a drive along the Jerash road with his closest friend, young Sherif Zeid. The lieavy royal brows were knit in thought. ""That was the moment," says Zeid, "when lie decided that Glubb had to go."

Two Hours' Notice. Back in Amman that evening, Hussein made up a list of officers "that I could be sure of." Colonel Abu Nawar telephoned his brother, a captain at the Legion's Zerka headquarters, read him the names of 35 officers he was to invite to his home forthwith for coffee.

An hour later Abu Nawar himself arrived to tell them "not to take orders from anyone but His Majesty or myself."

Next morning the King sat down and wrote out orders in longhand dismissing Glubb and two other British officers. At 11:45 the King went to the office of old Prime Minister Samir Rifai. He tossed his papers on the table: "These are my orders. I want them executed at once."

According to Glubb's account, the Prime Minister called him to his office at 2 o'clock that afternoon. The Prime Minister, never taking his eyes off the floor, said: "His Majesty the King orders that you take a rest." Glubb asked why. "Is he annoyed about something? I had a long and very cordial audience with him only yesterday. What is wrong?"

The Prime Minister said: "None of us know the reason." But his question, according to Glubb, was: "Can you leave Immediately?" Glubb asked what he meant by immediately. The Premier's answer: "Say at 4 o'clock this afternoon. We will give you an airplane." Glubb balked at that. "No, sir," he said. "I have lived here for 26 years, and I cannot leave at two hours' notice." The Premier suggested: "You can leave your wife behind." They compromised on 7 a.m. the next day.

And the next morning the man who built and led the Arab Legion for a quarter of a century was shipped out of the country. His departure was so hasty that clothes and children's dolls were piled Into the plane in an open basket.

The People's Choice. By sacking Glubb, Hussein made himself King before his subjects in fact as well as in title. Overnight he was the hero of the Palestinians. Newspapers hailed him as "the new Sala-din." When he toured the refugee centers, frenzied crowds tore off his red-checkered headdress and bore him through the streets shouting: "Long live Hussein--with his sword we will go to war!" Legionnaires shouted: "Back to Palestine!" "It was the first time in the history of the Hashemite family that one of them stood up to the British," said a former Hussein critic. Only some of the old Bedouins, who had called Glubb Pasha their "little father," were silent.

But Hussein seemed appalled by the commotion his action set off in the West.

He hastily assured the British that he had expelled Glubb not from any animus against Britain but because Glubb had become a liability both to Britain and himself. Pointing to his cheering subjects, he asked: "Don't you think the spirit of the crowds might have been quite different if we had not dismissed Glubb?"

Since Glubb's firing, the young King has shown considerable nimbleness. He dexterously avoided the bear hug embrace extended by Nasser, Saudi Arabia and Syria, who offered to replace the British subsidy. There is no question that for the moment Hussein is in charge. In his negotiations with the British, he did not even bother to keep Prime Minister Rifai informed. He sent Major General Radi Innab (whom he installed as Legion commander to replace Glubb) to negotiate an agreement with Syria to regard their borders with Israel as "one military frontier" in case of Israeli attack. Last week Hussein persuaded Whitehall to leave many of the Legion's British officers as technicians and instructors. And Britain announced gruffly that it would renew its $25 million subsidy for the Legion.

But Hussein is a man on a tightrope, and the tightrope is fraying. For his Palestinians he proclaims: "We will regain what was lost of our fatherland, with God's help." Privately he admits that Israel is probably there to stay. "The Arabs were wrong to think that the Jews were like the American Indians and could nev er regain their lost lands," he says. His suggested solution: "First, the Jews must recognize Arab rights, and allow the refugees to return or give them compensation. Second, they must rectify the unrealistic border. It splits villages and makes people live in the face of death."

Few people in the Middle East think young King Hussein can teeter long on his fraying rope. Already a group claiming to represent the Palestinians has served an ultimatum demanding that Hussein 1) accept the proffered aid from the Egyptian-Saudi-Syrian bloc in place of British help, 2) purge the Legion not only of all British officers but of all pro-British Arab officers. If Hussein yields he will alienate his rich Hashemite Cous in Feisal in Iraq, make himself dependent on the uncertain largesse of his ancient enemies, the Sauds. But if he cleaves to the British or fails to press the case against Israel, the refugees and perhaps the Legion itself will turn against him. The Israelis predict that Jordan will end by being divided among Saudi Arabia, Syria, and an Arab Palestine ruled by a Nasser puppet. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett says flatly: "It is logical to suppose that Hussein's future lies with Glubb's in the wilderness."

If Hussein is to retain his throne, the first imperative is a settlement of the Israel-Arab dispute, something that the best efforts of the free world have notably failed to achieve. Ultimately, the forces that will determine the future of Hussein's arid kingdom lie outside and beyond Hussein's control. The new tide of Arab nationalism rampages through the Middle East from Tangiers to Iraq. Not only Hussein but also the West has somehow to come to terms with it. Until this is done, neither Hussein nor the West will be secure.

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