Actor with a Will of Iron

An intimate look at the villager who became a ruler

TIME Correspondent Robert Ajemian recently spent a day with Anwar Sadat. His portrait of the Egyptian President:

Anwar Sadat had just stepped out of the small elevator at the Barrages, the favorite of his ten presidential homes, to begin his working day. It was shortly after 11 o'clock and there was a strong fragrance of cologne on his shiny bronze face. He wore zippered black boots and a tailored suit, which gave him the look of a Mediterranean dandy, but his deep rugged voice spoke with authority. As usual, Sadat had slept late. He insists on at least eight hours of sleep, as well as a daily afternoon nap, which his wife Jihan thinks is too much. Sadat has a clock radio that he always sets himself; he falls asleep and wakes up to the all-music station in Cairo. He keeps a loaded pistol on the same table.

As he often is, the President was at the Barrages--which is north of Cairo, on the Nile--without his family. Although he seems hearty and outgoing in public, Sadat is a withdrawn, introverted man. He has few friends. His closest, wealthy Egyptian Contractor Osman Ahmed Osman, says he will sometimes be alone with Sadat for as long as two hours without speaking a single word. Says Sadat with satisfaction: "No one ever knows what I am thinking, not even my own family. I go alone." He says that the long months he spent in prison under British rule turned him into a meditative man; his family tells that even as a boy he used to climb onto the straw roof of their village home and stare for hours at the stars.

Sadat's breakfast, as usual, was a spoonful of honey. He watches his health carefully, and is something of a hypochondriac who often complains of feeling ill. Sadat perspires a lot, and because he is susceptible to colds, he forbids air conditioning wherever he stays. The perspiration embarrasses him slightly because the dampness on his brow and chin makes him look more tense than he really is. An alert aide is always close by to pass him a fresh white handkerchief to dab his face. Perhaps because he has had a minor heart attack, Sadat does not work too hard. He still recalls that his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was signing letters until 3 o'clock in the morning the day he died of a heart attack. "Sadat doesn't have the stamina to be a dictator like Nasser," says an aide who has worked closely with both men.

After breakfast, Sadat went through two hours of interviews and meetings, including one with an emotional group of 150 Palestinian Arabs who had traveled from Gaza. He made a ringing speech, saying that Egypt would never abandon them and the grateful Arabs swarmed around to embrace and kiss him. Afterwards Sadat left for his daily walk. In his blue and white sneakers, he strode along the Nile for one hour, a valuable time when he likes to think. Then he took his regular rubdown from a masseur who is also one of his bodyguards. Lunch was, as always, a bowl of soup. For nourishment during the day Sadat drinks liquids constantly: fruit juice, minted tea and a lightly carbonated European cola. A devout Muslim, he never touches liquor or wine.

Sadat begins to tire noticeably, aides say, late in the afternoon. He has his one big meal of the day, in the American style, between six and seven o'clock: because of his tender stomach, it is normally a dish of simple, boiled food--this time macaroni imported from Italy and rice. Every evening without fail, Sadat schedules two movies, mostly American westerns; he watches them, usually alone, in his pajamas. He leads an ungaudy life, really, but Sadat's comfortable residences and stylish clothes--as well as his glamorous wife--have drawn disapproving mutters from the public.

Sadat, the imaginative thinker, is a poor administrator who shuns details. Although he is tolerant of dissent, the President is impatient with staff work. "I don't want people to organize me," he says. He detests reading reports and prefers to have them delivered orally. Most letters from Jimmy Carter, for example, are read to him aloud by the U.S. Ambassador. Because there are so few able men around him, many of Sadat's own directives seem to melt away when they reach Egypt's swollen bureaucracy. The President keeps the important decisions secret; his ministers, and even his wife, usually hear about them the same time the public does. When Sadat finally does arrive at a decision, it is usually irreversible. "He has a will of iron," says one military officer.

The introspective Sadat is at the same time a dramatist. He likes pomp. After his 1975 decision to reopen the Suez Canal, Sadat dressed up in a white admiral's uniform and rode down the canal for four hours on the deck of a destroyer. As a young man he wanted to be an actor, and for a brief period, he now relates somewhat uncomfortably, he did perform on the Cairo stage. He answered an ad in the newspaper for a theater job and sent in his photograph, declaring that he did both tragedy and comedy but preferred comedy. Even today he sings Egyptian pop songs around the house. In telling a story, he often adds extravagant whispers or growls. "He's still the actor," says a longtime colleague. "No one ever sees his real face."

Sadat's patience and sense of survival run directly back to his village roots. One of 13 children, he was born on Christmas Day 59 years ago in the little (then pop. 2,000) Nile settlement of Mit Abu el Kom. His father was a military hospital clerk who so much admired Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, that he named his sons after Turkish officers. His mother was an illiterate Sudanese. He grew up hating the colonial British. When the upper-class Military Academy was opened up in 1936 to all Egyptians--a decision that changed the future of the country--Sadat was one of 52 boys picked. So were Nasser and six other Egyptians who later banded together to overthrow King Farouk. During World War II, Sadat, still passionately anti-British, collaborated with the Germans. On one occasion he urged his fellow officers to blow up the British embassy; the cooler Nasser restrained him.

Sadat was imprisoned twice. At the Barrages, puffing on a pipe in his huge French chair, Sadat recalled his days in Cell 54 of Qurah Maydan Prison. He remembered books he had absorbed, like Lloyd Douglas' The Magnificent Obsession and Jack London's The Sea Wolf. All dealt with the victory of the spirit over adversity. Even in prison, Sadat was a loner who kept silent, remembers Moussa Sabry, one of four inmates who escaped with Sadat from an earlier jailing. They crawled through a hole in the roof of the camp's rabbit hutch. Says Sabry: "Somehow Sadat made us hold the secret from the hundreds of prisoners."

Released from prison in 1948 and cashiered out of the Egyptian army, Sadat took any job he could land: baggage porter, truck driver, used-tire dealer. By now he was divorced from his first wife and in 1949 he married Jihan Raouf, the beautiful, 15-year-old daughter of middle-class Anglo-Egyptian parents.

In 1952 Sadat, reinstated in the army and now a lieutenant colonel, joined in the Nasser-led coup that ousted Farouk; Sadat was chosen to announce the dramatic news to the nation. Nasser himself took power from General Mohammed Naguib two years later.

During Nasser's stormy 16-year reign, Sadat was never taken too seriously. He was judged to be unambitious and even weak, a man who seemed to care more about smart clothes, his home and car, than Cabinet meetings and political responsibility. Colleagues nicknamed him "Nasser's poodle," and even Nasser himself would refer to Sadat as a "black donkey." Characteristically, Sadat the survivalist concealed his feelings and watched and learned. "If you showed ambition with Nasser," he says now, "that was the end." Nearly all of the original Revolutionary Command Council were eventually ousted from office and in 1969 Nasser chose the unmenacing Sadat as his Vice President. Sadat remembers the day well; it was the one time his acting skills failed him. "Anwar's eyes popped," Nasser told his top aide. A year later Nasser was dead.

In 1971, now Egypt's President, Sadat faced his first deadly challenge: an attempted coup by Leftist Ali Sabry and a group of ministers who confronted Sadat with a list of demands. But Sadat has often outwitted his enemies by encouraging them to underestimate him. His poker face showed nothing, and his rivals left unaware of their danger. He swiftly jailed them.

That lightning move solidified Sadat's hold on the country and gave him the confidence to turn away from Nasser's sweeping pan-Arabism and to abandon his predecessor's repressive socialist state. Sadat later felt bold enough to tell colleagues that he felt Nasser had been a disaster for Egypt: the wars, the large Russian presence, the seizure of property, the elimination of the private sector, the concentration camps. In a public ceremony, with Sadat in attendance, the Interior Ministry's large collection of taped conversations was burned. The government began returning private property and Egypt adopted a permanent constitution guaranteeing the rule of law.

Sadat had always despised the Russians, partly because Egypt frequently had to grovel for its arms shipments and partly because of the stony way they treated him personally. "They are crude, tasteless people," Sadat says. In 1972 he decided to upbraid them with a bit of theater. He put on his Commander in Chiefs uniform, complete with medals and sashes, and summoned the chief Soviet adviser. "Who do you see sitting in front of you?" Sadat asked. When the Russian expressed bafflement, Sadat screamed at him: "I am Field Marshal Joseph Stalin, that's who! If those spare parts don't get here immediately, I am going to deal with you the way Stalin did." Shortly afterward, Sadat sent the Soviets to his own version of Siberia--back to Russia.

Earthy and gracious, Sadat finds the Europeans too cold and sophisticated, and much prefers Americans because of their egalitarian ways. "I like the way Americans put their feet up on the desk," he says. Sadat is a sensitive man who for years felt that Westerners disliked Arabs because of their dark skin. Says a member of the Egyptian Parliament: "Sadat has few fanaticisms. He's not against Jews, or against women. Maybe it's because of his own dark skin."

With his people and his army behind him, Sadat today has concentrated more power in his hands than Nasser ever had. Yet the villager who became a ruler feels alone in power. The threat of death does not depress him, he says, even though he has become the No. 1 villain to Arab rejectionists. "Neither the Palestinians nor Gaddafi," he said, "can deprive me of one hour of my life, if God doesn't accept it." At the Barrages, Sadat recalled a book about Abraham Lincoln that he had read as a boy. "Lincoln was a villager, too," he said, "and he moved alone." Sadat became excited about the comparison as he talked about Lincoln's humble beginnings. His deep voice increased in strength as the actor rose to the part. "To this day," he said, "I still remember a movie I saw about Lincoln. The last scene showed him getting on the train alone to go to Washington. He put a black shawl over his shoulders--just the way our villagers do." He dropped his voice and said slowly, "It is simplicity, but it is glory." Sadat's journey to Jerusalem was simple too--and it held the promise of glory.

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