Word: nasser
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TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn was living and reporting in the Middle East in 1952 when King Farouk was ousted in a coup brilliantly planned by a young Egyptian colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the years that followed, Wynn came to know Egypt's new leader well, and in 1959 published a study of him entitled Nasser of Egypt: The Search for Dignity. Wynn, whose present post is Rome, flew to Cairo a few hours after Nasser's death and cabled these reminiscences...
...live in Egypt in the 1950s really to understand Gamal Abdel Nasser. He used to read our copy every night before he went to sleep. Even if years went by without direct contact, we always had the feeling that he was reading over our shoulder, chewing rugs because of some of our words. He could be outraged that we didn't give his revolution the support he thought it deserved, but still he would respect us for our honesty. The greatest compliment he could give any newsman came to me in 1962 when he told a visitor, "Wilton Wynn...
...perhaps it was because I am a Louisiana redneck, and I could understand an Egyptian redneck. Nasser was a hick. Though he was born in Alexandria, he was marked as a Saidi, a product of his father's village in upper Egypt, regarded as a vulgar character because his first language was Arabic instead of French...
...never felt I got the point of Nasser's revolution until I dined with a wealthy, French-educated Egyptian who came from the area of Beni Murr, the Abdel Nasser family's home town. I asked the man if he knew the family and he answered. "Of course we knew them. But we never spoke to them. We would never speak to such people...
...then that I found the subtitle of my book. Nasser symbolized a "search for dignity" throughout the Asian-African world. He emerged from the grass roots, from the silt of the Nile Valley. He was determined to make his people feel proud to be Egyptians instead of posing as carbon copies of Frenchmen or anyone else...