Word: nasser
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...family moved to Cairo's Kubri al Quba section. Finally he secured an appointment to the military academy at Abbasiyah, which had just begun to accept sons of the lower classes as well as the aristocratic boys it traditionally favored. Sadat quickly became friends with Cadet Gamal Abdel Nasser, his classmate. "We were young men full of hope," wrote Sadat later in his Revolt on the Nile. "We were brothers-in-arms, united in friendship and common detestation of the existing order of things. Egypt was a sick country...
...Fanatically anti-British, the young officer plotted with the Germans. When he was caught, he was cashiered from the army and spent more than two years in prison for spying. While there he learned to read and speak English and German and read French and Persian. After the war, Nasser helped him get his commission back...
Sadat was the firebrand of the young officers' group that gathered around Nasser. His most spectacular idea was a plot to blow up the British embassy. Nasser talked him out of that. "I was always eager to step up the pace. But Gamal, a man of deliberation, acted as a restraining influence," Sadat once wrote. On the night of July 23, 1952, when the planners decided to move against King Farouk's corrupt regime, Sadat was nowhere to be found; he had gone to a movie in Cairo with his wife, Gehan. Eventually he received a message from Nasser, threw...
Sadat's loyalty to Nasser was unquestionable, and it finally paid off. One gray December morning in 1969, Nasser summoned Sadat to his home in the Cairo suburb of Manshiet al Bakri. He was preparing to go to an Arab summit in Rabat, and he had spent all night reading intelligence estimates about a supposed assassination plot against him. Nasser figured that he ought to have a Vice President and swore Sadat in on the spot. Less than ten months later, the man who had announced the success of Nasser's 1952 revolution was called upon to tell the Egyptian...
Pictures of Nasser continue to hang in Egypt's public buildings. Sadat soon began to develop his own style, however. Nasser had worked only in the Kubbeh Republican Palace on the outskirts of Cairo; Sadat also opened up the older, ornate Abdine Palace down town, which had belonged to Farouk. He also holds occasional meetings in a suite of the new Cairo-Sheraton Hotel, a 23-story building that is now the tallest in Cairo. Nasser was a restless ball of energy who could work a 20-hour day. Sadat works at a less frenetic pace. He prefers to spend...