"... Faisal proved to be an enigmatic and highly autocratic ruler. He was in some ways the most cosmopolitan of the al-Sauds. In 1919, at the age of 14 he became the first Saudi royal to visit London and Paris, acting as his father's de facto foreign minister. In 1945 at age of 41 he attended the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. He had seen the industrialized West and understood the attraction of its cosmopolitan pleasures. On occasion, he drank alcohol, until a stomach operation in 1957 led him to forswear it altogether. In 1945 British police saw him emerge from a Bayswater brothel. For most of his life he was a chain-smoker. But aside from a few youthful indiscretions, Faisal was at his core a man of steely character, conscientious in his daily work habits, clever and decisive. With the passing of the years he also became austere and ever more puritanical. Unlike many royals, he never kept concubines. During his lifetime he had only three wives concurrently, and after divorcing his first two wives, from 1940 he lived alone with his third and favorite wife, Iffat bint Ahmed al Thunayan. She convinced him to allow his daughters to be educated at schools in Riyadh. He sent his sons to the Hun School, an elite preparatory school in Princeton and then to a variety of Western universities. But if he was a modernizer, Faisal was also a political conservative. With Saud's abdication there was no more talk about introducing a Consultative Council or an elected assembly. Faisal placed senior princes -- his closest half-brothers -- in key cabinet posts. He was a stickler for details and found it nearly impossible to delegate authority. Far from liberalizing the political process, he gathered all authority to himself. As he aged, Faisal became increasingly suspicious of a host of perceived enemies: Jews, Nasserites, Baathists, Shiites -- and even the Americans. His deep-seated anti-Semitism was overt; he often lectured foreign dignitaries about the international Zionist conspiracy, and he routinely handed out copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 19th-century Russian forgery that purported to describe a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.
Gamal Nasser,
Suave and articulate, Nasser exuded a quiet intelligence. Always well mannered and impeccably dressed, he had a commanding presence. In 1944 he married Thiya Kazem, a young, upper-middle class woman of Persian ancestry who spoke fluent English and French. They had five children and lived in a modest house. He was in the habit of buying one suit each year -- and he had a collection of several hundred bright, gaudy ties, almost all of them striped. His colleagues knew him to be incorruptible. He had no personal peccadilloes aside from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. He loved American films, which he rented from MGM's Cairo office. He liked Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata!, starring Marlon Brando. "Colonel Nasser used to watch it over and over again," said the woman who rented him the film. "[He was] fascinated with the Mexican Revolution and the peasant's uprising of 1910." His good friend, the newspaper editor Mohammad Heikal, claimed that Nasser's all-time favorite American film was Frank Capra's syrupy Christmas tale, It's a Wonderful Life. His favorite American writer was Mark Twain. He liked classical music. He spent an hour or two each evening reading American, French and Arabic magazines. His sensibilities were thoroughly bourgeois. He was a secular, modern Arab.
Leila Khaled, Palestinian
As a teenager, some of Khaled's teachers were Americans, including an African-American woman, Miss McNight. She told Khaled about Martin Luther King and his non-violent struggle to overturn segregation. Khaled soon grew to think of the vivacious, quick-witted black woman as her big sister. "But our politics differed," Khaled wrote. "She was surprised when I expressed deep hatred of the Jews and taught me not to make sweeping declarations. She pointed out that not all Jews were Zionists; some were, in fact, anti-Zionist. I reflected on her distinctions and tried to adopt them into my thinking."
Khaled spent the academic year 1962-63 enrolled at the American University of Beirut, where she had further encounters with Americans. She arrived at AUB with 50 Lebanese pounds to her name, roughly $100. She lived in Jewett Hall, the women's dormitory, and her roommate was an American, Judy Sinninger. "Her social life never ceased to amaze me," wrote Khaled in her 1973 memoirs. "One week she had three different dates, with three different men and she kissed each one of them with the same passion in the grand room at Jewett in front of a lot of other girls. I asked Judy how she could do it. She passed it off: ‘It was all nice, clean American fun with no strings attached.' I laughed and admired her for her amorality."..."
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