President Bill Clinton and dozens of other heads of state are expected to attend King Hussein’s burial, where they will praise him as a great peacemaker. He will be remembered as a force for moderation in a region of extremes, and his passing will be seen as an omen of more chaos. Attempting to provide reassurances, Hussein’s successor, Crown Prince Abdullah, 37, met with reporters from NEWSWEEK and other publications last week and declared, ““I am an extension of His Majesty’s outlook and His Majesty’s beliefs.’’ To Americans dazed by the endless Middle East peace process, King Hussein was an attention-grabbing royal–a dashing monarch married to a former Princeton cheerleader. At the same time, he defined realpolitik, coexisting with Palestinian terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists and the state of Israel, even while on the CIA payroll.
How did Hussein manage to become so revered and stay so nimble? At 5 feet 4, he was never particularly prepossessing. His posture was rigid, and he greeted visitors with an exaggerated deference, calling them ““Sir’’ with an Arabian-Harrow accent. He was sometimes accused of indecisiveness, even pusillanimity. But he had a keen sense of when to switch partners, and how to say one thing while doing another. A NEWSWEEK correspondent recalls visiting Hussein’s palace (modest by Middle East standards) during the gulf war in 1991. Past the black-garbed palace guards, with their carved daggers and antique rifles, Hussein lived in British clubman’s comfort with a large library of American movie videos. One well-used cassette near the VCR was ““The Godfather.''
Throughout his life, Hussein studied the uses of power and betrayal in a violent world. His first and greatest lesson came when, at the age of 15, he watched his grandfather die from an assassin’s bullet. Young Hussein was the favorite of King Abdullah of the House of Hashem. He was taught that the Hashemites were the direct descendants of the Prophet, sworn to protect the holy places of Islam. As a practical matter at midcentury, that meant praising Allah while making deals with the West. It was a dangerous business, and a Palestinian extremist mortally wounded King Abdullah as the monarch was entering the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in 1951. The assassin shot young Hussein, too, but the bullet glanced off a medal on his chest. Hussein said he would always remember the sight of the king’s advisers fleeing in fear. It was ““a constant reminder of the frailty of political devotion,’’ Hussein later wrote.
Hussein spent his early career trying not to get lost in the shifting sands of Middle East politics. Packed off to Harrow and Sandhurst in England, where he was nicknamed the ““Brazen Hussy’’ for his gaudy dress uniforms, Hussein was brought back and given the Hashemite crown in 1953 after his father, a schizophrenic, was forced to abdicate. For a time, Hussein toadied up to the British–until the anticolonial, Pan-Arabist movement of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser swept through the region in the late ’50s and ’60s. In 1967, Hussein was conned into joining the Arab-Israeli war. (Nasser lied to Hussein, telling him that three quarters of the Israeli Air Force had been destroyed; actually, the Egyptian Air Force had been wiped out.) When Israel triumphed and Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Hussein was called a fool. Had he not joined the conflict, however, he might have been deposed by Arab nationalists.
As it was, Hussein had to flip-flop again. Dispossessed Palestinians poured into Jordan until they formed a state within a state. Fearful of taking on the violent Palestine Liberation Organization, Hussein dithered; his own Army mocked their monarch’s manhood by hanging bras from the antennas of their tanks. Finally, in the so-called Black September uprising of 1970, Hussein drove the PLO from Amman. When the Arab nations ganged up on Israel once more in 1973, Hussein evened the score for getting suckered in 1967: he tried to secretly tip off the Israelis that the Egyptian attack was coming. Hussein spent the next two decades dickering with the Palestinians and Israel. No permanent modus vivendi was achieved–but Hussein stayed on his throne.
Unlike some Middle East monarchs, Hussein was never profligate. He remembered that as a child he had to sell his bicycle to help balance the palace accounts of the House of Hashem. He did not imbibe, and he matched his Savile Row suits with traditional Arab headdress (and, at times, cowboy boots). He loved racing cars, however, and he loved racy women. His first, arranged marriage to a distant Egyptian cousin ended in divorce in 1956. He married a British beauty, Antoinette Gardiner, in 1961, but traded her in for a Jordanian beauty in the politically sensitive year of 1972. He was quite in love with wife number three, Queen Alia, and was devastated when she died in a helicopter crash in 1977. He perked up when he met Lisa Halaby, the free-spirited, preppy daughter of the former chairman of Pan American World Airways. She became Queen Noor in 1978.
Noor become indispensable to Hussein during the next threat to his reign, the gulf war. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 tested the Jordanian king’s agility. The Iraqi strongman was very popular in the streets of Amman, and King Hussein couldn’t afford to join the Arab-American alliance to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. The Western press was full of scorn. How could Hussein side with the Butcher of Baghdad? But then the criticism began to quiet down. One reason: Queen Noor hosted small dinners and coffees for Western journalists to help them understand Jordan’s dilemma. Correspondents, including those from NEWSWEEK, would be ushered into the king’s private quarters, where Queen Noor would fuss over the king, telling him not to smoke. (Hussein would try to hold out, but inevitably he would light up a Marlboro Lights 100 as the evening wore on.)
All through the war, Hussein covered his bets by continuing to cooperate with the CIA. And, as President George Bush well understood, Hussein would be critical to hammering out a long-term postwar peace. The king embraced the role of peacemaker. In 1994, Jordan signed a formal peace agreement with Israel. After his friend Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Hussein had to endure snubs and double-crosses from the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. But he kept faith. When seven Israeli schoolgirls were murdered by a Jordanian soldier in 1997, the king got down on one knee and begged forgiveness from the victims’ families.
His most dramatic intervention came last October, when he helped salvage a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. By then, Hussein had been stricken with lymphatic cancer. Gaunt and hairless from chemotherapy, he was flown from the Mayo Clinic to peace talks at the Wye Plantation in Maryland. At the signing ceremony, President Clinton said that Hussein’s ““courage, commitment, wisdom and, frankly, stern instruction were at the heart of this success.''
Hussein came home to Jordan saying he was ““completely cured’’ in January, but he may have been engaging in useful dissembling to buy time. He was not happy with his heir apparent, his brother Crown Prince Hassan, 51. Two weeks ago Hussein ousted Hassan and replaced him with his eldest son, Abdullah, 37, chief of Jordan’s Special Forces and a favorite of the top military brass.
As Hussein lay dying last week, the royal-palace PR machine worked to transform Prince Abdullah’s image from fun-loving playboy to earnest family man and career soldier. Abdullah, who claimed he never dreamed of being king until a month ago, would do well to closely study his father’s acting skills. His survival–and the hope of keeping peace in the Middle East–may depend on it.
A MODERATE AMID EXTREMISTS The king was born to a life of privilege. But he had to contend with warring forces that repeatedly threatened to crush his kingdom and end the monarchy.
1935 Hussein is born in Amman. At the age of 1, he is given his first horse. Later he develops a taste for jets, fast cars and sleek women.
1951 The prince is at the side of his grandfather King Abdullah when a Palestinian nationalist shoots the Jordanian monarch dead at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest shrines.
1952 Hussein is proclaimed king at 16 after his father, a schizophrenic, abdicates. Friends condescendingly nickname him the PLK–Plucky Little King.
1956 Educated in the United States and Britain, the young king soon gets lessons in the art of survival. He overcomes the most serious threat to his rule, a coup attempt by senior Army officers swayed by the fiery Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
1967 Conned into going to battle against Israel when Nasser claims the Israeli Air Force has been shattered, Hussein loses the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel during the Six Day War. The defeat is probably the lowest point of King Hussein’s 46-year reign.
1970 Black September: Jordanian troops rout Palestinian fedayeen fighters who have established a virtual state within Jordan under PLO chief Yasir Arafat. In 1974, an Arab summit decides Hussein no longer speaks for the Palestinian people. Arafat assumes that job.
1988 Hussein renounces Jordan’s rights to the West Bank after Palestinian youth launch the intifada (uprising).
1990 The king’s efforts to keep Jordan neutral after Iraq invades Kuwait, provoking the gulf war, strain ties to the West. Some call him pro-Iraq, but Saddam Hussein later denounces him. Secretly, Hussein continues to cooperate with the CIA.
1998 The king begins treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands. In October, he travels to the Wye Plantation in Maryland, where he helps forge an interim peace arrangement between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
1999 In January, Hussein returns to Jordan and abruptly demotes his brother Crown Prince Hassan, 51, in favor of his eldest son, Abdullah, 37.
