King Hussein: A Life on the Edge

An astute, dramatic biography that also serves as a political history of the Middle East power game, Dallas's book is a gripping portrait of the highly paradoxical king of Jordan, who died of cancer last February. Hussein was a strong man, writes Dallas, who ""ran a quasi-democracy."" Though a friend of the West, Hussein had more amicable relations with fiercely anti-American Islamists than did the leaders of other Arab countries. Dallas, editor of the London-based Foreign Report newsletter, shows that Hussein's embattled regime (launched in 1953 when the 18-year-old prince took the reins of power from his schizophrenic, incapacitated father) was propped up not only by the U.S. and Britain but also by Israel, which indirectly came to Hussein's rescue time and again, viewing the king, moderate by the region's standards, as a buffer to Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Like his grandfather, King Abdullah, who was assassinated by a Muslim extremist in Jerusalem in 1951, King Hussein kept channels open with Israel through clandestine meetings beginning in 1963. While Dallas covers Hussein's relations with Israel (always more cordial than Israel's relations with its other Arab neighbors, even after the 1967 war in which Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan), the book is more interesting for the light it sheds on conflict among the Arabs--especially the strife between the king and PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who, after 1967, set up a Palestinian state-within-a-state in Jordan. Ultimately, Dallas concludes that the king was ""a man of substance who had lessons to impart"" about the virtues of moderation in an immoderate region of the world. Maps, photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)