Welsh-born cartoonist Leslie Gilbert Illingworth drew the famous cartoon of John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arm wrestling while sitting on hydrogen bombs. It appeared in the October 29, 1962 edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail.

Born in 1902, Illingworth started drawing cartoons for the famous British news magazine Punch in 1927. The Daily Mail hired him as well in 1937 and he continued to provide cartoons for both publications for the rest of his career. He gained a measure of national fame for the effective cartoons he drew during England's dogged stand against Nazi Germany.

Illingworth was not an overtly political cartoonist and this is evident in this arm wrestling cartoon. One notices the characteristic Illingworth preference for detail rather than commentary on who is right or wrong. The intensity of the struggle is captured both by the energy that radiates out of Kennedy and Khrushchev's gripped hands, but also by the fact that each is sweating profusely. Each man still has his finger on the button that will detonate the bombs.

Illingworth's drawings contrast sharply with those of Edmund Valtman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and fiercely anti-communist cartoonist for The Hartford Times. On October 30, after the crisis had seemingly passed, his paper published a Valtman cartoon of Khrushchev yanking missile-shaped teeth out of a hideous-looking Castro's mouth. The caption above the illustration reads, “This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You” and the cartoon clearly represents a moment of American gloating over the communists.

That the Illingworth cartoon was published in a British newspaper bears witness to the fact that the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis affected the fate of populations beyond those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed the whole world was watching. The publication date of October 29 is also significant since on October 28, Khrushchev announced that he was withdrawing the missiles out of Cuba and the crisis seemingly had passed. Illingworth's cartoon reminded readers that the superpower struggle would continue and that the possibility of nuclear annihilation remained.

Fundamentalism, in the narrowest meaning of the term, was a movement that began in the late 19th- and early 20th-century within American Protestant circles to defend the "fundamentals of belief" against the corrosive effects of liberalism that had grown within the ranks of Protestantism itself. Liberalism, manifested in critical approaches to the Bible that relied on purely natural assumptions, or that framed Christianity as a purely natural or human phenomenon that could be explained scientifically, presented a challenge to traditional belief.

A multi-volume group of essays edited by Reuben Torrey, and published in 1910 under the title, The Fundamentals, was financed and distributed by Presbyterian laymen Lyman and Milton Stewart and was an attempt to arrest the drift of Protestant belief. Its influence was large and was the source of the labeling of conservatives as "fundamentalists."

Useful for looking at this history of fundamentalism are George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford, 1980), Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville: Unusual Publications, 1986), and Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

Lately, the meaning of the word "fundamentalism" has expanded. This has happened in the press, in academia, and in ordinary language. It appears to be expanding to include any unquestioned adherence to fundamental principles or beliefs, and is often used in a pejorative sense. Nowadays we hear about not only Protestant evangelical fundamentalists, but Catholic fundamentalists, Mormon fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, Buddhist fundamentalists, and even atheist or secular or Darwinian fundamentalists.

Scholars of religion have perhaps indirectly contributed to this expansion of the term, as they have tried to look for similarities in ways of being religious that are common in various systems of belief. Between 1991 and 1995, religion scholars Martin Marty and Scott Appleby published a 5-volume collection of essays as part of "The Fundamentalism Project" at the University of Chicago, which is an example of this approach. Appleby is co-author of Strong Religion (2003), also from the University of Chicago Press that attempts to give a common explanatory framework for understanding anti-modern and anti-secular religious movements around the world.

Sears Roebuck, like its competitor Montgomery Ward, built its business as a mail-order company. Consequently, many of its customers were farmers or at least lived far away from big cities. The majority of Sears Roebuck customers also ordered out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.

In the early 1920s, many of Sears Roebuck's rural mail-order customers wrote to the company asking them to set up a way for trappers to sell their furs. Beginning in late 1925, Sears Roebuck & Company, through the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services, began buying furs from independent, rural trappers. Trappers would mail packages of their prepared muskrat, mink, otter, raccoon, fox, badger, beaver, weasel, skunk, and opossum pelts to a Sears depot. At first there was only one in Chicago, but the company soon increased the number of depots around the country, including ones in Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Memphis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Sears would grade the pelts and either promptly send the trappers a check or give them credit toward purchases from its general merchandise catalog. If the trapper was unsatisfied with the value Sears gave him, he could return the check and the company would return the furs. The vast Sears catalog carried a line of Victor, Oneida, and Gibbs traps, scents, and pelt stretchers, as well as firearms, ammunition, decoys, and a wide selection of farm equipment and supplies.

In this way, Sears Roebuck became one of the largest fur buying companies in the country. The trappers generally found the company's fur grading to be accurate and the prices paid to be fair, especially for good, large skins. The company had found a way to help their rural customers by giving them a market for their furs that was as close as their mailboxes. Farmers trapped for sport and recreation, but also to control the wildlife population that threatened their crops.

Sears Roebuck mailed more than 7 million copies of an annual publication, Tips to Trappers, a magazine of about 30 pages in length, written and edited by "Johnny Muskrat" (a trapper, as well as a Sears spokesman) "and his trapper friends."

Tips to Trappers had articles and photographs showing the best ways to find and trap animals and prepare their pelts, as well as letters from readers, techniques from renowned trappers, information on state trapping seasons and limits, news on the fur market, and instructions on how to prepare and mail pelts to Sears. Included in each issue were shipping tags for mailing packages to a Sears raw fur depot.

Sears Roebuck also ran the National Fur Show in different cities around the country each year from 1929 to 1958. Pelts that had been submitted to Sears depots during the year were judged at the shows and cash awards (and even new cars) were given for the "best prepared" pelts, regardless of their ultimate value. This helped promote and teach the company's suppliers and clients about the best ways to handle pelts.

Johnny Muskrat also had a regular radio show during the 1920s and 1930s on Sears' own Chicago-based radio station WLS ("World's Largest Store"), and then elsewhere in the country through station affiliates. He and his occasional trapper guest would talk about how to set traps, dry pelts, and other techniques. Muskrat also discussed fur market conditions, tips on camping and hunting, and pioneer life in general, as well as reading letters from his listeners.

Radio station WLS was the voice of the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation, which Sears began in 1924 as a means to increase its outreach to American farmers. The programming on WLS was a mix of music and entertainment (such as its annual sponsorship and broadcast of the "National Barn Dance") designed to appeal to a rural audience, as well as regular shows for farm listeners that were devoted to growing, harvesting, and selling crops.

The Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation offered advice and instruction by mail to farmers and their wives who wrote to the company. The Foundation also supported rural agricultural agents, farmers' markets, cooperative associations, 4-H and FFV chapters, agricultural demonstration projects, and scholarships to agricultural colleges.

Sears Roebuck and Company's second president, during the 1920s and 1930s, Julius Rosenwald, was a true philanthropist who viewed the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation not just as a way to capture customers for Sears, but as a means to improve the lives of Americans living in rural communities. He was, for example, responsible for Sears' extensive support for Historically Black Colleges, especially in the South, and for the establishment of almost 5,000 schools for African American children in the region.

After 34 years in the fur buying business, Sears Roebuck decided in 1958 to focus on urban customers and retail stores, and so discontinued, among other things, the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services and the publication of Tips to Trappers.

Maybe, but in a roundabout way.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that this question is apparently not something that has elicited a lot of serious historical research up to now ("Where do I find historical evidence for a simple game played by children that requires no equipment?" and "Will I hurt my chances for tenure if I spend much time researching such a seemingly trivial subject?"), so I will have to go out on a limb here with my own theory, which is based only on circumstantial evidence. Because this is just my theory, I am going to have to explain how I arrived at it.

First, a confession: Although I began playing rock-paper-scissors when I was a child, I had never heard it called "Rochambeau" until you sent in your question. Asking around, however, I discovered that some of my colleagues, raised in various places around the country, had vaguely heard of "Rochambeau," but with some of them I was not able to figure out if they had definitely called the game of rock-paper-scissors "Rochambeau" when they were younger, or whether they had merely watched a certain South Park episode in which Eric Cartman challenged another child to play "Rochambeau," but which he explained as consisting in a kind of duel carried out by kicking each other (Google "Rochambeau" and "South Park" to find a link to the clip, but I hereby give you a "language warning" for this).

Nevertheless, more Googling makes it clear that "Rochambeau," used for rock-paper-scissors, has an older and wider provenance. Mathematicians and evolutionary biologists, for example, who have recently become interested in "multivariant" selection systems over the past 20 years or so, have written about rock-paper-scissors and have typically cited the game as "rock-paper-scissors" and then added "Rochambeau" or "Roshambo" in parentheses after it. So that carries the word back at least a couple of decades.

As an illustration of the severe limits on using Wikipedia for research, the English-language Wikipedia entry on rock-paper-scissors (or rock-scissors-paper, etc.) says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in French. But the French-language Wikipedia entry on the game lists the Francophone countries' names for it as: pierre-feuille-ciseaux, papier-caillou-ciseaux, roche-papier-ciseaux, pierre-papier-ciseaux, and feuille-caillou-ciseaux. It then says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in the United States. I wondered whether "Rochambeau" might be an English-language corruption of a French triplet beginning with "roche" (rock), but I have nothing else to offer in this speculative vein, so this is not part of my theory.

Next up was to consider the alleged connection with the Comte de Rochambeau, the French general who was a hero of the American Revolution.

Over the past decade, rock-paper-scissors has become a quasi-formally organized sport with international tournaments. Two American brothers, Douglas and Graham Walker, organized the World RPS Society, with tournaments, a website, t-shirts, and posters, and they have also published a light-hearted guide to playing "professional" rock-paper-scissors, which includes a brief and half-serious history of the game. Their Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide (2004) offers one theory about how the game became "synonymous with" the Comte de Rochambeau:

"It is widely believed that an ill-advised throw of Scissors (or Ciseaux) resulted in his being uprooted from his ancestral home to become the marshal of the French forces during the American Revolution. His arrival is widely credited with the introduction of RPS to the United States."

But this is all unlikely. Rochambeau (and Lafayette and other French military officers) were quite eager to come to America to fight with the Americans, and had to resist others' efforts to keep them in France so that their military experience would not be missed there.

Another mention of the supposed historical connection with Rochambeau is in physicist Len Fisher's Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life (2008):

"George Washington is reputed to have played it with Cornwallis and the Comte de Rochambeau to decide who would be the last to leave Cornwallis's tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. (The story goes that Rochambeau won, which is why the game is still called Ro-Sham-Bo in some quarters.)"

But Washington, Rochambeau, and Cornwallis did not negotiate surrender terms together in a tent; nor did they even meet together on that occasion. Cornwallis sent Washington a message under a flag of truce, proposing a cessation of hostilities so that officers appointed by each side could meet and "settle terms of the posts at York and Gloucester." After speaking with his own staff and with Rochambeau and his officers, Washington responded in writing that he wished to see Cornwallis' proposed terms of surrender before he could agree to the talks. Cornwallis sent back another written message to Washington, listing his terms. Washington then decided that he could not accept the terms as written, but that they were enough to begin negotiations, so he agreed to the ceasefire and to send representatives to the Moore house on the York River behind the Americans' lines, where Cornwallis had proposed the meeting take place.

The officers who met for negotiations the following day included Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens, a native South Carolinian, who had previously been Washington's aide-de-camp, and (for Rochambeau) Colonels Louis Marie Antoine vicomte de Noailles (Lafayette's brother-in-law), and Guillaume Jacques Constant Liberge de Granchain. They met with British Lieutenant-Colonel Duridas and Major Ross, one of whom was Cornwallis' aide-de-camp. Negotiations lasted eight hours that day. They were extremely detailed about terms, including even the requirement for the British troops to march out with their colors masked and with their fifers not playing any British or German tunes. A final agreement was reached only during the second session, the following day, on October 19, when the same negotiators returned, having consulted with their superiors. They then brought back the Articles of Capitulation for their commanders to study and to sign "in the trenches." Cornwallis signed for the British side. Generals Washington and Rochambeau, and Admiral de Grasse, gathered elsewhere, signed for the opposing side.

That afternoon, the British forces marched out from where they had been besieged. Cornwallis was not among them. He pleaded illness, and left the formal surrender to Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, who rode up to the allied officers and asked which one was Rochambeau. He was immediately told to surrender to Washington, but when he stopped in front of Washington and offered him Cornwallis' sword, Washington refused, for reasons of military protocol, to receive a sword from the opposing side's subordinate commander. Washington directed him to surrender the sword to his second in command, General Benjamin Lincoln, which he did, and turned and rode away.

None of the details of the surrender or the ceremony itself seem like they would have been left to a game of chance.

I conclude, therefore, that the stories that try to link the game with Rochambeau himself, are likely recent and apocryphal, made up in an ad hoc fashion to give flesh to why the game was called "Rochambeau."

Now we get to the nub of this matter: I did a rather tedious search in online databases of books, periodicals, and newspapers published in America from the 17th- through 19th-century and found absolutely no mention of "Rochambeau" used as the name of a game, or, for that matter, of any mention of Rochambeau playing rock-paper-scissors, or even any mention of the game of rock-paper-scissors itself being played in America at all until well into the 20th century. I certainly do not believe that my search has been exhaustive (many old newspapers are not online, for example), and there was plenty that was written that was never published, but if the game was being played by children of European descent "from time immemorial," it seems odd (but not conclusive) that I have been able to find no one mentioning it in anything published in America for the first several centuries of European presence here, even though the game, by its very nature, is not something on which writers would necessarily have thought to expend much ink, if they deigned to notice it at all.

The absence of any mention of the game does not mean, by the way, that American children did not have hand games for deciding winners or selecting alternatives—"Odds and evens," for example, has a long history in Anglo-American culture (James Boswell mentions it in his Life of Samuel Johnson).

In addition, there is evidence (by way of a conspicuous absence of another order) of American ignorance of the game as late as the turn of the 20th century: Stewart Culin, Director of the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, published Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan in 1895. In it, he described various East Asian hand games, among which was the Japanese game of Janken (or Jankenpon). This was precisely what became our game of rock-paper-scissors, and is most likely its ultimate source, either via Europe or across the Pacific (perhaps through Japanese immigrants to the West Coast). Culin, however, grinds right through his description of it, placing it among his descriptions of the other East Asian hand games to which it is closely related, without ever talking about any game in his own culture, that is, without mentioning anything like, "this is identical to our game of rock-paper-scissors." This too suggests that in fact the game had not yet become a part of American culture by that time.

The first homegrown mention of the game rock-paper-scissors I found is in a compilation of children’s games, Handbook for Recreation Leaders, put together by Ella Gardner, the Government's "play expert" and "recreation specialist" with the Children's Bureau in Washington and first published by the Government Printing Office in 1935. In the 1930s, the Children's Bureau helped organize or participated in many national and international gatherings of child care specialists. Gardner herself was a kind of traveling outreach specialist on the subject of recreation activities.

In the Handbook, the game of rock-paper-scissors is called, precisely, "Rochambeau." Gardner appears to have been fond of team games, so to adapt rock-paper-scissors, her Handbook has the players of each of two teams decide among themselves whether their team will present rock, paper, or scissors. Then, with the two teams facing each other, the captains of each team raise their fisted arms and bring them down in partial steps, each at the same time, saying "Ro," then "cham," and then, on "beau," revealing their sign. The Handbook presents the game along with another, called "Fox, Hunter, Gun," in which foxes defeat hunters, hunters defeat guns, and guns defeat foxes. The signals of that game included simultaneous cries and arm gestures that impersonate the characters.

Soon after the government made the book available to educators, recreation planners, community groups, clubs, and parents around the country, more descriptions of the game began to appear in books, magazines, and newspapers. Bernard Sterling Mason's Social Games for Recreation, for example, published the following year, describes "rock scissors paper." And letters to the children's sections of domestic newspapers began explaining and recommending the game in the late 1930s.

There was an upsurge in the number of mentions of the game after World War II. It was initiated with articles in the Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper, written by army reporters stationed in Japan during the U.S. occupation of the country. The reporters appear to have been unfamiliar with the game from their own childhoods, calling it a kind of "odds and evens." From about that time, the game began being mentioned regularly in books, magazines, and newspapers. Clearly, by then it had become embedded in American culture. Judging by the "documentary" evidence, then, it looks like the game found its way to popularity in America through the combined efforts of Ella Gardner of the Children's Bureau and, later, G.I.s returning from Japan.

The author of the Children's Bureau handbook, Ella Gardner, was a Washington, D.C. native. The Children's Bureau had been in the Department of Labor, but with the Bureau's large expansion under the New Deal, and especially the Social Security Act of 1935, would soon end up with the Social Security Administration (and later with HEW and its successor, HHS).

At the time the book was published, the Children's Bureau was in the Widner building in Washington, D.C., on Connecticut Avenue. But the government was in the midst of a huge expansion, and was buying and leasing buildings all over downtown, and moving agencies from one place to another. The new Social Security Administration would quickly be moved into an apartment building that had been commandeered by the Government about a block away from the Children's Bureau. This building was the Rochambeau Apartments, at the corner of 17th and K Streets. The building had that name because it faced Lafayette Square, which has a large bronze statue of the Comte de Rochambeau.

The Rochambeau statue had been erected in 1902 and, in 1931, had been the focus of a large celebration of the sesquicentennial of the victory at Yorktown. If the Children's Bureau staff were looking for a ready place to try out games with a group of children, Lafayette Square would have been ideal. And if they were looking for a three-syllable word to hang on the game of rock-paper-scissors, "Rochambeau" would certainly have been near at hand.

But why bother with making up a new name for the game? Well, it was a Japanese game and English-speaking children might have been leery of a name as unfamiliar as "Jankenpon." Diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States were growing quite cool by the mid-1930s, so perhaps the Children's Bureau reduced the "foreign" feeling of the name "Jankenpon" by attaching a foreign name to it that was nevertheless indubitably a "patriotic" one: "Rochambeau."

The upshot is that the name "Rochambeau" does appear to link the game to the French General, but it is likely his statue, not the gentleman himself, that is responsible for the link.

So that is my theory, and I am sticking to it. At least for now. It seems more reasonable than supposing Washington, Cornwallis, and Rochambeau were playing hand games together during the British surrender. However, my theory is based almost entirely on a long chain of guesses and circumstantial evidence. If or when someone runs across some early mention of "Rochambeau" applied to the game, the entire limb I have climbed out on will be sawed off. But for now, that is the best I can come up with.

The goals of U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt during the 1950s were to protect American and western European access to oil in the Middle East, to end British colonial rule throughout the area in line with the ideal of self-determination expressed in the Atlantic Charter, to contain the expansion of communism and particularly the influence of the Soviet Union in the region, and to support the independence of Israel without alienating the Arab states.

In all this, the U.S. State Department regarded Egypt as the natural leader among the Arab states and sought to make it an ally and to encourage pro-Western elements in Egyptian society.

One essential problem was that the various goals of U.S. policy toward Egypt were often at odds with one another. As one example, the U.S. was sympathetic to Egypt's desire to free itself from British colonial rule--just as the U.S. had done--and emphasized its support for full Egyptian self-rule to the country's political and military leaders. But the U.S. was also allied with Britain to oppose the Soviet Union's expansion into Europe.

Almost all of Europe's oil at the time came through the Suez Canal. Britain was divesting itself of its empire, but in Egypt it had strong concerns about leaving the Suez Canal undefended. Britain's lingering military presence in the Mideast helped protect oil shipping lanes, the canal, and the oil fields from the threat posed by the Soviet Red Army. For its part, Egypt simply wanted Britain out and was disappointed when the U.S. did not always take its side.

Another example of internally conflicting goals--the U.S. supported "peoples' right to self-determination." This was, in fact, one way of framing why the U.S. opposed communism and the Soviet Union in particular: because it was totalitarian and crushed individuals' liberties. However, the U.S. had in mind a model of self-governance that assumed its own historical situation and that of other western European states who were the heirs of the Enlightenment and its ideals of individual autonomy. Other places were not necessarily burgeoning libertarian strongholds that only wanted a chance to grow to fruition as western-style capitalist democracies.

Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, approached this dilemma by applying a "Marshall Plan" strategy of massive aid to places such as the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while also implicitly dealing with the fact that in these places (unlike in the European countries with strong democratic traditions that had been devastated by World War II), the "people" were not necessarily committed to turning their countries into capitalist, pro-western democracies.

Dulles's State Department believed that countries such as Egypt, for example, would naturally undergo a two-step process. First, relatively corrupt old regimes would be cast aside (least destructively, by military coups) and the governments would then be controlled by relatively authoritarian regimes that would pull together and organize the country's various factions. Second, with development aid and the establishment of trade ties with the rest of the world, the countries would emerge (through a peaceful evolutionary process, it was hoped) as full-fledged democracies.

Even if this were a true description of the "natural" evolution of Third World countries, however, none of this could happen in isolation. Larger political forces, outside the individual countries, affected their internal politics.

For the U.S., Dulles's goal of opposing and, as he framed it, "containing" the expansion of the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and China provided a dilemma. When colonial powers disengaged from their former colonies in the Third World, the power vacuum that resulted meant that the U.S. found itself in various places giving its support to indigenous, but authoritarian and even dictatorial, regimes. This, it was thought, would cordon off these countries' borders, as it were, against communist intrusion and provide an opportunity for the U.S. to engage there in what the State Department came to call "nation building," which generally meant the infusion of massive economic and military aid. The eventual goal was the peaceful evolution of these countries into functioning, pro-western democracies.

This was the template for U.S. policy toward Egypt in the 1950s. Unfortunately for its prospects of success, it was only partly congruent with Egypt's own perceived interests. In particular, Egypt's leaders were generally never sympathetic to communism, but they did not fear anything like a takeover by the Soviet Union. In fact, following a long established practice in Mideast diplomatic circles, they looked for ways to play off one great power against another to their advantage.

Egypt had centuries of experience in warding off the domination of great powers by playing them against one another. When the U.S. stalled in advancing Egypt's positions against Britain, Egypt sought to engage with the Soviet Union, partly because that was where it could find military and economic support and partly because it was a way to exact more concessions from the U.S. in return.

In addition, the political power that Egyptian leaders wielded, like that in other countries in the region, was weak. In a way that American diplomats did not understand, Mideast leaders had to adjust their countries' alliances constantly with one another and could not make permanent, unilateral alliances. It was an Egyptian goal to enhance its own power in the region, not as the leader of a pro-American alliance.

Beginning with President Roosevelt's meeting with King Farouk at the end of World War II, American diplomats (including Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson) assured Egyptian leaders that the U.S. supported the country's efforts at self-determination. The Egyptians unfailingly heard these assurances to mean that the U.S. would help them rid Egypt of Britain. Sometimes, however, U.S. diplomats used this sort of language to mean that the U.S. would protect Egypt from communist subversion, internally or externally, from the Soviet Union. This miscommunication caused confusion.

Internal Egyptian politics made Egyptian King Farouk align himself increasingly with factions that demanded an immediate abrogation of an earlier treaty that allowed Britain to continue control over the Suez Canal and that Britain pull all its troops out of Egypt. The U.S. found the King to be unsympathetic to America's reluctance to go along with the demand for Britain to abandon Egypt and the canal immediately. To the U.S., it seemed that political power in Egypt was rapidly being corrupted and that it was flowing "down the drain," out to the more radical political factions.

The U.S. State Department concluded that it would find a more sympathetic hearing from another ruler. Historians have reached different conclusions about the extent of the involvement of U.S. diplomats and CIA operatives at this juncture, but it seems fairly clear that they met with dissatisfied Egyptian military officers and at least promised them that if there was a military coup, that the U.S. would not oppose it, and that the U.S. would prevent possible British opposition to it, as long as foreign nationals and property were protected.

The coup occurred in July 1952. Two military officers, General Mohammed Naguid and Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser, emerged as the new Egyptian leaders. The military government immediately asked for U.S. military and economic aid. A State Department official agreed, but the Secretary of State and the President balked at the deal, which caused internal political problems for the Egyptian leaders.

President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson were succeeded by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles in 1953. Dulles' brother Allen was made director of the CIA.

The Dulles brothers provided military advisors and equipment to the Egyptian army. Through clandestine contacts, both the State Department and the CIA gave Egyptian leaders, especially Nasser, important intelligence training and assistance in moderating potential internal political rivals and in conducting propaganda campaigns.

In 1954, Nasser edged out Naguid and ascended to sole leadership of the military government. During the tumult surrounding this, Nasser was able to disband the main faction of his opposition, the Moslem Brotherhood, after an assassination attempt during one of his speeches, in which the would-be assassin fired seven shots at him, but missed. Public sympathy for Nasser surged, allowing him to quash his opposition. Nasser's chief of security much later admitted that the CIA had given Nasser a bulletproof vest, which he was wearing during his speech, raising the issue of whether the assassination attempt was a setup, designed to benefit Nasser.

Egypt looked for military equipment and aid. During this period, both State and the CIA provided it, sometimes clandestinely, hoping for a formal military alliance with Egypt, and for Egypt to take the lead in reaching a peace settlement with Israel. Egypt, however, extracted as much military and economic assistance from the U.S. as it could, but refused a military alliance with the West. It was Nasser's intention to adopt a policy of "neutralism" between West and East (that is, between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.) in order to maintain its own independence, and, in fact, to heighten competition between the two in the region in order to fend off domination and to gain as much aid as possible from each.

The U.S. recognized that by the mid-1950s the U.S.S.R. had developed a Third World strategy of pouring vast amounts of money and material into countries in Asia, Africa, and the Mideast that had recently been colonies of Western countries. The Soviets hoped to counter Western influence in these countries by promoting anti-colonial sentiment and supporting socialist reform there. The strategy was quite successful, at least for a time. The result was that in much of the Third World, the Soviet Union was viewed more favorably than the United States.

The U.S. and Britain attempted to form a cordon of defensive alliances around the world in order to prevent Soviet expansion. This included NATA in Europe and SEATO in Southeast Asia. The initial plan also included a Mideast alliance to bridge the gap between the two, but when the U.S. and Britain began formalizing agreements with Turkey and Iraq (rivals of Egypt in regional influence), Nasser felt that they had discarded Egypt. Nasser's idea was to form a regional military alliance within the Arab League, with him as leader. The souring of relations between Nasser and the West resulted in a turning point in 1955 in which Nasser asked for, and received, large-scale military equipment sales from the Soviet Union, and distanced his country and himself from the United States. Indeed, he adopted socialist reforms and heavily promoted "pan-Arab nationalism," as well as "neutralism" and "noncooperation with the West."

Despite that, the U.S. continued to court Nasser with economic aid, which indeed he was happy to receive. The U.S. accepted that a "neutralist" Egypt was better than a communist one, and recognized that the Soviets, from this time, intended to block Western efforts to cordon them and, to do that, were encouraging vast sales of its military equipment all over the region, as well as supporting the idea of Arab nationalism, especially in opposition to Israel. The U.S. pressured Israel and Egypt to make concessions toward a settlement, with the intention of avoiding war and reducing Soviet influence in the region.

When the U.S. found that Nasser and Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion were ultimately unable or unwilling to conclude a peace agreement, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles opted to call Nasser's bluff by countering him in several covert ways, especially in promoting relations with his regional Arab rivals in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. The U.S. calculated that Nasser, confronted by the possibility that the other Arab states were aligning with the West, would find himself in a situation that he would find unacceptable--namely, with only one powerful "friend," the Soviet Union.

In order to avoid such an outcome, the U.S. believed, Nasser would become more tractable to a peace settlement with Israel, so that he would not be left behind, relative to the other Arab states. In response, Nasser stepped up anti-American rhetoric in the region and, in return from the Soviets for help in setting up covert intelligence operations in the region designed to undermine the Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Libya, and Iraq, Nasser agreed to accept Soviet military assistance.

The denouement occurred over the plans to construct the Aswan High Dam, which the U.S. had been willing to fund, but which the Soviet Union had told Nasser that it would also be willing to do. Secretary of State Dulles, with Eisenhower's agreement, finally decided to extract the U.S. from situations in the Third World in which the countries were deliberately playing them off against the Soviet Union. In 1956, Dulles let it be known to Nasser that the U.S. would not fund the dam, believing that Nasser's only other option to finance it was to accept the Soviet Union's offer. This, Dulles believed correctly, Nasser would be highly reluctant to do. Nasser responded by opening diplomatic relations with China.

Nasser also had another option that the U.S. did not anticipate: He suddenly took an enormously dangerous risk and nationalized the Suez Canal, anticipating that Egypt could use the canal revenues to finance the construction of the Aswan High Dam without U.S. or Soviet funding.

In response, three months later, Britain, France (the two foreign shareholders in the canal), and Israel attacked Egypt, resulting in a quick and decisive military defeat for Egypt. The Israelis occupied a large portion of the Sinai Peninsula, and the Anglo-French forces occupied Port Said and Port Fouad at the Mediterranean terminus of the Suez Canal. All of this they did without consulting the U.S.

Eisenhower and Dulles were appalled at the attack. They believed with some good evidence that it would result in a military response from the Soviet Union, risking a much larger war, and, in any event, would throw the weight of public opinion throughout the Arab Middle East entirely against the West and into the Soviet camp. The U.S., therefore, strongly and publicly opposed the invasion and worked in the U.N., especially with Canada, to pass a cease-fire resolution and a call for the withdrawal of military forces.

In addition, the U.S. pressured Britain by threatening to sell the British bonds it held, which would have forced a devaluation of the British currency and threatened Britain's ability to import food and oil. The British relented, a cease-fire was called, and the occupying forces were evacuated.

In the Suez Crisis, the Third World in general and the Arab states in particular saw the U.S. as having acted as its friend. Despite Egypt's military loss, Nasser remained in power with the Suez Canal under Egypt's control, and the British, French, and Israelis evacuated the region they had invaded.

For the next few years, U.S. policy toward Egypt was guided by what became known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine," a declaration that the U.S. was prepared to offer assistance to any Middle Eastern country (if it asked for assistance) in order to oppose the military threat of "any nation controlled by international communism." In reality, the doctrine was fairly impractical for a number of reasons.

It invited pro-Western countries in the region to gin up internal or external "communist threats" as a simple way to procure U.S. aid without the necessity to negotiate agreements or treaties. Also, the policy was actually aimed at thwarting Nasser's ambitions to undermine his Middle Eastern rivals in the region, many of whom were pro-Western. The policy was given public shape, however, in a resolution that the Eisenhower Administration had pushed through Congress by the expediency of using the phrase "international communism." This left the Administration's actual policy in the dark and often at odds with its publicly expressed policy.

The practical result of this was State Department and CIA involvement, by covert means, in the complicated internal politics of the region, as the political winds within each country shifted. This created unintended and unwanted consequences for the United States, for which the CIA coined the term "blowback." Much of this activity, including coups and counter-coups, was inspired, influenced, or even orchestrated by the CIA. In Egypt, CIA operator Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (Teddy's grandson), developed an exceedingly complicated and intimate relationship with (and sometimes against) the Nasser regime, as did CIA operative Miles Copeland. The U.S., however, acted for the rest of the decade under the conviction that Nasser himself was too powerful to be deposed and came to reconcile itself to containing his attempts to consolidate his influence with the other Arab states.