The Late King Hussein of Jordan (A Reminiscence)

By Andrew I. Killgore

The first time I saw King Hussein, in the spring of 1956, he was racing a Porsche in the mountains of Lebanon. There were other high-powered cars in the race and other highly skilled drivers all going at breakneck speed.

But the king won the race, not because the others held back to let him win but because he was a superb driver and dared to take more risks than the others on the curving, twisting racecourse.

Later, when I got to know him personally in Amman, King Hussein also usually won in go-cart races in which young Western diplomats, including some of my U.S. Embassy colleagues, enthusiastically took part.

He was also a skilled aviator in fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and he generally piloted his own planes whenever he was aboard.

King Hussein Bin Talal Al Hashemi, born in Amman in November 1935, was initially not as successful in marriage as he was in sports competitions. His first marriage in 1955 to his cousin, Princess Dina of the Egyptian branch of the Hashemite family, was dissolved. This was an “in the family” match in which the two principals had little in common other than illustrious Middle Eastern bloodlines. Princess Dina, as she is now called, was a highly educated intellectual, while Hussein, though very intelligent, had few intellectual interests. Princess Alia was their only child.

Princess Dina remarried and lived with her PLO activist husband Salah Talmari in the U.S. national capital area for several years. He now is an elected member of the Palestinian legislature representing the Bethlehem area.

In 1961 the king married Antoinette (Toni) Gardiner, the daughter of a British army colonel assigned to Jordan at that time to help train the Jordanian army. This match provoked a lot of subdued opposition in Jordan. The obvious ground for objection was that Miss Gardiner was a subject of Britain, whose country’s colonial policies had hurt, and were still hurting, the Arabs.

A more fundamental objection among King Hussein’s countrymen, to my surprise, was that Toni Gardiner had “dated Western-style,” that is with no chaperon present, which was incompatible with Arab tradition. In fact, she had earlier dated a young American Embassy colleague of mine when I was still stationed in Jordan.

However, the union of King Hussein and Princess Muna, as she was renamed, lasted 11 years and produced Abdullah, who in 1999 became King Abdullah, his brother Feisal, and twin girls Zein and Ayesha. The king and his British bride divorced in 1972 and both sons received much of their education in the United States.

Later in 1972 the king married a Jordanian of Palestinian ancestry, Alia’a Baha Eddin Toukan, from one of the great families of Nablus in the West Bank. Described at the time as the woman Hussein “really loved,” Alia’a died tragically in a helicopter crash five years after the wedding. This was a particularly ironic turn of fate because the king’s obvious devotion to his Palestinian bride had made Jordan’s Palestinian majority feel that they had both a place and a sympathetic ear in the Jordanian court. The Hussein-Alia’a union produced two children, Princess Haya and Prince Ali.

King Hussein’s fourth wife was an American, Lisa Halaby, now Queen Noor, whom he married in 1978. Her mother is of Norwegian-American stock and her father is Arab-American lawyer/financier Najeeb Halaby, administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency under President John F. Kennedy and a former president of Pan American World Airways. The king and Queen Noor had two boys, Hamzeh and Hashem, and two girls, Iman and Raijah. Eighteen-year-old Hamzeh was particularly close to his father, but too young to be considered for the kingship at the time King Hussein hurriedly changed the order of succession from his younger brother, Prince Hassan, to his son, the commander of Jordanian army special forces, Prince Abdallah, only days before King Hussein’s death from cancer on Feb. 7.

King Hussein studied at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, at Harrow School in England and at Sandhurst, Britain’s West Point. His English was perfect, and he became a world-class speaker in both English and Arabic. The king’s bearing was military and his manner polite and courtly, adding to his widely acknowledged charm and personal magnetism.

His mainly Bedouin army was fiercely loyal to him, not just because the monarchy and the East Bank Bedouin tribes depended upon each other in a land where Palestinian refugees and their descendants have been the majority for half a century, but also because, in personal style, King Hussein was a classic Bedouin leader.

The king traced his lineage to the Al Hashem family, or tribe, of the Prophet Muhammad. The king’s great-grandfather, Sharif Hussein bin Ali Al Hashemi, headed the Muslim hierarchy in the Holy City of Mecca.

In the Arabian peninsula the Hashemites lost out after World War I to the Al Saud family/tribe following a long struggle. This was the period when Britain made promises to Sharif Hussein to get Arab support against the Ottoman Turks. Unfortunately for all concerned, those promises conflicted with British World War I undertakings to the early Zionists over Palestine, and to France over Syria.

After Britain partially sorted out its contradictory promises to the Hashemites, the Sharif Hussain’s son, Amir (later King) Abdallah, King Hussein’s grandfather, assumed the throne in Amman. His Arab Legion, later the Jordanian army, helped halt the rout of the Palestinians by Jewish forces before Israel’s declaration of independence, in early 1948. In accordance with a secret agreement between King Abdallah and the Jewish leaders of the soon-to-be state of Israel, however, the Jordanian troops only defended what was left of Palestinian territory and did not seek to retake any of the territories awarded by the U.N. Partition Plan but seized later by Israel.

Abdallah kept the West Bank territories his troops had defended, making it impossible for the Palestinians to set up the independent state promised them by the U.N. partition plan for Palestine. For this he was assassinated in 1951 at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by a member of the al-Husseini family, which had opposed creation of the state of Israel.

The 16-year-old Hussein, who had accompanied his grandfather to the mosque, was also hit by one of the assassin’s bullets, but because it struck a medal on Hussein’s chest, he emerged physically unscathed.

In defense of King Abdallah’s conduct, it must be recalled that the Arab Legion at the time was paid by the British and commanded by the legendary British General John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha). In fact, Abdallah, later research proves, was ambitious at the time to play a larger Middle East role, hoping to unite Syria and Jordan as part of a “greater Syria,” under his rule, and was willing to ally himself with whomever might make that possible.

Hussein’s father, King Talal, ruled only briefly before he was diagnosed as a manic-depressive. After he was succeeded by his son, Hussein, in 1951, he lived the rest of his life under the care and protection of the Turkish government in Istanbul, where he had studied as a boy.

So soon after his death, it is difficult to assess King Hussein’s life and accomplishments as ruler of a small, weak country on the immediate periphery of events that have had deeply divisive effects upon Middle Eastern, European and North American politics. In my opinion, King Hussein was better in some ways and worse in others than his public reputation.

The number of assassination attempts and plots against his life has been exaggerated by Israel and its supporters in the U.S., by the king’s own spin doctors, and by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA maintained a cozy relationship, part of it as secret paymaster, with Hussein for 40 years.

His reputation as “the brave young king” was built on events that started with his seemingly miraculous escape from the assassin at the al-Aqsa mosque who killed his grandfather. But the king was, in fact, a brave man, both physically and in making bold decisions, such as the separate peace with Israel. That peace remains unpopular with most Jordanians, whether from the East or West Bank territories.

Nor was King Hussein afraid to throw out Glubb Pasha after Britain’s secret collusion with France and Israel to attack Egypt in October 1956. After Glubb and the British were gone, the United States eventually picked up the financial subsidy. But the king didn’t know for sure that this would happen when he dismissed the British commander of his army.

A well-known American journalist recently blamed Hussein for opening fire on Israeli forces in Jerusalem after Israel attacked Egypt in June 1967. But the truth is that the stage was set for the sequence of events that enabled Israeli forces to occupy East Jerusalem and the West Bank when, in early 1967, Israeli forces viciously attacked the Palestinian West Bank village of Samu, near Bethlehem, which was under Jordanian administration, killing about 40 villagers.

The “justification” for the Israeli assault was a fake claim of infiltration attacks from Samu on Israel. As Jordanian soldiers moved in with trucks and armored cars to halt the Israeli attack, they were ambushed by Israeli tanks and artillery. More than 200 Jordanian soldiers were killed and a hundred Jordanian vehicles destroyed. All the circumstances point to a carefully planned Israeli provocation.

As a consequence, the king made a defense treaty with Egypt and Syria. When Israel launched its June 5, 1967 “pre-emptive attack” on his new allies, the king fulfilled his treaty obligation to come to their defense. This gave Israel the pretext it needed for a long-planned attack. Within hours Israel had seized East Jerusalem and the entire West Bank, which it still holds.

So the brave young king—B.Y.K. to two generations of Middle East hands—reigned for 47 years by performing a magical balancing act in the minds of his Western admirers, including especially friends of Israel in the American media, that held old trans-Jordan together. But it will be prudent for all concerned, especially Jordan’s new King Abdallah, to keep in mind that deep in their hearts most Palestinians see the Hashemite family—the first King Abdallah, and, despite his many admirable personal qualities, the late King Hussein as well—as having betrayed their chances for a state of their own more than half a century ago.

Andrew I. Killgore, a retired career foreign service officer and former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.