Eden suffered from cholangitis, an abdominal infection which became so agonising that he was admitted to hospital in 1956 with a temperature reaching 106°F (41°C). He was re-operated in London in an attempt to correct the injury with placement of a surgical drain. He suffered further with symptoms of biliary obstruction and required further revisional surgery on three more occasions in Boston, Massachusetts to treat recurrent stricturing of the right hepatic duct. [198] [199] [200] [195] He was also prescribed Benzedrine, the wonder drug of the 1950s. Regarded then as a harmless stimulant, it belongs to the family of drugs called amphetamines, and at that time they were prescribed and used in a very casual way. Among the side effects of Benzedrine are insomnia, restlessness, and mood swings, all of which Eden suffered during the Suez Crisis; indeed, earlier in his premiership he complained of being kept awake at night by the sound of motor scooters, [201] being unable to sleep more than 5 hours per night or sometimes waking up at 3 am. [198] Eden's drug regimen is now commonly agreed to have been a part of the reason for his bad judgment while prime minister. [3] The Thorpe biography, however, denied Eden's abuse of Benzedrine, stating that the allegations were "untrue, as is made clear by Eden's medical records at Birmingham University, not yet [at the time] available for research". [8] C. Philip Skardon, A Lesson for Our Times: How America Kept the Peace in the Hungary-Suez Crisis of 1956 (2010), pp. 194–195.

Eden was born on August 19, 1946, in Ozone Park, Queens. [1] [3] Eden was Jewish. [4] Relationship with Wojtowicz [ edit ] This was the speech in which Churchill declared "Thank God for the French Army" and in which he stated that Ramsay MacDonald had "more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought". Eden felt sure most of his colleagues would feel unenthusiastic about any favourable report on the Soviet Union but felt certain to be correct. UK considered cutting off Nile". BBC News. Archived from the original on 3 March 2007 . Retrieved 21 June 2011. Stalin's) personality made itself felt without exaggeration. He had natural good manners, perhaps a Georgian inheritance. Though I knew the man was without mercy, I respected the quality of his mind and even felt a sympathy I have never been able to analyse. Perhaps it was because of the pragmatic approach. I cannot believe he had any affinity to Marx. Certainly no one could have been less doctrinaire". [91]A year later, Wojtowicz would rob the Chase Manhattan Bank in Gravesend. Clearly, all was not as it seemed. Because of the critical and commercial success of Dog Day Afternoon on its release in 1975, the world saw Wojtowicz’s bank robbery as a delicious scandal. Fourteen hours! Armed with shotguns! Taking hostages! But what was his motivation? How did he go from Vietnam vet to bank robber in just a few short years? a b c The Rt Hon Lord Owen CH (6 May 2005). "The effect of Prime Minister Anthony Eden's illness on his decision-making during the Suez crisis". Qjmed.oxfordjournals.org. Archived from the original on 25 September 2012 . Retrieved 21 July 2012. Gallant0 (1 December 2011). "Russia's War – Blood Upon the Snow [04-10] Between Life And Death". Archived from the original on 17 March 2016 . Retrieved 4 August 2015– via YouTube. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) Eden, who faced domestic pressure from his party to take action, as well as stopping the decline of British influence in the Middle East, [3] had ignored Britain's financial dependence on the US in the wake of the Second World War, and had assumed the US would automatically endorse whatever action taken by its closest ally. At the 'Law not War' rally in Trafalgar Square on 4 November 1956, Eden was ridiculed by Aneurin Bevan: "Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt to strengthen the United Nations. Every burglar of course could say the same thing; he could argue that he was entering the house to train the police. So, if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying, and he may be, then he is too stupid to be a prime minister". Public opinion was mixed; some historians think that the majority of public opinion in the UK was on Eden's side. [149] Elizabeth Debbie Eden (born Ernest Aron; August 19, 1946 – September 29, 1987) was an American trans woman whose husband John Wojtowicz attempted a bank robbery allegedly to pay for her gender-affirming surgery. The incident was made into the crime drama film Dog Day Afternoon ( 1975), directed by Sidney Lumet. [1] The character Leon Shermer, played by Chris Sarandon, is loosely based on Eden. [2] Biography [ edit ] Early life [ edit ]

The Dog (also known as Storyville: The Great Sex Addict Heist), by directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2013. [23] [24] [12] Norton, Philip (2020). Governing Britain: Parliament, Ministers and Our Ambiguous Constitution. Manchester University Press. p.143. ISBN 978-1-5261-4545-1. Watching the interview footage today, it’s problematic by many standards — Wojtowicz misgenders Eden’s pronouns, calls her by her pre-transition birth name, and says that after a failed suicide attempt she was “put in the nuthouse.” This is a salt of the earth guy from Brooklyn in the ’70s, in the earliest days of the gay liberation movement. Getting pronouns right wasn’t even part of the collective consciousness at that point.

Tony Shaw, "Government Manipulation of the Press during the 1956 Suez Crisis," Contemporary Record, 1994, 8#2, pp. 274–288.

At the turn of the ’70s, Wojtowicz began spending time in the gay bars of Greenwich Village, in spots such as Danny’s, the Stonewall Inn, and all the classic gay haunts along Christopher Street. This was New York before AIDS, a time when the city’s gay community first began to flourish. During this period, he met and fell in love with the woman who would change the course of his life: Elizabeth Eden. The two met at the San Gennaro Festival in 1971, and a fast and furious romance ensued, with the pair holding a wedding ceremony within months. Kirkup, Jonathan; Thornton, Stephen (2017). " 'Everyone needs a Willie': The elusive position of deputy to the British prime minister". British Politics. 12 (4): 504. doi: 10.1057/bp.2015.42. S2CID 156861636. Eden later wrote that in the early 1930s, the word "appeasement" was still used in its correct sense (from the Oxford English Dictionary) of seeking to settle strife. Only later in the decade would it come to acquire a pejorative meaning of acceding to bullying demands. [2] [80] Most people believed that Nasser was acting from legitimate patriotic concerns and the nationalisation was determined by the Foreign Office to be deliberately provocative but not illegal. The Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, was not asked for his opinion officially but made his view, that the government's contemplated armed strike against Egypt would be unlawful, known through the Lord Chancellor. [135]Eden was forced to bow to American diplomatic and financial pressure, and protests at home, by calling a ceasefire when Anglo-French forces had captured only 23 of the 120 miles of the canal. With the US threatening to withdraw its financial support for the pound sterling, the cabinet divided and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan threatening to resign unless an immediate ceasefire was called, Eden was under immense pressure. He considered defying the calls until the commander on the ground told him it could take up to six days for the Anglo-French troops to secure the entire Canal zone. Therefore, a ceasefire was called at quarter past midnight on 7 November. [ citation needed] Mount, Ferdinand (4 January 2018). "Always the Same Dream". The London Review of Books. 40 (1). Archived from the original on 26 September 2020 . Retrieved 9 September 2020. During the last months of peace in 1939, Eden joined the Territorial Army with the rank of major, in the London Rangers motorised battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps and was at annual camp with them in Beaulieu, Hampshire, when he heard news of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. [97]

British Government cabinet papers from September 1956, during Eden's term as prime minister, have shown that French Prime Minister Guy Mollet approached the British Government suggesting the idea of an economic and political union between France and Great Britain. [170] This was a similar offer, in reverse, to that made by Churchill (drawing on a plan devised by Leo Amery [171]) in June 1940. [172] In December 1976, Lord Avon, as Eden now was, felt well enough to travel with his wife to the United States to spend Christmas and New Year with Averell and Pamela Harriman; however, after reaching the States, his health rapidly deteriorated. Prime Minister James Callaghan arranged for an RAF plane that was already in America to divert to Miami, to fly Avon home. [203] At Oxford, Eden took no part in student politics, and his main leisure interest at the time was art. [50] Eden was in the Oxford University Dramatic Society and President of the Asiatic Society. Along with Lord David Cecil and R. E. Gathorne-Hardy he founded the Uffizi Society, of which he later became president. Possibly under the influence of his father, Eden gave a paper on Paul Cézanne, whose work was not yet widely appreciated. [49] Eden was already collecting paintings. [50] Dietrich, Kris (11 September 2015). Taboo Genocide: Holodomor 1933 & the Extermination of Ukraine. Xlibris Corporation. ISBN 978-1-4990-5607-5 . Retrieved 13 January 2019.Braasch, John W. (24 November 2003). "Anthony Eden's (Lord Avon) Biliary Tract Saga". Annals of Surgery. 238 (5): 772–775. doi: 10.1097/01.sla.0000094443.60313.da. PMC 1356158. PMID 14578742– via journals.lww.com. Turner, Suez 1956: The Inside Story of the First Oil War, Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 978-0-340-83769-6, 2007. In retirement, Lord Avon corresponded with Selwyn Lloyd, co-ordinating the release of information and with which writers they would agree to speak and when. Rumours that Britain had colluded with France and Israel appeared, albeit in garbled form, as early as 1957. By the 1970s they had agreed that Lloyd would only tell his version of the story after Avon's death (in the event, Lloyd would outlive Lord Avon by a year, struggling with terminal illness to complete his own memoirs). [185] Wojtowicz was the son of a Polish father and an Italian-American mother (nee Terry Basso [4]). [5] Personal life [ edit ]