47 Years Ago In Time

In 1957, when TIME devoted a cover story to Nuri as-Said, the pro-Western Prime Minister of IRAQ, he was spearheading a much different sort of nation-building project.

The population of Baghdad has doubled in five years (to about 1 million), and the capital is booming. Streets are jammed with American cars, creating a monumental traffic problem that the Development Board’s new bridges over the Tigris have not begun to solve. The board’s bulldozers are flattening 300 slum houses and bazaar shops to open a new freeway through the city center. Now that the floods have been stemmed, the city is spreading beyond the dikes where handsome villas are rising for the new, well-to-do middle classes … France’s Le Corbusier will build a sports stadium, and 88-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright returned enthusiastically from Baghdad last week ready to create an opera house “like nothing in the world” on an island in the Tigris … Says a senior U.S. diplomat: “We feel Iraq is potentially if not right now the brightest spot in the area. There’s hope here to build something solid.” –TIME, June 17, 1957