Books: Terrific Turk

GHOST ON HORSEBACK, THE INCREDIBLE ATATURK (408 pp.)—Ray Brock—Duell Sloan & Pearce ($4.75).

Out of the ruins of the decayed and defeated Ottoman Empire rose a new Turkish republic that stands today as democracy’s strongest bastion in the Middle East. This was the achievement of one man, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. After World War I he raised a new army and drove out the Greeks, who were occupying Turkey with Allied backing. He threw out the established Moslem religion, warred on the fez and the veil, forced Western clothes, laws, letters and institutions on 16 million bewildered Turks. Through all the years of dazzling leadership, this bitter, sullen, debauched son of the Salonika slums never seems to have loved a soul; he abandoned his innumerable women and he killed many of the men who worked most closely with him.

Once Ataturk invited the diplomatic corps to a champagne party at his villa overlooking Ankara; when the binge ended at dawn, the diplomats, driving home, saw the corpses of the entire opposition leadership hanging in the square. With Ankara under his heel, Ataturk toured country districts announcing that Islam “is a dead and finished thing.” Returning suddenly after eight years’ absence to “that cesspool” Istanbul, he summoned notables to a grand ball. Before the band played a note, Ataturk himself stepped, chalk in hand, to a blackboard and for four hours lectured the jaded heirs of the Ottomans on the new, latinized language he had ordained for the republic.

Author Ray Brock (Blood, Oil and Sand), who spent five years as war correspondent in Ankara and Istanbul, has written—or overwritten— the first fulldress biography of this tremendous figure since his death. But the book is too crammed with imagined detail to gratify either history or Hollywood. When Author Brock tries, in a sort of romantic, Irving Stone style, to read the great man’s thoughts, the portrait of the remote and terrible Turk turns into semifiction. After an early setback, for instance, Ataturk is made to muse: “Yes, Pasha, and like that monstrous egg in the rhyme for children, you had a great fall.” In the end, Author Brock’s purplish flights—the old roughneck gallops off as a kind of ghost rider in the sky—obscure the black-and-white facts of Ataturk’s life, which was more fantastic than any biographer’s invention.