Camille Chamoun
Camille Chamoun was president of Lebanon from 1952 to 1958, the Maronite lawyer who had led the white revolution, the general strike that forced Bechara el-Khoury out in September 1952. He took the country through its first boom: the banking secrecy law of 1956 that made Beirut the Arab world's bank, the oil money from the Gulf, the hotels and the airline. He took it into its first civil war, in May 1958. His refusal to rule out a second term, his alignment with the Eisenhower doctrine against Nasser, and the parliamentary election of 1957 that his people had rigged to remove the opposition brought the Sunni and Druze leaders into armed revolt with Syrian weapons, and he asked Eisenhower for the Marines, who landed at Beirut on 15 July 1958, the day after the Iraqi revolution. They stayed three months while the army's commander Chehab, who had refused to fight the rebels, was elected to replace him. He was born in Deir el-Qamar in the Chouf in 1900, studied law at the French faculty in Beirut, was a deputy from 1934, and a minister under the Mandate. He was the minister in London in 1944-47 who argued Lebanon's case at the UN's founding, an anglophile in a francophone elite. The presidency had also the electoral law of 1953 that cut the parliament to forty-four seats. There was the Suez crisis of 1956 in which he refused to break with Britain and France, which cost him his Sunni prime minister, and the murder of the journalist Nassib Metni in May 1958 that lit the fire. After 1958 he founded the National Liberal Party. He was the elder of the Maronite right for thirty years, and a minister in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the ally and then the victim of the Gemayels, whose Phalange destroyed his militia the Tigers at Safra in July 1980 and killed a hundred of his men. He survived a car bomb in 1987 that killed his guards. He died of a heart attack that August, at eighty-seven, with his son Dany already murdered in 1990 to come. He was the president who first put Lebanon in the Cold War and the first to ask the West to save it, which set a pattern.
- Lived: 1900 CE – 1987 CE
- Nationality: Lebanese
- Roles: president, politician
