Fuad Chehab
Fuad Chehab was president of Lebanon from 1958 to 1964, the general who had commanded the army since independence and had refused, in the civil war of 1958, to use it against the rebels or for Chamoun, so that when the Marines left both sides could accept him. He then spent six years trying to make the confessional republic a state. The civil service was reformed and the ministries built, and the central bank was founded in 1964. There were the social security fund, the Litani dam, and the roads and schools and clinics in the Shia south and the Sunni north and the Bekaa that Beirut's merchants had never reached. There was the Lebanese University, the statistical office that produced the first study of the country's poverty, and the Deuxième Bureau, the army intelligence that watched the politicians and the Palestinian camps and that the politicians hated. Together the country called it Chehabism, the only attempt in its history to govern it from above. He was the descendant of the emirs who had ruled Mount Lebanon under the Ottomans, and he governed like one who owed the zaims nothing. He was born in Ghazir in 1902 into the Chehab family that had given the mountain its emirs and had lost its money. He joined the French Mandate's army of the Levant in 1921, trained at Saint-Cyr, and was the first commander of the Lebanese army in 1945, the man who kept it out of politics for thirteen years and out of the war of 1948 as far as he could. The presidency's politics were the reconciliation of no victor, no vanquished after 1958, in which the Sunni leader Rashid Karami was prime minister for most of the term. There was the coup attempt of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party on New Year's Eve 1961, which the army crushed and which gave the Deuxième Bureau its licence. He refused the constitutional amendment that would have let him serve again in 1964, saying the country was ungovernable by its leaders. He chose Charles Helou to follow him, and in 1970 he declined to run again with a statement that Lebanon's institutions could not be reformed by its political class, which the war of 1975 confirmed. He died in Beirut in April 1973. He is the president the country remembers as the one who tried.
- Lived: 1902 CE – 1973 CE
- Nationality: Lebanese
- Roles: president, general, politician
