Two parallel structures, one collapse
Between the April 16 ceasefire and the outbreak of Beirut’s second round on May 20, seventeen days passed. During those days, two parallel processes ran in Lebanon, each claiming to address the same crisis, and each documented in the Embassy’s cables.
The first process was official. Prime Minister Rashid Solh and President Suleiman Frangieh conducted rounds of consultation with fedayeen leaders, Phalangist leaders, and representatives of other Lebanese political groupings. On May 3, a joint GOL–PLO committee met with military and PLO representatives and announced “practical steps,” unspecified. In his public statements, Solh characterized the state of Lebanese–fedayeen relations as “excellent.”
The Embassy’s judgment of this official process, in Ambassador Godley’s own phrase, was that it had produced “no agreement on concrete or practical measures.”
The second process was private. On April 19, Shiite Imam Musa Sadr — acting independently of the state — convened a “Conference of National Reconciliation” attended by 77 notables from across Lebanon’s confessional lines. From the conference emerged a 14-member “National Committee for Public Pacification” under Sadr’s leadership. Its charge: draft a proposed new “National Charter” covering three distinct areas — public order, a new accord governing Lebanese–Palestinian relations, and socio-economic reform for Lebanon’s underprivileged populations.
Frangieh gave the initiative his blessing. Arafat, before departing for Damascus and Moscow, assured Sadr of PLO support. Phalange leader Pierre Gemayel reacted favorably. The Embassy’s April 30 assessment: “the only real efforts thus far which show promise of injecting new elements of much-needed stability into Lebanese–Palestinian relations.”
But the Embassy also predicted the initiative’s fate. The proposed Charter, Godley wrote, was “not likely to replace” the 1969 Cairo Agreement but “may take form of protocol or some other ‘add-on’ to it.” And: “there is every possibility that Imam Sadr’s ‘Charter’ — like the Cairo Agreement — may never progress beyond stage of pious expression of well-meaning but vague and unrealizable ‘principles.’” The Embassy further worried that by lumping socio-economic reform into the Charter, Sadr might be “biting off more than he, GOL and Lebanese body politic can chew.”
May 8: the cabinet breaks
The Solh cabinet convened for the first time since the April 17 ceasefire on May 8. Before the meeting ended, six Phalangist and allied ministers had submitted resignations to President Frangieh. A seventh, from the Armenian Tashnag party, signaled oral resignation intent.
The Embassy’s reading of this event, documented in cable 1975BEIRUT05913, was not that the ministers had independently reached the same conclusion. It was that Frangieh and Pierre Gemayel had orchestrated the walkout in advance. The six ministers walked out simultaneously; the political geometry was too clean to be accidental.
Solh, who had publicly assured the country as recently as May 5 that no confrontation was occurring, was contradicted within hours of the cabinet’s opening.
May 16: Solh resigns
Eight days later only four of twenty ministers remained. Solh delivered a long parliamentary statement — blaming the Phalange, endorsing leftist-Palestinian demands for systemic reform, defending his tenure — and then, formally, resigned. The Embassy’s cable 1975BEIRUT06284 is sharply critical. Solh’s “refusal to play by the rules” of Lebanese political practice — the expected norm of resigning promptly once a cabinet has functionally collapsed — had, in the Embassy’s judgment, actively worsened confessional tensions at a critical moment. Frangieh accepted the resignation with criticism. He directed Solh to continue as caretaker.
Four days later the second round of Beirut fighting would begin.
What the interregnum documents
These four cables, read together, document something the standard narrative of the Lebanese Civil War’s opening does not give much attention to: that for the five weeks after April 13, the Lebanese state was not the only structure attempting to handle the Palestinian question. A parallel, unofficial, Shiite-led body had the explicit blessing of the President, the PLO Chairman, and the Phalange leader — and was, in the U.S. Embassy’s written assessment, the only effort that showed promise.
That structure went nowhere. The cabinet collapsed under it on May 8. The prime minister fell from under it on May 16. Four days after that, the second round of Beirut fighting would make any reconciliation charter moot. Three years later the cleric who had convened the process would disappear in Libya.
The record of what was tried, and by whom, is in these four cables.