Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1992, page 59

In Memoriam

Philip Charles Habib
1920-1992

Dear Phil,

This is the letter I always intended to write, but kept putting off. I'm sorry.

Remember? It was Feb. 25, 1977, your birthday. You were in New Zealand on official business. Marjorie and I were your dinner hosts in Wellington, with many of your old friends from your first Foreign Service post 25 years earlier also present. Lots of good food and drink and a crackling wood fire helped warm a chilly night. You only sipped the wine, but did more than justice to the food. Not good for your waistline but let's face it, Phil, you hadn't been slim for years. You and your friends were happy. A pity your Marjorie couldn't have been there.

The post-World War II Foreign Service was never the exclusive WASP redoubt that journalists describe two generations later, Phil, but you were unusual. A Brooklyn-born Lebanese American educated at the University of Idaho. With your Mediterranean ebullience and personal warmth you were a refreshing contrast to the diplomatic reserve that some FSO's affected then.

Your rise in the Foreign Service was no more than normal at first, but then it picked up speed. You got better and better. You "grew," as they say. Political counselor at our embassies in Seoul and Saigon. Then deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's East Asia Bureau, negotiator in Paris or Vietnam, ambassador to South Korea, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and then under secretary for political affairs, the highest job for professional diplomats. All in quick succession.

You were senior adviser to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Then, from 1981 to 1983, President Reagan's personal representative in the Middle East. You negotiated an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire in south Lebanon that stopped the killing for 11 months, until Israel broke it by launching its 1982 aggression against Lebanon, killing 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians.

That wasn't your fault. You were a Far East expert who simply got caught up in the one issue that poisons everything else in the Middle East. But you came back and negotiated yet another cease-fire, and in a country where every American was fair game, and a presidential envoy a prime target.

I'm writing, Phil, to praise you as one brainy man. You were tough and you talked even tougher. Your dressings down were famous, but some elusive magic of your personality meant that no one ever resented what you said. Essentially, I think, it was because you were scrupulously fair, without a mean bone in your body. Perhaps your finest quality was moral courage, your readiness to tell your superiors the truth, as you saw it, even when you knew they didn't want to hear it.

Finally, I thank you. I didn't articulate anything, but you knew I was dying to leave New Zealand, to which I had been consigned in 1974 under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's "Global Assignments Policy." It was deviously designed, I shall go to my grave believing, to get out of the Middle East all of those Arabists who feared that Kissinger's quick-fix symptomatic relief measures were masking the domestic political cancer eating away at America's standing in the crucially important Middle East.

Just before boarding your plane in Wellington to return to Washington you whispered to me, "I'm going to try to help you." Two months later I learned I would be returning to my beloved Middle East as U.S. ambassador to Qatar.

I'll never know why you helped me. You owed me nothing. It had to be out of the goodness of your heart.

Sincerely,

Andy

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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