escape the postresignation curiosity of Washington, as he put it, Haig had taken up residence at the Greenbriar, a grand secluded resort in West Virginia, where he continued to monitor the cable traffic. Notwithstanding the gulf between Habib, Haig, and the White House over the war, Al Haig was still managing the U.S. role in dealing with the Beirut crisis. Haig had resigned, but he remained. Decisions were being taken in which I had no hand but with which I would be compelled to work as soon as I was confirmed. It made no sense for Al Haig to keep trying, between sets of tennis, to run a negotiation in war-stricken Beirut from a telephone in the West Virginia mountains.

As I talked with the president in person andfirst two weeks of July, Beirut kept breaking in. I was now getting briefed on the situation two or three times a day. Phil Habib was raging over the secure telephone that negotiations had been halted because of Israeli shelling and harassment of the Lebanese go-betweens. The cease-fire kept breaking down. As of Tuesday, July 13, the day my Senate confirmation hearings began, all fronts looked bad. The PLO was stalling and complicating the negotiations because no Arab country wanted to take them. The Israelis, seeing Habib’s effort as likely to fail, were threatening to capture Beirut and rout the Palestinians. Yet they were hesitant, realizing that house-to-house fighting in Beirut would cost the lives of many Israeli soldiers. They preferred a negotiated outcome. But the multinational force