SPLIT PERSONALITIES

Tiny Lebanon (pop. 1,500,000) is roughly half Christian, half Moslem, but that is not the half of it. In this ancient land of differing races and religions, personal and tribal loyalties count for more than other allegiances. Among the key personalities:

President Camille Chamoun, 58, one of the world's handsomest chiefs of state, rounds out his six-year term in September and still has not rejected the idea of another. Trim, silver-haired, he took his law degree at the French Jesuit St. Joseph's University in Beirut, married a wife who is half English, half Lebanese and a Presbyterian. Chamoun himself, as tradition dictates for a Lebanese president, is a Roman Catholic of the Maronite sect. Elected as an ardent nationalist on a reform ticket, he stuck to Lebanon's customary neutral foreign policy until the Suez crisis, then plumped for the West and followed through by becoming the first Arab leader in the Middle East to pledge his country to the Eisenhower Doctrine.

Kamal Jumblatt, 39, a hereditary chief of Druse mountain tribesmen and ex-Cabinet minister, formed his own socialist party in 1949, later backed the movement that installed Chamoun in office. A somewhat intellectual and moody mountaineer who studied in Paris and took to visiting an Indian ashram after his first parting with Chamoun, he now controls the south central area of Lebanon for the opposition. Chamoun's ultimate insult, he claims, was to deny him his ancestral parliamentary seat in last year's elections. As leader of a heretical Moslem sect, he is no friend to Islamic pan-Arabism, insists: "This situation has nothing to do with Nasser. It is an internal Lebanese matter."

General Fuad Shehab, 56, patrician, arthritic, French-trained professional soldier, has headed Lebanon's 8,000-man army since 1945. A Maronite Christian, he is a collateral of the famous Emirs Mansur, Yusuf and Bashir who ruled Lebanon under the Ottoman Turks. Eighty percent of his officers, 60% of his men are Christian. Six years ago, when Chamoun's predecessor tried to stay in office during an unpopular second term, Shehab refused him the army's assistance and reluctantly served as acting president until Chamoun's election. Ostentatiously unwilling to order his troops to fight except when attacked, ever ready to parley affably with rebel leaders, and to see that they are kept well supplied with food and water, Shehab would probably be acceptable to rebel leaders as a compromise successor to Chamoun. His conduct suggests that a draft would be all right with him.

Ex-Premier Saeb Salam, 53, is a volatile, roly-poly Sunni Moslem who wants to be Premier again. Educated at the famed American University in Beirut, president of the Middle East Airlines, he was invited by Chamoun to become Premier in 1953, and like several other ex-Premiers now in the opposition, was generally accounted pro-Western. Partly from embitterment at Chamoun (he was counted out of a Parliamentary seat at last year's election too) and partly from political opportunism, he now sings Nasser's tune louder than any of the other rebels. He has about 800 troops.

Patriarch Paul Meouchi, 64, was made head of the Maronites, Lebanon's largest religious group, by Pope Pius in 1955. Genial, spade-bearded, Meouchi was pastor for 14 years in New Bedford, Mass., and in Los Angeles, and proudly recalls that as a U.S. citizen at the time, "I voted for Roosevelt in 1932." Believing that the church cannot survive if it clashes with dynamic Arab nationalism, Meouchi says: "Either we live with the Moslem Arabs in brotherhood, love and peace or else we must depart and vanish." To win back Lebanon's place as "mediator" between the Arabs and the West, says Patriarch Meouchi, President Chamoun must go.

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