Word: neumanns
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...having a coherent Middle East policy. Haig's patience was further strained when Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger assailed Begin's lack of "moderation," a more reproachful view than that of the State Department. So when Haig learned that one of his own ambassadors, Robert Neumann in Saudi Arabia, had joined the chorus of dissent, he decided to make his own feelings very plain...
During a meeting in Washington on July 20 with Senator Charles Percy, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Neumann reportedly denounced Haig's refusal to say that the Administration's delay in shipping F-16 fighters to Israel was punishment for the Beirut raid. Word of that disloyalty reached the Secretary, and Neumann was called in for a loud dressing down. The next day, Haig met privately with President Reagan and got permission to fire the ambassador. Last week Neumann, who had been in Saudi Arabia for only two months, announced his resignation "for personal reasons...
Since taking office, Haig has mounted a crusade to make the Administration speak with one voice on foreign policy issues, an effort that has sometimes brought him into collision with Weinberger, National Security Adviser Richard Allen and occasionally people in his own department. Neumann had earlier displeased Haig by pushing for the U.S. to sell Saudi Arabia five sophisticated AWACS radar and command center planes, while Haig saw no reason to rush the deal. To make matters worse, when Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear power plant in June, Neumann complained that U.S. reaction had been excessively mild...
...Neumann had another strike against him: his close association with Richard Allen, whom Haig dislikes. A scholarly former Ambassador to Afghanistan and Morocco, Neumann was vice chairman of the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies when Allen, a founder of the center, picked him to head Reagan's transition team at the State Department. Haig considered the team inept and unduly ideological, and dismissed most of its members as soon as he took office. Neumann survived-but without ever gaining the Secretary's trust...
...ousting an Allen protégé, Haig has demonstrated that his sometimes shaky status in the Administration is on the rise again. His choice for Neumann's replacement: Ambassador to the Philippines Richard Murphy, 51, a career diplomat with pro-Arab sympathies similar to those of Neumann. Murphy, TIME has learned, was Haig's original choice for the Saudi Arabia post...