The World - News from May 18, 1986

U.S. Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew ended a two-year, seven-month assignment in Beirut and left the Lebanese capital. Bartholomew, 50, a career government officer who has worked in both the Defense and State departments, will be replaced temporarily by Francis T. McNamara, the embassy’s charge d’affaires. Bartholomew witnessed the decline of American influence in Lebanon following Beirut’s decision to abrogate a U.S.-backed troop withdrawal treaty with Israel. Bartholomew, from Maine, was slightly injured in a fundamentalist Muslim bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Christian East Beirut in 1984.