This paper examines a critical period in the history of Lebanon’s Litani river project to consider how competing public narratives affect development projects. Drawing on state, private, and institutional archives and the Lebanese press, it historicizes how narrative claims to success and failure do political work and generate consequential expectations. It explores the possibilities opened or foreclosed when rival bureaucrats, powerful financial institutions, and popular movements advance competing narratives of a development project’s “failure” or “success.” Fuad Chehab’s regime (1958-1964) promised state-led rural water and power development to diminish the tensions the 1958 civil war had exposed. The regime’s young technocrats, dubbed Chehabistes, inherited from the outgoing Chamoun government a troubled hydroelectricity scheme: the Litani project. In 1955, the World Bank funded a Litani project design that provided electricity to Beirut by diverting water from the disenfranchised rural peripheries. In 1959, a disastrous construction accident, corruption scandal, and rural labor strike rocked the project, providing the Chehabistes an opportunity to define their era against Chamoun’s failures. They put the project’s leaders on trial and promised to scrap the hydroelectric infrastructure and distribute the Litani to water-poor farming communities. But the World Bank and Électricité de France intervened to prevent any unprofitable alterations to the hydroelectric scheme. When construction completed, the energy infrastructure functioned and the responsible institutions claimed the project was a success. But opposition leaders and rural dissidents portrayed the power plants as a failed promise. They mounted a campaign to redistribute the Litani whose consequences are still felt today. Although scholars favorably portray the Chehabiste era as Lebanon’s brief experiment with technocracy, I demonstrate that, like their promised Litani reforms, much of the Chehabistes’ planned infrastructure never materialized. But their narrative project did enable them to expand the bureaucratic and security apparatus and curtail radical and rural critics while generating politically consequential expectations. The anthropologist James Ferguson famously argued against diagnosing development projects in simplistic success-failure terms, advocating instead that scholars historicize these projects’ material effects. This paper builds on this insight, but argues that we cannot subtract success and failure from our analysis because they are powerful actor’s categories that can provide meaningful grievances to popular movements or shore up a regime’s claims to legitimacy. The Litani disaster reveals the necessity to analyze success and failure as historically contingent claims with potent consequences.