[Deathwatch] Cyrus Vance, Former Secretary of State, 84

[Deathwatch Central]

Saturday January 12 11:28 PM ET 

Former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance Dies
By Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cyrus Vance, who died on Saturday at the age of
84, was a rare Secretary of State, having resigned in protest over the
botched attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran.

But the man who had helped secure peace between Israel and Egypt found
a second career late in life, laboring to end fighting in former
Yugoslavia as a trouble-shooter for the United Nations (news - web
sites).

Vance, who had worked on treaties between the United States and Panama,
China and the Soviet Union, said he was finally defeated by Bosnia in
1993.

``It is probably the most difficult task that, certainly, I've ever
seen,'' he said just before resigning that year.

As Carter's secretary of state, Vance was a major architect of a
foreign policy that produced historic achievements but was widely
perceived as muddled and inconsistent.

Persistent disagreements reached a climax over the abortive hostage
rescue attempt. On April 28, 1980, Vance became only the second
secretary of state in U.S. history to quit over a clear policy issue.

Vance told Carter of his decision to resign before the attempt to free
52 U.S. embassy employees, who ended up being held for 444 days.

Three of the eight helicopters failed before they could reach Tehran,
and the mission was aborted. Eight men died.

``I knew I could not honorably remain as secretary of state when I so
strongly disagreed with a presidential decision that went against my
judgement as to what was best for the country and for the hostages,''
Vance wrote in ``Hard Choices,'' his account of the Carter years.

``Even if the mission worked perfectly, and I did not believe it would,
I would have to say afterwards that I opposed it, give my reasons for
opposing it and publicly criticize the president,'' he wrote.

However, Vance could point to several historic successes, headed by the
Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of March 1979, a lasting monument to
Vance's tireless negotiating skills as well as Carter's determination.

The effort to bring two historic foes together, first in an agreement
at the Camp David presidential retreat and then in a peace treaty,
demanded calm, patience and the will to keep ''slogging away'' -- all
qualities possessed by Vance.

But other foreign policy initiatives were deeply divisive and pitted
Vance against conservatives.

They included conclusion of treaties handing over the U.S.-built Panama
Canal to Panama, normalization of relations with China and downgrading
of U.S. ties with Taiwan and the signing of the Strategic Arms Control
Treaty with the Soviet Union. SALT-2 was seen as doomed to Senate
defeat even before Carter withdrew it from consideration.

U.N. TROUBLE-SHOOTER

Vance withdrew for a time to his Wall Street law firm but found a new
diplomatic career as U.N. trouble-shooter.

At 75 he journeyed to warring Armenia and Azerbaijan and
Nagorno-Karabakh, the largely Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan
that has been the focus of a guerrilla war worsened by the fall of the
Soviet Union.

Vance began his assignment for the United Nations late in 1991 and
negotiated a cease-fire between Serbs and Croats in Croatia that led to
the stationing of 15,000 peacekeepers to the newly independent
republic.

He lobbied unsuccessfully to prevent early recognition of Croatia
without first solving political conflicts. He predicted Bosnia would
have no choice but to follow because Serbs, angered at being cut off
from Yugoslavia, would take up arms.

Vance could not later secure peace in Bosnia and he resigned in 1993.

Vance's government career began in 1957 when he served as special
counsel to a Senate subcommittee. When John Kennedy became president in
1961 he appointed Vance general counsel to the Defense Department where
he later became secretary of the Army and deputy secretary of defense,
resigning in 1967.

President Lyndon Johnson sent him as a trouble-shooter to investigate
Canal Zone riots in Panama in 1964, to the Dominican Republic during
the 1965 civil war and to Detroit to study civil disturbances in 1967.

Vance was born on March 27, 1917, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. His
mother belonged to the Philadelphia Main Line social set and his father
was an insurance executive.

But his father died when he was five and the boy was raised by his
mother and his father's cousin, John Davis, a U.S. congressman and
ambassador to Britain who was the Democratic presidential candidate
against Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

Vance graduated from Yale in 1939 and obtained his law degree in 1942.
While captain of the university hockey team he received a back injury
that troubled him for much of his life.

In 1947, after Navy service as a lieutenant, Vance joined a New York
law firm and married Gay Sloane. They had four daughters and a son, and
several grandchildren.

He won the Medal of Freedom in 1969, was made an honorary knight by
Britain's Queen Elizabeth in 1994 and was given France's Legion of
Honor in 1993.

Vance's son was quoted as saying he suffered from Alzheimer's disease
(news - web sites) but that last battle was fought quietly. A
spokeswoman at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where he died,
declined to say how long he had been a patient there.