Cyrus Roberts Vance (March 27, 1917January 12, 2002) was an American lawyer and diplomat who served as the 57th United States Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1980.

As Secretary of State, Vance approached foreign policy with an emphasis on negotiation over conflict and a special interest in arms reduction. In April 1980, he resigned in protest of Operation Eagle Claw, the secret mission to rescue American hostages in Iran. He was succeeded by Edmund Muskie.

Vance was the cousin (and adoptive son) of 1924 Democratic presidential nominee and lawyer John W. Davis. He was the father of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

Early life and family

Cyrus Vance was born on March 27, 1917, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He was the son of John Carl Vance II and his wife, Amy (Roberts) Vance, and had an elder brother, John Carl Vance III. Following Vance's birth, his family relocated to Bronxville, New York, so that his father could commute to New York City, where he was an insurance broker. Vance's father was also a landowner and worked for a government agency during World War I. He died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1922.

Vance's mother was Amy Roberts Vance, who had a prominent family history in Philadelphia and was active in civic affairs.

Vance graduated from Kent School in 1935 and earned a bachelor's degree in 1939 from Yale College, where he was a member of the secret Scroll and Key society and earned three varsity letters in ice hockey. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1942. In 1968, Johnson sent him to South Korea to deal with the hostage situation. Vance returned to his law practice at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in 1980, but was repeatedly called back to public service throughout the 1980s and 1990s, participating in diplomatic missions to Bosnia, Croatia, and South Africa. Vance helped negotiate the dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Vance played an integral role as the administration negotiated the Panama Canal Treaties, along with peace talks in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. He worked closely with Israeli Ministers Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman to secure the Camp David Accords in 1978. Vance insisted that the President make Paul Warnke Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, over strong opposition by Senator Henry M. Jackson. In June 1979, President Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the treaty in Vienna's Hofburg Imperial Palace, in front of the international press, but the Senate ultimately did not ratify it. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, Vance's opposition to what he had called "visceral anti-Sovietism" led to a rapid reduction of his stature. calling Brzezinski "evil". The only secretaries of State who had previously resigned in protest were Lewis Cass, who resigned in the buildup to the Civil War, and William Jennings Bryan, who resigned in the buildup to World War I.

President Carter aborted the operation after only five of the eight helicopters he had sent into the Dasht-e Kavir desert arrived in operational condition. As U.S. forces prepared to depart from the staging area, a helicopter collided with a transport plane, causing a fire that killed eight servicemen.

Later career in law and as special envoy

In 1991, he was named Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Croatia and proposed the Vance plan for solution of conflict in Croatia. Authorities of Croatia and Serbia agreed to Vance's plan, but the leaders of SAO Krajina rejected it, even though it offered Serbs quite a large degree of autonomy by the rest of the world's standards, as it did not include full independence for Krajina. He continued his work as member of Zagreb 4 group. The plan they drafted, named Z-4, was effectively superseded when Croatian forces retook the Krajina region (Operation Storm) in 1995.

In January 1993, as the United Nations Special Envoy to Bosnia, Vance and Lord David Owen, the EU representative, began negotiating a peace plan for the ending the War in Bosnia. The plan was rejected, and Vance announced his resignation as Special Envoy to the UN Secretary-General. He was replaced by Norwegian Foreign Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg.

In 1997, he was made the original honorary chair of the American Iranian Council.

Later life

Vance was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

In 1993, Vance was awarded the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award.

In 1995 he again acted as Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and signed the interim accord as witness in the negotiations between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece. Vance was a member of the Trilateral Commission. and died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, on January 12, 2002, aged 84, of pneumonia and other complications. His funeral was held at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan. His remains are interred at the Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia. His wife Grace died in New York City on March 22, 2008, at the age of 89.

Legacy

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969.

In 1980, Vance received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

He received the Freedom Medal in 1993.

The house of Vance's mother, which was known as the Stealey-Goff-Vance House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It is home to the Harrison County Historical Society.

In 1999, Vance was presented the Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy Award by the American Foreign Service Association.

In the 2012 movie Argo, he was portrayed by actor Bob Gunton.

References

Further reading

  • McLellan, David S. Cyrus Vance. Rowman & Littlefield, 1985. Scholarly biography.
  • Mulcahy, Kevin V. "The secretary of State and the national security adviser: Foreign policymaking in the Carter and Reagan administrations." Presidential Studies Quarterly 16.2 (1986): 280–299.
  • Rosati, Jerel A. "Continuity and change in the foreign policy beliefs of political leaders: Addressing the controversy over the Carter administration." Political Psychology (1988): 471–505.
  • Sexton, Mary DuBois. The wages of principle and power: Cyrus R. Vance and the making of foreign policy in the Carter administration (Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University, 2009).
  • Smith, Gaddis. Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (1986).
  • Wallis, Christopher. The Thinker, the Doer and the Decider: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance and the Bureaucratic Wars of the Carter Administration (PhD Thesis, Northumbria University 2018).

Primary sources

  • Talbott, Strobe, Endgame: The Inside Story of Salt II (New York: Harpercollins, 1979) online
  • Vance, Cyrus. Hard Choices: Four Critical Years in Managing America's Foreign Policy (1983) memoir as Secretary of State. online
  • "U.S. Foreign Policy: A Discussion with Former Secretaries of State Dean Rusk, William P. Rogers, Cyrus R. Vance, and Alexander M. Haig, Jr." International Studies Notes, Vol. 11, No. 1, Special Edition: The Secretaries of State, Fall 1984. (pp. 10–20)
  • Vance, Cyrus R. "The Human Rights Imperative". Foreign Policy 63 (1986): 3–19. .
  • Cyrus R. and Grace Sloane Vance Papers at Yale University
  • Foreign Service Journal article on his Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy Award.
  • , from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library
  • Cyrus R. Vance and Grace Sloane Vance Papers, 1957-1992, held at Yale University Library, Manuscripts & Archives
  • Arlington National Cemetery
  • : Cartes sur table, 31 March 1980 (40 minutes)