Sunday January 13 5:42 AM ET
Former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance Dies
By Maggie Fox
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cyrus Vance, a former Secretary of State who resigned over the botched 1980 attempt to save U.S. hostages in Iran, died on Saturday. He was 84.
Vance, who had Alzheimer's disease (news - web sites), was a patient at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. ``I can confirm he died today at 4:15 p.m. at the Sinai hospital,'' a spokeswoman for the hospital said.
The spokeswoman could not give any information on the cause of death or on how long Vance had been a patient.
As secretary of state for former President Jimmy Carter, Vance helped fashion the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
He sought to secure a permanent arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union, helped normalize U.S. relations with China and helped gain approval for treaties on the Panama Canal.
But in April 1980, Carter approved a military operation to rescue hostages seized the previous year at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Vance so strongly opposed the idea that he resigned -- and the rescue attempt ended in spectacular failure.
Vance was one of the few senior U.S. officials ever to step down on a point of principle. Three years ago Vance urged the United States and Iran to resume diplomatic relations.
``With the passing of Cyrus Vance, America has lost a true patriot,'' Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said in a statement issued late on Saturday.
``He was a man of principle, whose quiet contributions were often the difference between success and failure, as at the historic Camp David conference of 1979,'' Powell added.
``In Yugoslavia, in the Caucasus and in South Africa, he wielded his wisdom and principled humanity for the greater good.''
In 1991, then-U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar appointed him as negotiator in the former Yugoslavia. He was part of a team that won a cease-fire between Serbs and Croats in Croatia but resigned in 1993 after failing to end the fighting in Bosnia.
He was also De Cuellar's personal representative in South Africa in 1992 and he journeyed to warring Armenia and Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, the largely Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan where guerrilla war was worsened by the fall of the Soviet Union.
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 Department of Defense (news - web sites), where he later became secretary of the army and deputy secretary of defense, resigning in 1967.
President Lyndon Johnson sent him as a troubleshooter 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. Later the same year he used shuttle diplomacy to avert a war between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus.
In March 1968, Vance, who had been a Vietnam war hawk while at the Pentagon (news - web sites), joined other Democratic Party leaders in telling Johnson the war had to stop.
Vance was born on March 27, 1917, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. His father died when he was five and Cyrus was raised by his mother and his father's cousin, John Davis, a congressman and ambassador to Britain who was the Democratic presidential candidate against Calvin Coolidge in 1924.
He graduated from Yale in 1939, obtained his law degree there in 1942 and joined the Navy as a lieutenant.
His marriage to Gay Sloane produced four daughters and a son. |
