Vance: Man on the Move

In the age of instantaneous communication via space satellite, the art of diplomacy is still practiced, as it was in the days of Talleyrand or Machiavelli, face to face, man to man. That is why Cyrus Roberts Vance, 61, the cool, gray professional who serves as the U.S.'s 56th Secretary of State, last week found himself tossing and twisting on a blue and green sofa bed some 35,000 ft. over the Sahara desert. He was on the move once again, in a white and blue Air Force Boeing 707 outfitted like a flying foreign ministry, with its own cryptographic machines and its own ice cubes.

Vance was on his way, through turbulent skies, to Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, then to South Africa, then Rhodesia, then London, then Moscow. The twelve-day odyssey will add some 20,000 miles to the 160,000 that the Secretary has logged since he became the nation's chief diplomat 15 months ago--quite a bit of traveling (to 28 countries) for a man who once vowed to stay close to his office. But the problems that the U.S. now confronts in its relations with Africa, and with the Soviet Union, demand every bit of skill, intelligence, dedication and finesse that Cy Vance can bring to them.

It is possible, actually, that Vance left the nation's most treacherous foreign affairs crisis behind him in Washington, where the Senate was scheduled to vote this week on the treaty transferring the Panama Canal to Panama by the year 2000. The prospective vote was so close--a related treaty passed last month by only one vote more than the required two-thirds--that a handful of borderline Senators suddenly acquired an extraordinary power to demand their own revisions in the treaty. A defeat in the Senate would be a stunning blow to U.S. prestige throughout Latin America; a hedged Senate vote that might provoke the already affronted Panamanians into rejecting the treaty on their own would be hardly less harmful.

Either result would be a personally damaging defeat for President Carter, already beset by worsening inflation and spreading doubts about his ability to govern effectively. Sharply aware of those doubts, Carter decided on a trip of his own last weekend--to Camp David for a summit session with his key advisers on ways to rechart the course of his Administration.

To Cy Vance, however, fell the responsibility for two more distant diplomatic problems that also are entering a critical stage.

AFRICA. It is Vance's goal to arrange a truce conference among all participants in the Rhodesian guerrilla fighting before it degenerates into an international war, with possible Soviet-Cuban intervention on the model of Angola and Ethiopia. The problem is complex. Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith has responded to black nationalist demands with what he calls an internal settlement, drawing moderate black leaders into his government and giving them shared power with the whites during a transition period. Smith and his supporters argue that they have granted the basic principle of eventual black rule. This "internal settlement," however, excludes the Patriotic Front guerrilla fighters based in neighboring Zambia and Mozambique and led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, respectively. With the Patriotic Front already receiving Soviet supplies, U.S. officials fear that the war cannot be ended without a political agreement among all factions, and that growing Soviet-Cuban support of the guerrillas could prove disastrous. As of last week, the guerrilla leaders had not agreed to a meeting of involved parties, and Smith and his internal-settlement co-leaders were refusing, apparently in the belief that the Patriotic Front would come in only on terms that guaranteed its own dominance of Rhodesia. Vance, not optimistic, told reporters he was determined to "go the last mile."

RUSSIA. The increasing Soviet involvement in Africa was high on Vance's agenda in two days of scheduled talks with the Soviets' veteran Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko. Of even greater significance was Vance's determination to try to reassert the value of detente and edge the long-stalled SALT conference a bit closer toward agreement. By now, six months after SALT I expired, both sides have agreed to a reduction of about 10% in the 2,400 strategic launchers permitted under the Vladivostok accord of 1974. There are still some highly sticky and technical details to be worked out for limiting the U.S. cruise missile and the Soviets' Backfire bomber. But if all goes well, there will be another meeting with Gromyko in New York in May, then more detailed negotiations by the technicians in Geneva and finally, just possibly, a summit conference between Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev before the end of the year.

Should all this happen--via the slow, patient maneuvering toward a high-level spectacular--it would be perfectly typical of Cy Vance's role as Secretary of State and of his relationship to Carter, a President who wants to determine and proclaim his own foreign policy. Vance, they both agreed from the start, was to be Carter's counselor and advocate, his loyal lieutenant. Vance came to office in the wake of a man who had almost redefined the position of Secretary of State--Henry Kissinger, student of Bismarck, self-styled gunslinger, secret envoy to China, Nobel prizewinner, wit and bon vivant. At his height, Kissinger personally embodied U.S. foreign policy. The wounded Nixon of 1973-74 and the somewhat innocent Ford of 1974-76 were both heavily dependent upon him. No successor was going to duplicate the Kissinger role, and Vance never wanted to. "Henry is a genius, no question about it," he once told a friend, "but I have my own strengths, my own way of doing things."

Kissinger returns Vance's praise, but not unreservedly. "I have extremely high regard for Vance," he says. "I like him enormously as a human being. He's done a very good job in conducting foreign policy. His strengths are his fairness, his sound judgment and his patience. If he has any weakness it's that he doesn't assert himself enough. There can be free debate within the Government, but there has to be one recognizable voice that speaks for American foreign policy."

That voice was supposed to be the voice of Jimmy Carter. But Carter, inexperienced and impetuous in foreign affairs, subject to conflicting advice and distracted by domestic problems, has often vacillated and improvised. The consequence has been a series of foreign policy reverses. The problems of U.S. relations with the world have proved much more stubborn than Carter expected, and the need for a steady, if unspectacular negotiator with solid experience and sound judgment has, as a result, grown increasingly important.

This does not mean that Vance, an affluent Wall Street lawyer with long service in Democratic Administrations and close ties to the once dominant Eastern foreign policy establishment, disagrees in any basic way with Carter's goals in world affairs. Indeed, he takes considerable pride in helping to shape them. Nor does it mean that he is without blame for some of the setbacks those policies have suffered.

What it does mean is that the selflessly professional Vance, after some hesitation, has gradually pushed the State Department back into its once prominent pre-Kissinger role in both planning and executing foreign policy.* This has occurred in part because while Carter is indeed more intensely interested in world affairs than his predecessor, Gerald Ford, he is certainly no more so than John Kennedy or Richard Nixon. And as Carter has rushed to confront many problems both at home and abroad, he has sometimes stumbled by not availing himself of State Department expertise. The lesson has been a painful one for both Carter and Vance, but the President seems to have learned that while he must make the final decisions, he cannot be his own Secretary of State.

To be sure, there is still a strong competitive foreign policy voice seeking the President's ear in the more aggressive and imaginative Zbigniew Brzezinski, who operates just down the hall from Carter's office as head of the National Security Council. Yet the former Columbia professor, for all his purposefulness, respects Vance's role, and while the two certainly differ on just how tough the U.S. should be toward Russia (Vance advises the milder approach), Brzezinski has made no attempt to dominate Vance the way Kissinger humbled Secretary of State William Rogers.

Brzezinski explains that his responsibility is national security, that it is up to him to perceive the threats and probes to the U.S. and figure out how to react, repel or rebuff. Vance's job, says Brzezinski, is to resolve contentious issues through negotiation. Vance sees his role as somewhat broader than that of negotiator, however. Some of his associates believe he feels a professional kinship with the modest but highly effective and creative George C. Marshall, Harry Truman's postwar Secretary. Unlike Brzezinski, Vance is both so self-effacing and self-confident that he does not resent or fear bureaucratic competition.

"He's an old Government pro," says Vice President Walter Mondale. "I don't know of any member of the Cabinet who tries harder to avoid poisonous disputes over minor matters. He doesn't indulge in backbiting, and he won't tolerate adults with graduate degrees behaving like children fighting over a toy." Yet there is steel in Vance's chronically ailing back. (A ruptured disc has bothered him ever since 1966, forcing an operation in 1967 and requiring him to wear a body cast for a time. His back has grown less troublesome, although he eases it at times by relaxing in a rocking chair in his office.) Adds Mondale: "He'll fight on principle. But he doesn't run up the flag five times a day to show who's boss." A Vance aide concurs, declaring, "He fights like a son of a bitch. But when the decision is made, he'll say, 'The battle is over,' then go out and support it."

A skilled manager willing to delegate tasks, Vance demands that ideas and policy options bubble up from middle levels of the State Department bureaucracy. He adds ideas of his own, hones the arguments and choices from the perspective of his experience in Lyndon Johnson's Pentagon (in which he served as Deputy Secretary of Defense), always emphasizing practicality and erring, if at all, on the side of caution. Says Columbia History Professor Henry Graff: "Vance is a practitioner of turtle diplomacy." Graff defines this as the art of gradual but persistent pushing toward long-term goals. He adds: "Carter could learn a lot from him--and he has."

Vance forcefully advocates his department's well-researched positions at the forums in which policy is decided. He does not hesitate to press his views on Carter in their daily telephone calls and frequent meetings when both are in Washington. He is especially vocal at the weekly Friday-morning foreign policy breakfasts attended by the President, Mondale, Brzezinski and Presidential Assistant Hamilton Jordan. It may be that Vance, who is renowned in Government for "leaving no footprints," relishes the fact that no one takes notes at the breakfasts. "It's the only federal forum I've known to be leakless," reports Mondale wryly.

The early Carter impulsiveness ran counter to advice Vance had laid down in the pre-election period. He had warned against moving too quickly on too many issues.

Yet Carter was not long in office before he began publicly scolding the Soviet Union for its harassment of political dissidents. Dispatched on a mission to Moscow by the President and told to carry out "open" diplomacy, Vance found himself uncharacteristically briefing reporters on what the new Administration was demanding of the Kremlin in the way of a SALT II agreement: the Russians should either agree to a drastic reduction in strategic weapons or defer such problems as the Soviet Backfire bomber and U.S. Cruise missile and accept a simple continuation of the modest limitations on offensive weapons tentatively set by Brezhnev and Ford at Vladivostok in 1974. Brezhnev, stung by both the human rights campaign and what sounded like an arms ultimatum, coldly rejected the proposals and in March of last year scolded a red-faced Vance in Moscow.

Vance knows now, and perhaps he should have known then, that he should have more forcefully resisted the posing of such a sharp challenge to the Soviet Union. But Vance, says one of his aides, has a tendency--both a strength and a weakness at times--to be "sometimes more like a soldier than a lawyer; he takes his orders and marches off."

Vance returned from Moscow and successfully urged Carter to moderate his human rights approach. It should by no means be abandoned, he advised, but it should be conducted less stridently, it should be applied to other countries outside Eastern Europe, and it should be pushed through private diplomatic channels whenever that approach looked more promising. Above all, it must be squared with overriding U.S. security interests. Vance persuaded Marshall Shulman, Columbia Sovietologist, to switch from a part-time consulting job at the State Department to a full-time post as the Secretary's adviser on Soviet affairs. Not coincidentally, the medium-soft-line Shulman serves as a kind of academic counterweight to the NSC's Brzezinski.

Carter appreciated these moves, and Vance's influence with him grew steadily. The President, however, still vacillates between the Vance and Brzezinski approaches to the Russians. Increasingly, Vance tends to prevail on the practical tactics to be taken in pursuing agreed-upon foreign policy goals.

The Secretary, for example, rejected advice from his department's top Africa experts that the U.S. take a compromise position between Kissinger's reluctance to pressure South Africa to abandon its apartheid policy and Carter's desire to place America openly on the side of black majority rule. Vance fully agreed with Carter. But when the President wanted to dispatch Mondale to jawbone South African Prime Minister John Vorster in what Carter called "the lion's den" in Pretoria, Vance objected. Mondale should be given the benefit of at least meeting Vorster on neutral ground, Vance argued, and the meeting was held in Vienna.

Vance has the highest regard for what he considers United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young's "excellent instincts" on Africa. But when the loquacious former Georgia Congressman accused various foreign white leaders of racism, Vance summoned Young to his office and scolded him for not tempering his language.

More recently, Vance privately displayed some uncustomary anger in the neutron bomb flap. He "went through five roofs," reports an aide, when other advisers pressured Carter to counter a partly inaccurate New York Times report that the President had decided against production of the weapon by immediately announcing that he had resolved only to postpone production. Vance argued for a week's delay in which to brief affected NATO allies. He was given only a few days, but it was time enough to get out advance word and limit the diplomatic damage.

The steadying Vance hand has probably been at its best in the Administration's policy on the Middle East--certainly the most intractable situation the U.S. is trying to influence. There, Vance's personal characteristics neatly fit the nation's role. Subdued, relatively inconspicuous, evenhanded, persistent, Vance symbolizes the U.S. as the patient mediator working to get the contending principals together. The issue has taken more of Vance's time than any other; he has visited the Middle East five times since taking office. Vance's gentle probing of the contending parties' feelings apparently helped inspire Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's "sacred mission" to Jerusalem. And although Israeli Premier Menachem Begin once lashed out publicly at Vance for saying that Sinai settlements "should not exist," the self-assured Vance, certain that he was right and was stating official U.S. policy, took no personal offense.

It is the widespread perception of Vance as a gray and bland figure that most worries his colleagues and, increasingly, Vance himself. Although he is effective in head-to-head private negotiations, he is a plodding public speaker and a poor salesman for policies that sorely need selling. Since the President too lacks a flair for inspirational rhetoric or the graceful articulation of American foreign policy concepts, the Administration has not been projecting a coherent foreign policy to the world--or to Americans, either.

"He's very suspicious of conceptualizing as a device," says one of Vance's State Department colleagues, in reference to a general complaint that Vance has no grand design for a future world order. "He thinks it tends to distort reality." Explains another associate: "He is so controlled, he is right out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. I keep wondering where he goes to do his primal scream."

Vance's natural caution has undoubtedly contributed to his durability. Unlike a number of recent Secretaries of State, he has never published a single book and has rarely written articles on foreign affairs, outside of official speeches and reports. And although he was the top deputy to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and strongly endorsed President Johnson's escalation of the U.S. troop commitment to Viet Nam, he has received remarkably little personal criticism for that role.

But if his record makes Vance a shadowy target for critics, his image is clearly etched for his professional associates in Foggy Bottom. He is their hero. He has given veteran State Department officials a revitalized feeling of usefulness, and they like his systematic, orderly approach to decisions. Says Matthew Nimetz, the Department counselor and a former law partner of Vance's: "He is the most efficient user of time I've ever known." Observes Hamilton Jordan: "He runs the State Department as well as it can be run."*

Vance's trademark tool for efficiency is his check lists, usually scrawled on yellow legal paper. He confronts almost every meeting with a list of key questions, topics, problems, all in tight logical sequence. Andy Young recalls occasions when Vance has reached him at a party. "I'll pick up the phone and Cy will say, 'Andy, just a couple of points.' And, man, there they'll come--tick, tick, tick; one, two, three." Aides tell of meetings that Vance holds with CIA Director Stansfield Turner, who has a similar habit. "The two of them will checklist you into stupefaction," says one observer.

The orderly approach to his job begins for Vance shortly after 5 on weekday mornings, when he awakens in his family's rented two-story brick colonial home in Northwest Washington. He does exercises to strengthen his back, which once afflicted him so sorely that his wife Grace had to tie his shoes. An unimposing black Ford reaches the house in time to get him to his office on the State Department's seventh-floor "mahogany row" at 6 on some mornings, 7 at the latest. By the time Vance arrives, two of his special assistants have already spent an hour poring over diplomatic cables, newspaper clippings and study papers for the day's meetings. Vance reads their selection in half an hour.

Then the pace quickens. A CIA agent gives Vance a briefing at 7:30. At 7:40, he calls in Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher, Under Secretary for Political Affairs David Newsom, Director of Policy Planning Anthony Lake, and Secretariat Director Peter Tarnoff for a ten-minute meeting to pinpoint the day's problems.

By 9 a.m. the housekeeping chores are over and the round of more substantive meetings begins. One day last week the first visitor was Ambassador to Saudi Arabia John West. Then Vance discussed arms-limitation issues with SALT Negotiator Paul Warnke; Leslie Gelb, director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs; Legal Adviser Herb Hansell, and Nimetz. Next in order came Dutch Foreign Minister Christoph van der Klaauw, CBS Correspondent Richard Hottelet, and a White House meeting on SALT between the President and Brzezinski. A 5 p.m. trip to Andrews Air Force Base to meet Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu concluded a typical business day. He manages to get home most evenings by 8.

After that kind of grind, Vance tries evade the diplomatic cocktail circuit. He and Grace--she too is an intensely private person--turn down numerous invitations, preferring to spend their evenings at home. They may go to a movie together, but rarely watch television unless a news event demands attention.

Vance works a shorter day on Saturdays, when his wife and their basset hound, Natasha, often drop by his office in time to take him to a 4 p.m. mixed-doubles tennis date with the Robert McNamaras. A good player despite his back (as a gangling youth nicknamed Spider, Vance captained the hockey team at Yale, class of '39), Vance usually wins. On Sundays the Vances occasionally attend Georgetown's St. Johns Episcopal Church. That routine has often been broken by Vance's frequent travel, a duty he dislikes, although he is beginning to sleep better aboard the department's aircraft. His demanding tasks have kept him away from his family, which includes four daughters and a son, far more than he would like. "Dad is basically shy and really a family person," says Daughter Amy. Yet he has been away so much, she says, that "Mom is what keeps the family together."

The travel and long days are one reason Vance sounds entirely serious about his determination to spend only one term as Secretary of State. Another may be that he was previously making some $200,000 a year as a senior partner at the law firm of Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett, specializing in civil litigation. And he may be ready to resume such additional former duties as a director of IBM, Pan Am, the New York Times, and as a trustee at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Vance then intends to do something quite out of character: he expects to publish his first and only book, his memoirs. His current trip may turn into a lively chapter. But whether Cyrus Vance's years as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State add up to a success story is not yet known. The answer is in the making.

*The State Department was once considered a steppingstone to the White House, and until 1947 the Secretary was second in succession to the presidency. Among notable holders of the office: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and William Jennings Bryan. *A suitable contradiction of Jordan's celebrated gaffe of 1976, when he said, "If after the Inauguration you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit. But that's not going to happen."

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