America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Next week several hundred blue-helmeted United Nations troops are due to arrive in Yugoslavia. They are the vanguard of 14,000 soldiers from 30 countries, the first U.N. peacekeeping force ever deployed in Europe. Their mandate is to disarm the warring militias, monitor the withdrawal of the Serbian-dominated federal army from Croatia and protect the Serb minority in the breakaway republic.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia has already cost at least 6,000 lives, driven 650,000 people out of their homes and thwarted 14 cease-fires. No. 15 has been in effect since Jan. 3. Last week Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic said, "The conditions now exist for a peaceful and democratic solution." That is thanks largely to four outsiders: Javier Perez de Cuellar, the former U.N. Secretary-General, who laid the ground for the intervention last fall; his successor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who engineered the Security Council's decision two weeks ago to dispatch the troops; Lord Carrington, the chief envoy in the European Community's effort to broker an overall political settlement among the pieces of the shattered Yugoslav federation; and Cyrus Vance, who has labored for five months as the personal envoy of the Secretary- General to negotiate a cessation of hostilities durable enough to put the peacekeepers in place.

Vance, who will turn 75 this month, is the ultimate troubleshooter: fair- minded and tenacious, self-confident yet self-effacing, and utterly dedicated to the musty idea that a private citizen should engage in public service. Soon after World War II, he joined the old-line Wall Street law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. For decades, his partners have been granting him leaves so that he can devote long, unbillable hours to difficult tasks. His career is a monument to the concept of pro bono publico. As compensation for his current assignment, he has asked the U.N. for $1.

He first distinguished himself as a mediator in 1967, when looting and burning broke out in the ghettos of Detroit. Vance had just resigned as Deputy Secretary of Defense because of a ruptured disk. President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to take command of the troops he was sending to quell the riots. Vance's back trouble was so incapacitating that he had to take his wife Gay with him to tie his shoelaces. His management of that crisis became a model for leaders in other cities during those long hot summers.

Later L.B.J. sent him to the eastern Mediterranean to head off a war between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus, then to Seoul to restrain President Park Chung Hee from retaliating against North Korea for a series of attacks against the South. In the spring of 1968, he helped keep the lid on Washington when the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. touched off racial conflict.

I covered Vance in the late '70s when he was Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State. He was the most unquotable public figure I had ever encountered. He still is. He is allergic to the first person singular and prone to wooden understatement. He has little knack for explaining what he is up to in terms of grand theories of history, strategy or geopolitics. After a breakthrough in the nuclear arms talks, all Vance could muster for the press was that diplomatic progress was achieved "brick by brick, inch by inch."

In 1980 Vance tried to dissuade Carter from dispatching a military task force to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran. After the mission ended in a debacle, he resigned on principle, one of the few American statesmen ever to do so. He left a solid legacy. The much maligned SALT II talks regulated the U.S.-Soviet missile rivalry until the end of the U.S.S.R. last December. Vance also played a key part in negotiating the Camp David agreements on the Middle East, and helped transform Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.

But lots of luck in getting him to say so. When I spoke to him at his law office for this column, he first tried to talk me out of writing it, then launched into a long encomium to his right-hand man for Yugoslavia, Herbert Okun, an old friend and veteran U.S. diplomat.

Vance's secretary, Elva Murphy, who has been with him for nearly 24 years, told me she was worried about his safety during five trips to the Yugoslav war zone. Once he had to cross a heavily mined no-man's-land in a minivan. When I asked him about the episode, he looked pained, then insisted that he had never been in real danger since his driver was skilled at spotting the filaments that trigger the mines.

What makes Vance a tough interview makes him a good mediator. Because he has so little interest in getting credit, the contending parties are more likely to trust him. He knows virtually everyone: he worked on the Camp David accords with Boutros-Ghali, then a senior Egyptian official, and on Rhodesia with Carrington, who was British Foreign Secretary. Vance is on a first-name basis with others in the Yugoslav drama, including Serbia's Milosevic and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. (Croatia's Franjo Tudjman prefers to be called "Mr. President.")

Vance's recipe for arbitration is "Master the facts of the situation; listen exhaustively to both sides; understand their positions; make sure they understand the principles that must dictate a solution; and don't give up." It doesn't exactly sing, but it works. If peace comes to the Balkans, Vance will have earned, in addition to his fee, a Nobel Peace Prize.