Cyrus Vance

Biography

Cyrus Vance was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, in 1917 and was raised largely by his mother after his father's early death; his cousin John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, became his mentor and adoptive father. He graduated from Kent School, Yale College in 1939 and Yale Law School in 1942, then served as a gunnery officer on a US Navy destroyer in the Pacific. After the war he joined the New York law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

In 1957 he went to work for the Senate Armed Services Committee and helped draft the act that created NASA. Under Kennedy and Johnson he was general counsel of the Defense Department, secretary of the Army from 1962, when troops were sent to enforce the integration of the University of Mississippi, and deputy secretary of defense from 1964 to 1967. He was a troubleshooter for Johnson in Panama, Detroit, Cyprus and Korea, and in 1968 a deputy negotiator at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam.

As Jimmy Carter's secretary of state from 1977 he favoured negotiation and arms control. He worked on the Panama Canal treaties and the Camp David Accords and negotiated the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, while clashing with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In April 1980 he resigned in protest at the decision to attempt a military rescue of the hostages in Iran.

Back in private practice, he was repeatedly called on as a mediator. As UN special envoy he negotiated the 1991 Vance plan for a ceasefire in Croatia and, with Lord Owen, a peace plan for Bosnia in 1993, and in 1995 he witnessed the interim accord between Greece and Macedonia. He died in New York in 2002.