'The Perfect Consensus Man'

In choosing a successor to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Presidentelect Jimmy Carter could hardly have selected anyone with a more contrasting style. Cyrus Roberts Vance is a low-key, prudent team player who made his reputation as a skilled troubleshooter for Lyndon Johnson. He is so uncomfortable with personal publicity that photographs often show him wearing a slightly rueful half-smile.

A lifelong Democrat, Vance is a product of the Eastern Establishment that regards foreign policy as its special purlieu. Son of an insurance executive (who was also a Democrat and who died when young Vance was five), he spent much of his boyhood in Clarksburg, W. Va., where he became friendly with John W. Davis, the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1924. "I used to browse in Mr. Davis' law library," Vance once recalled. "I remembered the smell of bound leather and those wonderfully big shelves of law books." Vance was sent to the Kent School in Connecticut. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Yale (one fellow law school student: Gerald Ford). His career has been true blue ever since.

Stormy Campaign. After serving as a gunnery officer in the Navy during World War II, Vance joined the prestigious New York City law firm of Simpson, Thatcher and Bartlett. His professional life changed course in 1957 when he became special counsel to the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. Vance caught the appraising eye of the chairman--L.B.J. In 1961 John F. Kennedy made him general counsel of the Department of Defense. There Secretary Robert S. McNamara soon put his talents to work in his stormy campaign to bring more efficiency to the Pentagon.

Vance was soon promoted to Secretary of the Army and in 1964 to Deputy Defense Secretary, the No. 2 job in the military--a post he had to leave in 1967 because of an excruciatingly painful slipped disc in his spine. To get better support for his back, Vance used to ride in the front seat of command cars, with the result that the aides riding in the rear got all his salutes.

While still Deputy Secretary, Vance was dispatched to dampen the 1964 anti-American crisis in the Canal Zone, thus beginning his remarkable set of peacemaking missions for Johnson. In 1965 Vance's skills as a negotiator helped settle a civil war in Santo Domingo, and in 1967 he lent a calming hand to the Army's occupation of Detroit, where violent race riots had killed 43 people.

In November 1967 Vance achieved his greatest success--helping avert a war between Greece and Turkey over the disputed island of Cyprus. In 1968 he plunged into an equally arduous but less rewarding mission: serving as Ambassador Averell Harriman's deputy during the lengthy and unsuccessful Paris negotiations to settle the Viet Nam War. Although Vance had been an early supporter of the war, he gradually began urging that the U.S. agree to an eventual withdrawal of its troops as one condition of a ceasefire. Later he criticized Richard Nixon for taking too hard a line with the North Vietnamese. In 1972 he condemned the renewed bombing of North Viet Nam.

With Republicans in office, Vance returned to his law firm (he is a partner with an estimated income of more than $100,000). But he still traveled widely (including a 1975 visit to China) and managed to direct or contribute to an impressive array of domestic and foreign policy task forces. Before he joined Carter, Vance was an adviser to the ill-fated presidential campaigns of Senator Edmund Muskie in 1970 and Sargent Shriver--an old friend--in 1976.

Vance is married to Grace Elsie ("Gay") Sloane, the great-granddaughter of the founder of W & J Sloane Inc., a leading Manhattan home-furnishings store. She heads the New York Urban League. In recent years Vance's back has improved. He can now strap on a brace and play tennis with friends or his five children, evoking images of his athletic feats at Yale, where he played varsity hockey. Coming up the ice, the lanky Vance was such a tangle of arms and legs that he earned a nickname that is still used by his intimates--Spider.

Untroubled Experts. The announcement that Vance was going to State was greeted with delight by senior officials in the department. A few of the younger men would have preferred a more independent thinker, but most foreign policy experts were untroubled. Said one: "He's the perfect consensus man.

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