Departure of a Good Soldier

By Strobe Talbott

The chilling of Soviet-U.S. relations blighted Vance's dreams

In his handwritten letter of resignation to President Carter, Cyrus Vance declared: "I look with pride and satisfaction at the many actions and new directions which have marked our foreign policy under your leadership." Then he listed the accomplishments for which he wants to be remembered. Yet even that recitation --by which Vance meant to console both Carter and himself--has a melancholy ring. It is a list of what may well turn out to be pyrrhic victories, noble failures and unfinished business:

The Panama Canal treaties. The Administration's knockdown, drag-out, barely successful battle for Senate ratification left political scars that have still not healed.

The Camp David accord and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. That process, in which Vance played a key role, shows signs of slowing to a halt and perhaps collapsing altogether.

Normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski handled the announcement in a way that worsened Soviet-American relations and humiliated Vance by making him look as though he had been cut out of the play.

The strengthening of our military forces and our alliances. The Administration's military buildup has threatened a new arms race with the U.S.S.R. without assuaging congressional hawks, and NATO is racked by new strains, including disagreements over whether to modernize U.S. missiles in Europe.

The negotiation of the SALT II agreement. This masterpiece of modern diplomacy is as much Vance's handiwork as anyone's, but it may never become law.

The new thrust and direction given to our relations with the nations of the Third World. The U.S. seems baffled and threatened by upheaval in the Third World as never before.

There were other policies that Carter and Vance unveiled with much fanfare three years ago but that have either been revised or reversed and therefore did not bear mentioning in the letter: the human rights campaign, the curbing of conventional arms sales, nuclear nonproliferation, the pursuit of normal relations with Cuba and Viet Nam, the withdrawal of troops from Korea.

If many of his lofty goals have proved difficult to realize and many of his attainments have been overtaken by events, some of Vance's virtues seem to have been neutralized by a combination of bad luck and his own shortcomings.

He came into office with an extraordinary reputation for honesty and integrity, and he resigned last week with that reputation remarkably intact. But he was dogged by the criticism that he had been too straight, too decent, too much a Boy Scout for the job. Even some of his defenders were sorry he had not been willing to roll up his sleeves and bloody his knuckles in the bureaucratic back alleys of Washington and in the struggle with the forces of anarchy and terrorism in Iran.

Vance was determined to bring an orderly, disciplined mind and decades of experience as a troubleshooter to bear on the supervision of foreign policy. He knew his strengths as a manager and as a patient negotiator. He had enough self-confidence not to be bothered by the inevitable unflattering comparisons with his stellar predecessor, Henry Kissinger. Vance did not even try to compete with Kissinger as a spinner of grand designs or as a globe-trotting diplomatic superstar.

But he found it hard to stay at home minding the store. After years of dealing directly with Kissinger, Vance's foreign counterparts wanted to see the Secretary of State himself, not some surrogate. Vance ended up flying nearly half a million miles on 85 trips, 34 of them abroad. It was mostly physical fatigue, aggravated by a chronic bad back that led him to announce in April 1978 that he would not serve a second term even if Carter were reelected. That characteristically forthright declaration was a tactical blunder of major proportion. It instantly made him a lame duck, a man presumably looking forward to getting out, and therefore at a disadvantage with those who were trying to get around him or undercut him.

Vance came into office with a far more coherent, sensible and innovative vision of America's challenge than was usually acknowledged. His most cherished goal was for the U.S. to learn to deal with Third World nations on their own terms rather than as pawns on the strategic chessboard. He wanted to develop a foreign policy that would allow the U.S. to accommodate itself to revolutionary change rather than always finding itself among the losers.

Vance's message was not in tune with the times. The seemingly endless crisis in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rash of leftist rebellions in Central America restored to fashion the traditional balance-of-power politics; the Soviet-American shouting match of the past year has all but drowned out the North-South dialogue.

Nor was Vance himself a forceful spokesman for the Administration's foreign policy. His speaking style is notoriously wooden and his prose flat.

Concedes former SALT Negotiator Paul Warnke, a close friend and defender of Vance: "It would have helped if he'd been a better pressagent for himself, if he'd done a better job of articulating. But part of the problem was actually to his credit; he's got an aversion to geopolitical blather and high-sounding vacuity. He instinctively mistrusts any attempt to impose an overarching design on what is essentially an ad hoc process."

Peter Jay, who served as British Ambassador to Washington during the first two years of the Carter Administration, credits Vance with repairing strains that had developed in allied relations during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, when Kissinger often negotiated with Moscow over the allies' heads. Says Jay: "Cy Vance showed a very reassuring willingness to consult and to give time to issues that fell below the grand geopolitical concerns of the superpowers. He is very good at conducting hardheaded negotiations, but he is also good at settling matters out of court if possible. That is pretty close to the European approach."

Vance leaves behind considerable admiration at the State Department, but it is tinged with disappointment. On the one hand, the foreign service officers are grateful to him for devoting many hours to testifying on Capitol Hill on behalf of reforms that would improve salaries and benefits, streamline an archaic and occluded promotion system, and raise the quality and morale of ambassadors. Unlike Kissinger, Vance showed great respect for the professionalism of career diplomats and increased their role in day-to-day policymaking.

But the participatory system he introduced did not entirely mesh with his own rather remote personality. He was awkward in large meetings, uncomfortable about knocking heads, and he preferred to delegate unpleasant jobs. Even some of Vance's staunchest admirers at Foggy Bottom fault him for not going to the mat more often to protect the department against empire building by other agencies.

The far more important battle that Vance could never bring himself to wage with a vengeance was with the National Security Council and Zbig Brzezinski. In a number of conversations during the postelection transition in 1976, the two men agreed that one of their biggest problems would be to keep their staffs from each other's throats. They turned out to be right. Immediately after his Inauguration, Carter promulgated presidential Decisions 1 and 2, a plan for restructuring and strengthening the National Security Council. A group of Vance's aides bearded their boss in his office and alerted him to what they saw as Brzezinski's opening move in a power play against the State Department.

Vance told them: "I'm not going to make an issue over it. The best way to keep it from becoming a problem is not to get all excited about it." One of his aides persisted. Vance frowned and his eyes narrowed. "I don't want to hear any more of this," he said sternly. "We're not going to have that kind of squabbling."

Yet the squabbling continued for the next three years, both behind closed doors and, increasingly, in public. When a sensitive piece of information about Soviet-American relations leaked to the press, a number of top NSC officials immediately -- and falsely -- accused Vance's Soviet affairs adviser, Marshall Shulman, of being the source. When an article appeared revealing a U.S. espionage operation, a middle-level State Department officer spread the rumor --false-- that Brzezinski's deputy, David Aaron, had planted the story.

Vance repeatedly tried to declare and then enforce a truce between his troops and Brzezinski's. He tried by setting an example, almost never allowing himself to be provoked into criticism of the NSC. He ordered his deputies to play down his disagreements with Brzezinski over the most fundamental issue of all --the right way to handle the Soviets.

Vance's intimates say that he reached an all-time low of physical exhaustion and discouragement in mid-March, when he had to take the heat for the botched U.N. Security Council vote on the Israeli settlements, a foul-up for which Vance was only partly responsible. But even then he was not seriously contemplating resigning. In that sense, his disagreement with the President and Brzezinski over the ill-fated Iranian rescue operation was not the last straw. It was, all by itself, the cause of his quitting. Had he been able to support President Carter on the Iran decision, Vance would almost certainly have soldiered on, tired but proud, until Jan. 20, 1981.

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