Lawrence Eagleburger, a Top Diplomat, Dies at 80 (Published 2011) (2024)

Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a troubleshooting diplomat and senior foreign policy adviser to presidents who served the country for more than 40 years, including 42 days as secretary of state at the close of President George Bush’s term, died on Saturday in Charlottesville, Va. He was 80.

The cause was pneumonia, according to a spokeswoman for the family, Anaïs Haase, who said he died at the University of Virginia Medical Center after having a heart attack earlier in the week. He lived in Charlottesville, on a 40-acre estate.

Mr. Eagleburger, a Republican who rose to prominence as the top aide to Henry A. Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was candid in his confidential advice and outspoken in his public comments, particularly regarding his unhappiness about the Iraq war started by President George W. Bush.

Over a Foreign Service career that began in the early 1960s, Mr. Eagleburger became known for his dry, sometimes caustic wit, rumpled suits and reliance on a cane, forced upon him by a knee injury and a muscle disorder. Chronic asthma required him to use inhalers, though he continued to smoke.

He specialized in crises, often in Europe and specifically in the Balkans, where he spent seven years over two tours of duty. In the early 1980s, when he served as the ambassador in Belgrade, he was unable to keep Yugoslavia from dissolving several years later.

During the first Bush presidency, Mr. Eagleburger was second in command at the State Department under James A. Baker III, and because of his previous experience in the Middle East as Mr. Kissinger’s aide, he was sent on a delicate mission to Israel in 1991, at the start of the Persian Gulf war, which had been mounted to eject Iraq from Kuwait.

Mr. Eagleburger’s task was to persuade the Israelis under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to stay out of the fight, even though Iraqi Scud missiles were landing in Israel. The United States was concerned then, as it would be 12 years later in the war in Iraq, that Israel not be seen as a military partner, fearing that such a perception would alienate Arab and Muslim states willing to help. His success eventually led to his appointment as secretary of state, the first Foreign Service officer to be so elevated.

“Lawrence Eagleburger devoted his life to the security of our nation and to strengthening our ties with allies and partners,” President Obama said in a statement Saturday.

Mr. Eagleburger had retired from the Foreign Service in 1984 and was earning more than a million dollars a year working for Mr. Kissinger’s consulting firm when Mr. Baker persuaded him to return to government service as deputy secretary of state in 1989.

When Mr. Baker agreed somewhat reluctantly to step down to become Mr. Bush’s political adviser in his faltering re-election campaign in August 1992, Mr. Eagleburger was named acting secretary of state and ran the department. After losing the election to Bill Clinton, Mr. Bush officially named Mr. Eagleburger to the post. He served from Dec. 8, 1992, to Jan. 19, 1993. Only one other secretary served a shorter term, Elihu B. Washburne, who took office under President Ulysses S. Grant on March 5, 1869, and left 11 days later to head the American mission to France.

Overweight and a heavy smoker, Mr. Eagleburger did not fit the State Department mold. Time magazine wrote in 1992: “The common image of a U.S. secretary of state is that of Dean Acheson, Cyrus Vance, James Baker — a suave WASP lawyer, slender and urbane, who probably rowed at Yale or Princeton. But Lawrence Eagleburger, the new acting secretary, looks like the Michelin Man with a cane.”

His demeanor disguised an uncanny diplomatic ability to manage the difficult art of diplomacy, however. And his wit was legend. Asked at a Senate confirmation hearing if he had ever in public or private pinched a woman’s behind, Mr. Eagleburger replied: “Can I divide that into two questions?”

His influence in Washington grew as the top aide to Mr. Kissinger, who was named President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser in 1969 and secretary of state in 1973. In June 1969, he collapsed in his office from overexertion and was subsequently sent to NATO as head of the political section. He returned, though, in 1973 as Mr. Kissinger’s executive assistant. In that job, he was essentially responsible for running the State Department, which during the Watergate period effectively ran America’s foreign policy for a distracted White House.

Even though Mr. Eagleburger became known as “Kissinger’s man,” he was one of the few officials who had no fear of disagreeing with Mr. Kissinger. And he was able to win support throughout the bureaucracy.

Mr. Kissinger so trusted Mr. Eagleburger that he asked him to become involved in secret diplomacy with the Cubans when an abortive effort was made to see if relations could be established.

Despite Mr. Eagleburger’s close identification with the Republican Party and with Mr. Kissinger, President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, picked him to be the ambassador in Belgrade, a place he had relished since his days as an economics officer in the American Embassy from 1962 to 1965.

During that earlier period, Mr. Eagleburger became known as “Lawrence of Macedonia” to Yugoslavs because of his almost single-handed effort to marshal American aid to set up a full-scale United States Army field hospital in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, which had suffered a severe earthquake in 1963.

Josip Broz Tito, the wartime resistance fighter who led Yugoslavia as an independent communist state from the end of World War II, had died in 1980, and so Mr. Eagleburger faced a complex time as ambassador. Newsweek quoted a State Department official as saying in 1981, “We could not have been better represented in Yugoslavia during the tense period after Tito’s death.”

In Mr. Eagleburger’s tour as ambassador, the problems that later split Yugoslavia into separate states, leading to a long conflict in Bosnia and a NATO intervention in Kosovo, were just beginning to cause concern.

Mr. Eagleburger met several times with Slobodan Milosevic, then the president of Serbia, the largest of the Yugoslav states, to urge him to stop trying to suppress the aspirations of the large Albanian population in the Kosovo region. “You’re going to have to change your approach if you want a close relationship with the United States,” he told a reporter about his message to Mr. Milosevic. “You can’t hold Yugoslavia together by force.”

When Mr. Milosevic later tried to do precisely that, Mr. Eagleburger said, “I misjudged him.”

As his term as secretary of state was ending, he began speaking out on the conflict in Bosnia, in which Serbs were trying to crush the largely Muslim population of Bosnia.

“I spent seven years of my life in that country,” he told a reporter. “I got to know the various peoples and regions very well. I developed equal respect and admiration for all of them. I have friends in every republic. What has befallen all of the peoples of Yugoslavia is a tragedy.”

In 2003, President Bush asked him to lead the United States delegation to the funeral of Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister, who had been assassinated on March 12.

“I am scared to death that they are going to convince the president that they can do this,” he said in August 2002, “overthrow Saddam Hussein on the cheap, and we’ll find ourselves in the middle of a swamp because we didn’t plan to do it in the right way.”

Lawrence Sidney Eagleburger was born on Aug. 1, 1930, in Milwaukee. His father, Leon, was a doctor, and his mother, Helen, an elementary school teacher. When his father was called to service during World War II, the family moved to Mississippi and later to Seattle. In 1946, the Eagleburgers returned to Wisconsin and settled in Stevens Point.

His father “was somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan,” he once said, and his mother was a longtime supporter of Melvin R. Laird, then a congressman, who became secretary of defense under Nixon. Young Eagleburger was a leader of the Wisconsin Young Republicans from 1949 to 1951.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he joined the Army from 1952 to 1954, rising to a first lieutenant. He returned to Wisconsin to seek a master’s degree in political science. One day he saw a sign on a campus bulletin board for the Foreign Service examination. “I took it, passed it, took the oral exam and passed that,” he told The Washington Post in 1984. “Up until then, I had never even thought of the Foreign Service.”

After assignments to Honduras and to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, he was assigned to Serbian-Croatian language training, and that started his identification with Yugoslavia.

After his “Lawrence of Macedonia” experience, he was rotated back to Washington, where he was assigned to work as special assistant to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had been asked by President Lyndon B. Johnson to provide advice on how to respond to France’s threat to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The next year, he joined the staff of Walt W. Rostow, the head of the National Security Council, as an expert on European affairs. He then moved back to the State Department as a special assistant to Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, then the under secretary of state.

That set the stage for his collaboration with Mr. Kissinger when the two men were working on the transition team for Nixon, then the president-elect.

The stress of working day and night for Mr. Kissinger in the first months in office culminated in his collapse into unconsciousness in his White House office in June 1969. After recuperation, he was sent to Brussels and served in the Pentagon before Mr. Kissinger brought him back to the State Department when he became secretary of state in 1973.

After serving as Mr. Carter’s envoy to Yugoslavia, he returned to Washington, where the new president, Ronald Reagan, appointed him assistant secretary for European affairs under Alexander M. Haig Jr., then secretary of state. He was promoted to under secretary of state for political affairs, then the highest-ranking job for career officials.

For years he was troubled by a variety of ailments. He walked with a cane after his left knee was replaced with a titanium joint.

After resigning from government service, Mr. Eagleburger spent five years at Kissinger Associates before returning to the State Department.

As Mr. Baker’s No. 2 he handled day-to-day responsibilities for running the department. Besides his mission to Israel, he was also sent to China after the Tiananmen Square crackdown to assess relations and to Panama after the American invasion in 1989.

A brief first marriage ended in divorce in 1963. In 1966 he married Marlene Ann Heinemann, of the Heinemann Bakeries family of Milwaukee. She died last June. He had one son by his first marriage and two by his second. All three are named Lawrence. When asked by The Washington Post why all had the same given name, he replied: “It was ego. And secondly, I wanted to screw up the Social Security system.”

The sons, who use their middle names, survive him. They are Scott, of Madison, and Andrew and Jason, both of Charlottesville. Survivors also include a sister, Jean Case of Las Vegas, and three grandchildren.

In recent years, Mr. Eagleburger led the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, which sought to settle claims brought by victims of Nazi brutality.

In 2006, he served on the Iraq Study Group, the panel headed by Mr. Baker and former Representative Lee H. Hamilton, Democrat of Indiana, that called for a gradual troop reduction and increased diplomacy to extricate the United States from Iraq.

In 2008, he was a strong supporter of Senator John McCain’s bid for the White House but drew wide publicity when he questioned the qualifications of Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, wondering if she would be “prepared to take the reins of the presidency” if necessary.

His death brought tributes from the Bush family, Mr. Baker and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Eagleburger occasionally, if grumpily, returned to the White House during the George W. Bush administration, usually for updates on the Iraq war.

Minutes before going into one such session, he ran into a reporter on the driveway just outside the West Wing. They chatted for a while about the administration’s national security policies while Mr. Eagleburger lit a cigarette.

“They won’t let you smoke down in the Sit Room anymore,” he explained, clear annoyance in his voice as he took a last drag.

“Well,” he said, “I better go see if they finally figured out the damn war.” He tossed his cigarette, still smoldering, into the White House bushes and, cane in hand, marched inside.