Vance, Cyrus Roberts

▪ 2003

      American lawyer and statesman (b. March 27, 1917, Clarksburg, W.Va.—d. Jan. 12, 2002, New York, N.Y.), served as U.S. secretary of state from 1977 to 1980 during the administration of Pres. Jimmy Carter; in part to protest ill-fated plans to rescue American hostages in Iran, Vance resigned his post, becoming only the third U.S. secretary of state to have done so. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1942 and serving in the navy during World War II, Vance practiced law in New York City. In 1957 he was appointed counsel for a Senate armed services subcommittee, and three years later he was named general counsel for the Department of Defense. He became secretary of the army in 1962, and a year later Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson named him deputy secretary of defense. Though initially a supporter of Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War, Vance urged the president in 1968 to stop the bombing of North Vietnam. That year he helped prepare the first Vietnamese peace negotiations in Paris. After another stint in private law practice, he reentered public life when Carter selected him to head the State Department. Vance was an ardent advocate of détente with the Soviet Union, and he helped engineer the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978. He failed to negotiate the release of captive U.S. diplomats in Iran in 1979–80, then resigned from the cabinet after Carter ignored his opposition to plans for a rescue mission that ultimately proved futile. Vance returned once again to private practice but in the early 1990s agreed to UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar's request that he serve as a special envoy. He successfully brokered a cease-fire between Serbs and Croats in Croatia, but after his joint plan with European Union negotiator David Owen for a decentralized Bosnian federation was rejected, Vance retired.

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