Former Sec State W. Christopher Dies
The New York Times reports:
Warren M. Christopher, secretary of state in President Clinton’s first term and the chief negotiator for the 1981 release of American hostages in Iran, died Friday night in Los Angeles. He was 85 and had been ill with kidney and bladder cancer.
The Associated Press reported that a spokeswoman for O’Melveny & Myers, the law firm where Mr. Christopher was a senior partner, confirmed his death.
Methodical and self-effacing, Mr. Christopher alternated for nearly five decades between top echelons of both the federal government and legal and political life in California. Among other things, he served as administration point man with Congress in winning ratification of Panama Canal treaties, presided over normalization of diplomatic relations with China and conducted repeated negotiations involving the Middle East and the Balkans.
At home, Mr. Christopher developed a reputation as a riot expert, investigating racial unrest in Detroit and in the Watts district of Los Angeles and later heading a 1991 commission that proposed major reforms of the Los Angeles Police Department following riots prompted by the beating of a black motorist, Rodney King.
As a political operative, he headed Mr. Clinton’s 1992 search committee for a vice presidential running mate, settling on Albert Gore, and subsequently directed the transition team of the president-elect, acting as an establishment counterweight on a team dominated by Arkansans new to the national scene. Eight years later, he directed for Mr. Gore, running for president, the search resulting in the selection of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman for the second spot on the Democratic ticket.
When the election stalemated, Mr. Christopher supervised the recount of disputed votes in Florida before George W. Bush emerged the winner by decision of the Supreme Court.
Though widely admired for his even-handedness and equanimity — he was once described as every husband’s ideal for a wife’s divorce lawyer — Mr. Christopher was accused by detractors of lacking passionate, big-picture diplomatic vision. Even friends and associates, to whom he was known as Chris or sometimes as “the Cardinal,” said they could not discern a guiding geopolitical philosophy, regarding him more a consummate tactician than a conceptualizer.
“If we were in a meeting on a crisis,” said a one-time State Department official who worked with him, “no one would turn to Chris and say, ‘You put together the strategy memo.’ But everyone would want him to read it because he’d be very good at implementing it,” The Times reported when he was named secretary of state.
Mr. Christopher appeared not to disagree. “My task had been to serve as steward, not proprietor, of an extraordinary public trust,” he wrote in “Chances of a Lifetime: A Memoir,” published in 2001.
Click here to read more.
