Lawrence Eagleburger, head of the International Commission of Holocaust Era Claims and former US secretary of state, speaks about the World War II slaughter of six million Jews at the end of a visit by the commission to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in this June 23, 1999 file photo. Eagleburger died on June 4, 2011 at the age of 80 years old according to local media. -Reuters Photo
WASHINGTON: Lawrence S. Eagleburger, the only career US foreign service officer to rise to the position of secretary of state, died Saturday, according to two of his one-time bosses, former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. No other details were immediately available.
A straightforward diplomat whose exuberant style masked a hard-driving commitment to solving tangled foreign policy problems, Eagleburger held the top post at the State Department for five months when Baker resigned in the summer of 1992 to help Bush in an unsuccessful bid for re-election.
As Baker’s deputy, Eagleburger had taken on a variety of difficult assignments, including running the department bureaucracy. Baker often was abroad, working on Middle East problems, German reunification and the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving Eagleburger to tend to the home front.
Eagleburger told The Associated Press in 1990 that he operated ”sort of by osmosis. You get a feel how he (Baker) would react to a situation.”
He did not fit the image of the office. He was hugely overweight. He chain-smoked cigarettes, sometimes with an aspirator to ease chronic asthma. He was afflicted with a muscle disease.
Born Aug. 1, 1930, in Milwaukee, Eagleburger graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He grew up in a Republican family, once telling a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal that ”my father was somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan.”
Eagleburger remained a Republican, but of a more moderate stripe.
Over 27 years in the foreign service, he served in the Nixon administration as executive assistant to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, as President Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Yugoslavia, and as an assistant secretary of state and then undersecretary of state in the first Reagan administration.
In subsequent years, he was available to offer advice, along with other former senior officials, to Hillary Rodham Clinton as she prepared for the job of secretary of state.
Bush called Eagleburger ”one of the most capable and respected diplomats our foreign service ever produced, and I will be ever grateful for his wise, no-nonsense counsel during those four years of historic change in our world.”
In a statement, Bush said that ”during one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein began attacking Israel with Scud missiles trying cynically and cruelly to bait them into the conflict, we sent Larry to Israel to preserve our coalition. It was an inordinately complex and sensitive task, and his performance was nothing short of heroic.”
Baker said Eagleburger ”was a legend in the U.S. Foreign Service, a consummate professional who served his country expertly and with great dignity as a selfless diplomat.”
He said his former colleague was ”superb at divining trouble and heading it off. That’s why he became the first Foreign Service officer in history to rise to deputy secretary of state and later to secretary of state. Simply stated, Larry Eagleburger was as good as they come, loyal, hard-working and intelligent, a trifecta for an American diplomat.”
Eagleburger provided his support in 2008 to a drive by a new international group, Global Zero, to eliminate nuclear weapons over 25 years. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was among the star-studded group of supporters.
For five years, before joining the first Bush administration in 1989 as deputy secretary of state, Eagleburger was president of Kissinger Associates, offering companies advice on international politics and cashing in on his connections as did Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser.
The job paid handsomely. He earned more than $1 million in salary and severance payments in his final year.
After Bush’s defeat in 1992, Eagleburger took a similar job with a law firm headed by former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker.
Eagleburger’s intimate knowledge of the issues and the key players was a valuable commodity Eagleburger chaired the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, which sought to settle decades-old claims brought by victims of Nazi brutality whose right to insurance settlements had been violated during World War II.
Eagleburger served in 2006 on the Iraq Study Group, the blue-ribbon panel headed by Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton that called for a gradual troop pullback and stepped-up diplomacy to help extricate the US from Iraq.
”When I was asked to do this by Jim Baker, I was not at all sure that I was going to want to do it because I had really serious doubts as to whether bipartisanship could prevail in this sort of a session,” Eagleburger said at the time.
In 2008, he was a prominent supporter of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential candidacy. He did tell an NPR interviewer that McCain’s running-mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, wasn’t up to the task of taking over the presidency in a crisis but could become ”adequate.”
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