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                                                                                WORLD, Page 37

AMERICA ABROAD

The Ultimate Troubleshooter


By Strobe Talbott


    Next week several hundred blue-helmeted United Nations
troops are due to arrive in Yugoslavia. They are the vanguard
of 14,000 soldiers from 30 countries, the first U.N.
peacekeeping force ever deployed in Europe. Their mandate is to
disarm the warring militias, monitor the withdrawal of the
Serbian-dominated federal army from Croatia and protect the Serb
minority in the breakaway republic.

    The disintegration of Yugoslavia has already cost at least
6,000 lives, driven 650,000 people out of their homes and
thwarted 14 cease-fires. No. 15 has been in effect since Jan.
3. Last week Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic said, "The
conditions now exist for a peaceful and democratic solution."
That is thanks largely to four outsiders: Javier Perez de
Cuellar, the former U.N. Secretary-General, who laid the ground
for the intervention last fall; his successor, Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, who engineered the Security Council's decision
two weeks ago to dispatch the troops; Lord Carrington, the chief
envoy in the European Community's effort to broker an overall
political settlement among the pieces of the shattered Yugoslav
federation; and Cyrus Vance, who has labored for five months as
the personal envoy of the Secretary-General to negotiate a
cessation of hostilities durable enough to put the peacekeepers
in place.

    Vance, who will turn 75 this month, is the ultimate
troubleshooter: fair-minded and tenacious, self-confident yet
self-effacing, and utterly dedicated to the musty idea that a
private citizen should engage in public service. Soon after
World War II, he joined the old-line Wall Street law firm of
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. For decades, his partners have been
granting him leaves so that he can devote long, unbill able
hours to difficult tasks. His career is a monument to the
concept of pro bono publico. As compensation for his current
assignment, he has asked the U.N. for $1.

    He first distinguished himself as a mediator in 1967, when
looting and burning broke out in the ghettos of Detroit. Vance
had just resigned as Deputy Secretary of Defense because of a
ruptured disk. President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to take
command of the troops he was sending to quell the riots. Vance's
back trouble was so incapacitating that he had to take his wife
Gay with him to tie his shoelaces. His management of that
crisis became a model for leaders in other cities during those
long hot summers.

    Later L.B.J. sent him to the eastern Mediterranean to head
off a war between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus, then to Seoul
to restrain President Park Chung Hee from retaliating against
North Korea for a series of attacks against the South. In the
spring of 1968, he helped keep the lid on Washington when the
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. touched off racial
conflict.

    I covered Vance in the late '70s when he was Jimmy
Carter's Secretary of State. He was the most unquotable public
figure I had ever encountered. He still is. He is allergic to
the first person singular and prone to wooden understatement.
He has little knack for explaining what he is up to in terms of
grand theories of history, strategy or geopolitics. After a
breakthrough in the nuclear arms talks, all Vance could muster
for the press was that diplomatic progress was achieved "brick
by brick, inch by inch."

    In 1980 Vance tried to dissuade Carter from dispatching a
military task force to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran. After
the mission ended in a debacle, he resigned on principle, one
of the few American statesmen ever to do so. He left a solid
legacy. The much maligned SALT II talks regulated the
U.S.-Soviet missile rivalry until the end of the U.S.S.R. last
December. Vance also played a key part in negotiating the Camp
David agreements on the Middle East, and helped transform
Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.

    But lots of luck in getting him to say so. When I spoke to
him at his law office for this column, he first tried to talk
me out of writing it, then launched into a long encomium to his
right-hand man for Yugoslavia, Herbert Okun, an old friend and
veteran U.S. diplomat.

    Vance's secretary, Elva Murphy, who has been with him for
nearly 24 years, told me she was worried about his safety during
five trips to the Yugoslav war zone. Once he had to cross a
heavily mined no-man's-land in a minivan. When I asked him about
the episode, he looked pained, then insisted that he had never
been in real danger since his driver was skilled at spotting
the filaments that trigger the mines.

    What makes Vance a tough interview makes him a good
mediator. Because he has so little interest in getting credit,
the contending parties are more likely to trust him. He knows
virtually everyone: he worked on the Camp David accords with
Boutros-Ghali, then a senior Egyptian official, and on Rhodesia
with Carrington, who was British Foreign Secretary. Vance is on
a first-name basis with others in the Yugoslav drama, including
Serbia's Milosevic and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher. (Croatia's Franjo Tudjman prefers to be called "Mr.
President.")

    Vance's recipe for arbitration is "Master the facts of the
situation; listen exhaustively to both sides; understand their
positions; make sure they understand the principles that must
dictate a solution; and don't give up." It doesn't exactly sing,
but it works. If peace comes to the Balkans, Vance will have
earned, in addition to his fee, a Nobel Peace Prize.