Cyrus Vance

Cyrus Vance was born on March 27, 1917, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He was the son of John Carl Vance II and his wife, Amy (Roberts) Vance, and had an elder brother, John Carl Vance III. Following Vance's birth, his family relocated to Bronxville, New York, so that his father could commute to New York City, where he was an insurance broker. Vance's father was also a landowner and worked for a government agency during World War I. He died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1922. Vance's mother was Amy Roberts Vance, who had a prominent family history in Philadelphia and was active in civic affairs. Vance graduated from Kent School in 1935 and earned a bachelor's degree in 1939 from Yale College, where he was a member of the secret Scroll and Key society and earned three varsity letters in ice hockey. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1942. While there, his classmates included Sargent Shriver, William Scranton, Stanley Rogers Resor, and William Bundy, with all of whom he would later work. During World War II, Vance served in the United States Navy as a gunnery officer on the destroyer USS Hale (DD-642) until 1946. He saw sea action in the Battle of Tarawa, the Battle of Saipan, the Battle of Guam (1944), the Bougainville Campaign, and the Philippines Campaign (1944–1945). After the war, he worked for the Mead Corporation for a year before joining the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York City. At the age of 29, Vance married Grace Elsie "Gay" Sloane on February 15, 1947. She was a Bryn Mawr College graduate and was the daughter of the board chairman of the W. & J. Sloane furniture company in New York City. They had five children: • Elsie Nicoll Vance • Amy Sloane Vance • Grace Roberts Vance • Camilla Vance Holmes • Cyrus R. Vance Jr. ==Political career==

In 1957, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson asked Vance to leave Wall Street to work for the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, where he helped draft the National Aeronautics and Space Act, leading to the creation of NASA. In 1968, Johnson sent him to South Korea to deal with the hostage situation. Vance returned to his law practice at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in 1980, but was repeatedly called back to public service throughout the 1980s and 1990s, participating in diplomatic missions to Bosnia, Croatia, and South Africa. Vance helped negotiate the dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Vance played an integral role as the administration negotiated the Panama Canal Treaties, along with peace talks in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. He worked closely with Israeli Ministers Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman to secure the Camp David Accords in 1978. Vance insisted that the President make Paul Warnke Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, over strong opposition by Senator Henry M. Jackson. In June 1979, President Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the treaty in Vienna's Hofburg Imperial Palace, in front of the international press, but the Senate ultimately did not ratify it. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, Vance's opposition to what he had called "visceral anti-Sovietism" led to a rapid reduction of his stature. calling Brzezinski "evil". The only secretaries of State who had previously resigned in protest were Lewis Cass, who resigned in the buildup to the Civil War, and William Jennings Bryan, who resigned in the buildup to World War I. President Carter aborted the operation after only five of the eight helicopters he had sent into the Dasht-e Kavir desert arrived in operational condition. As U.S. forces prepared to depart from the staging area, a helicopter collided with a transport plane, causing a fire that killed eight servicemen. ==Later career in law and as special envoy==

In 1991, he was named Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Croatia and proposed the Vance plan for solution of conflict in Croatia. Authorities of Croatia and Serbia agreed to Vance's plan, but the leaders of SAO Krajina rejected it, even though it offered Serbs quite a large degree of autonomy by the rest of the world's standards, as it did not include full independence for Krajina. He continued his work as member of Zagreb 4 group. The plan they drafted, named Z-4, was effectively superseded when Croatian forces retook the Krajina region (Operation Storm) in 1995. In January 1993, as the United Nations Special Envoy to Bosnia, Vance and Lord David Owen, the EU representative, began negotiating a peace plan for the ending the War in Bosnia. The plan was rejected, and Vance announced his resignation as Special Envoy to the UN Secretary-General. He was replaced by Norwegian Foreign Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg. In 1997, he was made the original honorary chair of the American Iranian Council. ==Later life==

Vance was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 1993, Vance was awarded the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award. In 1995 he again acted as Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and signed the interim accord as witness in the negotiations between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece. Vance was a member of the Trilateral Commission. Vance also served on the board of directors of IBM, Pan American World Airways, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, U.S. Steel, and The New York Times, as a trustee of the Yale Corporation, as chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, and vice chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. ==Death==

Vance suffered for several years from Alzheimer's disease, and died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, on January 12, 2002, aged 84, of pneumonia and other complications. His funeral was held at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan. His remains are interred at the Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia. His wife Grace died in New York City on March 22, 2008, at the age of 89. ==Legacy==

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969. In 1980, Vance received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards. He received the Freedom Medal in 1993. The house of Vance's mother, which was known as the Stealey-Goff-Vance House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It is home to the Harrison County Historical Society. In 1999, Vance was presented the Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy Award by the American Foreign Service Association. In the 2012 movie Argo, he was portrayed by actor Bob Gunton. ==References==