WARREN CHRISTOPHER: NO ONE could ever accuse Warren Christopher, who has died aged 85, of hogging the limelight. His long career in the higher reaches of US government impressed his colleagues, who were often stunned by his rigorous attention to detail and his infinite ability to search out compromise. But even when he roamed the world as Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Christopher remained an elusive figure.
His last high-profile appearance came in 2000, when he served as Al Gore’s principal lawyer in the court battles to determine that year’s presidential election result.
Even then, he failed to make a significant public impact. His dry rehearsal of legal niceties to a baffled television audience contrasted with the confident comments of his Republican opponent James Baker. The US supreme court’s intervention put George Bush into the White House. A defeated but poker-faced Christopher slipped back into the shadows.
His apparent inner uncertainties were made clear in a telling interview he gave shortly after being sworn in as secretary of state in 1993. “This is a heavy responsibility,” he mused “and I worry about acquitting it well. I can’t help but think am I able to evaluate all the responsibilities?”
Within days of assuming office, he confirmed his reputation for indecision. The break-up of Yugoslavia brought Bosnia to the top of the international agenda. With Serbian attacks on civilians generating a humanitarian crisis, Christopher came under pressure from his UN ambassador Madeleine Albright to recommend US military intervention.
His response was to tour western Europe with a plan so hedged with nitpicking reservations that it was rejected by US allies. Washington then attacked the Europeans for their inadequate response but, as the crisis worsened, Christopher repeatedly argued with his colleagues that US military involvement must be kept at the lowest possible level.
The key to Christopher’s cautious character may have lain in an early, traumatic experience. He was the fourth of five children born to a bank owner’s family in Scranton, North Dakota.
At the height of the Depression, when he was 11, his father suffered a devastating stroke after his bank collapsed. His father’s death in 1939 plunged the family from modest comfort into a hand-to-mouth existence. In search of something better, the family moved to southern California, then undergoing an industrial revival as war in Europe stimulated its arms industry
Christopher won a scholarship to the University of Southern California and graduated with a first-class arts degree. He secured a law degree from Stanford and spent a year as clerk to the supreme court’s liberal maverick, Justice William Douglas.
In Los Angeles, he rose rapidly in his profession and, within eight years became a partner in the legal firm O’Melveny Myers. In 1959, he was made special counsel to Democratic governor Edmund Brown. President Lyndon Johnson later selected him as assistant attorney general.
During the Nixon and Ford administrations, he practised law until Carter selected him in 1976 to become deputy secretary of state to Cyrus Vance. It was an unhappy period, not least because of the uncertain leadership emanating from the White House. One moment would find Christopher denouncing the horrors committed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. The next found him defending the administration’s $15 million worth of military aid to Indonesia after it invaded East Timor and killed or expelled one-fifth of the population.
Christopher was a prime mover in ensuring the passage through Congress of the controversial Panama Canal treaties, which revoked US control of the waterway. His conciliatory talents were also deployed after Carter formally recognised mainland China.
Christopher was dispatched to assuage the Taiwanese and to devise new security and economic arrangements with them.
His most significant task during the Carter years was negotiating the release of the 52 US diplomats taken hostage in Tehran in November 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini’s new Islamist regime.
The talks dragged on for more than a year and the hostages were only released in January 1981 to coincide with Ronald Reagan’s assumption of the presidency.
Though Christopher, now out of office, was sent to greet the liberated hostages in Algiers and awarded the Medal of Freedom for his efforts, history has judged that the crisis ended because Tehran was worried about the new president’s likely military response.
In January 1993, Bill Clinton made Christopher secretary of state. Though there were several diplomatic “triumphs” in the next four years, most did not last.
The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993, with most of the spade work inherited from the Bush administration, was overtaken by Mexico’s financial crisis two years later. The triumphant White House handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat foundered on the assassination of Rabin and the Israeli voters’ choice of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister.
One of the few successes of Christopher’s incumbency came with the Dayton accords on Bosnia, which marked the end of his diplomatic work. He returned to Los Angeles and the law, until summoned to work on Gore’s unsuccessful White House bid.
His wife Marie, their two sons and a daughter, and a daughter from his first marriage survive him.
Warren Minor Christopher: born October 27th, 1925; died March 18th, 2011