Larry Eagleburger Dies at 80

Bernard Gwertzman writes a long and sympathetic bio of Larry Eagleburger, the only FSO ever to receive the baton of Secretary of State. For myself as an FSO native of Milwaukee like Eagleburger [and the distinguished dean of US diplomats in postwar America, George Kennan, whom I met in Princeton a few years before his death], the long career of Eagleburger has a special meaning.

My first tour in Vietnam was with a fellow named Dick Aherne, who was already a protege of Larry Eagleburger, and Dick fixed up my assignment to Lyon, France, with Peter Tarnoff, who in turn was part of the Lake, Holbrooke, Wisner crowd who served in Saigon a few years before my service in S. Vietnam. Strangely enough, it turned out that Marlene Heinemann's parents, his second wife from Milwaukee who was a secretary in the State Department, had been on my Milwaukee Sentinel paper route a few blocks from my home in suburban Wauwatosa! When I was Political Military Officer in Saudi Arabia, I often had long conversations over drinks with Ambassador Bill Porter, who served with Eagleburger in the Department when Porter was Undersecretary for Political Affairs under Kissinger, and Bill mentioned Larry from time to time. So I followed his career long before he became somewhat of a household name. I never had a chance to cross paths with him, however.

I happened to get to know Bernie Gwertzman and David Sanger, two reporters who wrote this excellent NYT obit, during my sojourn in DC and serendipitously reintroduced Bernie to Elizabeth Stein Farquhar, a friend of my wife's who had dated Bernie when he was a student at Harvard and she a student at Radcliffe back in the late '50's. I was at the dinner party when the two got back together again to remininisce, late in the eighties in DC. Sanger consulted me for some odds and ends on a book he wrote in the late eighties on the Arab/Israeli problem.

I often wish I'd had a chance to meet Eagleburger, but somehow the stars never were in the right alignment. His curmudgeonly persona one saw on TV was more of the Milwaukee-type Spencer Tracy [who went to my high school] than, say, the sophisticated George Keller, who allowed me to sit on his patio in Princeton drinking cocktails in a tete-a-tete in the late seventies while he expatiated on his career. When I asked Kennan about bein an FSO [I'd already told him his Memoirs had inspired me to join the Foreign Service], he responded that one had to treat the Dept. "like an old whore," maybe not the most felicitous phrase, but one indicating the lofty regions he had attained back in the day when he was Ambassador to Russia [and Stalin personally ordered him to be declared persona non grata], necessitating his recall to DC in 1950.

I did get a chance to meet the redoubtable Kissinger himself, in Saudi Arabia, where I was his case officer in Saudi Arabia during one of his many shuttle stops in the mid-seventies, but the guy was a rude POS, IMHO. Wouldn't even shake my outstretched hand?!

To end this orgy of name-dropping, another person on my Milwaukee Sentinel route was Red Schoendienst, now in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, who has his own statue outside Busch Stadium in St. Louis, where he starred for the Cardinals for a long time before being traded to the Milwaukee Braves. Hammering Hank Aaron and, later, Kareem Abdul Jabar both lived just across the Menominee River just a few blocks from the Mangan residence.

Sadly, Schoendienst was a pre-pay, so I never got to meet him at his home digs.