Lawrence Eagleburger, 1930–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

Although Lawrence Eagleburger worked for the State Department most of his life, he never acquired the polish associated with the diplomatic trade. Rumpled, overweight, and rarely without a cigarette, he was once asked at a Senate confirmation hearing if he’d ever pinched a woman’s bottom in public or in private. Replied Eagleburger, “Can I divide that into two questions?”

Born in Milwaukee, Eagleburger described his father’s politics as “somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan’s,” said the London Guardian. Eagleburger grew into a more moderate Republican. He tried diplomacy on a whim after seeing a State Department recruiting notice at the University of Wisconsin. Serbo-Croat language training launched his lifelong fascination with Yugoslavia.

Eagleburger rose at State alongside his mentor, Henry Kissinger, whom Richard Nixon named secretary of state in 1973, said The New York Times. Eagleburger directed operations at the department, “which during the Watergate period effectively ran American foreign policy for a distracted White House.” Despite Eagleburger’s links to Kissinger and the GOP, Jimmy Carter named him ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1977. He returned to Washington in 1989 and later served as secretary of state during the final months of the first Bush administration, courting controversy by denying that Serbian paramilitaries were committing atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia.