Over the course of nearly four decades, Christopher served three Democratic presidents, guiding foreign policy as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, defending the Great Society as Lyndon Johnson’s deputy Attorney General, and negotiating with the Iranians for the release of America’s hostages as Jimmy Carter’s No. 2 at State. He helped Clinton pick Al Gore as his running mate in 1992, and eight years later he guided the selection of Joe Lieberman for Gore, then oversaw the 2000 recount in Florida on the Democratic ticket’s behalf.

President Barack Obama alluded to Christopher’s ability to maneuver between foreign diplomacy and domestic politics in a Saturday statement that spoke of the Californian’s “practice of law and politics in California and Washington.”

“Warren Christopher was a skillful diplomat, a steadfast public servant, and a faithful American,” Obama said.

The Cardinal, as he was sometimes called, obtained elder statesman status for Democrats relatively early: In 1981, at 55, Carter gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When a racial firestorm erupted in Los Angeles after police officers beat Rodney King in 1991, Christopher chaired the independent commission that recommended significant reforms to the police department.

Christopher’s primary legacy will be his four years as Secretary of State through Clinton’s first term. He took the office as both America and the Democratic Party struggled to find a foreign policy footing in the unipolar, post-Cold War era. Democrats had been out of power for 12 years, and the young new president had no foreign policy background. Christopher would try to tutor him, first as leader of the running mate selection process, then as head of the transition and finally as the highest-ranking member of his cabinet.

He broke the record for most miles flown by a secretary of State during one term. He witnessed the Oslo Accords in 1993, pushed NATO to admit former Soviet client states in 1994 as partners and normalized relations with Vietnam in 1995. He helped arrange for peace between Jordan and Israel,but he was unable to close a peace deal between the Syrians and Israelis. And he helped convince the Ukrainians to give up their nuclear weapons.

Christopher’s low-key demeanor was unusual for a principal. His critics saw it as meekness; his friends, who all called him Chris, saw it as key to his success.

Strobe Talbott, his deputy secretary of State, recalls how Christopher patiently dealt with the Russians in the early 1990s when they faced upheaval and internal division.

“Chris was about the most un-histrionic person I’ve ever known. He had this very effective way of just listening to them, not interrupting them, letting them vent and then saying, ‘let me see if I’ve figured out exactly what you’re saying,’” said Talbott, now president of Brookings. “Then he would reassemble their argument in a way that made it more rational and reasonable. … Rather than treating them as adversaries, he would treat them sort of as a counselor, helping them make sense of their own position.”

It all stemmed from his training as a lawyer, which also shaped his management style and work ethic.
Mike McCurry, Christopher’s spokesman at the State department before he became White House press secretary, said he’ll never forget all the Saturdays he spent at Foggy Bottom helping the secretary prepare for Sunday shows. Christopher would carefully write out detailed notes on a yellow legal pad, going through every possible question he could get.

“I don’t think anyone on the face of the plant prepared as rigorously as he did for everything, for hearings, for interviews,” said McCurry, who named his youngest child “Chris” in honor of his old boss. “Some people said, ‘he’s not the flashiest voice we could have out there,’… but the patient, methodic stuff produced results. At the end of the day, that’s really what the measure is anyhow.”

As a man of the establishment and a student of traditional power politics, Christopher focused heavily on the places he saw as most strategically important to the United States, including Russia and the Middle East. His weaknesses were illustrated both in the Clinton administration’s lackluster early response to violence in Bosnia and the failure to intervene in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. He was leery to waste limited diplomatic capital in either hot spot. The result was carnage.

After National Security Adviser Tony Lake convinced Clinton to use air power against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 1995 — something the president was initially weary of — Christopher and special envoy Richard Holbrooke jointly supervised successful U.S. negotiations at the Dayton peace summit in 1995. The accord resulted in the deployment of a 20,000-troop peacekeeping force.

William Minor Christopher was born Oct. 25, 1925 in Scranton, N.D.

He followed the arc of the Greatest Generation. Born in rural North Dakota, his bank cashier father died during the Depression and his mom raised her five children in California.

During World War II, Christopher was an ensign in the Navy Reserves and deployed to the Pacific. After coming home, he graduated from the University of Southern California in 1945 and Stanford Law School in 1949. He won a coveted Supreme Court clerkship from Justice William Douglas.

Partly because he was Norwegian and partly because he grew up in the West, Christopher wasn’t as arrogant as a lot of the other liberals attracted to government in that era. Many of them came from the Northeast and graduated from Ivy League schools. His soft-spoken, mild-mannered, attention-to-detail personality quickly earned him a reputation for collegiality.

He represented big corporate clients at the prestigious Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny & Myers, but he had a political itch that prompted him in 1958 to begin working closely with California Gov. Edmund Brown, the Democrat trounced by Ronald Reagan in 1966.

In 1967, on the strength of work he did for Brown and his success as a U.S. negotiator at a textile conference in Geneva, Christopher became deputy Attorney General under Ramsey Clark. The Justice department was busy protecting Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives at that point. Christopher’s portfolio included politically treacherous hot-button civil rights issues.

After Richard Nixon’s victory, Christopher retreated through the revolving door to his law practice in California.

Eight years later, Jimmy Carter made him deputy Secretary of State. As Cyrus Vance’s second-in-command, he helped whip votes in the Senate for the ratification of the treaty that gave the Panama Canal to the Panamanians and regularized diplomatic relations with China (which entailed controversially distancing the U.S. from Taiwan).

The most public visibility Christopher received during his first stint at the State Department came from the protracted negotiations he led with the Islamic extremists who took control of Iran during the 1979 revolution and held 52 Americans hostage in the U.S. Embassy. The Iranian crisis became a politically damaging issue for Carter in his 1980 race against Reagan, and Christopher wasn’t able to broker a deal until the administration’s final hours.

A dozen years later he returned to Foggy Bottom as secretary, but he was not perfect fit in the administration of a young president. Clinton biographer John F. Harris noted that Christopher saw himself too much as a lawyer and not enough as an advocate.

While “an eminently logical choice for the eminent position he held,” Harris wrote in his 2005 book “The Survivor,” Christopher “misunderstood in a fundamental way what this young and uncertain president needed from a foreign policy counselor.”

“What Clinton needed was someone who could quiet Clinton’s doubts through the force of certitude,” Harris wrote. “[Treasury Secretary] Lloyd Bentsen provided exactly this sort of rudder on economic policy. But Christopher did not try to do this. He was … trying to read and respond to his boss’s wishes and second-guessing in ways that amplified uncertainties rather than putting them to rest.”

McCurry, who served as White House press secretary from 1994 to 1998, said Christopher sent many private notes to the president, none of which ever leaked, and that Clinton counted on his confidential advice.

“He was the ultimate in discretion,” McCurry said. “He had that kind of relationship of trust.”
After leaving the Clinton administration and returning to California, he was pressed into service again during the 2000 recount.

He went head-to-head against another former secretary of State, James A. Baker III, who in many ways has been Christopher’s counterpart as the Republican Party’s go-to fixer. Baker, also a lawyer, had served in key political or diplomatic roles for Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Christopher’s niceness dogged him during the weeks of the recount, as critics on the left tried to scapegoat him for not being a vocal or forceful enough advocate of Gore’s case. It was, of course, a Supreme Court vote that fell 5-4 along party lines — not Christopher’s mild manners — that gave George W. Bush the presidency.

Eight years later, Baker and Christopher co-chaired the National War Powers Commission, which recommended guidelines for when a president has a responsibility to notify or seek approval from Congress to use military force.

“Regardless of whether he was an adversary or an ally, Warren Christopher always exhibited utmost integrity, sincere courtliness and a noble nature,” Baker said in a statement. “His character was special and exemplary in the dog-eat-dog world of politics.”

As Bush marched the country toward what became the quagmire in Iraq, Christopher presciently warned about the dangers of invading to topple Saddam Hussein.

“Afghanistan, which is at risk again of becoming a haven for terrorists, seems to be getting less attention than it deserves,” he wrote in a December 2002 op-ed for The New York Times. “A United States-led attack on Iraq will overshadow all other foreign-policy issues for at least a year. … Even if the optimistic predictions of quick victory prove to be accurate, we would then find ourselves absorbed with the occupation of Iraq and efforts to impose democracy on the fractious elements of that country.”

Christopher has left a lasting legacy on the Democratic foreign policy establishment. One protégé is National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, a longtime partner at Christopher’s law firm who served as his assistant secretary of State in the Clinton years.

Christopher is survived by his second wife, Marie, and four children: Lynn, Scott, Thomas and Kristen.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.