No one could ever accuse Warren Christopher, who has died at the age of 85 of cancer, of hogging the limelight. His long career in the higher reaches of American government undoubtedly 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 was roaming the world as President Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Christopher remained a generally elusive figure.
His last high-profile appearance came in 2000, when he served as Al Gore's principal lawyer in the unprecedented 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 sharply with the confident and sharply political comments of his Republican opponent, James Baker. In the end, of course, the controversial intervention of the US supreme court put George Bush into the White House. A defeated but poker-faced Christopher slipped back into the shadows from which he had briefly emerged.
His apparently deep-seated inner uncertainties were made unusually 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?" This Hamlet-like inability to resolve such uncertainties led to repeated charges that American foreign policy drifted badly under his stewardship.
President Jimmy Carter's famously abrasive national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, accused Christopher of "preferring to litigate endlessly, to shy away from the unavoidable ingredient of force in dealing with contemporary international realities". At his confirmation hearings Christopher disputed the charge. "While there is no magic formula to guide such decisions," he told the Senate foreign relations committee, "I do believe in the discreet and careful use of force in certain circumstances."
Within days of assuming office, however, he had confirmed his reputation for indecision. The break-up of Yugoslavia had brought Bosnia to the top of the international agenda. With Serbian attacks on civilians generating a deepening humanitarian crisis, Christopher came under pressure from his UN ambassador, Madeleine Albright, and from other senior staff to recommend American military intervention.
His response was to tour western Europe with a plan so hedged with nitpicking reservations that it was inevitably rejected by America's allies. Washington then attacked the Europeans for their inadequate response but, as the crisis worsened, Christopher repeatedly argued with his colleagues that American military involvement must be kept at the lowest possible level.
He responded similarly after 18 American marines were killed by rebel forces during the Somalian civil war. Having initially supported President George Bush Sr's decision to intervene in the conflict in late 1992, the Clinton White House suddenly announced that the US was no longer responsible for rebuilding Somalian society. It repudiated the security council resolutions under which Bush had acted and withdrew its troops. Though the decision was not Christopher's alone, he certainly fostered the climate in which it was taken, hardly an encouragement to anyone seeking consistency in America's foreign relations.
The key to Christopher's ever-cautious character may have lain in an early and traumatic experience. He was the fourth of five children born to a bank owner's family in Scranton, a small farming town in North Dakota. At the height of the Depression, when he was 11, his father suffered a devastating stroke after his bank collapsed. His son saw him totally disabled for two years before he died in 1939.
His death plunged the family from modest comfort into the hand-to-mouth existence allowed by the only work his mother could find, as a shop assistant. 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, after an interlude of wartime naval service, graduated with a first-class arts degree. He moved on to secure a law degree from Stanford and, as often happens with America's brightest legal graduates, spent a year serving as clerk to the supreme court's liberal maverick, Justice William Douglas. Whatever impact that year may have had, Christopher did not seem to embrace his mentor's political or social attitudes.
On returning to Los Angeles he joined a legal firm, O'Melveny & Myers, and the upper-crust California Club, both of which had been criticised on grounds of racial discrimination. He rose rapidly in his profession and, within eight years, became a partner in the firm.
In 1959, having worked strenuously on Edmund Brown's Democratic campaign for the governorship of California, Christopher's reward was to be made the new governor's special counsel. In that role he was assigned in 1965 to the McCone commission, appointed to investigate the worst riots that America had witnessed till then. They erupted in Watts, the black suburb of Los Angeles, amid widespread allegations of persistent racial discrimination and police brutality. In all, 34 people were killed and hundreds more injured. The McCone report, largely written by Christopher, offered an early example of his style. To widespread astonishment, the commission exonerated the policies of the state and city governments and the actions of the Los Angeles police. It placed the blame for the disturbances squarely at the door of "local riff-raff".
A subsequent report by the Episcopalian Bishop of San Francisco vigorously denounced the McCone findings. The churchman accused the mayor of Los Angeles and his police chief of gross negligence in dealing with racial tensions and accused the McCone commission of "prescribing aspirin where surgery is needed".
In spite of this dissent, President Lyndon Johnson selected Christopher to become his assistant attorney general, under Ramsey Clark, and in August 1967 sent him to Detroit to help cope with the rioting there. In a worrying new development, some of the rioters had been deployed as snipers in the city centre, where they attacked firemen and other emergency workers as well as black and white civilians. The death toll rose to 43, and more than 1,100 buildings were burned down.
Christopher judged the Michigan National Guard wholly inadequate for the situation and, in an uncharacteristically firm reaction, advised the president to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division to restore order. He was called in again in April 1968 to deal with the riots in Chicago which followed Martin Luther King's assassination. By co- ordinating the actions of the army, national guard and local police he managed to quieten the situation. He also drew on his experience of Chicago's notoriously tough approach to policing when he prosecuted a number of officers for their brutal treatment of anti-war demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic national convention.
During the Nixon and Ford administrations, Christopher practised law once more 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 roundly denouncing the horrors committed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. The next found him defending the administration's $15m worth of military aid supplied to Indonesia after it had invaded East Timor and killed or expelled one-fifth of the population.
On the positive side, Christopher was a prime mover in ensuring the passage through Congress of the controversial Panama Canal treaties, which finally revoked US control of the waterway. His conciliatory talents were also deployed after Carter had 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 to negotiate the release of the 52 American diplomats taken hostage in Tehran in November 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini's new Islamist regime. The talks dragged on for more than a year with little sign of progress 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 since judged that the crisis ended only because Tehran was worried about the new president's likely military response.
Back in Los Angeles, Christopher took over control of his legal partnership and steadily expanded its international presence to include a wide swath of major Japanese companies and organisations. His principal public activity in the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations was once again to investigate the Los Angeles police department.
He had been called in after dramatic amateur film of a vicious police attack on Rodney King, a black motorist stopped for speeding in 1991. After a five-month inquiry this report, unlike his previous one, sharply attacked the department's record of racism and violence and called for the resignation of its chief, Daryl Gates. It was a mark of Christopher's negotiating skill that he won over the three inquiry members nominated by the departing Gates.
Clinton, having relied heavily on Christopher to find a running mate for the 1992 election and to oversee his subsequent transition into government, made him secretary of state. Though there were several highly publicised diplomatic "triumphs" in the ensuing 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 their prime minister.
One of the few successes of Christopher's incumbency came with the Dayton accords on Bosnia – and they probably owed more to Jacques Chirac's ill temper than to the secretary of state. In the wake of the Serbian massacre of civilians in the UN safe haven at Srebrenica in July 1995, the French president commented after a visit to Washington that the post of leader of the free world was vacant. A furious Clinton leapt into frenzied military and diplomatic action. He authorised air and missile strikes on Serbian positions and sent the assistant secretary of state, Richard Holbrooke, to hammer out an agreement which eventually secured a ceasefire and a separate republic for the Serbs. The enforcement mechanism, always resisted by Christopher, was a contingent of 20,000 US troops sent to join the Nato peacekeeping force. In September 1996, Bosnia successfully held its first democratic elections.
That in effect marked the end of Christopher's years in diplomacy. As the Taliban rebels in Afghanistan captured Kabul and murdered the defeated president that same month, Christopher announced he would not stay beyond Clinton's first term. He returned to Los Angeles and the law, until summoned for the unsuccessful effort to put Gore into the White House.
He is survived by his wife Marie, their two sons and a daughter, and a daughter from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.