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                                                                                PROFILE, Page 56

Comfortable In His Own Ample Skin


The perfect deputy, Lawrence Eagleburger is now on top, for
the moment

By J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON


    The common image of a U.S. Secretary of State is that of
Dean Acheson, Cyrus Vance, James Baker -- a suave Wasp lawyer,
slender and urbane, who probably rowed at Yale or Princeton. But
Lawrence Eagleburger, the new Acting Secretary, looks like the
Michelin man with a cane. He once had an exercise bike fitted
with a special rack so he could read diplomatic cables; it stood
unused so long it was finally removed, and now he's ballooned
to more than 250 lbs. He's had a knee-replacement operation,
takes steroids for a muscle disorder, and has been spotted with
a cigarette in one hand and an asthma inhaler in the other.
"One," he bellows into the telephone, then hangs up. His
secretary appears bearing a single cigarette from a pack
imprisoned in her desk, which he lights with a silver lighter.
He claims to have cut from three packs a day to less than half
a pack; in the next 90 minutes he smokes three.

    But as he takes on the biggest job of his 30 years as a
career diplomat, Eagleburger, 62, somehow makes all this work
to his advantage. "There is charisma in that funny penguin of
a figure," says a veteran congressional aide. His devil-may-care
attitude about how he treats his body extends to how he handles
his public image, and at least in that regard the result has
been astonishingly healthy.

    That image is built with simple materials: intelligence
and a bluff honesty. "I do not dissemble well," he says, a
startling admission for a diplomat. He not only gets away with
being direct, but people like him for it. "Many people in the
State Department are quietly subversive about policies they
don't like but obsequious to their elders and betters," says a
longtime colleague. But Eagleburger has swum against that
stream: never talking out of school, but glad to raise his voice
within it.

    Though he's careful enough to avoid saying things that
could cause a diplomatic embarrassment, he can be winningly
unvarnished. When sent to Capitol Hill to explain Washington's
spineless policy toward Iraq prior to its invasion of Kuwait,
he admitted, "I'm here to defend the policy. It didn't work.
When you've got a policy that didn't work, it's not easy to
defend." Says Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz: "He always
conveys the impression that he's speaking bluntly and candidly,
and that goes a long way."

    The result is a lack of pretension rare in Washington, and
especially so at Foggy Bottom. Eagleburger avoids using his
formal office, with its chandelier, red damask couch and heroic
picture of George Washington, because he thinks it looks too
much "like a Moroccan house of ill repute." Says his wife
Marlene: "He presents the same face to people in Washington that
he does to our sons' friends. He's just comfortable in his own
skin, and people respond to it.''

    A sense of humor has helped him as well. Each of his sons
is named Lawrence, which he attributes to a combination of ego
and a desire "to screw up the Social Security system." (Scott,
Drew and Jason go by their middle names.) During his
confirmation hearings, one Congressman was disgruntled about the
way John Tower, the nominee for Defense Secretary, was being
rejected partly because of charges of womanizing. Have you,
asked the Congressman, "ever in public or private pinched a
woman's behind?" Replied Eagleburger: "Can I divide that into
two questions?" Asked by reporters how he planned to run the
State Department now that Baker is gone, he deadpans, "Badly."

    Every laugh he gets is goodwill in the bank. For a man who
has climbed up the foreign service's slippery pole to the
highest rank ever achieved by a career diplomat, who spent five
years enforcing Henry Kissinger's notoriously impossible demands
on the bureaucracy, who is regularly trotted out to testify on
the stickiest topics, Eagleburger has remarkably few enemies in
Washington.

    His comfortable attitude stems in part from the fact that
he is only the Acting Secretary -- plunged into the job when
Baker left to salvage George Bush's White House and campaign --
and he is not expecting to get the job permanently. If Bush
wins in November, Baker will probably come back to the State
Department, and Eagleburger will gracefully and gratefully
retire to his Virginia farm, where he likes to mow 10 acres of
meadow and listen to opera. The same awaits if Bush loses. But
there is always the possibility of becoming a semipermanent temp
if Bush wins and decides to keep Baker as a domestic-policy czar
for a while.

    As Deputy Secretary for the past three years, Eagleburger
has been able to satisfy Baker, a hard-driving pragmatist who
can sniff divided loyalties at a hundred paces. He was a
consummate No. 2, steadfast and discreet, who eagerly handled
whatever Baker preferred to ignore or avoid. He oversaw messy
subjects like aid to Eastern Europe, ran the bureaucracy,
appeared before Congress when Baker sensed trouble, all without
complaint. Though he never became part of Baker's innermost
circle, he earned his boss's professional respect. "Eagleburger
is the best deputy I ever had," Baker recently told some White
House officials.

    During the Gulf War, Eagleburger hustled to Israel and
persuaded the Shamir government not to retaliate against
Saddam's Scuds, a key element in holding the coalition together.
His let's-have-a-drink-after-work relationship with key
legislators was an important asset. "He is one of the few
foreign-service officers who can enter into the spirit of the
heavyweights on the Hill," says an old colleague. But he doesn't
slap backs. "When Baker calls, it's for politics," says a Hill
aide. "When Larry calls, it's for substance. That's his star
quality up here: because people think of him as intellectual
titanium, he makes members feel glad to be a member of his
club, not that he's part of theirs."

    Eagleburger was born into a Republican family in northern
Wisconsin, spent two years in the Army after college, and
considered going into Wisconsin politics until he gave up that
notion because he was repelled by powerful Senator Joseph
McCarthy. Instead, he decided to take the foreign-service exam
when an advertising poster caught his eye. His wife calls him
a "liberal Republican"; given the company he keeps, he prefers
"moderate Republican."

    His big break came in 1969 when he was tapped to be the
personal aide to Kissinger, Richard Nixon's new National
Security Adviser. Kissinger's demanding work habits took a toll:
Eagleburger had a physical breakdown one day while Kissinger was
throwing a tantrum, and he ended up departing for calmer duties
in Brussels as a diplomat assigned to NATO. But he returned when
Kissinger became Secretary of State in 1973 under Nixon and then
Gerald Ford. By then he had learned to handle Kissinger, and he
even gained a reputation as the only aide who could talk back
bluntly to the Secretary. During one Middle East shuttle mission
to Damascus, a muezzin's call to prayer, broadcast from a
nearby mosque, awakened Kissinger at 4:30 a.m. shortly after he
had completed a marathon meeting with Syrian President Hafez
Assad. Bursting from his bedroom, he screamed that the muezzin
had to be silenced. Eagleburger, says Kissinger, made "the
officious moves of a foreign-service officer confronted by a
demented Secretary of State"; the impolitic demand went
undelivered.

    In personality, Eagleburger was Kissinger's opposite:
straightforward rather than clever, stolid rather than
brilliant, a believer in channels rather than back channels. But
philosophically, Eagleburger shared Kissinger's adherence to a
"realist" rather than "idealist" approach to international
relations. He considers stability and balances of power, rather
than moral crusades, to be the best way to pursue America's true
national interests. Like Bush, he was worried that pursuing a
total victory over Iraq during the Persian Gulf War might create
a destabilizing power vacuum in the region, and he was one of
the envoys Bush sent to China after the Tiananmen Square
massacre to help restore relations with the rulers in Beijing.

    For five years before joining the Bush Administration,
Eagleburger was president of Kissinger Associates, which
provides firms with advice on international politics. It paid
handsomely: in his final year he earned $1.1 million in salary
and severance payments. But it also made him part of the old
though not particularly venerable world of Washington
consultants who cash in on their connections as well as their
expertise as they revolve in and out of government.

    While at Kissinger Associates, Eagleburger served on the
board of the Yugoslav-owned LBS Bank, which was convicted of
money laundering in 1988. About one-quarter of its business came
from Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, whose Atlanta branch was
instrumental in diverting U.S. agricultural loans to arms
purchases by Saddam Hussein. Eagleburger has never been accused
of any wrongdoing or even any knowledge of the banks' illegal
practices, but Congressman Henry Gonzalez continues to pursue
the theory that high officials in the Bush Administration have
tried to cover up these activities. In addition, critics charge
that Eagleburger's former financial connections to Yugoslav
businesses made it awkward for him to become involved in U.S.
policy toward the Balkans.

    The breakup of Yugoslavia has been painful for
Eagleburger, and a test of his philosophy. Seven of his 11 years
abroad as a diplomat, four of them as ambassador under Jimmy
Carter, were spent in Yugoslavia, where he earned the nickname
"Larry of Macedonia." Soon after becoming Deputy Secretary in
the Bush Administration in 1989, he warned that the end of the
cold war could unleash ethnic hatreds in Europe, especially in
Yugoslavia. He was criticized for having cold war nostalgia, but
his fears have been justified. The U.S. mostly kept out of the
mounting Yugoslav crisis until Baker visited Belgrade in June
1991, when the country was on the brink of dissolution. Baker
and Eagleburger agreed that the federal government should be
bolstered as the only force able to manage an orderly transition
into freer statelets. But that government, which became a hollow
creature of Serbian expansion, did nothing to stop the country's
breakup.

    In London last week for a conference on Yugoslavia,
Eagleburger called for tighter sanctions against Serbia, more
international monitoring of Serbia's borders and intensified
relief efforts. He also pushed for the creation of a permanent
negotiating mechanism in Geneva to slog through the messy
details standing in the way of a Yugoslav settlement. All these
things came to pass, and Eagleburger was pleased by the strong
international unity demonstrated. But absent the use of U.S.
military force, which he fears could lead to another Vietnam
quagmire, none of these steps will guarantee a formula for
changing Serb behavior soon, and he knows it. "To a degree I
think we're in the midst of a Greek tragedy," he says, "which
had a beginning, and somewhere will have an end, and a lot of
people are going to die in the meantime. And it's awful."

    That may be cold realism. But there are times when
realism, a clear-sighted understanding of how things are, shades
into fatalism, an assumption that they must stay that way.
Eagleburger says he learned from Baker's Middle East diplomacy
that persistence in a hopeless task can pay off. But the most
interesting paradox about Eagleburger is that a man who is by
nature an activist -- a lifelong problem solver who fills up a
room with his presence and energy -- also insists that "there
are sometimes problems," such as Yugoslavia, "for which there
is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for
which there is no solution."

    His wife notes that "Lawrence is not a worrier. If he
thinks he can do something about a problem, he does. If he
doesn't, he can compartmentalize it and come back to it." As she
admits, ``This isn't a completely terrific trait, but it mostly
stands him in good stead." At the very least, it makes him
suited for what he seems destined to be: a caretaker who will
manage foreign policy for a few more months, allow Baker to
supply any necessary strategic and political vision from his
perch at the White House, and then step aside when the time
comes for him to do so.