In the age of instantaneous communication via space satellite, the art of diplomacy is still practiced, as it was in the days of Talleyrand or Machiavelli, face to face, man to man. That is why Cyrus Roberts Vance, 61, the cool, gray professional who serves as the U.S.'s 56th Secretary of State, last week found himself tossing and twisting on a blue and green sofa bed some 35,000 ft. over the Sahara desert. He was on the move once again, in a white and blue Air Force Boeing 707 outfitted like a flying foreign ministry, with its own cryptographic machines and its own ice cubes.
Vance was on his way, through turbulent skies, to Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, then to South Africa, then Rhodesia, then London, then Moscow. The twelve-day odyssey will add some 20,000 miles to the 160,000 that the Secretary has logged since he became the nation's chief diplomat 15 months ago—quite a bit of traveling (to 28 countries) for a man who once vowed to stay close to his office. But the problems that the U.S. now confronts in its relations with Africa, and with the Soviet Union, demand every bit of skill, intelligence, dedication and finesse that Cy Vance can bring to them.
It is possible, actually, that Vance left the nation's most treacherous foreign affairs crisis behind him in Washington, where the Senate was scheduled to vote this week on the treaty transferring the Panama Canal to Panama by the year 2000. The prospective vote was so close—a related treaty passed last month by only one vote more than the required two-thirds—that a handful of borderline Senators suddenly acquired an extraordinary power to demand their own revisions in the treaty. A defeat in the Senate would be a stunning blow to U.S. prestige throughout Latin America; a hedged Senate vote that might provoke the already affronted Panamanians into rejecting the treaty on their own would be hardly less harmful.
Either result would be a personally damaging defeat for President Carter, already beset by worsening inflation and spreading doubts about his ability to govern effectively. Sharply aware of those doubts, Carter decided on a trip of his own last weekend—to Camp David for a summit session with his key advisers on ways to rechart the course of his Administration.
To Cy Vance, however, fell the responsibility for two more distant diplomatic problems that also are entering a critical stage.