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Vance works a shorter day on Saturdays, when his wife and their basset hound, Natasha, often drop by his office in time to take him to a 4 p.m. mixed-doubles tennis date with the Robert McNamaras. A good player despite his back (as a gangling youth nicknamed Spider, Vance captained the hockey team at Yale, class of '39), Vance usually wins. On Sundays the Vances occasionally attend Georgetown's St. Johns Episcopal Church. That routine has often been broken by Vance's frequent travel, a duty he dislikes, although he is beginning to sleep better aboard the department's aircraft. His demanding tasks have kept him away from his family, which includes four daughters and a son, far more than he would like. "Dad is basically shy and really a family person," says Daughter Amy. Yet he has been away so much, she says, that "Mom is what keeps the family together."
The travel and long days are one reason Vance sounds entirely serious about his determination to spend only one term as Secretary of State. Another may be that he was previously making some $200,000 a year as a senior partner at the law firm of Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett, specializing in civil litigation. And he may be ready to resume such additional former duties as a director of IBM, Pan Am, the New York Times, and as a trustee at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Vance then intends to do something quite out of character: he expects to publish his first and only book, his memoirs. His current trip may turn into a lively chapter. But whether Cyrus Vance's years as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State add up to a success story is not yet known. The answer is in the making.
*The State Department was once considered a steppingstone to the White House, and until 1947 the Secretary was second in succession to the presidency. Among notable holders of the office: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and William Jennings Bryan. *A suitable contradiction of Jordan's celebrated gaffe of 1976, when he said, "If after the Inauguration you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit. But that's not going to happen."