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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.