Dan's Papers - June 26, 2009 - Ambassador Heyward Isham, 82

Ambassador Heyward Isham died in Southampton on June 18. The cause of death was cardiac arrest.

Born in New York City on November 4, 1926, Ambassador Isham attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. He obtained a B.A. in International Relations from Yale in 1947 and later studied at Columbia's Russian Institute. He continued his Russian language studies at the U.S. Army Russian Institute in Garmisch, Germany. He began his Foreign Service career at the U.S. Mission in Berlin from 1950-1954. After that he was Chief of the Consular Section and Political Office at the US Embassy in Moscow ('55-'57). As Chief, he located people with a claim to U.S. citizenship, a number of whom had been detained by Soviet authorities. He negotiated their release. In '62 he was posted to the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong as a Political Officer. There he, among a few other analysts, recognized the emerging Sino-Soviet rift.

With the escalation of the war in Vietnam, Isham served in a number of posts. From 1966-1969 he was Deputy Director of the "Vietnam Working Group" at the Department of State. He subsequently worked as Deputy-Chief, then Chief, of the U.S. Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam, where he conducted direct negotiations with the N. Vietnamese. Those negotiations resulted in the Paris Peace Accords, which were signed on January 27, 1973 and ended "the war" in Vietnam. As Chief of the U. S. delegation to the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam, a position he held from 1971-1973, Isham lived in Paris with his family. From 1974-1977 he was U. S. Ambassador to Haiti, and from 1977 and 1978 assistant Secretary of State and Director of the Office for Combating Terrorism.

After retiring from the Foreign Service, Isham was a senior editor at Doubleday. He published the memoirs of Andrei Gromyko and edited books translated from Russian. In 1990, he became V. P. and Ambassador-in-Residence at the Institute for East-West Studies in New York City.

Heyward Isham is survived by his artist wife Sheila Eaton Isham, two sons, Ralph and Christopher, and nine grandchildren. His talented poet daughter, Sandra Isham Vreeland, predeceased him in 1996.

I had the good fortune to meet the Ishams in the fall of 1971, just after the death of my stepfather, Emanuel Benson. My mother Elaine and I traveled to Europe, and in Paris we visited the Ishams - friends of my mother's. Isham was soft-spoken, clearly diplomatic, warm, and wonderful, even to a 16-year-old girl.

Despite his amazing career and accomplishments, I have known Heyward Isham to have always put his wife and her career as an artist at the top of his list of priorities. He was quietly behind the scenes, pushing her into the limelight and acknowledging her talents, beauty and social grace. He was a great man and he will be missed.