Heyward Isham; diplomat played key role in Cold War
WASHINGTON - Heyward Isham, 82, a career Foreign Service officer and a Russian scholar who held key posts during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, died June 18 at a hospital near his Long Island home. He had complications from an infection and pulmonary fibrosis.
During the Vietnam War, Mr. Isham served in the early 1970s as a leader of the US delegation to the Paris peace talks and was directly involved in negotiations with the Vietnamese. The talks led to the accords that ended direct US military involvement in Vietnam.
Over his career, Mr. Isham spent years on Vietnam, was ambassador to Haiti, and held vital posts in Moscow, Hong Kong, and Washington, where he was assistant secretary of state and director of the office for combating terrorism.
In an incident apparently illustrative of his character, Mr. Isham refused to submit to two robbers who accosted him as he left his car in Washington in 1977. He pulled a curtain rod from the parked car, struck one of the robbers, and pursued both when they fled. The chase ended when he was shot in the leg.
“He’s got a lot of courage,’’ his wife, Sheila, said then.
He was born in New York, attended Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, and received a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Yale in 1947.
After study at Columbia University’s Russian Institute and at an Army school in Germany, he began his Foreign Service career in 1950 with a post at the US mission in Berlin, then a Cold War crossroads.
As chief of the consular section at the US Embassy in Moscow in the mid-1950s, he worked out the release of people who had been detained by the Soviets despite claims to US citizenship.
In 1962, he was sent to Hong Kong, a monitoring post for observing developments in China, with which the United States had no diplomatic relations. As a political officer in the US consulate, Mr. Isham was viewed as one of the first to recognize the emerging Chinese-Soviet split.
