Frank Wisner, seasoned diplomat and foreign policy adviser, dies at 86

Boston Globe

24-02-2025

'I could recite the names of every prime minister in the world,' he told Foreign Affairs magazine, 'while my friends could tell you the starting pitchers in the American and National Leagues.'
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Mr. Wisner became a Foreign Service officer in 1961 and came of age during the Vietnam War, joining a diplomatic circle that grew to include his friends Richard C. Holbrooke, who helped negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia, and Leslie H. Gelb, who became a journalist and chaired the Council on Foreign Affairs.
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Unlike them, Mr. Wisner was seldom in the limelight. But he made a vivid impression in world capitals: bald and barrel-chested, with a fondness for claret, hunting, and cigars. President Carter named him ambassador to Zambia in 1979, and he was tapped as top diplomat in Egypt by Ronald Reagan, in the Philippines by George H.W. Bush and in India by Bill Clinton.
For a few hours in January 1993, the day of Clinton's first inauguration, he served as acting secretary of state. The position came in between a pair of influential Washington postings, as undersecretary of state for international security affairs and undersecretary of defense for policy.
Friends who knew him in Vietnam, where he was stationed for four years at the height of the war, recalled him as 'short and straight-backed, handsome and rakish,' as journalist George Packer wrote in his 2019 book 'Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.'
'He spoke in a slightly old-fashioned diction that was only half jest, using phrases like 'in due course' and 'well in hand,'' Packer added, 'and he believed in old-fashioned concepts like having a good war, which meant seeing one's share of action.' For Mr. Wisner, who was assigned to an interagency 'pacification' program, that meant accompanying soldiers on night patrols.
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While serving as ambassador to Egypt from 1986 to 1991, Mr. Wisner sought to ease tensions in Cairo after Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, generating panic among American expats in the region. On his next assignment, to the Philippines, he worked to stabilize relations with President Corazon Aquino, although he had less success lobbying for a lease extension that would have kept the US Navy's sprawling Subic Bay military base in place.
Mr. Wisner remained an influential voice in US diplomacy even after he retired from the Foreign Service in 1997, turning down a reported offer to serve as ambassador in Paris so that he could start a second career in business. He served as a vice chairman of the insurance giant AIG for more than a decade, and was a board member at Enron Oil & Gas (now EOG Resources) and an international affairs adviser at the lobbying and legal powerhouse Squire Patton Boggs, where he worked until his death.
While on his way out of the State Department, Mr. Wisner helped the Clinton administration in negotiations with Boris Yeltsin's government in Moscow, aiming to curb Russian weapon sales to Iran.
Eight years later, the George W. Bush administration enlisted Mr. Wisner's help negotiating Kosovo's status as a sovereign state, an effort that was largely successful - even as Mr. Wisner lamented that Serbia, Kosovo's northern neighbor, still refused to recognize the country's independence.
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Mr. Wisner returned to the news in 2011, when he was recruited by the Obama administration to meet with Egypt's authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak, amid antigovernment protests that were sweeping through the Arab world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later said that she had selected Mr. Wisner to coax Mubarak, a key US ally for three decades, into easing the country toward a democratic transition.
The two men had a close relationship that dated back to Mr. Wisner's ambassadorship in Cairo. But the envoy's appeals were ignored, at least at first: When Mr. Wisner left the country not long after their meeting, Mubarak was still holding tightly on to power.
Days later, Mr. Wisner made headlines when he appeared to contradict President Obama while addressing an international security conference in Munich.
'You need to get a national consensus around the preconditions of the next step forward,' he said, adding that Mubarak — rather than step aside — 'must stay in office in order to steer those changes through.'
The administration distanced itself from Mr. Wisner, with a State Department spokesman clarifying that he had spoken as a private citizen, not a US envoy. Mr. Wisner drew further scrutiny after British journalist Robert Fisk reported that Mr. Wisner's employer Squire Patton Boggs did business with the Mubarak regime, in what appeared to be a 'blatant conflict of interest.'
The episode was overshadowed when Mubarak resigned the next week, under pressure from millions of Egyptian protesters who had taken to the streets. His ouster set the stage for a tug-of-war among protesters, the military, and the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood, with retired general Abdel Fatah El-Sissi taking power in 2014.
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To Mr. Wisner, the revolution's chaotic fallout underscored the importance of the patient approach he had advocated for in Munich.
'We ought to have been calling for an orderly transition, rather than telling Mubarak 'get out of town, get out of government,' with no strategy for what happens next,' he told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius in 2016. 'We needed a responsible path to stability and evolution, not revolution.'
Mr. Wisner, then ambassador to India, presented Mother Teresa an award of honorary American citizenship in 1996.
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The oldest of four children, Frank George Wisner II was born in Manhattan on July 2, 1938. The family moved to Washington after World War II, and Mr. Wisner spent part of his school years in England, when his father, also named Frank, was posted in London as CIA station chief.
The elder Wisner had served in World War II with the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, and later oversaw the CIA's clandestine branch, playing a role in US-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala. He was diagnosed with manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder, and took his own life in 1965, three years after he retired from the CIA.
Mr. Wisner's mother, the former Polly Knowles, was a fund-raiser for Washington arts organizations and a close friend of Katharine Graham, the longtime chair of The Washington Post Co. After her husband's suicide, Polly married newspaper columnist Clayton Fritchey.
As a young man, Mr. Wisner prepared for a diplomatic career by traveling overseas, living 'with a couple of old ladies in a suburb of Tours' to learn French. After graduating from Woodberry Forest boarding school in Virginia, he studied Arabic at Princeton University, wrote his senior thesis on Algeria's war for independence, and received a bachelor's degree in 1961.
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The next year, he arrived in Algiers, where he settled into his first State Department posting just as the country was celebrating its independence from France. Mr. Wisner was sent to South Vietnam in 1964 and, after postings in Tunisia and Bangladesh, joined a presidential task force managing the resettlement of some 1 million Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.
His first wife, Genevieve de Virel, a French advertising executive, died of cancer in 1974. His second marriage, to Christine de Ganay, the stepmother of future French President Nicolas Sarkozy, ended in divorce.
In 2015, he married Judy Cormier, the owner of a New York City art gallery and design business. In addition to his wife and son, David, he leaves a daughter from his first marriage, Sabrina Wisner; two stepchildren from his second marriage, Caroline and Olivier Sarkozy; two stepchildren from Cormier's earlier marriage, Jamie Nicholls Biondi and Christopher Nicholls; a brother; and 12 grandchildren.
Interviewed about foreign affairs after his retirement from the Foreign Service, Mr. Wisner repeatedly championed the importance of political engagement over military action. He joined another former ambassador, Edward P. Djerejian, in publicly cautioning against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
'We cannot allow ourselves to be seen to be dictating to the world,' he had said in an oral history a few years earlier. 'We must be in search of partnership, of balance. Not of assertion, but of compromise.'