Profile : Globe-Trotting Envoy Douses the Hot Spots : * Patient, principled Cyrus Vance is the top choice for U.N. missions impossible. His latest stop was Nagorno-Karabakh.

UNITED NATIONS —  Adjectives like shy, self-effacing and patient come forth whenever associates describe Cyrus R. Vance, a man who abhors frills so much that even after tasting the privileges accorded a top government official, he would often take the bus from his home in mid-town Manhattan to his law office on Wall Street.

But the slender, tall, 75-year-old Vance, it is sometimes forgotten, also is steeled with a steadfastness and principle that made him one of only two U.S. secretaries of state to resign on an issue of conscience. The other, ironically, was the flamboyant orator William Jennings Bryan, who resigned from President Woodrow Wilson’s Cabinet before World War I.

It is these two sides of Vance--the shy diplomat and the persistent, principled public servant--that have brought him into the limelight once more as a peacemaker, taking on what seem like impossible missions for the United Nations. He is widely credited with a major role in fashioning the fragile cease-fire in the Yugoslav civil war and in preparing the way there for a U.N. peacekeeping force.

His seeming success in Yugoslavia prompted U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to ask Vance to take on a second peace mission--seeking threads of accord in bloodied Nagorno-Karabakh, the largely Armenian-populated enclave in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Vance returned a week ago from a trip to the enclave and made a private report to the secretary general.

Vance has long been noted for a quiet style and demeanor that seems to work well in crises. When he took office as secretary of state in 1977, in fact, his style was so different from that of his predecessor, Henry A. Kissinger, that he astounded State Department professionals. When he made his first official trip overseas to a conference in Geneva, he sent his secretary to an airline office to pick up a ticket, and then flew off on a commercial airliner. Kissinger, by contrast, traveled on an Air Force plane with an entourage.

There was another sharp difference. “I never saw Vance really seriously angered and bawling out someone,” said George Vest, a retired diplomat who served as an assistant secretary of state for Kissinger and Vance. “If he didn’t like something, he would call you in and, in the most polite way, ask you to do something over. . . . It was the exact opposite from Kissinger.”

Those who have sat in on Vance’s talks with Yugoslav politicians and warlords like to describe his negotiating style as indefatigable, no-nonsense, persevering.

“He manages, with very few words, to convince each participant that his view is being given equal weight with the others,” said a Muslim official who was in on one of Vance’s meetings in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in early March. “He is very skilled at getting people to trust him.”

Even radical nationalists who have rejected European Community mediation efforts in Yugoslavia have praised Vance as evenhanded. Radovan Karadzic, the leader of Bosnian Serbs who staged an armed uprising against independence for the multiethnic republic, said he was satisfied that Vance heard him out with an open mind.

With the press, Vance performs a strange balancing act. He is at once eternally accessible but virtually unquotable. He favors monosyllabic answers that tend to keep his face and voice off the air. Off camera, he is relaxed and thorough in explaining how he sees the task at hand.

As secretary of state, Vance was credited with a patient hand in keeping Israel and Egypt at the bargaining table until they signed the Camp David peace accords in 1978. But his tenure was troubled.

His problem much of the time was Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, who, unlike Vance, did not believe in self-effacing government service. Brzezinski seemed to relish speaking out without consulting Vance. And his view was quite different: Vance believed in building on the positive strands in the relationship with the Soviet Union; Brzezinski did not trust the Soviets in any way. To most outsiders, Brzezinski became the Carter Administration’s voice on foreign policy.

“The result,” Vest said, “was that while Vance would be quietly working on something with other foreign ministers and making great headway, Brzezinski was just as likely to shoot off his mouth with a great idea that might run counter to what had been negotiated.”

When the two disagreed in public, Brzezinski’s speeches and interviews became, in Vance’s view, “a serious impediment to the conduct of our foreign policy.” After two years of infighting, Vance finally protested to Carter. Put on the spot, the President announced at a White House breakfast meeting of his top officials that Vance, not Brzezinski, was his spokesman on foreign affairs. Journalists soon wrote about Vance’s ascendancy. “But Carter never did get the situation with Brzezinski under control,” said Vest.

The decisive break with Carter came in April, 1980, when the President launched his ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The raid came to an embarrassing and tragic end when a rescue helicopter and a cargo plane collided in the Iranian desert, killing eight American servicemen and injuring five others.

Carter’s go-ahead for the abortive mission came at a meeting of the National Security Council attended by Brzezinski but held while Vance was on a weekend holiday in Florida. Vance, who described himself as “stunned and angry that such a momentous decision had been made in my absence,” returned to Washington and asked for a chance to argue the case against the rescue mission.

When the officials reassembled, Vance insisted that the mission would enrage American allies who had agreed to impose sanctions on Iran only after the Carter Administration promised to hold off any military action until there was a chance for sanctions to work. Vance also argued that the mission would cause the deaths of hostages and Iranians.

Finding no support for his stand, Vance handed Carter his resignation without waiting for the outcome of the mission. “I knew I could not honorably remain as secretary of state when I so strongly disagreed with a presidential decision that went against my judgment as to what was best for the country and for the hostages,” Vance wrote in his memoirs.

A Yale University classmate of President John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, and of Kennedy’s National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Vance was brought into the Kennedy Administration in 1961 as chief legal officer of the Department of Defense. He rose quickly, being named secretary of the Army by President Kennedy in 1962 and deputy secretary of defense by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Vance made his main impact during the Johnson years as the President’s trouble-shooter on crisis assignments somewhat like those he’s now handling for the United Nations.

In 1968, Johnson appointed Vance as deputy to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman at the Vietnam peace talks in Paris. The President had begun to suspect the dovishness of Harriman and felt that Vance would bolster him. Yet Vance, who had been described in the Pentagon Papers as “overwhelmingly in favor of prosecuting the war with more men and material,” later grew to feel that the American intervention had been a mistake, and there was no difference between him and Harriman in their approach to the talks.

During the Nixon and Ford administrations, Vance returned to his Wall Street law firm but kept so active in foreign policy that he was viewed as the “secretary of state-in-waiting” for the next Democratic administration. His appointment by Carter in 1977 was no surprise.

The final verdict is not in on Vance’s achievement in Yugoslavia. He is sometimes credited in diplomatic circles with single-handedly halting the bloodshed. But some argue that relative peace was achieved only because Serbian authorities wanted an end to the war--a political turnabout that just happened to coincide with Vance’s intervention.

Whether because of his persuasive powers or good timing, the Jan. 3 cease-fire negotiated by Vance has allowed the United Nations to launch its first peacekeeping mission in continental Europe.

The Vance Years

March 27, 1917. Born Cyrus Roberts Vance in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

1936-1939. Attended Yale University, majoring in Economics. Played varsity hockey and was nicknamed “Spider” by his teammates for his gangly appearance.

1939-1942. Attended Yale law school where he was remembered as a “brilliant” student with the capacity of “a Rolodex file in his head.” He graduated with honors in 1942.

1942-1946. Enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served as a gunnery officer aboard destroyers in the Pacific during World War II. He was discharged from active duty with the rank of lieutenant senior grade.

1947. Passed the New York state bar exam and became an associate with the Wall Street law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. He became a partner in the firm in 1956.

1957-60. Was named special Counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on military preparedness by then-Senator Lyndon Johnson. Later served as counsel for the Senate Special Committee on Space and Astronautics and was involved in the creation of NASA. Earned a reputation as a tireless worker and skilled.

1961. Appointed general counsel for the Department of Defense, beginning his full-time service in Washington. Responsible for the creation of unified defense supply and intelligence agencies.

1962. Served as Secretary of the Army by President John F. Kennedy.

1964-1967 Served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson. Resigned from his post for economic and health reasons.

July, 1967. Was a member of a special investigative team sent ot Detroit in the aftermathof that city’s racial riots. His report of the events, was widely praised by black leaders.

1967-1976. Returned to work in his old law firm.

November, 1967. Helped avert a war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots through intensive negotiations.

1968. Sent to South Korea as an envoy of President Johnson following the seizure by North Korea ofU.S. intelligence ship Pueblo. His mission was to assure South Korean of U.S. support.

May, 1968. Deputy chief delegate to the Paris Peace Conference on Vietnam and, in a retreat from his previous position, supported a cease-fire.

1970-1972. Member of a committee investigating alleged police corruption in New York City.

1976-1980. Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter. Played an integral role in the Camp David Accord between Egypt and Israel. Continued to promote the policy of detente with the Soviet Union and visited China to help normalize U.S.-Sino ties. Worked vigorously to secure the release of American hostages in Iran, but resigned in opposition to President Carter’s abortive rescue mission. Later returned to his old law firm.

1988-1990. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

1991-March, 1992. As U.N. special envoy, helped to broker a series of cease-fires in Yugoslavia.

Present. As U.N. special envoy, he has been seeking to achieve a truce between Azerbaijanis and Armenians

Source: Current Biography, Encyclopedia Britannica

Compiled by Times research Kevin Fox.

Meisler reported from the United Nations and Williams from Yugoslavia. Times staff writer Rudy Abramson, in Washington, also contributed to this report.