Joseph Sisco, 85; Key Player in Kissinger’s Shuttle Diplomacy

Joseph Sisco, a diplomat who played a major role in former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East and whose career in the State Department spanned five presidential administrations, died Nov. 23 of complications from diabetes at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 85.

As a State Department negotiator, Sisco was involved in diplomatic hot spots that included Syria’s invasion of Jordan in 1970, the India-Pakistan war in 1971, and Egypt and Israel’s peace negotiations in 1974.

Tough and resourceful, Sisco was known for his drive and intensity. Writing about a Mideast cease-fire in the summer of 1970, columnist Joseph Kraft noted that credit was widespread, but “by far the most important contribution was made by Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco, an outspoken, candid man, rough in manner and more interested in tactics than strategy who possesses in abundance the quality Talleyrand said diplomats should renounce -- zeal.”

A Chicago native, Joseph John Sisco was the son of Italian immigrants. His mother died when he was 9, and his father, a tailor, raised the five Sisco children in modest circumstances.

He graduated from high school in 1937, briefly attended junior college and transferred to Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1941. He worked for a short time as a high school teacher and then joined the Army, where he served as a first lieutenant with the 41st Infantry Division in the Pacific. He was discharged in 1945.

At the University of Chicago, he received his master’s degree in 1947 and his doctorate in 1950, specializing in Soviet affairs.

He became a Central Intelligence Agency officer in 1950 and joined the State Department the next year. From 1951 to 1965, he served as a foreign affairs officer specializing in issues involving the United Nations and other international organizations. In 1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk appointed Sisco assistant secretary of State for international organization affairs.

His deep involvement in Middle East diplomacy began about the time Arthur J. Goldberg succeeded Adlai Stevenson as ambassador to the United Nations. Because Rusk was devoting much of his time to Vietnam, Goldberg was, in essence, in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East during and after the Six-Day War in June 1967. Sisco worked closely with Goldberg and became the chief U.S. mediator in the Middle East.

On Jan. 30, 1969, President Nixon appointed him assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. Later that year, his policy paper on the Middle East became the basis for the president’s Middle East policy.

As Marvin and Bernard Kalb explained in their book “Kissinger,” Sisco’s strategy involved containing the Soviet Union’s growing influence in the Middle East, convincing the Arab states that the Nixon administration was being evenhanded and coaxing Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territory.

Although the approach did not work as planned, it eventually led to a fragile cease-fire along the Suez Canal, beginning Aug. 7, 1970, with Jordan, Egypt and Israel agreeing to stop shooting. In July 1974, as Kissinger’s chief deputy, he was dispatched to seek a solution to the Cyprus crisis that erupted after a Greek-inspired coup deposing the country’s president, Archbishop Makarios, triggered the Turkish invasion five days later. Shuttling between Athens and Ankara, he helped tamp down war rumblings between the countries.

“There is little doubt Greece would have responded to Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus with its own invasion of Turkey were it not for Undersecretary of State Joseph Sisco’s backstage pressure in Athens,” columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote July 25, 1974. “In most undiplomatic language, Sisco told the Greek generals that the U.S. would abandon them to inevitable destruction if they attacked Turkey. Jolted by this unexpected threat, the military dictatorship backed down and thereby guaranteed its own fall on Tuesday.”

In 1976, Sisco left government service and became president of American University. He resigned in 1980 and soon launched what he called his third career, becoming a partner of Sisco Associates, an international management and consulting firm founded by his wife, Jean Head Sisco.

Sisco’s wife, whom he married in 1946 while they were students at the University of Chicago, died in 1990. He is survived by two daughters and two brothers.