Zoellick, State Dept.’s Strategist on Darfur and China, to Resign

The No. 2 official in the State Department, Robert B. Zoellick, announced Monday that he is resigning, leaving his role as point man on U.S. efforts to end the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region and on U.S. policy toward China.

Zoellick said he is quitting the job of deputy secretary of State after 16 months to join the New York-based investment firm Goldman Sachs.

“I’ve accomplished what I’ve set out to do and it’s time for me to step down,” Zoellick told reporters, noting that he worked in the Bush administration -- first as U.S. trade representative, a Cabinet position, then as deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- for more than five years.

Zoellick, a hard-driving man with a reputation as a brilliant policy strategist in the administration of President Bush’s father, worked on the mission of ending the violence in Darfur, where more than 180,000 civilians have been killed as a byproduct of fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.

He traveled frequently to Africa and, aides said, delayed his resignation to fly to Nigeria last month to help push one of Darfur’s rebel factions to sign a peace accord.

Rice has not decided who will inherit Zoellick’s responsibilities for the Darfur issue and has not settled on a nominee for his job as deputy secretary of State, said a senior State Department official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity while discussing internal deliberations. Officials said Rice’s director of foreign aid programs, Randall L. Tobias, is a leading candidate.

Zoellick said Monday that the U.S. had done everything it could to stop the violence in Darfur. “That isn’t to say that I’m not heartbroken by seeing the things that happen” there, he said in an interview on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” a Public Broadcasting Service show.

“There’s a lot of follow-up work to do,” he acknowledged. “This peace accord ... is just an opening.... There’s no doubt that it’s going to take a long time.”

In addition to Darfur, Zoellick also oversaw the administration’s complex relationship with China, and prided himself on coining a term for the role the United States has urged Beijing to play: a “responsible stakeholder” in world affairs. The American business term “stakeholder” kept Chinese translators busy for months with its ambiguity -- just as Zoellick hoped it would, another official said.

Rice, in a public statement accepting Zoellick’s resignation, praised him as “a seasoned diplomat [and] a masterful strategist ... a deputy who would get up his courage and roll up his sleeves and occasionally even hug a panda.”

She was referring to an incident last year when, on a visit to China, the normally stiff Zoellick was suddenly presented by Chinese officials with a live baby panda. (It was a double-edged honor; “panda-hugger” is conservative jargon for a U.S. official who has gone soft on Beijing.)

Friends said Zoellick, who served in the Treasury and State departments in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush, would have stayed in government if the current president had named him Treasury secretary when that job became open earlier this year.

Zoellick acknowledged that he would have been enticed by the job. “If you’re someone like me who is interested in public service, those are attractive possibilities,” he told reporters.

But he said he had decided to leave the State Department months ago, and was not leaving because he did not get the Cabinet post.

Bush nominated Goldman Sachs chairman Henry M. Paulson Jr. for the Treasury job last month.

“I certainly knew I’d always be a contender [for the job], as the president and others told me, but ... if I were the president, and I had a choice in Hank Paulson, I’d pick Hank Paulson,” Zoellick said.

Paulson’s old firm, Goldman Sachs, said Zoellick would carry the title, “vice chairman, international,” and advise the investment bank on global strategy.