Department of State Reception Honoring Cyrus R. Vance Remarks at the Reception for the Former Secretary of State.

I'm delighted to be here this evening in my good place in the program between the chest¹ and Cy Vance. [Laughter] This is wonderful for me. And I felt it completely appropriate, as I walked in the door, when Ed Muskie said that this is a meeting of friends, a kind of a family.

¹Prior to the President's remarks, Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie unveiled a Chippendale chest, contributed by Department of State employees and their families, to be placed in the State Department's Diplomatic Reception Room, in honor of Secretary Vance.

Ever since I asked Ed Muskie to be Secretary of State, he's been trying to act more statesmanlike than Cy Vance. [Laughter] Cy, I can't say that he's succeeded at all. [Laughter]

It's also appropriate for us to be bound together with a common tie. With very few exceptions, all of us have served with Cy Vance in a time of crisis and achievement, a time of disappointment, a time of frustration, a time of sorrow, and a time of joy.

And it's also appropriate to honor this evening not just Cy Vance but Gay Vance. I've had an excellent relationship with my Cabinet members. I think the strongest personal ties that we have has been with Cy and Gay. We've been on the tennis court together. We've been in the trout streams together. We've been on crosscountry skis together. We've been up all night together. We've sweated through crises together. We've traveled together. When Rosalynn has been on trips by herself, Gay was there.

And it's always been an inspiration to me to see on the evening television in a time of intense importance to our country Cy Vance come down the ladder from an airplane with the "United States of America" on it and to see Gay Vance at his side. The diplomatic service, the Foreign Service is one of sharing, and there is not a husband or a wife here, employed in the State Department in the service of our Nation, whose spouse does not share in the fullest sense of the word that common dedication to a great nation.

Ed covered a lot of points that I wanted to make in my remarks about Vance. I think it's appropriate for me, though, as a President who has sat with Cy Vance during 13 days at Camp David, sometimes he and I alone representing our Nation, speaking either to Prime Minister Begin or to President Sadat or, most often, I might say, to their subordinates, where we negotiated the details of the Camp David accords, to know the worth and the virtue of this man, his depth of integrity and also his calmness and his patience and his perceptiveness, and a kind of sense about him so that when he told me something or told a foreign leader something or told one of his fellow workers in the State Department something, there was no doubt about its accuracy and about the soundness of his judgment.

I think Cy had this same relationship with the Members of Congress, who in times of cross-examination or doubt, when secret negotiations were going on, were reassured by the depth of his knowledge of detail and about the breadth of his statesmanship and about his own integrity.

I won't enumerate again, because Ed has covered it very well, some of the things that have bound us together. Most of the things Ed mentioned were achievements, triumphs. We also shared the greatest personal sorrow when our American hostages were taken and we went through weeks and then months of frustrating, constant efforts to protect their lives and their safety and at the same time protect the integrity and honor of our Nation and work for their early release. We accomplished all those goals except the last one, and of course, our commitments are still as deep and as fervent now as they have been in any one of those days when they were separated from us.

I'm very proud to have served with Cy Vance. He was the Cabinet officer about whom there was no debate during this time 4 years ago. There was an absolute unanimity among all those who advised me: "The best man you can get under any circumstances to be Secretary of State is Cy Vance." And all those multiple sources of advice were accurate. I'm very grateful to him personally.

I tried to think of some notable expression to sum up Cy's work, and the one that I think is most appropriate is a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes. He made this in 1913, trying to describe at a graduation ceremony, I believe, what was the measure of one's service to one's country and to oneself. And I'll just quote it in closing.

This is what Oliver Wendell Holmes said about Cy Vance: "To see so far as one may and to feel the great forces that are behind every detail, to hammer out as compact and solid a piece of work as one can, to try to make it first rate, and to leave it unadvertised."

I intend to spend a lot of my time in the future advertising what Cy Vance has done for our country.