Ambassador Heyward Isham

Heyward Isham of Sagaponack, a former United States ambassador and noted Russian scholar, died on Thursday, June 18, in Southampton, of cardiac arrest. He was 82.

A career foreign service officer, Mr. Isham served as U.S. ambassador to Haiti from 1974 to 1977, assistant secretary of state and director of the Office for Combating Terrorism from 1977 to 1978, and chief of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam from 1971 to 1973.

“My father was warm, compassionate, and incisively intelligent,” Mr. Isham’s son Ralph said this week. “He had a keen love of country, friends and family and was a devoted father, husband and grandfather.”

Born in New York City on November 4, 1926, Mr. Isham attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations from Yale University in 1947 and subsequently studied at Columbia University’s Russian Institute. He continued his Russian language studies at the U.S. Army Russian Institute in Garmisch, Germany.

He began his foreign service career at the U.S. Mission in Berlin, Germany, a post he held from 1950 to 1954, followed by a position as the chief of Consular Section and Political Office at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1955 to 1957. As chief of the Consular Section, he located people with a claim to U.S. citizenship, a number of whom had been detained by Soviet authorities, and negotiated their release.

In 1962, Mr. Isham was posted to the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong as a political officer, and was among the first analysts to recognize the emerging Sino-Soviet rift.

With escalation of the war in Vietnam, Mr. Isham served in a number of posts relating to that conflict. From 1966 to 1969 Mr. Isham was the deputy director of the Vietnam Working Group at the Department of State working under Assistant Secretary William Bundy. He subsequently worked as deputy chief and then chief of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, and conducted direct negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Those negotiations resulted in the Paris Peace Accords, which were signed on January 27, 1973, and ended direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

In 1974, Mr. Isham was appointed United States ambassador to Haiti, serving under presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford. In Haiti, Ambassador Isham implemented development projects and cultivated ties with a wide range of political and cultural figures on the island.

Ambassador Isham went on to serve as a senior foreign service inspector and in a number of other senior positions at the Department of State in Washington, including the Office of Combating Terrorism. In 1983, Ambassador Isham chaired the Human Intelligence Committee at the Intelligence Community (IC) Staff, the interagency office reporting to CIA Director William Casey that was responsible for the evaluation and improvement of overseas reporting.

After his retirement, Mr. Isham became a senior editor at Doubleday and published the memoirs of Andrei Gromyko. In 1990, he became vice president and ambassador-in-residence at the Institute for East-West Studies in New York, for which he designed and implemented several initiatives. Building on his early interest in underground Russian writings (Samizdat), Mr. Isham also developed and edited two important books that introduced Russian writers to Western readers: “Remaking Russia: Voices from Within” (1995) and “Russia’s Fate through Russian Eyes: Voices of the New Generation” (2001).

For the past 15 years, the Ishams’ principal home has been in Sagaponack, where he was a well-known figure and a beloved member of the community. Mr. Isham was an active member of the congregation of St. Ann’s Church in Bridgehampton and served as chairman of the World Affairs Council at Southampton College.

Mr. Isham’s father was Col. Ralph Heyward Isham CBE, of New York. Col. Isham served with distinction in the British Army during World War I and went on to acquire the papers of James Boswell, the first biographer in the English language.

The discovery and acquisition of Boswell’s papers is considered to be one of the most important literary discoveries of the 20th century. Col. Isham brought the papers to America where 18 volumes were published. They were acquired by Yale University in 1949 and are housed at the Beinecke Library.

Mr. Isham is survived by his wife of 59 years, the noted artist Sheila Eaton Isham; two sons, Christopher E. Isham, vice president and Washington bureau chief for CBS News, and Ralph H. Isham, managing partner, GH Venture Partners in New York City; and nine grandchildren. His daughter Sandra Isham Vreeland died in 1996.

A funeral service was held on June 26 at St. Ann’s Church in Bridgehampton. In lieu of flowers, donations to the St. Ann’s Outreach Program in Bridgehampton would be appreciated by the family.