Richard L. Armitage, who served because the No. 2 official on the State Department from 2001 to 2005, through the turbulent period of the 9/11 assaults and the beginning of America’s retaliatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Sunday. He was 79.
The trigger was a pulmonary embolism, Armitage Worldwide, a consulting firm that Mr. Armitage ran in Arlington, Va., stated in a assertion. The assertion didn’t say the place he died.
Barrel-chested and with a shaved head, Mr. Armitage, a Naval Academy graduate who served in Vietnam, labored for 3 Republican presidents in senior international coverage and protection jobs, a part of a decades-spanning coterie of presidency officers who believed in a muscular American presence overseas.
He was one among a group, led by Condoleezza Rice, who known as themselves “the Vulcans,” advising an inexperienced President George W. Bush on protection points throughout his presidential marketing campaign and first time period.
Mr. Armitage, nonetheless, achieved unwelcome notoriety because the unnamed supply of a 2003 information account that exposed the key id of a Central Intelligence Company operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, shortly after the invasion of Iraq.
The Bush administration made the case for warfare based mostly on exaggerated claims that Iraq was tied to the assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, and harbored weapons of mass destruction.
What got here to be often known as the “Valerie Plame affair” spun into a Washington scandal, with a full-court press by the information media and a legal investigation by a particular prosecutor.
Ms. Wilson was publicly named after her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion column in The New York Instances accusing President Bush of misleadingly claiming that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.
Mr. Wilson, a former state division official, accused the Bush administration of outing his spouse in retaliation for his criticism.
Per week after Mr. Wilson’s article was printed, the conservative columnist Robert Novak revealed Ms. Wilson’s identify, which was categorized, setting off a particular prosecutor’s investigation into the supply of the leak.
Mr. Armitage, who cooperated with the investigation, publicly revealed three years later that he was the supply. He stated the disclosure was inadvertent, and he supplied his apologies to former colleagues and to the Wilsons. No legal expenses have been introduced over the leak, though I. Lewis Libby Jr., an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of mendacity to investigators in 2007. (President Bush granted him clemency the subsequent month.)
“It was a horrible error on my half,” Mr. Armitage stated in an interview with The Instances in 2006. “There wasn’t a day once I didn’t really feel like I had let down the president, the secretary of state, my colleagues, my household and the Wilsons.”
Mr. Armitage’s tenure in senior roles in the State and Protection Departments started through the Reagan administration.
Within the 2000 election, he and different members of the Vulcans — hawkish international coverage insiders from earlier Republican presidencies — teamed as much as advise Mr. Bush, who, because the governor of Texas, was new on the nationwide stage.
Ms. Rice turned President Bush’s nationwide safety adviser; Colin L. Powell turned secretary of state; and Mr. Armitage, one among Mr. Powell’s finest associates, was confirmed by the Senate as his deputy secretary.
Following the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11 — when the Vulcans, who additionally included Mr. Cheney and Protection Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, led the aggressive American response — Mr. Armitage spoke with a Pakistani normal, looking for assist in what would change into the American-led warfare on terror.
The president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, later instructed the CBS Information program “60 Minutes” that Mr. Armitage had threatened to bomb his nation “again to the Stone Age” if it didn’t assist the US. Mr. Armitage denied that he had threatened army motion in opposition to Pakistan.
He supplied his resignation from the State Department in November 2004, after President Bush’s re-election, and at some point after Mr. Powell introduced he was stepping down, fulfilling an settlement with the president that he would serve solely 4 years because the nation’s chief diplomat. Mr. Armitage formally departed in February 2005 and entered the personal sector.
In 2009, he stated that the C.I.A.’s waterboarding of terrorism detainees, which the Bush White Home had authorised, was mistaken and a type of torture.
“I hope, had I identified about it on the time I used to be serving, I’d’ve had the braveness to resign,” he stated in an interview with The Los Angeles Instances. “However I don’t know. It’s in hindsight now.”
Richard Lee Armitage was born on April 26, 1945, in Wellesley, Mass., and grew up in Atlanta. He graduated from St. Pius X Catholic Excessive Faculty there in 1963.
Following his commencement from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., he served on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. He then volunteered to function an adviser to Vietnamese forces, and he turned conversant in Vietnamese throughout three excursions with them. He earned a Bronze Star.
After the autumn of Saigon in 1975, Mr. Armitage led a flotilla of 30,000 Vietnamese evacuees to protected harbor in the Philippines, in response to a Naval Academy biography.
He entered authorities that 12 months as a Pentagon guide and later was an aide to Senator Bob Dole of Kansas.
Mr. Armitage was a international coverage adviser to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential marketing campaign after which joined the Reagan administration as an assistant secretary of protection for East Asia and the Pacific. From 1983 to 1989, he was assistant secretary of protection for safety coverage.
Underneath President George H.W. Bush, he was an emissary to King Hussein of Jordan through the 1991 Persian Gulf warfare and an envoy to East European states after the autumn of the Soviet Union. He based Armitage Worldwide after leaving authorities in 2005 and ran it till his demise.
His survivors embody his spouse, Laura (Samford) Armitage; eight kids; a brother and a sister; and 12 grandchildren. He and his spouse have been additionally foster mother and father of many kids.
Within the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Armitage endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump. 4 years later, he was one among greater than 130 former Republican nationwide safety officers who signed a assertion calling Mr. Trump “dangerously unfit” to serve a second time period. He endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 race.
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