Warren Christopher, Lawyer, Negotiator and Adviser to Presidents, Dies at 85

O’Melveny & Myers, the law firm where Mr. Christopher was a senior partner, announced his death, saying he had been ill with kidney and bladder cancer.

Methodical and self-effacing, Mr. Christopher alternated for nearly five decades between top echelons of both the federal government and legal and political life in California. He served as the Carter administration’s point man with Congress in winning ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, presided over the normalization of diplomatic relations with China and conducted repeated negotiations involving the Middle East and the Balkans.

At home, Mr. Christopher investigated racial unrest in Detroit and in the Watts district of Los Angeles and later headed a 1991 commission that proposed major reforms of the Los Angeles Police Department after riots prompted by the beating of a black driver, Rodney King.

As a political operative, he headed Mr. Clinton’s 1992 search committee for a vice-presidential running mate, settling on Al Gore, and subsequently directed the transition team of the president-elect, acting as an establishment counterweight on a team dominated by Arkansans new to the national scene. Eight years later, when Mr. Gore was running for president, he directed the search resulting in the selection of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman for the second spot on the Democratic ticket.

When the election became stalemated, Mr. Christopher supervised the recount of disputed votes in Florida before George W. Bush emerged the winner by decision of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Christopher was in overall charge of Mr. Gore’s Florida recount effort, although much of the legal strategy was devised by a team of lawyers led by David Boies, the prominent corporate lawyer, and Ronald A. Klain, Mr. Gore’s former chief of staff and a onetime partner of Mr. Christopher’s at O’Melveny & Myers.

Mr. Christopher came under criticism at the time, and later in “Recount,” the 2008 HBO dramatization of the Florida vote dispute, over his handling of the Florida episode. His detractors said he had showed a lack of legal and political aggressiveness against Mr. Bush’s legal team, led by James A. Baker III, another former secretary of state. The movie, in particular, portrayed Mr. Christopher as overly concerned with the niceties of the law while Mr. Baker was waging a bare-knuckled campaign on all fronts.

Mr. Klain called it an unfair characterization. “Like all dramatic portrayals, they sought dramatic tension by exaggerating people’s personalities,” he said on Saturday. “People often confused Chris’s reserved style and personal sense of propriety with a lack of fierceness on behalf of his client. That would be a mistake.”

He said it was Mr. Christopher’s decision to challenge the Florida result, even as most Republicans and some prominent Democrats were urging Mr. Gore to concede. “People don’t remember how controversial that effort was. Without Chris’s stature and credibility, I’m not sure we would have gotten as far as we did,” Mr. Klain said.

Mr. Bush’s ascension to the White House was decreed by five Supreme Court justices, Mr. Klain insisted, not by any flaw in Mr. Gore’s legal strategy or Mr. Christopher’s leadership. “In all the years since then,” he said, “no one has come up with any workable strategic advice on how we could have gotten one of those justices to switch.”

In a statement, Mr. Gore described Mr. Christopher as “one of the great statesmen of our era. His quiet, consistently thoughtful demeanor belied a fierce commitment to principle and a brilliant mind. Time and again, his wisdom and skillful diplomacy was invaluable in the conduct of America’s foreign policy.”

Though widely admired for his even-handedness and equanimity — he was once described as every husband’s ideal for a wife’s divorce lawyer — Mr. Christopher was also criticized as lacking passionate, big-picture diplomatic vision. Even friends and associates, to whom he was known as Chris or sometimes as “the Cardinal,” said they could not discern a guiding geopolitical philosophy, regarding him as more a consummate tactician than as a conceptualizer.

“If we were in a meeting on a crisis, no one would turn to Chris and say, ‘You put together the strategy memo,’ ” a onetime State Department official told The New York Times when Mr. Christopher was named secretary of state. “But everyone would want him to read it because he’d be very good at implementing it.”

Mr. Christopher appeared not to disagree. “My task had been to serve as steward, not proprietor, of an extraordinary public trust,” he wrote in “Chances of a Lifetime: A Memoir,” published in 2001. But he bristled at criticism that Mr. Clinton’s penchant for consultation and his own eagerness to listen had made for seminars, not decisions. “The president’s desire to consult and my Norwegian taciturnity didn’t prevent us from making the right judgments,” he said of one occasion.