Herbert S. Okun

Herbert Stuart Okun (November 27, 1930 – November 8, 2011) was a United States Ambassador to East Germany (1980–1983) and the Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (1985–1989). He was a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. After his retirement from the U.S. State Department, he played a key role in unsuccessful efforts to halt the Balkan Wars in the early 1990s.

Early life and education Okun was born in Brooklyn. He earned his A.B. in history from Stanford University in 1951, and his Master of Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School, then known as the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, in 1959. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Dzyarzhynsk, was a wholesale vegetable vendor in New York City.

Career Okun decided to become a diplomat at 16 after reading 1947 Foreign Affairs article in which scholar George F. Kennan, writing under the pseudonym "X", offered the strategy known as containment in response to Soviet expansionism during the Cold War. "I read it and said, 'That's what I want to do,'" Okun told The New York Times in 1993.

As a young foreign service officer, Okun translated the correspondence between President John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Okun recalled that Khrushchev nicknamed him "ryzhyi" (redhead) because of his hair color.

After retiring from the foreign service, he served as chief aide to former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and former British Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen in the talks to end the slaughter resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia. Okun was "extraordinarily ready to listen to and to give credit to the opposing views," recalled Owen. "He was a person who did manage to build a measure of trust from the Serbians, which is not easy to do."

While serving as Vance and Owen's aide, Okun warned Serb leader Radovan Karadžić before the fighting started: "If you continue to talk about the mortal danger that Serbs are under in Bosnia, you will end up committing preemptive genocide." Karadžić later was charged with war crimes in the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, where as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed, and Okun also testified against him in The Hague.

"Diplomacy without force is like baseball without a bat," Okun famously said.