William Hyland, who helped shape U.S. foreign policy, particularly toward the Soviet Union, as a top-level bureaucrat and then became editor of the influential journal Foreign Affairs, died Tuesday in Fairfax, Va. He was 79.
The cause was an aortic aneurysm, his son James Hyland said.
Mr. Hyland, who lived in Vienna, Va., held high posts in the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the White House. President Gerald Ford named him to a top-level panel to coordinate the intelligence community, and President Jimmy Carter chose him to represent the National Security Council on an interagency committee to guide relations with the Soviet Union.
In 1975, when the House Intelligence Committee accused Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of withholding documents and moved toward holding him in contempt of Congress, Mr. Hyland defended him. Mr. Hyland brokered a compromise through which he personally briefed the committee on the contents of documents but did not show them to representatives.
In a column in The New York Times in 1977, William Safire characterized Mr. Hyland as perhaps the most experienced presidential aide in determining what sensitive information goes into the Oval Office.
In the 1980s and ’90s, as editor of Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Hyland played a part in furthering the journal’s role in framing the establishment’s discussion of international affairs. Mr. Hyland guided its coverage of the fall of the Soviet Union.
In an interview with The Washington Post in 1991, Mr. Hyland urged the United States to take advantage of the new opportunities by tackling domestic problems and “start selectively disengaging abroad to save resources.”
Mr. Hyland, who played the trumpet as a youth, wrote three books about jazz, big bands and Broadway musicals. The first, “The Song Is Ended: Songwriters and American Music, 1900-1950” (1995), focused on musical legends like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter.