Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger served as Bill Clinton's top foreign policy adviser during the 1992 campaign. | Getty Sandy Berger, former national security adviser, dies

Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who served under President Bill Clinton, has died at the age of 70 from cancer.

"V sad start to day; just learned Sandy Berger passed away during the night," Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted Wednesday morning. "Good man & friend who served nation well as bill clinton's NSA."


Antony Blinken, the current deputy secretary of state and a Berger acolyte, tweeted, "Mourn the passing of Sandy Berger --- father, husband, mentor, friend, leader and great patriot. RIP SRB."

Berger, a longtime lawyer who founded Stonebridge International, a Washington-based advisory group — the firm that later merged and became the Albright Stonebridge Group in 2009 — after leaving government, had just been awarded World Food Program USA's inaugural Global Humanitarian Award on Tuesday.

“We are honoring one of America’s most devoted and influential humanitarian champions,” Rick Leach, the group's president and CEO, said in a statement. “On behalf of WFP USA, Sandy has been our principal voice in advocating that the U.S. and the world respond effectively to the greatest humanitarian challenge of our generation.”

In a statement released through Albright Stonebridge Group, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright mourned the death of her former colleague.

“Our country is stronger because of Sandy’s deep and abiding commitment to public service, and there are countless people whose lives he changed for the better. I am certainly one of them. He was one of my dearest friends and among the wisest people I have ever met," she wrote. "I will always treasure our decades-long partnership, both in and out of government, and I will be forever proud of what we accomplished together. All of us at ASG will continue to draw inspiration from his vision and leadership."

President Barack Obama paid tribute to Berger's legacy with the Clinton administration, remarking in a statement that he was personally grateful for his advice and counsel.

"From his service in President Carter's State Department to President Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy devoted himself to strengthening American leadership in an uncertain world," Obama said. "Today, his legacy can be seen in a peaceful Balkans, our strong alliance with Japan, our deeper relationships with India and China."

"Around the globe, families and children are living healthier, more secure lives because, as a private citizen, Sandy was a humanitarian who helped the world respond to crises and feed the hungry," the president continued. "With his trademark passion, wisdom and good humor, he is remembered fondly within the ranks of the National Security Council, where those he mentored carry on his work."

"Nobody was more knowledgeable about policy or smarter about how to formulate it," Bill and Hillary Clinton said in a statement Wednesday. "He was great both in analyzing a situation and figuring out what to do about it. His gifts proved invaluable time and time again, in Latin America, the Balkans, Northern Ireland and the Middle East."

Berger served as Bill Clinton's top foreign policy adviser during the 1992 campaign before serving as deputy national security adviser and eventually national security adviser shortly after Clinton began his second term, in March 1997.

As the president's chief foreign policy aide, Berger oversaw the Clinton administration's push to expand free trade in Africa and Asia, as well as its response to the al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, the NATO-led bombing of Kosovo, and the efforts to forge a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Following his time in the Clinton administration, Berger remained an active player in Washington's foreign-policy debates, informally advising Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton, and publishing articles about various international issues. As secretary of state, Clinton consulted Berger on topics from how to handle Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to how to "gain leverage over the Pakistanis" and persuade them to go after al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, her emails show.

In an op-ed for POLITICO Magazine in August, Berger warned Congress against rejecting President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, writing that doing so would allow "Iran to move further toward a nuclear weapon, presenting the United States and Israel with terrible choices."

Born Oct. 28, 1945, in the small upstate village of Millerton, New York, Berger graduated from Cornell University in 1967 and from Harvard Law School in 1971, before working on the campaign of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. There, he met Clinton, where as he recounted in a 2014 oral history with the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project, he saw him as someone with a bright political future.

"This guy bounded up the stairs. He had a white Colonel Sanders suit on," Berger said, in recounting his first impressions of Clinton, who was leading McGovern's organizing efforts in Texas. "He was Arkansas. Some of the other young people were from someplace, but they were not of someplace. But Clinton was grounded in Arkansas, and there was never any doubt in my mind that he was returning to Arkansas, from the very first time we had any kind of extended conversation."

Berger first turned toward international affairs in 1977, when Secretary of State Cyrus Vance asked him to be his speechwriter.

"That totally reoriented my career," he said. "When I left I went back to practice law, but I started the international trade practice of my law firm and remained involved and got more active, did more writing about foreign policy, did more reading about foreign policy. So I became a foreign policy person really starting in ’77."

Berger also recounted how he kept in touch with Clinton over the years, eventually signing up to be the Arkansas governor's top campaign adviser on foreign policy. "The bar was not extremely high in 1991 to become senior foreign policy adviser to Bill Clinton, who wasn’t even a blip on anybody’s chart," he said.

Berger's legacy was marred, however, when he pleaded guilty in 2005 to removing highly classified documents from the National Archives in Washington the previous year. The inspector general of the National Archives said that a staff member had witnessed the former NSA adviser wrapping the classified documents around his socks and under his pants.

He was fined $50,000, sentenced to two years' probation and stripped of his security clearance for three years. Following a Justice Department investigation and subsequent congressional hearings, Berger voluntarily gave up his license to practice law in 2007.

"While I derived great satisfaction from years of practicing law, I have not done so for 15 years and do not envision returning to the profession," Berger said, according to a contemporaneous Associated Press report, "I am very sorry for what I did, and deeply apologize."

