Heyward Isham, 82, a career Foreign Service officer and a Russian scholar who held key posts during the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, died June 18 at a hospital near his Long Island home. He had complications from an infection and pulmonary fibrosis. During the Vietnam War, Isham served in the early 1970s as a leader of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks and was directly involved in negotiations with the Vietnamese. The talks led to the accords that ended direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Over his career, Isham spent years on Vietnam, was ambassador to Haiti and held vital posts in Moscow, Hong Kong and Washington, where he was assistant secretary of state and director of the office for combating terrorism. In an incident apparently illustrative of his character, Isham refused to submit to two robbers who accosted him as he left his auto in Washington in 1977. He pulled a curtain rod from the parked car, struck one of the robbers and pursued both when they fled. The chase ended when he was shot in the leg. 'He's got a lot of courage,' his wife, Sheila told a reporter at the time. He was born in New York, attended Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and received a bachelor's degree in international relations from Yale in 1947. After study at Columbia University's Russian Institute and at an Army school in Germany, he began his Foreign Service career in 1950 with a post at the U.S. mission in Berlin, then a Cold War crossroads. As chief of the consular section at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the middle 1950s, he worked out the release of people who had been detained by the Soviets despite their claims to U.S. citizenship. In 1962, he was sent to Hong Kong, a monitoring post for observing developments in China, with which the United States had no diplomatic relations. As a political officer in the U.S. consulate, Isham was viewed as one of the first to recognize the emerging Sino-Soviet split. Before his peace talks assignment he was deputy director of the Vietnam Working Group in the State Department. Other assignments before his 1987 retirement from the government included chairmanship of the human intelligence committee for the intelligence community staff. Later, as a senior editor for Doubleday, he published the memoirs of former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Afterward, he became an official of the Institute for EastWest Studies in New York and developed and edited two books that brought Western attention to Russian writers. In addition to his wife, of Long Island, survivors include sons Christopher Isham of Washington and Ralph Isham of New York, and nine grandchildren. A daughter, Sandra Isham Vreeland, died in 1996. In an incident described in a book by Sally Bedell Smith, Isham was a guest at a lively White House party during the Kennedy administration. As reported by Smith, 'Lyndon Johnson fell on' another guest as they were dancing, and to free her, 'Isham had to hoist LBJ.' 'He definitely picked him up,' Christopher Isham said. It 'was a famous family story.' 