The Associated Press reported that a spokeswoman for O?Melveny & Myers, the law firm where Mr. Christopher was a senior partner, confirmed his death.
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. Among other things, he served as administration point man with Congress in winning ratification of Panama Canal treaties, presided over normalization of diplomatic relations with China and conducted repeated negotiations involving the Middle East and the Balkans.
At home, Mr. Christopher developed a reputation as a riot expert, investigating racial unrest in Detroit and in the Watts district of Los Angeles and later heading a 1991 commission that proposed major reforms of the Los Angeles Police Department following riots prompted by the beating of a black motorist, Rodney King.
As a political operative, he headed Mr. Clinton?s 1992 search committee for a vice presidential running mate, settling on Albert 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, he directed for Mr. Gore, running for president, the search resulting in the selection of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman for the second spot on the Democratic ticket.
When the election stalemated, Mr. Christopher supervised the recount of disputed votes in Florida before George W. Bush emerged the winner by decision of the Supreme Court.
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 accused by detractors of 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 more a consummate tactician than a conceptualizer.
?If we were in a meeting on a crisis,? said a one-time State Department official who worked with him, ?no one would turn to Chris and say, ?You put together the strategy memo.? But everyone would want him to read it because he?d be very good at implementing it,? The Times reported when he was named secretary of state.
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 to criticism that President Clinton?s penchant for consultation and his secretary?s eagerness to listen made for seminars, not decisions, Mr. Christopher bristled. ?The president?s desire to consult and my Norwegian taciturnity didn?t prevent us from making the right judgments,? he said of one occasion.
Warren Minor Christopher was born in the farming hamlet of Scranton, N.D., one of five children. His father, a local banker, suffered a stroke that the family believed was the result of overwork from his unsuccessful efforts keep the bank solvent during the Depression. The elder Christopher died four years later at 53 after the family had moved to California.
The unabashed New Deal liberalism that young Warren embraced during this formative period remained with him throughout his career even though he made his financial fortune representing I.B.M, Lockheed Martin Corporation and other major companies for O?Melveny & Myers, the most traditional and prestigious of Los Angeles law firms and which he eventually led.
Always impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite, Mr. Christopher told an interviewer while secretary of state that ?I always thought that I would do things in a conservative way to maximize the progressiveness of my policy positions.?
While attending Hollywood High School he delivered newspapers several hours each day and, he told friends, he felt discriminated against because of his family?s straitened financial circumstances. His entered the University of Redlands at 16 but World War II intervened and he wound up in a naval officer program at the University of Southern California, soon to serve as an ensign in the naval reserve on an oil tanker in the Pacific.
Mr. Christopher, who as a diplomat came to embody a reluctance to use force, supported President Truman?s use of atomic bombs on Japan but later expressed doubt as to whether all alternatives had been fully explored.
After taking degrees from U.S.C. and Stanford University?s law school Mr. Christopher won a clerkship with William O. Douglas, drafting book chapters for the libertarian Supreme Court justice.
He joined O?Melveny & Myers in 1950, soon became an adviser and speech writer for California?s newly elected governor, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, and was credited with coining the term ?responsible liberalism.?