Lawrence S. Eagleburger, the only career US foreign service officer to rise to the position of secretary of state, died today. He was 80.

Eagleburger died in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a short illness, according to a family friend, Christy Reap.

Mr Eagleburger visited Malta twice and was the first senior US official to visit the Island after the dip in relations with the United States seen in the first half of the 1980s.

Two of his one-time bosses, former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker, mourned the retired diplomat and praised his service. "As good as they come" was Baker's description.

President Barack Obama called Eagleburger a statesman who "devoted his life to the security of our nation and to strengthening our ties with allies and partners".

A straightforward diplomat whose exuberant style masked a hard-driving commitment to solving tangled foreign policy problems, Eagleburger held the top post at the State Department for five months when Baker resigned in the summer of 1992 to help Bush in an unsuccessful bid for re-election.

As Baker's deputy, Eagleburger had taken on a variety of difficult assignments, including running the department bureaucracy. Baker often was abroad, working on Middle East problems, German reunification and the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving Eagleburger to tend to the home front.

Eagleburger told The Associated Press in 1990 that he operated "sort of by osmosis. You get a feel how he (Baker) would react to a situation."

He did not fit the image of the office.

He was hugely overweight. He chain-smoked cigarettes, sometimes with an aspirator to ease chronic asthma. He was afflicted with a muscle disease.

Born on August 1 1930 in Milwaukee, Eagleburger graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He grew up in a Republican family, once telling a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal that "my father was somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan".

Eagleburger remained a Republican, but of a more moderate stripe.

Over 27 years in the foreign service, he served in the Nixon administration as executive assistant to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as President Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Yugoslavia, and as an assistant secretary of state and then under-secretary of state in the first Reagan administration.

In subsequent years, he was available to offer advice, along with other former senior officials, to Hillary Rodham Clinton as she prepared for the job of secretary of state.

Bush called Eagleburger "one of the most capable and respected diplomats our foreign service ever produced, and I will be ever grateful for his wise, no-nonsense counsel during those four years of historic change in our world."

In a statement, Bush said that "during one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein began attacking Israel with Scud missiles trying cynically and cruelly to bait them into the conflict, we sent Larry to Israel to preserve our coalition. It was an inordinately complex and sensitive task, and his performance was nothing short of heroic."

Baker said Eagleburger "was a legend in the US Foreign Service, a consummate professional who served his country expertly and with great dignity as a selfless diplomat."

He said his former colleague was "superb at divining trouble and heading it off. That's why he became the first Foreign Service officer in history to rise to deputy secretary of state and later to secretary of state. Simply stated, Larry Eagleburger was as good as they come - loyal, hard-working and intelligent, a trifecta for an American diplomat."

"Larry believed in the strength of America's values, and he fought for them around the world," Hillary Clinton said today. "He was outspoken, but always the consummate diplomat. Even in retirement, Larry remained a staunch advocate for the causes he believed in. He never stopped caring, contributing, and speaking out."

Eagleburger was married to the former Marlene Ann Heinemann, who died last year. Her family was in the bakery business in Milwaukee. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.

Their home was a 40-acre (16-hectare) estate west of Charlottesville, Virginia, where Eagleburger enjoyed listening to opera and playing poker, which he often did with reporters accompanying him and Kissinger on long overseas flights.

"Lawrence is not a worrier," his wife once said. "If he thinks he can do something about a problem, he does. If he doesn't, he can compartmentalise it and come back to it."