Fisher isn't involved behind the scenes in the ongoing Iraq crisis, although he says he has talked extensively with several of his friends in the White House and has written articles cautioning against the use of force. Still, Fisher's career, which has spanned the greater part of the past half-century, hardly seems to have run out of steam.

Last May, Fisher ran a workshop for nearly 50 diplomats from Warsaw Pact and NATO countries. And next week, Fisher will coordinate a five-day course for diplomats in West Germany.

Fisher succinctly explains his resolve to continue such efforts: "When the president wants to see you, you tend to do it."

Fisher the Meteorologist

Of course, Fisher hasn't always been jet-setting through the continents to train presidents and diplomats.

After finishing up at Harvard College in 1943, where he concentrated in international relations, Fisher took part in the fight against Japan as a member of a weather reconnaissance team. Fisher says the experience of flying a plane while teaching others how to identify the weather sparked a life-long pursuit of being directly involved in events, instead of just studying them.

"It's the same stuff that's in the books, but it felt totally different--you've been there," he says.

As a result of this newfound desire for worldly experience, Fisher followed up his Harvard Law School education in 1946 by going to Paris with Averell Harriman, a top State Department official, to work on the Marshall Plan. Fisher says he was selected for the mission, along with former Yale president Kingman Brewster, because he had "pretty good grades."

Fisher returned to the U.S. to work for prominent Washington law firm. Since it specialized in international disputes, the young Fisher continued to hone his negotiation skills overseas, in varied places such as Denmark, Iran and Pakistan.

At that point, Fisher was ready for the rough-and-tumble world of arguing cases for the government, winning his first eight cases he argued for the Solicitor General's office in front of the Supreme Court. Fisher then asked his supervisor for a "tough" case, but he says he learned more from the response than he did from his previous string of victories.

"He said, 'did you ever think what would happen if the government won every case?'" Fisher says. "That's kind of stuck with me. More important than every victory is working each case out."

"People ask who's winning this negotiation," Fisher says. "[If] you ask who's winning this marriage, you're not doing very well."

Fisher finally decided to return to the Law School as a professor, ready to put onto paper the negotiation theories he had already been practicing. In 1979, Fisher became director and co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, which has also worked with the Program on Negotiation, an umbrella group composed of negotiation researchers from Harvard, Tufts and M.I.T. that was founded in 1983.

Providing a Framework

As director of the project, Fisher has become a major figure in the study of negotiation. Those in the field say that perhaps Fisher's greatest academic contributions lie in the way he has provided a larger framework for important earlier theoretical work that had gone largely unnoticed.