Tributes poured in immediately, from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to two of his one-time bosses, former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. "As good as they come" was Baker's description.
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 he 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 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.
Details of Eagleburger's death are not immediately available, but He was hugely overweight. He chain-smoked cigarettes, sometimes with an aspirator to ease chronic asthma. He was afflicted with a muscle disease.
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 A. Kissinger, as President Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Yugoslavia, and as an assistant secretary of state and then undersecretary 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."