William J. Jorden, U.S. ambassador to Panama from 1974 to 1978 and a former Gazette reporter and seasonal visitor, died Feb. 20 in New Bedford of lung cancer. He was 85 and had made his home in North Dartmouth in recent years. During his years as ambassador, he played an important role in negotiations that led to the 1977 turnover of the canal to Panama. His 746-page book, Panama Odyssey, about the negotiations and his years in Panama, is, according to Lambert’s Cove resident Thomas R. Goethals, grandson of the canal builder Gen. George W. Goethals, “one of the very best accounts of former President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to return the canal to its legitimate owners.” At work now on a biography of his grandfather, Tom Goethals has found the Jorden work “immeasurably valuable” in his own research.

In the mid-1940s, Bill Jorden became acquainted with the Vineyard through his then wife, Eleanor Harz Jorden, whose family had been longtime seasonal residents of East Chop.

Before his Panama post, Mr. Jorden had served with the State Department as it formed its early positions on Viet Nam. He had always urged moderation in policies toward that country and was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks of the 1960s that finally led to an end to the fighting there.

Bill Jorden was born on May 3, 1923, in Bridger, Mont. His college studies at Yale were interrupted by World War II, in which he served in the U.S. Army and began the study of Japanese. At the war’s end, he returned to Yale where he earned a degree in international relations in 1947 and a master’s degree in journalism the following year from the Columbia School of Journalism. The summer in between, he had his first experience with journalism at the Gazette. In 1951, writing an article for a magazine designed to teach English to Japanese students, Mr. Jorden described the Gazette as “one of the best country newspapers in America.”

After Columbia, Mr. Jorden became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and then for the Associated Press, covering the Far East for them. In 1952, he joined the New York Times, covering Korea and Japan for them before becoming bureau chief in Moscow. He was part of the team there that received a Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting in 1958.

The following year, he returned to the United States, to the Washington bureau of the New York Times, reporting on the State Department, which he joined in 1961. During his Washington years, James B. Reston was the New York Times Washington bureau chief and, some years later, it was at Mr. Jorden’s Chilmark home that Mr. Reston, visiting the Vineyard, was introduced by Bill Jorden to the Gazette’s then-publisher and editor, Henry Beetle Hough. Mr. Hough was seeking a buyer for the Gazette, and found it in Mr. Reston.

In 1966, Mr. Jorden became an assistant to Walt W. Rostow, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Security advisor. In 1972, he joined the National Security Council as a Latin American expert. Later he was a writer in residence at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.

Mr. Jorden’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Mildred Xiarhos Jorden, whom he married in 1972, and three children from his first marriage, his son Temple and two daughters, Eleanor Haller-Jorden and Telva Jorden; and six grandchildren.