Jean Gerard, 58, Reagan Envoy Who Led U.S. to Leave Unesco

Jean Broward Shevlin Gerard, who as America's permanent representative at Unesco played a key role in President Reagan's decision to pull out of the agency in 1984, died of cancer at her home in Paris yesterday. She was 58.

Drago Najman, a friend and former senior Unesco offical, confirmed her death by telephone from Paris, where Mrs. Gerard had been living while undergoing treatment.

Active in Republican politics, Mrs. Gerard was appointed representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1981 with a mandate from the Reagan Administration to clean up an agency that in its view was badly managed and had become increasingly politicized and anti-Western under its director general, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal.

The outspoken Mrs. Gerard tried to negotiate changes at Unesco headquarters in Paris, but quickly ran into opposition from Mr. M'Bow and his senior staff.

Mrs. Gerard and Mr. M'Bow also found themselves at odds over the developing world's campaign to create what it termed a New World Information and Communications Order to be administered by Unesco.

This new order was intended to curb the industrialized world's perceived monopoly on the flow of information by drawing up a new code of conduct for journalists and the work they do. But the proposal was opposed by the United States as an infringement of press freedom.

On Dec. 28, 1983, the Reagan Administration abandoned its efforts to negotiate change at Unesco when Mrs. Gerard gave Mr. M'Bow notice of America's intention to withdraw from the organization on Dec. 31, 1984, and to end its financial support of the agency, cutting its budget by a quarter. Subsequently Britain and Singapore also withdrew.

None have yet returned, although Mr. M'Bow was replaced in 1987 by Federico Mayor, a Spaniard who is regarded as more moderate, and the campaign for a new information order has been abandoned.

In 1985, Mrs. Gerard was named Ambassador to Luxembourg, serving there until 1989. She was a director of the Youth Foundation, the N.Y. Genealogical and Biographical Society and the Child Health Foundation.

Born in Portland, Ore. in 1938, she graduated from Vassar College in 1959. She married James Watson Gerard, a United States Army officer, the same year. He died in 1987. She earned her law degree from Fordham University in 1977.

She is survived by a son, James, and a daughter, Harriet.