Our Man

Richard Holbrooke passed on a decade ago but is still recalled by everyone connected with American foreign policy. He was brilliant, egotistical, arrogant, pragmatic, and likely had more enemies than friends. A book about him, Our Man, by George Packer, now in paperback, presents him, warts and all, as perhaps the last huge, significant figure in U.S. diplomacy. 

He started in the Foreign Service school with the class of 1962, at a time when diplomacy was a prized career in the U.S. In his class was Anthony (Tony) Lake, who for the next thirty-plus years would be a close friend and colleague, and also rival and even enemy. Both were dispatched in the hothouse that was Vietnam as the quagmire was building. 

Holbrooke learned early how politicians never looked beyond the immediate problems. Kennedy more or less let the coup and murder of Diem happen. He watched as special assistant to Henry Cabot Lodge, dispatched to resolve the situation, failed as everyone else had and would in the future. Johnson got caught in the domino theory and fear of losing. 

But Vietnam was where Holbrooke insisted on going into the provinces and managing projects to help peasants and other Vietnamese country people. His pragmatism got him some results but, unlike the military, which really called the shots, and even the others there in the American civilian cadre, he knew it was an incipient disaster. It taught him a lot worth knowing and he used it well, but when he would bring up Vietnam thirty years later, none of the next generation wanted to hear it. 

His last assignment was Afghanistan. He was past his peak, the dividend of a hard-pushing life, and he was no more successful than anyone else in figuring a way out of America’s longest war. His brief included Pakistan, which was equally impossible to negotiate a solution. This didn’t stop Holbrooke from trying. Even after he had alienated almost everyone on all sides, he still kept at it and amazingly, all of these players would meet with him. He was pressing to add India to his terrain when he collapsed in the State Department and was dead half a day later of  aortic shredding.  

Holbrooke’s peak accomplishment was brokering a settlement of hostilities in Bosnia, a republic of t he former Yugoslavia. He had built contacts there for some years dating back to his service as Ambassador to Germany. This made it possible for him to move from meeting with Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, for the Serbs, with President Franco Tudjman of Croatia, and with Alija Izetbegović, President of Bosnia, representing the Bosnian Muslims. Holbrooke had met with the Bosnian Serbs, but their intractability led him to keep them out of the negotiations and have them represented by Milosevic.  

He brought them to Wright-Patterson air base outside Dayton, Ohio, in the U.S.m because he wanted this conference to occur here and because placing it on the huge base would isolate the parties. There was virtually no where to go off the base except for a small commercial strip. He didn’t know if he would havean agreement until the very last hour of the meeting. But his familiarity with the leaders enabled him to know when to push one or the other, especially Milosevic, who seemed completely concerned only with his internal political situation in Serbia. Reaching the agreement ended a long, terrible war with casualties and the coining of the term “ethnic cleansing”. 

Holbrooke had become Assistant Secretary df State for Far Eastern Affairs at a remarkably early age. His progress slowed thereafter. While he did become Ambassador to the United Nations and was effective there, he constantly battled with the White House National Security staff, no matter who was President or National Security Advisor. His best chance to become Secretary of State saw him nosed out by his later sponsor, Hillary Clinton (when she later became Secretary), who wanted her husband to name the first female Secretary—Madeleine Albright. 

Holbrooke had great regard for the postwar predecessors who he believed had created the firm structures that defined world relations until relatively recently. These were Marshall, Acheson, Harriman, Kennan, and their contemporaries in State and Defense. They were The Wise Men, as their story was entitled in the Walter Isaacson-Evan Thomas book.  

Packer aims to show that Holbrooke may have been the last of the great American diplomats who was larger than life and strived hard to make the U.S. an important but benevolent world power. He sees Holbrooke as emblematic of the gradual decline of American influence worldwide. In this view, even if this diplomat had been more diplomatic, the age of the masterful foreign policy leaders had passed. 

Packer’s judgment of Holbrooke as “almost great” is judicious, and makes his story all the more enthralling because of his personal quirks, They made him the fascinating character he was but they also limited his achievement.