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Home  /  Articles  /  “A bull with no china shop”: the diplomat who embodied the
many sides of American optimism
June 10, 2019
Tom Fletcher, Prospect Magazine
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“A bull with no china shop”: the diplomat who embodied the many sides of
American optimism
Diplomat Richard Holbrooke was at the heart of America's greatest foreign policy
challenges in the latter 20th century — and represented the end of a national
era.
 
“Above all, not too much zeal,” Talleyrand famously counselled his fellow
diplomats. Richard Holbrooke was a keen student of history, but he never got the
memo.
 
This giant of American diplomacy—who worked for Democratic presidents from
Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, and who helped broker peace in the former
Yugoslavia—was certainly undiplomatic. Holbrooke sought to bend history with his
self-belief. He earned the grudging respect of Slobodan Miloševi?, and his name
became a Serbian verb—holbrukciti—to get your way through brute force. Needy,
offensive, mischievous, sceptical, abrasive, he combined physical courage, moral
passion, boundless energy and a sense of fun. He elbowed into other people’s
cars, lifts, meetings, portfolios, peace processes, offices, even
bathrooms—anything to further his agenda, and his career. He rarely paid for the
lunch, cab, apartment, failed marriage or failed policy. “If Richard asks you
for something, just say yes,” Henry Kissinger once said. “If you say no, you’ll
eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful.”
 
Holbrooke became the embodiment of an outward-looking, muscular US foreign
policy. But was he swimming against the tide of history? And does he deserve a
central place in that history? George Packer’s unsparing new biography tries to
find the answers. Packer has had great access to Holbrooke’s papers and friends.
But this is no hagiography—he gives his subject more credit than that.
 
Holbrooke’s Jewish parents fled Europe and he was born in New York in 1941, the
year Henry Luce defined the American century. They buried their own history by
giving him as many non-Jewish names (Richard Charles Albert) as they could cram
on a passport; his father had already changed his own surname from Goldbraich.
He was marked by his father’s early death, when Richard was 15. “Throughout his
life, the person whose approval he needed most was no longer there to be
impressed,” writes Packer. He carried with him the memory of their visit to the
construction site of the new United Nations building in 1949, aged eight. His
father told him the postwar world could be different. Holbrooke took it as a
mission statement.
 
Inspired by Kennedy, his first posting was as a civilian officer in Vietnam,
from 1963. His idealism soon faded amid the chaos and incompetence. As the US
got bogged down, colleagues circulated Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—“I
never knew a man who had better motives for the trouble he caused.” And the
Peanuts cartoon of Charlie Brown wondering, “how can we lose when we’re so
sincere?!”
 
In 1969, Holbrooke wrote a letter to his friend Tony Lake who had recently
joined President Nixon’s National Security Council: “we have to get out of
Vietnam. The war has already spread a poison through our nation which will take
years to neutralise.” When Saigon fell, he wrote in his notebook of “one simple,
horrible truth: we didn’t belong there, we had no business doing what we were
doing, even the good parts of it.”
 
After Vietnam he became the youngest ever US assistant secretary under Jimmy
Carter. Later, after years out of office, he was a popular ambassador to Germany
(1993-4), and became Bill Clinton’s envoy in the Balkans, which turned out to be
his finest hour.
 
When Clinton complained that he was “getting creamed” for his inaction,
Holbrooke seized his chance. “He gave the impression of being always in motion,”
writes Packer, “sweeping with his entourage in and out of airports and hotels,
crowding each day with meetings deep into the night, always pushing the pace,
and this intensity created momentum for the next small breakthrough.” After
watching another theatrical display of anger, one sceptical colleague conceded
that he was “a true character. Can’t fail but like him. He is something to
watch.”
 
Holbrooke, who was no dove, persuaded Clinton to “bomb for peace.” At one
negotiation in Dayton, Ohio, he seated the Bosnian Serbs below a Tomahawk cruise
missile hanging from the ceiling, the same kind that had been fired at their
forces. He bullied, caressed and corralled the factions towards the 1995 Dayton
Accord, which brought peace between the warring Balkan factions. It would never
have happened without him.
 
The Holbrooke legend was burnished by the man himself. He served as ambassador
to the UN (1999-2001), where he directed his talents to negotiating US dues,
thus saving the institution from decline. He put Aids on the Security Council
agenda for the first time, and recognised early on that modern diplomacy would
take place beyond the maps and chaps inside the room.
 
Throughout his career, Holbrooke was a writer-diplomat. When the US team in
Saigon was banned from talking to journalists, he sought them out. He leaked
relentlessly. “In journalism I was regarded as a bureaucrat, in government as a
journalist, so I have felt an outsider in both.” He took two years off to edit
Foreign Policy.
 
The wheels came off when he became envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan under
Obama. His abrasive style quickly led to a fallout with Afghan President Hamid
Karzai, a man who—the greatest sin for Holbrooke—wanted power for its own sake.
He alienated the US embassy, the generals and Washington. Obama regarded him as
a prima donna who lectured him about Vietnam. Excluded and humiliated—the White
House didn’t even tell him when Obama was in Afghanistan—he became a shadow of
his former self, sulking through meetings when Obama needed him to argue against
a proposed troop surge. Perhaps Holbrooke recognised that if he applied the real
lesson of Vietnam—don’t get involved in the first place—he’d be out of a job. At
one point, Obama’s National Security Adviser fired him, only to be overruled by
Hillary Clinton.
 
In December 2010 Richard Holbrooke collapsed from a heart attack in Clinton’s
office. But by that time the “Holbrooke” of legend was already dead.
 
Holbrooke always marched towards gunfire. In Vietnam, he asked to be sent to the
Mekong Delta, which he called a “supremely unlivable place.” For Packer, he was
always “unafraid to face the truth, cared enough to act on it, and was willing
to take the consequences.” Even as a junior official, he questioned President
Johnson’s Vietnam strategy. He wrote parts of the Pentagon Papers, which took
apart US policy. Ideas mattered to him, and the more fiendish the problem, the
better.
 
But his “disorderly presence” was also his greatest flaw. “The propulsion from
idea to action was never broken by self-scrutiny,” writes Packer. He couldn’t
hide his ambition. He lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize, and elbowed Holocaust
survivors off the bus taking them to an Auschwitz commemoration. A colleague in
Vietnam advised him that “you will move faster if you slow down.” But it was too
late. One girlfriend wrote in a Newsweek piece taking down the culture of
Washington that “the only romance in town is the one with power.” Everyone read
this as an attack on Holbrooke. He had it framed.
 
For Packer, such flaws define the man. For him, “idealism without egotism is
feckless; egotism without idealism is destructive.” Yet this idealist and
egotist was destructive. He was an absent husband and indifferent father; he
exaggerated his own role at the expense of more dignified colleagues.
 
The hatred towards him was often visceral. Kissinger called him “the most
viperous character I know around this town,” quite something from that quarter.
When Holbrooke put his boots up on the sofa of Obama’s UN Ambassador Susan Rice,
she gave him the finger. “I like Deek,” said Serb leader Slobodan Miloševic´,
“but for the sake of his career he would eat small children for breakfast.” Vice
President Joe Biden couldn’t stand him.
 
Yet those under him were fiercely loyal. One British colleague told me that
“working for him was a constant workshop in being alive. He had your back.”
Ronan Farrow, who worked with him at State, has called him a father figure. And
we get occasional glimpses of sensitivity. When friends organised his 50th
birthday, he was hurt by speeches highlighting his flaws. “Never, never forget
Dick’s fragility, his vulnerability,” his friend Les Gelb said at his funeral.
 
Amid the three marriages and numerous affairs, the relationship that stands out
is with his friend and rival Tony Lake, who went to Saigon to work in the
embassy the same year. They were inseparable as thrusting young diplomats in
Vietnam and Washington. But then Holbrooke had an affair with Lake’s wife. They
circled each other like hawks for the rest of their careers. Holbrooke replaced
Lake as key aide to the ambassador in Saigon, and then again at State in 1970
when Lake’s doubts over Vietnam become too grave. They argued throughout Lake’s
tenure as Bill Clinton’s NSA: over who went in the car, whether Holbrooke should
nod in meetings with the president and—most importantly—how America should
behave in the world. “What the hell happened to those guys in Vietnam?” asked
Clinton. Holbrooke called Lake “a control freak who is now out of control… the
person in greatest denial of himself of anyone I’ve ever known.”
 
Lake allowed his nemesis to get the Balkans job, through gritted teeth: “it
might take that kind of shamelessness to push the ball over the line,” he
admitted. For a brief moment, they reunited and wrote the strategy together. And
then Holbrooke ignored Lake’s contributions. Later, when a book by a former NSC
official shared the credit for the Dayton peace with Lake, Holbrooke tried to
have it blocked and its author fired from Brookings. The final straw was when
Holbrooke, as UN Ambassador, blundered through Lake’s mediation on Ethiopia and
Eritrea. They never spoke again.
 
But perhaps Lake understood him better than anyone. “What Holbrooke wants
attention for is what he’s doing, not what he is. That’s a very serious quality
and his saving grace.” When Holbrooke died, Lake slipped quietly in to his UN
memorial in New York.
 
Most biographies skip past the wilderness years, but Packer gives us great
insights into how they shaped his subject. What does the man of destiny do when
destiny is eluding him? He frets and manoeuvres. He makes joyless money and
dubious friends. He seethes at his enemies and resents his allies. He settles
scores. He writes books that don’t get read, bar the index. He gets more
obsequious with those in power, and more obnoxious with everyone else. He sleeps
with other people’s wives and hunts for a better-connected wife for himself. He
invents new ways of describing old diplomatic ideas. He watches friends die or
peter out, and celebrates or mourns their lack of impact on history. He becomes
a bull with no china shop.
 
Packer uses Holbrooke to say something about half a century of American decline.
Holbrooke starts out amid towering figures, who saw a ruined world at their feet
and didn’t just “grab for land and gold like the great men of earlier empires.
Instead they built the structures of an international order that would endure
for three generations.” That scaffolding looks increasingly fragile.
 
For Packer, US foreign policy failures show “we’re no good at it because we
don’t have the knowledge or patience, few of our people are willing to learn the
history and language and put the years in… It comes down to our belief in
ourselves. If we are good… we won’t need to force other people to do what we
want.” Meanwhile the rest of the world swings between frustration at too much
interference and despair at too little engagement. Like Holbrooke, the best and
worst are inseparable.
 
We now know that the nationalism Holbrooke challenged in the Balkans was not
just the death throes of the 20th century. We can only imagine what Holbrooke
would have made of a US president who now treats Nato and the UN as a business
deal, befriends tyrants and alienates allies, and leaves the state department
humiliated. Holbrooke represented the end of an era when America didn’t have to
tell the world—or itself—that it was great.
 
Could Holbrooke have thrived among today’s less forgiving moral codes, social
media scrutiny and risk averse bureaucracies? Probably not. Diplomats tend to be
the ripples in the pond, not the stone that creates them. Yet his friend Les
Gelb captures an enduring reality that many modern diplomats would acknowledge.
“Foreign policy makes no sense. The people in charge make decisions based on the
politics of the moment, or on an ideology that bears little relation to human
reality, or on sheer ignorance compounded by wishful thinking. Or they don’t
make a decision at all—events gallop ahead and the decision-makers stumble to
keep up. Then they spend the rest of their lives pretending that they knew what
they were doing all along and justifying something that made no sense in the
first place.”
 
Diplomats might also recognise that this vocation can destroy relationships and
lives. Pressure, long days and flights, endless paperwork, a merciless press and
the frustrations of having no objective standard against which to measure their
performance all contribute. As a result, observes Packer, diplomats obsess over
office size and proximity to power, presence in the right meetings and protocol.
More fundamentally, many “feel a profound sense of responsibility for matters
that are ultimately uncontrollable.” Fast forward to Iraq or Syria, and some
things never change. Yet the idealism keeps calling them back.
 
Holbrooke “didn’t want to miss a minute of his life.” Neither should we. He was
never boring or insipid. Like Holbrooke, Packer’s account barrels along,
brimming with mischief, verve and a sense of history. Unlike Holbrooke, it is
tender and self-aware. “In that unfinished space where the souls of the almost
great clamour to be recognised, he was still struggling, striving, yearning for
more.”
 
And what of that place for him in “ruthless” history? His doctrine, vindicated
at Dayton, was that if the US fails to act no one else will, and other people’s
problems will become America’s. Towards the end, Holbrooke weeps through a
performance of South Pacific, “the sense of loss of American optimism and our
feeling that we could do anything.” They play an excerpt at his funeral. But it
is too soon to bury this idea itself. It will find its place again.
 
Blessed are the peacemakers, the unofficial UN motto goes, for they will be
hated by everyone. But Dayton stands out as a high point of late 20th-century
diplomacy. Every secretary of state wants their Holbrooke moment, but few have
the patience and drive to get it. And Holbrooke’s other success in getting
Carter to take in 1.5m Indochinese refugees should help us to forgive him the
tantrums and narcissism. “Human suffering didn’t plunge him into psychological
paralysis or philosophical despair. It drove him to furious action… his egotism
and idealism in perfect balance to achieve something good.” As Kofi Annan said,
he always came with good intentions, however well disguised.
 
Pity the ambitious man who does not attain his ambitions. And pity the man who
does. Perhaps Holbrooke’s old friend Strobe Talbott deserves the last word,
telling Bill Clinton that “pound for pound, ounce for ounce, Dick is the most
talented, energetic, experienced, able, articulate broad-gauge foreign policy
operative of our time. Also a royal pain in the ass.”
 
Photograph description: George Packer’s “Our Man” reveals a portrait of a
diplomat who embodied America’s outward-looking muscular foreign policy, at a
time when the country did not try to convince itself it was once great. Photo
credit: Getty Images
 
Click here to read the article in full.

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