Richard Holbrooke: the Not-So-Quiet American

Book Reviews : 213 william a. schabas Richard Holbrooke: The Not-So-Quiet American George Packer. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. New York: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/1/213/5850073 by guest on 30 September 2021 Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. 608 pp. $30.00 (hardcover). The Balkans have now been without war, more or less, for two decades. Two entities of what was once the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are members of the European Union. All of Yugoslavia’s component parts belong to the Council of Europe and are subject to the European Court of Human Rights, with the exception of Kosovo. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has closed its doors, having dealt with more than 150 of the major war criminals from the conflicts in the 1990s (and a few from Macedonia in 2001). The Dayton Peace Agreement, negotiated in late 1995 in the United States under the Mephistophelian oversight of master diplomat Richard Holbrooke, occupies the center of Balkan peace. Tensions in the region and the manifest failure to build a coherent new state in Bosnia and Herzegovina are regularly attributed to flaws in the Dayton Agreement. Bosnia’s constitution, which is part of the Agreement, has been challenged by human rights courts for its failure to recognize the rights of minorities. Or, rather, other than the three domi- nant minorities. Yet for all of its shortcomings, the Dayton Agreement has lasted five more years than the last great European peace treaty, adopted at Versailles in 1919. The peace agreed at Dayton may be unsatisfactory but it is still better than the alternative. Richard Holbrooke’s own version of the Dayton negotiations, To End a War, was published in 1998. It might have been a brief to support a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor that the supremely ambitious Holbrooke sought openly, or the top job at the Department of State that was closed to him during the George W. Bush years. An alpha male with excessive testosterone levels, he must have been frustrated to see women in the top jobs, first Madeline Albright under Bill Clinton and then Hillary Clinton under Barack Obama. He died suddenly in 2010, just shy of his seventieth birthday, rushed to hospital from Hillary Clinton’s office where he had collapsed from an aneurism of the aorta. A more balanced account of the Dayton process, and of the life of Holbrooke generally, is provided by George Packer’s biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. An accomplished journal- ist, Packer obtained access to Holbrooke’s private papers, including his diaries, VC The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 214 : diplomatic history from his widow Kati Marton. He also interviewed almost 250 individuals who knew and worked with the man. The style of writing is familiar, conversational, and compelling. “You will have heard that he was a monstrous egotist,” writes Packer. “It’s true. It’s even worse than you’ve heard” (6). Holbrooke was involved in a tragic prologue to the Dayton negotiations. As he and Wesley Clark were speeding down Mount Igman to Sarajevo in a mili- tary convoy, an armored personnel carrier that followed them with three of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/1/213/5850073 by guest on 30 September 2021 Holbrooke’s senior colleagues left the road and somersaulted down the slope. In To End a War, Holbrooke described heroic conduct by Clark and himself as they attempted to access the burning vehicle and its unfortunate passengers. He dedicated the book to the three victims. But after interviewing those present, Packer concludes that Holbrooke’s account exaggerates his conduct and bears little resemblance to reality. Packer skips quickly over the childhood and adolescence of Richard Holbrooke. “Do you mind if we hurry through the early years?” he inquires. “There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school” (11). Some reviewers seem to have appreciated this abbreviated approach to biography. But perhaps we might have been told more about the young Holbrooke. Should a reader be required to trust the biographer’s assertion that there is nothing to be learned? Holbrooke’s diplomatic career began in his early twenties. After graduating from university, Holbrooke was focused initially on a future in journalism. Others might have started modestly, with a local paper, perhaps in a small com- munity. Typically, Holbrooke first applied to The New York Times and, when initially rebuffed, he chose to switch careers. Dean Rusk, the father of one of his high school mates, steered him to the Department of State and a diplomatic career. Within a year or so, now twenty-two years old, he was off to Vietnam. Actually, the job had little in common with diplomacy. In his position as a “rural affairs advisor,” Holbrooke’s job was to promote the “strategic hamlets” so as to win the euphemistically labelled “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese peasantry. He was not much more than a counter-insurgency operative, a cold warrior who operated under the protective shield of the world’s greatest army as it sought to master the political future of a small Asian country. Graham Greene is a familiar reference here. Holbrooke and his young colleagues studied The Quiet American, Greene’s clairvoyant tale of the twilight of French dominance in south-east Asia and the beginnings of U.S. efforts to take its place. Was Packer, too, inspired by Greene with his title, which echoes Our Man in Havana, a satire on incompetent and gullible intelligence agents? He does not explain nor does he really fulfill the promise of the book’s subtitle, which is more interesting and descriptive: to depict what he thinks Holbrooke’s role was in “the end of the American century” and why he thinks it has come to an end. Packer can be very hard on Holbrooke but at times he seems to be praising him with faint damns in grudging admiration. He describes the first year in Book Reviews : 215 Vietnam as “the best of Richard Holbrooke” (83). Packer observes that his ambition “still had a clean smell, and youth was working in his favor—physical courage, moral passion, the boundless energy and enthusiasm and sheer sense of fun, the skepticism, the readiness to talk straight to ambassadors and gener- als” (84). Holbrooke is credited with being one of the first to sense the futility of U.S. policy in Vietnam. At the time, huge numbers of young Americans put careers on hold in displays of public opposition to the war. Many of them left Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/1/213/5850073 by guest on 30 September 2021 the country as draft dodgers and deserters. Others accepted their fate and, perhaps stirred by misplaced patriotism, suffered life-changing injury and death on the battlefield. Packer does not present Holbrooke as a cynic. But as “our man” he reminds us that he was always a loyal soldier. Grasping the failure of the United States in Vietnam is not the same as opposing the illegal use of force and unlawful interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The career in State took a break for many years. Holbrooke became an investment banker, earning incomes far beyond the hopes of an energetic civil servant. His lifestyle evolved in accordance with the new prosperity. Apparently, he was not especially gifted in high finance but his personal networking skills compensated. Throughout his entire career, in its many permutations, Holbrooke had a very active personal life. The space that Packer saves by abbre- viating the first twenty years of the man’s life is put to use describing his multi- ple marriages, including a robust extra-marital dimension. Holbrooke returned to diplomacy following Bill Clinton’s election. He had a number of diplomatic responsibilities, including serving as Ambassador to Germany for a time. The high point of his career remains the three-week stint at Dayton in 1995. His name surfaced from time to time during prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. During his trial, Radovan Karadzic claimed that Holbrooke had promised him immunity from prosecution in exchange for removing himself from political life. He said Holbrooke had given his word but for “political reasons” he could not put any- thing in writing. The Tribunal dismissed the argument, not out of any doubt Holbrooke might have made such an undertaking but rather because he had no legal authority to do so. Hillary Clinton named him her special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke insisted upon parallels with Vietnam, which haunted his entire career. Fifty years had passed yet Holbrooke was still trying to “win”a war of intervention. Obama did not appreciate the references to Vietnam and, more generally, did not seem to care for Holbrooke at all. When he made an unannounced visit to Kabul in November 2010, the President neglected to con- sult with Holbrooke, let alone invite him aboard Air Force One. He died a few weeks later. doi: 10.1093/dh/dhaa043 Advance Access publication on June 1, 2020.

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