Derek Chollet - The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World

Table of Contents

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
Whom every Man in arms should wish to be?
It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought:
Whose high endeavours are an inward light
That make the path before him always bright:
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes his moral being his prime care;...

Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward, persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpast:
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
For ever, and to noble deeds give birth,
Or He must go to dust without his fame,
And leave a dead unprofitable name,
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heavens applause;
This is the happy Warrior; this is He
Whom every Man in arms should wish to be.

William Wordsworth
from Character of the Happy Warrior

Preface

DEREK CHOLLET AND SAMANTHA POWER

R ichard Holbrooke loved history. He had a keen sense of the past and how it helps define contemporary choices. So in the days after he passed away so suddenly in December 2010, and his friends and colleagues tried to make sense of the loss, we shared tales of all the ways in which Holbrooke had shaped history and changed lives. Holbrooke stories flew back and forth over email; they populated websites; and they dominated dinner conversations and hallway run-ins. Lacking the ability to talk or write to Holbrooke, we consoled ourselves by talking and writing about Holbrooke. Some stories portrayed him as a once-ina-lifetime Great Man of History, some recalled his imperious side, but virtually all offered novel details on his trailblazing diplomacy, showing the large dent he made in the world around him.

This book is an effort to capture Richard Holbrookes contributions to that world, a world he altered and devoured. Our aim was to produce more than a memorial or celebration of his life; it was to assemble a book that offered fresh insight into the man whose presence is sorely missed and whose contributions are known in silhouette butwith the lone exception of his role in ending the war in Bosniain surprisingly sparse detail. The contributors to this book each had a special relationship with Holbrooke. They include journalists who reported on him, friends who worked with him, mentees who were shepherded by him, and even a two-time hostage whose release he tried to negotiate. The contributors delve into the most important phases of his career. They offer colorful portraits of the man and new reporting on events that he rarely discussed. Holbrooke was someone who elicited strong and diverse opinions, and each essay offers a unique window into his life story.

The contributors offer perspectives on the history that Holbrooke witnessed, chronicled, participated in, and ultimately shaped. In taking readers on a journey through Holbrookes life, the book also offers an up-close look at statecraft, journalism, politics, public service, and Americas role in the world. Here, we take our cue from Holbrooke himself, who in the opening chapter of his memoir, To End a War , quotes the British historian Eric Hobsbawm: For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, ones own life. Holbrooke was never a dispassionate inspector of anything, and nor, we are pleased to report, are the contributors to this book, as Holbrookes own life is both background toand window intosome of the most significant events in American and world history of the past fifty years.

This book follows Holbrookes career chronologically, from his days as a budding journalist at Brown University, to Vietnam, Bosnia, the United Nations, and Afghanistan. We see in every mission what we know motivated him from the very startas he wrote and underlined six times in his diary as a young man: PURPOSE.

Every one of these chapters testifies to the tremendous energy he put into pursuing concrete goals, and his achievements speak for themselves: authoring a volume of the Pentagon Papers at the age of twenty-seven; editing Foreign Policy magazine; handling the normalization of relations with China; negotiating the Dayton peace for Bosnia; pushing for NATO expansion eastward; creating the American Academy in Berlin; masterminding a historic deal to pay back nearly $1 billion in U.S. arrears to the UN; promoting the global recognition of AIDS as a national security threat, and enlisting more than two hundred companies in the effort to provide antiretroviral treatment to HIV-positive workers; and orchestrating the civilian surge in Afghanistan. In all of these missions, he married huge ambition with a gift for improvisation. He wanted to be at the center of things and, from the White House job he held at age twenty-six to his last mission as President Obamas Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, he constantly found a way to place himself there.

Holbrooke and Martonduring an eleven-countrytour of Africa when hewas UN Ambassador.Holbrooke spent a large part of his life on airplanesand hetreated them like anextension of his office.(Courtesy of KatiMarton)

Notable though his achievements are on their face, his impact comes to seem all the more remarkable when one gets a behind-the-scenes feel in these chapters for the personal risks Holbrooke took, the bureaucratic fights he waged, and the people he crossed, in order to get results. Whether you were or werent a fan of Richard Holbrooke, you will see in this book two simple truths. First, he made more of an impact in more places and on more issues than almost anybody appreciated and, arguably, more than anyone else. His reach and his range were staggering. And second, nothing about his achievements was foreordained; indeed most of his endeavors started with low odds of success. Without Holbrookes dreaming, his bullying, his irrepressible activism, and his chronic longing for impact, the history of the last half century could in fact look quite different. As James Traub writes in his essay, for Holbrooke, If its worth doing, its worth overdoing. That overdoing of his did not always win him friends, but it indisputably won him results.

Because writing was such a huge part of Holbrookes lifeas columnist, author, ghostwriter, and editorthis book also includes selections from his own pena small sample of the hundreds of articles he wrote over his career. In these writings, one hears the same distinct voice that has lodged permanently in our heads from conversationopinionated, authoritative, unrelenting, and attentive to the small details that grab an audiences attention and offer ballast to the larger argument. As a writer of articles out of government, or as a writer of memos inside government, Holbrookes purpose was the same: His readers should agree with him and do what he advised so as to make America more secure or some part of the world more peaceful.

EACH OF THE CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS BOOK HAS A DEMANDING DAY JOB, and yet none hesitated even a second when asked to contribute. All threw themselves into the writing task, conducting fresh interviews, poring over old diaries, letters, and primary source material, and regaling us with previously untold tales of Holbrooke in action. On reflection, it was probably hard for any of us to complain about the hazards of multitasking when our assignment was to write about perhaps the worlds greatest multitaskera man whose favorite word was urgent and who turned his double-fisted cell phone use into the stuff of legend. Nonetheless, we are enormously thankful to our fellow contributors, whose enthusiasm for Richard Holbrooke made it possible to meet our aims, which were threefold: to produce a book that would satisfy Holbrookes own high editorial standards; to capture his voice and his ambition such that it read like he was sitting across the dinner table; and to inspire would-be public servants to see the enormous good a single individual can do in a life crammed with activity and driven by purpose.