Remembering Richard
Holbrooke
By
JACOB HEILBRUNN
THE UNQUIET AMERICAN
Richard Holbrooke in the World
Edited by Derek Chollet and Samantha Power
Illustrated. 383 pp. PublicAffairs. $29.99.
In the spring of 1991 Strobe Talbott, who would
become deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, visited Richard
Holbrooke at his weekend home in Connecticut. After playing tennis and going
for a swim, they had brunch at a neighbor’s house. But when Holbrooke saw a
trampoline on the far side of a manicured lawn, he excused himself, hopped onto
the canvas and insisted that Talbott join him. “The result,” Talbott recalls,
“was an exceedingly amateurish blend of gymnastic duet and duel — sometimes
semicoordinated, sometimes dangerously competitive and constantly accompanied
by talk, most of it coming from Richard. The subject, naturally, was world
affairs.”
It was vintage Holbrooke. He could never stop
talking about what was wrong in the world and how it could be fixed, preferably
by himself. Holbrooke, who died in 2010 while serving as President Obama’s
special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wasn’tinterested in
foreign policy; he was consumed by it. Though his seemingly
inexhaustible energy and fervor brought him service under each Democratic
president since John F. Kennedy, his desire for power was so brazen that it
impeded him from attaining the job he coveted most. Holbrooke, who had
apprenticed under doughty establishment figures like Henry Cabot Lodge, W.
Averell Harriman and Dean Rusk, never became secretary of state. But like
Harriman, whom Kennedy admiringly referred to as a “separate sovereignty,” he
had a knack for maneuvering himself from the sidelines into the center of the
diplomatic fray, all on his own terms.
When he wasn’t occupying a government post,
Holbrooke traveled constantly, and he published several hundred articles. A
skillful writer, Holbrooke had a keen interest in European history (and was
responsible for the establishment of the American Academy in Berlin). He was
co-author of Clark Clifford’s illuminating memoir “Counsel to the President.”
He also wrote the acclaimed “To End a War,” an account of his negotiations to
bring the Bosnian war to a close in 1995. Now Derek Chollet and Samantha Power
have assembled “The Unquiet American,” a festschrift-like tribute to Holbrooke
that includes excerpts from his own writing. The result is a fascinating book.
Holbrooke, who grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y., always
seemed to possess a preternatural instinct for where the action was. As the
student editor of Brown University’s Daily Herald, he traveled to Europe in
1960 and wangled a temporary position with The New York Times to help cover the
four-power summit in Paris. As E. Benjamin Skinner reports in a crisp essay
about Holbrooke’s early years, he got to witness Khrushchev blow up the
conference with a two-and-a-half-hour tirade about the perfidy of capitalist
countries.
Inspired by John Kennedy, Holbrooke entered the
Foreign Service in 1962 and was soon stationed in Vietnam. There he became
friends with journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, who were
skeptical about the war. Upon returning to Washington, he made a beeline for
the White House, where he became a special assistant to the deputy national
security adviser Robert W. Komer at the age of 26. He also helped draft the
Pentagon Papers — “The process by which the American government came to
increase its support for pacification,” he wrote, “is disorderly and haphazard”
— and was a junior member of the American delegation to the 1968 Paris peace
talks. Yet despite the disastrous conduct of the war he had witnessed
firsthand, Holbrooke never concluded, as George McGovern’s 1972 presidential
campaign slogan had it, that the moment had arrived for America to come home.
On the contrary, by the 1990s Holbrooke was one of
the premier liberal hawks during the Serbian onslaught against Bosnia, which
included herding Muslims into camps like Omarska. It wasn’t so much that he had
views about foreign policy. He had convictions. He announced in Foreign Affairs
that Bosnia was “the greatest collective security failure of the West since the
1930s,” extremely strong words from an official serving in the Clinton State
Department. When it came to Kosovo, the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen
writes that despite his years of conversations with Slobodan Milosevic,
Holbrooke had no hesitation about supporting military action: “When Milosevic
balked, NATO bombed — and just over a year later Milosevic would be ousted and
make his way to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.” Cohen adds
about Holbrooke, “I have no doubt that the free and stable Europe he worked so
tirelessly to build was also his own American retort to the horrors of
Auschwitz and Omarska.”
What none of the contributors to this volume mention,
however, is that the efficacy of air power in the Balkans led inexorably to the
delusive belief that it would be a simple matter to wage war in Iraq. It is an
unfortunate omission. Holbrooke was quite explicit in arguing during the run-up
to the war that while Saddam Hussein should be removed by a coalition of
powers, George W. Bush was essentially on the right path. Speaking on “Charlie
Rose” in September 2002, for example, he said the president had ended the
disarray of that summer with “a beautifully crafted, beautifully delivered
speech a week ago at the U.N., where he didn’t change his positions — an inch.”
He continued: “I think Saddam Hussein is far and away the most dangerous person
in leadership in the world today, and removing him, which is not related to
Sept. 11, is a legitimate goal, just as removing Milosevic was a legitimate
goal.” Not quite. America had responded to Serbian aggression. The Iraq
conflict, by contrast, was a preventive war. Isn’t it sometimes a bit too easy
to slide from liberal moralism about human rights violations to endorsing the
use of American military force abroad?
Holbrooke himself had to grapple with the limits of
American power when he tried to clean up the mess left behind by the Bush
administration in Afghanistan. But here he once more found intractable terrain
that was as forbidding in its own way as the jungles of Vietnam. One of his
first moves was to confront Afghan President Hamid Karzai, but his threats and
bluster went nowhere. Nor did he ever really earn the confidence of President
Obama, who regarded him warily from the outset. It was Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton who understood his talents and helped ensure that he become
special envoy. According to Gordon M. Goldstein, Holbrooke was particularly dismayed
by three glaring similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan: “the existence
of an indefensible border harboring enemy sanctuaries; American reliance on a
corrupt partner government; and, most critically, the embrace of
counterinsurgency doctrine, which he had learned through painful experience was
an exceedingly difficult military and civilian strategy to execute.” He pushed
successfully for several pragmatic policies, including direct negotiations with
the Taliban.
Holbrooke was not unaccustomed to being a singular
figure. In a handsome eulogy to George Kennan in 2005, he observed: “In today’s
Washington, with its emphasis on orthodox thinking, such a person could never
rise inside the government. . . . This is a great loss, because, as the life of
George F. Kennan shows, individual, original thinking by one lonely person can
sometimes illuminate and guide us better than all the high-level panels and
commissions and interagency meetings.” That might also serve as an appropriate
epitaph for Holbrooke.
Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book
Review, is a senior editor at The National Interest.
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