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| 'To End A War' in 1990's |
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| In 2000's |
My comment: An outstanding, brilliant diplomat, probably accomplished more than Kissinger did for the US. A very colourful person who conducted diplomacy in much of his own way - did not not shy away from befriending dictators. He is widely quoted (in obituaries) for the following 1999 words:
"If you can prevent the deaths of people still alive, you're not doing a disservice to those already killed trying to do so. And so I make no apologies for negotiating with Milosevic and even worse people, provided one doesn't lose one's point of view."
Kissinger said of Holbrooke:
"If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes. If you say no, you'll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful."
Colourful adjectives and pictures such as 'physical, feisty, bulldozer, the raging bull' have been used to describe Holbrooke the diplomat.
Notable for the Dayton Agreement which ended the Balkan war. Of Jewish parentage, raised as a Quaker, but turned out to be atheist, according to his mother. Married three times.
Died on Monday December 13. 2010 caused by a torn aorta. [A torn aorta is a rip in the inner wall of the body's largest artery. The result is serious internal bleeding, a loss of normal blood flow and possible complications in organs affected by the resulting lack of blood, according to medical experts. Without surgery it generally leads to rapid death.]
You may not agree with some of the things he did, but you have to admit he did work for his country's interest, and he had given his best, up to the last hours of his life. Above all, he seemed to have truly believed in what he did.
Here is an obituary that appears today on the New Yorker:REMEMBERING HOLBROOKE
Posted by Steve Coll
It was not easy to construct a quiet hour or two with Richard Holbrooke. I saw him regularly, as did other journalists and researchers who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but a long sit-down took some effort. Holbrooke was an accessible, open, and attentive person, but he was also in perpetual motion. He moved from meeting to meeting, conversation to conversation, and if you managed to sequester him somewhere for fifteen minutes or more, his cell phone was sure to ring—Islamabad, Kabul, the Secretary of State, somebody.
Earlier this year, however, we managed to arrange a private lunch in Washington on a Saturday. He invited me to meet him at the Four Seasons Hotel, near his home in Georgetown. The dining room at the hotel is not quite the watering hole for the wealthy and famous that it is in Manhattan, but it is a Washington-limited facsimile. When the Ambassador arrived the maître d’ attended him lavishly, scolding the waiter who had initially greeted him for failing to assign him an appropriately expansive and exclusive table.
He was carrying that morning’s Financial Times. He marvelled over an article he was reading about I. M. Pei and he wanted to talk about architecture for a while. As I had gotten to know him a little, I had discovered that he would speak about subjects such as acting or trends in academic history with genuine passion. He sometimes preferred those topics to the repetitive nuances of South Asia’s dysfunctional politics. He had a reputation for creating drama around himself; he was genuinely a theatrical man, in the sense of being physical and full of emotion and gesture. I came to think that he lived the way he did in part to avoid boredom.
While we ate lunch, Jerry Seinfeld and some of his entourage entered the dining room; Seinfeld was a guest at the hotel. “Jerry!” Holbrooke shouted, warmly. They were neighbors, it turned out, in New York and Telluride. We stood for introductions and chit-chat. Holbrooke asked what Seinfeld was working on and the comedian talked about his new reality-television show. In mid-explanation, however, Holbrooke’s cell phone rang. It was Robert Mueller, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and so the Ambassador had to interrupt Seinfeld to take the call. Eventually we returned to our table and resumed our discussion about the Waziristans and the rest.
Two years ago, Richard Holbrooke actively sought and embraced his assignment as Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. That by itself made him an unusual character; who else would relish such a deeply difficult, politically unrewarding, high-risk job? He travelled to the region repeatedly before President Obama took office, and he read into his prospective subject in unusual depth. He knew that the portfolio he had chosen might fall apart on him disastrously or damage the record he had created for himself at Dayton, Ohio, where he mediated a durable end to the brutal Bosnian war. He loved his assignment anyway. It was anything but dull. He understood why the war mattered and how it had evolved. He never shaded or spun the facts. He accepted the possibility of failure but counselled boldness anyway. These are not common qualities in diplomats, in my experience. He will be missed.
It was not easy to construct a quiet hour or two with Richard Holbrooke. I saw him regularly, as did other journalists and researchers who worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but a long sit-down took some effort. Holbrooke was an accessible, open, and attentive person, but he was also in perpetual motion. He moved from meeting to meeting, conversation to conversation, and if you managed to sequester him somewhere for fifteen minutes or more, his cell phone was sure to ring—Islamabad, Kabul, the Secretary of State, somebody.
Earlier this year, however, we managed to arrange a private lunch in Washington on a Saturday. He invited me to meet him at the Four Seasons Hotel, near his home in Georgetown. The dining room at the hotel is not quite the watering hole for the wealthy and famous that it is in Manhattan, but it is a Washington-limited facsimile. When the Ambassador arrived the maître d’ attended him lavishly, scolding the waiter who had initially greeted him for failing to assign him an appropriately expansive and exclusive table.
He was carrying that morning’s Financial Times. He marvelled over an article he was reading about I. M. Pei and he wanted to talk about architecture for a while. As I had gotten to know him a little, I had discovered that he would speak about subjects such as acting or trends in academic history with genuine passion. He sometimes preferred those topics to the repetitive nuances of South Asia’s dysfunctional politics. He had a reputation for creating drama around himself; he was genuinely a theatrical man, in the sense of being physical and full of emotion and gesture. I came to think that he lived the way he did in part to avoid boredom.
While we ate lunch, Jerry Seinfeld and some of his entourage entered the dining room; Seinfeld was a guest at the hotel. “Jerry!” Holbrooke shouted, warmly. They were neighbors, it turned out, in New York and Telluride. We stood for introductions and chit-chat. Holbrooke asked what Seinfeld was working on and the comedian talked about his new reality-television show. In mid-explanation, however, Holbrooke’s cell phone rang. It was Robert Mueller, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and so the Ambassador had to interrupt Seinfeld to take the call. Eventually we returned to our table and resumed our discussion about the Waziristans and the rest.
Two years ago, Richard Holbrooke actively sought and embraced his assignment as Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. That by itself made him an unusual character; who else would relish such a deeply difficult, politically unrewarding, high-risk job? He travelled to the region repeatedly before President Obama took office, and he read into his prospective subject in unusual depth. He knew that the portfolio he had chosen might fall apart on him disastrously or damage the record he had created for himself at Dayton, Ohio, where he mediated a durable end to the brutal Bosnian war. He loved his assignment anyway. It was anything but dull. He understood why the war mattered and how it had evolved. He never shaded or spun the facts. He accepted the possibility of failure but counselled boldness anyway. These are not common qualities in diplomats, in my experience. He will be missed.
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