Our man Richard Holbrooke and the end of the American century

Review by Choice Review

Our Man is required reading, a brilliant sequel to Packer's 2013 bestseller, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013, FSG), spun out in biographies. Richard Holbrooke's life (1941--2010) spanned that of the American Century proclaimed in 1940 but already declining, in Packer's opinion, during the self-absorbed Clinton administration. The author, given full access to Holbrooke's personal archives, spent four years reconstructing his career and complex love life and directly cites more than 40 pages of his diary here. Entering the State Department out of college in 1962, Holbrooke was perhaps the most brilliant and enterprising diplomat of his generation. Volunteering immediately for Vietnam, he quickly discovered the futility of American counterinsurgency campaigns, whether in Vietnam or eventually in Afghanistan. He engineered the Dayton Accords to end the carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 but unfortunately never knocked heads for Middle East peace. He avoided the region throughout his career because "it was too easy to piss off American Jewish organizations and hurt himself on his climb" to power and fame in Washington. Summing Up: Essential. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Clement Moore Henry, emeritus, retired from the University of Texas at Austin

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

RICHARD HOLBROOKE WAS a large man with gargantuan appetites - for food and women and movies and acclaim and, above all, diplomatic and undiplomatic maneuvering - appetites that struggled to feed an outsize ego that was matched only by his insecurities. As the last great freewheeling diplomat of the American Century, Holbrooke, with his turbocharged zeal and laughable lack of self-awareness, earned fervent admirers and fevered enemies, including a few longstanding colleagues who fell passionately and paradoxically into both camps. In fact, Holbrooke himself was caught in this duality of being his own most fervent admirer and worst enemy (although when someone once commented that he was his own worst enemy, a national security adviser he had worked with snapped, "not as long as I'm around"). I doubt that any novel, not even one co-written by Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald, could have captured Holbrooke fully, and I certainly thought that no biography ever would. But now one has. George Packer's "Our Man" portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory: relentless, ambitious, voracious, brilliant, idealistic, noble, needy and containing multitudes. It's both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy, with Holbrooke strutting and fretting his hour on the stage. Perhaps intentionally, the book emulates the rollicking cadences, lapidary character descriptions and exhaustive reporting of "The Best and the Brightest," by Holbrooke's close friend David Halberstam. (Packer on Halberstam: "Jewish and middle-class, with thick-framed glasses and big hairy hands and violent gestures and moral certainties, with his gift for dramatizing everything, including himself.") Informed by complete access to Holbrooke's intimate diaries and letters, along with almost 250 interviews, the book overflows with the trait that was Holbrooke's saving grace: an in-your-face intellectual honesty that is not tainted, as Holbrooke's was, by his manipulativeness. The result is so bracing that "Our Man" not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography. Packer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and former staff writer at The New Yorker, pulls no punches, and the complex shadings of the all-too-human personalities - including Holbrooke's widow, Kati Marton; his lifelong frene my Tony Lake; his patron Hillary Clinton; and his nemesis Barack Obama - are painted with vibrant complexity. They will likely wince but then nod as they read. So too, 1 think, would Holbrooke himself, who died in December 2010 when his heart exploded from the strain of unappreciated diplomatic exertions. 1 can almost hear him howling at Packer from the grave, berating him for the brutal passages and then, after realizing how brilliant and brilliantly he has been portrayed, pouring on his flattery and ham-handed charm. (Full disclosure: When 1 was a journalist, 1 fell into the camp of his alloyed admirers, and he would do all of that to me, albeit while looking over my shoulder to see if there was someone more important to flatter and berate.) Packer establishes a Holbrookian intimacy by talking directly to the reader at times. "Holbrooke?" he begins. "Yes 1 knew him. 1 can't get his voice out of my head." And a few pages later, "Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school." The key to the mysteries, instead, begins with Vietnam. When Holbrooke arrived in Saigon in 1963 as a newly minted Foreign Service officer, America was not yet waistdeep in a quagmire. His role as a rural affairs adviser was to help win "hearts and minds" in "strategic hamlets" as part of the "pacification" program, before napalm and Zippo lighters had imbued those words with an ironic and then sinister stench. He and his colleagues read Graham Greene's Vietnam novel "The Quiet American," but they did not yet fully appreciate Greene's deft description of his title character: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Holbrooke was among the first diplomats to harbor doubts about the war. "I sometimes think this first year in Vietnam was the best of Richard Holbrooke," Packer writes. "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 generals." In Vietnam Holbrooke became best friends with Tony Lake, a fellow Foreign Service officer who "kept his ambition more tightly wrapped," a talent that came naturally to someone born into the WASP establishment that Holbrooke, the son of Jewish refugees, hungered to join. The intensity of their friendship and then their falling-out provides one of the many wrenching plots in the book. They play tennis, invent games, party, smoke pot and travel together. But when they return to Washington, Holbrooke's social-climbing among the Harrimans and Alsops of the Georgetown elite turned Lake sour. "Friendship with Holbrooke had acquired a whiff of the instrumental," Packer writes. Eventually almost all of Holbrooke's colleagues, even the admiring ones, came to feel used. Also at times abused. With his appetites, Holbrooke couldn't help himself. In one of the most egregious examples, he decided to pursue an affair with Lake's wife. "Holbrooke's betrayal," Packer writes, "would stay secret from almost everyone, while the acid it released would take years to eat silently at the bonds of youthful ambition and Vietnam and tennis and American greatness that had held the two men together." Holbrooke's compulsion for cheating on or with women - and also Packer's willingness to report with gusto the psychological and physical details involved - would seem shocking were these passions not so interwoven with the neediness and drive that was at the core of his professional life. Holbrooke was perpetually in heat. Chapters recounting fevered statecraft are interspersed with those chronicling Holbrooke's three marriages and multiple affairs and romances, including one with Diane Sawyer, all featuring the same detailed reporting and sharp personality portraiture. The most intense (and intensely described) relationship was with his last wife, Kati Marton, who gave Packer exclusive access to Holbrooke's papers. A vibrant reporter and writer of several highly acclaimed books, including an extraordinarily powerful memoir of the family betrayals and secret love affairs that accompanied her parents' escape from Nazi and then Communist Hungary, Marton ascended during periods when her husband languished. This was not a recipe for marital harmony. Each had dramatic affairs, but they were tethered by ambition. "She became what he'd never had," Packer writes, a "climbing partner." The peak of Holbrooke's career came under President Clinton, when he shuttled around the Balkans cajoling Bosnian warlords and Serbian war criminals to make peace. His work culminated with three weeks of negotiations in November 1995 at an Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, where he pushed the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and others into a peace agreement. "Let's give him his due. He ended a war," Packer writes. "Diplomacy, real diplomacy, is not for the short of breath." True to form, Holbrooke personally led his own lobbying campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote letters extolling his accomplishment and pressed others to sign them. He also repeatedly found excuses to travel to Oslo, where he made a point of meeting several times with the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel committee. "He campaigned so hard for the Nobel Prize that that's probably one reason he didn't get it," Clinton remarked. He also did not get the other prize he wanted. After Dayton, Clinton passed him over for secretary of state and gave the job to Madeleine Albright. Even though (or perhaps because) they agreed on most major issues, Holbrooke's contempt for Albright, which mixed sexism with rivalry, oozed out regularly. On the back of a menu card at a lunch she hosted, he jotted his unfair opinion of her: "MKA - very articulate, even eloquent on values - weak on process, policy + diplomacy - uneven, unpredictable - charming + mean - insecure - her biography was her career - very strong will." In this universe, particles of like charge are destined to repel each other. When Barack Obama was elected president, Holbrooke again lobbied hard to be secretary of state, but the incoming president became allergic to him. Obama, who took as much pride in telling people he hadn't read their books as Holbrooke did saying that he had, was disdainful of Holbrooke's compulsion to flatter and be flattered. When the president called him Dick at their first meeting, Holbrooke stopped him and, as Marton had instructed him to do, asked the president to call him Richard instead. "If Holbrooke had tried to repel him in their first minute together he couldn't have done a better job," Packer reports. Instead, Obama recruited Hillary Clinton to be secretary and Holbrooke's erstwhile friend Tony Lake to be national security adviser. Bravely defying intense resistance from the White House, Secretary Clinton appointed Holbrooke as her special representative to handle Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unlike the no-drama Obama crowd, she understood that what made Holbrooke a handful also made him effective. Holbrooke's tenacity as he whirled through the region might have, if he had been given time and support, allowed him to cajole and browbeat the prideful warlords there as he had done in the Balkans. But it soon became clear he was completely lacking in support from the president. Obama thought Holbrooke was "disruptive," and Holbrooke thought, as he told a young woman he had an affair with, "Obama has ice water running in his veins." The problem was they were both right. When Obama made a surprise trip to Kabul in November 2010, he didn't invite Holbrooke aboard Air Force One or even let him know about the trip in advance. Not long after, exhausted by his missions and drained by his tumultuous commuter marriage with Marton, Holbrooke barreled into the White House, sweating and pastyfaced, to make yet another effort to wrangle a private session with Obama. He was rebuffed. He then dashed to the State Department for a meeting with Secretary Clinton. Suddenly, his face turned red, his legs collapsed. An aneurysm in his heart had burst, ripping a hole in his aorta. When he arrived at the trauma bay of the hospital, the doctor told him to relax. "I can't relax," he replied. "I am in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan." Three days later on Dec. 13, he died. His multiple memorial services were packed with friends and enemies. Marton later took pride that she had choreographed the one at the Kennedy Center so that Obama had to sit through two hours of testimonials. "I could never understand people who didn't appreciate him," Bill Clinton said in his eulogy. "Most of the people who didn't were not nearly as good at doing." At a service a few weeks later in the United Nations General Assembly chamber in New York, Tony Lake, with a gray beard, sat alone in the balcony, feeling conflicted as always. The overriding theme of Holbrooke's life, detailed with unnerving accuracy in this book, was ambition. He was relentless in forcing his way into meetings to which he wasn't invited and clambering into motorcades where he wasn't manifested. During the Carter administration, when Holbrooke was an assistant secretary in the State Department, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's personal aide had to send him a memo. "Henceforth, you may not insert yourself as a passenger in the secretary's car unless this office has specifically approved," it said, adding that the security detail had been given instructions to enforce this edict. As Packer notes, "Holbrooke, undeterred, had the memo framed." "Ambition is not a pretty thing up close," Packer writes. "It's wild and crass, and mortifying in the details. It brings a noticeable smell into the room. ... Because of Holbrooke's psychological mutation of not being able to see himself... he let us ogle ambition in the nude." Lurking in this description is a more subtle point. It wasn't just Holbrooke's ambition that hobbled him, it was his inability to cloak his ambition like the more polished members of Washington's striving elite. The difficulty in writing biographies of grand players, as I know from trying to do it with Steve Jobs, is to be honest about their rough personalities while guiding a reader to the conclusion, which is as true for Holbrooke as it was for Jobs, that their unvarnished drives were part and parcel of their greatness. "I don't think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face," Jobs once said. "I know what I'm talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. Maybe there's a better way - a gentlemen's club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words - but I don't know that way." Or as he put it more poetically: "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." In corporate as well as governmental realms, leaders often prefer, as Obama did, teammates who are low-maintenance. But as Packer shows, there can be a payoff for those able to harness a Holbrooke. "Don't forget that inside most people you read about in history books," he writes, "is a child who fiercely resisted toilet training. Suppose the mess they leave is inseparable from their reach and grasp? Then our judgment depends on what they're ambitious for - the saving glimmer of wanting something worthy." Why such a mammoth book - and such a long review of it - about a midlevel diplomat whose only major achievement was helping settle a war in a faraway place with unpronounceable names? Because if you could read only one book to comprehend America's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it. You have to begin in Vietnam, as Holbrooke did, and understand that American involvement there was a complex mix of sincerity and blindness and idealism and hubris. Likewise, our subsequent interventions, including Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan, have involved good intentions, outsize ambitions and a deficit of humility. Just like Holbrooke. "Our confidence and energy, our reach and grasp, our excess and blindness - they were not so different from Holbrooke's," Packer writes. "He was our man." Our man, our man in full. "I still can't get his voice out of my head," Packer concludes. "One day I know it will start to fade, along with his memory, along with the idea of a life lived as if the world needed an American hand to help set things right. By this point you're familiar with its every failing. But now that Holbrooke is gone, and we're getting to know the alternatives, don't you, too, feel some regret? History is cruel that way. He loved it all the same." Walter Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane, is the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of "The Wise Men" and the author of biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

This biography of powerhouse diplomat Richard Holbrooke by the award-winning author of The Unwinding (2013) offers a pensive portrait of a man permanently biased toward action. As a young foreign service officer stationed in the Mekong Delta, Holbrooke stood out for his shrewd analyses, informed by long hours of fact-gathering in the provinces, and the truth-to-power directness of his reports. But he was also known for his relentless ambition and his tendency to brush off, bulldoze, or outright betray anyone in his way. No one loved America more, suggests Packer, or had a more nuanced understanding of its power. In position after diverse position in half a dozen countries, including Bosnia and Afghanistan, under every Democratic administration from Johnson on, Holbrooke would demonstrate his talent for wrenching agreement from the jaws of impasse. Yet his idealism was inseparable from his egoism, and late in his career, hamstrung by decades of accumulated grudges, he struggled to remain relevant and never achieved his dream of serving as secretary of state. Packer, who knew Holbrooke personally, celebrates the man's larger-than-life qualities while remaining clear-eyed about his profound flaws. And by the end, he convincingly argues that Holbrooke's passing signifies the loss of something larger still, a sense of American possibility, now seemingly out of reach.--Brendan Driscoll Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A brilliant, abrasive diplomat struggles to resolve foreign conflicts while fighting bureaucratic wars at home in this scintillating biography. New Yorker writer Packer (The Unwinding) follows Holbrooke's State Department career from his start in the American "pacification" program during the Vietnam War, through his star turn negotiating the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, to his fruitless efforts under the Obama administration to start peace talks in Afghanistan. As nerve-wracking as his negotiations, in Packer's telling, was Holbrooke's struggle to rise in America's foreign-policy establishment: he stalked and schmoozed everyone who could further his career, sometimes ambushing them in the men's room, while waging cutthroat turf battles against rivals. Drawing on Holbrooke's fascinating diaries and his own memories of the man, Packer makes him a Shakespearean character-egomaniacal, devious, sloppy enough to make presidents deny him the prize of becoming secretary of state, yet charismatic and inspiring-in a larger-than-life portrait brimming with vivid novelistic impressions. (Holbrooke's voice was "always doing something to you, cajoling, flattering, bullying, seducing, needling, analyzing, one-upping you-applying continuous pressure like a strong underwater current.") In Holbrooke's thwarted ambitions, Packer finds both a riveting tale of diplomatic adventure-part high drama, part low pettiness-and a captivating metaphor for America's waning power. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Jericho. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The riveting life of a deeply flawed diplomat whose chief shortcoming seems to have been the need to be more recognized than he was.New Yorker staff writer Packer (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, 2013, etc.), winner of the National Book Award, was a friend of the diplomat and foreign policy specialist Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010), one of whose signal accomplishments was navigating through the endless difficulties of Balkan ethnic politics to negotiate peace in the former Yugoslavia. When it came to national interest versus universal principles of human rights and the like, "Holbrooke favored the former while making gestures toward the latter." Still, faced with the ugly realities of such things as the Cambodian genocide, which, as one of the "best and the brightest" of the American technocrats in Vietnam, he bore some responsibility for, he stretched to accommodate justice. Serving one administration after another, Holbrooke accumulated friends and favors; he also made powerful enemies, and it was not always easy to tell one from the other. As a sometime outsiderhe was descended from a Jewish immigrant named Golbraichhe desperately longed for power, wanting especially to rule over Foggy Bottom as Secretary of State. Alas, he did not achieve his aim, though Packer supposes he was worthy enough. Instead, he served other leaders, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the latter of whom considered him disruptive. The author notes Holbrooke's real accomplishments along the way, including founding an American cultural center in Germany and achieving delicate balancing acts in the intractable mess of Afghanistan. As Packer notes, he also had a "huge appetite for details [and] need to understand from the ground up," attributes that not every American diplomat shares. In the end, though egotistical and quick to be insulted, Holbrooke was also, by Packer's absorbing account, highly capable.Students of recent world history and of American power, hard and soft, will find this an endlessly fascinating study of character and events. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue   Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can't get his voice out of my head. I still hear it saying, "You haven't read that book? You really need to read it." Saying, "I feel, and I hope this doesn't sound too self-satisfied, that in a very difficult situation where nobody has the answer, I at least know what the overall questions and moving parts are." Saying, "Gotta go, Hillary's on the line." That voice! Calm, nasal, a trace of older New York, a singsong cadence when he was being playful, but always doing something to you, cajoling, flattering, bullying, seducing, needling, analyzing, one-upping you--applying continuous pressure like a strong underwater current, so that by the end of a conversation, even two minutes on the phone, you found yourself far out from where you'd started, unsure how you got there, and mysteriously exhausted. He was six feet one but seemed bigger. He had long skinny limbs and a barrel chest and broad square shoulder bones, on top of which sat his strangely small head and, encased within it, the sleepless brain. His feet were so far from his trunk that, as his body wore down and the blood stopped circulating properly, they swelled up and became marbled red and white like steak. He had special shoes made and carried extra socks in his leather attaché case, sweating through half a dozen pairs a day, stripping them off on long flights and draping them over his seat pocket in first class, or else cramming used socks next to the classified documents in his briefcase. He wrote his book about ending the war in Bosnia--the place in history that he always craved, though it was never enough--with his feet planted in a Brookstone Shiatsu foot massager. One morning he showed up late for a meeting in the Secretary of State's suite at the Waldorf Astoria in his stocking feet, shirt untucked and fly half-zipped, padding around the room and picking grapes off a fruit basket, while Madeleine Albright's furious stare tracked his every move. During a videoconference call from the U.N. mission in New York his feet were propped up on a chair, while down in the White House Situation Room their giant distortion completely filled the wall screen and so disrupted the meeting that President Clinton's national security advisor finally ordered a military aide to turn off the video feed. Holbrooke put his feet up anywhere, in the White House, on other people's desks and coffee tables--for relief, and for advantage. Near the end, it seemed as if all his troubles were collecting in his feet--atrial fibrillation, marital tension, thwarted ambition, conspiring colleagues, hundreds of thousands of air miles, corrupt foreign leaders, a war that would not yield to the relentless force of his will. But at the other extreme from his feet, the ice-blue eyes were on perpetual alert. Their light told you that his intelligence was always awake and working. They captured nearly everything and gave almost nothing away. Like one-way mirrors, they looked outward, not inward. I never knew anyone quicker to size up a room, an adversary, a newspaper article, a set of variables in a complex situation--even his own imminent death. The ceaseless appraising told of a manic spirit churning somewhere within the low voice and languid limbs. Once, in the 1980s, he was walking down Madison Avenue when an acquaintance passed him and called out: "Hi, Dick." Holbrooke watched the man go by, then turned to his companion: "I wonder what he meant by that." Yes, his curly hair never obeyed the comb, and his suit always looked rumpled, and he couldn't stay off the phone or T.V., and he kept losing things, and he ate as much food as fast as he could, once slicing open the tip of his nose on a clamshell and bleeding through a pair of cloth napkins--yes, he was in almost every way a disorderly presence. But his eyes never lost focus. So much thought, so little inwardness. He could not be alone--he might have had to think about himself. Maybe that was something he couldn't afford to do. Leslie Gelb, Holbrooke's friend of forty-five years and recipient of multiple daily phone calls, would butt into a monologue and ask, "What's Obama like?" Holbrooke would give a brilliant analysis of the President. "How do you think you affect Obama?" Holbrooke had nothing to say. Where did it come from, that blind spot behind his eyes that masked his inner life? It was a great advantage over the rest of us, because the propulsion from idea to action was never broken by self-scrutiny. It was also a great vulnerability, and finally, it was fatal. I can hear the voice saying: "It's your problem now, not mine." He loved speed. Franz Klammer's fearless downhill run for the gold in 1976 was a feat Holbrooke never finished admiring, until you almost believed that he had been the one throwing himself into those dangerous turns at Innsbruck. He pedaled his bike straight into a swarming Saigon intersection while talking about the war to a terrified blonde journalist just arrived from Manhattan; he zipped through Paris traffic while lecturing his State Department boss on the status of the Vietnam peace talks; his Humvee careened down the dirt switchbacks of the Mount Igman road above besieged Sarajevo, chased by the armored personnel carrier with his doomed colleagues. He loved mischief. It made him endless fun to be with and got him into unnecessary trouble. In 1967, he was standing outside Robert McNamara's office on the second floor of the Pentagon, a twenty-six-year-old junior official hoping to catch the Secretary of Defense on his way in or out, for no reason other than self-advancement. A famous colonel was waiting, too--a decorated paratrooper back from Vietnam, where Holbrooke had known him. Everything about the colonel was pressed and creased, his uniform shirt, his face, his pants carefully tucked into his boots and delicately bloused around the calves. He must have spent the whole morning on them. "That looks really beautiful," Holbrooke said, and he reached down and yanked a pants leg all the way out of its boot. The colonel started yelling. Holbrooke laughed. Back in the Kennedy and Johnson years, when he was elbowing his way into public life, the phrase "action intellectuals" was hot, until Vietnam caught up with it and intellectuals got burned. But that was Holbrooke. Ideas mattered to him, but never for their own sake, only if they produced solutions to problems. The only problems worth his time were the biggest, hardest ones. Three fiendish wars--that's what his career came down to. He was almost singular in his eagerness to keep risking it. Having solved Bosnia, he wanted Cyprus, Kosovo, Congo, the Horn of Africa, Tibet, Iran, India, Pakistan, and finally Afghanistan. Only the Middle East couldn't tempt him. As the Washington bureaucracy got more cautious, his appetite for conquests grew. Right after his death, Hillary Clinton said, "I picture him like Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians." He loved history--so much that he wanted to make it. The phrase "great man" now sounds anachronistic, but as an inspiration for human striving maybe we shouldn't throw out the whole idea. He came of age when there was still a place for it and that place could only be filled by an American. This was just after the war, when the ruined world lay prone and open to the visionary action of figures like Acheson, Kennan, Marshall, and Harriman. They didn't just grab for land and gold like the great men of earlier empires. They built the structures of international order that would endure for three generations, longer than anything ever lasts, and that are only now turning to rubble. These were unsentimental, supremely self-assured, white Protestant men--privileged, you could say--born around the turn of the century, who all knew one another and knew how to get things done. They didn't take a piss without a strategy. Holbrooke revered them all and adopted a few as replacement fathers. He wanted to join them at the top, and he clawed his way up the slope of an establishment that was crumbling under his crampons. He reached the highest base camp possible, but every assault on the summit failed. He loved books about mountaineers, and in his teens he climbed the Swiss Alps. He was a romantic. He never realized that he had come too late. You will have heard that he was a monstrous egotist. It's true. It's even worse than you've heard--I'll explain as we go on. He offended countless people, and they didn't forget, and since so many of them swallowed their hurt, after he was gone it was usually the first thing out of their mouth if his name came up, as it invariably did. How he once told a colleague, "I lost more money in the market today than you make in a year." How he bumped an elderly survivor couple from the official American bus to Auschwitz on the fiftieth anniversary of its liberation, adding himself to the delegation alongside Elie Wiesel and leaving the weeping couple to beg Polish guards to let them into the camp so they wouldn't miss the ceremony. How he lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize--that kind of thing, all the time, as if he needed to discharge a surplus of self every few hours to maintain his equilibrium. And the price he paid was very high. He destroyed his first marriage and his closest friendship. His defects of character cost him his dream job as Secretary of State, the position for which his strengths of character eminently qualified him. You can't untangle these things. I used to think that if Holbrooke could just be fixed--a dose of self-restraint, a flash of inward light--he could have done anything. But that's an illusion. We are wholly ourselves. If you cut out the destructive element, you would kill the thing that made him almost great. As a member of the class of lesser beings who aspire to a good life but not a great one--who find the very notion both daunting and distasteful--I can barely fathom the agony of that "almost." Think about it: the nonstop schedule, the calculation of every dinner table, the brain that burned all day and night--and the knowledge, buried so deep he might have only sensed it as a physical ache, that he had come up short of his own impossible exaltation. I admired him for that readiness to suffer. His life was full of pleasures, but I never envied it. We had few things in common, but one that comes to mind is a love of Conrad's novels. In one of his letters Conrad wrote that "these two contradictory instincts"--egotism and idealism--"cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism. Each alone would be fatal to our ambition." I think this means that they need each other to do any good. Idealism without egotism is feckless; egotism without idealism is destructive. It was never truer of anyone than Holbrooke. Sometimes the two instincts got out of whack. Certain people--his younger brother Andrew, for example--couldn't see his idealism for the mountain of his egotism. Andrew thought his brother was missing the section of his brain that would have made him care about anyone other than himself. But Holbrooke's friends, the handful he kept for life, absorbed the pokes and laughed off the gargantuan faults without illusion. They wanted to protect him, because his appetites and insecurities were so naked. Now and then they had to hurt him, tear him to pieces. Then they could go on loving him. They knew that, of them all, he had the most promise, and they wanted to see him fulfill it--as a way to affirm them, their generation, their idea of public service, and their country. If Holbrooke could do it, then America might still be an adventure, with great things ahead. He always wanted more, and they wanted more for him, and when he died they mourned not just their friend but the lost promise. He loved America. Not in a chest-beating way--he didn't wear a flag pin on his lapel--but without having to try, because he was the child of parents who had given everything to become American, and he grew up after the war amid the overwhelming evidence that this was a great and generous country. In the late summer of 2010, he went with his wife--his third wife and widow, Kati--to see a revival of "South Pacific" at Lincoln Center. Lifelong friends can't remember Holbrooke ever shedding tears, but he wept at "South Pacific," and other men his age were weeping, too, and he tried to understand why. That was around the time he began speaking his thoughts into a tape recorder for some future use--maybe his memoirs--and here's what he said: "For me it was the combination of the beauty of the show and its music, and the capturing in that show of so many moments in American history, the show itself opening in New York at the height of New York's greatness, 1949, the theme--Americans at war in a distant land or islands in the South Pacific--the sense of loss of American optimism and our feeling that we could do anything. The contrast with today--" At this point his voice fails, and I find it hard to keep listening. He had only a few months to live. "--it was very powerful, and I kept thinking of where we were today, our nation, our lack of confidence in our own ability to lead compared to where we were in 1949 when it came out, evoking an era only five years or seven years earlier, when we had gone to the most distant corners of the globe and saved civilization." I'm trying to think what to tell you, now that you have me talking. There's too much to say and it all comes crowding in at once. His ambition, his loyalty, his cruelty, his fragility, his betrayals, his wounds, his wives, his girlfriends, his sons, his lunches. By dying he stood up a hundred people, including me. He could not be alone. If you're still interested, I can tell you what I know, from the beginning. I wasn't one of his close friends, but over the years I made a study of him. You ask why? Not because he was fascinating, though he was, and right this minute somewhere in the world fourteen people are talking about him. Now and then I might let him speak for himself--that was something he knew how to do. But I won't relate this story for his sake. No: we want to see and feel what happened to America during Holbrooke's life, and we can see and feel more clearly by following someone who was almost great, because his quest leads us deeper down the alleyways of power than the usual famous subjects (whom he knew, all of them), and his boisterous struggling lays open more human truths than the composed annals of the great. This was what Les Gelb must have meant when he said, just after his friend's death, "Far better to write a novel about Richard C. Holbrooke than a biography, let alone an obituary." What's called the American century was really just over half a century, and that was the span of Holbrooke's life. It began with the Second World War and the creative burst that followed--the United Nations, the Atlantic alliance, containment, the free world--and it went through dizzying lows and highs, until it expired the day before yesterday. The thing that brings on doom to great powers, and great men--is it simple hubris, or decadence and squander, a kind of inattention, loss of faith, or just the passage of years?--at some point that thing set in, and so we are talking about an age gone by. It wasn't a golden age, there was plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it. The best about us was inseparable from the worst. Our feeling that we could do anything gave us the Marshall Plan and Vietnam, the peace at Dayton and the endless Afghan war. Our confidence and energy, our reach and grasp, our excess and blindness--they were not so different from Holbrooke's. He was our man. That's the reason to tell you this story. That's why I can't get his voice out of my head. Excerpted from Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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