Holbrooke was “special” and he was an “envoy,” and, mostly through the force of his own determination and resourcefulness, combined with the steady backing of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, he achieved important milestones in the seemingly intractable effort to bring stability to Pakistan and peace to Afghanistan.
But his title — special envoy — never seemed to fit exactly right. As his longtime friend and former State Department colleague Strobe Talbott writes in one of the book’s essays: “It was the worst-kept secret in Washington that [Obama] never acquired a taste for Richard’s operating style. That wasn’t surprising, given Obama’s signature preference for ‘no drama.’ Life with Richard was nothing if not dramatic.”
Talbott reports what also became well known at the time: that in 2010, the president’s then-national security adviser, retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones, tried to get Holbrooke fired. But Clinton intervened. Seven months later, it was Jones who was gone.
In another essay, David Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who covered Holbrooke’s work in Bosnia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, who was captured twice while reporting on those conflicts, and who credits Holbrooke with helping save him in both episodes, writes that “his perceived competitiveness with his peers compounded suspicions in Washington.”
“In theory,” Rohde writes, “Holbrooke should have been at the zenith of his diplomatic skills and career. Decades of work in Washington and war zones had prepared him for what he called his last mission.” Alas, that was not to be. He died on Dec. 13, 2010, of complications from surgery to repair a torn aorta. He was 69.
This is an important, timely and imaginative book, a collection of essays from friends, colleagues, journalists and academics who knew Holbrooke well and observed him closely. It is therefore, in one sense, a memorial or a celebration of someone “whose presence is sorely missed,” as co-editors Derek Chollet, author of a book on the Dayton Accords, and Samantha Power, a Pulitzer-winning author and special assistant to Obama, write in the preface. But it is also about someone “whose contributions are known in silhouette but — with the lone exception of his role in ending the war in Bosnia — in surprisingly sparse detail.”
That is true. Holbrooke is most well-known for his central role in forging and forcing a peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia in 1995, ending the worst conflict on European soil since World War II, and for insisting on the use of U.S. and NATO air power to make that happen.
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