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Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America’s greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence.
In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
608 pages, Hardcover
First published May 7, 2019
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April 29, 2019
This is a fitting elegy to an iconic statesman of the late-American empire, but it is also a book about the virtues and flaws of the United States during its brief period as lone superpower. George Packer is a writer I greatly admire and he was probably one of the only people able to write this book. He had access to some of the most powerful people in the world and their perspectives come across here. Some of it felt like elite inside-baseball, but in fairness this is what the history of power tends to be.
I was struck by the mix of glamour and power that characterized Holbrooke's life. Holbrooke was equally at home in the White House, among A-list movie stars and on Wall Street. His life crossed through all the major centers of American power (except for the newest one: Silicon Valley) and brought him around types of power and prestige I can scarcely imagine. The book made for uncomfortable reading at times. The easy money and lurid behavior mixed with life-and-death power politics that characterizes American elite life is surreal and disturbing. At times I felt as though the book was about to call security on me and have me escorted from the premises.
Holbrooke was sentimental, arrogant, brilliant, self-absorbed, brutal and compassionate all at once. In other words, he was the embodiment of American foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century. The post-WW2 world had been created by men like MacArthur, Acheson, Kennan and Harriman. Holbrooke was a page from the same book. However he came of age during a time when American power was at the start of its long relative decline. By the time he died, it seemed to be entering its twilight. I'm not sure if the United States of the next few decades will be able to satisfy the ambitions of people like him, though it may still surprise us. As a diplomat Holbrooke experienced both Vietnam, a disaster, and Bosnia, a qualified success, and those experiences colored his view on the world up til his death.
This is not a traditional biography of a man, which I appreciate. It's more like a sympathetic biography of American liberal empire, with Holbrooke's life used as a thread. I can't help but feel that if Americans had been more careful and fastidious, their "century" might have lasted a bit longer than the fifty or so short years that it did. America was often ugly, Packer doesn't hide from this, but the vision of world order coming next might make us nostalgic for it. Holbrooke was not a monster, though you could say he was a jerk. He had a heart and was awake to the sufferings of others. Perhaps if men like him had been more personally conservative and less inebriated by the glamor and wealth that came along with American power they would have done a better job marshaling it. Flitting in between investment banks and government offices while hanging out with Robert DeNiro does not sound like the behavior of world-builders who will sit at the apex forever. It sounds like decadence.
Packer is a great writer. While this book is long, the pages fly by thanks to his exhilarating prose. The chapters on the Balkans, which I have a keen interest in, were captivating. Holbrooke was an anti-hero who did some good and some bad, but above all wanted to be a Great Man in the way that his heroes were. He came up just short, but did well enough that people were writing books about him after his death. I'm sure he would've been pleased by this one.
4.5/5
I was struck by the mix of glamour and power that characterized Holbrooke's life. Holbrooke was equally at home in the White House, among A-list movie stars and on Wall Street. His life crossed through all the major centers of American power (except for the newest one: Silicon Valley) and brought him around types of power and prestige I can scarcely imagine. The book made for uncomfortable reading at times. The easy money and lurid behavior mixed with life-and-death power politics that characterizes American elite life is surreal and disturbing. At times I felt as though the book was about to call security on me and have me escorted from the premises.
Holbrooke was sentimental, arrogant, brilliant, self-absorbed, brutal and compassionate all at once. In other words, he was the embodiment of American foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century. The post-WW2 world had been created by men like MacArthur, Acheson, Kennan and Harriman. Holbrooke was a page from the same book. However he came of age during a time when American power was at the start of its long relative decline. By the time he died, it seemed to be entering its twilight. I'm not sure if the United States of the next few decades will be able to satisfy the ambitions of people like him, though it may still surprise us. As a diplomat Holbrooke experienced both Vietnam, a disaster, and Bosnia, a qualified success, and those experiences colored his view on the world up til his death.
This is not a traditional biography of a man, which I appreciate. It's more like a sympathetic biography of American liberal empire, with Holbrooke's life used as a thread. I can't help but feel that if Americans had been more careful and fastidious, their "century" might have lasted a bit longer than the fifty or so short years that it did. America was often ugly, Packer doesn't hide from this, but the vision of world order coming next might make us nostalgic for it. Holbrooke was not a monster, though you could say he was a jerk. He had a heart and was awake to the sufferings of others. Perhaps if men like him had been more personally conservative and less inebriated by the glamor and wealth that came along with American power they would have done a better job marshaling it. Flitting in between investment banks and government offices while hanging out with Robert DeNiro does not sound like the behavior of world-builders who will sit at the apex forever. It sounds like decadence.
Packer is a great writer. While this book is long, the pages fly by thanks to his exhilarating prose. The chapters on the Balkans, which I have a keen interest in, were captivating. Holbrooke was an anti-hero who did some good and some bad, but above all wanted to be a Great Man in the way that his heroes were. He came up just short, but did well enough that people were writing books about him after his death. I'm sure he would've been pleased by this one.
4.5/5
May 22, 2019
Our Man is a warts-and-all bio of Richard Holbrooke, of one of the few modern diplomats who understood American power through the lenses of both Wilsonian moralism and Kissingerian Realpolitik.
I loved Packer's The Unwinding, but in The Unwinding he was an observer with empathy reporting on stories that merited the reader's empathy. Here, Packer inserts himself as a narrator who knew Holbrooke, who can deliver a more personal view of the subject, and who wants to tell a more populist story than to get bogged down in the boring details of a diplomat's life or diplomatic efforts. And Holbrooke is not a subject who evokes empathy (and it is not clear from the biography that empathy was something he craved; rather, he wanted to be heard but also involved in, if not leading, the policymaking of Democratic Administrations ).
The upside of that approach is that the book is an entertaining read, which is no easy feat given that as much as Holbrooke could be entertaining, he could also be unreliable and bombastic. Packer effectively paints a portrait of these various sides of Holbrooke well, and then colors in the rest. He deftly maneuvers between biography and novel (as Les Gelb had advised him might be the best format).
The downside of that approach is that Packer is a narrator with obvious biases. Those biases not only distract from his storytelling, but they blind him to obvious takeaways that the storytelling delivers. And that makes him an unreliable narrator, which is positive in the sense that it mirrors Holbrooke's unreliability, but hurts Packer in other ways. For instance, there are many first-person mentions about "American decline", which in the context of The Unwinding helped to frame stories of success and failure in America over the years, but in the context of a biography of Richard Holbrooke, fails to accurately reflect the problems with post Cold War policymaking he describes in the book (meaning, it is not a symptom of American decline that Clinton or Obama struggled with foreign policy making, or hired poorly for it; those were weaknesses of those leaders).
It also means the Packer turns a blind eye to contradictions in his observations: for example, there is naked fanboy love for President Obama - like when Packer imagines Obama listening intensely with a finger on his cheek - but a glossing past of facts which paint an objectively negative picture of the former President (a technocrat who was not a good governor (but brilliant campaigner), who hired poorly for his foreign policy staff, who ran policy meetings that were intensely legalistic in their structure but did not seem to produce any policy, and who was quick to sideline the experts, like Holbrooke, if he didn't like them). And also problematic are the moments when he tells us that he "could" tell us more about other successful initiatives of Holbrooke's, but he wants to keep the story going. And at times, like the Bosnia section of the book, a rich and complicated history gets boiled down to storytelling around key events in Holbrooke's life, at the expense of that history (worse, it neglects to describe just *how* horrified the world was to witness genocide on European soil 50 years after WWII, and with international legal mechanisms in place) . So, with this approach, Packer not only exposes himself to critiques with reasonable questions about decisions he made as a narrator, but also whether the history of what he is describing is being accurately captured.
It is also a sad book - Holbrooke is brilliant but is often sidelined and peripheral. Part of that is because the majority of Administrations in his career were Republican, but also because Democratic policymakers did *not* like him. He was not perceived to be a team player by Clinton or Obama or anyone who served under them or with Holbrooke. And his personal life reads tragically dysfunctional.
So, in the end, the biography, like Holbrooke, reveals deep flaws about both its subject and its author. Which is a completely surprising outcome. I understand why Packer chose this approach - a standard political biography would be too technical and boring to capture the dynamics of Holbrooke's restless energy and showmanship, and how it played out in Bosnia- but Packer's biases are exposed, too. And those biases become "warts" which compromise integrity of the historical record he aimed to leave for Holbrooke.
That said, for the same reason, it would hard to imagine anyone who did not know Holbrooke delivering a similar outcome to this book. Because with the principle of "bodies in rest vs. bodies in motion", to that person Holbrooke would be a body in rest, something static to be analyzed. But here he is a body in motion, very much alive, forcefully bullying his way into history, because that is how Packer observed him. That makes the biography an unusual accomplishment for a biography, and therefore for Packer, but it does not hold up to Packer's writing elsewhere, as in The Unwinding and his New Yorker pieces.
Last, a disclaimer: in 1998 I wrote my senior essay on Holbrooke (was it the first biography of Holbrooke...?). It was focused on the Dayton Accords, and how his career had helped to shape the outcome. I was able to interview him for the paper, we stayed in touch, and even, for a brief moment, was in talks for a job working for him and his staff at the UN.
The question that always fascinated me was *why* Holbrooke succeeded in delivering peace to the former Yugoslavia when other big names in diplomacy (Lord David Owen, Cy Vance) failed, and when other approaches (e.g., negotating a democracy for Bosnia in democracy without first securing the peace) played out as naïve and idealistic. My hypothesis was that Holbrooke had a unique understanding of how to leverage American Realpolitik to achieve Wilsonian ends, and that had been shaped by the unique arc of his career. Packer fills in a lot of blanks that I missed because I was too narrow in my approach: particularly, no other US diplomat's personality could have delivered the same outcome with a cast of characters like Milosevic, Itzebegovic or Tudjman. Bombast was a part of the game with those leaders, and Holbrooke had plenty of it. So, coming back to my bodies in rest vs. bodies in motion paradigm, in retrospect I was guilty of falling into the former camp, because Holbrooke's bombastic and deceptive approach to diplomacy was not something for which the rigor of academic analysis in a history paper may capture.
That said, Packer's history of Bosnia in Our Man still leaves open the door to an exploration of *why* Holbrooke succeeded. Because the extraordinary series of events that led to the peace agreement at Dayton all point to the reasonable conclusion that Holbrooke should *not* have succeeded, as they suggest the whole thing could have collapsed at any moment. There is more there worth exploring for any future historian, or negotiations expert.
Packer's approach to writing about Holbrooke may answer the question implicitly: "Our Man" Richard Holbrooke was the product of the U.S. foreign service in Vietnam, and the U.S. does not produce diplomatic talent like him anymore. I am not sure if that is a symptom of "American Decline", but this takeaway, alongside the brutal portaits of Clinton and Obama era staffers being more obsessed with optics and pet projects than policy, it does make one wonder about whether any policymaker in the future will have the skills to serve our country as well as Holbrooke did.
I loved Packer's The Unwinding, but in The Unwinding he was an observer with empathy reporting on stories that merited the reader's empathy. Here, Packer inserts himself as a narrator who knew Holbrooke, who can deliver a more personal view of the subject, and who wants to tell a more populist story than to get bogged down in the boring details of a diplomat's life or diplomatic efforts. And Holbrooke is not a subject who evokes empathy (and it is not clear from the biography that empathy was something he craved; rather, he wanted to be heard but also involved in, if not leading, the policymaking of Democratic Administrations ).
The upside of that approach is that the book is an entertaining read, which is no easy feat given that as much as Holbrooke could be entertaining, he could also be unreliable and bombastic. Packer effectively paints a portrait of these various sides of Holbrooke well, and then colors in the rest. He deftly maneuvers between biography and novel (as Les Gelb had advised him might be the best format).
The downside of that approach is that Packer is a narrator with obvious biases. Those biases not only distract from his storytelling, but they blind him to obvious takeaways that the storytelling delivers. And that makes him an unreliable narrator, which is positive in the sense that it mirrors Holbrooke's unreliability, but hurts Packer in other ways. For instance, there are many first-person mentions about "American decline", which in the context of The Unwinding helped to frame stories of success and failure in America over the years, but in the context of a biography of Richard Holbrooke, fails to accurately reflect the problems with post Cold War policymaking he describes in the book (meaning, it is not a symptom of American decline that Clinton or Obama struggled with foreign policy making, or hired poorly for it; those were weaknesses of those leaders).
It also means the Packer turns a blind eye to contradictions in his observations: for example, there is naked fanboy love for President Obama - like when Packer imagines Obama listening intensely with a finger on his cheek - but a glossing past of facts which paint an objectively negative picture of the former President (a technocrat who was not a good governor (but brilliant campaigner), who hired poorly for his foreign policy staff, who ran policy meetings that were intensely legalistic in their structure but did not seem to produce any policy, and who was quick to sideline the experts, like Holbrooke, if he didn't like them). And also problematic are the moments when he tells us that he "could" tell us more about other successful initiatives of Holbrooke's, but he wants to keep the story going. And at times, like the Bosnia section of the book, a rich and complicated history gets boiled down to storytelling around key events in Holbrooke's life, at the expense of that history (worse, it neglects to describe just *how* horrified the world was to witness genocide on European soil 50 years after WWII, and with international legal mechanisms in place) . So, with this approach, Packer not only exposes himself to critiques with reasonable questions about decisions he made as a narrator, but also whether the history of what he is describing is being accurately captured.
It is also a sad book - Holbrooke is brilliant but is often sidelined and peripheral. Part of that is because the majority of Administrations in his career were Republican, but also because Democratic policymakers did *not* like him. He was not perceived to be a team player by Clinton or Obama or anyone who served under them or with Holbrooke. And his personal life reads tragically dysfunctional.
So, in the end, the biography, like Holbrooke, reveals deep flaws about both its subject and its author. Which is a completely surprising outcome. I understand why Packer chose this approach - a standard political biography would be too technical and boring to capture the dynamics of Holbrooke's restless energy and showmanship, and how it played out in Bosnia- but Packer's biases are exposed, too. And those biases become "warts" which compromise integrity of the historical record he aimed to leave for Holbrooke.
That said, for the same reason, it would hard to imagine anyone who did not know Holbrooke delivering a similar outcome to this book. Because with the principle of "bodies in rest vs. bodies in motion", to that person Holbrooke would be a body in rest, something static to be analyzed. But here he is a body in motion, very much alive, forcefully bullying his way into history, because that is how Packer observed him. That makes the biography an unusual accomplishment for a biography, and therefore for Packer, but it does not hold up to Packer's writing elsewhere, as in The Unwinding and his New Yorker pieces.
Last, a disclaimer: in 1998 I wrote my senior essay on Holbrooke (was it the first biography of Holbrooke...?). It was focused on the Dayton Accords, and how his career had helped to shape the outcome. I was able to interview him for the paper, we stayed in touch, and even, for a brief moment, was in talks for a job working for him and his staff at the UN.
The question that always fascinated me was *why* Holbrooke succeeded in delivering peace to the former Yugoslavia when other big names in diplomacy (Lord David Owen, Cy Vance) failed, and when other approaches (e.g., negotating a democracy for Bosnia in democracy without first securing the peace) played out as naïve and idealistic. My hypothesis was that Holbrooke had a unique understanding of how to leverage American Realpolitik to achieve Wilsonian ends, and that had been shaped by the unique arc of his career. Packer fills in a lot of blanks that I missed because I was too narrow in my approach: particularly, no other US diplomat's personality could have delivered the same outcome with a cast of characters like Milosevic, Itzebegovic or Tudjman. Bombast was a part of the game with those leaders, and Holbrooke had plenty of it. So, coming back to my bodies in rest vs. bodies in motion paradigm, in retrospect I was guilty of falling into the former camp, because Holbrooke's bombastic and deceptive approach to diplomacy was not something for which the rigor of academic analysis in a history paper may capture.
That said, Packer's history of Bosnia in Our Man still leaves open the door to an exploration of *why* Holbrooke succeeded. Because the extraordinary series of events that led to the peace agreement at Dayton all point to the reasonable conclusion that Holbrooke should *not* have succeeded, as they suggest the whole thing could have collapsed at any moment. There is more there worth exploring for any future historian, or negotiations expert.
Packer's approach to writing about Holbrooke may answer the question implicitly: "Our Man" Richard Holbrooke was the product of the U.S. foreign service in Vietnam, and the U.S. does not produce diplomatic talent like him anymore. I am not sure if that is a symptom of "American Decline", but this takeaway, alongside the brutal portaits of Clinton and Obama era staffers being more obsessed with optics and pet projects than policy, it does make one wonder about whether any policymaker in the future will have the skills to serve our country as well as Holbrooke did.
July 28, 2019
Perhaps the most colorful and able diplomat in American history has been Richard Holbrooke. The possessor of an irascible personality who was not the most popular individual with colleagues and presidents that he served but was a highly effective strategic thinker and negotiator with a number of important accomplishments to his credit. The success that stands out the most is his work that produced the Dayton Accords in 1995 that brought closure somewhat to the civil war that raged in the former Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. But he should also be given credit for his work as Ambassador to the United Nations, Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs, and his last position as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan for which he gave his life.
Holbrooke exhibited a powerful ego that did not always play well with others be they friend or foe, but in the end, he was at the center of American strategic thinking throughout a career that spanned the beginning of US involvement in Vietnam through our continuing imbroglio in Afghanistan. A self-promotor who saw his work and ideas as the key to American success, Holbrooke was a dominating presence in the American foreign policy establishment for decades and is the subject of George Packer’s important new study, OUR MAN: RICHARD HOLBROOKE AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY.
Holbrooke owned many personality flaws for which he paid dearly. His drive would in part destroy two marriages and his closest friendships. His character defects would cost him any chance of being chosen Secretary of State, a position he craved, for which he was eminently qualified. If he had the capacity of introspection and a dose of self-restraint, he could have accomplished anything. However, if he was able to tone himself down, he would not have been true to himself which is the core of why he was successful.
For George Packer, Holbrooke was the embodiment of the American Century (or half century!) which encompassed Holbrooke’s life. He was part of the belief that the US could accomplish anything, be it the Marshall Plan, remake Vietnam, bring peace to Bosnia, or make something out of the quagmire that is Afghanistan. For Holbrooke to be part of great events and decisions was his life blood and that is why it is important to tell his story.
In many ways Packer’s narrative is a conversation with the reader as he imparts practically all aspects of Holbrooke’s private and public life. He takes us inside his subject’s marriages and family life, his intellectual development, travels throughout the world and the important individuals who were his compatriots or enemies, and his obsession to create a foreign policy that would embody the liberal internationalism that was so effective following World War II. Packer makes assumptions about how conversant the reader is with post-war history as it relates to Holbrooke’s career and to his credit, he offers a great deal of background information to make the reader’s task easier. Packer prepares character sketches of all the major personages that Holbrooke shared the stage with; be it Edward Lansdale, the CIA psy-ops guru; Averill Harriman, a mentor and benefactor; David Halberstam, the New York Times reporter; Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hillary Clinton, presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama among many others.
Perhaps the most poignant relationship that Packer describes is that of Anthony Lake who was a close friend of Holbrooke in the early 1960s as they both entered the Foreign Service and served in Vietnam. Packer follows their relationship and competition over the next five decades, they’re ups and downs on a personal level, policy disagreements all of which would ruin their friendship and turn them into bureaucratic enemies. At times it feels like Packer has inserted Lake’s autobiography amidst the narrative as a means of comparing the two and providing insights into steps and positions Holbrooke might have taken which may have altered his career path.
Holbrooke’s Vietnam experience would stay with him throughout his career. The military self-deception of Vietnam and the role of the national security establishment created doubts and reinforced the idea that Holbrooke himself knew what was best and would usually consider himself to be the smartest person in the room. This is evident in Holbrooke’s writings which critique US policy as he integrates his personal life into the narrative. Packer does an excellent job culling Holbrooke’s thoughts as he incorporates segments of his notebooks into his story. When it came to Vietnam, Holbrooke was very astute as he saw the failure of the Strategic Hamlet program early on and that fighting the Viet Cong only from the air could only result in failure. For Holbrooke the watershed date for the war was February, 1965 as the Pentagon issued an “evacuation order” for non-essential personnel and families as it brought an end “to the pretty colonial town of Saigon” and “was the beginning of sprawling US bases and B-52s and black market Marlboros and industrial scale-prostitution.”
Packer’s discussion of Kissinger and Brzezinski are fascinating. Both men despised Holbrooke and the feelings were mutual. When three egos as large as theirs the result had to be intellectual and verbal fireworks. For what it is worth, Holbrooke felt Kissinger was a liar, amoral and a deeply cynical man with an overblown reputation who had contributed to the culture of Watergate and the events that followed. Kissinger described Holbrooke as possessing minimal intelligence and “the most viperous character I know around town,” which was something coming from Kissinger. Holbrooke saw Brzezinski as another Kissinger type who would destroy Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and seize control of President Carter’s foreign policy through his role as National Security Advisor. Brzezinski’s hard line view of the Cold War was born out with Russia, but “he did help destroy the last pieces of any postwar consensus, bringing viciousness and deception into the heart of the government.” Both men loved the spectacle of power and wielded it for its own sake, bringing Vance to tell Holbrooke, “I still cannot understand how the president was so taken with Zbig. He is evil, a liar, and dangerous.”
Holbrooke’s greatest accomplishment was his work bringing a pseudo peace to Bosnia. Packer delves into the Yugoslav civil war in great detail providing character studies of the major players and/or psychopaths from Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, Fanjo Tudjman, the president of Croatia, Alija Izetegovic, president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Radovan Karadzic, president of Republic Srpska, among many other “interesting individuals.” Packer’s details of the Dayton negotiations are priceless and reflect Holbrooke’s doggedness and highlights the difficulties that he faced dealing with such diverse characters steeped in their own ethnic, religious, and nationalistic hatreds. Packer describes Holbrooke’s negotiating tactics, ranging from bombasity, reasonable proposals, and Bismarckian type threats to achieve his goals. In so doing he believed he was rectifying Bill Clinton’s disinterest, ignorance, or lack of gumption in dealing with the Balkans. With the slaughter of Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, Holbrooke was able to rally Clinton, foster NATO action by our European allies, who had done nothing to that point to bomb and coerce the participants to the negotiating table and foster a diplomatic agreement.
Holbrook always believed he should be Secretary of State, but his personality and poor judgement would turn off Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama in addition to his colleagues in the diplomatic arena whether it was Cy Vance, Madeline Albright, Susan Rice and a host of others. The bureaucratic battles behind the scenes and some in public are present for all to see, many of which Holbrooke won, but many of which he lost. It was only Hillary Clinton who saw the positives in using Holbrooke’s talents as she made him the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan which Packer discusses in great detail as Holbrooke worked to try and bring about negotiations with the Taliban and gain Pakistani cooperation.
Packer delves into the personal side of Holbrooke particularly his marriages which resulted in two divorces and a decades long marriage to Kati Marton, who was more than a match for Holbrook in terms of ego, self-centeredness, and their own special type of charm. Holbrooke’s feelings are explored when he failed to achieve the positions he desired and Packer provides numerous insights into policy and personal decision-making that affected himself, his family, and the professionals around him.
Packer’s effort is to be applauded as he seems to have captured Holbrooke, warts and all in conducting research that included over 250 interviews, the liberal use of Holbrooke’s notebooks, and a strong knowledge of American post-World War II foreign policy. But one must remember that Packer and Holbrook were friends who strongly believed in a liberal-internationalist approach to foreign policy that encompassed a strong humanitarian component. The importance of the book cannot be in doubt as it rests on the major impact that Holbrooke had on the conduct of US foreign policy over four decades.
Holbrooke exhibited a powerful ego that did not always play well with others be they friend or foe, but in the end, he was at the center of American strategic thinking throughout a career that spanned the beginning of US involvement in Vietnam through our continuing imbroglio in Afghanistan. A self-promotor who saw his work and ideas as the key to American success, Holbrooke was a dominating presence in the American foreign policy establishment for decades and is the subject of George Packer’s important new study, OUR MAN: RICHARD HOLBROOKE AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY.
Holbrooke owned many personality flaws for which he paid dearly. His drive would in part destroy two marriages and his closest friendships. His character defects would cost him any chance of being chosen Secretary of State, a position he craved, for which he was eminently qualified. If he had the capacity of introspection and a dose of self-restraint, he could have accomplished anything. However, if he was able to tone himself down, he would not have been true to himself which is the core of why he was successful.
For George Packer, Holbrooke was the embodiment of the American Century (or half century!) which encompassed Holbrooke’s life. He was part of the belief that the US could accomplish anything, be it the Marshall Plan, remake Vietnam, bring peace to Bosnia, or make something out of the quagmire that is Afghanistan. For Holbrooke to be part of great events and decisions was his life blood and that is why it is important to tell his story.
In many ways Packer’s narrative is a conversation with the reader as he imparts practically all aspects of Holbrooke’s private and public life. He takes us inside his subject’s marriages and family life, his intellectual development, travels throughout the world and the important individuals who were his compatriots or enemies, and his obsession to create a foreign policy that would embody the liberal internationalism that was so effective following World War II. Packer makes assumptions about how conversant the reader is with post-war history as it relates to Holbrooke’s career and to his credit, he offers a great deal of background information to make the reader’s task easier. Packer prepares character sketches of all the major personages that Holbrooke shared the stage with; be it Edward Lansdale, the CIA psy-ops guru; Averill Harriman, a mentor and benefactor; David Halberstam, the New York Times reporter; Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hillary Clinton, presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama among many others.
Perhaps the most poignant relationship that Packer describes is that of Anthony Lake who was a close friend of Holbrooke in the early 1960s as they both entered the Foreign Service and served in Vietnam. Packer follows their relationship and competition over the next five decades, they’re ups and downs on a personal level, policy disagreements all of which would ruin their friendship and turn them into bureaucratic enemies. At times it feels like Packer has inserted Lake’s autobiography amidst the narrative as a means of comparing the two and providing insights into steps and positions Holbrooke might have taken which may have altered his career path.
Holbrooke’s Vietnam experience would stay with him throughout his career. The military self-deception of Vietnam and the role of the national security establishment created doubts and reinforced the idea that Holbrooke himself knew what was best and would usually consider himself to be the smartest person in the room. This is evident in Holbrooke’s writings which critique US policy as he integrates his personal life into the narrative. Packer does an excellent job culling Holbrooke’s thoughts as he incorporates segments of his notebooks into his story. When it came to Vietnam, Holbrooke was very astute as he saw the failure of the Strategic Hamlet program early on and that fighting the Viet Cong only from the air could only result in failure. For Holbrooke the watershed date for the war was February, 1965 as the Pentagon issued an “evacuation order” for non-essential personnel and families as it brought an end “to the pretty colonial town of Saigon” and “was the beginning of sprawling US bases and B-52s and black market Marlboros and industrial scale-prostitution.”
Packer’s discussion of Kissinger and Brzezinski are fascinating. Both men despised Holbrooke and the feelings were mutual. When three egos as large as theirs the result had to be intellectual and verbal fireworks. For what it is worth, Holbrooke felt Kissinger was a liar, amoral and a deeply cynical man with an overblown reputation who had contributed to the culture of Watergate and the events that followed. Kissinger described Holbrooke as possessing minimal intelligence and “the most viperous character I know around town,” which was something coming from Kissinger. Holbrooke saw Brzezinski as another Kissinger type who would destroy Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and seize control of President Carter’s foreign policy through his role as National Security Advisor. Brzezinski’s hard line view of the Cold War was born out with Russia, but “he did help destroy the last pieces of any postwar consensus, bringing viciousness and deception into the heart of the government.” Both men loved the spectacle of power and wielded it for its own sake, bringing Vance to tell Holbrooke, “I still cannot understand how the president was so taken with Zbig. He is evil, a liar, and dangerous.”
Holbrooke’s greatest accomplishment was his work bringing a pseudo peace to Bosnia. Packer delves into the Yugoslav civil war in great detail providing character studies of the major players and/or psychopaths from Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, Fanjo Tudjman, the president of Croatia, Alija Izetegovic, president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Radovan Karadzic, president of Republic Srpska, among many other “interesting individuals.” Packer’s details of the Dayton negotiations are priceless and reflect Holbrooke’s doggedness and highlights the difficulties that he faced dealing with such diverse characters steeped in their own ethnic, religious, and nationalistic hatreds. Packer describes Holbrooke’s negotiating tactics, ranging from bombasity, reasonable proposals, and Bismarckian type threats to achieve his goals. In so doing he believed he was rectifying Bill Clinton’s disinterest, ignorance, or lack of gumption in dealing with the Balkans. With the slaughter of Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, Holbrooke was able to rally Clinton, foster NATO action by our European allies, who had done nothing to that point to bomb and coerce the participants to the negotiating table and foster a diplomatic agreement.
Holbrook always believed he should be Secretary of State, but his personality and poor judgement would turn off Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama in addition to his colleagues in the diplomatic arena whether it was Cy Vance, Madeline Albright, Susan Rice and a host of others. The bureaucratic battles behind the scenes and some in public are present for all to see, many of which Holbrooke won, but many of which he lost. It was only Hillary Clinton who saw the positives in using Holbrooke’s talents as she made him the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan which Packer discusses in great detail as Holbrooke worked to try and bring about negotiations with the Taliban and gain Pakistani cooperation.
Packer delves into the personal side of Holbrooke particularly his marriages which resulted in two divorces and a decades long marriage to Kati Marton, who was more than a match for Holbrook in terms of ego, self-centeredness, and their own special type of charm. Holbrooke’s feelings are explored when he failed to achieve the positions he desired and Packer provides numerous insights into policy and personal decision-making that affected himself, his family, and the professionals around him.
Packer’s effort is to be applauded as he seems to have captured Holbrooke, warts and all in conducting research that included over 250 interviews, the liberal use of Holbrooke’s notebooks, and a strong knowledge of American post-World War II foreign policy. But one must remember that Packer and Holbrook were friends who strongly believed in a liberal-internationalist approach to foreign policy that encompassed a strong humanitarian component. The importance of the book cannot be in doubt as it rests on the major impact that Holbrooke had on the conduct of US foreign policy over four decades.
May 7, 2023
Back in my Hollywood days, I wondered if I was "playing the game" enough. I kept in touch with my best contacts, and forged a good path as a young creative, but always felt like a hermit compared to my actress pal Sally, who was literally out-- at Hollywood events, screenings, shows, readings, parties, lunches, drinks-- 24/7, 365 days a year. I got exhausted just looking at her appointment book.
Thus, far more striking to me than Richard Holbrooke's State Department work is how he played the game, i.e., his never-ending, decades-long geyser of self-hype and chest-beating; a personality so relentless, pompous, and shameless, it makes your average Hollywood climber look like a rube.
I fully concur with Mr. Packer's driving thesis that biographies of great men are often sanitized, but by examining this Man Who Desperately Aspired to, but Failed to Achieve Greatness, we can learn far more about how things do and don't get done in the trenches. I liked Packer's earlier book on the occupation of Iraq, but here he further shakes off the tone of establishment journalism to produce a near-gonzo work of biographical infotainment. OUR MAN is the BULL DURHAM of U.S. diplomacy.
Thus, far more striking to me than Richard Holbrooke's State Department work is how he played the game, i.e., his never-ending, decades-long geyser of self-hype and chest-beating; a personality so relentless, pompous, and shameless, it makes your average Hollywood climber look like a rube.
I fully concur with Mr. Packer's driving thesis that biographies of great men are often sanitized, but by examining this Man Who Desperately Aspired to, but Failed to Achieve Greatness, we can learn far more about how things do and don't get done in the trenches. I liked Packer's earlier book on the occupation of Iraq, but here he further shakes off the tone of establishment journalism to produce a near-gonzo work of biographical infotainment. OUR MAN is the BULL DURHAM of U.S. diplomacy.
July 2, 2019
I read this book right when it came out and then I read all the reviews and the hype and I guess I don't get the hype. The book is really well-written and Packer's insights are fully loaded, hilarious, and razor sharp. The book is about Holbrooke, but only so far as he is the thread that runs through American foreign policy. It's a book about foreign policy bureacrats and their relationship to the world. Holbrooke is not an admirable hero, but he's not awful. The true gems of insight are about what the different democratic regimes were like. The reviews I've read seem mixed about whether Holbrooke is the good guy or the bad guy, but to me that's sort of irrelevant. He's just a cog in the machine who was interesting enough and who left enough papers to tell a story about how the bureacracy works to make or break other countries.
June 19, 2019
I couldn't put this down. I encountered Holbrooke from a distance when he was SRAP. No matter what he told others, he seemed to love having his office off the busiest corridor and the most important meeting room in the State Department -- outside the cafeteria, near the ATM and the snack shop. He'd bring his Hollywood friends like Natalie Portman at a table where everyone would walk by and see him. He'd have an aide trail him with Blackberry in hand to the men's room where the great/near-great continued to dictate his messages while taking a long pee at the urinal. In fact, this biography includes several vignettes of Holbrooke at the urinal. Packer captures all the craziness and contradictions, the good, the bad, and the ugly, the genius, and the tragic flaws worthy of Shakespeare. He also highlights how Vietnam imprinted itself on Holbrooke and his generation, just as the Balkans did for those in the 1990s, and Afghanistan since 2001. I finished this book days ago, and I can't stop thinking about it.
July 11, 2019
This was fun, but not quite what I hoped it would be. I liked the tone a lot. It was interesting to read this and Directorate S in the same year. Lots of Holbrooke! I think I'm done reading about Holbrooke for now, though.
Anyway, recommended for the staggering number of cameos in this book: Tobias Wolff, David Halberstam, Neal Sheehan, Peter Jennings, Dikembe Mutombo (!)...the list goes on.
Anyway, recommended for the staggering number of cameos in this book: Tobias Wolff, David Halberstam, Neal Sheehan, Peter Jennings, Dikembe Mutombo (!)...the list goes on.
February 28, 2021
A vivid, compelling and balanced biography.
Packer ably deals with Holbrooke’s talents, ambition and flaws, and his narrative gives you the impression that Holbrooke’s life was a tragedy or disaster just waiting to happen, like a slow-motion train wreck. One of Holbrooke’s ambitions was to become secretary state, but his deceptiveness, self-aggrandizement, and aggressive turf wars seem to have made that unlikely from the start. Any effective secretary of state has to communicate a vision well, manage a big department well, and build relationships with the Pentagon, White House, and Congress一Holbrooke had trouble in all of these areas. The presidents he worked for, Clinton and Obama, didn’t seem to trust him very much, and Obama didn’t much like him, either. Packer also notes that Holbrooke often kept his concerns to himself for fear of looking weak or of affecting his future political career. He was opposed to escalation in Afghanistan in 2009, for example, but kept it to himself, afraid to speak up in front of the president and his other advisers, convincing himself that he could somehow make a difference from the inside.
Holbrooke’s open desire for a Nobel Peace prize, of course, didn’t help; he even wrote letters about the greatness of his achievements and begged people to sign them. People respected Holbrooke, but they couldn’t stand him. Hamid Karzai downright hated him and suspected that Holbrooke was trying to oust him from power一which happened to be true. Packer also covers Holbrooke’s cozy relationship with the press, and how they could often be counted on to publish stories about the items he wanted leaked. At one point somebody at the Brookings Institute gave Anthony Lake more credit for the Dayton Accords than Holbrooke. Holbrooke responded by trying to have the man fired. When two American UN diplomats failed to recognize him in an elevator he demanded that they be fired as well.
Other than his careerism, Holbrooke’s personal life doesn’t seem to have been all that great. Milošević at one point talks about Holbrooke to a US diplomat: “For sake of career he would eat small children for breakfast.” At one point Packer writes in his odd style (more on that later) “I haven’t told you about Holbrooke and women. There’s a lot to say.” Holbrooke’s love affairs obviously don’t make him very appealing; he had three wives and cheated on all of them一he even had an affair with his best friend’s wife. That particular affair makes Holbrooke seem downright mentally deranged. He had two sons, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, they weren’t close. He also had grandchildren, but couldn’t recognize them at first glance. The decline of American power is a theme that runs through the book. Packer does a good job looking at the big picture and explaining broad issues while using details to tell an engaging and thoughtful story. Holbrooke’s intelligence and energy really comes through.
Packer tries to portray Holbrooke as an idealist, but that theme doesn’t really convince. Obviously, the book does deal with Holbrooke’s time in the Balkans. For some reason, however, his diplomacy during the Kosovo crisis and his dealings with Milošević are dealt with only in passing. Still, Packer does do a good job describing what happened and he doesn’t try to paint it as some sort of ideal model for diplomacy. Packer als writes of Holbrooke that “the only problems worth his time were the biggest, hardest ones”: a questionable assertion, since Holbrooke went out of his way to avoid any postings dealing with the Middle East. When discussing US support for the Khmer Rouge’s retention of Cambodia’s seat at the UN, Packer quotes Holbrooke as saying that voting against it would have cost the US more. Packer does not, however, try to find out what Holbrooke meant. Packer describes Holbrooke’s shady financial dealings out of government, such as paid speeches to foreign oligarchs and discounted loans from banks involved in the subprime mortgage scandal. However, these are dealt with in a cursory fashion, and Packer seems to accept it as “just the way it is” with elites. Packer also writes that “the work smelled enough like corruption to make him uneasy,” even though Holbrooke seems to have been fine with it.
The tone gets a bit gossipy at times, too. Whenever a woman is introduced to Holbrooke, Packer has to comment on her physical appearance for some reason一only for Packer to later criticize Holbrooke for his sexism. A few parts of the book are pretty weird. At one point Packer writes about one of Holbrooke’s lovers: “Breasts larger than expected一he liked that, too.” I don’t know how Packer knew about that particular expectation of Holbrooke’s, and I don’t want to know. Packer also writes that Obama was baffled at the idea that people blamed him for Holbrooke’s death (what people?) He also writes that Obama viewed his attendance at Holbrooke’s funeral as a form of “penance” (How did Packer come to that conclusion? Telepathy?)
Also, the book isn’t always as insightful as one may like. “That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service----other countries...strange for a country of immigrants from everywhere,” When the narrative gets to Vietnam: “I’m not going to tell you the whole history...That story isn’t my concern here, and if you don’t already know it I can recommend a half dozen excellent books.” Similarly, when he mentions the negotiations to end the war in Bosnia, Packer writes “I won’t go into the details...You can read about Lake’s effort in a lot of books.” At one point he mentions Henry Cabot Lodge’s arrival in Vietnam: “it was one of those moments where no one really knows what the hell is going on.” Packer also asks: “Why do Americans keep falling in love with counterinsurgency? I ask because we’re obviously no good at it.”Packer also writes that “after the overthrow of the Taliban, the United States and Iran had worked together to support the new Afghan government, but Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech in 2002 killed their short-lived cooperation.” He doesn’t mention other factors like Iran’s nuclear program, American and Western sanctions, America’s search for Caspian oil pipelines, and America’s alliances and military presence in the Gulf. US and Iranian tensions in these areas are pretty clear, but the solutions less so. Another issue is that the book has photographs, but oddly, they don’t have any captions, so you have to flip to the endnotes. There’s not even an index.
Packer’s style is often informal and too conversational at times. Examples of this seem endless:
“Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head...I’m trying to think what to tell you, now that you have me talking.”
“I’ve gone on longer than I meant to.”
“Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school.”
“If you want analysis that’s the best I can give you.”
“And perhaps by now you’re also shaking your head over Edward Lansdale and Rufus Phillips.”
“I have to admit Greene was on to something in Vietnam.”
“Foreign policy is given to heavy internal bleeding, for reasons I’ve never really understood—perhaps they’ll become clearer as we go along.”
“I don’t have much to tell you about his year in Bonn.”
On Anthony Lake and Holbrooke: “Hamilton and Burr come to mind, but don’t ask me which is which.”
“If there’s a better piece of writing on Vietnam by an American official, I haven’t read it.”
On the Nixon campaign’s back channel to Saigon during the 1968 election: “Was it treason? I can’t think of any other word.”
“There isn’t much to tell you about the Peace Corps Years.”
“I don’t have much to tell you about his years in Bonn.”
“He did other things as ambassador but you don’t need to know about them.”
“Ambition is not a pretty thing up close...Because of Holbrooke’s psychological mutation of not being able to see himself, and maybe not giving a shit anyway, he lets us ogle ambition in the nude.”
“And if, while following him, you ever feel a disapproving cluck rise to your palate, as I sometimes do, don’t forget that inside most people you read about in history books is a child who fiercely resisted toilet training.”
“I don’t know what you were doing in your mid-thirties, but I wasn’t trying to establish diplomatic relations with two of America’s former enemies simultaneously.”
“Foreign policy is given to heavy internal bleeding, for reasons I’ve never really understood---perhaps they’ll become clear as we go along.”
“But I wonder if I’ve really made you feel what he was like to be around, and I’m not sure I can.”
“A travel book based on a travel book fell into the young president’s hands, and he changed his mind about Bosnia. I told you foreign policy makes no sense.”
Still, an insightful, well-researched and mostly well-written work.
Packer ably deals with Holbrooke’s talents, ambition and flaws, and his narrative gives you the impression that Holbrooke’s life was a tragedy or disaster just waiting to happen, like a slow-motion train wreck. One of Holbrooke’s ambitions was to become secretary state, but his deceptiveness, self-aggrandizement, and aggressive turf wars seem to have made that unlikely from the start. Any effective secretary of state has to communicate a vision well, manage a big department well, and build relationships with the Pentagon, White House, and Congress一Holbrooke had trouble in all of these areas. The presidents he worked for, Clinton and Obama, didn’t seem to trust him very much, and Obama didn’t much like him, either. Packer also notes that Holbrooke often kept his concerns to himself for fear of looking weak or of affecting his future political career. He was opposed to escalation in Afghanistan in 2009, for example, but kept it to himself, afraid to speak up in front of the president and his other advisers, convincing himself that he could somehow make a difference from the inside.
Holbrooke’s open desire for a Nobel Peace prize, of course, didn’t help; he even wrote letters about the greatness of his achievements and begged people to sign them. People respected Holbrooke, but they couldn’t stand him. Hamid Karzai downright hated him and suspected that Holbrooke was trying to oust him from power一which happened to be true. Packer also covers Holbrooke’s cozy relationship with the press, and how they could often be counted on to publish stories about the items he wanted leaked. At one point somebody at the Brookings Institute gave Anthony Lake more credit for the Dayton Accords than Holbrooke. Holbrooke responded by trying to have the man fired. When two American UN diplomats failed to recognize him in an elevator he demanded that they be fired as well.
Other than his careerism, Holbrooke’s personal life doesn’t seem to have been all that great. Milošević at one point talks about Holbrooke to a US diplomat: “For sake of career he would eat small children for breakfast.” At one point Packer writes in his odd style (more on that later) “I haven’t told you about Holbrooke and women. There’s a lot to say.” Holbrooke’s love affairs obviously don’t make him very appealing; he had three wives and cheated on all of them一he even had an affair with his best friend’s wife. That particular affair makes Holbrooke seem downright mentally deranged. He had two sons, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, they weren’t close. He also had grandchildren, but couldn’t recognize them at first glance. The decline of American power is a theme that runs through the book. Packer does a good job looking at the big picture and explaining broad issues while using details to tell an engaging and thoughtful story. Holbrooke’s intelligence and energy really comes through.
Packer tries to portray Holbrooke as an idealist, but that theme doesn’t really convince. Obviously, the book does deal with Holbrooke’s time in the Balkans. For some reason, however, his diplomacy during the Kosovo crisis and his dealings with Milošević are dealt with only in passing. Still, Packer does do a good job describing what happened and he doesn’t try to paint it as some sort of ideal model for diplomacy. Packer als writes of Holbrooke that “the only problems worth his time were the biggest, hardest ones”: a questionable assertion, since Holbrooke went out of his way to avoid any postings dealing with the Middle East. When discussing US support for the Khmer Rouge’s retention of Cambodia’s seat at the UN, Packer quotes Holbrooke as saying that voting against it would have cost the US more. Packer does not, however, try to find out what Holbrooke meant. Packer describes Holbrooke’s shady financial dealings out of government, such as paid speeches to foreign oligarchs and discounted loans from banks involved in the subprime mortgage scandal. However, these are dealt with in a cursory fashion, and Packer seems to accept it as “just the way it is” with elites. Packer also writes that “the work smelled enough like corruption to make him uneasy,” even though Holbrooke seems to have been fine with it.
The tone gets a bit gossipy at times, too. Whenever a woman is introduced to Holbrooke, Packer has to comment on her physical appearance for some reason一only for Packer to later criticize Holbrooke for his sexism. A few parts of the book are pretty weird. At one point Packer writes about one of Holbrooke’s lovers: “Breasts larger than expected一he liked that, too.” I don’t know how Packer knew about that particular expectation of Holbrooke’s, and I don’t want to know. Packer also writes that Obama was baffled at the idea that people blamed him for Holbrooke’s death (what people?) He also writes that Obama viewed his attendance at Holbrooke’s funeral as a form of “penance” (How did Packer come to that conclusion? Telepathy?)
Also, the book isn’t always as insightful as one may like. “That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service----other countries...strange for a country of immigrants from everywhere,” When the narrative gets to Vietnam: “I’m not going to tell you the whole history...That story isn’t my concern here, and if you don’t already know it I can recommend a half dozen excellent books.” Similarly, when he mentions the negotiations to end the war in Bosnia, Packer writes “I won’t go into the details...You can read about Lake’s effort in a lot of books.” At one point he mentions Henry Cabot Lodge’s arrival in Vietnam: “it was one of those moments where no one really knows what the hell is going on.” Packer also asks: “Why do Americans keep falling in love with counterinsurgency? I ask because we’re obviously no good at it.”Packer also writes that “after the overthrow of the Taliban, the United States and Iran had worked together to support the new Afghan government, but Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech in 2002 killed their short-lived cooperation.” He doesn’t mention other factors like Iran’s nuclear program, American and Western sanctions, America’s search for Caspian oil pipelines, and America’s alliances and military presence in the Gulf. US and Iranian tensions in these areas are pretty clear, but the solutions less so. Another issue is that the book has photographs, but oddly, they don’t have any captions, so you have to flip to the endnotes. There’s not even an index.
Packer’s style is often informal and too conversational at times. Examples of this seem endless:
“Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head...I’m trying to think what to tell you, now that you have me talking.”
“I’ve gone on longer than I meant to.”
“Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school.”
“If you want analysis that’s the best I can give you.”
“And perhaps by now you’re also shaking your head over Edward Lansdale and Rufus Phillips.”
“I have to admit Greene was on to something in Vietnam.”
“Foreign policy is given to heavy internal bleeding, for reasons I’ve never really understood—perhaps they’ll become clearer as we go along.”
“I don’t have much to tell you about his year in Bonn.”
On Anthony Lake and Holbrooke: “Hamilton and Burr come to mind, but don’t ask me which is which.”
“If there’s a better piece of writing on Vietnam by an American official, I haven’t read it.”
On the Nixon campaign’s back channel to Saigon during the 1968 election: “Was it treason? I can’t think of any other word.”
“There isn’t much to tell you about the Peace Corps Years.”
“I don’t have much to tell you about his years in Bonn.”
“He did other things as ambassador but you don’t need to know about them.”
“Ambition is not a pretty thing up close...Because of Holbrooke’s psychological mutation of not being able to see himself, and maybe not giving a shit anyway, he lets us ogle ambition in the nude.”
“And if, while following him, you ever feel a disapproving cluck rise to your palate, as I sometimes do, don’t forget that inside most people you read about in history books is a child who fiercely resisted toilet training.”
“I don’t know what you were doing in your mid-thirties, but I wasn’t trying to establish diplomatic relations with two of America’s former enemies simultaneously.”
“Foreign policy is given to heavy internal bleeding, for reasons I’ve never really understood---perhaps they’ll become clear as we go along.”
“But I wonder if I’ve really made you feel what he was like to be around, and I’m not sure I can.”
“A travel book based on a travel book fell into the young president’s hands, and he changed his mind about Bosnia. I told you foreign policy makes no sense.”
Still, an insightful, well-researched and mostly well-written work.
September 19, 2023
It wasn’t a golden age, there was plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it.
Our Man is an exceptionally well written book, with in depth sourcing. It should be good, great even – but instead it serves as a warning that great research and a way with words are not always sufficient conditions. You’ve got to have heart, and possibly a little less nostalgia for a particular piece of the world that wasn’t that great, even if you were doing well out of it.
Personal
His appetite was more than large enough for a salon full of Pamela Harrimans—millionaires, movie stars, society fixtures. He would seek them out for the rest of his life. He was a star-fucker, and the star could be Averell or Pamela of Dikembe Mutombo or Angelina Jolie.
Richard Holbrooke was:
- A philanderer
- A shitty dad
- Quite corrupt
- Nakedly ambitious
- Betrayer of his best friend
- Tall tale teller (such as during the APC accident above Sarajevo)
- Probably a few other flawed things I’ve forgotten.
He’s a guy, like Coram’s Boyd, who considered his work bigger than everything else, even when it most certainly was not:
One afternoon he asked Vali Nasr to stay late to draft a memo. Nasr took out his phone to tell his son that he would need to find another ride home from his soccer game. Holbrooke said something about the importance of fatherhood and jotted down a note on his own letterhead for Amir Nasr: “This is to excuse your father Vali for his failure to pick you up after the soccer game today, but he was helping me write a memo that could save the world."
This is all from the book, though there’s an occasionally sugarcoating of the sleeping around and the corruption – kind of that’s what people in the higher echelons of society do, when really it is probably more a case of magnitude than categorical differences.
Most of that is fine in principle – I have stated multiple times that ambiguity in characters or plots is an interesting thing. In an actual biography, it’s part of the many layers to a person.
But.
I think Packer has gotten the balance wrong – the desire to show off as much information he has collected as possible. Does the reader need to know that Holbrooke fucked some random woman in an aeroplane toilet? I would argue: No. And my crude expression of this scene is intentional – a lot of these complicated layers presented by the author are not really that. Instead, Holbrooke in Our Man is an incredibly intelligent horndog with a habit of satiating his immediate needs, and who couldn’t make his accounts balance despite owning about nine(!) pieces of property. Stripping away the sense of noblesse oblige that permeates the book, you end up with a Holbrooke that was a slave to his basest desires.
This is not to say Holbrooke is that person. Instead it is that Our Man, when you cut through explanations for sleeping around as an appetite in a class where affairs were practically expected, tries too hard to pry into Holbrooke’s peccadillos and leaves me with not enough of the rest of his character. And there’s several reasons why I back myself on this:
- Packer, more than once, states there isn’t time to describe the full story of Holbrooke and that, if he had the time, we would get to read more of the kinds of things Holbrooke did even when no one was looking. Yes, it is a real shame that 550 pages of narrative was too constraining for Packer, that he was forced to only include the vital stuff, like how a 60+ Holbrooke was still a randy old goat with a younger woman that he claimed.
- A political conversation about Harmid Karzai, brutally stalls on a musing that Karzai may be bisexual who has a crush on one of his Ministers. It is totally out of place with any other aspects of the narrative and never becomes relevant. I question whether it is even recorded correctly and serves as titillation rather than analysis.
- Packer writes of Holbrooke’s third wife that [s]ome of his aides believed that she abandoned him when he needed her most, Packer picking emotive information that is laughable in the context of how Holbrooke behaved to others.
My point is that Holbrooke’s life is presented as the embodiment of the decline of America’s global reach, but he’s just such a parody of a person that it weakens the connection. It is a shame because Our Man is smart enough to quote Holbrooke’s words at length – whatever his flaws, he was, from an incredibly intelligent and perceptive person from a very young age. Perhaps that was his issue (“I alone can fix it”) and that could have been emphasised more.
Political
Let’s give him his due. He ended a war.
The major foreign policy interactions of Holbrooke’s life were the Vietnam War (and the worthy saving of many many boat people), the Bosnian Civil War, and America’s involvement in Afghanistan. Packer makes judgements on Holbrooke’s performance, which is fine – maybe I have a more rosy perception of the Dayton peace agreement, but it’s good to get different impressions – Packer comes across as well informed enough to at least respect his positions. He also notes Holbrooke’s dilettantism on Kosovo and outright mistakes re Ethiopia and Eritrea, interesting comparisons with matters that Holbrooke properly engaged with.
There are also good looks into the diplomatic and internal political processes – how much they depend on personal interactions. The portrayal of Obama in this book as a bit cold and professorial/legalistic does accord with other narratives I’ve read – maybe they feed off each other rather than as independent sources, but it seems remarkably in line with an Obama interview with Jon Stewart before the 2012 election – there’s an element of distance to Obama that Our Man gets.
A slight issue is that a lot happened between those major events that are covered, particularly under Republican administrations from which Holbrooke was excluded. However, I’m willing to be forgiving to Our Man on this. History is sometimes picking key events and working off them. There’s no shortage of comprehensive histories of the modern era. Focussing on the policies of Democratic administrations does give insights into liberalism (without shades of conservatism and neo conservatism) that might carry wider meaning as to America’s character.
However, I don’t share Packer’s pessimism over America’s relative decline. While there are undeniably challenges and increased weaknesses, I would not consider the rise of other powers such as China as inexorable. While that is a matter of opinion rather than a criticism, there’s a weakness and disconnectedness to Packer’s analysis, as encapsulated by this quote:
Pax Americana began to decay at its very height. If you ask me when the long decline began, I might point to 1998. We were flabby, smug, and self-absorbed. Imagine a president careless enough to stumble into his enemies’ trap and expend his power on a blue dress.
Packer once again oversexualises matters, and the remainder of the paragraph waxes on about events that Holbrooke played no part in, such as the early rise of Al-Qaeda. Packer gives the game away – he’s pissed off about America’s lost greatness, and Holbrooke is a vehicle to whinge about it. Here, when he really wants to make his point, he forgets Holbrooke even exists. He also cuts Holbrooke’s successes as ambassador around that period at the knees, claiming there just isn’t enough time to cover it which, as I’ve mentioned, is ridiculous – that he got America to pay its UN fees is covered, but should be credited more, frankly.
We are wholly ourselves. If you cut out the destructive element, you would kill the thing that made him almost great.
Maybe. But there are many many ways to present oneself. Our Man didn’t quite get it right to me. Not enough heart, and too much of the bit hanging below. Still good, but not great.
Our Man is an exceptionally well written book, with in depth sourcing. It should be good, great even – but instead it serves as a warning that great research and a way with words are not always sufficient conditions. You’ve got to have heart, and possibly a little less nostalgia for a particular piece of the world that wasn’t that great, even if you were doing well out of it.
Personal
His appetite was more than large enough for a salon full of Pamela Harrimans—millionaires, movie stars, society fixtures. He would seek them out for the rest of his life. He was a star-fucker, and the star could be Averell or Pamela of Dikembe Mutombo or Angelina Jolie.
Richard Holbrooke was:
- A philanderer
- A shitty dad
- Quite corrupt
- Nakedly ambitious
- Betrayer of his best friend
- Tall tale teller (such as during the APC accident above Sarajevo)
- Probably a few other flawed things I’ve forgotten.
He’s a guy, like Coram’s Boyd, who considered his work bigger than everything else, even when it most certainly was not:
One afternoon he asked Vali Nasr to stay late to draft a memo. Nasr took out his phone to tell his son that he would need to find another ride home from his soccer game. Holbrooke said something about the importance of fatherhood and jotted down a note on his own letterhead for Amir Nasr: “This is to excuse your father Vali for his failure to pick you up after the soccer game today, but he was helping me write a memo that could save the world."
This is all from the book, though there’s an occasionally sugarcoating of the sleeping around and the corruption – kind of that’s what people in the higher echelons of society do, when really it is probably more a case of magnitude than categorical differences.
Most of that is fine in principle – I have stated multiple times that ambiguity in characters or plots is an interesting thing. In an actual biography, it’s part of the many layers to a person.
But.
I think Packer has gotten the balance wrong – the desire to show off as much information he has collected as possible. Does the reader need to know that Holbrooke fucked some random woman in an aeroplane toilet? I would argue: No. And my crude expression of this scene is intentional – a lot of these complicated layers presented by the author are not really that. Instead, Holbrooke in Our Man is an incredibly intelligent horndog with a habit of satiating his immediate needs, and who couldn’t make his accounts balance despite owning about nine(!) pieces of property. Stripping away the sense of noblesse oblige that permeates the book, you end up with a Holbrooke that was a slave to his basest desires.
This is not to say Holbrooke is that person. Instead it is that Our Man, when you cut through explanations for sleeping around as an appetite in a class where affairs were practically expected, tries too hard to pry into Holbrooke’s peccadillos and leaves me with not enough of the rest of his character. And there’s several reasons why I back myself on this:
- Packer, more than once, states there isn’t time to describe the full story of Holbrooke and that, if he had the time, we would get to read more of the kinds of things Holbrooke did even when no one was looking. Yes, it is a real shame that 550 pages of narrative was too constraining for Packer, that he was forced to only include the vital stuff, like how a 60+ Holbrooke was still a randy old goat with a younger woman that he claimed.
- A political conversation about Harmid Karzai, brutally stalls on a musing that Karzai may be bisexual who has a crush on one of his Ministers. It is totally out of place with any other aspects of the narrative and never becomes relevant. I question whether it is even recorded correctly and serves as titillation rather than analysis.
- Packer writes of Holbrooke’s third wife that [s]ome of his aides believed that she abandoned him when he needed her most, Packer picking emotive information that is laughable in the context of how Holbrooke behaved to others.
My point is that Holbrooke’s life is presented as the embodiment of the decline of America’s global reach, but he’s just such a parody of a person that it weakens the connection. It is a shame because Our Man is smart enough to quote Holbrooke’s words at length – whatever his flaws, he was, from an incredibly intelligent and perceptive person from a very young age. Perhaps that was his issue (“I alone can fix it”) and that could have been emphasised more.
Political
Let’s give him his due. He ended a war.
The major foreign policy interactions of Holbrooke’s life were the Vietnam War (and the worthy saving of many many boat people), the Bosnian Civil War, and America’s involvement in Afghanistan. Packer makes judgements on Holbrooke’s performance, which is fine – maybe I have a more rosy perception of the Dayton peace agreement, but it’s good to get different impressions – Packer comes across as well informed enough to at least respect his positions. He also notes Holbrooke’s dilettantism on Kosovo and outright mistakes re Ethiopia and Eritrea, interesting comparisons with matters that Holbrooke properly engaged with.
There are also good looks into the diplomatic and internal political processes – how much they depend on personal interactions. The portrayal of Obama in this book as a bit cold and professorial/legalistic does accord with other narratives I’ve read – maybe they feed off each other rather than as independent sources, but it seems remarkably in line with an Obama interview with Jon Stewart before the 2012 election – there’s an element of distance to Obama that Our Man gets.
A slight issue is that a lot happened between those major events that are covered, particularly under Republican administrations from which Holbrooke was excluded. However, I’m willing to be forgiving to Our Man on this. History is sometimes picking key events and working off them. There’s no shortage of comprehensive histories of the modern era. Focussing on the policies of Democratic administrations does give insights into liberalism (without shades of conservatism and neo conservatism) that might carry wider meaning as to America’s character.
However, I don’t share Packer’s pessimism over America’s relative decline. While there are undeniably challenges and increased weaknesses, I would not consider the rise of other powers such as China as inexorable. While that is a matter of opinion rather than a criticism, there’s a weakness and disconnectedness to Packer’s analysis, as encapsulated by this quote:
Pax Americana began to decay at its very height. If you ask me when the long decline began, I might point to 1998. We were flabby, smug, and self-absorbed. Imagine a president careless enough to stumble into his enemies’ trap and expend his power on a blue dress.
Packer once again oversexualises matters, and the remainder of the paragraph waxes on about events that Holbrooke played no part in, such as the early rise of Al-Qaeda. Packer gives the game away – he’s pissed off about America’s lost greatness, and Holbrooke is a vehicle to whinge about it. Here, when he really wants to make his point, he forgets Holbrooke even exists. He also cuts Holbrooke’s successes as ambassador around that period at the knees, claiming there just isn’t enough time to cover it which, as I’ve mentioned, is ridiculous – that he got America to pay its UN fees is covered, but should be credited more, frankly.
We are wholly ourselves. If you cut out the destructive element, you would kill the thing that made him almost great.
Maybe. But there are many many ways to present oneself. Our Man didn’t quite get it right to me. Not enough heart, and too much of the bit hanging below. Still good, but not great.
June 17, 2019
There is so much good to say about Richard Holbrooke, and also so much that is bad.. He negotiated the Dayton Accords that ended the awful slaughter in the former country known as Yugoslavia, he badgered Jimmy Carter into increasing the number of refugees taken into the US from Southeast Asia by about a factor of 5, and her personally lobbied Congress to get the US to pay their share of the funding for the United Nations.
On the minus side he was vain, ambitious, a suck-up to those higher than himself in government, a womanizer and a pretty terrible father. His main goal in life was to be Secretary of State, and he never realized that final ambition, mostly due to his own faults. And in the end, he died while trying to make sense of our relationship with Pakistan and Afghanistan when his heart literally exploded.
George Packer, who knew Holbrooke and gained access from his widow to all his personal papers shortly after his death, has written the most remarkable biography I've read in a very long time. Packer writes in a conversational tone as if the reader is sitting across from him at a dinner table and he is spinning out a story over dessert and after dinner drinks.. The very first sentence is "Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him, I can't get his voice out of my head." He proceeds in this tone with sentences like "Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school." And he's correct. His life really began in his first foreign service appointment to Vietnam in 1962. There he saw the escalation of the war and its humiliating denouement, there he met the people who would become his friends and enemies, there developed his method of doggedly pursuing the goals he had in mind. It was Vietnam that shaped everything he did afterwards.
It seems a miracle that he lasted as long as he did in government because he seemed to alienate people wherever he went. It was probably a testament to his brilliance that he made it as far as he did. At one point during the Balkan War, on the eve of his wedding to his third wife, he was trying to get the Serbs to release some hostages.
"Give the Serbs 48 hours to release all the hostages unharmed, and tell them if they don't, we will bomb Pale.," he yelled into a phone from his hotel room in Hungary. "Send them a video of the bombing of Baghdad in the Gulf War. I am convinced that they will cave if the threat is credible. I'm serious, but now I have to go get married." He was wiling to do just about anything to get the job done.
Ultimately he backed the wrong horse in the 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries. Hillary Clinton, to her credit, remained loyal and got him a job as special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan.. Unfortunately, his personal chemistry with Barack Obama could be measured in negative numbers and nothing he could do would remedy that situation. The president couldn't stand being around him ansd was quite blunt about it toward the end of the book.
"Is there anyone here who thinks Richard Holbrooke is adding value to our efforts in the region?"Jones raised his hand and asked if the president wanted to relieve Holbrooke of his duties. "Yeah, that would be helpful, but be sure to tell Hillary I'm not saying he should leave the State Department if she can find another job for him, But it's time for a change."
In the end, his heart literally exploded during aa staff meeting with Clinton and while he was rushed to the hospital from her office, the damage had been done and recovery was impossible. Being wheeled into the operating room he said, "This is the end of my career. It's never going to be the same again,." "Don't let me die alone. I want to die at home with my family. I have so much to do."
Exasperating as the man could be, I couldn't help but admire him. - especially when I consider the people we have in government today.
On the minus side he was vain, ambitious, a suck-up to those higher than himself in government, a womanizer and a pretty terrible father. His main goal in life was to be Secretary of State, and he never realized that final ambition, mostly due to his own faults. And in the end, he died while trying to make sense of our relationship with Pakistan and Afghanistan when his heart literally exploded.
George Packer, who knew Holbrooke and gained access from his widow to all his personal papers shortly after his death, has written the most remarkable biography I've read in a very long time. Packer writes in a conversational tone as if the reader is sitting across from him at a dinner table and he is spinning out a story over dessert and after dinner drinks.. The very first sentence is "Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him, I can't get his voice out of my head." He proceeds in this tone with sentences like "Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school." And he's correct. His life really began in his first foreign service appointment to Vietnam in 1962. There he saw the escalation of the war and its humiliating denouement, there he met the people who would become his friends and enemies, there developed his method of doggedly pursuing the goals he had in mind. It was Vietnam that shaped everything he did afterwards.
It seems a miracle that he lasted as long as he did in government because he seemed to alienate people wherever he went. It was probably a testament to his brilliance that he made it as far as he did. At one point during the Balkan War, on the eve of his wedding to his third wife, he was trying to get the Serbs to release some hostages.
"Give the Serbs 48 hours to release all the hostages unharmed, and tell them if they don't, we will bomb Pale.," he yelled into a phone from his hotel room in Hungary. "Send them a video of the bombing of Baghdad in the Gulf War. I am convinced that they will cave if the threat is credible. I'm serious, but now I have to go get married." He was wiling to do just about anything to get the job done.
Ultimately he backed the wrong horse in the 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries. Hillary Clinton, to her credit, remained loyal and got him a job as special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan.. Unfortunately, his personal chemistry with Barack Obama could be measured in negative numbers and nothing he could do would remedy that situation. The president couldn't stand being around him ansd was quite blunt about it toward the end of the book.
"Is there anyone here who thinks Richard Holbrooke is adding value to our efforts in the region?"Jones raised his hand and asked if the president wanted to relieve Holbrooke of his duties. "Yeah, that would be helpful, but be sure to tell Hillary I'm not saying he should leave the State Department if she can find another job for him, But it's time for a change."
In the end, his heart literally exploded during aa staff meeting with Clinton and while he was rushed to the hospital from her office, the damage had been done and recovery was impossible. Being wheeled into the operating room he said, "This is the end of my career. It's never going to be the same again,." "Don't let me die alone. I want to die at home with my family. I have so much to do."
Exasperating as the man could be, I couldn't help but admire him. - especially when I consider the people we have in government today.
May 27, 2022
“Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head.”
That narrator’s voice is George Packer’s opening gambit, his way of saying in the first few sentences, “I know what you think this book is, but it’s actually several shades darker and many layers deeper than that.” It doesn’t seem to be Packer’s voice per se — more like that of a composite character fashioned from any number of cynical, burned-out cases commiserating in a dive in Logan Circle; they grew up spellbound by the romance of “The Year of Living Dangerously” and decided to become foreign correspondents, only to find there is nothing glamorous or romantic about stumbling into the hastily abandoned mass graves of Srebrenica, or killing time deep in the Green Zone in Baghdad while 20-year-old kids were getting themselves blown up in the alleyways of Fallujah.
From the first pages of “Our Man,” that mesmeric voice propels you through the early idealism and eventual collapse of a peripheral character to history — not a great man, but one who wanted so desperately to be great and nearly was. Holbrooke, as captivating as he can be (his diary, excerpted at length here on multiple occasions, is remarkably clear and insightful), is not really the point of the book. His life is a vehicle, a device, a metaphor. In the hands of a lesser writer, this conceit might have overextended itself into a goulash of ‘end of the American-led liberal order’ cliches.
But Packer is that rare creature of the establishment who hasn’t lost his allergy to such cliches. He opts instead for a brutally frank and clinical examination of the actions and internal contradictions that shaped American statecraft during its half-century astride the world, from the end of the Second World War right up to the new millennium. Holbrooke was there for much of it, starting in his twenties in the rice paddies of South Vietnam, trying his best to use American stockpiles of bulgar wheat, an inferior staple grain, to gain leverage over local village leaders. To his credit, it only took him a few years in the tropics to grasp that Vietnam was unwinnable, least of all by the techniques McNamara and Rostow and Westmoreland were agitating for.
McNamara later recapitualted his disastrous tenure at the Pentagon in a memoir with the truncated title “In Retrospect,” I guess the subtextual second clause being “We Fucked Up.” Everyone now knows Vietnam was a calamity, but what is less remembered is that in the early years of the war, before Operation Rolling Thunder and the Tet Offensive, the American civilian officials in Saigon, in their thousands, lived a charmed existence, levitating above roiling tensions that manifested in the 1963 self-immolation of a Buddhist monk on a busy street corner. Yeah, in retrospect, it is outrageous that such an act barely seemed to register amid the daily tennis matches, the lavish embassy parties, the thousands of cables urgently fired off to Washington, which gave them their sense of noble purpose. (Donald Rumsfeld claimed in an interview with Errol Morris to have written a million or so such cables over the course of his own career, equally blind in his prodigious output.) This was our professional diplomatic class, by turns idealistic and self-absorbed, serving its own purpose and that of the greater good, to the extent it could fuse the two into the same thing.
If anything, our men in Washington were even further removed from reality. In the haunting words of Tony Lake, Holbrooke’s close friend, rival, and eventual enemy:
“We remember, more clearly than we care to, the well carpeted stillness of those government offices where some of the Pentagon Papers were first written. The efficient staccato of the typewriter, the antiseptic whiteness of nicely margined memoranda, the affable, authoritative and always urbane men who wrote them—all of it is a spiritual as well as geographic world apart from piles of decomposing bodies in a ditch outside Hue or a village bombed in Laos, the burn ward of a children’s hospital in Saigon, or even a cemetery or veteran’s hospital here.”
One of Holbrooke’s virtues as a literary device is his embodiment of the quintessentially American mixture of idealism and egotism that so defines our foreign policy. He was voracious in his appetites for the most expensive foods and the toniest of zip codes. Between stints in government, he took a bullshit seven-figure job at Lehman Brothers and helped himself to the same subsidized VIP mortgages his shady friends at Countrywide used to buy off senators and congressmen for decades. He didn’t go into public service with the thought of eventually cashing in, but when the opportunity to cash in presented itself, he didn’t seem to have any second thoughts. And what misgivings, if any, did Henry Kissinger or Colin Powell or Madeleine Albright have the first time they were offered six figures for a one-hour speech? To turn down such benevolence and forego his patrimony as a member of the elite would have required an almost superhuman fealty to old ideas of abstinence and honor, which he and his contemporaries had long since shed.
I don’t recall Donald Trump’s name ever showing up in the book’s 560 pages, but he is a kind of spectral figure lurking in the background of the narrative. Holbrooke was, after all, deeply devoted to Hillary Clinton, someone characterized by a kindred duality of idealism and cunning, who thrived under the same set of cozy arrangements for celebrity politicos. As Secretary of State she flew to over a hundred countries, pushed hard for our intervention in Libya, and by all accounts won the devotion of a foreign service that had felt sidelined by the Bush administration’s unilateral military adventurism. But in the years between Hillary Clinton’s service at Foggy Bottom and her second presidential campaign, she too found time to cash in; by 2016, she and her husband were reportedly worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
Not that any of this was illegal or even unusual, except in its scale. The venality and opportunism of Holbrooke and his contemporaries don’t erase their good qualities or their moments of true accomplishment — and that’s maybe the point of Holbrooke as metaphor. Even his worst tendencies don’t erase the fact that Holbrooke more than anyone at Carter’s State Department fought for the U.S. government to dramatically increase its intake of refugees from Southeast Asia, such that within a decade we took in over 1.5 million refugees from across the region. We had royally fucked up, and Holbrooke at least felt a duty to do something more about it than write a solipsistic memoir decades after the fact.
His overweening sense of entitlement also doesn’t cancel out the relentlessness with which he negotiated, against enormous odds, an end to the war in Bosnia. And by the time he was shuttling back and forth on an endless Kabul-Islamabad-DC circuit, his health and career in a downward spiral, Holbrooke was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of dollars every month from mortgages taken on more houses than he knew what to do with. But he nonetheless saw more clearly than virtually anyone else the truth about the war in Afghanistan. He understood better than Obama and Petraeus and Hillary did the war’s basic commonalities with Vietnam — another counterinsurgency campaign fought on impossible terrain surrounded by porous borders, ultimately doomed to failure — even if Obama thought the analogy anachronistic and self-serving.
One interpretation of the meaning of this book reads as follows: The mounting failures and hypocrisies of our foreign policy elite have fostered a corrosive, transpartisan cynicism in the American public, which ultimately gave way to a kind of nihilistic synthesis between Chomskyan and Trumpian views of America’s role in the world, which says that the System, the Deep State, is irredeemable, and that the thousands of men and women who spend their days anonymously carrying out the foreign policy of the United States are either deluded or in it for themselves, whether they know it or not, because any notion of a higher national purpose was long ago shown to be a lie. The narrative of “Our Man” gathers some of its force from the undercurrents of this line of reasoning, though it reveals a more complicated underlying picture, one that takes care to acknowledge the good that has come from American leadership. Our eventual decline as a great power may have been inevitable, but it took a special kind of nihilism in the body politic for someone as brazenly corrupt and dishonest as Donald Trump to seize power and so accelerate the pace of that decline. That nihilism gained at least some of its purchase from the unwillingness of our mandarin class to take responsibility for even the most disastrous of its mistakes, and from its unwillingness to seek its reward in heaven rather than at Davos or on Wall Street.
That narrator’s voice is George Packer’s opening gambit, his way of saying in the first few sentences, “I know what you think this book is, but it’s actually several shades darker and many layers deeper than that.” It doesn’t seem to be Packer’s voice per se — more like that of a composite character fashioned from any number of cynical, burned-out cases commiserating in a dive in Logan Circle; they grew up spellbound by the romance of “The Year of Living Dangerously” and decided to become foreign correspondents, only to find there is nothing glamorous or romantic about stumbling into the hastily abandoned mass graves of Srebrenica, or killing time deep in the Green Zone in Baghdad while 20-year-old kids were getting themselves blown up in the alleyways of Fallujah.
From the first pages of “Our Man,” that mesmeric voice propels you through the early idealism and eventual collapse of a peripheral character to history — not a great man, but one who wanted so desperately to be great and nearly was. Holbrooke, as captivating as he can be (his diary, excerpted at length here on multiple occasions, is remarkably clear and insightful), is not really the point of the book. His life is a vehicle, a device, a metaphor. In the hands of a lesser writer, this conceit might have overextended itself into a goulash of ‘end of the American-led liberal order’ cliches.
But Packer is that rare creature of the establishment who hasn’t lost his allergy to such cliches. He opts instead for a brutally frank and clinical examination of the actions and internal contradictions that shaped American statecraft during its half-century astride the world, from the end of the Second World War right up to the new millennium. Holbrooke was there for much of it, starting in his twenties in the rice paddies of South Vietnam, trying his best to use American stockpiles of bulgar wheat, an inferior staple grain, to gain leverage over local village leaders. To his credit, it only took him a few years in the tropics to grasp that Vietnam was unwinnable, least of all by the techniques McNamara and Rostow and Westmoreland were agitating for.
McNamara later recapitualted his disastrous tenure at the Pentagon in a memoir with the truncated title “In Retrospect,” I guess the subtextual second clause being “We Fucked Up.” Everyone now knows Vietnam was a calamity, but what is less remembered is that in the early years of the war, before Operation Rolling Thunder and the Tet Offensive, the American civilian officials in Saigon, in their thousands, lived a charmed existence, levitating above roiling tensions that manifested in the 1963 self-immolation of a Buddhist monk on a busy street corner. Yeah, in retrospect, it is outrageous that such an act barely seemed to register amid the daily tennis matches, the lavish embassy parties, the thousands of cables urgently fired off to Washington, which gave them their sense of noble purpose. (Donald Rumsfeld claimed in an interview with Errol Morris to have written a million or so such cables over the course of his own career, equally blind in his prodigious output.) This was our professional diplomatic class, by turns idealistic and self-absorbed, serving its own purpose and that of the greater good, to the extent it could fuse the two into the same thing.
If anything, our men in Washington were even further removed from reality. In the haunting words of Tony Lake, Holbrooke’s close friend, rival, and eventual enemy:
“We remember, more clearly than we care to, the well carpeted stillness of those government offices where some of the Pentagon Papers were first written. The efficient staccato of the typewriter, the antiseptic whiteness of nicely margined memoranda, the affable, authoritative and always urbane men who wrote them—all of it is a spiritual as well as geographic world apart from piles of decomposing bodies in a ditch outside Hue or a village bombed in Laos, the burn ward of a children’s hospital in Saigon, or even a cemetery or veteran’s hospital here.”
One of Holbrooke’s virtues as a literary device is his embodiment of the quintessentially American mixture of idealism and egotism that so defines our foreign policy. He was voracious in his appetites for the most expensive foods and the toniest of zip codes. Between stints in government, he took a bullshit seven-figure job at Lehman Brothers and helped himself to the same subsidized VIP mortgages his shady friends at Countrywide used to buy off senators and congressmen for decades. He didn’t go into public service with the thought of eventually cashing in, but when the opportunity to cash in presented itself, he didn’t seem to have any second thoughts. And what misgivings, if any, did Henry Kissinger or Colin Powell or Madeleine Albright have the first time they were offered six figures for a one-hour speech? To turn down such benevolence and forego his patrimony as a member of the elite would have required an almost superhuman fealty to old ideas of abstinence and honor, which he and his contemporaries had long since shed.
I don’t recall Donald Trump’s name ever showing up in the book’s 560 pages, but he is a kind of spectral figure lurking in the background of the narrative. Holbrooke was, after all, deeply devoted to Hillary Clinton, someone characterized by a kindred duality of idealism and cunning, who thrived under the same set of cozy arrangements for celebrity politicos. As Secretary of State she flew to over a hundred countries, pushed hard for our intervention in Libya, and by all accounts won the devotion of a foreign service that had felt sidelined by the Bush administration’s unilateral military adventurism. But in the years between Hillary Clinton’s service at Foggy Bottom and her second presidential campaign, she too found time to cash in; by 2016, she and her husband were reportedly worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
Not that any of this was illegal or even unusual, except in its scale. The venality and opportunism of Holbrooke and his contemporaries don’t erase their good qualities or their moments of true accomplishment — and that’s maybe the point of Holbrooke as metaphor. Even his worst tendencies don’t erase the fact that Holbrooke more than anyone at Carter’s State Department fought for the U.S. government to dramatically increase its intake of refugees from Southeast Asia, such that within a decade we took in over 1.5 million refugees from across the region. We had royally fucked up, and Holbrooke at least felt a duty to do something more about it than write a solipsistic memoir decades after the fact.
His overweening sense of entitlement also doesn’t cancel out the relentlessness with which he negotiated, against enormous odds, an end to the war in Bosnia. And by the time he was shuttling back and forth on an endless Kabul-Islamabad-DC circuit, his health and career in a downward spiral, Holbrooke was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of dollars every month from mortgages taken on more houses than he knew what to do with. But he nonetheless saw more clearly than virtually anyone else the truth about the war in Afghanistan. He understood better than Obama and Petraeus and Hillary did the war’s basic commonalities with Vietnam — another counterinsurgency campaign fought on impossible terrain surrounded by porous borders, ultimately doomed to failure — even if Obama thought the analogy anachronistic and self-serving.
One interpretation of the meaning of this book reads as follows: The mounting failures and hypocrisies of our foreign policy elite have fostered a corrosive, transpartisan cynicism in the American public, which ultimately gave way to a kind of nihilistic synthesis between Chomskyan and Trumpian views of America’s role in the world, which says that the System, the Deep State, is irredeemable, and that the thousands of men and women who spend their days anonymously carrying out the foreign policy of the United States are either deluded or in it for themselves, whether they know it or not, because any notion of a higher national purpose was long ago shown to be a lie. The narrative of “Our Man” gathers some of its force from the undercurrents of this line of reasoning, though it reveals a more complicated underlying picture, one that takes care to acknowledge the good that has come from American leadership. Our eventual decline as a great power may have been inevitable, but it took a special kind of nihilism in the body politic for someone as brazenly corrupt and dishonest as Donald Trump to seize power and so accelerate the pace of that decline. That nihilism gained at least some of its purchase from the unwillingness of our mandarin class to take responsibility for even the most disastrous of its mistakes, and from its unwillingness to seek its reward in heaven rather than at Davos or on Wall Street.
August 29, 2019
George Packer has written a 600 page biography of Richard Holbrooke. Who is he? He is the guy who led the diplomatic effort that stopped the genocidal civil war in Bosnia that culminated in the Dayton Peace Accords back when Clinton was President. The Yugoslav Civil War was brutal and many at the time were extremely troubled by a major genocide in what had been a major European vacation area when NATO and the US appeared willing to stand by and let it happen. What had the point of the Cold War been if the West turned a blind eye to mass murder in plain sight? Holbrooke seemed like a tough humanitarian who got the US to stand up to bullies and saved people in the process. Or so it seemed at the time. That was a while ago but the 90s were a calamitous time and the Clinton Presidency was rocky. Packer is an effective writer, so I will admit to looking forward to his new book on Holbrooke.
Be careful what you wish for! After working through Packer’s book, I think he accomplished what he set out to do. I am not at all clear whether I am satisfied with the result or whether the payoff is what I expected or wanted. This biography will get you thinking on multiple levels about issues that continue to haunt US foreign policy today under Trump - as well as more general issues of how to manage one’s career and family and how to live one’s life.
Conclusions and Takeaways
1) PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR CARDIOLOGIST. If you have artery blockages or other signs of heart disease, get them treated. If you have an aneurism in your Aorta - or anywhere else important - get the surgery you need to fix it! If your doctor schedules follow-up exams on these problems, go to those appointments. Start exercising and eating well. Whatever you do, do not maintain a highly stressful work agenda, travel all over the world to meet with unsavory characters in ultra stressful conflicts, fight with nearly everybody in your workplace, and alienate your family and friends in the process. I know it may sound short sighted but it is hard to save the world or even advance in one’s career if one ends up unexpectedly dead in a heap somewhere or even on the operating table. Holbrooke knew about his heart problems.
2) Big time diplomacy, like much else, is a team sport. While Holbrooke obtained some excellent results by dint of his driving personality and temperament, his quest for fame and career advancement arguably hurt his efforts in a number of other situations as well as souring his marriages. Even where he had successes, the ultimate achievement of US objectives depended on more than him - much more. It is not clear that the overall ledger for Holbrooke is a positive one.
3) When all is said and done, Packer seems to like Holbrooke and is supportive of the humanitarian military intervention against the Serbs. Packer sees this intervention as having continuity with other American interventions in the 20th century to intervene in the affairs of other nations to promote American values and the cause of liberty. The trouble with this is that is seems identical with a “war of choice” - a war that the US initiates to pursue its interests. This includes the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq. Whatever the niceties of the motivation, wars of choice have proven difficult to see through to a conclusion and appear much more difficult to justify as time goes on. Robert Gates was quoted as saying that post-Iraq, any US official who proposed a new war of choice should have his or her head examined. Where is the dividing line between a justifiable humanitarian war against genocide and a less justifiable war to promote other national priorities? This does not even start to address other issues such as when not to intervene (for example, Bosnia versus Rwanda). Maybe it is not a terrible development that the “American Century” has ended, although the new century’s diplomacy is not beginning in stellar fashion.
4).I do not understand the difference between Holbrooke’s perspective on diplomacy and the use of force and the perspectives of everyone else in this story. The relevant discussions were about how to combine military and diplomatic efforts to obtain some set of objectives. The process involves the rather abstract consideration of problems, options, and solutions followed by boots on the ground and armed conflict or not. This is all out of Clausewitz (war is the continuation of politics by other means) and was well known to all the main characters in the story, whether in Vietnam or in other arenas. I do not see how Holbrooke was different except in putting options and solutions together in different ways than the generals did.
5). What have you done for me lately? The relatively poor showing of Holbrooke in his last assignment should not be blamed primarily on the failure of the US administration to support his mission. Another possibility is that Holbrooke believed his own press clippings and as a result did not do his own homework on Afghanistan but instead thought that he could personally “handle” the problems. The record of a senior diplomat/operator will be determined by the individual’s ability to solve problems for his bosses (here Hillary Clinton and Obama) in real time. Given the long record of wars in Afghanistan, it is at least plausible that the failure of Obama’s team to do whatever Holbrooke suggested was not the only or principal reason why Holbrooke was nearly fired and achieved little. Time passes and situations and people change. A senior manager who fails to do likewise is not going to last long. I was surprised Holbrooke lasted as long as he did on his last tour in Afghanistan.
6) Packer is a fine writer but I am unsure of the point of including all the sordid details of Holbrooke’s personal life. What difference does it make? Does everyone do it in the rarefied atmosphere in which Holbrooke and Clinton travelled? I am still unsure of what Packer was trying to show readers about Holbrooke.
Be careful what you wish for! After working through Packer’s book, I think he accomplished what he set out to do. I am not at all clear whether I am satisfied with the result or whether the payoff is what I expected or wanted. This biography will get you thinking on multiple levels about issues that continue to haunt US foreign policy today under Trump - as well as more general issues of how to manage one’s career and family and how to live one’s life.
Conclusions and Takeaways
1) PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR CARDIOLOGIST. If you have artery blockages or other signs of heart disease, get them treated. If you have an aneurism in your Aorta - or anywhere else important - get the surgery you need to fix it! If your doctor schedules follow-up exams on these problems, go to those appointments. Start exercising and eating well. Whatever you do, do not maintain a highly stressful work agenda, travel all over the world to meet with unsavory characters in ultra stressful conflicts, fight with nearly everybody in your workplace, and alienate your family and friends in the process. I know it may sound short sighted but it is hard to save the world or even advance in one’s career if one ends up unexpectedly dead in a heap somewhere or even on the operating table. Holbrooke knew about his heart problems.
2) Big time diplomacy, like much else, is a team sport. While Holbrooke obtained some excellent results by dint of his driving personality and temperament, his quest for fame and career advancement arguably hurt his efforts in a number of other situations as well as souring his marriages. Even where he had successes, the ultimate achievement of US objectives depended on more than him - much more. It is not clear that the overall ledger for Holbrooke is a positive one.
3) When all is said and done, Packer seems to like Holbrooke and is supportive of the humanitarian military intervention against the Serbs. Packer sees this intervention as having continuity with other American interventions in the 20th century to intervene in the affairs of other nations to promote American values and the cause of liberty. The trouble with this is that is seems identical with a “war of choice” - a war that the US initiates to pursue its interests. This includes the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq. Whatever the niceties of the motivation, wars of choice have proven difficult to see through to a conclusion and appear much more difficult to justify as time goes on. Robert Gates was quoted as saying that post-Iraq, any US official who proposed a new war of choice should have his or her head examined. Where is the dividing line between a justifiable humanitarian war against genocide and a less justifiable war to promote other national priorities? This does not even start to address other issues such as when not to intervene (for example, Bosnia versus Rwanda). Maybe it is not a terrible development that the “American Century” has ended, although the new century’s diplomacy is not beginning in stellar fashion.
4).I do not understand the difference between Holbrooke’s perspective on diplomacy and the use of force and the perspectives of everyone else in this story. The relevant discussions were about how to combine military and diplomatic efforts to obtain some set of objectives. The process involves the rather abstract consideration of problems, options, and solutions followed by boots on the ground and armed conflict or not. This is all out of Clausewitz (war is the continuation of politics by other means) and was well known to all the main characters in the story, whether in Vietnam or in other arenas. I do not see how Holbrooke was different except in putting options and solutions together in different ways than the generals did.
5). What have you done for me lately? The relatively poor showing of Holbrooke in his last assignment should not be blamed primarily on the failure of the US administration to support his mission. Another possibility is that Holbrooke believed his own press clippings and as a result did not do his own homework on Afghanistan but instead thought that he could personally “handle” the problems. The record of a senior diplomat/operator will be determined by the individual’s ability to solve problems for his bosses (here Hillary Clinton and Obama) in real time. Given the long record of wars in Afghanistan, it is at least plausible that the failure of Obama’s team to do whatever Holbrooke suggested was not the only or principal reason why Holbrooke was nearly fired and achieved little. Time passes and situations and people change. A senior manager who fails to do likewise is not going to last long. I was surprised Holbrooke lasted as long as he did on his last tour in Afghanistan.
6) Packer is a fine writer but I am unsure of the point of including all the sordid details of Holbrooke’s personal life. What difference does it make? Does everyone do it in the rarefied atmosphere in which Holbrooke and Clinton travelled? I am still unsure of what Packer was trying to show readers about Holbrooke.
December 10, 2019
So much thought, so little inwardness
I was initially reluctant to read Our Man as I am a bit tired of the “great statesman” biographies, many that tend to fall either in the realm of overly fawning or overly critical of the inevitably complicated (read: difficult), noble (read: egotistical), and brash (read: overbearing) men who create and carry out the policies that deeply affect the lives of us mere mortals. However, as I live and work under the legacy of the Dayton Accords, I was compelled to take this deep dive into the world of its chief architect. Lucky me. This is an extraordinary biography. Holbrooke's wife, Kati Marton, granted George Packer exclusive rights to the treasure trove of Holbrooke’s papers and diaries with the aim to create the best and true picture of her late husband. Packer achieved that and more. Within 556 pages, Packer has managed to create an extraordinarily three-dimensional portrait of a deeply flawed, complicated, egomaniacal, bombastic, shortsighted, idealistic, romantic, strategic, utterly utterly brilliant man.
For all intents and purposes, the story begins in Vietnam – it is the hellscape that Holbrooke cuts his teeth upon. He sees the writing on the wall long before those around him are willing to admit it, but he is also taken with Graham Greene-esque life of the young diplomat sipping cocktails by the pool at the edge of insanity. He’s professionally driven and intellectually keen and personally obtuse – qualities that will never change throughout the course of his life. But, it is Vietnam that shapes his views on foreign policy and international intervention. It also sets his style: make decisions quickly and don’t think about them in the aftermath.
If Vietnam is the training ground, Bosnia is the show. With little in his pockets, Holbrooke bare-knuckles his way to the head of the table in leading the negotiations toward peace and the signing of the Dayton Accords. Central casting could not have come up with a better candidate to square with Milosevic, Izetbegovic, and Tudjman. For once, Holbrooke’s bull in a china shop ways bought him a modicum of respect and the ability to check one-off in the “win” column. But, of course, the win came with some steep and fatal flaws, namely the carving up of Bosnia and Herzegovina into two separate entities (The Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska) that some 20+ years later are more determined than ever to stay separate, and an entrenchment of the ethnic divisions and ethnic cleansing of areas that marked the war. Holbrooke would go on to champion his role in Bosnia, overplaying his achievements and, most horrifically, exaggerating his role as a savior in the accident on Mt. Igman that took the life of several of his colleagues.
The final bow comes in the form of Afghanistan. Holbrooke used every means he had (namely in the form of a loyal and compassionate friend in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) to get a job in the literal bowels of the Obama White House. His bombastic style and overbearing strategic analysis never gibed with Obama’s cool tactician approach. The new guard of young and whip-smart analysts and staffers didn’t seem to want much to do with the old man who flattered too much, couldn’t get to the point, and waxed on for long hours about the lessons of Vietnam. Holbrooke was an outdated and sad mess. But, Packer does manage to call out the kind of hubris it was to simply overlook the lessons of the old man who didn’t shut up (particularly when he may have rightly been protesting against the unilateral military approach of the administration.) But, everything was too late.
Holbrooke was likely awful to work for and with much of the time. He was full of himself and unabashedly self-promoting. He was sexist – rarely seeing women as more than hangers-on, romantic partners or lesser adversaries (Hillary seems the only woman who was spared this – he obviously respected her greatly, even more so than her husband for whom he also worked). He had a chip on his shoulder about the size of the seat of the Secretary of State, a position he aspired to but never achieved. He was cruel and obtuse, even to those he loved. But he yearned to do the right thing. And he saw things acutely and clearly. And he was often right where so many others were wrong.
Incredible subject and Packer's effortless prose make this an excellent read.
I was initially reluctant to read Our Man as I am a bit tired of the “great statesman” biographies, many that tend to fall either in the realm of overly fawning or overly critical of the inevitably complicated (read: difficult), noble (read: egotistical), and brash (read: overbearing) men who create and carry out the policies that deeply affect the lives of us mere mortals. However, as I live and work under the legacy of the Dayton Accords, I was compelled to take this deep dive into the world of its chief architect. Lucky me. This is an extraordinary biography. Holbrooke's wife, Kati Marton, granted George Packer exclusive rights to the treasure trove of Holbrooke’s papers and diaries with the aim to create the best and true picture of her late husband. Packer achieved that and more. Within 556 pages, Packer has managed to create an extraordinarily three-dimensional portrait of a deeply flawed, complicated, egomaniacal, bombastic, shortsighted, idealistic, romantic, strategic, utterly utterly brilliant man.
For all intents and purposes, the story begins in Vietnam – it is the hellscape that Holbrooke cuts his teeth upon. He sees the writing on the wall long before those around him are willing to admit it, but he is also taken with Graham Greene-esque life of the young diplomat sipping cocktails by the pool at the edge of insanity. He’s professionally driven and intellectually keen and personally obtuse – qualities that will never change throughout the course of his life. But, it is Vietnam that shapes his views on foreign policy and international intervention. It also sets his style: make decisions quickly and don’t think about them in the aftermath.
If Vietnam is the training ground, Bosnia is the show. With little in his pockets, Holbrooke bare-knuckles his way to the head of the table in leading the negotiations toward peace and the signing of the Dayton Accords. Central casting could not have come up with a better candidate to square with Milosevic, Izetbegovic, and Tudjman. For once, Holbrooke’s bull in a china shop ways bought him a modicum of respect and the ability to check one-off in the “win” column. But, of course, the win came with some steep and fatal flaws, namely the carving up of Bosnia and Herzegovina into two separate entities (The Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska) that some 20+ years later are more determined than ever to stay separate, and an entrenchment of the ethnic divisions and ethnic cleansing of areas that marked the war. Holbrooke would go on to champion his role in Bosnia, overplaying his achievements and, most horrifically, exaggerating his role as a savior in the accident on Mt. Igman that took the life of several of his colleagues.
The final bow comes in the form of Afghanistan. Holbrooke used every means he had (namely in the form of a loyal and compassionate friend in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) to get a job in the literal bowels of the Obama White House. His bombastic style and overbearing strategic analysis never gibed with Obama’s cool tactician approach. The new guard of young and whip-smart analysts and staffers didn’t seem to want much to do with the old man who flattered too much, couldn’t get to the point, and waxed on for long hours about the lessons of Vietnam. Holbrooke was an outdated and sad mess. But, Packer does manage to call out the kind of hubris it was to simply overlook the lessons of the old man who didn’t shut up (particularly when he may have rightly been protesting against the unilateral military approach of the administration.) But, everything was too late.
Holbrooke was likely awful to work for and with much of the time. He was full of himself and unabashedly self-promoting. He was sexist – rarely seeing women as more than hangers-on, romantic partners or lesser adversaries (Hillary seems the only woman who was spared this – he obviously respected her greatly, even more so than her husband for whom he also worked). He had a chip on his shoulder about the size of the seat of the Secretary of State, a position he aspired to but never achieved. He was cruel and obtuse, even to those he loved. But he yearned to do the right thing. And he saw things acutely and clearly. And he was often right where so many others were wrong.
Incredible subject and Packer's effortless prose make this an excellent read.
June 9, 2019
A well-written book that humanizes Richard Holbrooke, who, according to the author, represented the best and the worst impulses of American foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century. With access to his diaries and personal correspondence, Packer often lets Holbrooke speak for himself, seldom editorializing his protagonist’s actions. It’s also clear that Packer (like me) is fascinated by the scale of Holbrooke’s ambitions, his tenacity, commitment to human rights, and, above all, a complete devotion to the cause at hand (mixed with a sense of personal destiny, of course). That said, the description of Holbrooke’s myriad failings are unsparing, right down to his repeated attempts at flirting with the attending doctor while she diagnosed him with a ripped aorta shortly before his heart gave out.
The book also provides glimpses of the machinations of American foreign policy under different Presidents from Holbrooke’s vantage point—as a result the Middle East is conspicuously missing, although Holbrooke’s support for the Iraq War is mentioned in passing—but reserves any final judgement on how the country (empire?) can extricate itself from the various quagmires of its own creation.
I have one serious complaint with the book: there is, like so many other pop culture themes, a distinct flavor of American navel-gazing to the narrative, where almost every other international player is sidelined to a minor character. I feel an obligation to research and read works by other writers, preferably from outside the Washington Consensus, to develop a more well-rounded perspective on the role of someone like Holbrooke on the global stage.
The book also provides glimpses of the machinations of American foreign policy under different Presidents from Holbrooke’s vantage point—as a result the Middle East is conspicuously missing, although Holbrooke’s support for the Iraq War is mentioned in passing—but reserves any final judgement on how the country (empire?) can extricate itself from the various quagmires of its own creation.
I have one serious complaint with the book: there is, like so many other pop culture themes, a distinct flavor of American navel-gazing to the narrative, where almost every other international player is sidelined to a minor character. I feel an obligation to research and read works by other writers, preferably from outside the Washington Consensus, to develop a more well-rounded perspective on the role of someone like Holbrooke on the global stage.
March 12, 2020
Excellent book. Tends to ramble quite a bit as it tries to encompass the mind of a man who is in motion and tends to ramble, but that can be very distracting and the one writing the book should have taken greater pains to make it a bit more comprehensible. Overall an excellent look into a complex figure in history that doesn’t try to cast that figure in a positive or negative light, just a light.
December 1, 2019
What a remarkable achievement this book is. Packer has captured the captivating, vexing complexity of a public servant with exceedingly engaging prose. I can’t think of another biography that has wrought such a deeply emotional response. Well worth the time.
September 24, 2020
A masterpiece
January 21, 2020
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer
⅘ Stars
Richard Holbrooke is an incredibly interesting persona in our country’s foreign policy story. His name will be forever tied to three countries that strike fear in American hearts: Vietnam, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. In Vietnam, he was a freshly graduated foreign service officer who saw first hand many of the failings of our war there. In Bosnia, he was a primary actor in negotiating an end to the genocidal conflict between Bosnian Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. In Afghanistan, he helped lead American policy in neutralizing the Taliban and managing corrupt foreign leaders. Despite all of his gifts that brought him to those lofty positions, his career is full of ‘almosts.’ Even the introduction to his Wikipedia article lays them out clearly. His ultimate goal was to be Secretary of State, which he came tantalizingly close to three times. First was in 1996 as he was passed over by President Clinton for Madeleine Albright. In 2004 he had another great shot, serving as John Kerry’s top foreign policy advisor during his ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign. His dream was again stolen from him in 2008 when he served a similar role in Hillary Clinton’s fruitless run at the presidency. He does, however, have the distinction of being the only person to ever serve as Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions (Asia 1977-1981 and Europe 1994-1996).
But what makes George Packer’s account of Holbrooke’s life so engrossing is not just these brushes with greatness, but also the frank account of Holbrooke’s numerous professional shortcomings. To put it as lightly as possible, Holbrooke had a way of rubbing people the wrong way. He did it early and often in his career, no matter how high ranking those other people happened to be. In some cases (Bosnia most specifically) his Big Stick diplomatic outlook and brash interpersonal style served him well. In others, it absolutely sunk him. The most infamous case of his sinking was in the Obama administration. It was an open secret that Obama and Biden couldn’t stand Holbrooke, but his close relationship with Hillary Clinton gave him somewhat of a safety net in his special position working on issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But things went down the drain for him when he was caught aiding Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s political opponents. Karzai was reelected and for good reason viewed Holbrooke and the United States suspiciously for the rest of his time in the presidential palace.
Holbrooke also had his shortcomings on a personal level. He was an absent father, an unfaithful husband, a slob (he loved taking off his shoes and propping his feet up on other people’s desks at the State Department), and lived a lavish lifestyle that his public sector jobs could hardly support financially. But rather than using these details to slam Holbrooke, the author uses them to weave a more complete picture of the man. I think one of the most telling details were his last words. He was working feverishly when he fell ill and had to be rushed to George Washington University Hospital for a twenty hour surgery that would eventually take his life. But before losing consciousness his last words were “You’ve got to end this war in Afghanistan.” Those words speak to his tireless commitment to his country and to improving human lives across the world.
⅘ Stars
Richard Holbrooke is an incredibly interesting persona in our country’s foreign policy story. His name will be forever tied to three countries that strike fear in American hearts: Vietnam, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. In Vietnam, he was a freshly graduated foreign service officer who saw first hand many of the failings of our war there. In Bosnia, he was a primary actor in negotiating an end to the genocidal conflict between Bosnian Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. In Afghanistan, he helped lead American policy in neutralizing the Taliban and managing corrupt foreign leaders. Despite all of his gifts that brought him to those lofty positions, his career is full of ‘almosts.’ Even the introduction to his Wikipedia article lays them out clearly. His ultimate goal was to be Secretary of State, which he came tantalizingly close to three times. First was in 1996 as he was passed over by President Clinton for Madeleine Albright. In 2004 he had another great shot, serving as John Kerry’s top foreign policy advisor during his ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign. His dream was again stolen from him in 2008 when he served a similar role in Hillary Clinton’s fruitless run at the presidency. He does, however, have the distinction of being the only person to ever serve as Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions (Asia 1977-1981 and Europe 1994-1996).
But what makes George Packer’s account of Holbrooke’s life so engrossing is not just these brushes with greatness, but also the frank account of Holbrooke’s numerous professional shortcomings. To put it as lightly as possible, Holbrooke had a way of rubbing people the wrong way. He did it early and often in his career, no matter how high ranking those other people happened to be. In some cases (Bosnia most specifically) his Big Stick diplomatic outlook and brash interpersonal style served him well. In others, it absolutely sunk him. The most infamous case of his sinking was in the Obama administration. It was an open secret that Obama and Biden couldn’t stand Holbrooke, but his close relationship with Hillary Clinton gave him somewhat of a safety net in his special position working on issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But things went down the drain for him when he was caught aiding Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s political opponents. Karzai was reelected and for good reason viewed Holbrooke and the United States suspiciously for the rest of his time in the presidential palace.
Holbrooke also had his shortcomings on a personal level. He was an absent father, an unfaithful husband, a slob (he loved taking off his shoes and propping his feet up on other people’s desks at the State Department), and lived a lavish lifestyle that his public sector jobs could hardly support financially. But rather than using these details to slam Holbrooke, the author uses them to weave a more complete picture of the man. I think one of the most telling details were his last words. He was working feverishly when he fell ill and had to be rushed to George Washington University Hospital for a twenty hour surgery that would eventually take his life. But before losing consciousness his last words were “You’ve got to end this war in Afghanistan.” Those words speak to his tireless commitment to his country and to improving human lives across the world.
May 28, 2020
An engaging, insightful, and at times brilliant picture of a flawed but truly human man.
November 16, 2020
This was a magisterial biography, warts and all. It paints both a flattering, adulatory portrait of Richard Holbrooke, a heavyweight in American diplomacy across multiple decades and numerous Democratic administrations, but it also depicts him in a raw and merciless light. The result is a complex picture of a complex human, with many personal flaws as well as many incredible achievements and individual strengths. I think the following excerpt best captured the man:
"He gave the impression of being always in motion, sweeping with his entourage in and out of airports and hotels, crowding each day with meetings deep into the night, always pushing the pace. This created momentum for the next small breakthrough, and each breakthrough added more speed and power. The experience exhilarated him, and when he had to spend a whole day in Geneva conferring with European diplomats and got his first full night’s sleep, in a luxury hotel, he fell into exhaustion and wanted to get back to the Balkans, where the tense, sleepless hours with warlords restored his energy. If he had a strategy, it was this: He set himself in motion and caused others to move, and things became possible that never happened with everyone at rest."
In the end, Holbrooke was a tragic figure. He sacrificed everything for his career, perhaps selfishly. In his final moments, he appears full of regret for not having more time and a recognition that family is more important than his actions seemed to denote. But at the same time, he uses his final words to dole out praise for his subordinates and staff. You can sense the urgency that he wishes he could have achieved peace in Afghanistan, and it leaves the reader wondering, "what if?" It's an incredible biography, exquisitely told.
What's more, Packer maps Holbrooke's career over a specific moment - or several chapters - in American history. Holbrooke's early career put him in Vietnam at the height of US folly during the Cold War. He gained insights into the use and abuse of US military power and learned early on how civilian and military leadership can completely misunderstand far flung local contexts. Later, during the Bosnian-Serb crisis, we see Holbrooke at the pinnacle of American power during the unipolar moment. He operates with swagger and unbridled enthusiasm for his cause. In the twilight of his life, however, Holbrooke is operating on the margins of Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy, unable to command influence over a younger president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The arc of US history and declining relative global power fits the story of Holbrooke's life all too well.
"He gave the impression of being always in motion, sweeping with his entourage in and out of airports and hotels, crowding each day with meetings deep into the night, always pushing the pace. This created momentum for the next small breakthrough, and each breakthrough added more speed and power. The experience exhilarated him, and when he had to spend a whole day in Geneva conferring with European diplomats and got his first full night’s sleep, in a luxury hotel, he fell into exhaustion and wanted to get back to the Balkans, where the tense, sleepless hours with warlords restored his energy. If he had a strategy, it was this: He set himself in motion and caused others to move, and things became possible that never happened with everyone at rest."
In the end, Holbrooke was a tragic figure. He sacrificed everything for his career, perhaps selfishly. In his final moments, he appears full of regret for not having more time and a recognition that family is more important than his actions seemed to denote. But at the same time, he uses his final words to dole out praise for his subordinates and staff. You can sense the urgency that he wishes he could have achieved peace in Afghanistan, and it leaves the reader wondering, "what if?" It's an incredible biography, exquisitely told.
What's more, Packer maps Holbrooke's career over a specific moment - or several chapters - in American history. Holbrooke's early career put him in Vietnam at the height of US folly during the Cold War. He gained insights into the use and abuse of US military power and learned early on how civilian and military leadership can completely misunderstand far flung local contexts. Later, during the Bosnian-Serb crisis, we see Holbrooke at the pinnacle of American power during the unipolar moment. He operates with swagger and unbridled enthusiasm for his cause. In the twilight of his life, however, Holbrooke is operating on the margins of Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy, unable to command influence over a younger president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The arc of US history and declining relative global power fits the story of Holbrooke's life all too well.
July 27, 2019
George Packer is a great American chronicler. His biography of Richard Holbrooke is both illuminating and heartbreaking. This story of "almost greatness" gives an inside glimpse of 50 years of American Diplomacy and the man who insinuated himself into a lot of it. Holbrooke was a big man with big appetites and big ambitions. From his admission into the foreign service in 1962 until his death in 2010 from an exploding aortic valve, Holbrooke strove to solve the bigggest diplomatic problems of his day. He served in the foreign service in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, worked for, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama. He was Assistant Secretary of State twice, US Embassador to Germany, America's chief envoy to The Balkans and Afganistan during two wars. He negotiated an end to the bloody Bosnian War. His accomplishments were as numerous as his flaws but most Americans wouldn't recognize his name because his ambitions were always thwarted by his overbearing personality. His goal of becoming Secretary of State was never realized because there was always someone more inside than he was blocking his every move. Holbrooke worked with just about every key diplomat of the past 60 years ~Kissinger, Hillary, Vance, Brzezinski and Albright. There is a lot packed into this 546 pages. Well worth the read if you care about foreign policy. Packer tells this story of achievement and failure beautifully revealing Holbrooke at his very best and at his most vulnerable. His three marriages, his burned bridges, his relationship with his best friend who became his worst enemy. A truly great biography of an almost great man.
August 5, 2020
In the prologue, author George Packer describes Our Man not as “great man history,” but as “almost-great man history.” You can learn a lot, Packer argues, by looking one rung below the people at the top, to men like diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who were tasked with carrying out policies they could influence and advocate but could not ultimately decide.
Holbrooke’s singular flaw—and greatest strength—was his ambition to become U.S. secretary of state, a position he had craved since high school. In his earliest years in the Foreign Service, first deployed to South Vietnam at 21 years old in 1962, Holbrooke rose quickly through the ranks and was arguing with Lyndon Johnson in the White House by the age of 26. His ambition led him to the greatest accomplishment of his career, the Bosnian peace deal signed at Dayton, Ohio in 1995.
By the end of his career, Holbrooke was a badly aging lion kept on at the State Department for his loyalty to Hillary Clinton, pathetically begging for an audience with a president who despised him. Packer writes that when one of Holbrooke’s few friends, Les Gelb, defended him to Vice President Joe Biden, “Biden didn’t disagree” that “Holbrooke was the very best they had ... it was just that everybody hated him.”
In the introduction, Packer reveals his overall thesis: “What’s called the American century was really just a little more than half a century, and that was the span of Holbrooke’s life…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.” Packer argues that Holbrooke’s life parallels the rise and fall of American power, peaking with that 1995 summit at an Air Force base in Dayton. The Cold War won, the U.S. stopped a faraway genocide not because it had to, but because it could.
Our Man is written in a frank and conversational tone, delivered almost like a eulogy. “Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him,” Packer begins, and continues with segues like “It’s time I told you about this” or “You’ll have heard that.” Three chapters are composed of excerpts from letters from Holbrooke’s personal correspondence that Packer has stitched together into a freeform narrative. I appreciated Packer’s dry wit. “Officially, Holbrooke knew almost nothing about Vietnam,” he quips. “That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service—other countries.”
Holbrooke comes off as a fascinating character in Packer’s hands, almost Shakespearean. He is only likeable early in his career, when his ambition could come off as earnest. At 22, Holbrooke was placed in charge of distributing U.S. aid in a vast, poor region of South Vietnam so infested with Vietcong that it was described by reporter David Halberstam as “the southernmost province of North Vietnam.”
In an apt metaphor for the entire war effort, Holbrooke was given unlimited quantities of Bulgur wheat to feed the population, even though the people hated the stuff because “it wasn’t white and didn’t taste like rice.” It took Holbrooke a few months to wash the pink pigment off his thick-rimmed glasses, but he realized what no one else was brave enough to admit: “A division of Marines would be bled to death in the swamps and paddies here,” Holbrooke wrote in 1963.
After Vietnam, Holbrooke stayed away from the Cold War, viewing it as rigid and ultimately insoluble—he preferred to work on the periphery. But as he rose through the Washington bureaucracy, his many gifts could no longer propel him past his tendency to make enemies of everyone. During the long period of Republican dominion over the White House in the 1980s, Holbrooke, a lifelong Democrat (although basically apolitical), went to Wall Street and did his best to fit in with the Donald Trump crowd, dating the ABC News anchor Diane Sawyers, among many other women.
Holbrooke re-entered government with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, passed over for secretary of state but finally given a meaningful assignment, to end the war in Bosnia. Holbrooke’s ball-busting tendencies and muscular approach to diplomacy turned out to be exactly what the Yugoslavian conflict needed. On behalf of the U.S., Holbrooke lied and manipulated the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and the Bosnian Serbs to a negotiating table at Dayton, Ohio, chosen by Holbrooke as the venue because he knew the delegates would be desperate to leave. Packer retrieves some astounding anecdotes, including the time Holbrooke took Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic—later convicted of war crimes—for wings at a Dayton sports bar. Despite the success at Dayton, Clinton passed on Holbrooke for the top job once again, sending Holbrooke to the United Nations.
Packer beautifully mirrors the beginning of Holbrooke’s career, in Vietnam, to its end, in Afghanistan. After backing Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, Holbrooke was rewarded with the job “special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” a position that only had as much power as Barack Obama was willing to give him. Vietnam and Afghanistan were similar in so many ways. Holbrooke recognized many of the strategies being proposed for counterinsurgency and nation-building as the exact same failed policies from forty years earlier.
But by now, no one was listening to him. Obama and his technocratic staff had no time for the romantic Holbrooke, who was still enamoured of the American greatness which Obama recognized was in sharp decline. Holbrooke badly mismanaged the Afghan elections of 2009, and made enemies everywhere in the Middle East and in Washington, D.C. Obama—justifiably—wanted to fire him, but Holbrooke was saved by Clinton, who relied on his counsel. Holbrooke would die in 2010, his heart literally exploding as he tried to bend Clinton to his will.
Our Man drags during its middle section, which captures Holbrooke’s wilderness years of the 1970s and 80s, spending excess time detailing the man's various female conquests. Meanwhile, Packer admits to glossing over crucial events during his tenure as U.N. ambassador, alluding to instances where Holbrooke acted as a legislator, whipping votes on the General Assembly floor. I guess the U.N. years simply don’t fit into Packer’s overall themes of declining American power following the late 1990s. Still, this is only a minor issue. Packer has delivered a wonderful character study, history of U.S. foreign policy, and meditation on the meaning and future of American power. This is a great book.
Holbrooke’s singular flaw—and greatest strength—was his ambition to become U.S. secretary of state, a position he had craved since high school. In his earliest years in the Foreign Service, first deployed to South Vietnam at 21 years old in 1962, Holbrooke rose quickly through the ranks and was arguing with Lyndon Johnson in the White House by the age of 26. His ambition led him to the greatest accomplishment of his career, the Bosnian peace deal signed at Dayton, Ohio in 1995.
By the end of his career, Holbrooke was a badly aging lion kept on at the State Department for his loyalty to Hillary Clinton, pathetically begging for an audience with a president who despised him. Packer writes that when one of Holbrooke’s few friends, Les Gelb, defended him to Vice President Joe Biden, “Biden didn’t disagree” that “Holbrooke was the very best they had ... it was just that everybody hated him.”
In the introduction, Packer reveals his overall thesis: “What’s called the American century was really just a little more than half a century, and that was the span of Holbrooke’s life…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.” Packer argues that Holbrooke’s life parallels the rise and fall of American power, peaking with that 1995 summit at an Air Force base in Dayton. The Cold War won, the U.S. stopped a faraway genocide not because it had to, but because it could.
Our Man is written in a frank and conversational tone, delivered almost like a eulogy. “Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him,” Packer begins, and continues with segues like “It’s time I told you about this” or “You’ll have heard that.” Three chapters are composed of excerpts from letters from Holbrooke’s personal correspondence that Packer has stitched together into a freeform narrative. I appreciated Packer’s dry wit. “Officially, Holbrooke knew almost nothing about Vietnam,” he quips. “That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service—other countries.”
Holbrooke comes off as a fascinating character in Packer’s hands, almost Shakespearean. He is only likeable early in his career, when his ambition could come off as earnest. At 22, Holbrooke was placed in charge of distributing U.S. aid in a vast, poor region of South Vietnam so infested with Vietcong that it was described by reporter David Halberstam as “the southernmost province of North Vietnam.”
In an apt metaphor for the entire war effort, Holbrooke was given unlimited quantities of Bulgur wheat to feed the population, even though the people hated the stuff because “it wasn’t white and didn’t taste like rice.” It took Holbrooke a few months to wash the pink pigment off his thick-rimmed glasses, but he realized what no one else was brave enough to admit: “A division of Marines would be bled to death in the swamps and paddies here,” Holbrooke wrote in 1963.
After Vietnam, Holbrooke stayed away from the Cold War, viewing it as rigid and ultimately insoluble—he preferred to work on the periphery. But as he rose through the Washington bureaucracy, his many gifts could no longer propel him past his tendency to make enemies of everyone. During the long period of Republican dominion over the White House in the 1980s, Holbrooke, a lifelong Democrat (although basically apolitical), went to Wall Street and did his best to fit in with the Donald Trump crowd, dating the ABC News anchor Diane Sawyers, among many other women.
Holbrooke re-entered government with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, passed over for secretary of state but finally given a meaningful assignment, to end the war in Bosnia. Holbrooke’s ball-busting tendencies and muscular approach to diplomacy turned out to be exactly what the Yugoslavian conflict needed. On behalf of the U.S., Holbrooke lied and manipulated the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and the Bosnian Serbs to a negotiating table at Dayton, Ohio, chosen by Holbrooke as the venue because he knew the delegates would be desperate to leave. Packer retrieves some astounding anecdotes, including the time Holbrooke took Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic—later convicted of war crimes—for wings at a Dayton sports bar. Despite the success at Dayton, Clinton passed on Holbrooke for the top job once again, sending Holbrooke to the United Nations.
Packer beautifully mirrors the beginning of Holbrooke’s career, in Vietnam, to its end, in Afghanistan. After backing Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, Holbrooke was rewarded with the job “special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” a position that only had as much power as Barack Obama was willing to give him. Vietnam and Afghanistan were similar in so many ways. Holbrooke recognized many of the strategies being proposed for counterinsurgency and nation-building as the exact same failed policies from forty years earlier.
But by now, no one was listening to him. Obama and his technocratic staff had no time for the romantic Holbrooke, who was still enamoured of the American greatness which Obama recognized was in sharp decline. Holbrooke badly mismanaged the Afghan elections of 2009, and made enemies everywhere in the Middle East and in Washington, D.C. Obama—justifiably—wanted to fire him, but Holbrooke was saved by Clinton, who relied on his counsel. Holbrooke would die in 2010, his heart literally exploding as he tried to bend Clinton to his will.
Our Man drags during its middle section, which captures Holbrooke’s wilderness years of the 1970s and 80s, spending excess time detailing the man's various female conquests. Meanwhile, Packer admits to glossing over crucial events during his tenure as U.N. ambassador, alluding to instances where Holbrooke acted as a legislator, whipping votes on the General Assembly floor. I guess the U.N. years simply don’t fit into Packer’s overall themes of declining American power following the late 1990s. Still, this is only a minor issue. Packer has delivered a wonderful character study, history of U.S. foreign policy, and meditation on the meaning and future of American power. This is a great book.
May 13, 2020
This book is a biography of one Mr Richard Holbrooke—a Washington foreign policy careerist who tried to involve himself in Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He was an ambitious man, who wanted to solve hard problems and be the secretary of state—alas his highest office was UN ambassador, his biggest accomplishment was perhaps helping negotiate the Bosnia crisis. He was a card carrying democrat, so during the republican years, he worked as a connection maker at wall street banks raking in millions of dollars a month. But Holbrooke was in a different era when elites were not hated, he was so smug that he would not get why people hate elites now. But he was good at a few things—he cared and tried to make a difference.
I always thought of American foreign policy people as nerds or careerists. This book gives an idea of a middle approach. To be good at your job, you have to care about the foreign country, have a solid plan of how to help and then convince the President and the general American public.
The book follows the life of Holboroke and in the background tells the story of Americas foreign wars.
The power games that happen within the government was more than I expected. It was surprising to see that JFK was trying to go around the bureaucracy in the 60s, imagine what it would be right now.
500 pages long, only for history nerds.
I always thought of American foreign policy people as nerds or careerists. This book gives an idea of a middle approach. To be good at your job, you have to care about the foreign country, have a solid plan of how to help and then convince the President and the general American public.
The book follows the life of Holboroke and in the background tells the story of Americas foreign wars.
The power games that happen within the government was more than I expected. It was surprising to see that JFK was trying to go around the bureaucracy in the 60s, imagine what it would be right now.
500 pages long, only for history nerds.
August 10, 2020
Richard Holbrooke was a jackass. He knew it, and everyone in his life knew it, friends and enemies alike. The significance of this fact is what George Packer explores in Our Man.
The general idea is that Holbrooke is representative of The American Project itself, destructive and arrogant but also brilliant and capable of greatness. And that’s true as far as it goes, the main flaw in Our Man is that Packer doesn’t take it far enough. Holbrooke represents what Packer wants America to be, all the liberal (lower case “l”, classical, non-politically loaded use of the term) assumptions about America’s place in the world. The fact that Holbrooke never got to be the man in charge says more about the crumbling nature of elite assumptions about The American Project and how power works in a global empire than the sort of “we mean well even when everything goes horribly wrong” narrative that Packer is pushing.
That being said, Our Man is a good read. The 600 or so pages move along briskly and you are given a vivid sense of what it was like to be a low level diplomat in Vietnam, or a big-wig in the Balkans, or an almost made it powerbroker in 20th century American politics.
So, even though Packer misses the bigger picture and misreads the larger political context where his story takes place, in doing so he still manages to give a compelling account of the life of Richard Holbrooke.
The general idea is that Holbrooke is representative of The American Project itself, destructive and arrogant but also brilliant and capable of greatness. And that’s true as far as it goes, the main flaw in Our Man is that Packer doesn’t take it far enough. Holbrooke represents what Packer wants America to be, all the liberal (lower case “l”, classical, non-politically loaded use of the term) assumptions about America’s place in the world. The fact that Holbrooke never got to be the man in charge says more about the crumbling nature of elite assumptions about The American Project and how power works in a global empire than the sort of “we mean well even when everything goes horribly wrong” narrative that Packer is pushing.
That being said, Our Man is a good read. The 600 or so pages move along briskly and you are given a vivid sense of what it was like to be a low level diplomat in Vietnam, or a big-wig in the Balkans, or an almost made it powerbroker in 20th century American politics.
So, even though Packer misses the bigger picture and misreads the larger political context where his story takes place, in doing so he still manages to give a compelling account of the life of Richard Holbrooke.
September 3, 2019
Packer's biography of Richard Holbrooke, one of the most prominent US diplomats in the later half of the 20th century, is a fascinating study in brilliant diplomacy, fierce intelligence, naked ambition, self-absorption without an ounce of self-awareness, never-ending drive, self-destruction, and a humanitarian heart. Shaped around three critical wars - Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan - this biography plunged into the evolution of Holbrooke's approach to diplomacy, nation-building, and political maneuvering by examining in careful detail the circumstances around each war and how he impacted the stance of the US government.
I loved reading how he navigated politics and personalities to exert influence, and at other times, I was tremendously frustrated that his arrogance and lack of self-reflection limited his ability to be effective in relationships with others. Likely, his effectiveness in key moments hinged on this unique personality.
I loved reading how he navigated politics and personalities to exert influence, and at other times, I was tremendously frustrated that his arrogance and lack of self-reflection limited his ability to be effective in relationships with others. Likely, his effectiveness in key moments hinged on this unique personality.
September 4, 2019
This is another of those books I finish reading and wonder how in the hell I came to it, glad though I am. Holbrooke answered Kennedy's call to service in 1961 -- the year Obama was born -- and spent six years as a civilian in the Rural Pacification Program in the Mekong Delta. As a diplomat he is given credit for ending the Balkan Wars. He died trying to extricate us from Afghanistan. The Vietnam War created his world view and at one stage almost got him fired: Obama said Vietnam held no lessons for the US in Afghanistan. (Oh my.) Be it the power that Vietnam holds over some of us today, or the phrase in the title, "...the End of the American Century" this book affected me greatly, just the way Vietnam and the end of empire affected Holbrooke! This book is less a biography than it is a history lesson that uses a biography to illuminate the workings of government during the endless wars since Vietnam. It's very good but not very uplifting.
November 16, 2020
This has been on my to-read list since it came out but I always shied away from reading it as it seemed...too far - how interesting could a biography of a US career diplomat who never made it to the Cabinet and who peaked with the Dayton Accords be?
I was completely wrong. The book is about Holbrooke, but is far more about the optimism and career failings of an entire school of liberal internationalism that ran from Vietnam to the Obama era. The way Packer tells it is both totally unsparing about what prevented Holbrooke from achieving his dreams, and brings home how little influence his ideology had even though he was one of the leading diplomats of his generation - out of power for most of the 70s, all of the 80s, caught up in the frustrations of the 90s and....that was basically it. It’s a masterpiece of storytelling about post WWII US foreign policy, done through a prism that wouldn’t occur to almost anyone else, much less be capable of execution like this.
I was completely wrong. The book is about Holbrooke, but is far more about the optimism and career failings of an entire school of liberal internationalism that ran from Vietnam to the Obama era. The way Packer tells it is both totally unsparing about what prevented Holbrooke from achieving his dreams, and brings home how little influence his ideology had even though he was one of the leading diplomats of his generation - out of power for most of the 70s, all of the 80s, caught up in the frustrations of the 90s and....that was basically it. It’s a masterpiece of storytelling about post WWII US foreign policy, done through a prism that wouldn’t occur to almost anyone else, much less be capable of execution like this.
September 29, 2019
Packer's last book (The Unwinding) was one of my favorites of the year it was published, and I had the opportunity to spend some time with Dick Holbrooke 25+ years ago, so I was excited about this book. In many ways, it didn't disappoint - it is thoroughly researched and well-written. That said, I had a couple of reservations that kept it from a five star for me. One was that it felt almost gossipy at times - like he was trying to titillate the reader, which annoyed me. The other was his floating back and forth with first-person (I honestly don't remember if The Unwinding was like this too). At seemingly odd times, and for no apparent reason to me, he began writing with I statements. Because of the randomness, it came across to me as ego-driven "don't forget I'm here, and I knew some of these people." That did nothing for the story or writing, IMO.
June 2, 2023
"I felt that [Richard Holbrooke's] restlessness had something to do with his being almost great...if he had been like most of us, grief and memory would have stayed private. But, in that unfinished space between, where the souls of the almost great clamor to be recognized, he was still struggling, striving, yearning for more."
Fuck it. Being a great man is overrated. Richard Holbrooke was the youngest Assistant Secretary of State, UN Ambassador, literally ended a war...and it wasn't enough for him. His dream -- becoming Secretary of State -- laid out of reach, but he kept chasing it anyways.
And at what cost? Terrible father. Absent husband. Ambitious to a fault. It's a tragedy. But man, what that terrible ambition accomplished.
Fuck it. Being a great man is overrated. Richard Holbrooke was the youngest Assistant Secretary of State, UN Ambassador, literally ended a war...and it wasn't enough for him. His dream -- becoming Secretary of State -- laid out of reach, but he kept chasing it anyways.
And at what cost? Terrible father. Absent husband. Ambitious to a fault. It's a tragedy. But man, what that terrible ambition accomplished.
September 3, 2019
If you cut out the destructive elements you would kill the thing that made him almost great.
Phenomenal biography -er, novel since there is no index and writing will hook anyone who's interested in the stories we tell ourselves- about a great man. Packer packs the narrative with nostalgia for America's golden century without shying away from the murky personal conflicts that haven riven the country's political elites for generations: "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." This is a great book about power, diplomacy, and the human spirit-- highly recommend!
Phenomenal biography -er, novel since there is no index and writing will hook anyone who's interested in the stories we tell ourselves- about a great man. Packer packs the narrative with nostalgia for America's golden century without shying away from the murky personal conflicts that haven riven the country's political elites for generations: "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." This is a great book about power, diplomacy, and the human spirit-- highly recommend!
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