Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer – review

Near the start of his account of ending the Bosnian conflict, Richard Holbrooke, arguably the most famous US diplomat since the cold war, describes a freak tragedy that almost destroyed the peace mission at its launch. At that time, anyone entering the besieged capital of Sarajevo by road had to cross Mount Igman on a dirt track that was exposed in parts to Serb anti-aircraft guns capable of cutting a car to shreds. In August 1995, an armoured vehicle carrying Holbrooke’s diplomatic and military aides drove off the side of the Igman road and plunged down the mountain.

Robert Frasure, a senior state department negotiator, Joseph Kruzel, a Pentagon official, and Nelson Drew, an air force colonel who had been assigned by the White House, were killed along with their young French military driver.

Holbrooke, the US special envoy, and Lt Gen Wesley Clark, the top military man on the mission, were in a Humvee driving ahead of the doomed vehicle. They survived and, according to Holbrooke’s version of events in his memoir, To End a War, these two leaders took charge of the situation and performed heroically. They scrambled down towards the wreckage until the mined hillside started exploding around them, at which point they lowered Clark on a rope to the victims while Holbrooke tended to the wounded.

Here was the apotheosis of an American ideal: men of vision and peace, but also men of action. Great men of history. Except key elements of the story turn out not to be true.

In Our Man, a deeply researched, compelling biography of Holbrooke, American journalist George Packer tracks down the lesser-known players on Mount Igman that day, who Holbrooke had erased from history. It was these men who slid down the mountain and prised open the doors of the burning vehicle. Holbrooke stayed on the road, complaining about being left alone in a dangerous spot.

The feats ascribed to Clark were actually performed by Lt Col Randall Banky, the US liaison officer at UN headquarters. His role was dismissed in Holbrooke’s book with a single line: “Colonel Banky had disappeared.” Confronted by Banky years later while on a book tour, Holbrooke tried once more to blame the other man for abandoning him. It was only when cornered by the awkward facts that Holbrooke relented and promised to correct the account in a later edition. He never did.

Such duplicity and narcissism are constant themes of Our Man. “You will have heard that he was a monstrous egotist,” Packer writes near the beginning. “It’s true. It’s even worse than you’ve heard.”

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Holbrooke regularly betrayed those closest to him in some of the worst ways imaginable. He propositioned the wife of his best friend, Anthony Lake, and Lake’s consequent disgust for him distorts US foreign policymaking for a generation, as the two men rise up the ranks of successive Democratic administrations. Yet taken in its entirety, Packer’s detailed, graceful account of Holbrooke is not unsympathetic. It shows him, for all his vanities and insecurities, dedicating most of his life to grappling with how the US could and should do the right thing in the world.

Holbrooke’s telling of the Igman incident may have been bogus, but the claim of his memoir’s title was not. More than any other individual, he ended the killing in Bosnia in late 1995, sequestering the warring leaders in a bleak air force base in Dayton, Ohio, until they compromised.

Our Man is not just a portrait of a fascinating historical figure, it is a contemplation of a half century of US foreign and security policy and its most intractable challenges: counterinsurgency, humanitarian intervention and nation-building. Holbrooke’s appetites, aspirations and flaws were echoes of the nation’s. “The best about us was inseparable from the worst,” Packer argues. “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.”

Packer strives, and mostly manages, to shrug off the heavier conventions of biographies of the good and the great. It is hard not to be thankful to a biographer who begins an early chapter: “Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school.”

We do find out that his father was Abraham Golbraich, a Polish Jew, who chose an anglicised version of the family name from the Manhattan telephone directory. His mother, Gertrude Moos, had fled Germany with her family when the Nazis took power.

The young Holbrooke would have become a journalist had the New York Times not passed him over for an entry-level job. Instead, he was persuaded to sit the foreign service exam by the father of a high-school classmate, Dean Rusk, who became secretary of state under John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Holbrooke was sent to Vietnam in 1963, knowing little of the country (“That’s always been the weak spot of our foreign service – other countries”) and his experience as a rural affairs officer trying to win hearts and minds in the Mekong delta shaped his beliefs and instincts. He learned you cannot defeat an insurgency by bombing the population, especially if you don’t belong there. That lesson would slip the mind of some future administrations. “Why do Americans keep falling in love with counterinsurgency?” Packer asks. “Because we’re obviously no good at it.”

Fifty years after his time building ill-fated “strategic hamlets” for the people of the Mekong, Holbrooke found himself in the middle of another quagmire, as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was so absorbed by the parallels that Barack Obama, who had no time for his grand nostalgic oratory, sent word he didn’t want to hear another word about Vietnam.

The paradox, as Packer points out, was that the real lesson of Vietnam was one word: “Don’t”. But had Holbrooke applied it, he would have been out of a job. He needed to feel he was at the centre of events and he kept going, trying to make things work in Afghanistan that had failed in Vietnam, until the end. In December 2010, during a meeting with secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Holbrooke’s aorta burst and surgery could not save him.

Packer writes that his subject “lived as if the world needed an American hand to help set things right”. He came from an era when that hand almost invariably belonged to “unsentimental, supremely self-assured white Protestant men… who all knew one another and knew how to get things done,” men who “didn’t take a piss without a strategy”.

Even the most well-meaning among them, such as Holbrooke, seldom managed to disentangle policy from their own ambitions, prejudices and petty rivalries. Our Man is a reminder that, in a world where such men are consistently put in the driving seat of world events, it should be no surprise that the most disastrous mistakes are the ones most often repeated.

Julian Borger is the Guardian’s world affairs editor.