OUR MAN BY GEORGE PACKER REVIEW – RICHARD HOLBROOKE AND AMERICAN POWER

An account of the major dilemmas, and egotism, of the top diplomat doubles as a dissection of America’s global status

On the day Richard Holbrooke died, in 2010, he went to the White House in a last desperate attempt to meet Barack Obama. Holbrooke was the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan – the diplomat tasked with ending the war that began on 9/11 – but the president couldn’t stand him. Holbrooke was a persuasive man, used to getting his own way, browbeating those below him and flattering those above. But his shtick didn’t work with Obama, who had grown tired of his grandstanding. The request for a meeting was turned down.

Flustered, sweating and out of breath, Holbrooke raced to the state department, where he was due for a meeting with Hillary Clinton and her advisers. He rushed in late, launched into a speech but immediately lost the room.

His career had been a microcosm of US foreign policy’s success and failures over the past 50 years. “He was our man,” argues the celebrated American journalist George Packer in this outstanding new biography. “Our confidence and energy, our reach and grasp, our excess and blindness – they were not so different from Holbrooke’s.”

A junior foreign service official in Vietnam who came to realise that war was a disaster, Holbrooke had worked in the state department under Jimmy Carter, brokered the Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia and served as UN ambassador in the Bill Clinton administration. The top job – secretary of state – had eluded him. And now, at the age of 69, trying and failing to bring peace to Afghanistan, ignored by his president, barely tolerated by his secretary of state, no one was listening. “Oh my god, Richard, what’s happening,” Clinton exclaimed. Holbrooke, Packer writes, “had turned a colour that never appears in a human face, so furiously red it was cartoonish”. It was a massive heart attack and within less than 24 hours he was dead.

As Holbrooke was rushed to hospital and into surgery he bellowed out orders to his staff, told them they would have great careers, listed off those he loved – friends, family, colleagues – told the doctor she was beautiful and remarked about how much he loved beautiful women, gave instructions on the press statement his staff should give about his operation, refused an order to relax because “I can’t relax … I’m trying to bring peace to Afghanistan,” and reminded a staff member to “make sure you’re recording every witticism”.

For a global superpower, America has always been remarkably uninterested in the world it supposedly wants to lead. When Holbrooke was sent to Vietnam in 1963, he knew hardly anything about the country and, despite spending the next decade either there or back in Washington working on the conflict, he “never learned to speak the language or made Vietnamese friends”. This, Packer writes, was not unusual. “That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service – other countries. It’s hard to get Americans interested in them, and the more interested you get, the worse your career prospects.”

Holbrooke knew enough to see through the official Vietnam briefings that claimed success was just around the corner. And he received an early lesson that good intentions are not enough. A Peanuts cartoon strip, which was shared among his friends during the war, showed a downbeat Charlie Brown after his baseball team had been beaten 184-0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”

But Holbrooke was not one to speak out in a way that might affect his career, or to resign on a point of principle. He kept his concerns quiet and convinced himself that he could make a difference if he stayed in government. This trait never left him. Right at the end of his career he was vehemently – and rightly – opposed to the surge in Afghanistan, yet was afraid to speak up in front of Obama in the situation room because he thought it might diminish his influence.

Holbrooke epitomised the liberal American struggle between human rights and that thing called the “national interest”. During the 1976 presidential campaign he had written many of the passages about the importance of human rights in Carter’s speeches. Once in office, the US wanted to renew the leases on two major bases in the Philippines, a nation then under the control of a dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. Holbrooke spent 24 hours with his wife “on Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’s enormous presidential yacht, eating, drinking, dancing, water-skiing, and warning Marcos that human rights was a top concern of President Carter”. The bases were renewed and Marcos released an opposition leader from prison, sending him into exile. “Holbrooke considered that a success.”

That’s not to say there weren’t genuine achievements, or moments when his principles and career prospects aligned. He saw the humanitarian urgency of taking in refugees from Indochina in the late 1970s, persuading Carter to dramatically increase the monthly quota – a change in policy that eventually led to 1.5 million people reaching the US. During his short stint as UN ambassador, at the tail end of the Clinton presidency, he was instrumental in the authorisation of a life-saving peacekeeping force in East Timor and put the Aids crisis on the agenda for the first time.

And then there was Bosnia, a moment when America was at the height of its post-cold war powers and Holbrooke’s bullying and cajoling was at its most effective. After persuading the reluctant main players to the negotiating table at Dayton, he forced an unlikely breakthrough at a restaurant with Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević sat at one table and his Bosnian counterpart Haris Silajdžić on the opposite side of the room. Holbrooke criss-crossed between the two, claiming to each man that the other wanted talks. Milošević drew a map on a napkin, outlining what he was willing to accept; Silajdžić responded with a napkin map of his own. Back and forth Holbrooke crossed before finally they were ready to sit at the same table, where they “argued about every mosque and village”, before agreeing the basis of a plan.

Yet the same traits failed him in Afghanistan, at a time when both Holbrooke and, arguably, his country’s powers were on the wane. President Hamid Karzai hated him and thought Holbrooke was trying to oust him (he was). Nor was he liked much at home. “He’s such a pain in the ass,” said vice president Joe Biden.

Holbrooke wanted to be a great man – as Packer concludes, he was “almost great”. Did he want to be a good man? He certainly didn’t try. He cheated on all three of his wives, abandoned his sons and couldn’t recognise his own grandchildren. He let down his friends and lied to everyone who loved him. That was also the reason he never got the job he craved, why he never became a “great man”. He was a shit.

Our Man is one of the most fascinating dissections of US power – its strengths and serious weaknesses – I’ve read. Holbrooke represented muscular liberal interventionism in human form – a person and an argument whose power peaked in the 1990s and disintegrated in the first decade of the 21st century, as the world changed around him.

Holbrooke “believed that power brought responsibilities, and if we failed to face them the world’s suffering would worsen, and eventually other people’s problems would be ours, and if we didn’t act no one else would.” It is an idea that, post-Iraq, few US or British politicians would be willing to voice in public. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still true.

• Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer is published by Cape (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/02/our-man-by-george-packer-review-richard-holbrooke