 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm delighted to welcome all of you to the Carnegie Endowment, and I'm especially delighted to welcome George Packer, who is one of the truly great writers of our time, to talk about his extraordinary new book, Our Man, Richard Holbrook in the End of the American Century. George really does need very little introduction. As we were discussing earlier, I've long admired his essays and articles in The New Yorker and now in The Atlantic about a changing America and also a changing world. He's written some terrific books. The Assassin's Gate is as fine a portrait of the tragedy of America and Iraq as I've ever read. The unwinding offers an equally vivid portrait of American society in the midst of profound transformation. No comment on the... Part of the transformation, part of the decline, I think. No, this is Carnegie unwinding. The unwinding won the National Book Award also. Our Man is a different kind of portrait, a portrait of Richard Holbrook, the brilliant diplomat who loomed large over the last half century of American foreign policy from the war in Vietnam to a war in Bosnia, which he helped to stop, to the continuing war in Afghanistan. And I should add that Carnegie is proud to claim a chapter in Richard Holbrook's professional life when he edited Foreign Policy Magazine in the 1970s, when foreign policy was still a part of the Carnegie endowment. Our Man is beautifully written. It's achingly honest and it's full of insight. It captures vividly an enormously complicated man, full of skill and idealism and drive and ego and excess and hubris. In many ways as George writes in the book, a mirror of America's journey in the world through that era. So I urge you to buy the book if you haven't already bought it and I know you'll enjoy it as much as I did. George and I will speak for the next 25 minutes or so in conversation and we'll open it up to all of your questions. And then I should add that after this session you'll have a chance to buy books in the room just beyond this one and ask George to sign them as well. So George, thanks so much again and congratulations. Bill, thank you and I'm honored to be on the stage with you. It's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me here at Carnegie. No, it's great to have you. But why don't we begin at the beginning? You've written on such a rich variety of subjects over the years. How did you come to choose this one and tell us a little bit if you would about the style and approach that you chose because you use a really compelling second person voice at key points in the book which I think captures remarkably well what Les Gelve I think had in mind when he said that Holbrook couldn't be captured in a traditional biography. He needed a novel. He needed a novel. Yeah, that was what Les wrote in his obituary. This is not a novel. This is scrupulously factual as close as I could get. But the narrative voice is sort of an answer to the question of how this book came to be. It chose me more than I chose it, which is not the way most books I've written have originated, not the way most books should originate. But shortly after, I wrote a profile of Holbrook for the New Yorker when he was President Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He died suddenly, abruptly, as everyone in here probably remembers and dramatically. And a few weeks later, strobe Talbot and Les Gelve kind of ganged up on me and said, why don't you write a book about him? And I was in the middle of the unwinding and didn't know what I would write about, but I suddenly realized I actually have a moment here and only a moment to say yes or no because Cotty Martin, his widow, had his papers. And if I didn't get them, someone else would. So I asked her, would you give me his papers exclusively with no strings attached? I just asked for everything. She said, there are other people who want them, but you can have them. So I had to decide right then and there, do I want to write a book about this man, even though I was in the middle of another book. A couple years went by. The paper sat in my home office totally occupying the space in a Holbrook-like way. I couldn't even open the door all the way. I couldn't get at some of my favorite books because these giant black filing cabinets were just looming over me sort of saying, what the hell is taking so long? Because I had another book to finish. When I turned to his papers, I found his voice so compelling, the letters he wrote to his fiance as a young Foreign Service officer in the Mekong Delta, the audio diaries he kept during his years working on Bosnia and then at the end on Afghanistan. And I thought this man, this character will not be contained by a conventional biography and I don't want to write one. I want the freedom that might come with a kind of narrative that has a voice and that has a point of view that doesn't feel like a normal biography. And one day as I was driving, I heard the words in my head. Holbrook, yes, I knew him. And it was a blind side of me. I had no idea where that had come from. But I liked it. It sounded engaging. And I realized that's the start of a yarn. That's the start of someone telling you a very long tale rather than the start of a sort of traditional biography. I thought I should follow that. So I began to write it in that voice and realized it isn't quite mine. It's more someone a bit older than me, someone who was maybe a peer of his and who somehow knew this entire story just by having been an eyewitness. I wanted to write it as if I had witnessed it again without any false statements. So that became a way of in some sense turning Holbrook into the hero and antihero of a very long novel except once again it's all true. George, if you had to tell one story that for the uninitiated at least would help explain Richard Holbrook the character in this wonderful book, what would it be? You know in a way his very last minutes alive were Holbrook to the fullest. And I don't want to spoil the ending but his life began to end in Secretary Clinton's office when he was meeting with her to talk about Afghanistan, the office that he had always always wanted to occupy and had never quite reached. He made all these assaults on the summit of the mountain and every one of them failed and he had to slide back down. And suddenly his aorta dissected, ripped, a massive coronary event. But all the way to the hospital to GW in the ambulance and in the trauma bay and on his way to the operating room he was completely himself. He was giving instructions, he was thinking about when the press statement should come out and what it should say, who should be told in what order. He was thinking about who he loved and how he wanted to tell them that. And he was telling his young aide, Dan Feldman, make sure you're getting down my every witticism. And Feldman was frantically scribbling on a Chinese restaurant receipt. And he was flirting with the young cardiologist in the trauma bay while suffering massive pain in his chest. So something heroic about never ceasing to be himself to the variant even in this extreme. Also all the things that were kind of a pain in the ass about him are captured in those last minutes as well. He was a man in full. It's a remarkable passage in the book. Let's go to Vietnam because in many ways you organized the book as Holbrook's professional life was organized around three huge conflicts in American history over the last half century, Vietnam, Bosnia and then Afghanistan. So Holbrook's generation, like the generation of lots of diplomats, some of them in this room, was shaped by the Vietnam experience. Different protagonists through that experience drew different lessons from it as well. There were lots of diplomats of that generation who became extremely wary about entanglements. Lots of military officers, my dad fought in Vietnam in that era, Colin Powell did, who drew a conclusion that when American force was used it had to be connected to very clear aims and used in overwhelming fashion as well. What do you think were the main lessons that Richard Holbrook drew from Vietnam and how did it affect the way in which he looked at problems later in his professional life? Well I think the most important thing to know is that his very first post was not the usual junior embassy job. He was sent to the Mekong Delta as a young aid worker. He was detailed to AID and he was handing out bulgar wheat and building materials and checking in on the local Hamlet self-defense forces. In other words he was seeing counterinsurgency at the very point of the spear and the Viet Cong in 1963 were at their strongest in that region. So one thing that is quite striking is his physical courage. He drove the roads day and night and he loved flying the helicopters and he in some ways relished being in the thick of the action. But he also saw with the incredible clarity he had from very young what was going wrong and that the reports that people were filing up to Saigon and from Saigon to Washington were misleading and even false and this astonished him and he for example he had been told there are 324 strategic Hamlets in Baswan Province. He got there and started asking about them and let's go visit them. Oh no we can't visit those. It's too dangerous. Well then they're not really there. So he insisted on telling the truth to Henry Cabot Lodge to William Westmoreland to people way way way above him and in that way he also ingratiated himself because he was both a flatterer and a truth teller and had this ability to cultivate his betters through both of those things and so he quickly rose but at the same time he began to be disillusioned about Vietnam. He went through what he called these four stages of disillusionment. First questioning those assessments, then the tactics, then the overall strategy and finally the war itself. That took four years. It didn't happen all at once because you're in the middle of this giant project. You don't just suddenly give up your faith in it. I think what he came away with was first of all go to the ground to get the truth and that never left him throughout his career and don't believe second hand and third hand reports. Second, he was skeptical of the military because a lot of those reports were coming from the military. The military were the most optimistic and he realized very quickly that our overwhelming firepower was a great disadvantage that it was actually helping to lose the war and so the militarization of our foreign policy was a concern of his way back in 1963 and all the way to the end of his life. But third, he moved on from Vietnam more than most of his colleagues and friends. He did not look back in a kind of self searching and soul lacerating way. He moved on and what he moved on with was the world view that he had grown up with which was the post war liberal internationalism of the Truman administration of his heroes, Dean Atchison, George Kennan, Avel Harriman. Dean Rusk wasn't exactly his hero but he was kind of a father figure to him and George Marshall. So he never really lost that and while some Vietnam diplomats turned to the left and became much more skeptical of American involvement in the world and others turned to the right and became hawks, Holbrook somehow stayed in that liberal internationalist course to the very end of his life. And then George, you fast forward to the war in Bosnia. You know what was in many ways Holbrook's greatest achievement, the Dayton Peace Accords. It was a moment when all of the gifts that you described so well in the book seemed to fit perfectly. You know, when there were a variety of many despots in the Balkans who were exposed to the whole Holbrook treatment when he drove the U.S. government relentlessly through this period as well. Tell us a little bit about the road to Dayton. Going back to, you know, Republican administration when Holbrook was out of government, first visited Sarajevo, first got a sense for the human suffering as well as the political predicament, then, you know, the tragedy on the Manningmun Road and, you know, all the way to the success at the end of Dayton. It's a really dramatic story. And in a way it begins with Holbrook being unable to secure a job in the Bill Clinton administration. He'd waited, he'd been President Carter's assistant secretary for East Asia, the youngest ever. But then he was out of government for 12 years. He was on Wall Street making money, but basically waiting and plotting. And suddenly his chance comes and he can't get a job. Why? Because he's made enemies of all the important people around Clinton who could get him a job, especially Tony Lake. So instead of sitting around in Washington brooding and waiting for Warren Christopher to answer his phone calls, he decides to spend 10 years even Bosnia. This is 1992. The war had been going on for eight months. James Baker had famously said, we don't have a dog in that fight. The Bush administration had basically written Bosnia off as some damn foolishness in the Balkans, as Bismarck called it. Holbrook, in the middle of that winter, got himself into Sarajevo, under siege, no heat, very little food, served shelling, coming from the mountains. Spent only 24 hours, but it was enough, it was that instinct to go to the ground and to see for himself. It was enough for him, first of all, to feel the human suffering and the awfulness and the barbarism. And I think there was an instinct in him that for this to happen in Europe again, in this way, in a way that seemed almost genocidal, was intolerable. But second, this was already dividing us from our European allies, who had UN troops in Bosnia, and he saw it as a threat to the transatlantic alliance. So he came back to Washington, seized with Bosnia, and found that for all his campaign rhetoric, President Clinton had no interest in getting involved. And Tony Lake, the National Security Advisor, was very interested in Bosnia and agreed with Holbrook, but had to work for Bill Clinton. And so for three years, the war burned on, 100,000 people died. We dithered, we had made half-hearted gestures, we then pulled back, the Europeans told us, you know, don't bomb unless you're going to put your own troops at risk. Finally, then Holbrook did get a job. He became ambassador to Germany, and then they called him back to Washington, strobe Talbot, I think, was instrumental in this, and made him assistant secretary for Europe, mainly to try to solve Bosnia, because they just knew we can't live without this guy. And Holbrook had said to John Burns, who we met in Sarajevo on that trip, they'll come for me. That's the chapter of that title. They'll come for me. You didn't lack for self-assurance. No. They need me. They can't live without me. He felt the same about Obama, too. We'll get to that. Once Holbrook was turned loose in the summer of 95, this was after the Srebrenica massacre. This was after the Croats began a major offensive against the Serbs, and suddenly the whole battlefield reality was swinging in the other direction. Holbrook was sent to the Balkans to try to negotiate a peace, and here you really see him at his best. He's in full gear. He's bringing all this energy and force, but also persuasive power. I think people mistake or over... They exaggerate the bullying side of him, which is there when he needed it. He had it under control with Milosevic. There was also his patience and persuasiveness and persistence, and his ability to read these Balkan leaders and know what they wanted and know their weak spots, not because he studied them, but because he had a real instinct sitting across heaps of lamb and rice in the presidential palace in Belgrade from Milosevic. He finally, with the help of NATO bombs, got them all to Dayton, which was his idea. He thought, No, diplomats love Paris. It goes on and on. They don't want to leave. We're going to put them on a military base in Ohio. The Europeans will hate it, and we're going to have total control over them because we will have security and the press and everything else under our control. That was a kind of a genius idea to go to Dayton. It was not obvious, and everyone in the administration was against it, except Tony Lake. After three weeks with many cliffhangers and moments when it seemed like the whole thing was going to collapse, Holbrook and others forced a very dissatisfying but real peace on that war. You just see what I think is the two sides of him. Idealism and egotism in perfect balance with each other. They needed each other. If you're an idealist without that egotistical drive, you end with fecklessness. If you're an egotist without the saving idealism that Holbrook had, you're destructive. He had them both, and at times they got out of balance, and often the ego was too strong, and that was when he hurt others and himself, but in this case they were in perfect balance also with the nature of that war and the context of American unipolar dominance that it was just the right moment for Holbrook to do what he did. That moment in Bosnia, particularly at Dayton, really was the perfect fit for all of his qualities. Then you fast forward to sort of the third of the conflicts, Afghanistan, which in some ways, as you write really beautifully, was a kind of sad coda to a wonderful professional life. He assembled a terrific team of people, from I see her in this room, a remarkable group of people that take on a remarkably difficult challenge in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He inspired them, he mentored them, but it was a moment where his gifts never really seemed to fit, either in Hamid Karzai's Afghanistan or in Barack Obama's White House. George, what do you think happened? Was it just the wrong intersection of personalities? Had he lost some of his mojo? Were his qualities underappreciated or some combination of them? I think you've hit all of them. He had lost some of his mojo. He was older, his health was beginning to break down, and maybe he was too confident. He came back after many, another eight years out of government as the man who had done Dayton, but this is a whole new world and it's a whole new generation of Americans in power. And instead of stopping and assessing the battlefield and where are the friendlies, where are the enemies, what are my capabilities, he just charged in. I'm Holbrook, I'm here. And immediately ran into resistance from the people around Obama and from the President himself. There are some scenes in the book that are quite painful because Obama clearly felt an almost physical dislike of kind of revulsion, stay away from me, because Holbrook was everything Obama wasn't. He was overstated and blustery and dramatic. He flattered Obama, which is a great mistake. He went on and lectured and condescended, talked about Vietnam, which was very relevant. I mean, Afghanistan reminded him of everything he'd gone through in Vietnam and it should have been a motherload of useful historical experience and instead it was just this sopping wet burden he kept putting on the situation room table and everyone said, why are you bringing Vietnam into this? President Obama was two years old when these things happened. They didn't want to hear it and he was told by Hillary Clinton the President doesn't want to hear about Vietnam anymore and Holbrook was gradually deflated and reduced. In fact, after his death, Secretary Clinton said to me, I picture him like Gulliver tied down by Liliputians. The White House and also General Petraeus sort of brought him down and he never had the standing to speak his mind when it mattered and that was at the end of 2009 when the White House and when the administration was debating sending 35,000, 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, Holbrook was deeply skeptical, informed by that experience in Vietnam. He thought we should begin to talk to the enemy, also informed by that experience in Vietnam. Don't wait until we begin to withdraw those troops because then our leverage decreases. He never said that in those meetings because he had been deflated and so he kind of watched this war go on knowing it was not going to succeed, knowing the military couldn't win but unable to get to the President and to say let me give you my strategy for how we're going to end this war. At the very end of his life on his very last day he was trying to get a meeting with Obama and was told you're not going to get a meeting with Obama and an hour later he had that heart attack in Secretary Clinton's office and I can't help feeling that there had to be some connection between those things. First thing I want to open it up to all of your questions but let me ask you one last question that's a little bit more forward looking. You know Richard Holbrook was always associated sometimes I think caricatured with a certain kind of muscular internationalism in terms of America's role in the world for all of his skepticism of the potential for over militarization of American foreign policy. It's that same kind of muscular internationalism that helped produce some great achievements like Dayton but also in different ways led to mistakes in Iraq in 2003 in Vietnam at the very beginning of his career. How hard do you think it is in this day and age to sell that kind of an approach of American activism not exceptionalism but activism on the international landscape but what do you think Holbrook's advice if he were with us today would be the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates on foreign policy? Kay I'll answer it if then you'll answer the same question for me because I would much rather know what you think than what I think because I'm not a foreign policy specialist by any means. I think it's exceedingly difficult to sell that today in both parties as I was we were talking about earlier before we came on in a weird way the Republican Party has so completely dropped the Bush doctrine in its more expansive we must sell democracy and markets around the world version that the Iraq war now is more of a burden for Democrats because when Democrats talk about we need to intervene we need to be involved America has to lead the immediate answer is well Iraq that didn't work why do you think it's going to work anywhere else so that war has in some ways hurt the internationalist strain of the Democratic Party more than the Republicans who have completely abandoned it on the Democratic side there's a are any of the candidates talking about foreign policy at all I mean it's pretty much it's as if it doesn't exist and that suggests a whole mindset which is strongest I think in the younger generation that why should we why do we think this is our responsibility so you're sort of given this choice between a really aggressive nationalism that only thinks in terms of why should we what's in it for us to a kind of softer skepticism on the left about America not just the military but even about diplomatic efforts that leaves the Holbrook position almost abandoned and I think he'd be appalled but also baffled he wouldn't understand it because his entire life was shaped by that post war generation who took for granted no one else is going to do it that's why it's our responsibility no one else can if we don't these problems will fester they'll burn out of control and eventually they will be our problem so we must intervene not with force but with all the tools of our foreign policy we must be early and be aware of how interconnected all these problems are and sustain and build up our alliances rather than regarding them as burdens all of that was Holbrooks just in his DNA and I don't think he would have an answer for why you know for how you would convince people to go back to that yeah it's a hard no I mean it's a hard sell I won't belabor it to your questions but I think there is a disconnect between people like me you know card-carrying members of the Washington establishment and lots of Americans so when we preach the virtues of disciplined American leadership in the world don't in many ways need to be persuaded so much of the importance of American engagement but they're skeptical about the discipline part because they've seen us mismatch ends and means and so that's the tough sell I think as well so let me yeah I'm gonna have to arrange to interview Ambassador Burns at some later date I think we are doing that yeah anyways let me open it up to all of your questions now if you just raise your hand wait for the microphone please identify yourself be concise and end with a question Mark Marvin Marvin Kalb I ask my question but with an apology first because I'm a great fan of George Packer and I've read your stuff and I've already bought the book look forward to reading it very much I knew Holbrook reasonably well a lot of us did and I'm wondering Dick would certainly have approved of a 500 page book about himself he would wonder why it was not 600 yeah but when you ask yourself as you look back in the last 30 years of American foreign policy and you look for friend setting crucially important figures in American foreign affairs I have trouble though I admire Dick enormously putting him in that category and so I'm hoping that you could elaborate I know that his personality was such he could win you over I'm sure you've described that all powerfully he could also lose you yes but is he the representative of something special in American affairs help me out on that yeah I mean he never got beyond what assistant secretary of state I guess he was you an ambassador for about 18 months his resume just job resume is a kind of normal Washington foreign service resume with some time off in Wall Street in the Peace Corps foreign policy magazine as Bill said so nor was he ever involved in the major story of his most of his adult life which was the Cold War with the Soviet Union he wasn't very interested I don't think he was very interested in Russia was he think it probably bored him there wasn't enough action going on it was static and abstract rather than I remember when I was I was serving in the embassy in Moscow in the early 90s and Holbrook came in the midst this was right after Dayton and he certainly controlled his enthusiasm for dealing with Russians so all of this is to say I completely understand your question 500 pages about a mid-level diplomat who did end a war but it was not the war it was a small war in Europe and yet name me an American diplomatic achievement since say Camp David that exceeds it I mean the Iran nuclear deal you might say except that it's no longer with us so but it really isn't his resume that interests me it's his character and the era that he lived in and I would say in many ways embodied he I think the reason Les Gelbs said he needs a novel is because what you really want with Holbrook is not to hear about his achievements it's to see and to feel what America was like when he was active because so much of him for better and worse his idealism his energy his confidence his arrogance his blindness his self-blindness which was I think his great fatal flaw all of those in some way I think are embodiments of what made America great and what made America fatally flawed in many ways so I thought I could tell a story of that time through this man that I couldn't tell through any other figure and that's why I sacrificed five years of my life which you're now making me question it's worth it I can assure you and you'll love the book yes in the back please Bill Drozdak Brookings George good to see you again toward the end of his life did you get a sense from reading his papers that he began to think that America was on this inexorable road to decline like other great powers in history or did he was he did he have this irrepressible optimism and particularly how did he see the rise of China and the the new competition between big powers in terms of the historical continuum yeah you know he didn't think or write much about that and that's tells you something about what he wasn't he was not Henry Kissinger he was not a grand strategist he didn't think in terms of 30 years out configuration of the great powers he was much more focused on an individual place and a conflict and the people involved he was a journalist at heart I mean he wanted to be a journalist and the New York Times rejected him in 62 and and the Foreign Service accepted him so he went into the Foreign Service but he never lost that love of the story and so I think the rise of China although he was part of it in the sense that he was part of the Carter administration when we normalized relations with China and later he helped businesses enter the market in China he didn't think about grand strategic issues did he think we were in decline well there's this one moment in his diary at the end his recorded diary where he describes going to see the revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center and he comes out of the theater and he's weeping and I don't know too many people who ever saw Richard Holbrook shed tears and he asks himself why was I so moved and it's because South Pacific which was from his boyhood embodied this confidence and optimism that was maybe in a way at its peak in 1949 when the musical was first produced and certainly the period of the war that it was about and he talks in this diary about how we lost that confidence and now we have we don't believe we can lead any longer he didn't then go on to say but I believe we only need to do X Y and Z and we will return so his life was closing in on him in that at that point everything was kind of going wrong this was two or three months before he died and that musical was enough to give him a the feeling of something ending he hadn't quite articulated it in the historical terms that you're describing in public he never lost his enthusiasm for American leadership but I have a feeling that he was too smart not to know that something was coming to an end yes ma'am yes hi hi my name is Liz Fanning I met Richard Holbrook briefly once and he had such a very strong impact on my life and I was wondering if you talk at all in the book about the people that he influenced the people that he mentored there was a chapter on mentorship in the unquiet American I think it was some of the power and if you think that people are carrying on his legacy well I know that in his last two years he built a staff of younger people at the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan that he thought very highly of and who thought very highly of him even though they saw him clearly and were exasperated often they loved him and their loyalty to him is such that there's going to be a reunion of them tonight I mean nine years after his death how many bureaucrats can can say that from the grave that their staffs are getting together nine years after their deaths to to celebrate them so he I feel that if you're his peer that's the danger spot you better watch yourself and be on your guard because he will take you out that's that's where you have to be careful so Wesley Clark had to be careful Tony Lake had to be careful Richard Haas had to be careful I mean that people at his level especially men who he saw as his real competitors were he had a hard time maintaining friendships with but those above him except for the last one he was loyal to he didn't he wasn't dissing Barack Obama behind his back that I know of and those below him he demanded a lot of he was very exacting but he had enormous influence on them and he gave them great responsibility and would pluck them from a desk somewhere over here in the State Department and put them in charge of something that you know they should have had to wait ten years to be in charge of he didn't care about the rules of the State Department in fact he loved to break them and that was a great thing for the people working for him and so they there many of them are still devoted to him and it's something that his detractors don't really know but what a following younger diplomats he has and they I think in many ways have been shaped by the way he saw the world and that is to say without the caricature of total confidence in our ability to shape events because that was never Holbrook I don't think. My name is Hattie Babbitt and I'm on the board of the Institute for Study of Diplomacy and I see lots of other members in the room. I've just finished reading Back Channel by Bill Burns and I've read the pieces of your book that are in magazine so far and I'll buy the book. My question is about diplomacy. The first unifying theme between what I've read of each of your writings is that in order to be a successful diplomat you must never sleep. I'm stunned I was stunned reading Bill Burns' book about nights with no sleep and in the run up to Dayton it appeared that Holbrook never slept. But I'd like to tease out those things that you all see in common about what it makes to be a successful diplomat. We may never be able to communicate them to the larger American public in a presidential campaign but we ought to know them. That's one for you first at least. Very briefly I mean you know I think the best diplomats I've seen or worked with including Richard Holbrook have a sense of strategic purpose. They know what they're about. A sense of strategic empathy they can put themselves in the shoes of even the creepiest of adversaries or rivals and understand how to navigate them and sometimes manipulate them and a sense of tactical agility too as well as so whether it was Jim Baker when he was Secretary of State who had enormous admiration for as a diplomat or Holbrook or others you know was that kind of combination of qualities. You know in that sense I think the core attributes of successful diplomats haven't changed all that much over the years. The world's changed enormously information moves at much greater speed and much greater volume than before but it's still a business of human interactions and that's what you know Holbrook brought to the table as a diplomat. The only thing I'd add is that he really cared. He his his stamina the sleepless nights the unbelievable air miles he logged the endless meetings always thinking of what moving part can I set in motion to push from this side then another from that how can I get the press on my side. Who do I remember from 30 years ago who could make a call he was just constantly orchestrating everything that he could and getting it in motion rather than letting things be static. But he cared I mean there was a genuine moral drive that made him want to end that war in Bosnia and that made him want to as a much younger diplomat save Indochinese refugees in the late 70s which was something he committed himself to when very few people were really interested in it and I think he knew that you couldn't come on with a moral argument that a lot of your colleagues would say we're not here for that but that was at the core I think of what drove him he really cared about people in desperate places that most of us have never heard of he never stopped wanting to see those places he never talked to those people he had an ability to that journalistic I think knack to sit down and listen he actually listened I think probably if you were Pakistani refugee you would get more of his attention and listening time than if you were the president of a European country and that I think without that you would have to ask yourself why am I really killing himself for this? Yes ma'am. I don't know if is it the Chinese century I think of the American Henry Luce coined the phrase American Century in the year 1941 which was the year the U.S. entered World War II and the year Richard Holbrooke was born so for me there's almost a perfect span from 1941 to sometime in the early 21st century when Pax Americana our taking it for granted and being taken for granted that we would take the lead ended I think the beginning of the end was the Iraq war and the waste of prestige and influence and alliances and Barack Obama managed it in a deft and subtle way and Donald Trump has hastened it in a brutal and thoughtless way but in some ways there's been a trajectory from between those two presidents that is on the same line and Holbrooke as Marvin Kalv said he was a kind of marginal figure in the American Century he was not Dean Atchison much as he wanted to be but he lived it in a way that was more vivid and real than almost anyone I can think of and it may be a little too pat to say that when he died it ended but that's the kind of thing writers have to we have to be a little bit glib what is the next I mean I don't know these are the kinds of questions I'm no good at my two bit answer is we're now in great power competition where the United States is no longer presiding over a system of alliances and interconnections and treaties we are one of several we are the first of several great powers that are in competition and that's why you know if you didn't like the American Century you're going to hate what follows it because last night I was in New York at an event and I was thinking and I said did it the end of our leadership in the post-war way means we'll simply be wiser and more prudent and more restrained and maybe more altruistic and more this and that no that's an NGO that's not a country if you take away the ideal of American leadership you're kind of left with the raw reality of American power which to me is a more frightening prospect so between those two I do think that there's something to regret in the passing of Holbrook end of that period yes way in the back hi Jessica sorry I didn't see thank you for wonderful conversation on both it's been terrific and the questions have been great Jessica Matt hi George one quick comment you just made reference to it and I've read the articles in the book is how unusually and how effectively he used his time out of government on policy work through NGOs I mean that's one of the things we can I think admire at least I do in him especially on refugee issues my question though is different which is did he kill himself in the sense that did he know how bad his health was becoming and just ignore it and how through he was afraid that he was killing himself he asked his heart doctors a couple of times in the last year of his life is this job going to kill me and they told him well you need to manage the stress and you need to get more sleep and eat better because he was putting on weight he was popping you know Albert almonds in his office late at night instead of having a salad he was traveling all the time and had atrial fibrillation for the last 10 years of his life they detected a aortic aneurysm in April of 2010 and that was the sort of thing that we need to keep an eye on this but it doesn't mean you're about to drop dead and I asked another cardiologist did they blow it did his doctors not see it and this cardiologist would have been happy to say yes they blew it but he had to admit this couldn't have been totally predicted but he all his friends were looking at him in those last months and saying you got to get out this is killing you your colors bad your weight is bad you're depressed your you know you're wearing down and he would say I know I know I will but not until I can get with the meeting with the president or not until they fire Jim Jones or not until you know I got out last Jones he said that once or not until I can no longer be useful and really I think he was facing the end if he had left what was his future I don't think he had another go round he was going to write a book but this was what Holbrook was about was being in the thick of the action so I think he had some some had barely conscious sense that he was yeah trying to both hold off mortality but also hastening it but I don't think he was suicidal in that way I don't think he he had a death wish I just think he couldn't do anything else he could not stop yes sir yeah so what you're getting at is he failed in Kabul he swaggered into Kabul thinking he was going to engineer the removal of Hamid Karzai and it would not be by coup d'etat the way we had removed ZM he had seen that as a disaster it would be by democratic means but we would remove Karzai Karzai immediately picked this up and began counter maneuver and he beat Holbrook because he knew Afghan politics and Holbrook didn't and that was a sort of hubris on Holbrook's part and a kind of indiscretion he was not careful he would tell people you know I'm going to make his life a living hell and that would get around and get back to Karzai and in Afghanistan you don't raise your voice you know you don't yell at the guy sitting across the table from you because that is going to mean I'm going to fight you it was not the Balkans as the Afghans kept telling him when Karzai was supposedly reelected through massive fraud Holbrook lost he had waved a gun in the king's face and failed to pull the trigger and Karzai told and I can bury the ambassador also had come to dislike Holbrook deeply no one wanted him in Kabul he went back to Washington and so whenever Obama went to Kabul he didn't bring Holbrook with him which is pretty devastating so he lost his usefulness in Afghanistan pretty quickly through these political mistakes and overconfidence but Washington was the real battleground for Holbrook I think he was not throughout his career he had trouble playing well with as we say at no time more than at the end with the Obama administration so I think that's where he felt his defeat most acutely not so much in Kabul but we should also remember he had a strategy which was we're going to bring the neighboring countries into this negotiation so that they can put pressure Pakistan and China on the Taliban India, Iran Russia on the Afghan government and force these combatants to deal with each other and at the same time we are going to approach the Taliban and begin peace talks as we did with the North Vietnamese that was his strategy it never went anywhere because the White House didn't really want it so we could say that he had many personal failings at the end but he was still in some ways the smartest guy around he was still the guy who saw the way through he just didn't have the ability any longer to bring other people along so here we are nine years later still at war in Afghanistan we have time for just one last question Karim Karim Sajidpur, Carnegie congratulations George, great to see you you said something George the whole book wanted to be in the middle of the action and I'm curious why he kind of avoided being part of the big issues in the Middle East I don't remember reading his name and your wonderful book about Iraq The Assassin's Gate so I'm wondering about what were his instincts on Iraq and second one of the excerpts I read of the book I look forward to reading the whole thing you had written that you avoided the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a personal or professional experience so I wanted you to talk a little bit about Holbrook in the Middle East I'm sure he was delighted not to be named in my book on Iraq he told John Kerry in 2002 you have to vote for the war resolution if you're going to run for president in 2004 he saw it in entirely political terms he saw Iraq he never learned anything about it I don't think he believed in that war I think it was actually pretty cynical and then he wanted nothing to do with it within a year or two and he turned his attention to Afghanistan and began going there in 2006 and writing op-eds and saying this is the war that matters Iraq is not the war that matters the Middle East to him was I think he looked at it and thought what can I get done even I, Richard Holbrook cannot do this one and in trying I'm probably going to destroy myself because there are too many political minds planted around too many constituencies in America he basically feared that he would never be Secretary of State because Jewish Americans would think he was being perhaps too pro-Palestinian not because he was pro-Palestinian but because he would make a mistake and it was just too difficult a tightrope to walk and he said that to friends that there's just nothing that appeals to me about trying about trying that so he he stayed out of the you could say the hardest problem of them all which yeah maybe that's a point I think he when he was interviewed by Barack Obama in Chicago after the election 2008 it's kind of a painful scene because he starts making these mistakes flattering Obama giving Obama a signed copy of his own book asking Obama to call him Richard not Dick and tearing up and saying you don't have to be African-American to cry not what Obama wanted to hear kind of the trifecta within a minute you wonder why things didn't work out between them but one thing he said to Obama is I am not interested in the Middle East if that's what you're planning on giving me so he also was you would say a Jew by background only his parents were refugees from Hitler and Stalin both Jewish but when they arrived in New York in 1939 they absolutely erased all traces his father changed his name from Abraham Goldbrich to Dan Holbrook and added an E at the end to anglicize it a little bit more Richard Charles Albert Holbrook there's not a lot of you know affinity for the old country there and he I know he was Jewish until he was an adult and never talked about his parents or his background never he absolutely avoided it really about what what did he say he admitted Scarsdale yes Jewish did he say you know he did finally he did finally grab it when he became ambassador to Germany it suddenly seemed like something that might be useful and so he he introduced his mother at his swearing in and his friends were all looking at each other like did he just say he's Jewish then it was erased again he didn't feel it he wasn't raised it and so that connection to the Middle East which could cut in any number of ways was never part of him either and he draw to it so he did want to talk to the Iranians though and he tried and then he was stopped yeah one of the worst parts of being moderator is having to bring fascinating conversations to a close as I mentioned before you'll have an opportunity to buy books as many as you can carry and get them signed by George just after this but first let me thank you George certainly for coming today but for a truly wonderful book and thanks all for coming thank you very much Bill