 Good morning. Thank you for your patience. Sorry, we're a bit delayed. George is obviously in a very busy schedule these days as he promotes his book. I'm a Wista UB Director of the Fellows Program at New America. And on behalf of the Fellows Program and the International Security Programs, I'm delighted to welcome you to today's event, Our Man, Richard Holbrook, and the End of the American Century. Twenty years ago, our founders had a unique vision at New America to support fellows who are eager to publish books that have the capacity to reach readers and policymakers who sit far outside the Beltway. Today, we're proud to have supported more than 200 national fellows, George Packer being one of those, as they offer an inventive perspective on the major challenges facing our society. As we welcome George Packer back to New America today, as he launches his book tour, but this book represents number 112 for us. So it's a great honor to have him back. And before I introduce our speakers, they do want to inform me that we do have books on sale. Solid State Books is our bookselling partner, and so George will be available to sign books if you buy copies or have copies with you today. And so with that, I'll just hand the conversation over to George. He is now at the Atlantic, and this is book number four for you, correct? Eight. Eight, no. But there are a bunch of them. Eight. No one's heard of most of them, so. Okay. Well, congratulations. And he's joined by Peter Bergen, Vice President of New America. All right. Thanks. I'm sorry you all had to wait. There was a scheduling miscue on somebody's end, but no one will be punished. Thanks for coming. So I want to thank Peter and Oista and Marie and New America for supporting me during the work on this book, which was five years labor, and I couldn't have done it without the kind of support and encouragement that I got. I remember describing the project to Peter when I was applying for a fellowship, and he gave me a big thumbs up, which meant a lot to me at the time, because I myself didn't know what the hell I was doing. I had, I received Richard Holbrook's personal papers a few weeks after he died from his widow, Cati Martin, and I spent the next two years reading them and not quite knowing what to do with them. I had them in my home office. In fact, they were so Holbrookian and bulky and dominating that I couldn't get my office door all the way open. And it was a challenge to think how to write a biography about basically a mid-level diplomat whose name was already beginning to fade a bit, not into obscurity, but away from fame. People had, no longer had always heard of him. So what kind of a book would that be? And one day I was driving on an interstate in Connecticut when I heard this voice, and this doesn't happen to me, I am not a mystical writer, but I heard a voice that said the first words of what is now the book. And so I'm going to read the first couple of pages from the prologue and you'll hear that voice yourself and then I'll talk a bit about what the book is about. Holbrook? Yes, I knew him. I can't get his voice out of my head. I still hear it saying, you haven't read that book, you really need to read it. Saying, I feel and I hope this doesn't sound too self-satisfied that in a very difficult situation where nobody has the answer, I at least know what the overall questions and moving parts are. Saying, gotta go, Hillary's on the line. That voice, calm, nasal, a trace of older New York, being son cadence when he was being playful, but always doing something to you, cajoling, flattering, bullying, seducing, needling, analyzing, one upping you, applying continuous pressure like a strong underwater current, so that by the end of a conversation, even two minutes on the phone, you found yourself far out from where you started, unsure how you got there and mysteriously exhausted. He was six feet one, but seemed bigger. He had long skinny limbs and a barrel chest and broad square shoulder bones, on top of which sat his strangely small head and, in case within it, a sleepless brain. His feet were so far from his trunk that as his body wore down and the blood stopped circulating properly, they swelled up and became marbled, red and white like steak. He had special shoes made and carried extra socks in his leather attaché case, sweating through half a dozen pairs a day, stripping them off on long flights and draping them over his seat pocket in first class, or else cramming used socks next to the classified documents in his briefcase. He wrote his book about ending the war in Bosnia, the place in history that he always craved, though it was never enough, with his feet planted in a Brookstone Shiatsu foot massager. One morning, he showed up late for a meeting in the secretary of state suite at the Waldorf Astoria in his stocking feet, shirt untucked and fly half zipped, patting around the room and picking grapes off a fruit basket, while Madeleine Albright's furious stare tracked his every move. During a video conference call from the UN mission in New York, his feet were propped up on a chair, while down in the White House situation room, their giant distortion completely filled the wall screen, and so disrupted the meeting, the President Clinton's National Security Advisor ordered a military aide to turn off the video feed. Holbrook put his feet up anywhere, in the White House, on other people's desks and coffee tables, for relief and for advantage. Near the end, it seemed as if all his troubles were collecting in his feet. Atrial fibrillation, marital tension, thwarted ambition, conspiring colleagues, hundreds of thousands of air miles, corrupt foreign leaders, a war that would not yield to the relentless force of his will. But at the other extreme from his feet, the ice-blue eyes were on perpetual alert. Their light told you that his intelligence was always awake and working. They captured nearly everything and gave almost nothing away. Like one-way mirrors, they looked outward, not inward. I never knew anyone quicker to size up a room, an adversary, a newspaper article, a set of variables in a complex situation, even his own imminent death. The ceaseless appraising told of a manic spirit churning somewhere within the low voice and languid limbs. Once in the 1980s, he was walking down Madison Avenue when an acquaintance passed him and called out, Hi, Dick! Holbrook watched the man go by, then turned to his companion. I wonder what he meant by that. Yes, his curly hair never obeyed the comb and his suit always looked rumpled and he couldn't stay off the phone or TV and kept losing things, and he ate as much food as fast as he could, once slicing open the tip of his nose on a clamshell and bleeding through a pair of cloth napkins. Yes, he was in almost every way a disorderly presence, but his eyes never lost focus. So much thought, so little inwardness. He could not be alone. He might have had to think about himself. Maybe that was something he couldn't afford to do. Leslie Gelb, Holbrook's friend of 45 years and recipient of multiple daily phone calls, would butt into a monologue and ask, what is Obama like? Holbrook would give a brilliant analysis of the president. How do you think you affect Obama? Holbrook had nothing to say. Where did it come from? That blind spot behind his eyes that masked his inner life. It was a great advantage over the rest of us because the propulsion from idea to action was never broken by self-scrutiny. It was also a great vulnerability. And finally, it was fatal. Now I'm going to just skip to the end of the prologue. I'm trying to think what to tell you now that you have me talking. There's too much to say, and it all comes crowding in at once. His ambition, his loyalty, his cruelty, his fragility, his betrayals, his wounds, his wives, his girlfriends, his sons, his lunches. By dying, he stood up a hundred people, including me. He could not be alone. If you're still interested, I can tell you what I know from the beginning. I wasn't one of his close friends, but over the years I made a study of him. You ask why? Not because he was extraordinary, though he was, and might have rivaled the record of his heroes if he and America had been in their prime together. Not because he was fascinating, though he was, and right this minute, somewhere in the world, 14 people are talking about him. No, I won't relate this story for his sake. We want to see and feel what happened to America during Holbrook's life, and we can see and feel more clearly by following someone who is almost great because his quest leads us deeper down the alleyways of power than the usual famous subjects, whom he knew, all of them, and his boisterous struggling lays up open more human truths than the composed annals of the great. This was what Les Gelb must have meant when he said, just after his friend's death, far better to write a novel about Richard Holbrook than a biography, let alone an obituary. What's called the American Century was really just a little more than half a century, and that was the span of Holbrook's life. It began with the Second World War and the creative burst that followed the United Nations, the Atlantic Alliance, containment, the free world, and it went through dizzying lows and highs until it expired the day before yesterday. The thing that brings on doom to great powers and great men is its simple hubris or decadence and squander, a kind of inattention, loss of faith, or just the passage of years. At some point, that thing set in, and so we are talking about an age gone by. 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. 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 in energy, our reach and grasp, our excess and blindness, they were not so different from Holbrook's. He was our man. That's the reason to tell you this story. That's why I can't get his voice out of my head. So that's a bit from the beginning of the book, and I wanted to give you an overview of who he was and what he did. He essentially was a mid-level diplomat. He never rose to the top. He never reached his dream of becoming Secretary of State, and the reason was himself. The very qualities that made him a relentless negotiator with Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkans made him an intolerable colleague who created enemies everywhere he went. And in 1996, after Holbrook's triumph at Dayton that ended the Bosnia War, he was up for Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton was really weighing him very carefully against Madeleine Albright and finally went for Albright, and it's because Clinton told a colleague, I don't think he has the self-awareness to keep his relationships from becoming toxic. So Clinton read Holbrook. Although Clinton also unleashed Holbrook in the Balkans, he saw what Holbrook, what his failings were, and those failings kept him from achieving his dream. It's a little hard to justify writing a 500-page book about a mid-level diplomat. He had his achievements, some of them quite significant, but what made me want to do this, and I hope I can bay a bit of that in this prologue, is first his enormous character, which is outsized in every way and is equally endearing, maddening, appalling, and inspiring. And the best in him was inseparable from the worst in him. I don't think you can disentangle those qualities. If you cut out the thing in him that was destructive, you would probably cut out the thing in him that got things done. But the other reason for writing it is he embodied this era. His life was almost exactly coincidental with what I think of as the American Century. He was born in 1941. The year Henry Luce coined that term. He died in 2010 in action in Secretary Clinton's office. He didn't die there, but he had an aortic dissection right in front of Hillary Clinton, the office that he had always wanted to occupy and had never attained. And that was in the middle of the Afghan War when Holbrooke was trying to persuade his colleagues that we needed to talk our way out of the war with the Taliban, which there was a lot of resistance to, as Peter knows, and which Holbrooke never achieved. He never won the trust of Barack Obama, and in fact, he won the dislike of Barack Obama. Quite remarkable dislike, which I describe in detail in scenes in the White House and elsewhere. Obama and Holbrooke were exact opposites temperamentally, and Holbrooke didn't have that self-awareness to see that he was, in some ways, disgusting Obama with his flattery and his long-windedness and his lectures about Vietnam and history. He didn't want to listen to him and didn't listen to him. And Holbrooke, at the end, you could say died of a kind of broken heart, not because of Barack Obama, but because all his effort was not making progress, and he knew this was his last chance at the thing that he cared about, really the only thing he cared about, which was being in power and getting things done. And it was also a period when American power, after the Iraq War, was declining. American influence was declining. Our leadership in the world was no longer close to what had been just 15 years before when Holbrooke negotiated the end of the Bosnia War, which I think of as the high watermark of the Pax Americana. So I didn't really understand what this book was about until Election Night in 2016 when I suddenly realized that the era that I described in this book was now over and that we were entering a new era, a diminished era, and that the subject of the book had become history. So that's the story of our man, and I'd love to talk to Peter about it and hear from you as well. Well, first of all, Les Gelb was right. You did write a novel, in a sense. I mean, it's interesting that it doesn't have an index, so that means the Washington Read can't be accomplished by many people. So there are people who are annoyed with me for not having an index, and I understand why they're annoyed, but I want this book to be read from beginning to end because it was written to read, like, a 19th-century novel, even though there are extensive notes and it's as scrupulously factual as I could make it. Yeah, one thing about it, which is interesting, there's you are in it. Is the you really you or some composite of... I mean, stylistically, it's both a history and a national sense of that, and also this you person in the veins. It's an unconventional biography because I felt that there was no purpose in writing a straight, dull, dry, correct biography of Richard Holbrook. First of all, his character would resist that at every turn. He'd be breaking the boundaries of the book himself. And second, I didn't think there would be people who would really want to read it. Instead, that voice that I mentioned coming into my head while I was driving, Holbrook, yes, I knew him, seemed to me like the way to tell the story, as if it's a yarn, as if it's a very long yarn told by someone who seems to have actually been there all through it and been an eyewitness. Without making any claims I can't substantiate, it's not quite me, that narrator. It's someone older than me. It's someone who seems to have known Holbrook and known the era in which Holbrook was active. And I just thought I needed that in order to make it engaging and to do justice to the subject. And there's a you as well who is the listener and who there's not a constant reference to the listener, but every now and then the narrator talks directly to the reader as if you're hearing the story. The first chapter begins, do you mind if we hurry through the early years? Because I didn't want to belabor Holbrook's elementary and high school education, they're really not that interesting to me or to the world. Most biographies force mark you chapter by chapter through the life of the subject. I wanted the freedom to speed up the pace, to skip over things that weren't interesting and to then plunge you as vividly as I could into the details of the things that were important and interesting, namely Vietnam where Holbrook began his career, Bosnia where his career reached its peak and Afghanistan where his career ended, Three Wars. Well Three Wars is a, I wanted to welcome the delegation from the war college here who will have to leave at noon. Just thank you for being here. And since we're talking about wars, you wrote something which I thought was very interesting. Americans were pushing Vietnamese to build a new country. Model loosely after ours and we were brothers. But as long as we pushed, it wouldn't be their country, but if we stopped pushing, it would collapse. Which seems a pretty good summary of so many of our efforts. So talk a little bit about how that was revealed in Holbrook's career and also what this means because the subtitle is The End of the American Century. Right, so that's sort of the paradox of nation building and of counterinsurgency. We think we are helping them to build their own country, but the more we do for them, the less they do for themselves and are able to do for themselves and maybe the more resistance we begin to generate. And there's a kind of American faith that basically we all want the same things and we're not that different from one another. We all want democracy, we all want our children to have a good future and so why wouldn't another country accept our help? Holbrook was plunged into the heart of the Vietnam War at age 22, his first post as a diplomat in the Mekong Delta in 1963 where he was detailed as an aid worker to essentially give out bulgar weed and building materials and help the local self-defense militias and he was doing counterinsurgency right at the start and so he saw it at ground level and for the rest of his life he always insisted on seeing things for himself and on experiencing it as close to the source as he could, which was the journalist in him. He always wanted to be a journalist and he loved hanging out with journalists. Wasn't the editor from Policy Magazine at one point? He was in the early 70s, but he just always liked, I think maybe more than being with his colleagues in government, he liked being with journalists. What Holbrook saw in Vietnam was that it wasn't working. Our overwhelming firepower was counterproductive, was actually creating enemies. We were trying to work with a corrupt South Vietnamese government that was actually in some ways working for the enemy by driving peasants into the arms of the Viet Cong and the solution to that was by no means obvious. He didn't lose faith in the mission of the war for a few years. I think it's very hard when you're inside government and are pushing every minute of your day for a goal with a team of people to suddenly say this isn't going to work, but he went through stages of disillusionment that he details very clearly at each level of first questioning the assessments in Vietnam, which he saw in the Mekong Delta were untrue, and then questioning the tactics of airpower and then questioning the strategy of pacification and finally questioning whether the war itself could be won, and that led him to the realization that we had to negotiate with the North Vietnamese and get out, which he went through similar stages I think at the end of his life in a war that hauntingly resembled his first go-around, which was Afghanistan. Assassin's Gate, your book about the Iraq war in a way is also a little bit about, you kind of went through that same process personally and did some of the key characters in the book who went into Iraq with high hopes and saw it all dashed. So how did that affect the way that you approach this? I think this book is not a hagiography of Richard Holbrook and it's not a love letter to American exceptionalism. On the other hand, it's not a damning indictment of either of them because reality is always more complicated than our ideological simplifications. Holbrook was the mixed bag of idealism and egotism that I tried to describe and those two forces, both in immense quantity and pressure in him, sometimes were in balance and when they were, he could end the war in Bosnia. When they were out of balance, he was a destructive force and a self-destructive force and you might say the same is true of us. When our faith in ourselves and in our own mission becomes hubristic, we become destructive and we can't see what's in front of our face because we're blinded by our own self-confidence and our belief in our good intentions but when our best qualities are aligned with our power and I think that was true in moments during Holbrook's career, not just Bosnia, he also had a lifelong concern with refugees. In the late 70s, when he was President Carter's Assistant Secretary for East Asia, no one wanted to have anything to do with Vietnam. It was over, we wanted to forget it. Holbrook, who had been formed by Vietnam, kept pressing for us to have a more open policy toward getting the boat people and the Cambodian refugees from the Khmer Rouge out of danger and here. In large part due to Holbrook's efforts, a million and a half Indo-Chinese refugees eventually settled in the United States and he had the same concern for Bosnian refugees, for refugees of African wars in the late 90s, for East Timorese refugees. This is something that people may not quite know about him. He really did care about other people in other places that were forgotten by top policy makers who were thinking in big abstractions or only in terms of a narrow national interest. So the alignment between Holbrook and American blindness and also goodness I think is a, I don't want to overstate it, but he is my embodiment, at least, of the best and the worst of this period of our supremacy. Clashing forward to his memorial service at the Kennedy Center, you mentioned Obama and Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and their kind of complex attitudes towards Holbrook. How did that reveal itself at this memorial service? Well, I wasn't there because we were about to have our second child, but I've seen the, it's on C-Span if you want to watch it. There on stage at the Kennedy Center were two presidents, a secretary of state, a four star, just an amazing lineup of illustrious people. President Obama sat through the entire thing, two and a half hours for a man he had never liked and in some ways had humiliated. And I still don't know because I haven't talked to him about it, whether that was something he felt duty bound to do or whether it was a form of penance or at least of regret. I don't know. But he did the honorable thing. When he spoke, it was clear he had no real immediate knowledge of her feeling for Holbrook. It was a kind of second hand eulogy. Bill Clinton got up and kind of poked Obama by saying, I never understood anyone who didn't get him. He was a doer and the people who didn't like him didn't do very much. And there are people walking around on the face of the earth because of the way he lived his life. Hillary Clinton really loved Holbrook and Holbrook loved her and even though there was tension between them, she saved his job under Obama at least once when Obama was ready to fire him. She just got up and she's not as, you know, she can't convey her feelings the way her husband can but her remarks told me that she had really lost someone important to her. And that relationship was kind of the one that sustained him during the dark last years in the Obama administration. Anyway, I don't blame President Obama for immediately feeling I don't have time for long speeches about Vietnam. I've got a financial crisis, a collapsing economy and two wars get to the point. But Holbrook couldn't do anything without an air of drama and history. He needed that in order to motivate himself and everyone else. It was just a generational and temperamental clash that was bound to end badly. Let's open it up to questions. If you have a question, just wait for the mic and identify yourself. We'll start with this gentleman here. George, I'm David Rusk. Hey, how are you? I talked to you a long time ago. You interviewed me back around 2008 or so for the article and, Dick, you were working on... Yes, for the New Yorker. For the Atlantic, I think. No, it was in the New Yorker. In the New Yorker, okay. I haven't seen Dick's brother, Andy, here. So I think that I can say very confidently that I knew Dick Holbrook longer than anybody else in this room. He and I were literally each other's best friend in our senior year in high school. And I think that best friend relationship continued throughout our college years even though we were on different coasts and up to the time probably that he met Tony Lake in Vietnam. And Dick has always said that he named his two children, David and Anthony, after me and after Tony Lake. At least that's what Dick would say to us. His wife had something else to say about the... Not you, but the Tony one, yeah. But I do want to testify. And by the way, I only got my copy of the book on Tuesday from Politics and Pros. And I've read about the first 100 pages. So what I'm really reacting to is the Washington Post review that was in the outlook this past weekend. And I bear no responsibility for the reviews of my book. I understand that. So I'm eager to read the rest of the book. But let me just say as a friendship that lasted for almost 60 years, Dick was always, to me and to Delcia, my wife and another classmate of his at Scarborough High School. Dick was always very thoughtful, very responsive. That relationship began and continued for many years after any period in which his having a personal relationship to the Dean Rusk family could in any way be construed as seen by Dick as advancing his career. And he was a good and loyal friend as well as being a tremendous talent. And I just want to give personal testimony to the folks in this audience about that on behalf of Dick's memory and perhaps to counterbalance some of the characterization of this report that appeared in the Washington Post review this past week. Thank you so much for coming Mr. Rusk and for saying all that. You're in the book as you know. And in that list of qualities that I read from the prologue loyalty was high on the list. He had a handful of friends from earlier in his life and you're one who he never left and who he cared about. And there was a kind of youthful bond and Vietnam cemented it in other cases. You went back further. And those were his circle for the rest of his life. This gentleman here. Good morning. Mike Massetic my connection with the subject in the book is via my many years with McNeil and Lerner on which he and by the way I'm about 200 plus pages into the book. And of course you know as you point out I mean he really because I remember Phillip Habib once told Jim Lerner who said why don't you come on the program and talk and Phil Habib said I'm a diplomat. My job is not to go on television. Look at the contrast with Holbrook. And of course I can't claim to know I've met him a number of times but didn't know him. I thought your two paragraphs on page 214 and 15 were the best single summation of what's happened in television journalism that have been written. I mean at some point you want to read from it or quote it fine. But my question again partly because of my McNeil Lerner question is some of the women in his life remain present and are thread throughout the book. Others disappear. Yeah. Diane Sawyer is not the kind of person who disappears. But some of the others did and specifically Blythe Babiak. Who worked with you. Yeah she was at McNeil Lerner right. She worked there before I came on board. She arrives on the scene at about page 100 and something and then disappears at a page 206. I didn't see her in the acknowledgement so I don't even know if you talked. I emailed with her and she is mentioned in the list of people who I talked to. Oh I missed that. Yeah but she did disappear from his life. They married in 77 in part because Jimmy Carter refused to have any of his top appointees living in sin as some of you may remember. So it was not quite a shotgun marriage but a marriage of ambition. And by 79 it was over. And the last time they met, Holbrooke was in New York to re-certify the Khmer Rouge seat at the UN which was a very cold decision that the Carter administration made after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to allow the Khmer Rouge to occupy the UN seat which Holbrooke said was the hardest thing he'd ever done but I was a public official so I had to swallow hard. They signed their divorce papers somewhere near the UN. That was the end of that except that Blythe Babiak said to him Paul Pot Dick really? And that was how their relationship ended which is kind of a, I don't know, she got the last word basically. But you're right that other women stayed in his life throughout his life and I think he was more himself with women than with men and that's why I devote a lot of time to his relationships with women. Did she go on to fulfill her writing career which is quite promising? She wrote two books. She actually changed her name to Blythe Holbrooke after the divorce and wrote two books but they're not well known. Let's talk with the lady here and then the gentleman right here. Hello, I'm Eleanor Bakrak. I managed to encounter Richard Holbrooke's difficult personality at both the beginning and the end of my career so to speak starting with my being a cowering freshman at Brown and he was a senior and editor of the Brown Daily Herald and ran to that me at some length with his henchman of course because he didn't like something I'd written. And then at the end I was working for AID in Afghanistan and he may have been a doer but in this case he ground everything to a halt because he insisted on approving even continuation of existing contracts but he never seemed to get around to actually going through them. There was a big bottleneck at his desk of all the contracts, yeah. Wow, you saw the entire arc. You were there at Brown and you were there at AID, that's remarkable. Yeah, well not quite as long as this gentleman and not nearly as pleasantly but actually I wondered though because what was his view of the war in Iraq which I always have felt was the death knell for accomplishing anything constructive in Afghanistan among other mistakes. He didn't pay much attention except to think he had to support it for political reasons if he wanted to become Secretary of State and he told John Kerry the same thing if you want to run for president you have to vote for the war resolution. So it was a I would say a rather cynical political judgment and then he spent the next few years not saying very much about Iraq and turning to Afghanistan which he cared about and which he thought was the more important conflict but when people asked him about Iraq he essentially washed his hands of it and you know the very last minutes of his life which are described in a detailed scene at the end of my book he was completely himself to the end. He was charming, even though he was in tremendous pain he was giving orders, here's the statement I want released after the surgery but make sure the surgery's done and I'm out first and spend more time with your family, he's telling his aid are you writing down my every witticism? He's flirting with the cardiologist in the trauma bay he's like having a staff meeting and he's now I've lost my train of thought what I was going to say about what you said he was completely connected to the entire experience of his life at the very end and yeah I've lost my main point for that Can I ask you a question about Cady Martin because obviously the book she gave you everything Yeah, I had all his papers and Cady was a long time board member of New America right from the beginning Cady's obviously read the book it's a waltz and all biography what was her kind of reaction? I mean, there were things in it that were very painful for her and she let me know that I showed it to her when it was still a manuscript because I thought I owed her that she had given me all of his personal papers with no strings attached whatsoever and I don't know maybe she's now having second thoughts about that I'm not sure but I wasn't promising her I would change things but I wanted to hear what she thought and she did ask for some changes most of them I didn't make but a couple of them seemed right and fair and I made them but mainly I want to say that she has been unbelievably generous in allowing this book to be mine and in not wanting it to be hers her book would not read like this but she's a writer and she understands that writers have to be given their own vision, their own freedom and she's allowed it to be my book which is a gift Mark Mazzetti? There's no one here than Mark Mazzetti I'm Paul London I followed Dick into Baswan province in I think June 4th 1965 I don't know exactly when he left he left around June 4th 1964 but I have to sort of second this thing Dick was a good friend for years not as you described I was not one of his close friends but my wife and I were always in touch with Dick and he was always I guess the word is a loyal friend as I was reading I haven't read a word of your book but it's very evocative already because of the reviews and I went back and I looked at that I think 2008 article that you had it was a very long article in the New Yorker but ignore that I didn't know what I was talking about the book knows what it's talking about well it's very interesting in the sense that in Vietnam and I think from what I read about his efforts in Afghanistan we've always spent a lot of time trying to strengthen the central governments of these places which may be sort of the roots of some of these problems we have because the central governments don't have the reach of a lot of local people who I spent a lot of time without there especially with local merchants and I just wondered if you'd comment about that I mean I was very surprised to read how much time he spent trying to strengthen the Kabul government which I think is a loser I mean he was actually trying to change the Kabul government he went into his job determined to get rid of Hamid Karzai and he was rather indiscreet about that and Karzai figured it out really quickly and Karzai knew how to maneuver in Afghan politics a lot better than Richard Holbrook did and he outmaneuvered him he won by massive fraud and Holbrook could do nothing and he became a kind of lame duck in Kabul he had to turn to Pakistan because no one wanted him in Afghanistan there's a lot of haunting things about that period because everything he was doing wasn't just focusing on high politics in Kabul where he failed he was also working on agriculture and trade and the police corruption and all the range of the non-military side of counterinsurgency which is exactly what he had done in Vietnam he had seen it fail in Vietnam he was part of cords he was part of blow torch Comer's operation and he saw it fail so he knew that this was very unlikely to succeed but it was the job he had so he threw himself into it Bob Gates would mock him in the situation room for thinking he knew something about wheat crops in Helmand province but this was Holbrook doing what he had to do as the civilian his main focus was on talking to the Taliban and the rest of the administration including Hillary Clinton weren't going to go there and so he was thwarted in the one thing that I think might have succeeded in Afghanistan George didn't he sort of make it the worst of all possible worlds by A encouraging lots of people to run against Karzai then Karzai found out about it and Karzai won yeah, yeah he would go around Kabul talking to all the Afghan politicians and telling them you should run and they took that to mean you will be our guy we will support you that's not what Holbrook meant but that's what it meant to them and so Ashraf Ghani who jumped into the race in Abdullah Abdullah and a few other people there were other Afghans who saw this as a trap and stayed out of it it kind of exacerbated nationalism and it backfired and Afghans said why is this American telling us who should be our president and it may have helped Karzai in the end it was a really clumsy strange chapter in his life as if he had lost something he had lost some touch that he had had back in the Balkans was that even the old times? George I look forward to the book and kind of on the subject of Afghanistan I'm wondering you know we'll see where the talks go right now with the Taliban but do you think that Holbrook would be able to accept and deal with the prospect of President Donald Trump ending the war in Afghanistan what would he think of it? it would just kill him I think it would kill him again because I mean Trump has represents the complete repudiation of everything Holbrook believed in alliances diplomacy humanitarianism America as a beacon rather than as a hammer or a snail withdrawing into its shell and for Trump and Zalmay Khalilzad who Holbrook had some kind of rapport with to be the ones to do I mean Holbrook wouldn't have wanted anyone else to be the one just him I'm sure he had an image in his head of a table in some Middle Eastern principality with Karzai in his cloak and cap and a Pakistani general in khaki uniform and a Taliban with a beard and a turban and Holbrook in his suit trying to end this war I'm certain that that image was in his head but even if the Obama administration had decided to push talks at the height of the surge which is what Holbrook wanted you don't talk as you're withdrawing which we did in Vietnam you talk when you're at your maximum leverage I still think that Obama would not have allowed the guy to do the negotiations he didn't trust him so it would be the Trump era would be baffling and horrifying and painful to Holbrook and someone else getting that spot would be in some ways even more painful I think I mean you knew him what do you think Mark you know I didn't actually know very well I talked to him a couple times some of my colleagues knew him far more yeah you watched so I mean I genuinely I suspected that might be the answer but figured you would you know you captured it very well thanks Sharon Burke do you still have a question okay Sharon Burke in the back mine's not related to this at all but it'll be a quick detour which is I'm Sharon Burke I work here at New America and I'm a former mid-level government bureaucrat I was in the Clinton administration the Bush administration and maybe a high middle level in the Obama administration and Bob Gates never mocked me in the situation room and Barack Obama is not going to come to my funeral even tonight so I'm really curious why you keep describing him as a mid-level bureaucrat because like having served around him I would never describe him that way never well I said mid-level diplomat maybe that's a little too diminishing he never got to the top assistant secretary of state how many assistant secretaries of state were the average person in this country named it's yes in Washington he was huge but in the grand scheme of history I'd say his character and some of his achievements were far bigger than his title and that's actually to his credit even though it was his own excesses that kept him from rising people are going to remember Holbrook in a way they won't remember Warren Christopher Christopher died shortly after Holbrook and he had a quiet funeral in Los Angeles Holbrook almost from the grave or from the urn probably forced a state funeral at the Kennedy Center and which was a remarkable thing but he's already fading I mean I know it seems he seems giant here but you talk to people talk to college students they haven't heard of him and the era that he embodied is also fading and one reason I wanted to write this was to try to keep it from fading out the lady in front thank you so much my Daruga I'm from Johns Hopkins Science Foreign Policy Institute I I still haven't read your book I have it in my bag it just came out two days ago well it arrived two days ago at our house it must have come out a bit earlier I'm interested in Holbrook obviously not obviously from different aspects I'm born and raised in Sarajevo and I left when the war started so my parents were on their terrace celebrating the the shelling of Serbian positions so Holbrook is obviously a big hero for many Bosnians I'm also interested in him as kind of a scholar writing on role of race and diplomacy and the need for assertiveness to diplomacy which we see less nowadays but I still want to kind of push you a little bit more on this question of Donald Trump and what Holbrook would be doing today if he was alive and as you describe in your introductory speech that the era had ended a certain era that Holbrook had symbolized had ended in 2016 if you want to be kind of to go further you could say for him it ended earlier for him it ended already with Obama because Obama was precisely the type of the president that was antithetical to what Holbrook was trying to do Obama did not see an American solution to every problem he was in some ways a manager of decline rather than of supremacy and Holbrook couldn't accept that at all and so in a way his style had made Obama reject him along with basically the interventionist of Holbrook so I wonder because you describe him I mean one thing that not having read your book but I presume coexist in your book is that portrait of him as an egomaniac self interested and career driven and an idealist at the same time and so which one do you think would have prevailed now with Trump and the presidency would he have stuck with the diplomatic career and tried to kind of you know to at least use Trump's inclinations towards a similar approach? Yeah I don't think he would have changed he was himself all his life to the last minutes and I don't think his views would have changed he also would be 78 years old today not I don't think he would be in government even if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 no 78 no he was born April 20th 1941 so he'd be 78 just turned 78 yeah he would be frustrated because I don't think he could understand Trump or Trumpism everything in him his DNA went back to an earlier period and you could also say to some extent that he joined an elite he wanted to be part of the establishment even though the establishment was sort of disappearing during his career he wanted to be the next Clark Clifford the next Averill Harriman and that establishment lost its or that elite let's say lost its hold on the American public people no longer trusted it with a lot of money in Washington in New York we're sending the sons and daughters of people from the rest of the country to fight and die in Afghanistan in Iraq and it seemed like maybe American leadership was a thing of people who didn't pay a price for it and Holbrooke wouldn't have understood the reaction I don't think to the failure of those wars and to the failure of our elites because the those elites were wasp elites or the earlier elites were wasp elites part of the story I'm telling is what happened when the wasp elite establishment broke up after Vietnam just as Holbrooke was getting into it he was like looking through the window at these elegant dinner parties and was invited into them but he was a Jew who never really reckoned with Jewishness he was raised out a sense of Jewishness didn't even know he was Jewish until he was an adult and all his life was indifferent to that identity but he was an outsider from the start and the next generation needed to have sharp elbows and a lot of aggressive energy to get into the establishment think of Kissinger and Brzezinski Holbrooke was more like that and that was a rowdy and less to the manner born elite and today the elite are somewhat discredited and I don't think Holbrooke would be able to have a full understanding of how the country has changed since he was in his prime and vice versa I mean I'll just say about that Kissinger and Holbrooke had a very tense mutually suspicious and despising but also they kind of needed each other Kissinger said Holbrooke was the most viperous man I know in this town which is really something coming from Henry Kissinger and Brzezinski tried to destroy Holbrooke under Jimmy Carter for various reasons okay we're going to do Uista and then this gentleman here has been very patient George thank you again for coming to New America as part of your tour I'm curious about the process for writing this book I guess why were you chosen to be interviewed a few different writers and why you and also Holbrooke is someone you knew when he was alive and you worked with him very intimately as a reporter and I'm curious about what it was like for you to write this book as you learned so much about him and the process I mean I knew him when he was alive I wrote a profile but I was at a sort of journalistic remove from him after he died strobe Talbot called me I didn't even know him really hardly knew him and he said well then Frank Wizard and I were thinking you should write a book about Holbrooke I was writing another book at the time The Unwinding and was actually having trouble with it so the thought of a different book seemed appealing so I had lunch with Conti and said would you give me his papers with no strings if I were to write a book and she said well you're not the only one in line but if you want them I will give them to you and I don't know why she chose me you'd have to ask her within a week of moving van with these huge black filing cabinets three feet wide by six feet tall was crossing the Brooklyn bridge from Tribeca to Brooklyn and these filing cabinets sat in my little home office for seven years blocking the opening of the door and Holbrooke just standing in my way and kind of with a mixture of who the hell are you to be reading my diaries and my notes about girlfriends and my audio thoughts during the Bosnian war and also what the hell is taking you so long to finish this book and what took me so long was I needed to hear that voice say Holbrooke yes I knew him before I could start writing this gentleman here George hi I'm Tim Lenderking from the Department of State was Holbrooke's director for Pakistan yes during the last six months of his life position for which he interviewed me was one of the more unusual job interviews the TV on his back to me as we conducted a conversation on you know world events that's how we interviewed everybody I mean left me with the impression for the job for which I was applying but it was all good it worked out I want to just agree quickly with Sharon's point I think characterizing him as a mid-level diplomat is just inaccurate the senior positions that he had as UN permanent ambassador two-time assistant secretary those are positions that most of us are lucky if we'll get even one of those Senate confirmed positions I won't use that phrase again the broader point I wanted to make is those of us who work for him in his SRAP team and I think I speak for a lot of others and I know you've talked to many of our group but we somehow felt that we had a kinder gentler Holbrooke there toward the end of his life and whether that was sensing his own mortality or his grandkids or you know being chased by some of these battles that he was having he was a super loyal guy and also very very team oriented and he really treated those of us who he brought into his professional family and I use the word family because sometimes it did feel like that it was and that was an extraordinary experience and so that staff meeting you know the Monday or Tuesday after he died where Hillary chaired that staff meeting and there were people in tears and you really sense that there was incredible love you know for this guy and one thing that I really appreciate about him as a career guy is just the out of box approach I agree it had a certain destructive impact but the way that he challenged all of us to don't do it by the don't play by the book you know invent your own book break the rules which I think was a great message particularly for those of us who were growing up in that system which is very risk averse in a lot of ways and he did it four times the same thing happened when he was Jimmy Carter assistant secretary for East Asia when he was Clintons for Europe and when he was you an ambassador he created a team who remained loyal to him and to whom he remained loyal for the rest of his life which bears on something I began to realize the best place to be with Holbrook was either below him or above him if you are working for him and he has confidence in you he will be hard on you but he will also give you great opportunities and pluck you out of one job and put you in another that should have taken five years because he didn't care about protocol if you were above him he never said a bad word about Barack Obama he persisted in trying to win his his trust but if you are at his level then you are in a dangerous position you are a rival and a potential threat and that's where people who came to really dislike him and to try to stop him are to be found and I found many of them because in Holbrook's metabolism there just couldn't be someone else who might be crowding him out he couldn't stand that he would crowd them out first and he made many enemies and they haunted him Susan Rice haunted him Anthony Lake haunted him and I could go on and on and it was not insignificant because they were often in a position to block his way but I think you had you were in the best place George my personal Holbrook story is I get a call it's Holbrook and he says I landed D.C. the job offer expired so that was his sort of I said yes I mean what are you going to say no to Holbrook but I said I have a few things to sort out I got this gig at New America and CNN but in the end then he died that was at the end I didn't know that this gentleman here John Mueller could you talk a little bit about Bosnia and Dayton did he make an independent contribution to that and what was the relationship with Milosevic did he make an independent contribution he was the contribution well anybody else in the world there were many other people but the Clinton administration had three years two and a half years to do something about Bosnia and the war went on and on and on sir and the Muslims had won and Milosevic in favor of an agreement the battlefield had turned against the Serbs and Milosevic was trying to find a way out and in Holbrook he saw his way out and in Milosevic Holbrook saw the Serb that he could work with to end the war but there was no guarantee that that war was going to end at Dayton if you read the section of the book on Dayton it was a cliffhanger and there were a couple of moments when the whole thing was about to collapse and who saved it Milosevic he was the one who really wanted this to end Holbrook never gave up and the persistence the sheer stamina of diplomacy which I didn't really understand until I wrote this book is just striking I mean it's like he's climbing a really high mountain and you can't be short of breath you have to be in it for the long haul because it is really hard work I don't think who's to say if the war in Bosnia would have ended if it were not for Holbrook I don't think anyone deserves more credit than Holbrook and they're go to Bosnia today even though it's a bit grudging because people don't like the two headed monster that was created by Dayton that was the only way this war was going to end and it was Holbrook who pushed it through we want to thank George for a brilliant presentation and he's willing to sign books and I know a number of people who bought books thank you