Much like Holbrooke himself, who died in 2010 at 69, Packer’s book is charming, brilliant, cocksure and exasperating. “If you cut out the destructive element,” Packer writes of his subject, “you would kill the thing that made him almost great.” The same apparently goes for the country whose interests Holbrooke pledged to represent. Lamenting the end of the American century — or what was “really just a little more than half a century, and that was the span of Holbrooke’s life” — Packer gets nostalgic: “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.”
Packer, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker before moving to The Atlantic, considered Holbrooke a friend. The two men shared a “liberal internationalist” sensibility and an ardent faith in the salutary effects of U.S.-led humanitarian intervention — in the notion that human suffering in far-off places compelled the United States to “do something.”
After 9/11, Packer and Holbrooke were early supporters of the Iraq War, although their subsequent responses played out in very different ways. Packer wrote “The Assassins’ Gate,” a deeply reported 2005 book about the war and acknowledged he had been wrong; Holbrooke, a lifelong Democrat, “had no desire to see Baghdad for himself” and treated the war as something he wanted to forget.
Holbrooke had lots of friends, a number of them journalists, whom he plied with dinner-party invitations and well-timed leaks. That this biography even exists is a testament to Holbrooke’s almost uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with the press. He never ascended to the position he so desperately wanted — secretary of state — and his biggest diplomatic accomplishment was his role in the 1995 Dayton Accords, which laid the groundwork for a tenuous peace in Bosnia. Even Packer calls it an “unjust” agreement, and he can’t quite exalt it, as much as he wants to. (“Let’s give him his due,” he writes of Holbrooke. “He ended a war. Well, he and others.”)
Packer, who wrote a profile of Holbrooke for The New Yorker in 2009, has plenty of material to work with. He conducted nearly 250 interviews, and he quotes liberally from Holbrooke’s notebooks and correspondence, entrusted to him by Holbrooke’s third wife and widow, Kati Marton, who “imposed no conditions whatsoever.” “Our Man” makes some high-minded noises about how Holbrooke’s death marked the definitive “end of the American century,” but the reason to read this book is less for Packer’s wistful tributes to American exceptionalism than for his consummate skills as a storyteller.
“Our Man” is divided into three parts — Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan — to mark the “three fiendish wars” that defined Holbrooke’s career. Packer rushes through Holbrooke’s childhood in New York City and Scarsdale, New York, although he doesn’t have to rush too much to get to Vietnam, when Holbrooke was an ambitious 22-year-old stationed with the Foreign Service in the Mekong Delta, trying to generate goodwill by unloading surplus bulgur wheat to feed the locals. Hearing unofficial reports of civilian deaths, Holbrooke felt stirrings of doubt — “We are fighting wrong, and it hurts” — although as much as he deplored the tactics, he couldn’t bring himself to question the war itself.
In 1966, he married his college sweetheart and moved to Washington, D.C., with the goal of becoming an assistant secretary of state by age 35 — which he achieved during the Carter administration, when he was appointed assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Two decades later, as an ambassador to the United Nations, Holbrooke would cajole Indonesia into stopping its genocidal campaign in East Timor; in the late 1970s, however, he was overlooking Indonesia’s brutal repression of the East Timorese in order to push for its purchase of U.S. fighter jets.
It’s a remarkable trajectory that Packer never fully elucidates, except by suggesting that Holbrooke’s Indonesian contacts in the 1970s meant that he could be more effective in the late 1990s, when his transformation into a stalwart humanitarian was complete.
Or almost complete. Later, in 2002, Holbrooke’s reasons for supporting the impending war in Iraq had to do with fear — not just of Saddam Hussein but also of the possibility that “a soft Democrat was politically doomed.” He persuaded Sen. John Kerry to vote for the war resolution by warning him of how perilous it was to look weak on national security. “If that was Holbrooke’s main reason for supporting the war,” Packer writes, “it might have been better to be stupidly, disastrously wrong in a sincerely held belief like some of us.”
Better? How so? Intentions seem to matter a lot to Packer — which might explain why, despite his moments of discomfort when writing about the more unseemly displays of Holbrooke’s grasping ambition, he wills himself into giving Holbrooke the benefit of the doubt.
There’s plenty of grasping to contend with, especially after Holbrooke started making money in the private sector between Democratic administrations, working as a consultant to companies like Nike and landing cushy gigs as an (ineffectual) investment banker. Holbrooke and his third wife, Marton, strategized the seating charts for their glitzy dinner parties as if they were drawing up battlefield plans; they obtained a sweetheart loan from Countrywide Financial — which later collapsed in the subprime mortgage crisis — to pay for several of their nine properties (including not one but two houses in Telluride); they both carried on affairs “in a class where affairs were practically expected,” with Holbrooke moving in to kiss a younger woman he worked with without waiting for her explicit consent. “He claimed her in the way of an entitled great man,” Packer writes.
Elite decadence doesn’t seem to be the story Packer set out to tell, but he’s too gifted a writer to fail to notice it (“A whole class of people in Washington and New York sent other people’s children to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq while they found ways to get rich”), even if his affection for his protagonist means that Holbrooke emerges in this account as flawed, yes, and fallibly human, of course, but ultimately meaning well.
“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused” — the line is from “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene’s 1955 novel about noble intentions gone awry in Vietnam. Packer quotes it, grudgingly, before adding: “My god, Greene loathed Americans.”
It’s a strange, drive-by generalization to make about an author who infused his novel with an intractable ambivalence. But then such knee-jerk moralizing is, as Packer admits, an American tradition: “We swing wildly between superhuman exertion and sullen withdrawal, always looking for the answers in our own goodness and wisdom instead of where they lie, out in the world.”
—
Publication Notes:
‘Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century’
By George Packer
Illustrated. 592 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.