If anyone questioned the sureness of Richard Holbrooke's media touch during his lifetime—when he was persona very grata on cable news shows, dated Diane Sawyer, and set-designed the Dayton Accords on a remote U.S. air base to dramatize the inconvenient necessity of American power—the fact that George Packer has produced a 600-page portrait of him should lay to rest any doubt. Not every diplomat of the second-tier receives full biographical treatment, much less from one of the most beloved journalists in the country.
Perhaps this book originated out of some sense of obligation. After Holbrooke's death in 2010, a group of his friends wanted someone to write his life. Already the author of a New Yorker profile of Holbrooke, Packer was the obvious candidate. Holbrooke's widow entrusted him with a massive trove of Holbrooke's personal papers and audio aide-mémoire. Less clear is what was in it for Packer. In order to get a long biography off the ground, he would need to make his subject embody something larger. If the mission was to re-quicken the country's lost appetite for humanitarian intervention and liberal internationalism, Holbrooke was a promising vessel. Who better represented the more noble side of American power, on display during the golden years between, in Packer's exacting periodization, “Cold War sobriety and the celebrity shitbox”?
Of course, Holbrooke could be belligerent, obtuse, and impatient: “Is he one of those guys you have to sit around and drink tea with for hours?” he complains about a Saudi go-between at one point in this book. “Holbrooke put his feet up anywhere,” Packer writes, “in the White House, on other people's desks and coffee tables—for relief, and for advantage.” But liberal legend had it that he had solved the riddle of the Balkan Peninsula through the sheer force of his personality, and might have done the same in Afghanistan if only he'd lived long enough, or if his ego hadn't tripped up his talents. In these dark times, with America's global prestige apparently in ruins, surely we would rally to have him on our side. The “our man” of Packer's title is in this sense not tip-of-the-hat-to-Graham Greene ironic, but elegiac and vaguely defiant.
“Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can't get his voice out of my head,” is how Packer, the Marlow of this tale, opens Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. The book has all the qualities of a nonfiction novel. Packer himself features as a close-breathing narrator on the margins, relating the fate of the main character, Holbrooke, who is a kind of alter ego. Born in New York City in 1941, Holbrooke came from a Jewish middle-class liberal background, much like Packer's own. (In Holbrooke's case, the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Hitler's Europe was kept from him until adolescence, and he downplayed it until late in life, when he suddenly “became Jewish” on the eve of his ambassadorship to Germany.) Like the young Packer, who joined the Peace Corps, Holbrooke too wanted to become a writer, though an early rejection from The New York Times seems to have sealed his fate as a foreign service officer, though one skilled at composing dispatches, foreign policy think pieces, and leaks to the press. “Journalism, diplomacy: one operated on the outside of power, the other on the inside, but both put you at the center of historic events,” Packer writes. “For the rest of his life Holbrooke compressed the gap between them as much as possible.”
Read Full Article »
