I’ve never met an abler diplomat, or a smarter one, than Richard Holbrooke. He was inevitably the brightest guy in the room, and usually the most pragmatic and hardest-working – and he was also a friend whom I admired hugely. His death today is a tremendous loss for all of us who knew him, and for the country as well.
Richard never achieved his dream of becoming secretary of state, but he leaves a legacy around the world – from Bosnia to East Timor, from AIDS clinics in South Africa to his legions of followers in the United States – that exceeds that of many Secretaries of State. He was simply a legendary public servant, and an inspiration.
I met Richard two decades ago when I was a China correspondent for the New York Times, and he came through Beijing on his way to Tibet. In the intervening years I learned an immense amount from him, and I came to have vast admiration for his combination of public service ideals and gritty can-do pragmatism.
It’s well-known that he could be abrasive, and he rubbed some people the wrong way. But what’s sometimes missed is that abrasiveness was usually serving some cause; it wasn’t just him trying to get his way. Quite regularly when I would write about AIDS, I would get a reproachful call from Richard. “So, why didn’t you mention testing?” he would ask. As chairman of the Global Business Coalition against AIDS, he was among the first to appreciate the importance of widespread testing for HIV, on the theory that you couldn’t constrain the epidemic until you knew who had it. And so once he understood that, he pushed and persuaded and bullied to get more testing. For my part, persuaded and bullied by Richard, I began to mention testing more often – and my readers and the public were better off for it.
There are lots of people who manage to get one big thing right in their careers, but Richard managed to be right and ahead of his time about any number of topics. He was certainly right about AIDS testing, even though initially the AIDS advocacy community resisted testing for fear of stigmatizing people; eventually, people came around to Richard’s side.
Likewise, Richard was most famously right about the Balkans. The Dayton peace accord couldn’t have been achieved without Richard’s combination of intellectual brilliance, strategic and tactical mastery, and indefatigability, and countless lives were saved as a consequence. That was diplomacy at its finest.
And he was right about Tibet, China and the need to empower women, among many other topics. Many people perhaps didn’t realize what a tireless advocate he was of educating girls and bringing women out of the margins of society into the mainstream. Some of that was the influence of his wife, Kati Marton, who for a time was chair of the International Women’s Health Coalition, but much was also Richard’s own idealism – a huge part of his soul, which people didn’t always perceive through his gruff exterior.
Richard succeeded as a diplomat, as a banker, as a journalist (he wrote excellent columns for The Washington Post during the Bush administration) and as a mentor for so many younger people. He particularly liked journalists, and some of that was no doubt a desire to be quoted– but he also shared the journalistic sensibility, the desire to go out and kick tires and talk to people directly rather than just read briefings. Even in his latest Af-Pak job, he managed to go and talk to real people, whereas many diplomats remained prisoners of our embassies.
Af-Pak was his toughest mission ever, and he assembled a fabulous team. As far as I could tell he had all the right instincts, and he certainly believed deeply in promoting economic development as well as just military operations. But he worked his tail off, and I wonder if the stress of the Af-Pak job, and his constant travel and jet-lag, wasn’t one of the underlying reasons for his final heart problem.
Richard also cared deeply about his family and was immensely proud of Kati – a superb author – and his children. He would brag about his kids to me, swelling with pride. And he cared about his huge circle of friends on many continents – and now all of us feel a certain emptiness. The news reports say that his aorta gave out, but don’t believe that. His heart couldn’t possibly have failed him. This was a man, larger than life, with brain and energy and vast ability, yes, but above all this was a man of heart. And we all feel the loss of that powerful heart, and send our deepest condolences to Kati, his children, and the extended family.
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