Richard Holbrooke Remembered

The following article appeared in the New York Times yesterday.WASHINGTON — There are not many people who can pack a Kennedy Center hall with 1,100 people — including five world leaders — and not only personally know just about every single one of them, but have all of them believe that they have a personal relationship with him.On Friday afternoon, Richard C. Holbrooke appeared to do just that.His memorial service drew an array of the world’s brightest diplomatic lights. There was President Obama, sitting next to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sat next to her husband, former President Bill Clinton, who sat next to the former secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, who sat two seats down from Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.Also in the audience was Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, who flew halfway around the world to pay homage, as did Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili (whom Mr. Holbrooke affectionately used to call Misha).They all came to pay homage to the man who, in the words of Mr. Obama, was “the leading light of a generation of American diplomats who came of age in Vietnam.”It was perhaps Mr. Obama’s misfortune that he, of the 14 people who spoke, knew Mr. Holbrooke the least. As Mr. Obama’s larger-than-life envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Holbrooke and Mr. Obama had only two years together before Mr. Holbrooke died last month of an aortic tear.So Mr. Obama could not sprinkle his remarks with the personal remembrances offered by speakers like Mr. Clinton (“He wanted to interview me to see if I was qualified to be president.”) or Mrs. Clinton (when he wanted something, “he would follow me onto a stage when I was making a speech, into my hotel room, into a ladies’ room — in Pakistan”).Nor could Mr. Obama offer an anecdote to match that of a lifelong friend of Mr. Holbrooke, Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Gelb said that while Mr. Holbrooke was negotiating the end of the war in Bosnia with Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic, he telephoned Mr. Gelb and said he had just persuaded Mr. Milosevic “to promise you a box of Cuban cigars, but he lies so much you can’t count on it — don’t you, Slobo?”Mr. Obama did have one story to offer. When the two men first met after the 2008 election, at Mr. Obama’s transition office in Chicago, the president said Mr. Holbrooke “teared up when he began to talk about the importance of restoring America’s place in the world.”“It was clear,” Mr. Obama said, “that Richard was not comfortable on the sidelines. He belonged in the arena.”As Mr. Holbrooke’s friend David Rubenstein put it, “Somewhere in heaven, there’s a need for a negotiator in an intergalactic dispute that only Dick can resolve.” No doubt, he said, Mr. Holbrooke “is saying to God, ‘I could negotiate up here even better if you gave me better powers.’ ”“If only,” Mr. Rubenstein said, imagining Mr. Holbrooke pressing his case, “I could have thunder and lightning.”Here's a link to the article.The Washington Post also posted a thoughtful tribute.