“I sometimes think this first year in Vietnam was the best of Richard Holbrooke,” Packer writes. Die Ehe wurde nach einem Jahr geschieden. “His ambition still had a clean smell, and youth was working in his favor — physical courage, moral passion, the boundless energy and enthusiasm and sheer sense of fun, the skepticism, the readiness to talk straight to ambassadors and generals.”In Vietnam Holbrooke became best friends with Tony Lake, a fellow Foreign Service officer who “kept his ambition more tightly wrapped,” a talent that came naturally to someone born into the WASP establishment that Holbrooke, the son of Jewish refugees, hungered to join.
Each had dramatic affairs, but they were tethered by ambition. “I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. History is cruel that way. His work culminated with three weeks of negotiations in November 1995 at an Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, where he pushed the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and others into a peace agreement. George Packer has written an incredible, and interesting biography, about Richard Holbrooke, American diplomat.
Less clear is what was in it for Packer. “One day I know it will start to fade, along with his memory, along with the idea of a life lived as if the world needed an American hand to help set things right.
Er gilt als „Architekt“ des Dayton-Abkommens, mit dem der Bosnienkrieg beigelegt wurde. But now that Holbrooke is gone, and we’re getting to know the alternatives, don’t you, too, feel some regret? It wasn’t just Holbrooke’s ambition that hobbled him, it was his inability to cloak his ambition like the more polished members of Washington’s striving elite.The difficulty in writing biographies of grand players, as I know from trying to do it with Steve Jobs, is to be honest about their rough personalities while guiding a reader to the conclusion, which is as true for Holbrooke as it was for Jobs, that their unvarnished drives were part and parcel of their greatness. “I still can’t get his voice out of my head,” Packer concludes. International bekannt wurde er als US-Sondergesandter für den Balkan in den 1990er Jahren.
During the Carter administration, when Holbrooke was an assistant secretary in the State Department, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s personal aide had to send him a memo. “He campaigned so hard for the Nobel Prize that that’s probably one reason he didn’t get it,” Clinton remarked.He also did not get the other prize he wanted. Holbrooke was perpetually in heat. Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke (* 24.April 1941 in New York City; † 13. He ended a war,” Packer writes. Obama, who took as much pride in telling people he hadn’t read their books as Holbrooke did saying that he had, was disdainful of Holbrooke’s compulsion to flatter and be flattered. In dritter Ehe heiratete er im Jahre 1995 Zwischen 1972 und 1976 war Holbrooke Herausgeber des Magazins Holbrooke wurde einer breiten internationalen Öffentlichkeit bekannt, als er im Im US-Präsidentschaftswahlkampf 2008 unterstützte Holbrooke die Nach seinem Tode wurde im Februar 2011 der frühere US-amerikanischer Diplomat, ehemaliger Botschafter in Deutschland und bei den Vereinten Nationenhttp://marriage.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=marriage&cdn=people&tm=265&gps=326_86_1268_815&f=00&su=p284.9.336.ip_&tt=11&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20101432,00.html (Link nicht abrufbar)“I saw this romantic, exotic, harmonious, multi-ethnic society, just a few years before it was destroyed.” Zitiert in: George Packer: http://www.americanacademy.de/uploads/media/090212_KissingerHeyden_DEU.pdf (Link nicht abrufbar) “Diplomacy, real diplomacy, is not for the short of breath.”True to form, Holbrooke personally led his own lobbying campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe there’s a better way — a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words — but I don’t know that way.” Or as he put it more poetically: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”In corporate as well as governmental realms, leaders often prefer, as Obama did, teammates who are low-maintenance. Suddenly, his face turned red, his legs collapsed. He wrote letters extolling his accomplishment and pressed others to sign them. With his appetites, Holbrooke couldn’t help himself. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.I doubt that any novel, not even one co-written by Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald, could have captured Holbrooke fully, and I certainly thought that no biography ever would. A vibrant reporter and writer of several highly acclaimed books, including an extraordinarily powerful memoir of the family betrayals and secret love affairs that accompanied her parents’ escape from Nazi and then Communist Hungary, Marton ascended during periods when her husband languished. Certainly the biography rings almost unpleasantly true and we really have too much information about this strange and perplexing man, but the author's collection of and publication of the details of Holbrooke's professional and personal life represent an absolutely intriguing window into not just the personality of Richard Holbrooke but also the equally personal and complex world of … “She became what he’d never had,” Packer writes, a “climbing partner.”The peak of Holbrooke’s career came under President Clinton, when he shuttled around the Balkans cajoling Bosnian warlords and Serbian war criminals to make peace. Suppose the mess they leave is inseparable from their reach and grasp? Also, this biography is a dissection of American power of its strengths and failures, and the embodiment of that is Holbrooke. But as Packer shows, there can be a payoff for those able to harness a Holbrooke. He then dashed to the State Department for a meeting with Secretary Clinton. By this point you’re familiar with its every failing. “Holbrooke?” he begins.