Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the end of the American Century

George Packer, “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the end of the American Century,” Random House (Large Print), 2019, 808 pp.

Richard Holbrooke (b. 1941; d. 2010):  was an American diplomat and author. He was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world and from1993 to 1994 he was U.S. Ambassador to Germany.  Holbrooke’s biggest diplomatic accomplishment was his role in the 1995 Dayton Accords, which laid the groundwork for a tenuous peace in Bosnia.  Many claim that Holbrooke was a jerk, but a brilliant jerk and this biography clearly demonstrates he was both.  This biography has no index—it’s supposed to be read like a novel and this worked for me.  Holbrooke is probably the last of his kind.  A diplomat backed up by his government with a military presence at the service of civilian diplomats.  Our diplomacy has now been totally militarized, this began during Holbrooke’s tenure in Afghanistan and continues to this day.

The author of this biography, Packer, was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker before moving to The Atlantic, and he considered Holbrooke a friend. The two men shared a “liberal internationalist” sensibility and an ardent faith in the effects of American-led humanitarian intervention — in the notion that human suffering in far-off places compelled the United States to “do something.”  Packer has plenty of material to work with in this book. 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” 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, N.Y., though 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” — though as much as he deplored the tactics, he couldn’t bring himself to question the war itself.

My Notes:

Pg. 7:  Holbrooke came of age when the phrase ‘great man’ did not sound anachronistic but served as an inspiration for human striving.  He came of age when there was still a place for it and that place could only be filled by an American.  This was just after WWII when the ruined world lay prone and open to visionary action figures like Acheson, Kennan, Marshall, and Harriman.  These men built the structures of international order that would endure for three generations, and that are only now turning to rubble.  Holbrooke strived his whole life to be like them, not realizing he was too late.

Pg. 12:  What’s called the American century was really just a little more than half a century, and that was the span of Holbrooke’s life.  It began with the creative burst that followed WWII—the United Nations, the Atlantic alliance, containment, the free world until it expired the day before yesterday. 

Pg. 70:  DEPTEL 243 is the August 24, 1963 cable by the United States Department of State to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the US ambassador to South Vietnam. The cable came in the wake of the midnight raids on August 21 by the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem against Buddhist pagodas across the country, in which hundreds were believed to have been killed. The raids were orchestrated by Diem's brother Ngô Đình Nhu and precipitated a change in US policy. The cable declared that Washington would no longer tolerate Nhu remaining in a position of power and ordered Lodge to pressure Diem to remove his brother. It said that if Diem refused, the Americans would explore the possibility for alternative leadership in South Vietnam. In effect, the cable authorized Lodge to give the green light to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) officers to launch a coup against Diem if he did not willingly remove Nhu from power. The cable marked a turning point in US-Diem relations and was described in the Pentagon Papers as "controversial". Historian John W. Newman described it as "the single most controversial cable of the Vietnam War"

Pg. 119:  We fell into Vietnam and kept on sinking out of a mistaken belief that Kennan’s policy of containment required us to stake our security and credibility on not losing another square mile of Asia to communism even though the enemy were nationalists and the war was a civil war (the domino theory). 

Pg. 146:  The author maintains that the February 1965 American order to evacuate non-essential women and children from Vietnam marks a dramatic turning point in the Vietnam War.  It was the end of the afternoon siesta and the diplomatic teas and American children at the Saigon Zoo.  It was the beginning of sprawling US bases and B-52s and black-market Marlboros and industrial-scale prostitution.  On March 30, 1965, two VC pushed a car right up to the ground-floor windows of the US embassy and detonated three hundred pounds of explosives, killing twenty-two people, almost all Vietnamese bystanders.  It was the end of the civilians and the beginning of Westmoreland’s killing machine. 

Pg. 178:  In the summer of 1967 Les Gelb, a friend of Holbrooke’s, was assigned by McNamara to assemble a team and take three months to answer one hundred questions about the war.  Are the body counts accurate” Has the bombing worked? How will we know if pacification is succeeding? Could Ho Chi Minh have been an Asian Tito?  The project was top secret, but Gelb told Holbrooke about it, and Holbrooke was interested.  Through the fall of 1967 Gelb’s project kept expanding.  McNamara’s questions led to more questions. The study of America’s involvement in Vietnam was expanded to go back to the 1940s.  No officials were interviewed so that the project wouldn’t leak.  It was so secret that not even Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, or Lyndon Johnson himself knew the nature of it.  Holbrooke contributed a chapter about the pacification effort that he’d been involved in from 1965 to ’67.  Daniel Ellsberg, still a hawk, was working on the chapter about Kennedy’s decisions in 1961.  On November 1, 1967, McNamara finally gave the president his honest view of the war, before even reading the Pentagon Papers.  It wasn’t welcome, and by the end of the month Johnson moved McNamara over to the presidency of the World Bank, where he remained in 1969 when Gelb showed up at his office carrying two boxes with forty-seven volumes of analysis and documents.  McNamara refused to read the Pentagon Papers he had been instrumental in compiling.  (McNamara may not have read them but I did when Ellsberg provided the NYT with copies that were then published as a book.)

Pg. 189:  On January 30, 1968, Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops attacked cities all over South Vietnam.  This was the Tet Offensive.  Katzenbach sent Holbrooke to Vietnam to assess the Communist offensive while it was still going on.  He found Westmoreland and Komer in shock.  They had believed their own talk of a demoralized enemy.  (Yet the war went on another seven years for a total of 17.4 years).

Pg. 238:  The 1973 Paris Accords, for which Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, was basically the same deal that Holbrooke and his colleagues in Paris could have had in 1968—five years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, with the fire spread to the whole of Indochina. 

Pg. 246:  People forget the hope that came with the election of Jimmy Carter.  Those old enough remember gas lines, blindfolded hostages, double-digit inflation, 20 percent interest rates, and Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech.  Carter swore that unlike his predecessors he’d always tell the truth to the American people, and he was pretty much as good as his word, and the American people turned him out for it.  He was the last president to make that mistake.

Pg. 303:  During the Eighties, it sometimes felt like there would never be another Democratic president.  Reagan found the perfect formula for Republican supremacy: wave the flag and ask nothing of the American people.  Swell the defense budget while cutting taxes.  Make America number one again at the Summer Olympics. Roll back communism through dirty little wars that didn’t cost American lives.  If almost three hundred Americans got blown up by Iran-backed suicide bombers in Beirut, quietly withdraw the marines and change the subject.

Pg. 321:  Clark Clifford was Holbrooke’s kind of man.  After the summer of 1945, Clifford pushed Truman to the left.  In foreign policy, he helped bring into being the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, American recognition of the state of Israel, and the National Security Act of 1947, which created the Defense Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council. 

Pg. 370.  In 1989 Milosevic became president of Serbia.  He revoked Kosovo’s autonomy, cracked down on its Albanian population, began to turn the Yugoslav People’s Army into a Serb fighting force, and used Belgrade TV to create an airless climate of fear and hatred among the Serbs spread across the other Yugoslav republics.