Our Man

Starred review from March 4, 2019
A brilliant, abrasive diplomat struggles to resolve foreign conflicts while fighting bureaucratic wars at home in this scintillating biography. New Yorker writer Packer (The Unwinding) follows Holbrooke’s State Department career from his start in the American “pacification” program during the Vietnam War, through his star turn negotiating the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, to his fruitless efforts under the Obama administration to start peace talks in Afghanistan. As nerve-wracking as his negotiations, in Packer’s telling, was Holbrooke’s struggle to rise in America’s foreign-policy establishment: he stalked and schmoozed everyone who could further his career, sometimes ambushing them in the men’s room, while waging cutthroat turf battles against rivals. Drawing on Holbrooke’s fascinating diaries and his own memories of the man, Packer makes him a Shakespearean character—egomaniacal, devious, sloppy enough to make presidents deny him the prize of becoming secretary of state, yet charismatic and inspiring—in a larger-than-life portrait brimming with vivid novelistic impressions. (Holbrooke’s voice was “always doing something to you, cajoling, flattering, bullying, seducing, needling, analyzing, one-upping you—applying continuous pressure like a strong underwater current.”) In Holbrooke’s thwarted ambitions, Packer finds both a riveting tale of diplomatic adventure—part high drama, part low pettiness—and a captivating metaphor for America’s waning power. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Jericho.

March 15, 2019
The riveting life of a deeply flawed diplomat whose chief shortcoming seems to have been the need to be more recognized than he was.New Yorker staff writer Packer (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, 2013, etc.), winner of the National Book Award, was a friend of the diplomat and foreign policy specialist Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010), one of whose signal accomplishments was navigating through the endless difficulties of Balkan ethnic politics to negotiate peace in the former Yugoslavia. When it came to national interest versus universal principles of human rights and the like, "Holbrooke favored the former while making gestures toward the latter." Still, faced with the ugly realities of such things as the Cambodian genocide, which, as one of the "best and the brightest" of the American technocrats in Vietnam, he bore some responsibility for, he stretched to accommodate justice. Serving one administration after another, Holbrooke accumulated friends and favors; he also made powerful enemies, and it was not always easy to tell one from the other. As a sometime outsider--he was descended from a Jewish immigrant named Golbraich--he desperately longed for power, wanting especially to rule over Foggy Bottom as Secretary of State. Alas, he did not achieve his aim, though Packer supposes he was worthy enough. Instead, he served other leaders, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the latter of whom considered him disruptive. The author notes Holbrooke's real accomplishments along the way, including founding an American cultural center in Germany and achieving delicate balancing acts in the intractable mess of Afghanistan. As Packer notes, he also had a "huge appetite for details [and] need to understand from the ground up," attributes that not every American diplomat shares. In the end, though egotistical and quick to be insulted, Holbrooke was also, by Packer's absorbing account, highly capable.Students of recent world history and of American power, hard and soft, will find this an endlessly fascinating study of character and events.

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Starred review from March 15, 2019
This biography of powerhouse diplomat Richard Holbrooke by the award-winning author of The Unwinding (2013) offers a pensive portrait of a man permanently biased toward action. As a young foreign service officer stationed in the Mekong Delta, Holbrooke stood out for his shrewd analyses, informed by long hours of fact-gathering in the provinces, and the truth-to-power directness of his reports. But he was also known for his relentless ambition and his tendency to brush off, bulldoze, or outright betray anyone in his way. No one loved America more, suggests Packer, or had a more nuanced understanding of its power. In position after diverse position in half a dozen countries, including Bosnia and Afghanistan, under every Democratic administration from Johnson on, Holbrooke would demonstrate his talent for wrenching agreement from the jaws of impasse. Yet his idealism was inseparable from his egoism, and late in his career, hamstrung by decades of accumulated grudges, he struggled to remain relevant and never achieved his dream of serving as secretary of state. Packer, who knew Holbrooke personally, celebrates the man's larger-than-life qualities while remaining clear-eyed about his profound flaws. And by the end, he convincingly argues that Holbrooke's passing signifies the loss of something larger still, a sense of American possibility, now seemingly out of reach.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2019

During his time as a career diplomat, Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) helped broker the peace in Bosnia that led to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords and most recently served as U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan under President Obama and ambassador to the UN under President Clinton. In this first treatment of the politician since Derek Chollet's The Unquiet American and the HBO film The Diplomat, directed by Holbrooke's son David, New Yorker journalist Packer (The Unwinding) gives a balanced analysis of Holbrooke, suggesting he was arguably one of the most significant international policy advisors not to serve as secretary of state. Focusing on the private life and public career of a restless, and at times assertive, politician and political advisor, the author mines interviews conducted with more than 200 people for background, whose accounts are thus individually unattributed; the Holbrooke Papers, to which he had special access; as well as secondary sources. VERDICT An insightful and indispensable rendering of an intriguing and accomplished figure who persisted in the pursuit of peace. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/18.]--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2019

Diplomat Holbrooke, who served as an adviser in Vietnam, U.S. ambassador to Germany and the UN, and assistant secretary of state (twice) and facilitated the Dayton Accords, gets full treatment from New Yorker staffer Packer, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist. A great subject-writer match-up.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.