by Ronan Farrow
“He also brought together a group of thirteen foreign policy people. . .And a lot of people noted that your name—your presence was not there,” Rose fired back. Holbrooke never had much of a poker face, and looked, for a moment, almost despairing. “And they were disappointed, frankly,” Rose went on, “because they think you are one of the principal spokespeople for foreign policy on the Democratic side of the aisle, because of your wide experience and your—”
“—My frequent appearances on your program.” He laughed a little too hard.
“Your frequent appearances on this program. Why weren’t you there?”
“I think I was doing a program with you.”
“Be candid with me. Tell me why you weren’t there and what was the story?”
Holbrooke glanced to the side then said, in a tone that suggested he’d rather douse himself in gasoline and self-immolate on that oak table than admit what he said next: “I wasn’t there because I wasn’t invited.” To which he added quickly: “I don’t have any problem. They can have anyone they want at a meeting. Actually, I was out of the city on that day and I couldn’t have gone anyway.”
Rose asked if he’d spoken to Obama, and Holbrooke instead responded with a list of advisers he had ties to. “We have all worked together, Susan Rice, Tony Blinken for Biden, Greg Craig. I worked closely with all of Senator Obama’s current team. I know them well.”
But the truth was, Richard Holbrooke had precious little currency with Obama’s team. He had indeed worked with Susan Rice, during the Clinton administration. To say they didn’t get along would be putting it mildly. During one meeting, the feud got so bad that she flipped him the bird in front of a room full of staffers. Holbrooke allies in turn called her a “pipsqueak” with a “chip on her shoulder” in the press. Officials who worked with both said she felt Holbrooke had trampled over her. (“He tried to trample over me,” she clarified. “I don’t think he succeeded.”) Holbrooke’s relationship with Blinken, likewise, wasn’t enough to prevent his boss, Vice President Joe Biden, from telling Obama “he’s the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” (Though Biden did admit Holbrooke was “maybe the right guy” to tackle the war in Afghanistan.) And Greg Craig, whom Holbrooke also listed, would soon fall out of favor with the Obama camp.
To many Obama loyalists, Richard Holbrooke was the enemy: part of the old guard of foreign policy elites that had accreted around the Clintons and dismissed Obama and his inner circle as upstarts. Holbrooke had avoided publicly criticizing the young senator from Illinois, but he had also leaned into his role as a Hillary loyalist, calling other foreign policy experts and signaling that support for Obama might mean throwing away job opportunities in a Clinton presidency (and, presumably, a Holbrooke State Department). Like much of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, he also wore the scarlet letter of his initial support for the war in Iraq. Later, he wrote and spoke about the disastrous repercussions of that invasion, including the neglect of Afghanistan. But in the eyes of many in the new administration, he remained exactly what Obama had run against.
There was also a divide of culture. Obama had run on excitement and change, not history or experience. He would later describe himself as “probably the first president who is young enough that the Vietnam War wasn’t at the core of my development.” When the United States finally pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, he was just thirteen, “so I grew up with none of the baggage that arose out of the dispute of the Vietnam War.” With a few notable exceptions, he surrounded himself with young men of the same generational outlook. Perhaps the most sustained and influential voice on foreign policy in the White House, Ben Rhodes, was given his bespoke role—deputy national security advisor for communications—at thirty-one. Staffers spent years swatting away a recurring comparison: White House as “frat house.”
In this White House, representatives of the dusty establishment were out of vogue. After a bruising race, Clinton loyalists were even less welcome—especially those with outsize personalities. “I think his whirlwind of activity, um, did cause some raised eyebrows in the White House,” Hillary Clinton said of Holbrooke. “They thought he was going outside the lines of the orderly policy process, the no-drama White House they were trying to run. And it was very painful for me.”
Two days after the election, Richard Holbrooke arrived in Chicago to interview with the president-elect. The meeting, which lasted thirty minutes, was an immediate disaster. According to friends Holbrooke called afterward, Obama greeted him as “Dick”—to which Holbrooke corrected him, saying that his wife, the writer Kati Marton, preferred that he be addressed as “Richard.” “That’s a joke, right?” Les Gelb, Holbrooke’s longtime friend who had involved him in the Pentagon Papers years earlier, recalled telling Holbrooke. “You didn’t really say that, did you?” It wasn’t. He did. Obama was annoyed—and later told several people so. “For some reason, President Obama thought he”—that is, Holbrooke—“had been treating him with some condescension,” Henry Kissinger said. “I do not know whether that’s true. But anyway, certainly Holbrooke had a lot more experience than the new people coming in.” In a sense, these were all characterizations of something simple: this was a job interview, like any other, and Obama just didn’t like the guy.
AMID THE SWEATY SCHMOOZING at the Fairfax on inauguration eve, Holbrooke was laser focused. Hillary Clinton becoming secretary of state was bittersweet, but also a reprieve. He would play a role in the administration. I watched as he and Clinton talked. He whispered in her ear. The two of them laughed. He made sure the assembled crowd saw it.
Clinton was at her most ebullient. The Obamas weren’t coming and she was the focus of every glance and whisper. She and I had attended the same law school, where several antediluvian professors spanned both of our enrollments. We’d met a number of times over the years, and she had always been kinder than she needed to be. Clinton had a preternatural knack for social recall, or at least artfully covering for memories she lacked. She professed to have read some of my foreign policy columns, and asked what I was doing next. I said I was deciding whether to go back to the law firm where I’d been a summer associate. She looked at me hard and said: “Talk to Holbrooke.”
She and Holbrooke had already begun crafting a new role for him, one she would later describe as, “by many metrics,” the most difficult in the administration. “Ever since my experience in Paris in 1968 as a junior member of the Vietnam negotiating team under Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance,” Holbrooke once wrote, “I had wanted to test myself against the most difficult negotiations in the world.” He would get his wish.
8
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
WHEN HOLBROOKE’S ASSIGNMENT first leaked, the role was framed as “a special envoy for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.” This was not sloppy reporting. Though his mandate was ultimately downsized to include only the latter two countries, Holbrooke had initially envisioned sweeping region-wide negotiations. “Afghanistan’s future cannot be secured by a counterinsurgency effort alone,” he wrote in 2008. “It will also require regional agreements that give Afghanistan’s neighbors a stake in the settlement. That includes Iran—as well as China, India, and Russia. But the most important neighbor is, of course, Pakistan, which can destabilize Afghanistan at will—and has.” In Bosnia, Holbrooke had juggled similarly fractious parties: not only Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, but also Russia, the European allies, and organizations like the UN and NATO. Here, he again saw a need for a grand, strategic approach.
This ambitious plan for another Mission: Impossible–style political settlement built on old-school diplomacy quickly collided with the realities of the new administration. Two days after the parties on inauguration eve, Holbrooke stood in front of a crowd of current and former diplomats in the Benjamin Franklin State Dining Room, the grandest ceremonial chamber on the State Department’s eighth floor. The room was renovated in the 1980s in a classical style meant to evoke the great reception halls of continental Europe
. Ornate Corinthian pillars, clad in red plaster and painted with faux-marble veins, lined the walls. Portuguese cut-glass chandeliers hung around a ceiling molding of the Great Seal of the United States: a bald eagle, one set of talons grasping a bundle of arrows, the other an olive branch. Holbrooke was flanked by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on his right, and Joe Biden and the administration’s newly appointed Middle East peace envoy, George Mitchell, on his left.
“It’s an extraordinarily moving thing for me to return to this building again, having entered it so many years ago as a junior Foreign Service officer,” he began. In Afghanistan, he described a war gone wrong; in Pakistan, a challenge “infinitely complex.” He thanked the president for paying tribute to diplomats on his second day in office, and Obama, in turn, stressed his “commitment to the importance of diplomacy” and his recognition “that America’s strength comes not just from the might of our arms.” Those convictions were tested during his eight years in office.
Holbrooke looked out at his wife, Kati, his sons David and Anthony, and colleagues he’d known across decades. He seemed emotional, his voice wavering. “I see my former roommate in Saigon, John Negroponte here,” he said. “We remember those days well, and I hope we will produce a better outcome this time.” The audience laughed. Obama was expressionless.”
While other regional initiatives being announced by the new administration were headed by “envoys,” Holbrooke, in what was to be one of many annoyances for the White House, insisted that he be given a sui generis title: “Special Representative.” It was, in his view, a more concrete managerial term than “envoy”—a way to signal that he was building up a sizeable, operational team.
In 1970, a young Holbrooke had written an article in Foreign Policy, the upstart publication at which he would later become editor, decrying the sclerotic, siloed bureaucracy of the State Department. Returning decades later, he decided to shake things up. He began assembling a crack team with officials detailed from across the government. There were representatives from USAID and the Department of Agriculture, the Treasury and the Department of Justice, the Pentagon and the CIA and the FBI. Then there were the outsiders—counterculture thinkers drawn from civil society, business, and academia. Vali Nasr, the Iranian-American scholar of Middle East studies, had received a midnight text in December. It was characteristically theatrical: “If you work for anyone else, I will break your knees.” And then, anticipating Nasr’s preference for an Iran-focused job: “This matters more. This is what the president is focused on. This is where you want to be.” Barnett Rubin, a New York University professor and authority on Afghan history and culture, got a call as well. Rina Amiri, an Afghan activist who had worked with the UN and Open Society Institute, recognized Holbrooke on a Delta shuttle from DC to New York and began pressing him about the upcoming Afghan elections. Holbrooke was impressed, and told her he was assembling a team. “I know,” she said, “but I’m here to lobby you.”
“I’m very efficient,” he said. “I just turned your lobbying into a job interview.”
My own interview was, likewise, distinctive.
“WHAT SHOULD WE BE DOING DIFFERENTLY?” Holbrooke shouted over the hiss of the shower he was taking in the middle of that job interview. From the next room over, I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
It was the culmination of a sprawling, hours-long meeting, which had ranged from his office, to the secretary of state’s, to his townhouse in Georgetown. I had followed up on Clinton’s advice at the preinaugural party at The Fairfax and begun talking to Holbrooke and his chief of staff, Rosemarie Pauli. A little over a month later, in March 2009, I arrived at the State Department to meet with him in person. He barreled out of his office, lobbing policy questions at me. How would I reinvigorate trade in Central Asia? How would I maximize the impact of assistance to the Pakistanis? Never mind that I was a wet-behind-the-ears lawyer, with a modest foreign policy background in Africa, not Afghanistan. I’d worked with local nongovernmental groups in the developing world, and Holbrooke wanted to ramp up the United States’ emphasis on those groups—a change of culture in a war zone where most of the implementation happened through powerful American contractors. He wanted nontraditional answers, unencumbered by government experience.
The State Department, in DC’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, is an imposing slab of stripped classical architecture, clad in limestone and built, in portions, in the 1930s and 1950s. The earliest part of the complex was intended for the growing War Department after World War I, though with the construction of the more ambitious Pentagon, it never actually became the military’s headquarters. The looming rear entrance to the building is still known as the War Department—a flourish of irony, for the seat of American peacemaking. The Department is a literal hierarchy, with opulent ceremonial rooms for receiving foreign dignitaries on the eighth floor, the secretary’s office on the seventh, and offices of roughly descending importance on the floors beneath. During Holbrooke’s prodigious turn as assistant secretary in his mid-thirties, he had occupied an office complex on the sixth floor. Now, he’d been relegated to the first, next to the cafeteria—where Robin Raphel was later deposited, and across the hall from the Department newsstand, where Holbrooke would load up on junk food between meetings.
Our walk-and-talk started in his office and moved into the hallway, then up to the seventh floor and the secretary of state’s ornate, wood-paneled office. He moved briskly through the entire conversation, only occasionally making eye contact, aides hurrying after him and handing him papers. He paused my answers frequently to take calls on his BlackBerry. This was not real-life government, where meetings are seated and staid. This was government as dramatized by Aaron Sorkin.
Holbrooke and I, and a veteran CIA officer Holbrooke was also lobbying to join his team, Frank Archibald, met with Clinton briefly in the antechamber outside her office. He outlined a dazzling vision for the roles we’d play. Repackaged and artfully marketed by Holbrooke, every underling was a one-person revolution. Archibald was going to single-handedly heal suspicions between State and the CIA. I was going to realign American assistance to NGOs. Amiri, I heard him say on numerous occasions, had written the Afghan constitution. (As he worked up a particular lather about this at one function, she leaned in and whispered in my ear: “I did not write the Afghan constitution.”) None of us had any business interviewing with the secretary of state for our jobs, but many of us did, through dint of Holbrooke’s willpower. Holbrooke had leaned on the patronage of great men himself, from Scotty Reston at the Times to Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman. He wanted to be the man that people would say was that kind of man, and he was.
After meeting with the secretary, we had returned to Holbrooke’s office suite on the first floor, where he’d picked up his luggage. He had just returned from a trip and had to go home to change before an afternoon meeting at the White House. He passed me a suitcase and out we went to hail a cab, not interrupting the flow of questions. Would I favor more overt United States branding on USAID assistance in the region? How would I enlist local watchdog groups in ensuring electoral transparency? I had just recovered from several years in a wheelchair, the result of a bone marrow infection left untreated while working in Sudan. Holbrooke was aware of this but characteristically oblivious to it in the moment. I hobbled after him with his luggage. When we arrived at his Georgetown town house, he headed upstairs—not asking, naturally, just carrying on with the conversation. He left the bathroom door ajar and peed. “What about negotiations with the Taliban?” he asked demurely. “Really?” I said. “What?” he replied innocently from behind the bathroom door, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. And for him, it was—virtually everyone seemed to have a story about Holbrooke meetings in bathrooms. He poked his head out, unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m going to hop in the shower.” I stood outside the door. The job interview continued.
Many Holbrooke wooed hesitated. Rina Amiri, worried about her outspoken views on human rights being muted
, held out for a month. Barnett Rubin made it a condition that he be allowed to keep his academic perch at NYU part time. I myself wasn’t convinced. The State Department wasn’t a glamorous career move. “I would go to Davis Polk,” one law school classmate wrote to me, referring to the law firm where I had a job offer. “What is the point of these technocratic positions? Do you really want to spend forty years trying to move your way up? If you work really hard you might end up where Holbrooke is himself, which is a whole lot of nowhere, really. Fuck that.”
But Holbrooke brought to every job he ever held a visionary quality that transcended practical considerations. He talked openly about changing the world. “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes,” Henry Kissinger said. “If you say no, you’ll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful.” We all said yes.
By the summer, Holbrooke had assembled his Ocean’s Eleven heist team—about thirty of us, from different disciplines and agencies, with and without government experience. In the Pakistani press, the colorful additions to the team were watched closely, and generally celebrated. Others took a dimmer view. “He got this strange band of characters around him. Don’t attribute that to me,” a senior military leader told me. “His efforts to bring into the State Department representatives from all of the agencies that had a kind of stake or contribution to our efforts, I thought was absolutely brilliant,” Hillary Clinton said, “and everybody else was fighting tooth and nail.”
It was only later, when I worked in the wider State Department bureaucracy as Clinton’s director of global youth issues during the Arab Spring, that I realized how singular life was in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—quickly acronymed, like all things in government, to SRAP. The drab, low-ceilinged office space next to the cafeteria was about as far from the colorful open workspaces of Silicon Valley as you could imagine, but it had the feeling of a start-up. The office was soon graced with cameos from eclectic and unexpected faces. Holbrooke hosted a procession of journalists, to whom he remained as close as he had in previous jobs. Prominent lawmakers visited. He met with Angelina Jolie about refugees and Natalie Portman about microfinance. Holbrooke knew what he was doing was counterculture, and he believed it to be historic. There were reminders of his view of our place in history everywhere. Even his office was a shrine to wars that came before. In framed pictures on the walls, there he was, smiling in the Mekong Delta; there he was with Bill Clinton in East Timor, or in Sarajevo flanked by armed guards. “Are you keeping a journal?” he’d ask me. “One day you’ll write about this.”
