Our Man: Richard Holbrooke. Racy account of a diplomat’s life

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

Author: George Packer

ISBN-13: 978-1910702925

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Guideline Price: £25

There are no facts, says Nietzsche, only interpretations. It is a thought to trouble the sleep of any historian, whether an adherent of Caryle’s “great man” theory of history, or a member of the annales school. We might add to the night’s disorders by observing that objectivity, like perfection, is not of this world. No one has ever seen a cube; all we have is the broad concept, and a limited point of view. Recall the apocryphal Frenchman in London wondering why so many places, such as Waterloo Station and Trafalgar Square, are called after defeats.

So how is the historian, and the historian-biographer, to proceed? George Packer’s rich and racy account of the life-story of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in post-war American public life, has been widely praised but in some quarters thoroughly deplored. Packer is a former New Yorker staff writer now with the Atlantic magazine, and the winner of many prizes, including the National Book Award in 2013 for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. He has also written fiction – two novels and a play – and in Our Man, it shows.

Here are the opening sentences of the prologue: “Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head.” The next section, which in any conventional biography would be devoted to the minutiae of the subject’s origins and antecedents, starting probably with his great-grandparents and the hard lives they led in the Old Country. Packer hasn’t got the patience for that sort of thing. “Do you mind if we hurry through the early years?” he asks, and proceeds to do so without waiting for answer.

And anyway, where would an answer come from? Who is the “you” he repeatedly addresses? This self-consciously intimate approach to the task of writing a biography of a major public figure, who died as recently as 2010, has irritated and even offended some readers; so has his tendency to interrupt his narrative with intense little meditations on the state of the American nation in the period from the second World War to the present.

Yes, Packer certainly takes risks, but many of them pay off handsomely. This is a new way of writing about a person in history, in recent history, and an attempt to enrich the craft of historiography through the use of a highly personalised voice and some of the devices of mainstream fiction. Our Man is not quite a non-fiction novel, but as an alternative title, In Hot Blood would not be inapt. No one’s blood was hotter than Holbrooke’s, and the stuff running in Packer’s veins is pretty warm too.

Richard Holbrooke, you will remember – see? it’s catching – was the chief architect of the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 which ended the savage war that had been raging in Bosnia for more than three years. He had organised the Dayton conference mainly by force of will, persuading such unappetising figures as Slobodan Miloševic, who would later be charged with war crimes, to come to a huge, bleak Air Force base in Ohio and spend weeks hammering out a peace treaty that was every bit as contentious and complicated as our own Good Friday Agreement.

Holbrooke came from a middle-class emigrant family – his father was a doctor, his mother’s people had been rich traders of animal hides in pre-war Germany – which had sought to cut itself off from its Jewish origins. Indeed, throughout his life Richard Holbrooke maintained a deeply ambiguous attitude to his Jewishness, surely a rich seam but one which for some reason Packer chooses not to mine to any depth.

After university, young Holbrooke tried hard to find a job at the New York Times, without success. He had been friends at college with the son of Dean Rusk, later JFK’s Secretary of State, who encouraged the bright and feverishly ambitious young man to go for the Foreign Service. Packer writes of the young man in a hurry: “I can see him: so old so young, tall and dorkish, the conservative suit and narrow tie of the early sixties, thick black-framed glasses and a faint smile that conveyed a shade of mischievous irony and all the optimism of an American going out into a world where Americans could do anything.”

And the part of the world he went to first was, of course, Vietnam.

Vietnam war

He knew practically nothing about the country and the war there that America was being increasingly sucked into. In a fine example of a pervasive dry wit Packer remarks, “That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service – other countries. . .” Distant lands are “never quite real to us.” Yet there were parts of America itself that were equally foreign to a great number of Holbrooke’s generation, and he was passionately supportive of the Southern civil rights movement. For him, a person could simultaneously support the struggle for freedom in Alabama and the war in Vietnam “and believe you were being true to America”.

Packer devotes a lot of space to Vietnam, quite rightly, since Vietnam was central to the formation of Holbrooke as a diplomat, and taught him strategies he was to apply and reapply to the numerous theatres of war he would work in until the very end of his life. The title he chooses for this section of the book is a line from Charley Brown in the Peanuts cartoon series: “How Can We Lose When We’re So Sincere”? Anyone who knew America in the Vietnam years will appreciate the bitter irony of repeating that question now.

Holbrooke had hardly arrived in South East Asia when he realised the war was unwinnable. “We have to get out of Vietnam,” he wrote. “The war has already spread a poison through our nation which will take years to neutralise.” A strong dose of that poison still remains in the national bloodstream, infecting millions of Americans who do not remember the war, and even some who have never heard of it. Packer states a simple but momentous truth: “we still can’t accept that we lost the war”.

The book is frank about Holbrooke’s awfulness, in his private and professional lives – “ambition is not a pretty thing up close”. Henry Kissinger described him as “viperous” and Kissinger would know.

Holbrooke was a big man, with big appetites – in the course of a strategy meeting he could eat an entire bowl of nuts almost without noticing. He would wander uninvited into a colleague’s office, flop down in a chair. kick off his shoes and put his stockinged feet up on the desk. He treated many of the people around him with cruel dismissiveness; the account of his leaving his first wife does not make for pleasant reading. He was shameless in outmanoeuvring those who stood in his way to the top – and the top for him that was the job of Secretary of State, which, perhaps tragically, he didn’t get – yet he could be almost weepily sympathetic when he came across someone in genuine distress.

In many ways he was his own worst enemy. After the Dayton Accords he lobbied so hard for the Nobel Peace Prize that he lost whatever chance he had of getting it. Yet always there was the desperate eagerness for America, his America, to do good in the world. As Packer writes, our judgment of such figures “depends on what they’re ambitious for – the saving glimmer of wanting something worthy”. One feels this should be written in the past tense; how far would a Holbrooke get in present-day American politics?

In large part Our Man is, as the subtitle indicates, a lament for what used to be called the “American Century” – which as Packer points out in fact was not much more than half a century – and all the possibilities that seemed on offer in that period, which began with the end of the second World War and “expired the day before yesterday”. Holbrooke, in Packer’s version of him, was, for all his egregious faults, that rarest of public servants, who “believed that power brought responsibilities, and if we failed to face them the world’s suffering would worsen, and eventually other people’s problems would be ours, and if we didn’t act no one else would. Not necessarily with force, but with the full weight of American influence. This was the Holbrooke doctrine . . .”

Our Man is a fine, adventurous and vastly entertaining book. The subject of it was no saint, but he did the state, and the world, some service. “What was he like?” Packer asks, and yet again answers his own question: “He didn’t want to miss a minute of his life.”