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But that was Holbrooke. Ideas mattered to him, but never for their own sake, only if they produced solutions to problems.
We are wholly ourselves. If you cut out the destructive element, you would kill the thing that made him almost great.
Throughout his life, the person whose approval he needed most was no longer there to be impressed.
There was a Peanuts cartoon strip of the time that circulated among Holbrooke and his friends in Vietnam. Charlie Brown’s baseball team has just gotten slaughtered, 184–0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”
He was exceptional from the start, not just because he was brilliant and curious and widely read, but because he was unafraid to face the truth, cared enough to act on it, and was willing to take the consequences.
In government, foolish certainty usually beats fragile wisdom.
For the first time Holbrooke was in a position to shape his country’s policies. He had the chance to relieve human suffering, or ignore it, or make it worse, all in the national interest. That’s the meaning of statecraft.
He gave his staff, not personal warmth—during conversations he was always on a phone call and shuffling paperwork—but intellectual stimulation, openness to dissent, and a sense of collective mission. In return they gave him their best.
Carter finished his term like a man staring under the hood of his car in the middle of a mudslide. On some things he was a generation ahead of his time, but he couldn’t lead and that’s what voters want, even if it means being lied to.
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.
It was the drink of political losers. Maybe that’s true of nationalism everywhere.
Blood and soil are for history’s losers.
A travel book based on a travel book fell into the young president’s hands, and he changed his mind about Bosnia. I told you foreign policy makes no sense.
This might be why foreign policy is the bloodiest field of all. Unlike domestic policy, which has jobs reports and public opinion to guide decisions, no one really understands what’s going on out there in the world, and there’s no time to learn by reading. Foreign policy comes down to naked human character.
“We’ve got to exhaust every alternative, roll every die, take risks. If we let this moment slip away, we are history.” He glanced across the table at Lake, who had been designated to inform the allies. “How quickly can you get your bags packed?” “I’ve got a toothbrush in my office.”
But the person at Dayton who sprang Rohde was Milosevic’s henchman Jovica Stanisic, and he did it in the traditional way—got on the phone with Karadzic and yelled, “Hand him over or I’ll fuck your mother.”
There are many things that I wish I had done differently, but the sum of the actions, the good and the bad, produced whatever I am today.
He yelled less often than in the past but he rode them hard, criticized their thinking habits, their prose style.
When a particularly turgid memo crossed his desk he called everyone into his office and handed out copies of Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” “Don’t begin sentences with the passive voice,” he commanded. “Say ‘I believe,’ not ‘It is believed.’ ”
