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

by George Packer

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 Second World War and the creative burst that followed—the United Nations, the Atlantic alliance, containment, the free world—and it went through dizzying lows and highs, until it expired the day before yesterday. The thing that brings on doom to great powers, and great men—is it simple hubris, or decadence and squander, a kind of inattention, loss of faith, or just the passage of years?—at some point that thing set in, and so we are talking about an age gone by. It wasn’t a golden age, there was plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it. The best about us was inseparable from the worst. Our feeling that we could do anything gave us the Marshall Plan and Vietnam, the peace at Dayton and the endless Afghan war. Our confidence and energy, our reach and grasp, our excess and blindness—they were not so different from Holbrooke’s. He was our man. That’s the reason to tell you this story. That’s why I can’t get his voice out of my head.

Officially, Holbrooke knew almost nothing about Vietnam. That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service—other countries. It’s hard to get Americans interested in them, and the more interested you get, the worse your career prospects. Strange for a country of immigrants from everywhere. But to become American the new arrivals have to erase the past. We wipe out this immense store of knowledge about the rest of the world and lose ourselves in the endless drama of America the Exceptional. So other countries are never quite real to us.

This is a particular story of the war. I’m not going to tell you the whole history—how the French lost colonial Indochina, how we took over the fight as a war against communism, how every president from Truman to Ford made it American policy to keep South Vietnam non-Communist, how every failed American effort required an even greater American effort, because we never bothered to learn the history and never understood what we had gotten into.

Americans were pushing Vietnamese to build a new country (modeled loosely after ours, since they and we were brothers). But as long as we pushed, it wouldn’t be their country. But if we stopped pushing, it would collapse.

The reporters concluded that the generals and diplomats were concealing the truth from them. The reality was worse: the officials were deluded. The habit of deception slipped into self-deception.

The people in charge make decisions based on the politics of the moment, or on an ideology that bears little relation to human reality, or on sheer ignorance compounded by wishful thinking—on anything but solid information. Or they don’t make a decision at all—events gallop ahead and the decision makers stumble to keep up. Then they spend the rest of their lives pretending that they knew what they were doing all along and justifying something that made no sense in the first place.

Take away the ties to Hanoi and Peking and the VC are fighting for the things we should always be fighting for in the world. Instead we continue to defend a class of haves which has not yet shown its real ability to understand that the have-nots must be brought into the nation.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never been on the inside, but at the level where big decisions are made, government work can destroy people. It destroyed Les Aspin, who wept and begged Clinton not to let him go and was dead of a stroke within fifteen months. Officials work killingly hard under nonstop pressure for relatively low pay (Holbrooke’s went from more than $1 million in 1992 to $123,000 the next year). They endure fourteen-hour days, endless meetings, mountains of paperwork, and a merciless press. But their egos, large by definition, find no objective standard to measure their performance—no annual bonus, popular vote, batting average, best-seller list—so they have to look for other ways, demeaning ones, to assure themselves that they’re on top: office location, high-level meetings, presidential favor. The only way they can be sure of doing well is at the expense of others. If someone is winning the room, someone else is losing it. Everyone’s stock is moving up or down every day, and if they ever lose track of their price, it’s too late. So the nation’s vital business is carried out amid humiliating pettiness.

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.

And yet people in government feel—don’t underestimate this—a profound sense of responsibility for matters that are ultimately uncontrollable. They spend their time failing to solve problems, or avoiding solving problems, because few problems lend themselves to bureaucratic solutions and few bureaucrats are willing to risk their careers to try. But most of them come into government with ideals, deeply felt ...

I suggested we shouldn’t make tactical decisions on a day-to-day basis until we had a strategic objective, tried to figure out what it might cost, and whether it would be worth pursuing, and whether we could get public support for it. It sounds simple, but it is exactly what we did not do in Vietnam, and what we are not doing now in the ricocheting back and forth.

I used to think, back in the sixties, that intelligence was far and away the most important factor you needed in government service. I still believe it’s vitally important—no one wants idiots to serve in the government. But character is an equally important function. Under the pressure of events, one never knows more than five, ten percent at most of what one needs to know about a decision. Often one has to make decisions based on two percent of the information one ought to have in order to make important decisions. So one needs a set of guiding principles, a value system, and rock-hard integrity, or else one is buffeted by public opinion polls, pressure, and the confusion of the bureaucracy’s competing claims. Without character one can lose one’s way.