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

by George Packer

He had ready entrée to the best clubs—the Fly at Harvard, the Century in New York, the Council on Foreign Relations—and so he felt free to quit them on principle and without regret when, for example, they solicited his money to hire lawyers to keep women out. He hated the rich. This was sociologically necessary for someone of his background, since new money pissed on the values of Lake’s class, possessed the power his class thought it was due, and aroused the material envy it pretended not to feel. No one inspired this class’s lust for power like Jack Kennedy (and no one again until Barack Obama). The intellectual upper class accepted the Kennedy wealth because of the Kennedy wit and brains.

Lake felt a surge of power—he would follow Kennedy anywhere. Being a descendant of Puritans, he interpreted this rush as a call to service, and he became one of the twenty-two-thousand young Americans to take the Foreign Service exam in the first year of the Kennedy administration. Yes, there was idealism—but there was also the smell of power. They’re hard to tell apart, and the mix can be dangerous.

He was focused on He

Ap Bac had shown militarily: the South Vietnamese government was a hollow thing and starting to collapse. In the Delta the VC were beefing up troop numbers and weapons, operating for the first time at battalion strength. And in that strange Saigon atmosphere of ritual suicide and tennis, the tension gathered like the saturating air before the afternoon rain.

1963

“Foreign policy makes no sense,” Holbrooke’s friend Les Gelb liked to say (he’s still a few years off in this story). 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.

I wish I could tell it all to you—the poorly lit room and bar that I am now sitting in, where the MAAG men sit and wait their tours out; the playmates from Playboy on the walls here, somehow very much out of place; the stacks of old magazines and paperbacks, the other hints of home that the US Army flies into the Vietcong’s homeland to make us feel a little less lost; the water everywhere, rising, raining, so that literally this province, even the ground around our building, is under water; the waiting; the ugliness, the cruelty, the tragedy. And in Saigon a regime so totally bankrupt and disgusting it is hard to describe. Events of the last 2 weeks have ended the dying hopes of some Americans that Diem and the family he is captive of will be able to lead this country anywhere but towards more death and dissension. So now we wait—for many things; above all, the end of this regime.

Field officer, Vietnam early 60's

I have my doubts, getting deeper and deeper, about our basic approach here. Recent discussions and hints I have got from various sources would indicate that out of the McNamara visits came added weight for the exponents of Victory through Air Power—the Air Force, and the armed helicopters. I feel that this is a terrible step, both morally and tactically. Of course, it would never do to actually attack policy on moral grounds in the American community here, which is a basically tough and getting tougher community (“War is hell,” justifies any horror among vast numbers,

But right now, we are fighting wrong, and it hurts. In the short run terms, we really should be on the other side. 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.

People with the deepest knowledge are almost never in the room when an important issue is debated at the highest level. Only the inner circle can be trusted not to leak.

Years later, Holbrooke would describe an almost inevitable sequence of doubt and disillusionment that took place in the minds of certain Americans in Vietnam. By now he had gone through the first stage, which was to question the assessments. Were there really 324 strategic hamlets in Ba Xuyen? On paper, maybe; in reality most of them were flimsy death traps. But the Vietnamese told the Americans what they wanted to hear, and the Americans in the field, especially the military, told their superiors in Saigon what they wanted to hear, and Saigon told Washington what it wanted to hear, and by the time reports reached the president they were useless. The lies and self-deceptions made it harder to reach the right policy, and this shocked and angered Holbrooke.

We’re no good at it because we don’t have the knowledge or patience, few of our people are willing to learn the history and language and spend the years out there necessary to understand the nature of the conflict.

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. He wasn’t questioning the war itself, not yet, not by a long shot. That would be psychologically just about impossible for someone serving the U.S. government in Vietnam and living the war every minute of the day, and as soon as such a question began to germinate it would be time to ship quietly out to some other port of call—you’d have no business staying. Instead, he put his whole effort into fighting it better. That was the watchword of Holbrooke and Lake and their friends. A better war.

While she slept, there had been a revolution in the lives of American women. In 1964 she was expected to be her husband’s helpmeet. In 1971 she was a loser for having no career of her own. She had been a fool to let herself be erased. But that was what she had done. Her instinct was not to save her marriage—she doubted that it could survive or that he wanted it to, and she would never go back to what it had been these past eight years, a parasitic marriage in which an interesting life had been given to her secondhand—but to save herself. “Since my life depends on yours in a way which yours does not on mine, I find myself shattered that you have fallen in love with someone else,” she wrote to him. “This threatens my whole life in a way which would not be true for you if the situation was reversed. So I’m determined now, really determined, since I’m so frightened, to build a life of my own.” A

Holbrooke spent the rest of his life pointing out that the Vietnam War was not lost by the reporters, the Democrats in Congress, the anti-war movement, or insiders like him: “It was lost in the rice paddies of Indochina.”

He published pieces in the Times, the Post, and his own magazine, with titles like “The Machine That Fails,” “A Little Lying Goes a Long Way,” and “Relentless Patterns to Our Vietnam Nightmare,” focusing on the destructive effects of official mendacity and overgrown bureaucracy—on

Economically, culturally, politically, militarily, the United States was still the most powerful country in the world. What ailed it was a loss of faith—bad leaders and the decade and a half of Vietnam and Watergate that degraded American values. In the new era, with new and better leadership, the United States could set aside its “demicolonial” role in Asia and restore its position without resorting to B-52s.

“We still possess, in addition to the sheer measurable elements of power already mentioned, an enormous force that we cannot use these days, but that I hope will once again, someday, be part of our ‘arsenal’—the basic moral force that exists in the principles of our system of government—a force eroded in recent years under leaders who apparently did not really believe in them.”

Good people imagine that their government should also be good and do good in the world—especially Americans. It’s in our idea of ourselves going back to the Declaration of Independence. It was Carter’s campaign slogan in 1976. We don’t take naturally to realpolitik, and insofar as Carter resisted it he achieved some worthy goals, none bigger than making human rights a permanent part of our foreign policy language—even as lip service. Without that, anything can be justified by the national interest. So let’s never give up the idea, but it’s not what governments are for. Be unhappy when high officials fail to live up to it—just don’t be surprised. —

Holbrooke found this airless, windowless room in the basement of the White House, sealed off by design from the outside world, to be a place where even drowning refugees became a bureaucratic abstraction.

“Are you telling me that we have thousands of people drowning in the open sea, and we have the Seventh Fleet right there, and we can’t help them?” The vice president told the admiral to carry out the mission or find another job. A couple of months later, Mondale flew by helicopter over Manila Bay to an aircraft carrier involved in the rescue operation. “I didn’t like the mission when I got those orders,” the ship’s commander told Mondale. “I thought it would demoralize my sailors…I was dead wrong.” The sailors reveled in saving the lives of boat people. “It’s going to make a difference to the way those people think about America,” the commander said. “Because when their life was at risk, they saw this ship with an American flag come up and these young guys go down and pick them up. They felt safe for the first time in months. The world looked better to them. It’s hard to stay mad at a policy like that.”

That time off Vietnam....when America did the right thing...

It’s the first glimpse you get of his egotism and idealism in perfect balance to achieve something good.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” the First Lady told the press. “As a wife, as a mother, as a human being, it’s devastating.” After that, the world paid attention to Cambodia. The next year—the last of his presidency—Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980, which tripled the annual number of refugees allowed into the country. By 1982 the United States had admitted half a million Indochinese, by far the most of any country in the world. The number eventually reached one and a half million. Holbrooke had a lot to do with it. It shames us today.

First Lady Carter

The details of almost every foreign policy issue are too complicated for most Americans to follow, and we are thus willing to leave them to the President as long as we trust him. Thus symbolism becomes considerably more important in foreign policy issues than in bread-and-butter domestic issues where the voter can measure promises and rhetoric against performance and reality.”

When I return to New York, I know I will be told that no one cares, or should care, about the problems of Tibet, with its 2 million people, when New York City, four times Tibet’s size, is deep in crisis. But I do not believe that New York’s very real problems (and for that matter the rest of the nation’s) means we must turn away from pressing human tragedies elsewhere. That process leads only one way—towards an ever-narrower definition of what is in one’s interests—geographically, ethnically, and so on. Will we all end up so self-absorbed that we have room in our lives for only ourselves?

Whither compassion?

THAT SPRING, Holbrooke published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “America, a European Power.” It was the kind of strategic thinking that government rarely produces.

He was on the inside pissing in—the

ice-blue eyes

One more time and I'll puke

His family came from northern Montenegro, the Appalachia of Yugoslavia, but he was born in a provincial shithole an hour from Belgrade. His father abandoned him early and he grew up devoted to his mother, who didn’t let him play sports. When he was seven, his uncle, a Partisan hero, shot himself in the head. When he was twenty his father committed suicide. When he was thirty his mother hanged herself. Milosevic never spoke of this morbid history. His rise through the Yugoslav Communist Party was skillful and ruthless, but his lifelong attachment was not to any ideology but to power itself, and to Mira, a true-believing Communist and a monster like her husband. She once wrote, “He would never say, ‘I’ll die for socialism, I’ll die for internationalism’ like I would.” A Serb psychologist described Milosevic as a “cold Narcissus” who cauterized the wounds of his youth with a power lust that deadened any empathy.

Pax Americana began to decay at its very height. If you ask me when the long decline began, I might point to 1998. We were flabby, smug, and self-absorbed. Imagine a president careless enough to stumble into his enemies’ trap and expend his power on a blue dress. Imagine a superpower so confident of perpetual peace and prosperity that it felt able to waste a whole year on Oval Office cocksucking. Not even Al Qaeda, which blew up two American embassies in East Africa that August, could get our serious attention—Clinton’s response, a bunch of Tomahawks, was derided left and right for following the script of De Niro’s Wag the Dog. The Republicans decided that destroying the president was more urgent than the national interest, and they attacked his every move at home and abroad. Our leaders believed they had the luxury to start tearing one another apart, and they’ve never stopped. Did any country ever combine so much power with so little responsibility? And slowly, imperceptibly at first, we lost that essential faith in ourselves. —

“An undefined job is like entering a room in which all the seats are taken, then insisting that everyone move to make room…Everyone

He had a PhD from Princeton—his dissertation was called “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.”

David Petraeuss

Obama—half Kenyan, raised in Indonesia, Pakistani friends in college—saw himself as the first president who understood the United States from the outside in. He grasped the limits to American power and knew that not every problem had an American solution.