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

by George Packer

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