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

by George Packer

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.