Talbott, who would go on to become a journalist and deputy secretary of state, and an aspiring politician named Bill Clinton. In their modest house at 46 Leckford Road in North Oxford, the friends spent hours agonizing over the threat of the draft. Clinton and Aller were both classified as “1-A”—available to be drafted—and both opposed the war. Clinton considered various strategies for avoiding the draft but ultimately decided against them, as he put it, “to maintain my political viability within the system.” Aller, on the other hand, stayed in England, on the run from the draft and agonized by the resulting stigma. A year later, he went home to Spokane, put a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson in his mouth, and blew his brains out.
I asked Raphel how Aller’s death, so soon after they dated, affected her. “Oh,” she said, as if I’d asked her about a fender bender. “I was very upset, needless to say!” She paused, realizing how she’d sounded. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’m passionate about being dispassionate.” Robin Raphel wasn’t about to let emotion be an obstacle to the life on the world stage she was, even then, beginning to craft. In the following years, her path would wind from Tehran to Islamabad to Tunisia.
OVER THE COURSE of that journey, Raphel’s critics would not share her dispassion. By the end of her career, she would be called a traitor, a turncoat, and a terrorist sympathizer. In the Indian press, she was called, with delight, “Lady Taliban.” The astonishing nadir would come during the Obama administration. Four years after our run-in in Islamabad, Raphel arrived at her desk on the first floor of the State Department, in a sea of cubicles not far from the cafeteria. She checked her email and took a few routine meetings. It was early afternoon when she saw the missed calls. The first was from Slomin’s Home Security; someone had been trying to get into Raphel’s house. The next call was from her daughter Alexandra, who was panicked. Raphel had to get home immediately, Alexandra said. Raphel got into her Ford Focus and drove the twenty-minute route to her home in Northwest Washington, DC.
What she arrived, she saw a dozen FBI agents crawling over her modest two-story Cape Cod–style house. Two earnest-looking agents in plainclothes approached her and showed her their badges. Next they handed her a warrant.
It specified that Robin Raphel was being investigated under 18 U.S.C. Section 793(e), a criminal statute that covers the illegal gathering or transmission of national security information:
Espionage.
VIETNAM WAS A SPECTRAL HORROR for the friends at 46 Leckford in the late 1960s, but for other young men, the war had an almost magnetic pull. Richard Holbrooke, who years later became close to Strobe Talbott, and through him, Bill Clinton, sought out the war as a proving ground. His experiences there would echo through forty years of American warfare. Decades later, he would become one of the last voices to carry the lessons of Vietnam into the modern conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Holbrooke was a New Yorker, born to Jewish parents. He was “Dick” to his friends, until his elegant third wife enforced a transition to the more genteel “Richard.” (His enemies never transitioned.) Dick Holbrooke was grasping, relentless, wore his ambition on his sleeve—the kind of person who could go in a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you, one friend said. He was oblivious to social graces in the pursuit of his goals. While making an impassioned point, he once followed Hillary Clinton into a women’s room—in Pakistan, she would stress in the retelling. A former flame recalled waiting with him, endlessly, for a cab during a torrential storm in Manhattan. When one finally approached, he kissed her on the cheek and hopped in without a word, leaving her in the downpour. As Pamela Harriman, the socialite-turned-diplomat, once remarked tartly: “He’s not entirely housebroken.”
He always struck me as vast—not so much taller but somehow more expansive than his six foot, one inch frame. He had pale eyes and a gaze like a bird of prey, but also an irrepressible twinkle, his thin lips always on the verge of a smirk. His eruptions of temper were legendary, but he would just as often go still, dropping his voice to a near whisper. He deployed both tactics in a singular negotiating style he compared to “a combination of chess and mountain climbing”—flattering, bullying, charming, and intimidating his way to persuasion. He wrote voluminously, and had the uncanny ability to speak in crisp, complete paragraphs. As oblivious as he could be to the sensitivities of people around him, he was a detailed observer of the world and indomitable in his excitement about it. In other words, he was the rare asshole who was worth it.
As a child, he idolized scientists: Einstein, Fermi. But his interests turned to the wider world. After his father succumbed to colon cancer, he grew close to the family of his classmate, David Rusk, whose father Dean would soon become Kennedy’s secretary of state, and who visited Holbrooke’s class at Scarsdale High School to extol the virtues of the Foreign Service. At the time, it was journalism that captivated Holbrooke. He was sports editor at his high school’s newspaper, then editor in chief of his college’s, the Brown Daily Herald, where his analyses of Cold War tensions ran under announcements for cheerleading tryouts. As a sophomore, he convinced his editors to send him to the 1960 Four Powers Summit in Paris, where Western leaders were set to meet with Nikita Khrushchev to try to ease tensions over the division of Berlin. The summit was a spectacular failure. Days before, the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane and the ensuing confrontation soon shut down the talks. James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times, whom Holbrooke idolized and who gave the young student journalist a job fetching drinks for the Times team in Paris, told Holbrooke: “Whether you go into journalism or the Foreign Service as a career, you will always be able to say, ‘I started my career at the worst diplomatic fiasco ever held.’” He was wrong: Holbrooke would see worse. After graduating from Brown, he tried and failed to get a job at the Times and decided to take the Foreign Service exam. So it was that newly minted Foreign Service officer Richard Holbrooke arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon on a muggy June night in 1963.
VIETNAM WAS THE FIRST modern test of American “counter-insurgency”—the strategy of securing a vulnerable population while winning its loyalty through social programs. During a Foreign Service training course, Holbrooke and his Vietnam-bound contemporaries—including Anthony Lake, who would later become Clinton’s national security advisor—whiled away sweltering nights playing a game called “fan ball,” which involved throwing a tennis ball at a ceiling fan, then scrambling to chase it as it ricocheted around the room. (They could hardly have designed a more conspicuous Vietnam metaphor if they tried.) At the time of his arrival, twenty-two-year-old Holbrooke was single and could be sent to the rural frontlines to oversee development programs. It gave him an unvarnished view of mounting failures that his superiors in Washington lacked.
He also witnessed the precipitous militarization of policymaking in Vietnam. During a trip with the 9th Marine Regiment in rural Da Nang, Holbrooke watched General Lewis Walt, commander of the Marine Amphibious Force, kneel and push away semicircles of sand in front of him, showing how the Americans would supposedly push out the Vietcong, making way for the South Vietnamese and good governance. A group of Vietnamese children looked on, chattering curiously. Holbrooke, never one to mince words, pointed out: “But the VC will just move in behind you.” The general, and Americans across Vietnam, kept on pushing for years. “Despite the hours and days of instruction they had in ‘counterinsurgency,’ despite all the briefings which emphasized the political nature of the war, they could not understand what was going on or how to deal with it,” Holbrooke wrote in one unpublished memo. The insurgents would not