He thanked the president for paying tribute to diplomats on his second day in office, and Obama, in turn, stressed his “commitment to the importance of diplomacy” and his recognition “that America’s strength comes not just from the might of our arms.” Those convictions were tested during his eight years in office.
Holbrooke looked out at his wife, Kati, his sons David and Anthony, and colleagues he’d known across decades. He seemed emotional, his voice wavering. “I see my former roommate in Saigon, John Negroponte here,” he said. “We remember those days well, and I hope we will produce a better outcome this time.” The audience laughed. Obama was expressionless.
While other regional initiatives being announced by the new administration were headed by “envoys,” Holbrooke, in what was to be one of many annoyances for the White House, insisted that he be given a sui generis title: “Special Representative.” It was, in his view, a more concrete managerial term than “envoy”—a way to signal that he was building up a sizeable, operational team.
In 1970, a young Holbrooke had written an article in Foreign Policy, the upstart publication at which he would later become editor, decrying the sclerotic, siloed bureaucracy of the State Department. Returning decades later, he decided to shake things up. He began assembling a crack team with officials detailed from across the government. There were representatives from USAID and the Department of Agriculture, the Treasury and the Department of Justice, the Pentagon and the CIA and the FBI. Then there were the outsiders—counterculture thinkers drawn from civil society, business, and academia. Vali Nasr, the Iranian-American scholar of Middle East studies, had received a midnight text in December. It was characteristically theatrical: “If you work for anyone else, I will break your knees.” And then, anticipating Nasr’s preference for an Iran-focused job: “This matters more. This is what the president is focused on. This is where you want to be.” Barnett Rubin, a New York University professor and authority on Afghan history and culture, got a call as well. Rina Amiri, an Afghan activist who had worked with the UN and Open Society Institute, recognized Holbrooke on a Delta shuttle from DC to New York and began pressing him about the upcoming Afghan elections. Holbrooke was impressed, and told her he was assembling a team. “I know,” she said, “but I’m here to lobby you.”
“I’m very efficient,” he said. “I just turned your lobbying into a job interview.”
My own interview was, likewise, distinctive.
“WHAT SHOULD WE BE DOING DIFFERENTLY?” Holbrooke shouted over the hiss of the shower he was taking in the middle of that job interview. From the next room over, I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
It was the culmination of a sprawling, hours-long meeting, which had ranged from his office, to the secretary of state’s, to his townhouse in Georgetown. I had followed up on Clinton’s advice at the preinaugural party at The Fairfax and begun talking to Holbrooke and his chief of staff, Rosemarie Pauli. A little over a month later, in March 2009, I arrived at the State Department to meet with him in person. He barreled out of his office, lobbing policy questions at me. How would I reinvigorate trade in Central Asia? How would I maximize the impact of assistance to the Pakistanis? Never mind that I was a wet-behind-the-ears lawyer, with a modest foreign policy background in Africa, not Afghanistan. I’d worked with local nongovernmental groups in the developing world, and Holbrooke wanted to ramp up the United States’ emphasis on those groups—a change of culture in a war zone where most of the implementation happened through powerful American contractors. He wanted nontraditional answers, unencumbered by government experience.
The State Department, in DC’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, is an imposing slab of stripped classical architecture, clad in limestone and built, in portions, in the 1930s and 1950s. The earliest part of the complex was intended for the growing War Department after World War I, though with the construction of the more ambitious Pentagon, it never actually became the military’s headquarters. The looming rear entrance to the building is still known as the War Department—a flourish of irony, for the seat of American peacemaking. The Department is a literal hierarchy, with opulent ceremonial rooms for receiving foreign dignitaries on the eighth floor, the secretary’s office on the seventh, and offices of roughly descending importance on the floors beneath. During Holbrooke’s prodigious turn as assistant secretary in his mid-thirties, he had occupied an office complex on the sixth floor. Now, he’d been relegated to the first, next to the cafeteria—where Robin Raphel was later deposited, and across the hall from the Department newsstand, where Holbrooke would load up on junk food between meetings.
Our walk-and-talk started in his office and moved into the hallway, then up to the seventh floor and the secretary of state’s ornate, wood-paneled office. He moved briskly through the entire conversation, only occasionally making eye contact, aides hurrying after him and handing him papers. He paused my answers frequently to take calls on his BlackBerry. This was not real-life government, where meetings are seated and staid. This was government as dramatized by Aaron Sorkin.
Holbrooke and I, and a veteran CIA officer Holbrooke was also lobbying to join his team, Frank Archibald, met with Clinton briefly in the antechamber outside her office. He outlined a dazzling vision for the roles we’d play. Repackaged and artfully marketed by Holbrooke, every underling was a one-person revolution. Archibald was going to single-handedly heal suspicions between State and the CIA. I was going to realign American assistance to NGOs. Amiri, I heard him say on numerous occasions, had written the Afghan constitution. (As he worked up a particular lather about this at one function, she leaned in and whispered in my ear: “I did not write the Afghan constitution.”) None of us had any business interviewing with the secretary of state for our jobs, but many of us did, through dint of Holbrooke’s willpower. Holbrooke had leaned on the patronage of great men himself, from Scotty Reston at the Times to Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman. He wanted to be the man that people would say was that kind of man, and he was.
After meeting with the secretary, we had returned to Holbrooke’s office suite on the first floor, where he’d picked up his luggage. He had just returned from a trip and had to go home to change before an afternoon meeting at the White House. He passed me a suitcase and out we went to hail a cab, not interrupting the flow of questions. Would I favor more overt United States branding on USAID assistance in the region? How would I enlist local watchdog groups in ensuring electoral transparency? I had just recovered from several years in a wheelchair, the result of a bone marrow infection left untreated while working in Sudan. Holbrooke was aware of this but characteristically oblivious to it in the moment. I hobbled after him with his luggage. When we arrived at his Georgetown town house, he headed upstairs—not asking, naturally, just carrying on with the conversation. He left the bathroom door ajar and peed. “What about negotiations with the Taliban?” he asked demurely. “Really?” I said. “What?” he replied innocently from behind the bathroom door, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. And for him, it was—virtually everyone seemed to have a story about Holbrooke meetings in bathrooms. He poked his head out, unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m going to hop in the shower.” I stood outside the door. The job interview continued.
Many Holbrooke wooed hesitated. Rina Amiri, worried about her outspoken views on human rights being muted, held out for a month. Barnett Rubin made it a condition that he be allowed to keep his academic perch at NYU part time. I myself wasn’t convinced. The State Department wasn’t a glamorous career move. “I would go to Davis Polk,” one law school classmate wrote to me, referring to the law firm where I had a job offer. “What is the point of these technocratic positions? Do you really want to spend forty years trying to move your way up? If you work really hard you might end up where Holbrooke is himself, which is a whole lot of nowhere, really. Fuck that.”
But Holbrooke brought to every job he ever held a visionary quality that transcended practical considerations. He talked openly about changing the world. “If