Mentions personal use of George Packer biography of Holbrooke.

Transcript context

…It’s hard to convey to people outside the realm of prosecuting foreign policy or practicing diplomacy, but most diplomats are quite bounded, in the sense that it’s very rare, actually, for a diplomat to be able to lean much beyond where they know their head of state has entitled them to go. When they do, they often get smacked down by the people who work above them. I was very fortunate — but again, it’s not a common circumstance — to be both a diplomat representing the United States and a member of the president’s cabinet. I was able to spend enough time with President Obama to have a sense not only of what my explicit instructions were, but where the gray areas were at the margins and how far to push. Being in that privileged position of spending more time with him, I was more inclined, I’d say, to be risk taking than somebody who’s literally receiving a cable from their minister or from their head of state to go forth and do X or Y on behalf of their country. I took a lot of risks in my public persona. They don’t sound like risks, certainly not like the risks I took as a war correspondent, but I thought it was really important to try to break out of a stale lingua franca that exists around contemporary conflict. The tendency is just to describe conflicts in very mechanical, very antiseptic ways, and what I would do when I was projecting publicly — let’s say at the UN Security Council or at a press stakeout — is to tell the stories of individuals that I had met who had suffered the consequences of conflict. This is, again, back to having been a journalist, but recognizing the diplomats who I’m disagreeing with are human beings, and that they’re as unlikely to be moved by rote talking points as I am unlikely to be moved by rote talking points or changed internally, emotionally, or changed as a practical matter. So my only hope of breaking them out of the rut that they are in — not maybe my only hope, but a main source of hope — is to remind them that this isn’t just some run-of-the-mill conflict, that this isn’t just a day job, that there are these individuals who might be the same age as your daughter or your sister or your mother who are suffering these consequences, and we have a responsibility to try to shake things up a little bit because what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, or we wouldn’t be in a position of having this conversation. It’s storytelling, but it’s more about breaking people out of their comfort zone so they can hear afresh what is happening in the world. If I think about Richard Holbrooke — he was one of the diplomats who helped broker a peace solution in former Yugoslavia. If I read your edited volume on Holbrooke, he sounds so sane and rational. If I read the new George Packer biography of Holbrooke, he sounds somewhat crazy and maybe a womanizer or obnoxious or a fair amount of disregard for protocol. How should I square these pictures? What’s the actual truth about Richard Holbrooke? It would be unusual for any individual in a self-portrait to depict themself as a womanizing crazy person, for starters. But George’s book also depicts a person who aligns with the Holbrooke that we know from Holbrooke’s own portrayal, namely somebody super energetic and creative and working all sources of leverage. He was a complex individual who was sort of both and everything. I was very lucky to have been mentored by him. That’s a story I told in the edited Holbrooke volume that isn’t as salient, I think, in Packer’s account. It’s very wonderful, but also quite unusual for an established diplomat, whether one who is self-involved and egotistical and/or one who is super talented and creative. Holbrooke was both of those things. For anyone in those categories to spend the time that Holbrooke spent cultivating young diplomats, I think that speaks to a depth of character and a deep reverence for the United States, a kind of patriotism, because he saw it wasn’t like, “Let me have my refracted glory,” or “Let all of these minions go forth in the world and they’ll be mini Holbrookes going around.” I think he really thought it was incumbent on him to groom the next generation of diplomats to go forth on behalf of US interests. So I think any black-and-white portrait of someone with that range of qualities would be flawed. I think George does an excellent job capturing the yin and the yang.…

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