Richard Holbrooke, Our ‘Man in the Arena’

It’s not often that you see a headline in the Washington Post that begins by calling someone a “jerk”.

This was the case with Adam Kurschner’s review of George Packer’s biography about Richard Holbrooke, “Our Man”.

“Richard Holbrooke was a jerk-and a talented diplomat. Which matters more?” was the title and — setting aside the question of whether the Washington Post should call names in clickbait headlines — I found most of the observations in the review both shallow, dramatic and incomplete in their analysis of a man who I consider to be my only true mentor.

The author of the Post piece regurgitated and then exaggerated many of the worst stories from George Packer’s exhaustive biography.

There is the “Holbrooke is too ambitious” story, the “Holbrooke wasn’t a good father” story, the “Holbrooke wasn’t a good husband” story and many “Holbrooke had a big ego” stories.

But beyond focusing on negative stories from Packer’s biography, Kurschner doubled down in a strangely emotional way saying:

“Packer truly shows Holbrooke’s ugliness. It is everywhere, and it’s revolting.”

Kurschner seems to feel that he needs to be harder on Holbrooke than Packer was — indignant that Packer wasn’t indignant enough.

There’s something unseemly about attacking a dead man’s character. Holbrooke can’t defend himself from Kurschner’s judgment and Kurschner is lucky that’s the case.

But more unsettling to those who worked closely with Holbrooke that read this piece is the fact that people like Kurschner just don’t know what the man was really like.

I worked with Holbrooke closely for three years — every day, all day, night and, well, whenever he wanted to work. We traveled extensively throughout Asia, Africa and Europe.

The person Kurschner describes as a “jerk” is simply not the person Holbrooke was.

He was very, very tough. He expected incredible intellectual rigor and was happy to point out intellectual laziness. I remember a discussion in his office about the need for a “Marshall Plan” for Africa. I knew as much as most people about George Marshall and began to quickly respond with a set of half-educated and perhaps half-baked thoughts. Holbrooke saw that I was on shaky ground and gave me a ten-minute lecture that combined a biography of Marshall with a detailed analysis of how my career was going nowhere if I didn’t know more about people like Marshall.

He was, at times, inconsiderate. Without fail, Holbrooke called me on every holiday — not to wish me a Merry Christmas, but to talk about something that quite obviously could easily be discussed on a day other than Christmas.

He was ambitious. Holbrooke genuinely wanted to fix the biggest problems facing the world and wanted credit for doing so. When he didn’t get that credit, he hated it.

But he was so much more than that — and that’s what people like Kurschner choose to ignore.

He was intensely loyal. I remember struggling to figure out how to buy my first apartment in New York on a low salary and Holbrooke sitting down with me and saying, “ok let’s see how we are going to figure this out.” The “we” in that statement meant everything to me.

He was absolutely brilliant. To be fair, Kurschner and Packer acknowledge this but the begrudging nature of that acknowledgment obscures how profound his brilliance was. I have never met anyone who knew more about how the world actually works than him. He believed in the lessons of history and knew history better than anyone else in the room.

He worked harder than anyone I know. Whether he was getting off a plane in Beijing, Kampala, Paris or Berlin Holbrooke went straight to the meeting he was in town for and tore through every day like it was his last day.

He believed in justice; and fought for it relentlessly. From his time as a student at Brown to the day he died, Holbrooke fought for the causes he cared about.

He was also “in on the joke.”

Holbrooke laughed at himself — a lot. I remember sitting in UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s office for a meeting with reluctant pharmaceutical company CEO’s on whether drug prices could be reduced so that 40 million people with HIV/AIDS could be given life-saving treatment. During the meeting, Holbrooke took it upon himself to eat the tops of half of the muffins which had been placed on the table. The CEO’s and Secretary General watched as one muffin after another was mercilessly decapitated. As we walked back to the office I asked about the muffins “It was a warning to them all” he said,” plus that’s the best part of a muffin.”

One of the strange lines in Kurschner’s review, “to his enormous credit, Packer then dwells on those sins, equipping us to condemn Holbrooke if we so desire. (And I do. I must.).”

Why does Kurschner, in this oddly dramatic admission, need to ‘dwell on sins’ and condemn Holbrooke?

What has brought out this brand of shrill criticism of Holbrooke after his death?

Perhaps we can look to history and specifically Teddy Roosevelt’s words in in April of 1910 offers some insight.

After a yearlong safari following his presidency Roosevelt stopped in Paris on April 23rd to give a speech to several thousand people gathered at the Sorbonne.

The words of the Citizenship in a Republic speech are familiar, but worth reflecting on as they relate to Richard Holbrooke;

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer,” he said. “A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness.”

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Kurschner, is clearly a talented writer, but he has never been “in the arena” of global diplomacy.

Perhaps those who can only see Holbrooke’s flaws hate to admit that they would like to be able to say that they have shaped history — that they had jumped in, gotten dirty, wrestled, cajoled and fought to make the world a better place.

Without being “in the arena”, one is left to judge those who are. Fixing global problems is a messy business conducted by imperfect people. Richard Holbrooke knew victory, and knew defeat, and fought like hell for what he believed in on behalf of his nation.

If that isn’t the definition of a great American then I don’t know what is.