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

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (2019), a biography by American journalist and author George Packer, chronicles the life and career of Richard Holbrooke, an American diplomat who in 1995 famously brokered a peace agreement between the warring parties in Bosnia. For Our Man, Packer received a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

Born in 1941 to Jewish parents in New York City, Holbrooke grows up wanting to become a journalist. But when he is denied an entry-level position at The New York Times, Holbrooke decides to take the US Foreign Service exam at the urging of Dean Rusk, the father of his childhood best friend and President John F. Kennedy's Secretary of State. Upon passing the exam, Holbrooke enters the Foreign Service and is sent to Vietnam in 1963. Over the next six years, he works in the rural Mekong Delta on behalf of the Agency for International Development. During this period, he learns valuable lessons about war and diplomacy—namely that you cannot defeat an insurgency in a foreign country by bombing its population.

In 1970, Holbrooke asks the White House to assign him the position of Peace Corps Director in Morocco. Two years later, he leaves the Foreign Service to become the Managing Editor of Foreign Policy magazine. Under his leadership, the magazine runs several pieces of investigative journalism on America's role in Vietnam, alienating some of his former colleagues in the US government.



During the US presidential election of 1976, Holbrooke leaves Foreign Policy to accept a position on candidate Jimmy Carter's campaign staff. Upon Carter's victory, Holbrooke becomes the youngest-ever person to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the age of 35. In 1977, a few months into his service, he draws controversy for his handling of Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, during which 100,000 East Timorese die at the hands of Indonesians or through starvation. Rather than condemn Indonesian President Suharto or press the leader for human rights reforms, Holbrooke praises him for helping to open East Timor to the West.

After Carter loses the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan, Holbrooke leaves the government to work on Wall Street as a strategic advisor. He continues to work in the financial sector until 1993 when Bill Clinton is elected president. Holbrooke becomes the US Ambassador to Germany at a critical moment when the US is still shaping its relationship with post-reunification Germany. He helps organize a July 1994 visit to Berlin by President Bill Clinton that the author considers a major highlight of Holbrooke's career.

Later that year, Holbrooke is promoted to Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian affairs. On a trip to the Balkans region, he observes firsthand the suffering experienced by citizens in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country created after the fall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Since 1992, Bosnia is plagued by sectarian violence, mostly perpetrated by ethnic Serbs led by Slobodan Milosevic against Bosnian Muslims. In an effort to preserve Serbian territory, Milosevic orders the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in what is considered the first European genocide since the Holocaust. While Bosnia is not considered a major priority for the Clinton administration, Holbrooke—genuinely tormented by the Muslims' suffering—convinces US Secretary of State Warren Christopher that the United States should try to broker a peace agreement between the warring factions. Holbrooke takes the lead in these negotiations.



Packer devotes a section of the book to the investigation of an event that occurred on a mountain road outside Sarajevo in August of 1995. According to Holbrooke's claim, an armored vehicle in Holbrooke's convoy fell off a cliff on the side of the road, killing four and injuring others. Holbrooke said that he and Lieutenant General Wesley Clark took charge of the situation, scrambling through an exploding minefield to the wreckage and tending to the survivors. But Packer is unable to verify many of these claims. On the contrary, he finds that Lieutenant Colonel Randall Banky performed these feats while a frightened Holbrooke remained on the road, complaining of being left alone and exposed to Serbian anti-aircraft guns. Banky is mentioned only once in Holbrooke's own account of the event. In his own book, Holbrooke merely states, "Colonel Banky had disappeared." Packer also explores claims that Holbrooke once propositioned the wife of his best friend, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, finding these claims to be credible.

Despite Holbrooke's alleged character flaws, Packer argues that Holbrooke deserves an enormous amount of credit and praise for brokering peace in Bosnia. At the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, Holbrooke exhibits an impressive amount of strategic acumen in convincing Milosevic and his Croatian and Bosnian counterparts to end the fighting. To this day, it is considered by many to be the United States' greatest diplomatic success in the post-Cold War era.

Holbrooke ends his career as President Barack Obama's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke struggles in this role and is unable to deploy the lessons he learned in Vietnam about battling counterinsurgents. In a December 2010 meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Holbrooke suffers a torn aorta and dies two later on December 13, 2010, at the age of 69.



According to the Guardian, Our Man is "a deeply researched, compelling biography."