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Good afternoon, everyone. So it's a great honor to have George Packer with us today he's going to talk about his, I guess it's a biography. But it's really more than a biography. So he'll fill us and I'll do a little reading will go through. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. We have it for sale that some of you probably know George Packer from his many years at the New Yorker, which is where I first discovered his work. He's also the author of many books, as well as magazine articles. He's currently at the Atlantic. And this book was released last week, a little Yeah, little less than a year ago. So So Jordan is going to do a little reading as I said, some slides and then we'll take questions so

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I'm happy to sign copies afterwards. Thanks cow, Alexandra and Odessa for your help in bringing me here. It's It's beautiful. I know it's sad in Los Angeles. Right now, but it's also beautiful. I am going to read a bit from the prologue of our man and then talk about how this book came to be. And then make time for all your questions if you haven't. Holbrook. Yes, I knew him. I can't get his voice out of my head. I still hear it, saying you haven't read that book. You really need to read it. saying, I feel that I hope this doesn't sound too self satisfied that in a very difficult situation where nobody has the answer, I at least know what the overall questions and moving parts are. are saying, gotta go. Hillary's on the line. That voice calm nasal, a trace of older New York, a singsong cadence when he was being playful, but always doing something to you cajoling flattering bullying, seducing needling analyzing one upping you applying continuous pressure, like a strong underwater current, so that by the end of a conversation even two minutes on the phone, you found yourself far out from where you started. unsure how you got there and mysteriously exhausted. He was six feet one, but seemed bigger. He had long skinny limbs, and a barrel chest and broad square shoulder bones on top of which sat his strangely small head and encased within it the sleepless brain. His feet were so far from his trunk, that as his body wore down, and the blood stopped circulating properly, they swelled up and became marbled red and white like steak. He had special shoes made and carried extra socks and his leather attache case sweating through half a dozen pairs a day, stripping them off on long flights and draping them over his seat pocket in first class, or else cramming used stocks next to the classified documents in his briefcase. He wrote his book about ending the war in Bosnia, the place in history that he always craved. Though it was never enough, with his feet planted in a Brookstone Shiatsu foot massager. One morning he showed up late for a meeting in the Secretary of State suite at the Waldorf Astoria in his stocking feet, shirt on tuck and fly half zipped, padding around the room and picking grapes off a fruit basket while Madeleine Albright furious stare tracked his every move. During a video conference call from the UN mission in New York. His feet were propped up on a chair while down in the White House situation room there giant distortion completely filled the wall screen and So disrupted the meeting, the President Clinton's National Security Advisor finally ordered a military aid to turn off the video feed. Mobile put his feet up anywhere in the White House, on other people's desks and coffee tables for relief and for advantage. Near the end, it seemed as if all his troubles were collecting in his feet, atrial fibrillation, marital tension, forded ambition, conspiring colleagues, hundreds of thousands of airmiles corrupt foreign leaders, a war that would not yield to the relentless force of his will. But at the other extreme from his feet, the ice blue eyes were on perpetual alert. Their light told you that his intelligence was always awake and working. They captured nearly everything and gave almost nothing away. Like one way mirrors they look outward, not inward. I never knew anyone quicker to size up a room, an adversary a newspaper article, a set of variables in a complex situation, even his own imminent death. The ceaseless appraising told of a manic spirit churning somewhere within the low voice and language limbs. Once in the 1980s he was walking down Madison Avenue when an acquaintance passed him and call that hi dick. Holbrook watch the man go by and then turn to his companion. I wonder what he meant by that?

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Yes, his curly hair never obeyed the comb and his suit always look rumbled and he couldn't stay off the phone or TV and he kept losing things and he ate as much food as fast as he could. Once slicing open the tip of his nose on a clamshell and bleeding through a pair of cloth napkins. Yes. He was in almost every way a disorderly presence. But his eyes never lost focus. So much thought so little inwardness. He could not be alone. He might have had to think about himself. Maybe that was something he couldn't afford to do. Leslie gal, Holbrooke's friend of 45 years and recipient of multiple daily phone calls, would but into a monologue and ask, what's Obama like? Holbrook would give a brilliant analysis of the President. How do you think you affect Obama? Holbrook had nothing to say, Where did it come from that blind spot behind his eyes that mask his inner life. It was a great advantage over the rest of us because the propulsion from idea to action was never broken by self scrutiny. It was also a great vulnerability. And finally, it was fatal. I can hear the voice saying it's your problem now. Not mine. He loves speed. France kilometers fearless downhill run for the gold in 1976 was a feat. Holbrook never finished admiring until you almost believe that he had been the one throwing himself into those dangerous turns at Innsbruck. He pedaled his bike straight into a swarming Saigon intersection while talking about the war to a terrified blonde journalist just arrived from Manhattan. He zipped through Paris traffic, while lecturing his state department boss on the status of the Vietnam peace talks, his Humvee career down the dirt switchbacks of the mount Eggman road above the siege of Sarajevo, chased by the armored personnel carrier with his colleagues. He loved mischief. It made him endless fun to be with and got him into unnecessary trouble in 1967 He was standing outside Robert McNamara his office on the second floor of the Pentagon, a 26 year old Junior official hoping to catch the Secretary of Defense on his way in or out for no reason other than self advancement. A famous Colonel was waiting to a decorated paratrooper back from Vietnam where Holbrook had known him. Everything about the colonel was pressed and creased, his uniform shirt, his face his pants, carefully tucked into his boots and delicately blouse around the calves. He must have spent the whole morning on them. That looks really beautiful Holbrook said and he reached down and yanked the pants leg all the way out of its food. The colonel started yelling and Holbrook laugh. You will have heard that he was a monstrous egotist. It's true. It's even worse than you've heard. I'll explain as we go on. He offended many people and they didn't forget And since so many of them swallowed their hurt after he was gone, it was usually the first thing out of their mouth if his name came up, as it invariably did, how he once told a colleague, I lost more money in the market today than you make in a year. How he bumped an elderly survivor couple from the official American bus to Auschwitz, on the 50th anniversary of its liberation, added himself to the delegation alongside le VSL and left the weeping couple to beg Polish guards to let them into the camp so they wouldn't miss the ceremony. How he lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize, that kind of thing all the time, as if he needed to discharge a surplus of self every few hours just to maintain his equilibrium. And the price he paid was very high. He destroyed his first marriage and his closest friendship His defects of character cost him his dream job as Secretary of State, the position for which his strengths of character eminently qualified him. You can't untangle these things. I used to think that if Holbrook could just be fixed, a dose of self restraint, a flash of inward light, he could have done anything. But that's an illusion. We are holding ourselves. If you cut out the destructive element, you would kill the thing that made him almost great.

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As a member of the class of lesser beings who aspire to a good life, but not a great one. To find the very notion both daunting and distasteful. I can barely fathom the agony of that almost think about it. The nonstop schedule the calculation of every dinner table, the brain burned all day and night. The knowledge buried so deep, he might have only sensed it as a physical ache, that he had come up short of his own impossible expectation. I admired him for that readiness to suffer. His life was full of pleasures, but I never ended it. I'm trying to think what to tell you now that you have me talking. There's too much to say. And it all comes crowding in at once. his ambition, his loyalty is cruelty, his fragility, his betrayals, his wounds, his wives, his girlfriend's his sons his lunches. by dying, he stood up 100 people, including me, he could not be alone. If you're still interested, I can tell you what I know from the beginning. I wasn't one of his close friends, but over the years I made a study of him. You ask why not because he was actually Ordinary though he was and might have rivaled the record of his heroes if he and America had been in their prime together, not because he was fascinating though he was and right this minute somewhere in the world 14 people are talking about now and then I might let him speak for himself. But I won't relate this story for his sake. No, we want to see and feel what happened to America during Holbrooke's life. And we can see and feel more clearly by following someone who was almost great because his quest leads us deeper down the alleyways of power than the usual famous subjects whom he knew all of them, and his boisterous struggling, lays open more human truths than the composed Annals of the great. This was what les Gayle must have meant when he said just after his friend's death, far better to write a novel about Richard Holbrooke than a biography Let alone 10 a bitchu airy what's called the American century was really just a little more than half a century and that was the span of Holbrooke's life. It began with the Second World War and the creative bursts that followed the United Nations, the Atlantic Alliance containment, the free world. And it went through dizzying lows and highs until it expired the day before yesterday. The thing that brings on Doom two great powers and great men, is it simple hubris or decadence and squander a kind of inattention, loss of faith or just the passage of years, at some point that things set in, and so we're talking about an age gone by it was not a golden age, there was plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it. The best about us was inseparable from the worst are feeling We could do anything gave us the Marshall Plan, and Vietnam, the peace at Dayton and the endless Afghan war. Our confidence and energy, our reach and grass, our excess and blindness. They were not so different from holdbrooks. He was our man. That's the reason to tell you this story. That's why I can't get his voice out of my head. Okay.

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So that's the prologue

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died in December 2010.

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I knew him a little bit but not nearly as well as the narrator of this book, which I'll talk about in a minute. A few weeks after he died. His widow offered me his personal papers for a book. And there they are in those filing cabinets which are totally taking Over my tiny home office so much that I couldn't even get my door all the way open. And there they sat for about four years while I was working on other things, and they seem to be getting unhappier and unhappier as they sat there as it was in my life in my head saying what the hell is taking you so long? And why why are you the one reading my diary letters, because in those filing cabinets was an incredible trove of letters from Vietnam to his first wife recorded micro cassette diaries from his time trying to end the war in Bosnia and later at the end of his life, battling with both Afghanistan and President Obama. Not systematic but a an amazing window into the life of a of a famous and important person of the kind. You don't you don't get very often, but I was really having trouble with it. And The reason I'm having trouble is I didn't know how to write this book. I'm not a biographer. To be honest, I find a lot of biographies boring. Because the writer has beautifully crammed every last detail about the subjects life between 800 pages, and you begin to wear down some time around high school.

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I knew I didn't want to write a book like that. I it would kill me and it would probably kill you. So instead, I needed to find another way into this story a way that was kind of equal to the subject because Holbrook also was too messy and two outsides to be contained by kind of stayed solid. cradle to grave biography with a neutral detached biographers voice, it just would not have worked with someone whose life with just was constantly overflowing the borders. So one day I was driving in Connecticut and I heard a voice which was a very unusual thing because I don't hear voices. And the voice said, Holbrook. Yes, I knew it came out of nowhere. I didn't know who was saying it, or what it meant. I didn't know that it excited. It suddenly sounded like a voice that I would want to listen to, maybe for a whole book, because it was personal. It was subjective. It was free. And I suddenly realized if I tried to write a book, in the voice, not have a biographer, but if someone who just somehow knew the story, and could tell it like a very long yarn over the course of a very long evening, maybe with a bottle of bourbon. That would be a book I would want to write and would want to read. And once I gave myself the license to write it in the voice of a Narrator who wasn't quite me, because what you just heard is not me. I didn't know him like that. It's more of an imaginary narrator, who's probably an amalgamation of some of the older people I interview who have known Holbrook since way back when. And somehow they were wiser than me. They were certainly older than me, they knew more than me. And they had a that that voice had a kind of view of Holbrook and of his times that gave me an authority to tell the story that I kind of feel I had, not having known and well, not having lived through those times. It was as if you are hearing the story from someone who happened to have witnessed at all like as a colleague or at the next desk or in somehow and in the next office and had just witnessed the story. And so in the book, I don't give you any home of my homework. There's no interviews described There's no research described, you can find all that at the end and the notes if you want to fact check me, but the voice is a novelistic voice. It's the voice of the narrator of a novel. And once I got that, I felt that I could actually do this. And then I began to write and it took much less time than, than it would have otherwise, because I had the energy and the excitement of telling the story in an original way, and it gave me this freedom. For example, the next chapter, the first real chapter of the book begins, do you mind if we hurry through the early years, which is a way of saying we're not going to get every high school class he ever took, in fact, I'm barely going to mention it because I don't think it's all that interesting or important. I'm going to skip some things, maybe summarize them briefly. Other things I'm going to slow way down and tell you in cinematic detail, because they are the important parts of his life. So the changes the pace, and the The asides and the quick opinions and then let's move on, we're not going to get a whole history, the Vietnam War, I'm going to give it to you in one paragraph, but it's going to be a lively paragraph that those were sort of the chances I felt I had to take. Because Holbrook

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demanded this kind of

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the cliche larger than life doesn't begin to describe him. And the aloof stance of a biographer could not do him justice, his his achievements, his failings, and his lasting value, could really only be brought to life on the page by a narrator who had somehow seen the whole span of it in a way I hadn't. And who has a kind of keenly personal knowledge of America's dreams and defeats and battles with itself, and therefore could really evoke Holbrook as the emblem of those dreams and battles. Kind of embodying the spirit of this era that I think of as the American Century.

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So who was Holbrook? And what did he do?

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Well, let's start with his career. He served under every democratic president from john F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, as in the State Department. He began as a Foreign Service officer, right out of college and Foreign Service Institute, he was sent to Vietnam, where he wanted to go because he wanted to be in the middle of action. And in 1963, the action was in South Vietnam. And not only didn't go to Vietnam, he went to the Mekong Delta, which was the hottest point of the war at that time where the Vietcong were really very close to taking over entire province, and Holbrook became the senior American civilian in an entire province at the age of 22.

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Clearly having some fun with a bottle of beer on a jeep

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and he saw The war right at the ground level from the start. And it's all in his letters to his first wife, which are a remarkable account of the day to day of being a civilian counterinsurgency advisor in the middle of a very difficult war in a country that Americans did not understand and knew nothing about. And he had two insights right away, and they were in his letters from within weeks of arriving. The first was that we were losing, which was not conventional wisdom by any means. In fact, Americans were hardly aware of this war and in Washington, they assume that basically, our superior firepower, technology and our will to win would overcome these pajama clad gorillas, no Holbrook saw that we were losing. He saw that we that by night, the Vietcong were taking over whole towns disappearing during the day. We didn't know where they were, we didn't know who they were all the things that we've come to associate with the Vietnam war he saw in the first few weeks. The second thing he learned was, we were lying to ourselves. We were sending reports up through the military chain to Saigon and under Washington that had all the statistics of victory. And Holbrook knew that those statistics were wrong, that they actually claimed that there were 324 secure strategic Hamlet's in his province, and he would ask to go out and see them and you'd be told you can't It's too dangerous, is strategic Hamlet's either didn't exist, or were insecure and about to fall. So he saw all of that. And he went through what I think of is a gradual series of stages of dissolution. It doesn't happen all at once, when you're inside the government. You're working on this immense and intense Possible problem and you're trying to succeed, you don't suddenly say we can't do it, what you say is, oh, our assessments are wrong. We have to start sending accurate assessments to Washington, then they will change the strategy and get it right. This all sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? From some recent stuff on Afghanistan, the second stage of the disillusionment, our tactics are wrong. We're using overwhelming firepower. We're going into villages on these big unit sweeps with artillery, and aircraft, and we're killing a lot of civilians and we're turning their survivors into Vietnam. We need to fight this war, like guerrillas not like a conventional armies if this is World War Two. a year or two later, he begins to realize it's not just the tactics, the entire strategy is wrong, because by then 1965 we had 200,000 troops, and within another year or two, that number doubled, and Holbrook saw That we had become an occupying force, like the French, and that we were activating Vietnamese nationalism by our very presence and somehow we could not overwhelm what really was a, a civil war going on in the south. And finally, the last stage was, we shouldn't be doing this. We can't win at a price that the American people are willing to pay. And so we have to talk to the enemy and negotiate our way out. So, first section of the book is about this young man going through these stages. And I don't, I found it to be a remarkable insight into what it's like to have a really smart, really perceptive young government official who sees things but doesn't see everything and how long it takes, and how much self deception and even ambition goes into not really seeing it until maybe it's too late. So here he is working I'm training South Vietnamese soldiers. And that was a lot of his work but the rest of his work was schmoozing. play tennis with Maxwell Taylor, on the left in Saigon, and then through Maxwell Taylor with William Westmoreland. And then back in Washington with Bobby Kennedy. There's a lot of tennis in this book because it seemed to be the way Holbrook socialize with his betters. Tried like hell to beat them, because he was too competitive not to, but also impressed them with his knowledge and with his candor, because he didn't hide it from him. He He told them what he thought and they admired him for it and he quickly moved up the ladder of the Foreign Service. And within by 66, he was back in Washington. Having done three years in Vietnam, in the Johnson White House, working on counterinsurgency from Washington,

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And that lasted a couple years. And by 68, he knew that this was doomed. And we needed to talk. And he became part of the first delegation to go to Paris to talk to the North Vietnamese. He spent almost a year there, nothing happened. The talks never began. And so when Richard Nixon was elected, he decided to leave government or at least to leave the State Department. And that was kind of the end of Vietnam for him. There were four more years of it for America. And, and for the Vietnamese, it went on and on but for him, he moved on. He also he became, he left his wife, by the way, which I mentioned in the prologue and his two sons, and became a swinger in Washington, and very much a figure of the 70s. He was an editor of foreign policy magazine for a while. He was networking all the time. He was just fanatically ambitious ambition with him was like a disease that he could not get under control. And so he would do crazy things and, and and embarrass himself at parties and he didn't care. He wants after his divorce, he was dating a young woman and propose marriage and she tried to swallow because she didn't want to marry him. And she said, What do you say? Do you see yourself in five years and he said, as the next Henry Kissinger and she knew Henry Kissinger, her parents were friends with Henry Kissinger, she despised Henry Kissinger that was the end of that relation. And Holbrook thought Kissinger was a moral and a liar. But also, he couldn't help admiring his his strategic brilliance. Kissinger for his part, back then said of Holbrook, he was the most Vipers man I know around this town, which is really something coming When he was just 35, he became Jimmy Carter's Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, the youngest in history. And here he is with his big Dr. Brzezinski and others on the Great Wall of China, beginning the talks that led to the normalization of us China relations and the recognition of the People's Republic, which was maybe the most significant foreign policy achievement of the Carter years even more than Camp David. But Holbrook looks unhappy, because he's engaged in a horrible bureaucratic battle with Brzezinski, who recognizes in Holbrook a kind of threat. And part of the book is about how brutal and bloody these bureaucratic fights are somehow in foreign policy, it's even worse than in other areas. And I found so many stories of increasing Double bad behavior, people being cut out of meetings and left off airplanes and sent to the back of the motorcade just for advantage because the egos and the ambitions and the stakes are also high.

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For him, he looks pleased with himself because he's pretty much eating homework for breakfast. He has he has the power to kind of cut hope workout and he has succeeded in doing it. So this was Holbrooke's first case of power at a pretty high level. And it was painful, but he was not a lightweight and he wasn't going to go away. He went to work on Wall Street during the 12 years of Reagan and bush and then came back to be Jimmy Carter's Bill Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State this time for Europe. And this was the peak of his career, because during the 90s there was a war going on in the middle of Europe, in Bosnia, a terrible war that saw genocide. And massive refugee movement, like nothing Europe had experienced since World War Two. And Bill Clinton simply wanted it to go away and did not want to deal with it because of domestic stuff because of polling because of all his scandals, everything, and Holbrook really was the official who forced the US government. To recognize it. This war would not end without significant American involvement. This was the period after the Cold War, when we destroyed the world like a Colossus Russia was on its back. China was not yet a power. Really, there was only the United States Europe could not end this war in its own neighborhood. And so Holbrook pushed through the Dayton Peace Accords, which brought together the thug who he's drinking with right here Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, and the two other Balkan warlords and force them to sign an agreement. That is Not at all a perfect agreement. But that ended the war and ended the killing and that was Holbrooke's great achievement. And the one for which he really should be remembered. His last rounding government was under brock obama. Look at the body language. Holbrook is on the other side of the sofa trying to get into a conversation. Obama is just studiously avoiding eye contact. And Biden is sort of staring daggers at Holbrook. Basically, Obama couldn't stand him. The first time they met was in Chicago. Right after Obama was elected in 2008. Holbrook was not part of his team. In fact, Obama's team consisted of people who Holbrook had made into enemies. I'll talk about one of them a little bit later, Anthony Lake but also Susan Rice. They've despised Holbrook the feeling's mutual. They were People around Obama. They kept Holbrook out. And what Obama knew of Holbrook he didn't particularly like because generational difference temperamental difference. Remember, no drama Obama Holbrook was drama all the time. But Obama knew he needed these heavyweights from earlier administrations because he did not have a lot of very deep in foreign policy. So he brought hope to Chicago to interview him without having it really a job to offer. And within a minute, I think literally one minute, Holbrook made three mistakes. The first was to hand Obama a signed copy of Holbrooke's book about Bosnia, which is kind of a typical Washington thing to do. But maybe not a thing to do with Barack Obama. I once interviewed Obama and the first thing he said to me was, I haven't read your book on Iraq. And that was Obama letting me know, I'm not like those other politicians. I don't schmooze. I don't lie I don't fake it. I'm going to be straight with you. I kind of admired that even though I was slightly hurt. Thrust his book into Obama's hands. Second thing he does is a Mr. President. Could you please call me Richard? Not dick. My wife prefers for people to call me, Richard. He corrects Obama. And in a way, that seems a little, I don't know. Maybe not all that. Cool. Obama says, okay, Richard, the third thing Hubbard does is his eyes tear up. And he gets emotional. And he says, you know, you don't have to be African American to cry. In other words, I'm so moved to see and with anyone with any sense of who Barack Obama is, knows that that's not what he wants. He doesn't want to have an emotional scene. He wants to talk about foreign policy. I think within that minute homework last Obama, even though they can't they had a 30 minute conversation, and hope you got a job. Obama knew that this was not someone he could trust for. Like and didn't want to be around him, it was almost physical. The job he got was as Hillary Clinton's advisor on a representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, maybe the hardest job in the administration.

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But he and Hillary actually had a very warm relationship. They really cared about each other. And she admired him. She tolerated him. She rolled her eyes at him. She needed him and he adored her. So he tutored her he was her kind of foreign policy guru. So she was his only protector in the Obama administration. But it wasn't enough because Obama made it clear to everyone in his inner circle, he did not want Cobra around. So over the course of two years, Holbrook found himself more and more pushed out, undercut even humiliated, left off presidential trips to Kabul, which was his And finally, in December 2010 when all his friends were telling him just quit, get out, why are you staying? What are you doing? He was overweight. His color was terrible, his he was cooking, his heart was bad. He was obviously in terrible health. He couldn't leave because he knew that if he left, that would be the end. That was his last chance. And he had not reached the top, whatever that meant. He was sitting in Hillary Clinton's office, at the State Department, the office he had always wanted. And suddenly she said to him, my God, Richard, what's happening to you his face had turned this unnatural shade of red, and his aorta had just torn. He was rushed to the hospital. In the book I described his last hour in my new detail, because it was kind of his finest hour in a way he was more himself than ever before. He is a huge pain but he was also dictating notes to an aide in the ambulance. Are you writing down my every witticism, he said he was flirting with the cardiologist while screaming and pain. I mean, it was kind of a explosion of Holbrook until the very last minute. And he died after 20 hours of surgery in 2010. So that was his career. What about Hulbert the character because this book is about a character and is a lot about his personal life because he's a man and full I'm not writing a resume I'm writing, as I said, a true novel about Richard Holbrooke. He was flamboyant. He was maddening. He was mesmerizing. He wanted to swallow life hole. He made a lot of money and then he spent a lot of money. He was a star funder. He had a seven year relationship with Diane Sawyer. And at the end of it she was exhausted in saw Mike Nichols and said help get me out of here and went off and married Mike Nick And broke Richard Holbrooke's heart for a day. He loved to hang out with nba stars like Hakeem Olajuwon and became a Mocambo. This is when Oprah was Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations. He loved adventure. He ate too much he saw more movies than most of us even heard of. And he was not a snob, his favorite? Was there something about Mary. Key to me, he was like one of those 19th century protagonists who are making their way up through the imperial capital, trying to prevail against an adversarial world. And he never made it to the top. He never achieved all that he thought he could. And the main reason as I say in the prologue was himself. He had idealism, and egotism in immense quantity. Sometimes they got out of whack and the egotism would overwhelm the idealism and that's when he got into trouble. But at other times he had them in balance, such as during the negotiations to end the war in Bosnia. And then he really got more done than anyone around him. He was one of those rare Americans at the top or near the top, who actually Oh, here he is poking the Dalai Lama in the chest and telling him what's what I mean, if you were here, he would be grabbing your water off the table and drinking it and and looking for who seemed to be the most important person in the room. And if they turned out not to be interesting, dropping them and moving on to someone else that was awake.

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Here is with his friend Bobby De Niro. As I said he was a bit of a star fucker. But here he is in a Pakistani refugee camp. And I think Cobra never listened more closely to anyone than to people like that man and his wife, because he really cared about the world's problems and the people who were suffering under oppression or destitution. He he really believed That America had a special obligation that no one else would do it, that if we didn't, the problem would fester and grow. And eventually it would become our problem. But we should get there early and do something about it, because he actually had a kind of old fashioned idealism about what it meant to be American, which now seems badly out of date, but which at the time, got us into a lot of trouble. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and also led to him being in this refugee camp trying to figure out how to get the resources of the US government to help the people he was talking to. I'm gonna skip. This is his best friend Tony lake. Same year at the Foreign Service Institute, friend in Vietnam tennis partner, served under Cyrus Vance and the Carter administration, they became mortal enemies. You can tell from this picture There's late iying warily as Holbrook tries to butter up Bill Clinton. And I'm not going to tell you why they became mortal enemies. But it had real consequences really, for US foreign policy because as I said, it's it's human, it kind of comes down to character. And character is full of contradictions and impulses and passions. And it doesn't happen by logic. It's not a game of chess. It's a, it's a drama. It's a human drama, which makes it I think, more interesting. And here he is, at the end of his life, maybe two or three months away from death. And I'm going to play you just a short piece from his Audio Diary, these little micro cassette tapes, I found in his papers which he which he recorded his thoughts and his, his actions at the end of his life, and you can hear that it's the end of his life, from his voice from this, the sound of his voice, and what he's describing is not actually gana Stan or Pakistan, it's going to see the revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center and what that did to him, which is in some ways, maybe more

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important to him than anything else he's doing.

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Yesterday was

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the best ever

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production which

43:00

myself

43:04

why that show is such an enormous emotional impact on us. For me, it was the culmination of

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the capturing of that show

43:21

in American history show

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the height of New York

43:35

American Civil War

44:04

Where we were today in our nation

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compared to where we were 1949

44:15

came out

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five years or seven years earlier.

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So I really understood what this book was about on election night 2016 when I suddenly realized that the era he's describing in that era he embodied to me more than anyone else was was really over and we were entering something new and something diminished.

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I suddenly understood that what I was writing

45:21

mercenary. He was part of the team that opened relations with China. And when Carter lost hope went to Wall Street and used his connections in China to open doors for investment banks and Nike and other American corporations. So for him China, it wasn't all that interested in its politics. I don't think he was it. He saw it as both a you know, a rising power, probably a benevolent one. And I think he thought, as a lot of Americans did, and also as a great marketing opportunity. After kinnaman Square, he became somewhat disenchanted, I think via the assumption that economic liberalisation would lead to political freedom, which the whole American political class believe, was hard to maintain after that, and today, it's impossible. So I think he was disappointed in the direction that China took. But it wasn't his passion and neither was a Soviet Union. By the way, you notice he spent most of his career in the Cold War, and never worked on the heart of that problem, the US Soviet relationship, because I think it was boring to him. It was static. It was abstract, nothing was happening. No nuclear arms talks around a big table in Geneva. That's not Holbrooke's think the things that really animated him. We're human problems in dramatic situations. So be it Bosnia, Afghanistan. That's the arc of his career.

47:10

His brother thoughts?

47:13

Yeah, I don't think he was autistic he because he, I mean, I don't know I don't understand autism well enough to say what it is. But Holbrook needed to be around people all the time. And that's not my understanding of autism. He was something else. He had something missing intended. Some restraint that most of us have, like, don't do that. It'll just end up being embarrassing, or you'll get in trouble. He did not have that. Yeah. Yes.

47:43

So you describe this person who's abrasive and yet very

47:49

capable. He said he had these great strengths. So I'm just curious if you have any insights as to how a person like him could achieve this, you know,

47:59

resolution to the world. You're out to

48:00

the Baltimore. So what was it about him that allowed him to?

48:06

Yep, yep. Well, I interviewed a couple of Bosnian women in Sarajevo, who worked at the US Embassy during those years. And they saw Holbrook in action. And when they saw him walk into the embassy, he was throwing things. He was slamming his helmet down. He was yelling, get me Milosevic on the phone. This was after a terrible accident. So he was in a particularly heightened state. And they said, Who is this? He doesn't seem like an American diplomat. He seems like a thug, a hooligan. They said to me, and then she said, but we had seen many diplomats in Syria. And none of them had done anything to solve our problem and in the war, and we thought maybe this guy who's a little bit like the people who brought the war can actually force them to ended and there was something of that in hoeber key had a way of zeroing in on Milosevic seeing his strengths and weaknesses. schmoozing with him for eight hours over giant heaps of lamb and rice and glasses of plum brandy, which Holbrook would pretend to drink so that you could stay sober. While Milosevic got drunk, sobered up, got drunk. He just had a feel for the drama and the brutality of this man and how to call his bluff. He was tough enough to do that. And he was subtle enough to do it and that no one else had done and, and he achieved this great thing. But the same qualities made him impossible to be around and be kept getting passed over for the job he most wanted. And I'll tell you a quick story. very brief. Bill Clinton was thinking very seriously of naming Holbrooke to be Secretary of State in 1996. After his reelection. The competition was Madeleine Albright And Clinton said to Al Gore, I just don't think he has the self awareness to keep his relationships from becoming toxic. That was Clinton analyzing Holbrook, I think brilliantly. And he's decided with Hillary pushing him. I'm going to nominate the first ever woman to be Secretary state, even though he kind of knew that homework was better. He just didn't trust him to keep himself from antagonizing the entire administration. Yeah, that's a fabulous talk. I've two questions that you may not be interested interested in answering them. But the first one is about about Holbrook. You say that he could have achieved more if he could have overcome his demons. But he couldn't have done that because the demons were part of what made him kind of essentially an argument against free will. And I wonder if you want to say I mean, I believe in free will. But I mean, it's really, I mean, you're essentially saying that it's kind of impossible for people to unbundle that your opinion. Gage, and you can't just I think some people some people therapy and experience and wisdom can change you can make you different Holbrook was himself from the beginning. One reason why I, I could not see spending a lot of time on his childhood is I did not find a deep psychological, biographical source of who he was he just who was who he was. And I didn't want to speculate about his mother and his father. I mean, I talked about them. But yeah, so he, he just had this nature that was there from the start. And that, I think, was a piece. Yeah. And the other thing I'm wondering, maybe you don't want to answer this is that I love the unwinding. And you write a lot about Joe Biden, in that and I wonder if there's anything you might want to say about about this election. I mean, my, my own thought is he's got plenty of flaws, but maybe compared to Trump, Trump to Trump. So in the unwinding, which is the book I was working on, when I got these papers, Biden appears through the eyes of an aide who he kind of treats badly and The a becomes more and more disillusion. I didn't see that as being particularly awful about Joe Biden, I saw it as being the way Washington works. It's like, it's transactional. People are used people are cast aside. There's a lot of bad feelings, but then people have to swallow them because they want to remain, you know, engaged. So that was the story I was telling. And some people thought I had a terrible grudge against Biden. I I don't I actually, I think quite highly of him. I I have my deep concerns about his cognitive and other abilities right now. And his, you know, how how energetic a president he could be. But in this book, there's one scene between Holbrook and Biden, they knew each other for years. They agreed about everything, mostly Bosnia, and of course, therefore, they disliked each other

52:58

under Obama Holbrooke went into the Vice President's office in the White House to talk about whether we should send more troops to Afghanistan and Biden started screaming at Holbrook. This isn't homeworks diary saying I am not sending my boy there to die for women's rights. That's not what we're fighting for we wrong. We're not going to do it. Obama doesn't understand this. No one understands this. And homeworks trying to calm him down and say, we know that it's not about like, this is part of it. We need women's rights to be part of it. Biden is just kind of getting more and more excited. So it's a very small vignette, but it shows you know, bionet is most erratic.

53:39

Yes, back a

53:46

piece of the Obama.

53:50

Yes.

53:52

I think Obama did treat him pretty shabbily and it's a weakness in Obama that he couldn't he could feel what he wants. About Holbrook and it was these feelings were not a legitimate Holbrook was a pain in the ass. He would lecture Obama in front of his cabinet. You know, it's just everything he did was wrong. And it all came back to his not seeing himself. Clinton save his ass. Obama was about to fire him in March of 2010. And Clinton went to the White House and basically said, you can fire him but over my objections, and Obama said, Okay, well, let's wait six months and see what happens. So she saved his job. But she was also exasperated with him. And I think by the end of his life, if there been a second attempted firing, which I think was a foot, she wouldn't have protected him again, because she'd had enough. She also was and this is more about policy. She was all for the surge and for a more militarized policy in Afghanistan. She wanted she was very tight with the generals Holbrook having seen a All of this before in Vietnam, and these two wars, in many ways, our allies knew that more troops was not going to make a difference in the end, and the only way out was talks. And he was pushing throughout his last month for talking to the Taliban. Obama wasn't really interested. The generals were against it, Petraeus and Mullen, the admiral, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Hillary Clinton did not want to stick her neck out on that issue. So he needed protection and because he didn't have it on that he couldn't push it too hard. He couldn't afford to get on the wrong side of Hillary Clinton. So really was only in the last weeks of his life that he finally began to push for talks. And then he died in her office. And 10 years later. We are still trying to talk our way out of Afghanistan. Yeah, George remember one lots, okay. Maybe to to rapid fire. Yeah, you in your book, Richard Holbrooke in the end of the American Century, what signals of signal the end of the American Century of not Vietnam war or involvement in the Middle East? What did? Well, Vietnam too many American seemed like a real trauma and a collapse of American power, prestige. It turned out to be kind of a false dusk because within a few years, we were the only superpower left standing. And then we had this decade where we were, we saw ourselves as indispensable to the world. That was Madeleine Albright spray 911. Iraq, the war on terror, the financial crisis, and I'd say the decay of our own democracy and our own middle class, our own sense of being a question coherent, successful democracy, all of that was One thing it was a gradual, maybe not so gradual, this wasting of, of power and influence and of moral authority around the world. And so by the time Obama came into office, I think he saw his job as being to manage our decline as gracefully as possible, which he tried to do didn't succeed necessarily as much as he could have. Now we're in a stage of the Holbrook worldview is not on the table. It's gone. Trump sees the world in opposite terms. It's transactional. It's about bullying and about, see everyone is a potential partner or a potential enemy and cook cozying up to dictators and stuffing our democratic allies everything Holbrook would have hated is now sort of our foreign policy, if you can call it that. And so I don't think we're going to go back to even if Biden is elected and he wants to go back To this, I don't think we can I think history moves on something. Last question. Yeah. There was a hand over here. Yeah. So I'm just really interested in

58:17

the invention of battery so completely agree, but I couldn't have other examples of, you know, fictional narrator invented and there's so much creativity around memoir now that I love so much. So in biographies,

58:35

modestly I invented, there is no other example. I invented it out of desperation, because I was forced, faced with this massive project that I kind of lost the heart for until I heard that voice and then I realized this could actually be fun. This could be enlivening. So it was a way to get to write the book. In and bring it to life for you and for me and I, I think there's a lot of room in nonfiction for exploration, a lot of room, the novel seems in some ways to have gone through that already. But nonfiction has kind of been, by and large sort of the same thing for a long time. But I think

59:24

this seems to be like in the

59:26

beginning of iteration, but I'm a real stickler I, I don't believe in mixing fact and fiction. I, I believe in creativity and experiment within the, the pressure the the guidelines of facts, because otherwise, I think you're opening up a Pandora's box. So this is scrupulously factual as I could make it. But once and I kind of need the facts in order to then experiment I have to have the confidence that I have facts before I feel like now I have the right To play with the voice to figure out a new way of telling the story, and I guess it wouldn't be

1:00:08

options.

1:00:11

Someone has I just heard last night that like some studio is going to make a TV series but I'll believe it when I see it because this is watching

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