Richard Holbrooke
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born on April 24, 1941, in New York City, a place that situated him from the start within one of the most densely connected urban centers in the world. He attended Scarsdale High School before pursuing his education at Brown University, and later at Princeton University and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, a sequence of institutions that moved him progressively toward the public sphere.
Over the course of his career, Holbrooke worked across a strikingly wide range of professional fields. He served as a diplomat and politician, and also worked as a banker, financial adviser, journalist, and writer, producing work in English throughout. That range — spanning government service, finance, and the written word — made him an unusual figure in American public life, someone whose professional identity resisted easy categorization and whose engagements crossed the boundaries that typically separate these domains.
His diplomatic work brought him recognition from governments in Europe. Poland awarded him the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, Germany conferred on him the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Lithuania honored him with the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas. Taken together, these three decorations reflect the geographic scope of his service and the regard that governments on that continent extended to him.
Holbrooke died on December 13, 2010, in Washington, D.C. He was a citizen of the United States throughout his life, and his death in the capital brought to a close a career that had taken him across multiple professions and into the company of foreign governments whose honors he carried. He was sixty-nine years old at the time of his death.
Quotes by Richard Holbrooke
People hated to take their disagreements to the President; it was as though a failure to agree somehow reflected badly on each of them, and consensus, rather than clarity, was often the highest goal of the process.
It is essential that the foreign forces who have invaded and occupy large parts of the Congo halt their offensive action.
I still believe in the possibility of the United States, with all its will and all its strength, and I don’t just mean military, persevering against any challenge. I still believe in that.
United Nations peacekeepers are going all over the world spreading AIDS even while they’re trying to bring peace. What a supreme irony.
Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won’t cooperate with each other – unless they are forced to do so by political level authority.
It’s an improvisation on a theme. You know where you want to go, but you don’t know how to get there. It’s not linear.
A peace deal requires agreements, and you don’t make agreements with your friends, you make agreements with your enemies.
A rough kind of justice has ended his life in a padded cell after his crimes were exposed and witnesses came forward including his own associates and that, I think, had a powerful effect.
It was his ruthlessness and vision that helped to create Bosnia and Herzegovina,