Lunch With Dick And Richard

A guilty pleasure read in August, when it comes out, will be Kati Marton's book about the love of her life, the late Richard Holbrooke. Susan Cheever has a preview:

In a bookstore after saying goodbye to Holbrooke [before one of his diplomatic missions], Marton picks up Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, flips to her husband’s name in the index, and finds an infuriating story. She writes, “The President soured on Richard when my husband asked him to call him Richard, not Dick, at the ceremony appointing him special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Holbrooke had explained to the president that Kati, who was in the audience, did not like the nickname Dick. Standing in a Paris bookshop, Marton is furious—how can Obama, who doesn’t like to be called by his nickname, Barry, be irritated that she doesn’t want people to call her husband Dick?

The rich are different from you and me—they are a lot more fun to read about. Marton and Holbrooke’s first date was a three-day jaunt to Chartres and the Chateaux of the Loire Valley at Christmastime in 1993. He was in his 50s, the American ambassador to Germany taking a few days off; she in her 40s was just barely separated from anchorman Peter Jennings, one of the most famous men in the world. They talked about Gothic vs. Romanesque, spoke perfect French, and ate at Chez Benoit where they ran into Holbrooke’s friend Pamela Harriman, the ambassador to France. (Harriman snubbed Marton.) No sweaty groping in cheesy hotel rooms for these two! Holbrooke’s most excited moment was when he and Marton sat side by side in a pew of the great Chartres cathedral. “Just imagine,” he whispered urgently, “the pilgrims’ first reaction to these windows! The power of this place for medieval peasants.” At the end of five days together, they held hands.

Kathy and I met Holbrooke in Bonn in March 1994, when we accompanied Richard Nixon on his last visit to Russia, she as his chief of staff, I as director of his presidential library. On the way back, we stopped in London and caught a performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel," then enjoying a West End revival. He and Mrs. Nixon (who had died the previous June) had seen it in New York right after World War II with their friend John Raitt (blueswoman Bonnie's father) as Billy Bigelow. In London, we got the last five or six seats in the balcony. When Billy's ghost broke through to his widow, Julie Jordan, and their embittered daughter, Louise, and they both stood to sing "You'll Never Walk Alone," Nixon was mopping his face with his raincoat.

We also popped back to West Germany for a meeting with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. You're allowed to say "popped" when you're riding in the private jet ADM's Dwayne Andreas had lent Nixon for his trip.

Holbrooke, as U.S. ambassador, met us at the airport. Since the Red Army Faction was still a threat, he had a half-dozen men around him toting semiautomatic weapons. We'd been a little late leaving London, and Holbrooke's apparatus was determined to get Nixon to Kohl's office on time. We were in four black Mercedes, virtually bumper to bumper, driving about 120 mph, the cars in front and back bristling with armament.

Afterward we went to Holbrooke's residence for lunch, where Nixon briefed him on his Moscow meetings (which had not included one with President Boris Yeltsin, who got angry at Nixon for visiting one of his political enemies). They had in common their enlightened realism in foreign policy and Diane Sawyer, Nixon's former aide, Holbrooke's one-time lover. Her name did not come up, so far as you know.

Richard The Dreamer-Doer

From Roger Cohen's eloquent tribute to Richard Holbrooke:

Wilsonian idealist? Ruthless realpolitiker? He was both rolled into one dreamer-doer. As he once told me, “We cannot choose between the two; we have to blend the two.” How could Americans forsake their idealism if they had become Americans precisely in defiance of the hateful ideologies that drove Holbrooke’s Jewish parents from Europe and ooze from Waziristan caves today?

Archibald Macleish wrote that if we had not believed all humankind is endowed “with certain inalienable rights, we would never have become America, whatever else we might have become.” That was the America Holbrooke took out to the world, even post-Iraq, with “interventionism” a dirty word.

Afghanistan Heroes, Afghanistan Doubts

Everyone, probably, is reading too much into Richard Hobrooke's last words, which were about ending the war in Afghanistan. And yet Tim Fernholz, a critic of the war, poses the question that's been in the back of my mind since last year, when President Obama began his agonizing reappraisal and then announced a major escalation of the war. Why exactly are we still there?:

There is the fear of giving terrorist groups unchecked space to prepare their next moves, but there are many safe havens and more effective interdictions of these efforts, including rebalanced investments in intelligence and security at home. There is also fear of seeing Pakistan's stability threatened by militant Islamists, but the current strategy doesn't seem to advance that end, especially as elements in the Islamabad government continue to maintain close relations with the Taliban.

Last week, St. John's School hosted some Marines and their families from Camp Pendleton, in northern San Diego county. For seven years, we've had a close relationship with the "3/5," the Darkhorse regiment. They've lost 19 young men since early October, and two just last week, while fighting in the Sangin River valley, which is thick with Taliban insurgents.

During an all-school chapel service, I told our students -- few if any of whom remember Sept. 11 -- that our volunteers are doing better than the British and Russians did fighting in the toughest place in the world. Preaching about war during Advent, in a building built in the holy name of the Prince of Peace? Not that hard, actually. Jesus understood that his people lived in a broken world.

Besides, no one hates war more than these soldiers and their families, who are giving and sacrificing so that every day can be Christmas for the rest of us. I know the president also hates war, and this war. If he insists our interests are at stake, I'm inclined to believe him. Friends have also reminded me of the American tendency to make abundant promises in the course of an intervention only to leave, and leave behind chaos, once exhaustion or a new flirtation with realism overtakes us. And yet when knowledgeable observers say or write that we'll be in Afghanistan "forever," I cringe. Doesn't everyone? After chapel last week, I said a blessing on this baby, Austin, and his twin brother (children #2 and 2.1 of the couple above) and called them future Marines. I prayed to myself that all wars should cease before they get the idea of following in their father's footsteps. If they do it anyway, I'd really prefer they stayed away from Sangin.

Last Words, With A Broken Heart

The late Richard Holbrooke to his Pakistan-born surgeon in Washington:

You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan.

Paging Ambassador Holbrooke

Norm Scheiber argues that AIG went south after its board drove out Hank Greenberg in 2005.

Richard's Dinner With Richard

Richard Holbrooke recounts the normalization of relations between the United States and China 30 years ago this week — and reveals how he asked for RN’s autograph.