Foreign Policy Forum

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

The late diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke, the American Academy in Berlin’s founder, possessed seemingly boundless energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars—America’s greatest post-Cold War diplomatic achievement. His power lay in an absolute belief in himself and his idea of a muscular but generous foreign policy that championed American global leadership. In George Packer’s new biography, he reviews the days of Holbrooke’s life, from a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan. Holbrooke’s story is also the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. Packer’s book draws from Holbrooke’s private diaries and papers to create a nonfiction narrative both intimate and epic in its portrait of an extraordinary figure and the elite social and political spheres he inhabited at “the end of the American century.”

Generously supported by Daimler-Fonds