*******
Farewell, Farewell...
In honor of a childhood friend, Richard Holbrooke, a Jewish - Quaker who combined power and ideals.
"Sir Richard," I salute you -- for your courage of a lion and your heart of a lamb.
In sadness for "Sir Richard" the big mouth, sometimes bullying, confrontational son of Jewish refugees.
With whom I had walked to Quaker meeting as a junior high student in Scarsdale, New York during the late 1950's.
We walked similar paths -- both part children of German Jews who sought for us to blend in by adopting Quakerism.
We continued to walk similar paths -- with him at the top as ranking diplomat and me at the bottom as lowly newspaper foreign correspondent.
Focusing in different ways on the same issues.
I had not seen him since 1977 in Beijing -- where both he and I were participating in different ways in the diplomacy to bring an American-Chinese alliance.
We were both peace makers of sorts -- although we had both rejected Quaker pacifism as too parochial.
By the 1990's Holbrooke was well into rediscovering his Jewish roots, while I was beginning to study Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his concept of "costly grace" -- as well as the theological underpinnings of my childhood interest in "Christian realism."
Farewell, farewell to you who'd hear
You lonely travellers all.
The cold North winds will blow again
The winding road does call.
******
Farewell, Farewell, my boyhood friend.Who died December 13 (born 1941, the same year as myself) of a ruptured aorta while serving as President Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In an age of bureaucrats and cautious politicians, the late "Sir Richard" swaggered through a classic role: the flawed hero.
Tough as nails with an idealistic heart and an elephant-size ego, he did not hesitate when calling for military action. But power was to be channeled for constructive ends.
Throughout his 69 years Holbrooke struggled with the challenge of how to impose American will for stability and humane rule -- first in Vietnam, then in the former Yugoslavia, and lastly in Afghanistan.
He served every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, and made millions as a Wall Street Banker when Republicans were in power.
"Sir Richard" was a manager of the "American Empire." He sought to combine military, economic, and humanitarian power with what today would be called "nation building" in far away places.
Often it seemed an illusive task of "squaring the circle."
A year before his death, he declared, "I still believe in the possibility of the United States, with all its will and all its strength, and I don't mean just military, persevering against any challenge. I still believe in that."
Holbrooke's greatest achievement was his lobbying of President Clinton to instigate military action during the Serbian genocide against Muslims in Bosnia when Clinton and others were timidly fleeing from an activist foreign policy.
Both inside and outside of government he unabashedly advocated the use of force when human rights issues and U.S. foreign policy goals coalesce.
Because of Bosnia, I see Holbrooke as a truly historic figure. He was militarily a hawk, but a moral conscience within the establishment.
Bosnia was remarkable when compared with Uganda and all the other human rights issues where President Clinton and the UN looked the other way.
But with lots of foot dragging force in Bosnia came too little and too late. Lots of the genocide had already been done by the time NATO air power and troops forced the 1995 Dayton accords negotiated by Holbrooke.
(See "Holbrooke: Why I Mourn," a remembrance of Holbrooke's role in Bosnia by TV journalist Christiane Amanpour. See also New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, On the Ground.)
(See this survey of how humanitarian agencies now see the use of force.)
Holbrooke also pioneered as one of the first Jews to penetrate the foreign policy establishment using non Jewish connections rather than a the traditionally Jewish Ph.D. professor route.
Instead of going on for a doctorate he chose to join the Foreign Service in 1962 -- mucking around in Vietnam's dangerous Mekong delta while contemporaries such as myself buried our noses safely in doctoral program libraries.
Today Jews serve widely in the foreign service, in the military, and in all kinds of think tanks and establishment groupings where once they would have been unwelcome. Moving deep into establishment journalism -- especially into outlets like National Public Radio.
They are no longer confined to ghettos of political radicalism -- or to stereotypical niches in law, teaching, small business, or finance.
When Holbrooke's father died young, he was, some say, partly "adopted" by future Kennedy Secretary of State, the very non-Jewish fellow Scarsdale resident Dean Rusk. Rusk's son was among Holbrooke's closest friends.
Holbrooke went on to Brown University, which was an excellent penetration point for a Jew seeking transition to the non Jewish foreign policy establishment.
His path to success was not the familiar Jewish academic one, but through mentoring relationships with gentiles such as Dean Rusk, and other establishment State Department people: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and General Maxwell Taylor.
His mentors were "muscular men," gentile veterans of the World War II generation -- for whom the use of massive military force was a familiar fact of life. No bespectacled agonizers on moral dilemmas were these.
I would see it like this: the U.S. failure in Vietnam and the plight of Indochinese refugees sensitized Holbrooke to refugee issues, out of a sense of US failure in Vietnam in which he was deeply involved as a young foreign service officer.
Then in 1995 Holbrooke took as his third wife Kati Marton, the Hungarian American journalist of Jewish background. She and her writing projects , helped reopen his Jewish past. For she had only recently discovered her own Jewish identity.
Thus his reawakened sense of Jewish identity and the plight Holocaust victims sat heavily on his sense of the suffering of Indochinese refugees displaced from Cambodia and Vietnam by American defeat there.
His outrage at Serbian genocide in Bosnia as both a private citizen and a government official thus stood at a double foundation: the failure of the West during the Holocaust and the suffering which came out of American failure in Indochina.
For Holbrooke the challenge was always to seize success from failure, "to make the next chapter work."
Let someone pick up the torch.
