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  • The American Scholar

    The Difficult Diplomat

    Jun 03, 2019 4 minutes
    Review by Charles Trueheart

    OUR MAN: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

    BY GEORGE PACKER

    Knopf, 592 pp., $30

    RICHARD HOLBROOKE DIED nearly a decade ago, not yet 70, having charged through American diplomacy for nearly 50 years on a manic quest for self-realization. He wore his ambitions so nakedly and bore his many disappointments so bitterly that his occasional triumphs, notably in drawing a shaky but durable peace from a genocidal war in Bosnia, can be obscured.

    In his supercharged new biography, George Packer doesn’t lose sight of Holbrooke’s spasms of near greatness, or of the high ideals that were in symbiosis with his oily machinations. Yet the cascade of often awkwardly intimate details—many of them in Holbrooke’s own words—can’t help but make him

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