is not a bad idea. but at the bottom it says the two reactors are 14.2 billion dollars. wait. many of you have gone through the bush no child left behind education program relays saying half of 14 is seven. not five. $2 billion difference per reactor. that in my neighborhood is money. in the old days it was fraud. but here, something interesting about corporation people. if you commit a fraud, you go to jail. if you commit racketeering, you go to jail. i used to do racketeering cases. but if you are a power company corporation people including stoner webster loweation to the congo i was justin comco a couple weeks ago. that's why i've invited friendse of congo because friends of will occupy wall street crossed the bridge and said where do we go next? they went to the avenue which ii friends ofs of hemisphere which is a company congo here because in the york last week those and occupy wall street crossed the brooklyn bridge. where do we go next? they went to the office which is a company that got a piece of paper, add debt owed buy condos i year and from that they took $100 million out of counsel of pay? that is a story that payment of bosnia it is looking for criminal charges of the debt that should not exist anymore. go to the congo and i need to in go. he is a 14 year-old kid like my son. i have twins. who has cholera. in the 21st century? you get cholera from bad water. water. it is pretty easy to fix. $1,200 you dig a well. congo sold $80 million of callable. it is sold when i went to the condo -- congo unicef planes coming in we will dig enough wells to give 40 million people clean water to end cholera. i said no you are not. because the vultures goldfingers group did and and this vulture fund turns out to be a two car garage. when we cross the bridge that is what holds $80 million of the condos wealth. that is where the clean water when. it is a complicated story. what is he saying? i'm sorry. get the book. [laughter] you do. because you've really have to have something when your brother-in-law says i don't know what they are doing. i do recommend the hardbound book to educate them. [laughter] you cannot do that with the ipod. [laughter] you don't go to wal-mart. that is what the vultures do. in the case of zambia i tell you all of this is on the nightly news out there. under british law we have to give this information we have to give all evidence to the targets of investigation. so? and tell us. bp did you coverup the blowout or did you bribe? they said we follow the rules. i said that does not sound like a denial. i am not hearing denial. the case of zambia zambia, $3 million was paid to this so-called favorite charity of the president chalupa. buy mr. goldfinger and his buddies. the president's favorite charities seem to be the president he took his money and follow the trail he took the money to his bank. of course, it is in geneva swaziland so we followed his trail and he stopped to go shopping before he went to the bank and stopped into a boutique and spent about $1 million cash on 200 pairs of elevator shoes. 90 leisure suits. diamond studded ties. how do we know this? because this bad penny you will meet her in "vultures' picnic" she speaks about four languages quite fluid the 12 accent's and wonderful fashionable disguise his a.m. looks like a tv star so she can get permission to say we're from a reality tv show called a shot being with the rich and famous by eight -- speaking local alpine tour mysia switching to french and anybody rich and famous shop here? the president of zambia was it just year 200 per se shares. we put it on the air. what this guy did was sign papers allowing goldfinger to basically pick up tens of millions of dollars. where does zambia get that? that is the money we gave them for aids medicine. nice. we try to ask about it here. we had a stake out. american television's stations don't do stake out. we do. we have to ask politely seven times will you please explain this to us? and if you don't we will do something american tv doesn't do. we will come to you. with the papers at dawn to ask you about it. so mr. goldfinger. we put this on the air. we put this story on the air of endo this dolan securities from bosnia, the cholera epidemic. even where i met with the president of liberia. we're tracking another vulture fund i knew a woman of five fingers open hand i know the professor likes to play games with me one figure was inside her cabinet. there is somebody inside and they have good to cold. she got them. don't know which one but she got them. we put this on the year. the british parliament all parties made in this culture activity illegal in britain. germany, holland, made it illegal. [applause] china you cannot collect this money. basically the entire civilized world and uncivilized. they have made this, they have made them outlaws. in other words, mr. romney billionaire and mr. goldfinger in the rest of the owe% and the rest of the world are outlawed, we are outlaws but in america their job creators. [laughter] that is why we occupy. we it occupied for stanley mattingly in jason alexander come on the deepwater horizon for the chief and his sons. etauk. janessa under the pipe that exploded. and also a farmer in fukushima with a farm that is poisoned forever. and four endo and the cholera quarantine center. that is why we occupied because it is not about the real estate. it is not about tens or t.a.r.p. or any of that. it is about them and us. and as i say in the book, just to read one little paragraph, there is only one story. that is what i am investigating. it is all one story. it is about them and us. they get home is bigger than disneyland we get foreclosure notices they give private jets and we get tarballs and lost futures and pay their gambling debts with our pensions. they get the third trophy wife and the tax break and we get subprime. they get to candidates and we're told to choose but they get the gold mine and we get the shaft. i will be signing books and answering your questions out there. go to "vultures' picnic".org this is about the information job creators or vultures waiting for us to die to feast? waiting for the economy is to die to feast? i have not even got into the goldman sachs chapter. [laughter] that is what is inside "vultures' picnic" go to "vultures' picnic".org to download the first chapter. that is against my publishers corporate policy. download the first chapter spread the information around. because i want you to have the information about the 1% to answer the question why reoccupy. i want to mr. singer, a goldfinger in the rest of the gang and stoner webster no matter what shape they have shifted into, to know that the picnic is over. in fact, i agreed on one thing. i want him to get everything that is coming to him. [laughter] [applause] he may be toto talk about the life and career of american diplomat richard holbrooke who passed away in december of 2010. this is about an hour. >> good evening everybody. thank you so much for being here tonight. my name is lissa muscatine i'm one of the owners of politics and prose and on behalf of my honor and co-owner of the booksellers' we welcome all of you to this evening's event which by the way for those of you that are not regulars here is one of about 475 author defense that we do every year and it's part of our mission not only to bring great books to the community but also to promote civic discourse which is which seems comes in greater scarcity so we love to have these eve ensler you can listen to authors and ask them questions so think you for joining us. there's a couple quick housekeeping these before we get started our guests will speak about half an hour, 25 minutes or half an hour and they will be happy to take questions. we ask you to state your name as a courtesy for people in your question know who you are or at least a little bit to your. at the end of the program if he could fool the pure chairs and put them at the site of the room that would be helpful to the staff and then will be a line for me going in this direction for book signing at the end so with that the last thing i ask is if you please turn off your cell phones before we get started would be greatly appreciated. it's delightful and a great pleasure for me and brad and the store to have strobe talbott and kati marton here to talk about the unquiet american in the world. there are no to people better suited to talk about this extraordinary larger than life force of man richard holbrooke and to talk about the book. by the way, neither of them are strangers to the store. they both have had their own readings here in the past and strobe has multiple the multiples. i was joking he might hold the record and of richard holbrooke was here for his book at the end of that he wrote after the peace accords call to end the war. there are also to people who may popping at some point you aren't going to speak tonight but i would love to at least mention and if they do show up will introduce them, the editors of the book derek chollet and some and the power as you know has been one of president obama's foreign policy adviser of the national security council on multilateral affairs and human rights. and she also has a very touching a say in this book about being mentored by richard holbrooke. derrick was actually a colleague of mine and i hope he does come. he's one of my favorite people and wonderful to work with. he and i had offices at the end of a short hallway at the office of policy planning at the state department for the first couple of years of the obama administration and i believe he insisted that it was time for me to finally turn over a draft a very unpolished draft of a speech i had written for secretary clinton before the nato defense dealing with afghanistan and pakistan. i was inexperienced speechwriter and worked in the clinton administration for years and i know richard. i'd been in meetings with him and i worked with him kind of on the fringes of some of what he had done but i never actually had to deliver a written work to him for judgment and so knowing that he was widely referred to as the bulldozer i approached this task with a fair amount of trepidation to skill myself and gave him the drafting of course i was prepared for the antics and fireworks and this is the worst thing i've ever written but i quickly discovered was that there was no better person in the world to read a speech and i really started realizing richard holbrooke thinks in speeches and he was my favorite person to have read a speech thereafter and i was very fortunate to be able to work with him not just on that particular speech on several subsequent ones while i was in the state department. derrick anderson and the with a lot of input, and i think this is really a colavita conception of this book between kati amstrup and samantha because after richard passed away last december, there was this outpouring about him and everybody was trading stories and as i said he was a force of nature so there were many stories to gore now come and they conceived of putting together a collection of essays written by people who knew them well. there were 12 in the book does allow us some of his writings from the decades and those were fascinating to read. when you go back and see what he was thinking at the time in vietnam for example and subsequent foreign policy it is quite extraordinary to look at in retrospect and really well worth reading. let me move on to the people you want to hear from which are stroke and kati. stroke of course is the president of the brookings institution and former said he believed the deputy secretary of state and highly regarded journalist at "time" magazine and it was interesting - but this today both you and richard have managed to fuse for journalistic skills and sensibilities with your diplomatic skills and sensibilities to extraordinary effect kind of amazingly to see these guys who bring all these things together in the way that they go about their lives and their work. he was of course a friend and an intellectual sparring partner of richard holbrooke. i hope maybe he will tell the trampoline story but in case he doesn't, it's in the book. so you might want to leave it for the book and then they have to buy the book and read the story. but thank you so much for being here stobe. and kati marton of course is a journalist from exceptional journalist in her own right. it is in her jeans. her parents were both reporters in their native country of hungary. they were jailed, falsely accused and jailed before the revolution. right after the revolution they came to this country. she went on to become a reporter at npr and abc news and she also has been the head of the committee to protect journalist and i think it's fair to say that kati has been a major force behind her husband's accomplishments. they were married in 1995 at really the worst part of the balkan war back and one of the things i've written this book is that during the dayton peace accord meetings she was assigned to sit between slobodan milosevic and his bosnian counterpart, and hurt orders from holbrooke were make them talk to each other. and i gather that his wife was also given a similar mandate at a different tenor, i'm sorry, but i say? i'm sorry, stobe. they didn't change wives as far as i know. [laughter] in washington you never know but evidently they really didn't. sorry about that. yes. also, you may not know that richard also went to hillary clinton a little before this to get hurt your so she could draw attention to bosnia during her husband's administration so i just want to say that it did occur to me that when richard wanted to get things done he knew who to turn to, the women. so, anyway, kati has provided a marvelous introduction to the book in her words that's wonderful, and i just want to end and introduce them with one quote from the last line of the preface to the book which is written by garate and samantha, and they say holbrooke may never have been a quiet man, but he was the first to say that in love he was a very lucky man and with that please join me in welcoming strobe talbott and kati marton. [applause] >> thank you so much, lisa coming and it is a pleasure to be back at my favorite bookstore. i think this is my fifth event. i've written seven books, and five of them have been launched here, so i am just delighted that politics and prose has gone on to greater heights and strengths under these wonderful new owners and thank you all for coming out this evening to hear stobe and i talk about our beloved richer. between the two of us, we cover the personal and the professional holbrooke but it would take more than two of us to really penetrates every corner of this mind and this is a towering personality who has left all of us changed. shortly after pritchard passed away, and will be an believably a year in three weeks i reflected on an interview that i had made with lady bird johnson for my book on presidential marriages in which she said lyndon stretched me and that is what richard did for me, she stretched knee and left me quite transformed and in some ways i didn't realize that until he left and he had a way of penetrating our souls, and i know i'm not the only one who feels that way. because he was the most opinionated person i have ever met, the most probably the most argumentative, the most forceful personality and in the 17 years i was richard i never heard him spot a cliche or pass on additional wisdom or say anything and for that i am so grateful because i feel as if i have a ph.d. richard holbrooke and it is the richest legacy anyone could be left with. as craft as i am i feel that he has prepared me for whatever comes next in an unbelievable way as he did for so many of us. i think part of the reason that there has been this outpouring of love, and i can't think of another reason other than love is because he did penetrate so many of us because to cope quite simply because he gave a damn, i've never known such a man who gave such a damn. he had a dog in every fight. you remember foreign secretary of state who gave slobodan milosevic courage by saying we don't have a dog in the fight. richard holbrooke had eight fight in balkans but he also had a fight in the battle against aids, in the battle for refugees right to return to their homeland and in countless other fights he gave a damn and he didn't mind letting you know, he didn't mind stepping on toes, he did a fair amount of that. i think that stobe and i were both astonished with the speed at which the tributes poured in. it seemed like hours after his passing the tributes from around the planet and. it's not an exaggeration. i've seen alive now collected headlines about his passage, and i don't know if i have experienced anything of the like. this isn't a man who ever reached the job that he hoped to reach as the secretary of state this isn't a man that got the nobel peace prize for which he was six times nominated and in my view desert for ending the war, and yet he is the american with a single man holbrooke and he continues to represent a style of diplomacy and the engagement which the world would like to see more of from our country. the sense that america has a big role to play in the world, but not based on the force of arms, an america that is based on values, an america that is based on the surgeon moral principles and that is not afraid to lead and to engage. that was richard come and of course we miss him terribly. with richard there was no separation between the personal and professional. as a result, we shared everything. a center for 17 years he didn't miss a single day wherever he was in calling home. so this may come as a surprise to some. he was a very good husband. how he found the time to be such a caring for and to so many literally thousands of people and i say that now with some authority because i think i've had letters from most of them. i spent the first few weeks after richard's passing reading letters and we've been through them and letters of such quality i don't think i've received a single pro-forma condolence note. there were letters obviously written as much for the sake of the person writing them as for me. people seem to want to capture that interaction with this man with the sense that -- sorry. that he would not come again. or that his like. there was -- sorry. this is hard but it's important which is why i do. you know, sudden death makes you feel the absolutely helpless. so i decided after richard doggett without any warning we were laughing on the phone an hour-and-a-half before making our christmas plans, so no warning. this was a thunderclap in the middle of life i decided that yes i would speak out about richard because that is something that within my powers and i also felt that as engaged as richard was in the lives of so many people come and a boy did he love to give advice, he was not equally open about his own emotional landscape, not at all. he was actually a very private man. he didn't like talking about himself. he liked to talk but there was never a better talkers than richard holbrooke. but he liked to talk about policy and the dreams for his country and about his friends come in and he loved to make his friends talk. but i wanted to kind of it out another dimension to that holbrooke, the holbrooke that all of you saw regularly on the charlie rose show or in washington. he was as david brooks, i love david brooks called after richard past in which he said that richard holbrooke's def is like driving in colorado and suddenly looking at to find that the rockies were gone. isn't that a great line? so i wanted to add another dimension to that which is the personal man, and because he was a very good man quite simply, and i wanted people to know that there was a private holbrooke, and in addition to the public one. when people say that he had a big ego i kind of bridle at that because his ego was not about self-promotion, it was yes she wanted to be very much in the arena but he wanted -- there was always purpose married to his ambition. he was not ambitious to be ambitious. he was ambitious because he wanted to get things done. and man did he get things done. this man didn't waste any time, and i don't really believe -- i don't believe that richard had a sense that time would be as short as it turned out to be. but perhaps at some level he did. his father died in his 40's. richard didn't have a father after age 13. and so maybe she had an acute sense of how elusive and unpredictable life can be and so he was a man in a hurry to end left behind as this book which i am deeply proud to have played a small part in, this book is a wonderful reminder of how many facets this man had as a historian, as a humanitarian, as a man who always spoke his mind whatever the consequences and paid for that frankness and honesty which are often in short supply in this beautiful city. but 5p didn't waste a single day and by the i don't mean that he was just a total want to become wonk. i couldn't be married to a total wonk. he loved every aspect of human experience. really, there was no place on the plan at where richard holbrooke was merely a tourist because whether we landed in moly or zimbabwe he would always find something about the local culture to zero in on a problem that he could give advice, he was a problem solver, she was in his -- he was most engaging and most comfortable when he was gone knotting a problem that others had dismissed as indissoluble is that the word, in soluble, and thus it was fitting that his final mission would be the most intractable problem of the mall, afghanistan and pakistan. but even there as you will read, in the unquiet american he made surprising headway, and of course he left too soon. i would like to recognize samantha power who had so much to do with this book from its inception to its beautiful dearth. ruslan the deacons -- samantha, you have been an amazing trend to richard and now to me. i can see that strobe is ready to grab the microphone but i just can't tell you that since samantha's of rival has reminded me, and command the and i had the most extraordinary time in the city of dayton that has now styled itself into the peace city, and so they named a bridge the richard holbrooke bridge and an annual what a reprise which i had the honor of presenting the first one to barbara kingsolver. so to the writers who have a vision as ambitious as richard and has engaged in the world as richard was, and it was a deeply moving weekend for me. it was the first time that i was back at wright-patterson based where richard helped in the the bosnian war since those days in 1995 it was moving and was equally moving to the people on the ground and i'm happy to say that i wasn't the only one with four allies during this weekend. and all of that has been such a balm to me. so, thank you. [applause] i.t. i should shut up and go straight to questions. >> no way, jose. >> kati has captured so much of the essence of the guy. i want to see some of the context if i could and i want to start with the context of the scene and the story. it is a great institution. a great washington institution, and a great national institution and i must say, melissa and brad, you have obviously gotten perfect pitch when it comes to striking a balance between the change and continuity, and i felt when i walked in here tonight and i didn't see them that i saw barbara, and we all have reason to be concerned about the fate of books as we move from the guttenberg era to the zuckerburg era. [laughter] i know that melissa and brown are looking at ways to make sure that books as things you can pick up and read rather than just turn on and staring at are not only going to survive but are going to thrive. and there is another washington institution that has to do with books and that's public affairs. and i think it is no accident that this book ended up in those capable hands and i do want to say a word of complement to peter osnos who among other things i think and you will check me on this contributed to if not maybe even had the idea of interspersing the tractors from the friends with of the writings of the guy himself which is absolutely brilliant. we think the chapters were very, very good, but the holbrook stuff is even better. if you can get to the other side, fine, but read richard's stuff combat. almost giving back to the time he was an undergraduate. the two points i wanted to make about richard's career i think provide an additional reason on top of those that kati has mentioned in a recorded in the book for at miring the sky and also appreciating the extent to which he was a phenomena. he was both a force of nature and seemed to prevail over nature in some ways and certainly prevailed over the nature of the profession he entered which is diplomacy and the city that he worked out of which is washington. and here's what i mean by that. all of the obits and testimony including from some people who were not as kind to him in life as they were in death talked about his almost unparalleled influence over a long period of time and there is no question about that but what makes it even more astonishing is that he operated not from the highest levels and kati referred to this but he made whatever job he was in a powerful job. as she touched upon he had every reason to aspire to be secretary of state and came very close a couple of the chapters touch on that. but whatever job he got, he made it much more than the job description would suggest. and i will give you just a couple of examples of that. when the clinton administration came into office in the early 1993 there were quite a number of people who felt that if the clinton administration was going to have a first-rate foreign policy team, richard holbrooke should be very near the top of that team and for a variety of reasons some of them having to deal with luck and some of them having to deal with the price that he paid for being the bulldozer. he didn't look for a while as he was going to get a job and then he thought he was going to get an embassy in the part of the world that he knew very well which is to say in asia that embassy went somewhere else and he as it were in that up with merely being ambassador to the federal republic of germany. this was long ago when the embassy was there and he wasn't there all that long but aa did he make a lot out of that. including intellectually. one of the great historians of our time whose books sold here over the years and nly richard would come up with the idea of the sickly kidnapping him from columbia and new york and taking them to have an intellectual mentor to understand what was going on, and even though he was there rather briefly, he, nonexistent -- [laughter] she still not only gave the job his all but even going after other things come he was the driving force in establishing the american academy in berlin which is and in perpetuity legacy to him and deal is here tonight who is one of the leaders of that venture. of course he had been an assistant secretary as a very young man in the carter administration and as he reached a more senior part of his own career he had every reason to expect that he would return to the higher floor in the state department, the assistant secretaries were on the sixth floor of the deputy secateurs, undersecretary of the seventh floor he ended up on the first floor somewhere between the cafeteria and the men's room with a shingle on the door that said it srap, not a title that he never aspired to, special representative in pakistan, and he gave it his all. that brings me to the second to last point that i will make. he was a complete realist. he was never under any illusion about how much could be accomplished how fast. in fact he knew that it was very likely to be his last mission. he certainly had every reason to hope and did hope that it wouldn't be the end of his life. certainly had no idea that he would die on the job and go into his final trauma in the office of the secretary of state in talking about policy. but he certainly knew that was about as close to being a mission impossible as there was, but it could be their different ways that you could do a mission impossible and you can make something of a worthwhile and variable for the national interest standpoint even out of mission impossible and he did that and a testament to that i think is that while many of the things that he advocated when he was in that position were very controversial including internally within the u.s. government agreed to deal of what has happened in the year since his death has more or less the track with what she recommended. and there's a particular irony in his last mission when it you will get it against the backdrop of his first mission which was vietnam and there is a very good chapter in the book on vietnam by gordon gould steam. richard started off in his career as a public servant with trying to make something salvage something and succeeding in salvaging something working with people like that on the policy that had gone quite wrong. and that is in a way what he did at the end of his career as well. and what that says is among other things he had absolute confidence she didn't like the sort of very much american exhibition was some and the degree to which american foreign policy can, advancing values and advancing interest and we are uniquely in the position to lead in the world, but things can still go very, very wrong. and he was constantly -- if he were not such a robustly good humored and optimistic person i'd say she almost had a tragic sense about what it means to lead the world particularly in these changing circumstances. the last thing i would say that takes us back to the business that this store is in and all of you are in because you are here as readers come he was the reader, big-time. i can never figure out how he found the time to read as much as he did. not to mention to write as much as he did coming and i think that in some ways, kati, while his career was that of a diplomat, she always thought of himself as a we were journalist. >> and historian. she had a very acute sense of history. i've never known an american because this is more a european trade if i may say so who had such a sharp sense of history and the continuum of history. actually there was a phrase he used a lot, the continuum of history. so those two things, diplomacy and history to him were absolutely intertwined. and i think that is what gives his writings going back to his earliest efforts 30 or 40 years ago there is i think, and you will be the judge, it's a perspective that one rarely find some journalism. i am a journalist in time the child of journalist. i have the highest regard for that profession, but richard had a somehow -- i think you put it beautifully just now, he had a tragic sense of -- he was certainly deeply aware of the existence of evil in the world which most americans are not. we are famously optimistic. richard had god knows nearly a decade in the balkans brought him face-to-face with evil, evil in the heart of europe and the 20th century murderous genocidal warfare, but a part of him wasn't surprised. perhaps he was just one generation removed from the holocaust. his mother was a german jew, his father was a russian fleeing the communist, so the to 20th century catastrophes were in his bloodstream and i do believe that had something to do with his deep sense of the tragic component of history, but as you said, and as we know, he somehow managed to be with all that one of the most optimistic can do people you and i have ever met. right? he just wasn't a thwarted man coming you know, to your us talk about the fact he didn't get the nobel peace prize. he didn't get the nod for secretary of state. was this man and unfulfilled man not in the least? >> a happy warrior. and as a good writer he was also a good editor which melissa takes us back to the help he gave you and samantha has a fabulous chatter on mentoring and it is among other things and added up to one of the stupid raps on richard which is he was always looking for people believe the people's shoulders because if he was looking over your shoulder it's because you were boring him and if the person he was spotting coming into the room was very likely a young up-and-coming foreign service officer he withheld. why don't we go to questions? [applause] >> anybody with questions if you could go to the microphone and just give your name that would be great. >> my name is chris kneal. is this working? i would like to ask because he loved history who were some of his hero's both in the diplomacy and as former president secretary of state for others and also in journalism who were some of his models? >> george kennon's whose biography is on sale just to the right as you come in over their. [laughter] >> are you employed by this establishment, strobe? [laughter] >> but george kennan for sure he wrote a very insightful i don't even remember if it was a column or what, he understood the complexity which comes through clearly in the book, but what he really appreciated like richard himself, george kennan was very much a historian and he went on from his diplomatic career to write the pulitzer prize-winning histories. george kennan was a writer, and he accomplished much more from the newly created mittal brank position in the state department of the director of policy planning than he left a bigger and longer legacy than many secretaries of state said he identified with him for sure. >> in addition to george cannon, dean acheson was a particular icon of his. april here man who was his first mentor who really ploch to this officer and took him to paris with him for the vietnam peace negotiations richard always called him the governor and considered him a great role model because in his seventies, herron and took a job as a assistant secretary of state because he wanted to search and he didn't give a damn whether he had the coroner office or the seventh floor or the basement, he just wanted to serve and god knows aver al-haramain didn't need the job. [laughter] the gentleman asked about the journalist. this is not an irony. it's sort of a appropriate coming of the full circle. he very much admired the work of george packer who writes of course about the new yorker and did some superb stuff and george is going to be doing a serious biography of richard's. >> other questions? >> dewey -- yes. this is the gentleman who played a big role in richard holbrooke's career, rufus phillips. first of all, would you tell everybody how you know richard and the role that you did play in his career? >> that's very kind of you to ask me that. i was going to tell the story about him but -- >> go ahead. >> i was his first loss in saigon and he had arrived as a very young foreign service officer with plenty of spirit, which is i think a trademark of his. we had a very difficult province where they would not cooperate, and so i removed the fellow who was down there and sent richard down there even though he had only been in the country for about three or four months. and he performed magnificently. he didn't let it bother him that they were not cooperative, and so there was a part of his spirit but the story that i wanted to tell is a very personal one in terms of his generosity for his friends, for people who worked for him. i remember my wife and i went to see him when he was ambassador to the u.n. because he had written a foreward for another book about the vietnam vet told the story of iran and its companions in the role of affairs and he wanted me to look at it and review it and i did. i sat down with him and i said this is very good, but it is to laudatory. you really should tone it down and he looked at me and she said you are no longer my boss. [laughter] and then he took us around and introduced us personally to everyone in his office. and that was so typical. so i just wanted to leave you with that picture of him which is something that i retain here forever. >> thank you so much for sharing that. you were very important to him. [applause] >> i'm still with the state department and a colleague of richard's for many years. his role, he's known for his role in the balkans. he is less known but should be more known for his role in the unification of europe after the end of the cold war. he came back from germany with one big idea command was several big ideas but one in particular it was called nato enlargement but that isn't really what it was about. it was about uniting europe and the racing the lines of the cold war, and when he arrived in washington in '94, this idea of uniting europe was on popular, beleaguered minority and rather tattered with the scorn of the general bureaucracy within about three months it was u.s. policy and on the road to success, and it is so successful it's seldom remarked upon. but this year we lost richard holbrooke and also ron who was one of richard's proteges and one of the people who made this happen. so he deserves remembrance for not only the peace in stopping the war in the balkans but extending piece on a very wide stage. >> amen. >> thank you. [applause] >> my name is eleanor. i'm not a prominent person from his life, but it has occurred to me sitting here that i experienced the bulldozer affect at the beginning of my career and the end late as it were in the beginning i was a shy freshman at brown who thought he wanted to be a journalist and richard was the big important editor of the brown daily herald known as the bdh who chewed me out enormously on something i wrote. so i didn't actually become a journalist. [laughter] >> i'm so sorry. [laughter] at the end -- than i was working for the u.s. aid and the economic growth office in kabul when he became s srap and implemented some new procedures but i'm sorry that he wasn't able to complete that terribly important and probably hopeless task. one of the things i've been reflecting on though is that it was well known at brown that he was going into the foreign service. i think that he was one of the very few who actually got to go into the foreign service right from college, and in those days, which i know because i personally pursued a career in public service also, but those were the unusual days i didn't know at that time when the public service government career was considered honorable come even the prestigious, a