And im sure most of you know georges byline very wellin the atlantic now and new yorker before that for a decade or two. Fifteen years. You probably know his most recent book the assassins is the most important chronicle of the early years of the iraq war, the unwinding which won the National Book award in 2014 2030. And now his new book, our man we were thrilled to have an expert in Foreign Affairs in this issue and focusing on two pieces of the book of enoch and afghanistan which we will talk about in the course of this conversation but i recommend the piece heartily not as a substitute for the book but as a teaser. Im confident if you read the 8000 words in Foreign Affairs will go on to read the entire 500 or so pages in the hardcover edition. It is a really extraordinary fascinating book. Both as a chronicle of an infection on American Foreign policy and diplomacy and war over the half century or so in which Richard Holbrook was a central player but also in its portrait of this individual and almost great man and its a complicated, rich novelistic portrait of holbrook and many of you in this room probably know. George, i want to start not with the Foreign Policy in the policy and war but by asking you a question that is maybe not entirely fitting for the council on Foreign Relations with thats about how you chose to write this book. It reads anyways more like Joseph Conrad or bram green and the usual biographies of the diplomats or statements that many of us are accustomed to reading. Thats exactly what i wanted to hear, dan. Thank you. Put that on the paperback if you would like. Please. [laughter] there is so much to but one interesting choice and that is the narrative voice. Essentially you invent a narrator is not exactly George Packer but funding for the different witches a risky choice in some ways for a book like this and i say that because so many of the reviewers seem to have missed that entirely. Maybe i was too subtle, i dont know. I want to emphasize this is not evan morris is dutch and no inventions and no fantasized past for me or for Richard Holbrook. Its all effectual as i can make it but the voice let me read the first paragraph and give the audience a little taste of it. If you could read and talk about why you made the choice. Yeah, so that when talking to abstractly. Holbrook, yes, i knew him. I cant get his voice out of my head and i still hear it saying you have not read that book and you really need to. Saying i feel and hope this does not sound too self satisfied that in a very difficult situation when i want the answer i, at least, know the overall questions and moving parts. Or saying, got to go, hillary is on the line. That voice, calm, nasal, a trace of older new york. A singsong cadence when they were being playful but always doing something to you, controlling, flattering, pulling, seducing, needling, analyzing and one upping you and applying continuous pressure like a strong underwater current. By the end of a conversation even two minutes on the phone you found yourself far out from her you had started, unsure how you got there and mysteriously exhausted. So, one day i was driving and heard this voice in my head which is not a normal thing for me. Im pretty rational guy and the voice said holbrook, yes, i knew him. It intrigued me because it was so much livelier and more energetic than the typical biographical narrative voice i had been trying to work within and growing very frustrated with because i dont know if all of you feel this way but i find biographies are often boring and there are these long stretches where you have to plod through passages of the life that the biographer is scrupulously going to every detail and you want to get on with it and get to the thing you are interested in. How do you handle that. I thought if i tried out the narration in a voice that says idiosyncratic in particular as if its a person, not quite me. Thats not my voice. That is someone a little older woman who knew him better than i did with someone who might have been a colleague of his or just has been an eyewitness to his whole story then it could really have the life that a reader wants from a biography. Rather than he was born on such and such a date and went to such and such a high school. Once i tried that out it liberated me to do all kinds of things with the narrative i would not have done otherwise to take risks. At what stage did you settle with us in the process . I was sort of in a crisis. I had spent two and half years interviewing 250 people including Rufus Phillips who was holbrooks broth in saigon in 1963 and reading through hundreds of pages of his personal papers which his widow gave me after he died and had all the usual biographical material but i felt crushed by it. How do i turn all this material and he lived this long, full life and knew everyone seemed to turn up everywhere. Hillary clinton said he was the selling of American Foreign policy. How do i turn it into a good book and so i was in this crisis of how to write it when that voice popped into my head and seems like my salvation because it would allow me to tell a story, a yarn rather than build a monument which i did not want to do. I wanted it to feel as if you are listening to a particular person who just happens to somehow note the whole story and telling it to you over a very long night without ever heading into who i interviewed and what documents i read in all the mechanics of research which i thought would kill the book. Was there something about homework and his personality that made the voice work or when you use it for john kerry or Madeleine Albright . Carrie, yes i knew him it just is not quite have the sam same i mean, holbrook. The name itself had kind of had this energy surrounding it both good and bad. He became a name when people said have you heard what holbrook did everyone knows what that means. The name already has the very beginning holbrook, yes, i knew him assumes a listener has asked the question did you know holbrook and why would someone want to know if i knew holbrook because people want to hear about holbrook and there is something outsized and mesmerizing about the sheer size of his personality and ambitions and appetites and flaws that fit a big capacious narrative voice and that, i think, a more contained subjects like john kerry would not be well served by the book is also nontraditional as you note in the way you struck the narrati narrative. You very happy to skip over large portions of his life and acknowledge that youre doing it as its happening to focus on when you see the event that shaped him in the three pillars of the book as i read it vietnam, bosley and dean and afghanistan where he ended his career just before he died. Had to ask myself how do i handle his ambassadorship in germany . Yes, he did things including losing behind the American Academy in berlin but readers dont want to know very much about that and thats more like a resume item than a core part of a story you are telling about a man who is trying to get things done and who embodies certain american attributes. So, i have a line like he did other things that you dont need to know about but what matters is that direct address to the reader which keeps me back when my narrator is breaking convention or do you mind if we hurry through the early years as the first sentence of the first full chapter and some readers have said i just wanted to hug you want to read that line because yeah, i dont mind at all please, i dont need to know where he went to elementary school. I want to focus on the first of the pillars. Vietnam and its really extraordinary for me as someone who could study vietnam in retrospect as a blunder to go back to these early years of the war when people like holbrook with this incredible ambition and the real idea he went to vietnam as a Foreign Service officer but was there incredible cast of journalists like david [inaudible] and Frankie Fitzgerald and military officers all of whom when he arrived in 1963 and have this hope for the war and the failure of those hopes in this disillusionment with the war in the next several years looms over his entire career in the entire book. Let me steal a question that you quote from my former boss, jim steinberg, who somewhat younger and around holbrook hearing him talk about being on endlessly comes back and says what happened to these guys in vietnam and why does this shape public . Steinberg came back from a white house meeting on bosnia in which holbrook and his close friend turned enemy, anthony lake, were locked in some conflict and they were others, peter who were all part of that vietnam generation and attention and energy and anger was so thick that he said what the hell happened to those guys in vietnam . Something must have happened. First of all, i wanted to create a world of the young diplomat. Is not a world many writers have approached and we usually get vietnam from the point of view from soldiers and marines or from the very top, from generals and investors and policymakers back in washington. I found this world of young civilians in saigon and in the provinces early in the war to be compelling and they were idealist and holbrook saw the war in vietnam as this foreign equivalent of what was happening in birmingham at the same summary in 1963 and wrote a letter to his brother saying your home and should be martin and if i were home i would be doing that, too. Instead im biting here fighting in the rice patties but he saw himself as essentially the same american mission. We forget how much of that was animated even these great skeptics of the war were not for withdrawal but were for winning by fighting the war better as john paul was instructing them to do. Holbrook was part of that mindset and because i have all his letters which he wrote to his fiancee i could track the stages of doubt as they took over his very sharp mind. He was almost immediately turned to by Rufus Phillips which was where the most war was most intense and vietcong were winning except that the high command in saigon and the embassy in the white house did not know that and at age 22 holbrook was a senior american civilian in this entire province and essentially doing aid and Counter Insurgency work on the inside which became his signature and immediately two things. The reports going to saigon were misleading, if not outright false because he could see the strategic cameras were collapsing and was not 324 of them functioning in his province and by the time the report that the washington no one questioned it and the other thing he realized when our strength and Technology Power was actually hurting us because we were going into hamlets with those and killing civilians and creating vietcong supervisors and he began to question both the assessment and the tactics right away and is not shy about telling his superior so you could see this courage and is clear idleness when he was very young but it took to go through the final stages of disillusionment to reach a point where he believed the war cannot be won and we had to negotiate with the north vietnamese but when he had to watch a very bright young man right in the thick of the action go through the transformation through the doubt and holbrook did that. Is incredibly compelling for those of us who saw this in retrospect and i should take a quick detour to bosnia in 1990s into dayton which was, i think, you would agree holbrooks greatest, schmidt that he was most known for in this incredible energetic negotiation to end the war in ohio in the 1990s started the negotiations in ohio but the war was in bosnia. You do incredible job in this chapter showing holbrooks relentlessness but also the kind of theatrics and trivia that comes into diplomacy and Foreign Policy making as you go through this negotiation and you show, i think here is much as a role in the book what made holbrook and almost great statesmen. This is where you see him at his best. You end with a somewhat less triumphant take on dayton in that, schmidt and what it meant that i wanted to ask you to read one more passage which i thought was compelling. First, let me Say Something about bosnia. The passage is at the end. Holbrook in that same spirit of young Foreign Service officers in vietnam wanted to see that was always in animating impulse so he went to sarajevo as a private citizen new years eve 92 and cannot get a job from bill clinton and waited 12 years to get back into government and cannot get a job when the democrat was elected. Why . He had alienated all the people around bill clinton. We have not discussed holbrook gargantuan faults but they were many and were, in some ways, fatal for him. By the time the brass ring, got together anthony lake was his enemy and he was at bill clinton side and keeping holbrook out along with others. Cannot get a job and went to sarajevo in the salk. It is something i really admire and he found a way to get into this besieged city to spend very little time but enough time to feel what the war was and to get it under his skin. He felt this was a war of aggression and of serb aggression against the multiethnic city and the europeans are standing by and are unable or unwilling to stop if we have to be involved. He came back to washington animated with that idea which no one in the Clinton Administration wanted to hear and for the next 2. 5 years clinton dithered and became distracted and did not want to confront this bleeding wound in the middle of europe and i think albrecht had to take from vietnam the right lesson clinton took from the lesson dont get involved in for holbrook there was nothing dawson but dont get involved in a civil war of nationalism that we dont understand. And that we cant win. But bosnia he saw differently more like a kind of fascist war. In that case he felt we had to be involved. Others had been paralyzed by vietnam and holbrook did not. He negotiated the end of the war which was a triumph and showed his persistence and persuasive powers and people think of him as a bully in the policy but really he was tenacious and a great student of the adversary. He can be charming and charismatic. And willing to spend eight hours eating lamb and rice but albrecht did not drink because he wanted to stay sober while [inaudible] would get drunk and sober up and get drunk again and holbrook had the patience to wait amount until finally he said the president , you have to end the siege at sarajevo and i do not understand how hard the policy was until i got into holbrooks life and how much stamina it takes and i picture it like climbing a mountain in just been able to breathe at a high altitude. I will read this passage. Is on 395. Dayton was the great crown of his career and thought it had earned him the Nobel Peace Prize and went to oslo to make his case which youre not supposed to do. Thats very holbrook. Bill clinton said to [inaudible] he probably would have gotten it if you not tried so hard but and yet you look back at the and begins to reseed and so anyway, heres the passage. History is officially brutal with our dreams. Dayton is not the highest peak after all. It wasnt the Marshall Plan for the opening to china. It solved a nasty problem but did not create something new and big. For those who lived through the war who suffered on the inside or cared on the outside but bosnia was immense and all that mattered but albrecht devoted three years of his life to a small war in an obscure place with no consequences in the long run beyond itself. The disproportion between effort and significance, i respect him for it. Heres this from ecclesiastes that i associate with holbrook. Whatsoever thy hand find it to do, do it with thy might. But dayton did not mark a new path onward and upward in the american story. It was closer to the end of something. I dont know if i need to go on but yeah, i feel that dayton in some way was a false hope and it seemed at the time as if we now have the way was clear for america values and interests to be perfectly married because russia was not a factor in china was not yet a factor and we had a free hand and we could use our diplomacy and our military and our ideals to solve these problems around the world and the chaos that followed the cold war. Turns out it was a oneoff. In retrospect, it was maybe the High Water Mark of the postcold war as the beginning of a new era. You also note that skeptics of dayton and the u. S. Policy or lessons drawn from u. S. Policy from the dayton experience draw a long line of them stealing your language from dayton to iraq and that dayton is seen as the humanitarian face of american hubris, as you put it what are the right lessons from dayton and what did holbrook take from it into the 2000 . It did lead to a certain overconfidence and kosovo may be further that even though kosovo was a messy war that anyone expected and i think the bread and overconfidence in people like me and liberals who suddenly fell in love with this idea that American Military could be a tool for trinitarianism and that was what holbrook embodied in that era. It was the insider who seemed most comfortable with humanitarian intervention with Madeleine Albright was the other one. After 911 it was a different Playing Field entirely but he saw iraq in some ways as an extension of the same we have a terrible dictator here and the ability to get read of him and we should work with the un but if you cant we dont need to because the rent was not there and it was the problem in bosnia and not the solution in bosnia and kosovo the rent was not involved and we did not go through the un in the war in kosovo so i think it created ideas that were destructively misleading. In some ways we are always learning the lesson of the last war. Albrecht grew up with a great generation that created the postwar institutions. For him, world war ii and nato and the one were what American Foreign policy was about in vietnam comes along and its an application of that and the wrong place. Bosnia comes along in a whole new generation tries to apply vietnam and