Let me just tell you a slice of the incredible story of why he accepted the position as President Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—and why he soldiered on in the face of poor treatment by the White House and the virtual impossibility of the task itself.

Dick took the envoy position because the United States faced no greater challenge. The challenge was to stop the killing, make “a peace” if possible, and sharply diminish America’s combat role as quickly as possible. The other reason for taking the job was that he was devoted to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was not threatened by his formidable talents, and she saved his job at least twice. (She also was Herculean in making arrangements to try to save his life when he was stricken in her office.) They were a great team. And as a practical matter, he was really Clinton’s envoy far more than Obama’s.

The answer to the second question—why Holbrooke stayed on given Obama’s attitude toward him and the virtual impossibility of the task—is very complicated. Holbrooke was loyal to the president. He never said a bad word about him to me, a quite unusual occurrence. But the chemistry didn’t work between them. Dick, as was his custom with superiors, flattered Obama excessively. Dick also “lectured” him, and the president is the kind of guy who felt he ought to be doing the lecturing. It was a clash as well of two very powerful intellects. Obama could have learned a lot from Holbrooke, but wasn’t disposed to do so. The result was that Holbrooke wasn’t given the power of the Oval Office in doing his job. Characteristic of the man, if he couldn’t do his work one way, he would search for others. But it was hard.

From the outset, Holbrooke was hamstrung. He knew that Americans and Afghans both had no chance unless the government in Kabul shaped up. President George W. Bush let President Hamid Karzai do whatever he wanted. So, Holbrooke went to Kabul and blasted Karzai for the corruption, inefficiency, and illegitimacy of his government. That was precisely the right move. Karzai had to understand that Washington was now going to get serious. But Karzai, no fool and no amateur bargainer himself, told Holbrooke’s bosses he wouldn’t talk to the envoy, period. Obama let that injunction stand until fairly recently, and that killed Holbrooke—and the U.S.—with Karzai. Instead, the president should have responded to Karzai’s ploy by picking up the phone and telling the Afghan leader that he would either have to speak to Holbrooke or he’d speak to no one.

Why did Holbrooke stay on in the face of all this and the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan itself? The answer shows another side of the man. He had little or no illusions about the limitations of American power to defeat the Taliban. But it was his job, his duty, his mission, to try anyway. So, he did his thing, which was not to create new grand strategies for solutions. Rather, his style was to learn everything about Afghanistan, then turn on his acute radar and wait for openings, for chances to ease America into a much more modest role in Afghanistan. He and Mrs. Clinton cooked up the idea of inserting the word “transition” in the NATO communiqué this past November. It was a wedge to move policy decisions along a bit faster toward troop drawdowns and turn over responsibility earlier to the Afghans. He also wanted to test all possible waters for talks with the Taliban, just in case. And he wanted to work with Kabul’s neighbors to establish a future alliance to contain Afghan extremism. As for Pakistan, he hoped to put the leaders there on the same or similar strategic trajectory with Washington. This was a long shot, but neither he nor the White House was prepared for more drastic approaches. The point was this: If the United States was not going to walk away from the sinkholes of AfPak, Dick Holbrooke wasn’t going to walk away either. Better in his mind for him than someone else to stay on and battle out policy at home and abroad.

Richard C. Holbrooke was the most luminescent foreign-policy figure of my generation. He was a unique personality, brilliant, a great diplomat, irresistible despite his obsessiveness about matters miniscule and mountainous, a Renaissance man in his interests and knowledge, controversial, beset with detractors almost as legion as admirers, both a formidable foreign-policy mind and bureaucratic swordsman, both a clever and too obvious maneuverer, mesmerizing in his intellectual sparkle and his energy.

He was the only person I could imagine capable of doing something truly Herculean on the diplomatic front. Friend and foe alike would agree that he was a human tidal wave.

Dick Holbrooke spent his youth being smart and useful to the titans of yore: Averell Harriman, General Maxwell Taylor, Henry Cabot Lodge, Clark Clifford, Dean Rusk, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. He saw he could be among them in their international deeds.

Making peace would be his trampoline to greatness and his pedestal.

Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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wsteed,
I must plead guilty to not having read Mr. Holbrooke’s To End a War. I would defend my citation of the commentary of Mr. Scheer on the death of Mr. Holbrooke as legitimate,on it face. Mr. Scheer, who covered the Vietnam War as a correspondent and became a legitimate and serious critic of American Foreign Policy, thereafter. I also admit that the tone in my reply was hyperbolic and that was intentional, as an antidote to the mawkish apologetics of Mr. Gelb. American Foreign policy is addicted to the notion of our exceptionalism as beyond critique: Mr. Holbrooke was both invested in a national and personal concept of our and his exceptionalism as nation and being: he was an egoist whose personal and national obsessions were destructive of the lives and and aspiration of others, whose wills were subject to his political/ethical carelessness. See Longboard1’s post for a more tightly focused appraisal of The Great Man. As for being a No-Nothing, I would say that that is a matter of your own use of the hyperbolic. Best regards .