here to lobby you.”
“I’m very efficient,” he said. “I just turned your lobbying into a job interview.”
My own interview was, likewise, distinctive.
“WHAT SHOULD WE BE DOING DIFFERENTLY?” Holbrooke shouted over the hiss of the shower he was taking in the middle of that job interview. From the next room over, I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
It was the culmination of a sprawling, hours-long meeting, which had ranged from his office, to the secretary of state’s, to his townhouse in Georgetown. I had followed up on Clinton’s advice at the preinaugural party at The Fairfax and begun talking to Holbrooke and his chief of staff, Rosemarie Pauli. A little over a month later, in March 2009, I arrived at the State Department to meet with him in person. He barreled out of his office, lobbing policy questions at me. How would I reinvigorate trade in Central Asia? How would I maximize the impact of assistance to the Pakistanis? Never mind that I was a wet-behind-the-ears lawyer, with a modest foreign policy background in Africa, not Afghanistan. I’d worked with local nongovernmental groups in the developing world, and Holbrooke wanted to ramp up the United States’ emphasis on those groups—a change of culture in a war zone where most of the implementation happened through powerful American contractors. He wanted nontraditional answers, unencumbered by government experience.
The State Department, in DC’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, is an imposing slab of stripped classical architecture, clad in limestone and built, in portions, in the 1930s and 1950s. The earliest part of the complex was intended for the growing War Department after World War I, though with the construction of the more ambitious Pentagon, it never actually became the military’s headquarters. The looming rear entrance to the building is still known as the War Department—a flourish of irony, for the seat of American peacemaking. The Department is a literal hierarchy, with opulent ceremonial rooms for receiving foreign dignitaries on the eighth floor, the secretary’s office on the seventh, and offices of roughly descending importance on the floors beneath. During Holbrooke’s prodigious turn as assistant secretary in his mid-thirties, he had occupied an office complex on the sixth floor. Now, he’d been relegated to the first, next to the cafeteria—where Robin Raphel was later deposited, and across the hall from the Department newsstand, where Holbrooke would load up on junk food between meetings.
Our walk-and-talk started in his office and moved into the hallway, then up to the seventh floor and the secretary of state’s ornate, wood-paneled office. He moved briskly through the entire conversation, only occasionally making eye contact, aides hurrying after him and handing him papers. He paused my answers frequently to take calls on his BlackBerry. This was not real-life government, where meetings are seated and staid. This was government as dramatized by Aaron Sorkin.
Holbrooke and I, and a veteran CIA officer Holbrooke was also lobbying to join his team, Frank Archibald, met with Clinton briefly in the antechamber outside her office. He outlined a dazzling vision for the roles we’d play. Repackaged and artfully marketed by Holbrooke, every underling was a one-person revolution. Archibald was going to single-handedly heal suspicions between State and the CIA. I was going to realign American assistance to NGOs. Amiri, I heard him say on numerous occasions, had written the Afghan constitution. (As he worked up a particular lather about this at one function, she leaned in and whispered in my ear: “I did not write the Afghan constitution.”) None of us had any business interviewing with the secretary of state for our jobs, but many of us did, through dint of Holbrooke’s willpower. Holbrooke had leaned on the patronage of great men himself, from Scotty Reston at the Times to Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman. He wanted to be the man that people would say was that kind of man, and he was.
After meeting with the secretary, we had returned to Holbrooke’s office suite on the first floor, where he’d picked up his luggage. He had just returned from a trip and had to go home to change before an afternoon meeting at the White House. He passed me a suitcase and out we went to hail a cab, not interrupting the flow of questions. Would I favor more overt United States branding on USAID assistance in the region? How would I enlist local watchdog groups in ensuring electoral transparency? I had just recovered from several years in a wheelchair, the result of a bone marrow infection left untreated while working in Sudan. Holbrooke was aware of this but characteristically oblivious to it in the moment. I hobbled after him with his luggage. When we arrived at his Georgetown town house, he headed upstairs—not asking, naturally, just carrying on with the conversation. He left the bathroom door ajar and peed. “What about negotiations with the Taliban?” he asked demurely. “Really?” I said. “What?” he replied innocently from behind the bathroom door, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. And for him, it was—virtually everyone seemed to have a story about Holbrooke meetings in bathrooms. He poked his head out, unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m going to hop in the shower.” I stood outside the door. The job interview continued.
Many Holbrooke wooed hesitated. Rina Amiri, worried about her outspoken views on human rights being muted, held out for a month. Barnett Rubin made it a condition that he be allowed to keep his academic perch at NYU part time. I myself wasn’t convinced. The State Department wasn’t a glamorous career move. “I would go to Davis Polk,” one law school classmate wrote to me, referring to the law firm where I had a job offer. “What is the point of these technocratic positions? Do you really want to spend forty years trying to move your way up? If you work really hard you might end up where Holbrooke is himself, which is a whole lot of nowhere, really. Fuck that.”
But Holbrooke brought to every job he ever held a visionary quality that transcended practical considerations. He talked openly about changing the world. “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes,” Henry Kissinger said. “If you say no, you’ll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful.” We all said yes.
By the summer, Holbrooke had assembled his Ocean’s Eleven heist team—about thirty of us, from different disciplines and agencies, with and without government experience. In the Pakistani press, the colorful additions to the team were watched closely, and generally celebrated. Others took a dimmer view. “He got this strange band of characters around him. Don’t attribute that to me,” a senior military leader told me. “His efforts to bring into the State Department representatives from all of the agencies that had a kind of stake or contribution to our efforts, I thought was absolutely brilliant,” Hillary Clinton said, “and everybody else was fighting tooth and nail.”
It was only later, when I worked in the wider State Department bureaucracy as Clinton’s director of global youth issues during the Arab Spring, that I realized how singular life was in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—quickly acronymed, like all things in government, to SRAP. The drab, low-ceilinged office space next to the cafeteria was about as far from the colorful open workspaces of Silicon Valley as you could imagine, but it had the feeling of a start-up. The office was soon graced with cameos from eclectic and unexpected faces. Holbrooke hosted a procession of journalists, to whom he remained as close as he had in previous jobs. Prominent lawmakers visited. He met with Angelina Jolie about refugees and Natalie Portman about microfinance. Holbrooke knew what he was doing was counterculture, and he believed it to be historic. There were reminders of his view of our place in history everywhere. Even his office was a shrine to wars that came before. In framed pictures on the walls, there he was, smiling in the Mekong Delta; there he was with Bill Clinton in East Timor, or in Sarajevo flanked by armed guards. “Are you keeping a journal?” he’d ask me. “One day you’ll write about this.”
CLINTON HAD TOLD HOLBROOKE he would be the direct civilian counterpart to General David Petraeus, who was then the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), the powerful
