Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Diplomat and Patriot, 1941-2010

Richard Holbrooke -- the indomitable, exuberant and, at times, Machiavellian diplomat who brokered the lasting 1995 Bosnian peace accords -- died Monday night in Washington in the wake of emergency surgery for a burst aorta. The 69-year-old Holbrooke, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration and was named by Barack Obama to the thankless (but vital) post of special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, became ill Friday in the midst of a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Holbrooke had been near the center of Democratic Party foreign policy since 1962, when he arrived in Saigon as a junior foreign service officer (Secretary of State Dean Rusk was the father of a high school friend). But his driving dream of becoming secretary of state was derailed by national politics (particularly the presidential defeats of Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton) and probably the enemies he made because of his sometimes brusque manner. But rather than withdrawing from the fray, Holbrooke used every tool in his formidable arsenal to make the best of secondary jobs (ambassador to Germany in Bill Clinton's first term) that he was given as consolation prizes.

In the introduction to his memoir, "To End a War," recounting the Bosnian negotiations that produced the Dayton Accords, Holbrooke wrote, "In an age when the media pays more attention to personalities than to issues, Americans may conclude that public service is either just another job, or a game played for personal advancement." Holbrooke's unrelenting ambition was sometimes mocked, but there was no questioning his commitment to public service.

At a 1998 White House Rose Garden ceremony marking his nomination as U.N. ambassador, Holbrooke unsuccessfully fought back the tears as he talked about his father taking him to the United Nations as a small boy and telling him that these buildings "would prevent future wars." Both of Holbrooke's parents -- his father Dan, a doctor, and his mother Trudi -- were European refugees who arrived in New York during the 1930s. Growing up in the New York suburbs, Holbrooke attended Brown University, where he wrangled his way to Paris in 1960 as a student reporter covering the U.S.-Soviet Summit.

As Obama's envoy to the most troubled turf on the planet (Afghanistan and Pakistan), Holbrooke had been an unswerving critic of the corruption and incompetence of Hamid Karzai's Afghan government. Holbrooke, who as a young foreign service officer wrote a volume of the Pentagon Papers, understood through the prism of his Vietnam experience the risks of fighting a war on behalf of an unpopular regime. But Holbrooke was also an early critic of Bush administration's 2002 failure to commit adequate troops to pacify Afghanistan, in contrast to the 60,000 NATO soldiers who maintained the peace, after the Dayton Accord, in the Balkans.

An investment banker between stints in government (he served under every Democratic president from Kennedy to Obama), Holbrooke had been married for nearly two decades to his third wife, the writer and former TV correspondent Kati Marton. During the early Clinton years, Holbrooke's love life made him the first major U.S. diplomat to be a regular in the gossip pages since the days when Henry Kissinger was an unlikely secret swinger. Holbrooke had a long romantic involvement with news anchor Diane Sawyer while Marton was married to news anchor Peter Jennings.

Undoubtedly, in part, because his father died comparatively young during the 1950s, Holbrooke was touched by a sense of fatalism. He considered accompanying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown on his fatal 1994 flight that crashed in a rainstorm off the Croatian coast. And in 1995, on the road to Sarajevo, Holbrooke's convoy came under heavy fire and three American diplomats accompanying him were killed. Harking back to these experiences in a 2000 magazine interview with my wife, Meryl Gordon, Holbrooke said: "There is no sense in being haunted. Isn't life a game of inches?"

Dick Holbrooke -- in power, out of power, or on the cusp of power -- was always a larger-than-life figure. Asked about pacing himself during that 2000 magazine interview, Holbrooke, then U.N. ambassador, said, "What does that mean -- pace myself?" Sadly, for this vital man of head and heart, whose dreams and ambitions were as outsized as his persona, his aorta literally burst in the service of his country.