Richard Holbrooke

Chief Negotiator in 1995 Dayton Accords

Former German Ambassador to the United Nations and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs

Former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Richard Holbrooke was born in New York City to a European Jewish couple who had fled the Nazis in the 1930s. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 1962, he joined the Foreign Service and was posted to Vietnam until 1966. His experience there and in Washington, D.C., on Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam staff led to his being named a junior member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Talks in 1968–69. After serving as Peace Corps director in Morocco from 1970 to 1972, he edited the quarterly magazine Foreign Policy (1972–76). He returned to the government in 1977 when Pres. Jimmy Carter appointed him assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. From 1981 to 1985 Holbrooke was both vice president of Public Strategies, a Washington consulting firm, and senior adviser to the New York investment firm Lehman Brothers; he then served as managing director of Lehman Brothers from 1985 until 1993. In 1996 he became vice chairman of Crédit Suisse First Boston.

Holbrooke served in the administration of Pres. Bill Clinton as ambassador to Germany (1993–94) and assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs (1994–95). In that role, he spent much of his time focused on the Balkans, and he was the chief U.S. negotiator between belligerent parties in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The 1995 Dayton Accords, achieved through his unorthodox mix of diplomacy, bluffing, and bullying, laid the groundwork for a lasting peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Considered briefly in late 1996 as a possible candidate for secretary of state, Holbrooke lost the position to Madeleine Albright. In 1997, however, he was appointed special envoy to Cyprus, where he attempted to broker a settlement of the two-decade-old dispute over that island between Greece and Turkey.

In 1998 Holbrooke returned to the Balkans to attempt to negotiate a cease-fire between Serbs and the ethnic Albanian majority in the ongoing Kosovo conflict. In this instance, Holbrooke’s shuttle diplomacy was unable to bring the fighting to a close, and a tenuous peace was achieved only after NATO warplanes began attacking targets in the Serb capital of Belgrade. After a prolonged Senate confirmation process, Holbrooke was seated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1999. As ambassador, he negotiated the settlement of a dispute concerning some $900 million in back dues owed to the UN by the United States. He left government in 2001 to serve as vice president of Perseus LLC, a private equity fund. After Pres. Barack Obama took office in January 2009, Holbrooke was named special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.