74 Facts About Richard Holbrooke

Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was an American diplomat and author.

Richard Holbrooke was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world.

Richard Holbrooke was long well-known among journalists and in diplomatic circles.

Richard Holbrooke was a prime contender to succeed Warren Christopher as Secretary of State but was passed over in 1996 as President Bill Clinton chose Madeleine Albright instead.

From 1999 to 2001, Richard Holbrooke served as US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Richard Holbrooke was an adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry in 2004.

Richard Holbrooke then joined the 2008 presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton and became a top foreign policy adviser.

Richard Holbrooke was considered a likely candidate for Secretary of State had Kerry or Hillary Clinton been elected president.

In January 2009, Richard Holbrooke was appointed as a special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan, working under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

On December 13,2010, Richard Holbrooke died from complications of an aortic dissection.

Richard Holbrooke was born on April 24,1941, in New York City, to Dan Richard Holbrooke, a doctor, and Trudi Kearl, a potter; brother, Andrew, survives him.

Holbrooke's father, who died of colon cancer when Richard was 15 years old, was born of Polish Jewish parents in Warsaw and took the name Holbrooke after migrating to the United States in 1939.

Richard Holbrooke was later a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, leaving in 1970.

At Brown, Richard Holbrooke was the Editor-in-Chief of the Brown Daily Herald in his senior year.

President John F Kennedy's call to service inspired Holbrooke to enter government work.

Richard Holbrooke served for six years in Vietnam, first in the Mekong Delta, as a civilian representative for the Agency for International Development working on the rural Pacification Program, a program supporting the South Vietnam government with economic development and enacting local political reforms.

Richard Holbrooke later became a staff assistant to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

When Richard Holbrooke was 24, he joined a team of experts, formed by President Lyndon Johnson that was separate from the National Security Council.

In 1968, Richard Holbrooke was asked to be part of the American delegation to the 1968 Paris peace talks, which was led by former New York Governor Averell Harriman and Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance.

Richard Holbrooke drafted a volume of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret report on the government's decision-making in Vietnam.

In 1970, at his own request, Richard Holbrooke was assigned to be the Peace Corps Director in Morocco.

Richard Holbrooke initially rejected an offer to become the editor of the magazine Foreign Policy instead recommending his friend, John Campbell.

Richard Holbrooke oversaw a warming with Cold War adversaries in the region, culminating in the normalization of relations with China in December 1978.

Richard Holbrooke was deeply involved in bringing hundreds of thousands of Indochinese refugees to the United States, thus beginning a lifelong involvement with the refugee issue.

In January 1981, Holbrooke left government and became both senior advisor to Lehman Brothers and vice president of Public Strategies, a consulting firm he formed with James A Johnson, a former top aide to Walter Mondale.

From 1985 until 1993, Richard Holbrooke served as managing director of Lehman Brothers.

Richard Holbrooke was a top policy adviser to then-Senator Al Gore during his 1988 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Richard Holbrooke visited Bosnia twice in 1992 as a private citizen and a member of the board of Refugees International, witnessing firsthand the damage and devastating human costs of the conflict.

In 1993, after Bill Clinton became President, Richard Holbrooke was initially slated to be Ambassador to Japan due to his depth of knowledge and long experience in Asian affairs.

However, this appointment eventually went to former Vice President Walter Mondale, and Richard Holbrooke unexpectedly was appointed Ambassador to Germany.

In 1992, Richard Holbrooke was a member of the Carnegie Commission on America and a Changing World and Chairman and principal author of the bipartisan Commission on Government and Renewal, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and the Peterson Institute.

Richard Holbrooke was Chairman and principal author of the "Memo to the President-Elect: Harnessing Process to Purpose," a blue-ribbon Commission report sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Institute for International Economics.

Richard Holbrooke served in Germany during a dramatic moment: only a few years after German reunification, he helped shape US relations with a new Germany.

In 1994, Richard Holbrooke returned to Washington to become the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, a position he held until 1996, when he resigned for personal reasons.

In Richard Holbrooke's telling of the incident, he portrayed himself and the other surviving member of his delegation, General Clark, as active participants in the rescue mission.

In Paris in December 1995, Richard Holbrooke was the chief architect of the Dayton Peace Accords which ended the three-and-a-half-year-long war in Bosnia.

In 1997, Richard Holbrooke became a special envoy to Cyprus and the Balkans on a pro-bono basis as a private citizen.

Richard Holbrooke returned to Bosnia two years later to the city of Sarajevo.

Richard Holbrooke was strongly anti-Serbia and referred to Serbs as "murderous assholes".

Richard Holbrooke wrote numerous articles about his experiences in the Balkans, and in 1998, published the widely acclaimed book, To End a War, a memoir of his time as the chief negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords, ending the Bosnian civil war.

Richard Holbrooke initially had issues passing the Senate because of perceived abuses of authority while as Clinton's Balkan envoy.

Richard Holbrooke secured a reduction in US dues to the UN despite a booming American economy by enfolding the US position within a broad push to update the UN's long-outdated financial system.

In January 2000, Richard Holbrooke used the United States' presidency of the UN Security Council to spotlight a series of crises in Africa, holding six consecutive UN debates that brought together leaders from the region and the across the globe, including former South African President Nelson Mandela and then US Vice President Al Gore, to catalyze more effective UN interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and elsewhere.

Richard Holbrooke decried a "double standard" whereby African conflicts received insufficient global attention.

In 2000, Richard Holbrooke led a UN Security Council delegation in a series of diplomatic negotiations throughout Africa, including to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Richard Holbrooke secured membership for Israel in the UN's Western European and Others regional group, ending Israel's historic exclusion from regional group deliberations and allowing it to, for the first time, stand for election to leadership positions in UN sub-bodies.

In January 2000, when the United States was in the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke held an unprecedented meeting of the Security Council to discuss AIDS in Africa.

Richard Holbrooke was Clinton's lead foreign policy advisor in her 2008 campaign for president and was believed to be her preferred choice for Secretary of State.

When Obama defeated Clinton and selected her as Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke was her preferred option for Deputy Secretary of State, but was vetoed by Obama.

In January 2009, Richard Holbrooke was appointed by President Obama as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Richard Holbrooke was never in serious contention to become Obama's secretary of state although he interviewed for the position.

Richard Holbrooke became unpopular in the administration when he attempted to aid Afghan President Hamid Karzai's political opponents during his reelection bid.

Richard Holbrooke was well-liked in Pakistan by civilians because he actively sought to build a relationship with their country.

Richard Holbrooke called for 'a complete rethink' of the drug problem in Afghanistan, suggesting that draconian eradication programs were bound to fail.

Richard Holbrooke was the vice chairman of Perseus LLC, a leading private equity firm.

From February 2001 until July 2008, Richard Holbrooke was a member of the Board of Directors of American International Group.

Richard Holbrooke was a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and formerly served on the Advisory Board of the National Security Network.

Richard Holbrooke was a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Citizens Committee for New York City, and the Economic Club of New York.

Richard Holbrooke was a member of the Trilateral Commission, and he has been listed on their membership roster as one of their "Former Members in Public Service".

Richard Holbrooke was an honorary trustee of the Dayton International Peace Museum, as well as professor-at-large at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, his alma mater.

Additionally, Richard Holbrooke was an Advisory Board member for the Partnership for a Secure America, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy.

Richard Holbrooke served as vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, managing director of Lehman Brothers, managing editor of Foreign Policy, and director of the Peace Corps in Morocco.

Richard Holbrooke wrote numerous articles and two books: To End a War, and the co-author of Counsel to the President, and one volume of The Pentagon Papers.

Richard Holbrooke received more than a dozen honorary degrees, including an LL.

Richard Holbrooke wrote a monthly column for The Washington Post and Project Syndicate.

Richard Holbrooke was the 'ambassador on call' and after a short mediation process the two parties agreed to taste each other's Ben and Jerry's ice cream to make amends.

Richard Holbrooke subsequently sang "On the Road Again" in a trio with Colbert and Nelson.

Richard Holbrooke was an Eminent Member of the Sergio Vieira de Mello Foundation until his death.

Richard Holbrooke was a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group and participated in every conference between 1995 and 2010.

Richard Holbrooke was married to Kati Marton from 1995 until his death.

Richard Holbrooke had been good friends with diplomat Anthony Lake whom he met in Vietnam in the early 1960s while both of them were in the foreign service.

On December 11,2010, Richard Holbrooke was admitted to George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC after falling ill at the State Department's headquarters.

Richard Holbrooke died on December 13,2010, from complications of the torn aorta.

In 1999, Richard Holbrooke received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.