Ambassador Richard Holbrooke: statesman

Ambassador Richard Holbrook 1941-2010

It is on days such as this that I regret not having kept a tape. It is on such says as this that I observe the passing of an individual who strove to end inhumanity, and with whom I had the great fortune to talk.

When I left the CBC Newsworld studios on Memorial Drive in Calgary at the end of 1998, I never returned. The tapes of the programs and coverage that I was proud to host are there, or they have been purged.

If still there, on one such tape, likely gathering dust in a box in the library, would be an interview that I conducted with the late US statesman, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (April 24, 1941 - December 13, 2010), on an important show that I anchored called International Hour for what was then CBC Newsworld.

I remember how hard my producer Mike Vernon and our team of young associate producers worked to book Ambassador Holbrooke on the show. In 1995, he was the "got-to-get" guest at the time because of his tireless efforts to end two wars in the former Republic of Yugoslavia - in Bosnia-Herezgovina and Kosovo. And our team got him.

It is a gross understatement to read, in the reporting of Ambassador Holbrooke's death today, these blood-feuds being described as conflicts and war. When Yugoslavia broke apart in the mid-90s, clans went for each others throats, blood flowed, and there was no sanctuary for the innocent.

My memory is that of every report or video that I introduced at the anchor desk from that region being prefaced with "a warning, some of you might find the images disturbing" - a phrase that had became an all too hourly clarion in 1995 with the Rwandan Genocide and the hatred that exploded in the former Yugoslavia. The images were deeply, deeply disturbing.

It disturbed me to read Ambassador Holbrooke's "style" described as a 'breathless monotone," by Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. assistant secretary of state, in the New Yorker magazine for a 2009 profile of Holbrooke.

“I wouldn't call it conversation. It’s this sort of breathless monologue that you can only engage by interrupting. Dick is an advocate. He almost always has a case to make.”

That is not the recollection that I have of my interview with Ambassador Holbrook. On the contrary, we had a conversation. He was intelligent, warm, gracious and humble as to what he'd achieved.

And, in what was his greatest achievements of many in a long and distinguished career of public service, he made his case. He ended the blood-shed. His role as President Bill Clinton's special mediator of the Bosnia-Herzegovina crisis led to 20 days of negotiations at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio that culminated in the 1995 Dayton Agreements.

Next, in 1998 Clinton sent him to deal with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic - the accused war criminal who died behind bars in 2006 while awaiting trial on crimes against humanity - in attempting to end the Kosovo blood-bath. However, Ambassador Holbrook was unable to secure peace with the monster and, just two years ago, warned that the region was again in danger of collapse.

Clinton said in a statement following Ambassador Holbrooke's passing after heart surgery,

“In a lifetime of passionate, brilliant service on the front lines of war and peace, freedom and oppression, Richard Holbrooke saved lives, secured peace and restored hope for countless people around the world."

Ambassador Holbrooke did that for four democratic presidents from Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam to Barack Obama's Afghanistan.

In these days of Wikileaks, if statesmanship is now measured by snarking, how telegenic or glib an individual is - and, sadly, it is - rather than by their intellect and abilities, then that is the state of public disservice. Ambassador Holbrooke was, to my mind, a noble and an honourable man. Such statesmanship would serve us well today.

Here is a conversation with Richard Holbrooke from Charlie Rose: