It’s that line that keeps coming to mind during the orgy of anything-but-silent eulogizing of Richard Holbrooke, a most influential diplomat who died Monday evening. I’m not an expert on the man, nor do I have any interest in becoming one, but it seems to me that his involvement in many of the major foreign policy sagas, beginning with Vietnam and ending, with his death, with our current (and very dubious, I think) undertakings in Afghanistan, would make a good starting point for a lot of questions.
I have not resumed drinking. I just had a momentary lapse of reason.
Richard Holbrooke was just amazing. In much the same way the supreme court justices are lauded for their “constitutional mastery” after asking a few basic questions about what a law might or might not mean, Richard Holbrooke, according to the post-mortem, had a phenomenal grasp on the finer points of U.S. foreign policy. Pardon my snarkyness, but it seems to me that anything less than that would be cause for serious alarm given the central role he played in formulating much of it. He was really strategic: His office at the U.S. State Department was like no other in that it was staffed by a real mix of people with different backgrounds including, well, including professors. He was genuinely interested in what other people had to say. He read a lot, and he wrote a lot as well. He was networked like no other, and he was generous with his time, his experience and his influence, which he used, as legend has it, to place many people in many jobs. One of the many overweight, suited white guys recalled working on something or another in Central America, and Richard Holbrooke came down for a visit, not because he was involved in the work per se but because he was simply so gosh-darn curious.
Unlike Richard Holbrooke, I’m not going to be remembered for my intellect, or the powerful connections I had with powerful people, but I am quite curious. I am curious about what and who carries the most weight in foreign policy decisions. I am curious about how much money is involved, where it’s from and where it’s going. I am very curious about the cost of the wars we’re currently involved in, not just in terms of dollars, but in terms of lives – lives of U.S. military personnel and also lives lived, or formerly lived, by people in the places where we’re “executing” on Richard Holbrooke’s brilliant foreign policy strategies. I’m really curious about Osama bin Laden. Is he the reason we went to war, or to wars? Where does he live? Where is he working these days? Just for fun, really, I’m very curious to know what the ratio of how much money we’ve spent searching for Osama bin Laden is compared to, say, the average amount of public funds we spend on a young person’s education from the time she enters kindergarten through high school graduation. I’m just curious.
But what makes me most curious about Richard Holbrooke’s death has nothing to do with him at all. Tuesday evening Oprah’s understudy (Charlie Rose) was on, almost unbearable in his smarminess, as usual, when I heard something that stopped me cold. Charlie Rose was bragging about how connected he was to Richard Holbrooke, exchanging utterly irrelevant remembrances with one of the fat white guys, when he let loose with this: Charlie Rose had known Richard Holbrooke for many years, having met him when that particular guest was working as an editor with a foreign policy publication and Charlie Rose was working for … Bill Moyers. I’m still in mourning over Bill Moyers’ retirement. He’s about the only one I’ve seen on television in the last decade who is worth watching, and he employed Charlie Rose? Denial has its place in every life, including mine, so I switched the channel and watched a bit of Antiques Road Show and pretended I had misheard. Because that’s some shit about which I am not even remotely curious. I’d really rather not know the details.
