Editor's Note: We think it is important for readers to know the personal and political history of Obama's new envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke. In whatever deal Obama made with the devil to become the first African-American President of the United States, it's obvious that as part of that deal, his cabinet, staff and foreign policy were decided for him by the masters who put him in office. - Les Blough, Editor

"Give the Serbs 48 hours, and if they don't release the hostages, bomb them to hell."

- Richard Holbrooke, May, 1995

December 17, 1995

Taming the Bullies of Bosnia
From The New York Times Magazine

By ROGER COHEN

THE HELICOPTER LANDS near the summit of Mount Igman, just outside Sarajevo. It's a cool morning with low clouds, the rain has just stopped and the city, encircled by the Serbs as it has been for more than three years, lies spread-eagled beneath the Americans. It is Aug. 19, and Richard Holbrooke is on the first of his Balkan shuttles, which will lead, some months hence, to Dayton, Ohio, and an agreement that will end -- temporarily, at least -- the brutal war in Bosnia. This day he leads a team that includes Robert C. Frasure of the State Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Kruzel, Col. S. Nelson Drew of the National Security Council and Lieut. Gen. Wesley K. Clark of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

These senior officials find themselves atop a waterlogged Bosnian mountain about to descend a twisting dirt track into the besieged capital because, the previous day, Holbrooke failed to obtain security guarantees from the Serbs for a flight into Sarajevo. He had demanded the guarantees from Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian President, saying it was "demeaning and dangerous" for his team to take the Igman road.

Milosevic spoke with Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Commander of the Bosnian Serbs and the orchestrator of the long Sarajevo siege. No deal. "Well, Mr. President, can you give us your assurances?" Holbrooke asked Milosevic. Not without Mladic. The usual Serbian run-around.

It had been this way for more than three months. Milosevic blaming Mladic or Radovan Karadzic, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Karadzic blaming rogue paramilitary forces beyond his control or the inventions of Muslim propaganda. Americans and Europeans gazing into this hall of mirrors, trying to make sense of it, blaming each other for failing to do so.

Meanwhile the facts were plain. This August day of 1995, with the shells still falling on Sarajevo, roads other than the Igman track are unusable, and the Serbs have just completed the eviction and mass execution of Muslims from the United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica. The Srebrenica operation is a rerun of what happened on a much wider scale in 1992, the first year of the war, when about three-quarters of a million Muslims were chased at gunpoint from their homes and herded into camps.

The presence of Holbrooke's team on a remote Bosnian mountain is thus the expression of a terrible failure -- that of the Clinton Administration, NATO and the United Nations to end the siege of Sarajevo or do anything but bow to the whim of the Serbs. This impotence exasperated Frasure, a seasoned State Department official who, on returning from an inter-agency meeting on Bosnia, remarked, "Boy, that was like a little-league locker-room rally."

Bosnian diplomacy, Frasure explained to his State Department colleague and friend Christopher Hill, was like white-water rafting: "You've got to decide which waterfall you're going to go off." Instead, the Administration kept trying to straddle the chutes. The result was a series of debacles, like the May bombing of the Serbs, aborted as soon as 400 United Nations hostages were seized. Frasure believed that perhaps the only way to end the Bosnian impasse was to bomb the bridges over the Drina River, which link Serbia with Serb-held Bosnia.

Holbrooke says now that he agreed with Frasure. But during the year he had spent in Washington as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe -- after returning in summer 1994 from his first Clinton Administration post as Ambassador to Germany -- he had failed to make a difference on Bosnia. Increasingly frustrated by the Washington bureaucracy, he had dispatched Frasure to the area and adopted a despairing mantra: Bosnia was "the greatest collective failure of the West since the 1930's." When the Serbs seized the United Nations hostages on May 29, 1995, the day Holbrooke wed the author Kati Marton in Budapest, the Assistant Secretary's exasperation finally exploded: "Give the Serbs 48 hours, and if they don't release the hostages, bomb them to hell." But, Holbrooke concedes, "everyone back in Washington thought I was joking." Washington tended to see Holbrooke that way, or worse. His year there had been an unhappy one. "He was a very frustrated functionary in an enormous bureaucracy, being driven increasingly crazy by the generic underminers, the envious, ferretlike Washington subspecies," his wife says.

He had been brought back to head the regional bureau for Europe because 1993 had been a disastrous year for the Clinton Administration in Europe. "We needed a much higher profile on Europe and Bosnia," says Thomas Donilon, chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. "We had not realized that in the post-cold-war era we had to consolidate the base, not take it for granted. That base was NATO. We didn't give it enough attention."

For Donilon, higher profile meant "Hurricane Holbrooke." But Anthony Lake, the national security adviser whose now-uneasy relationship with Holbrooke goes back more than 30 years, had doubts. Officials say Lake had come to view the man who was once his closest friend as a "high maintenance" personality, gifted but disruptive. Lake says his question was merely whether Holbrooke would find satisfaction in being an assistant secretary -- a rank he held almost two decades before.

There was a line on Holbrooke in Washington. Domineering. Imagines he's a seventh-floor official when he's only sixth floor. Too undisciplined to follow instructions. There was anger at his high-handedness, unease at his bald ambition. Such was the wariness that, at the National Security Council, thought was given to using Charles E. Redman, the former Balkan envoy, who replaced Holbrooke as Ambassador to Germany, to promote the peace plan that would be put forward in August. By then, Holbrooke, feeling underused and boxed in, was spreading the word that he was ready to quit and return to Wall Street. But Donilon and others prevailed upon him to stay, and Christopher convinced a skeptical N.S.C. that Holbrooke could be entrusted with so delicate a mission.

So at last in August, Holbrooke puts himself on the front line. He is a brave man. Unlike other Administration officials, he has been around the conflict. He took a careening car ride into Sarajevo in December 1992 and spent New Year's Eve there. Just for the hell of it. "I went because I didn't have a date," he says, laughing. He is also a man driven to be a central protagonist in the shaping of the American empire. In Vietnam in the 1960's, in the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970's, on Wall Street in the heady 1980's and most decisively in the Balkan wars, he has been involved in the exercise and projection of American power. Now, on Mount Igman, he is trying to settle Europe's worst conflict since World War II.

A Transforming Moment

GENERAL CLARK PUTS HOLBROOKE beside him in a Humvee because "I knew that way Dick would be able to see more and he's always very curious." The others get inside a French armored personnel carrier, more secure against Serbian gunfire but bulkier. The delegation starts down the track, the Humvee leading the way. Then a French truck coming up the mountain blocks the vehicle. The truck driver jumps out and tells Clark an armored personnel carrier has gone over the edge.

Holbrooke and Clark dash back up the hill about 100 yards and look down. "It seemed like a giant lawn mower had gone down the mountain, scything the trees," Clark says. "We heard an explosion." The two men run back down the road, which is exposed to Serbian fire, around a hairpin. Holbrooke, fearing an ambush, orders his Humvee turned around. He has not heard the intermittent crack of small-arms fire since Vietnam.

Lieut. Col. Daniel Gerstein was inside the ill-fated armored personnel carrier. "On the first roll, I thought it would be one roll and stop," he says. "We went over so slowly. Kruzel landed on top of me and said, 'What's going on?' Then I realized it was rolling. We were airborne. At one point, I felt four revolutions without touching the ground. I felt the bones around my eyes break. I tried to go with the roll, not against it. There was an awful cracking and groaning. A terrible noise."

Clark, scrambling over fallen trees and branches, reaches the vehicle at last. It is on its side, the wheels are burning. Gerstein, a mortally injured Kruzel and a security officer named Peter Hargraves have managed to get out. French soldiers are gesticulating, warning Clark not to go near the vehicle because it will explode.

He radios Holbrooke on the road above, asking for a fire extinguisher. Then the General takes a log and pries open the hatch. He peers into the fire, caused by oil and fuel on hot pipes as the vehicle rotated and by exploding anti-tank rounds. The scene reminds him of a gas boiler in a power plant: a round metallic interior and roaring flames. Frasure and Drew are utterly gone. Kruzel dies later on the way to a field hospital.

Holbrooke says that when he heard of Frasure's death: "It just hit me. I yelled, 'No, no, not possible.' " But he remained calm. Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State, took one of the first conference calls from Holbrooke, with President Clinton also on the line. "We were all listening very carefully for any hint whatsoever of something that would have been totally understandable," Talbott recalls. "But he was in control, shattered but totally in control. I remember him saying to the President, 'Mr. President, we must suspend the mission long enough to bring our fallen comrades home.' Dick was making the right judgments."

At an early age, on his return from a three-year stint as a foreign service officer in Vietnam, working for Robert Komer in the Johnson White House and then for the Deputy Secretary of State, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Holbrooke watched the best and the brightest falling apart under the pressures of Vietnam and America's deepening fracture. "The pressure was excruciating -- I saw people fall back on Scotch before lunch," he recalls. The experience is clearly a point of reference; his commitment on Mount Igman to comrades fallen on the field of battle is an echo of Vietnam and the dignity hard won there.

Something shifted, in Holbrooke -- who had been inclined to throw up his hands on Bosnia -- and in America. A war long clouded by complexity was now reduced to physical fact in the weight of the coffins against Holbrooke's and Clark's knees on the chopper rising above the ruins of Sarajevo. Moreover, the obfuscation and the loss of the three men were linked. It was repeated weakness, prolonged preoccupation with avoiding failure and pusillanimous policy that put these senior officials on a road they should never have been on.

"What has impelled Holbrooke in part has been the memory of Frasure," says Ron Nitesky, the former deputy chief of mission in Zagreb. "He knows Frasure was much too good a man to die putting the best possible twist on a bad policy." Marton saw a man "suddenly driven and propelled by a larger force. He felt terrible over the deaths, and at some level responsible, and the only way to redeem this was for these people in the Balkans to come to terms and end the war."

Peace, Justice and the Pursuit of Glory

IN MAY 1968, HOLBROOKE WAS trying to end another war. He came to Paris as a young member of the delegation led by W. Averell Harriman to embark on the first negotiations with the Vietcong. But where he was then trying to help extract an increasingly lacerated America from its most disastrous cold war failure, he now finds himself in a vastly different role. At 54, he has become a principal architect of the nation's most ambitious, and chancy, overseas military engagement since the Vietnam War.

The dispatch of 20,000 American troops as part of a NATO force to police the tenuous Bosnian peace is a mission that may well decide the fate of the Clinton Administration. At a time when isolationist temptations are strong, it is also likely to define the scope of America's global ambitions in the post-cold-war era. Holbrooke, who is more at home with the American military than many in the Clinton Administration, seems comfortable with the odds. He rejects what he calls the "Vietmalia syndrome" -- the compounded fears born of Vietnam and the aborted peacekeeping mission in Somalia.

"I've had my disagreements with the Joint Chiefs," he says. "I think they have had the wrong fear. At the beginning, on Bosnia, from what I've heard, the Administration could not take on the Chiefs because of the President's Vietnam record and the gays-in-the-military question. But the fact is, the thing the Pentagon should be seeking is success, not avoiding failure."

What constitutes success to Holbrooke, a man who now looks well placed to become Secretary of State if Clinton is re-elected? Is he moved by the notion of asserting American values around the globe, values that attracted his Jewish parents to the United States from Nazi Europe? Or is the thing that excites him the flexing of American muscle to advance the nation's strategic and commercial interests?

Or, as his many detractors say, do notions of public service, the kicks of Realpolitik and promoting democracy enter into it only marginally, if at all, because everything is essentially grist for the mill of Holbrooke's consuming quest for greater glory? And if hubris and Holbrooke are indeed inseparable, as many contend, then isn't the Bosnia accord itself flawed, and treacherously so?

"It's nothing but self there, all self," says Patricia Derian, who clashed repeatedly with Holbrooke when she was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights during the Carter Administration. "He sets his mind on getting something and then just has a fit if he doesn't get his way. His arms flail, he yells, he shouts, he leans forward. As you go along, having one sort of encounter after another with that personality, you see that the main motor is how he is going to appear and be seen. The rest is marginal and infinitely malleable."

Lake, who served in Vietnam with Holbrooke, sees a rather different person. Their close friendship has eroded over the years, but a bond of sorts remains. When they met in London on Aug. 14, as Holbrooke was about to set out on the feverish four-month Balkan shuttle, Lake says he allowed himself "a moment of sentimentality."

The sentiment was about dreams. The dreams, he says, were those the two men shared when they went together to Vietnam in 1963 -- youthful visions of settling conflicts, changing things, even making the world a better place. Ideals of action and public service. The allusion, obviously, would have had scant resonance with a pure narcissist, a man unmoved by the destiny of peoples or by old-fashioned patriotism. Lake says, "What Holbrooke wants attention for is what he's doing, not what he is -- that's a very serious quality, and it's his saving grace."

Holbrooke had long sought to lead a major international negotiation. An unremitting thirst to make a historical mark characterized him from an early age. His father had such high ambitions for him that as a bright teen-ager he was told to aim for the Nobel Prize in Physics. When, at 16, his father died, he gravitated toward the family of Dean Rusk, the former Secretary of State, whose son David was his closest high-school friend in Scarsdale, N.Y.

Rusk came to embody the ideals of patriotism and public service that led Holbrooke into the foreign service after college at Brown, and now make up one element in his personality. Onto this was grafted an unusual appetite.

At one meal he counts the number of clams on his plate, complains that his grilled "super-rare" tuna is smaller than his neighbor's and ends up eating everyone else's dessert. The food is vacuumed down with impressive speed between two prolonged sorties to chat with a colleague he has spotted at another table. When it comes to the wine, he nonchalantly tosses ice cubes into a very respectable chardonnay and downs a glass as if it were his preferred Diet Pepsi.

His appetite goes beyond the table. It is a force of nature. It gulps down movies, often two in an evening. It mops up books. It zaps restlessly from channel to channel. It has propelled him through two marriages and now into a third. It gives him, says Marton, who was previously married to the ABC anchor Peter Jennings, "this great, wonderful physicality, this very tactile big-bear quality."

It leads him to carry on two or even three telephone conversations at once. It causes him to size up people in extremely short order. It endears him to children, whose language he readily grasps. It impels him to acts of generosity. It is, at times, transparently insatiable about publicity, driving him to such stunningly guileless acts of attempted self-aggrandizement as suggesting to journalists how to write their leads. It guides him through labyrinthine, sometimes maddeningly meandering sentences interspersed with phrases like, "Just let me finish this" or "I'm really serious" or, ominously, when he is most entangled between the truth and the spin he wants to impart, "I just want to be sure there's no misunderstanding." In general with Holbrooke, the more long-winded he is, the more manipulative he is trying to be.

The appetite fills rooms and disrupts meetings. It is, in short, a devouring zest for life that sweeps over people, embracing them in its intrusive warmth or crushing them in its roughshod power, complicating his life and sometimes putting his Ruskian ideal of service and self-effacement grotesquely at odds with the baroque reality of being Richard Holbrooke.

Arriving in Zagreb in October, on the last of his five Balkan shuttles, he is greeted by Peter Galbraith, the American Ambassador. Galbraith's taste for the limelight has grated on Holbrooke. He was appalled when, in the glare of television cameras, Galbraith tried to join him and General Clark in the cortege as the coffins arrived at Split airport from Sarajevo after the Igman accident. He nudged the Ambassador out of the way.

The tension between the two men is thinly masked. Later in the evening, after a meal at the Ambassador's residence, which Holbrooke has enjoyed in bare feet, talk turns to Galbraith's former job on the House Foreign Relations Committee. Holbrooke's comment: "It's not really adult work." Then, not so gently, he rubs it in: "Of course, somebody as aggressive and forceful as you, Peter, can perhaps make something of it."

But the energy and the impatience with form are also constructive, imbued, as they often are, with an intellectual audacity, a courage and sheer historical range that seems increasingly rare in Washington. "He lives in three time zones all the time," says his friend Leslie Gelb, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Past, present and future. They are all there in his speech in a very conscious way because he wants to make his life consequential. He has never wanted to leave the stage until he has done something of real consequence."

That goal had eluded him until the Bosnian peace settlement. He had been, at age 34, head of Far Eastern Affairs and a Wunderkind of the Carter Administration. But then his star seemed to fall. When the Republicans took office in 1980 he went to New York, made a lot of money as a rainmaking investment banker at Lehman Brothers, dated the television journalist Diane Sawyer and cut a figure around town. But a big country place in Connecticut and a condo in the Rockies were no substitute for a life of consequence. His ambitions lay in becoming a statesman.

In Washington, however, that ambition made people wonder: could he be trusted? And could a personality of such explosive impatience work in a bureaucracy?

Patricia Derian is among those who have concluded that Holbrooke's relation to truth-telling is fragile, eternally vulnerable to what she calls "the willingness to do anything to keep up the pace." She recalls Holbrooke, in his days as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, returning from a visit to the Philippines in 1977, where he was lavishly entertained by President Marcos and his wife, Imelda, on the presidential yacht.

"It was extraordinary," she says, "Holbrooke is a real sycophant to people like Marcos, but he started regaling me with these stories about how sickening the party had been, how vulgar the Marcoses were, how imperious she was, how disgusting they were. He was really so scornful I had a little pang of pity for Marcos! But, you know, it was almost as if they were two different people, the Holbrooke on the yacht and the man talking to me. It must be a difficult lifetime role to play, but maybe not, maybe it's a twin, an evil twin."

The root of the differences between Derian and Holbrooke lies in a battle over the relative place of human rights and broader American interests in the conduct of foreign policy -- an issue that haunted Holbrooke in his extensive dealings with Slobodan Milosevic.

She believed that the sweeping human rights abuses of the dictatorial Marcos regime should head the Administration's Philippine agenda. Holbrooke saw other priorities. In particular, he focused on the renewal of an agreement for two important American military bases, Subic and Clark, in the Philippines. This renewal, which had eluded others, was secured under his watch in 1979.

"Derian thought human rights should be our entire foreign policy," Holbrooke says. "She's naive. She sent an unclassified message to Vance saying we should use all our leverage to remove Marcos. I said that's not the way to conduct policy. She simply does not understand the American national interest."

In December 1980, Derian and Holbrooke clashed again over a plan to invite the Philippine opposition leader, Benigno Aquino, to speak at the State Department. Aquino, who was assassinated by a Marcos agent in 1983, had been released in 1980 after a long imprisonment, an achievement, Holbrooke insists, that illustrates his striving to balance human rights and the national interest. But when Holbrooke heard of the invitation to Aquino, he was furious.

Lake, then the head of State's Office of Policy Planning, weighed in on Holbrooke's side. He sent a memo to Derian arguing that Aquino's appearance at the State Department was not in America's interest. Lake, who was angry, then visited Derian. Holbrooke followed, "arms akimbo, just a raving, furious man, telling me that it was bad for the country," Derian says. In the end, the Aquino meeting was relegated to a back room.

Holbrooke now argues that he has always tried to tread a middle path between moralism in foreign policy and a Kissingerian focus on raison d'etat, defined in purely strategic and economic terms.

There's been a long tension in America between a value-based Wilsonian foreign policy and the Realpolitik of a Kissinger," he says. "The fact is, America is one of the few countries whose inhabitants came here in pursuit of an idea, and that ideal is part of our values at home and abroad. Often we have not lived up to these ideas, but they are our values.

"I am not a Wilsonian. I think he was naive. I think he was a failure. Those thick red lines he drew at Versailles around imagined ethnic boundaries made a significant contribution to what is going on in the Balkans today. But I also believe Realpolitik for America is self-defeating in its cynicism. We cannot choose between the two -- we have to blend the two."

The fact is, however, that it is the mature man who seems to have found the blend, or at least become convinced of its central importance. The evidence is compelling that 15 years ago American military bases and the seductive companionship of the Marcoses held sway over an impressionable Holbrooke.

An 'Infuriating Childishness'

DAVID HOLBROOKE, WHO WORKS for the "Today" show and is the older of Holbrooke's two sons by his first marriage, was once waiting for his father on a ski slope in Telluride, Colo. The elder Holbrooke came down the mountain toward him, then abruptly veered off toward a bump, "got a lot of air and came down in the biggest heap of skis and poles and hats and gloves that you have ever seen."

Baffled, David made his way over to his splayed father. "I didn't know what the hell he was thinking," David says. "He said, 'I saw you waiting below and I just thought I would impress you.' "

For many years Holbrooke's many friends had the intermittent impression that his pronounced sense of theater and his need to impress might leave him in a heap. His manifold talents seemed matched by equally manifold flaws. Above all, his rapid insights into others seemed unmatched by any real self-knowledge.

Holbrooke had always been torn between the desire to be a protagonist and to be an observer. He wanted to write the story, but more than that, he wanted to be its subject. He recalls watching his journalistic heroes -- Rick Smith, Stanley Karnow -- standing in the rain outside the American Embassy in Paris in 1968 and feeding them some line about the Ho Chi Minh trail being renamed "The Highway of Aggression." They reported it. "My God," he says with his slightly crazed giggle, "it just hit me then. That's what I wanted to do for a living -- stand in the rain and report nonsense!"

Holbrooke's mother, whose Jewish family fled Hamburg in 1933 for Buenos Aires before coming to New York, took him to Quaker meetings on Sundays. "I was an atheist, his father was an atheist," says his mother, a potter now married to a sculptor. "We never thought of giving Richard a Jewish upbringing. The Quaker meetings seemed interesting."

Holbrooke's father, a brilliant doctor born of Russian Jewish parents in Warsaw, died of cancer. There is a faded black-and-white photograph of the gangly teen-ager holding his father's hand in the Scarsdale woods that seems to capture a closeness abruptly shattered. His father changed his name to Holbrooke when he arrived in the United States in the 1930's. Such, however, is the family's loss of contact with its roots that his original name is unknown.

"He was my father," Holbrooke says, when asked how the abrupt death affected him. "He was my father. What can I say? I leave the psychoanalysis to others."

His marriage to Marton, however, has led him to look more closely at his past. She was born into a family of Hungarian Jews but raised to believe she was a Roman Catholic. Only in researching a book did she learn that one of her maternal grandparents had died in Auschwitz. This shared experience is clearly important to them. She and Holbrooke are not religious, but there appears to be some nascent sense of Jewish identity, or at least sensibility, that binds them. They visited Budapest's main synagogue together. She talks of "just melting into each other as we watched 'Schindler's List.' "

Fritz Stern, a professor of history at Columbia University, is an old friend of Holbrooke's. "I think you have to see there was a deliberate mystification of the child," he says. "He grew up believing one thing -- he was another. And now, at times he has this endearing and infuriating childishness. It's interesting."

His mother, Trudy Kearl, says: "I never imagined that Dick might think about his roots. Oh, my God, I never thought of that. I do not believe in the roots business. But perhaps, he is on a sentimental journey. And why not?"

Holbrooke notes that his maternal grandfather, Samuel Moos, a German Jew, fought for the Germans during World War I. When, in 1993, Holbrooke became Ambassador to Germany after failing to get the job he wanted as Deputy Secretary of State, he placed a photograph in his Bonn office of his grandfather wearing the Prussian spiked helmet and an Iron Cross.

"People would ask me, why that picture?" Holbrooke says, his blue eyes twinkling with apparent amusement behind his Calvin Klein glasses. "I would say, it is simply a historical truth. My grandfather fought for the Kaiser against the Western Allies and later fled Germany. It is an event so complex you could weave a novel around it. If I was a novelist, which I would have loved to be, I would make that photograph a centerpiece. I used to tell the Germans, 'If it had not been for your history, perhaps I would be Germany's Ambassador to the United States today.' "

But Holbrooke is not the German envoy to Washington or a novelist. He is a Jew intrigued by the incongruity of his grandfather's wearing the military uniform of the state that would herd Jews into gas chambers. He says he knew exactly who he was. "I never made any bones about it. I knew what my background was. Those who thought I was not Jewish enough were having their own problems."

There were such people. Perhaps the issue was not really Holbrooke's Jewishness. It was his apparent willingness, at times, to bend the truth to suit his purposes and rush forward headlong with an unexamined life. Thus, the now-notorious 50th birthday party at the "21" Club in Manhattan, where the names Holbrooke constantly dropped all showed up to roast him. "The story that Holbrooke is only half Jewish," Gelb said at the party, "is only half true." Such gibes were all well meant. They also cut close to the bone.

An Eye on Milosevic, and History

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, WHOSE VIRulent nationalism unleashed the wars of Yugoslavia's destruction, is a very seductive man. Warren Zimmerman, the last American Ambassador to Yugoslavia, maintains that he deceives everyone once. He is a deal maker, like Holbrooke, quick, sometimes funny and extremely hospitable. He does not have Marcos's yacht, but he does have a couple of hunting lodges where he likes to entertain visiting dignitaries. Frasure, who spent many hours with the Serbian President, was plied with so much food that he once cabled Washington with the message, "The lambs of Serbia will be delighted that I'm leaving!"

When Holbrooke and Milosevic first met in mid-August, a rapport was quickly established. Frasure, just a couple of days before his death, described the relationship to the chief European envoy, Carl Bildt: "The two egos danced all night."

Holbrooke, perhaps more than anyone in the Administration, knew exactly with whom he was dealing. He had been in Banja Luka in August 1992, where he witnessed "an insane asylum, with all these half-drunk Serb paramilitaries and middle-aged men going and raping and killing young Muslim women." Later he was given a wooden carving from a Muslim survivor of a Serbian concentration camp. The pose, head bowed in abject humiliation, captures the Serbian terror of the war's first months, carried out largely by paramilitary forces equipped and financed by Milosevic. Holbrooke wrote about it for this Magazine and put the sculpture in his Washington office.

Asked if he thought of the carving when dealing with Milosevic, Holbrooke becomes defensive; when he's defensive, he does not answer questions. "The sculpture's sitting there. I point it out to people," he says. When the question is pursued, he says: "No, it's not that linear. I don't sit there looking at one of those guys and thinking of this piece of wood. You wouldn't, either. But I understand the connection. I'm sure we all do."

Holbrooke does care. There can be little doubt about it. He saw what happened to Bosnia's Muslims. But it was also clear to him that Milosevic was the key to closing down the war because he was the person who wanted most badly for it to end, so that trade sanctions against Serbia would be lifted.

This realization became overwhelming on Aug. 29 in Belgrade. NATO had embarked on its first serious bombing of the Serbs, following an Aug. 28 mortar attack on the Sarajevo market. Holbrooke had hesitated about going to Serbia in these circumstances, but he says he recalled Nixon's bombing of Hanoi on the eve of the SALT II signing in 1972. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, signed anyway.

Milosevic does not even mention the bombing. He produces a piece of paper that becomes known as the "Patriarch document" because it is endorsed by the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch. In it, Karadzic and Mladic cede authority to Milosevic to negotiate on their behalf. The Serbian hall of mirrors -- the same one that put Holbrooke's team on Mount Igman just 11 days earlier -- had finally been shattered. A serious negotiation had become possible.

Referring to Frasure, who has just been buried in Washington, Holbrooke turns to Christopher Hill, his State Department colleague, and says, "Boy, I wish Bob were here with us now to see this."

The relationship with Milosevic develops. It is, says Roberts Owen, the lawyer on Holbrooke's team, "uniformly good, candid, direct and easygoing." Milosevic, says Bildt, is so obsessed with America, "he even loves American coffee." The Serbian President astounds the American delegation repeatedly by saying, "I want to smell New York again, the wonderful smells!"

Milosevic has the bluntness of the city that he so admires: details in the talks are "mere technology." American obscenities litter his conversation and are uttered, Owen recalls, "with a lovely distinctive roll to them." The gulf between the sides, Milosevic explains, "is wider than those that Evel Knievel used to jump."

Holbrooke clearly enjoys all this. The two men go on long walks in the woods. They laugh a lot. Holbrooke, almost certainly, has half an eye on history: here he is again in the heart of the action. The old inebriation, as in Manila.

But the more mature man also has a much surer eye on the target and seizes on the leverage provided by Milosevic's evident obsession with American culture: if he wants readmission to the West, the Serbian leader has to change his ways.

Discussions on human rights, and on the continuing atrocities of Serbian paramilitary leaders, become increasingly frequent. Holbrooke pushes for the removal of Karadzic and Mladic. He insists that the killing of civilians has to stop. It is a condition for peace and sanctions relief, he tells Milosevic.

When, just six days after Milosevic presents the "Patriarch document," the question arises of whether NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serbs should resume after a three-day pause, Holbrooke does not hesitate: "History would never forgive us if we stop now."

His judgment proves sound, as it has throughout the past months. The bombing, as Frasure long predicted, balances the situation on the ground for the first time and so makes peace a possibility. Closing on His Prey

POWER WAS THE KEY. THE Balkans are a snake pit, and good intentions are worse than useless. Holbrooke understood this. He was ready and willing to be the biggest snake of all. It is doubtful that anyone else in the Administration could have bullied the parties to a close. Holbrooke knows about closing. When he sniffs it, he is like a wolf closing on his prey. The peace, in a real sense, is his.

Roger Cohen covered the Balkan wars for The Times for the past two years. His most recent article for the Magazine was about the Zecevic family of Sarajevo.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/daily/holbrooke-profile.html