I once told my wife that I would consider my life complete if I could overhear Richard Holbrooke saying to someone -- preferably someone very important -- "Look, I've got to go; Jim Traub is on the other line." My conversations with him always seemed to end the other way around: "Jim, I've got the South Korean foreign minister on the other line; call back if you need anything else." How could I take offense? I always laughed. The last time I saw Holbrooke, the lifelong diplomat who served most recently as President Barack Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, I told him I was writing a profile of Ahmet Davutoglu, the foreign minister of Turkey. "Jim," he said, "you cannot write that article without talking to me." He had known Davutoglu for years, and was prepared to defend him against his critics -- including ones inside the State Department. We were scheduled to talk by phone at 4 p.m. on Friday. Earlier that day, inevitably, his secretary emailed to say that something had come up; the ambassador would have to make it another time. Now I wonder how many other people could say they were supposed to talk to Richard Holbrooke at 4 p.m. on Friday.

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Holbrooke, who died yesterday after undergoing emergency surgery for an aortal tear, would have been certain that his obit would be page one material in the New York Times. But he would have been very pleased to know that it would appear above the fold (even if it was on the less coveted left side of the page). Is that such a bad thing? There were those who thought Holbrooke had grave flaws, and those who thought he had foibles. I was in the latter camp. Ten years ago, I wrote a long and flattering profile of him in the Times Magazine, though of course I included criticism from those he had trampled on the way up. I imagine the piece tickled Holbrooke's vanity, though what he said to me was, "Jim, I cannot believe you repeated those canards about me." He made it sound like a moral flaw. The man was sincerely blind to his own faults. Then again, self-understanding is a more useful attribute for a journalist than for a diplomat.

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Richard Holbrooke, 1941-2010
Remembering his contributions to foreign policy -- and Foreign Policy.

Yes, Holbrooke was ambitious. He was a pushy, self-promoting, Jewish guy in a profession that, especially when he first took it up, was WASPy and bankerish. He wanted to be in the center of the action, and he could drive people to distraction until he got there. In January 1993, just before Bill Clinton took office as president, Holbrooke sent a long memo to Warren Christopher and Tony Lake, soon to be Clinton's secretary of state and national security advisor, insisting that the new administration would need to take urgent action to prevent atrocities in the Balkans, from which he had just returned. Having supported Al Gore in the primaries, Holbrooke had no job in the administration, and no prospect of one. But he couldn't let the moment pass. In his memoir, To End A War, Holbrooke concedes that "the memo was not welcome," and was never even answered.

But Holbrooke fought his way into the center of the Clinton administration's policy-making apparatus on the Balkans. He cared about it more than other people did -- certainly more than the highly professional but classically cool and difference-splitting secretary of state did. And Holbrooke, along with then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright and others, overcame the administration's Europe-first inclinations to finally force decisive action in 1995. Who would you prefer: Richard Holbrooke with all his flaws, or Warren Christopher with his?

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