RIP Richard Holbrooke

The New Yorker had a fine profile of Holbrooke last year, The Last Mission, which seems to have provided material for many of the obituaries running today, rather like a civic requiem.

I particularly like this sentence, which set Holbrooke in generational context:

So the odd problem out [Af/Pak] was also the most important one, and for guidance the youthful new President had turned to one of the last icons of an earlier era, in which American greatness was assumed, the country’s diplomacy had expansive ambitions, and its foreign policy was dominated by a few men—among them Clark Clifford, Maxwell Taylor, Averell Harriman, and Dean Rusk, all of whom had been Holbrooke’s patrons.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine