drojjji

It was the worst of times in the siege of Sarajevo. No venture outside the Holiday Inn, which had become a media fastness in a city under siege, was safe from the daily staccato of sniper fire, mortars and artillery shells. And there at my door, in the first winter of the war, was Richard C. Holbrooke, asking if he could borrow space on my floor for him and his sleeping bag.

For Mr. Holbrooke, it was a fallow time, one of a succession of frustrating periods spent outside the game he loved and at which he excelled: deploying his irrepressible energies and bullish negotiator’s skills on behalf of America — and himself — in places of war and distress. His business card at the time listed him as a vice-president at American Express. But this was not a man in search of fresh credit-card business in a city with little food and almost no electricity.

He had found his way to Bosnia’s capital, at his own expense and risk, with none of the protections available to appointed negotiators at the time — no security guards, no United Nations armored personnel carrier, no guaranteed seat on a return United Nations flight. But far from the bravado of a war junkie seeking new stories for a repertoire stretching back to the early Vietnam war years, this was, in another sense, all business.

Riding in the New York Times’ armored Land-Rover, walking through the city’s rubble, visiting the morgue where victims lay row on row on the concrete floor, and ducking through a shell hole into the smoky, bomb-blasted basement known as “The Hole-in-the-Wall Club” that was the city’s most popular wartime redoubt for carousing, Mr. Holbrooke laid out his purpose:

He had come to experience for himself Europe’s first war since the 1940s — and to prepare for a role he felt sure he would be offered, as part of an American-led bid to end it.

Mr. Holbrooke was driven, ambitious, impatient with the fallibilities of the American diplomatic establishment, and endowed, or so his rivals and detractors said, with famously “sharp elbows” in the jockeying for power in Washington. And perhaps because of all that, in that murderous winter in Sarajevo, with a newly elected Democratic president gathering his administration, he was on the outside looking in, with no job yet in the Clinton administration. But he was preparing for the call.

And come it did. After a brief tenure as American ambassador to Germany, he returned to Sarajevo as the chief American peace negotiator, a role that brought him what was arguably his greatest success, the Dayton peace agreement of 1995. The role won him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, and it brought him closer to an early death than anything he had encountered in Vietnam, when one armored vehicle in a convoy carrying him into Sarajevo for talks toppled into a ravine outside the city, killing an Air Force colonel and two other American officials. He and Gen. Wesley Clark were in another vehicle, but helped in harrowing efforts to rescue their colleagues on that fateful road.

For many of my generation of foreign correspondents, word that Mr. Holbrooke had died on Monday, after suffering a ruptured aorta, struck like the tolling of a bell. And not just because he was only 69, and pressing himself as hard as ever in pursuit of a plan that might — against heavy odds, as he was blunt enough to say — save America from disaster in Afghanistan.

He was America’s most seasoned envoy, a consummate insider tempered by nearly a half-century of deal-making in Saigon and Manila, Kabul and Islamabad, and many other capitals. But he coupled that with something that explains why the discord and active dislike he prompted among some of his colleagues found scant resonance among reporters he met along the way, many of whom he courted assiduously, and many of whom became friends.

Uncharacteristically for a diplomat of his rank, he relished every opportunity to get out of the palaces and chancelleries and into the outsiders’ world that is the reporter’s habitat. A student editor at Brown before he joined the foreign service and was sent to Vietnam, he was not afraid to use a little shoe leather. Before Sarajevo, my wife and I teamed up with him after Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos helicoptered their way out of the Malacanang palace in Manila in 1986 on their way to self-exile, and had him as our guide through the palace’s personal quarters, its closets piled high with Imelda’s shoes.

Then, as so often, he coupled mischief with moments of reflection. At one moment, he was fashioning an impromptu bonnet for himself out of scarves stacked in Imelda’s closet; the next, he was guiding us through the gloomy palace state rooms, behind walls of thick, tinted armored glass. “These were people who weren’t having any fun,” he said.

Nobody accused Richard Holbrooke of lacking a sense of fun. Evenings with him were rich in reminiscence and irreverence, as well as talk of what ailed the world. Among friends, there was little of the selfishness of which he was accused by those who disliked him, much less the flashes of anger and hauteur that were a studied part of his professional arsenal. These were reserved, most fulsomely, for those in high places he thought dishonest or obstructive of American ends — or both, like Slobodan Milosevic and Hamid Karzai, both of whom experienced the rougher edge of the Holbrooke tongue.

Undiplomatic? Unquestionably. But effective, as often as not.