Richard Holbrooke

About

Richard Holbrooke was a prominent American diplomat born on April 24, 1941, in New York City. His parents, European Jews, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Holbrooke graduated from Brown University in 1962 and joined the Foreign Service, serving in Vietnam until 1966. He later advised President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam and participated in the Paris Peace Talks. In the 1970s, he worked as the Peace Corps Director in Morocco and managed Foreign Policy magazine. Holbrooke's diplomatic career included serving as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Jimmy Carter and as U.S. Ambassador to Germany and the United Nations. He is best known for brokering the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, ending the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He also served as Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan under President Barack Obama from 2009 until his death on December 13, 2010. Holbrooke's approach to diplomacy often involved combining negotiation with strategic military pressure.