Lake -- Holbrook

writePost();
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/opinion/10cohen.html

By ROGER COHEN
Published: July 10, 2008
PARIS — There are relationships for which a novel is a more adequate form than journalism. Their twists, and attendant psyches, demand an act of the imagination to render them. Into that category falls the recurrent charged drama of Anthony Lake and Richard Holbrooke.
Skip to next paragraph

Roger Cohen
Go to Columnist Page » Blog: Passages
Its latest subplot emerged last month when Barack Obama announced a 13-member Senior Working Group on National Security that includes Lake but omits Holbrooke, probably the most prominent Democratic foreign-policy luminary excluded from the inner circle.
Some may see no more than victors’ justice in this omission. Lake, who was national security adviser to Bill Clinton, sided with Obama from the outset. Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who bullied Bosnia’s warring factions into peace in 1995, supported Hillary Clinton.
But other prominent Hillary backers — including two former secretaries of state, Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, and a former defense secretary, William Perry — glided into a top Obama team oddly weighted, for a professed change agent, toward veteran Washington insiders.
In this context, Holbrooke’s nonglide was conspicuous. Having known Lake and Holbrooke since I covered the Bosnian war, I asked Denis McDonough, the senior foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign, if Lake closed the door on his former friend. “No, no, no,” McDonough said.
Doth he protest too much?
I don’t know, and Lake did not respond to attempts to reach him through McDonough and an e-mail message. But I do know this: If Obama is in his earnest about his admiration for the concept of a “team of rivals,” a phrase borrowed from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s so-named biography of Lincoln, he can find no better test of it than pairing Lake and Holbrooke.
(I applaud the team-of-rivals idea, practiced by Lincoln in bringing opposed Republicans into his cabinet. Nothing has been more damaging to the Bush administration than the president’s distaste for, and incapacity to absorb, vigorous dissent in the policy shaping process.)
The two men have known each other since Vietnam. They were “best friends, without a doubt,” in Holbrooke’s words. He named a son Anthony for Lake. Lake made Holbrooke godfather to his second child. Idealism, restlessness and brilliance united them. Temperament and ambition divided them.
Lake, 69, is controlled, measured, elusive, a man whose fierce competitiveness is dressed in the elaborate constructs of a probing intelligence. His energy and determination are no less apparent for being introverted.
Holbrooke, 67, by contrast, is sprawling, relentless, candid, a man of devouring appetites and extrovert energy, at once ingratiating and loyal, cajoling and ruthless — the doer to Lake’s thinker. If you want somebody to pull the trigger, or close a deal, think Holbrooke. He has compared diplomacy to jazz: improvisation upon a theme.
At some point, these differences became poison. The experiences of the first Clinton administration — when Lake got a top job and Holbrooke got nothing before becoming ambassador to Germany — turned poison to venom. Holbrooke’s Bosnia exploit, and Lake’s aborted nomination to head the C.I.A. in Clinton’s second term, deepened tensions.
Last year, a friend of mine now working on European issues for Obama, met with Lake. “So, it’s the duel of the consiglieri,” he said, referring to Lake’s backing of Obama and Holbrooke’s of Hillary Clinton. Lake laughed. When asked if he wanted to be secretary of state, he waved away the notion, but said he wanted to make sure Holbrooke didn’t get the job.
McDonough didn’t comment when I recounted this. Lake framed a negatives-laden rhetorical question about Holbrooke to Time magazine earlier this year: “Would I say Dick can play no role? Absolutely not.” There are others, including Warren Christopher, who are no Holbrooke fans.
I, like others who witnessed his Bosnian diplomacy, am a fan, however maddening the Holbrooke ego. It was impossible, having watched mass Balkan slaughter over years, not to marvel at his ability to forge enduring peace against all odds. He deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.
At a ceremony in Berlin this month, President George W. Bush’s father, the 41st president, described Holbrooke as “the most persistent advocate I’ve ever run into.” Translate as: Don’t get between this bull and what he wants.
That can be useful, put to the service of the nation he loves, at a time when America, enmeshed in two wars, needs to cut deals in Iraq, with Iraq’s neighbors, and in Afghanistan. Lake has called himself a “pragmatic neo-Wilsonian.” I’d call Holbrooke an “idealistic neo-Kissingerian” — a man for a rough world.
McDonough, in an e-mail, suggested Holbrooke would get an invitation. “Others we are eager to include in the group — and whom we have told we are going to work into the group — were also formerly with Clinton, including Wendy Sherman and Richard Holbrooke,” he wrote. Sherman is a former assistant secretary of state.
Get Holbrooke in, rejuvenate a too-traditional inner circle with some fresh talent like Christopher Hill and the ousted Samantha Power, and forge a true “team of rivals” boasting the mother of all rivalries. America’s huge foreign policy challenges demand no less.