Okay. All right, so I'm Trisha and I work here at the Jackson County UW Extension Office. Jesse asked me to help out with this first one a little bit and just getting us started and talking about sustainability and culture. So when I went to, when I did my undergraduate and graduate, this topic was big. I mean that was 10 plus years ago, but I was at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, where I was able to, you get to, you get to design your own master's degree. So I was in the Department of Agronomy and in the Department of Rural Sociology and sustainability was a big topic then. And now I feel like it's, it's kind of a buzzword. It's kind of a popular term and I think that you've probably all heard of it. Anyone? Have you heard the word sustainability? And so where have you heard it? Or where, what do you think of when you, when Jesse said, come to this workshop on sustainability and agriculture.  What changed your mind? What did you end up there? Um, like steady, like even. So for sustainable feed, should you be in swine production, or be like having a steady production of each? Not one. Anybody else? You see it in newspapers or on TV or, you know, social media? Any other things that come to mind at the top of your head? You don't want to share? Well, I didn't think you would want to share too much, but so what we'll do is work in pairs. We'll have a group of three there, that's okay. And then two, two, two, two. And I'm going to give you just a pack of sticky notes. And so you'll work together in your pair, but you'll each be writing on your own sticky note there. And, um, give me some ideas that come to mind with regard to sustainable, the term sustainable when it comes to agriculture. If the three of you want to work together, if you want to work, if you just want to jot down stuff on your own, no problem. But, um, give me kind of your initial thought, or maybe you have an idea of what a definition of sustainable might be. We'll just jot that down. We'll just take a few minutes here to do that. We had to hide the markers because on Monday night, somebody got creative and wrote all over the wall and it was creepy. So we had to hide them all. We tried everything. We didn't try to imagine it. We tried, you know, the spray and we tried some bleach wipes. Bring one back to see. So you got a couple minutes there to talk with each other. You shy? No, I'll ask you to share with the groups that I'm there to. Best year. Maybe we should use the projector. Looks good to me. Got them all written down? Got anything written down? Yes. No ideas? I'll put some terms on the board here, and maybe that'll jog some ideas that might help a little bit. Take another minute. Maybe this will help you. Three terms here that you have a three-legged camp stool like this. You should take camping or have that home. I know I have one somewhere. Somewhere in a family. One of us hasn't. I mean, you have one, but you can't do one. It's going to bring you in. Well, what do you know about a three-legged stool? First of all, if you lose one leg at top, it falls apart, right? It's not going to last. So often, sustainability is described as a three-legged stool that requires equal support from three areas. These are three words that are often used in describing sustainability. In order for any action that we do to be sustainable in a long-term sense, it has to be sustainably in terms of economics or the economy, environment in terms of natural resources used, or we'll get into more of these, or community in terms of the people involved. So each of you has something written down, and you can talk about this with each other, or if you already kind of have a feeling. With what you wrote down, I want you to come up and just stick it on the board where you kind of think it fits in. If you can pick an area, one of these three, if you had to guess, or maybe you already kind of really feel strongly, just come on up and stick it up here. If you're not quite sure, you can put it on the side. You don't have to have your name on it. I don't have to know who wrote what, but come on up and put it on the board where you think it might fit. I'll read it, and then we'll add it to the name. So that we've got a little bit there. Thanks, everybody. What we'll do is I'm going to read what you wrote, and we'll write them on the board so that everybody can see what was written to, so that you'll have them up there for the rest of the session, and then you can, you don't have to try and remember everyone that I wrote. So that will be our recorder here, Secretary Knight. So we have these kind of three concepts that are used often to define sustainability, economy, or economic environment, and communities. So we have terms of economy. I'll read the first one here. Sustainability means steady control and production of material. Another comment on here is able to control also under economy. This one was all under economy. Sustaining or self-sufficient, okay? Abilities to maintain production and availability of a resource. Management of a resource so it fulfills the needs of the economy and the environment. Management of a resource so it fulfills the needs of the economy and the environment. Okay, yep. So those are all the ones that are pretty close onto economy. So this one was kind of in between economy and environment, which is good because we'll talk about the environmental ones. So I think these are all really good. I just want to kind of summarize here under economy. So a lot of things on production and I like the one on self-sufficient a lot and maintaining production of a resource availability. Think about your projects. Many of you probably do the cost of production worksheets.  Meaning you make money. You make money. Well, we're talking about sustained production, right? So sustained production repeated or steady every year in the black? No, it's not uncommon, right? Most of our fair projects are probably in the red, right? And we talk about that a little bit when we do the cost of production worksheets. But if we're talking about economic sustainability, we probably don't have it in a lot of our fair projects, right? But if we were producing livestock as a living, that would be very important that we weren't able to have a sustained economic project, right? We'll be in the black a little bit more. So a little bit there on economics. What about environment? I only have one, although the last one was a little bit on. We got a little bit into resource management and meaning the needs of the environment. This one says something that an animal can live in that is good for them. Okay? Any other thoughts on environment? Justi said you guys are going to go visit Organic Valley. Anybody have any thoughts on organic? Is that sustainable or not? Not really. Not really? Do you want to elaborate? Well, like, if the farm is organic, they produce less than if they were. Like, because pesticides help plants grow and keep the things you don't want on the farm. And then, if you're producing less organic vegetation, then you can't feed as much to your animals as you want. So it might result that you'll end up with less feed produced and you might need more acres to produce the same amount of feed that you might have otherwise. Okay? Good points. I think you'll be exploring that in particular, especially on that visit. And big topic there, yeah. So we'll get into this a little bit more, but in terms of environment, things that come into mind would be things like water, air, what else do we use in agriculture in terms of natural resources, yeah. Trimmer. Okay. Anybody else? Soil. Yeah. Those are probably the big three. And in order to be, like we mentioned earlier, a steady production, you need to have those resources available, right? Some of those things might fall under the environment version of the three-legged stool, natural resources that we use. Of course we use a lot of other things too for livestock production and we'll get into more details of those over the next few visits and field trips. Okay. So community, I have a few that are kind of like out here. Maybe they weren't exactly sure if they fell on the community three-legged stool or you just put them over to the side, weren't quite sure. Long lasting ability to conserve a resource. Okay. And so maybe that one could fall under a minute of all three, really. But in terms of community, if I were to think about this one, I might say if you're working on a farm, as an employee, and you say, you know, I'm just not getting a fair pay here. Are you going to stay working on the farm? No. Yeah. So like, in terms of sustainability for our community, things like, you know, fair wages for workers that come into play there, what about, why are we producing livestock in the long run? What's the end game? What's the whole point of, you know, brewing it in your animals? Who is the, in the end, we have a person who buys them and does what with them. Yeah, we have consumers, right? And so, thinking about consumers and that they have access to the food that we're growing and that it is nutritious and affordable for them. So maybe we can kind of elaborate on that one there that way for our community. Okay, this one says the election of governor of states, election of our governor of states. Okay, so that one's probably on the edge, because I weren't quite sure what I've been in. Anybody want to elaborate on that one?  So this one, I think it was meant to go on the community, so it says it has something to do with ourselves. Yes, I would agree. Say, you know, we're all consumers and producers and we are all connected through the chain of our production and consumption. What is expected for livestock? Okay, maybe that one goes under community. And that could be, you know, what are consumers expected of the products that they're wanting to use? Yeah, for that last one, what is expected for livestock? For consumers? Would that be like at the fair, not like hitting your animal? Like for pigs, not like hitting them too hard in front of the public? Sure, I mean, yeah, for our consumers' view, what we're doing could have an impact on our ability to continue producing livestock. And we've seen some of that being played out in the world today. I mean, we're seeing consumers being probably more and more interested in how we are freezing livestock. And, you know, they may not necessarily know why a producer does what they do, but if they perceive something and they don't like it and they choose not to buy the product based on that perception, that can impact your ability to continue producing livestock, right? Thanks. Okay, so on this last one says, sustainable, it doesn't harm the environment. Self-sustaining, under control and balanced. All of them, they're all of them as well. Well, it's good to get your, it's good for us to get an idea of what your concept is of sustainability so that we kind of know where we're starting and, you know, where we should kind of go from here. So, thanks everybody for sharing your thoughts and ideas with us. And hopefully this starts to give you at least a little bit of a picture of what goes into defining the term sustainability. Like many of you wrote in here the idea of being able to continue with a particular action. We're going to focus on livestock production in this group and so agricultural sustainability or sustainable livestock production and how things like economics, environment and community come into play that in particular how we're going to talk about sustainability for the rest of this evening and you'll hear these things coming up throughout the rest of the programs that you have. Any other comments or contributions? Anybody? Thank you. Alright, next on the list I'll get you all in touch with your artistic side. Okay. Take a marker or two. Or two. Probably all wondering why you have a paper plate. Pass the markers down after you choose your colors. Please. What I would like you to do on your paper plate, you have a paper plate and and you have a placemat. We're getting fancy tonight. So, first of all on the plate I would like you to draw a meal that you've had within the last 48 hours. 48 hours. A meal that you've had in the last two days. And then I want you to take your placemat and see if you can figure out where each of those ingredients came from. You'll see that you've got the United States on one side and you've got a world map of where each of those ingredients came from. So, I don't want you to tell me your food came from a restaurant or the grocery store because we all know better than that by now, right? To help you along the way I have some food ingredients that might kind of surprise you when you start looking at the labels. And you can come up here and look at these and see if you can figure out where they're from. But draw your own meal first and then you can come and look at mine. I know you all have eaten the meal within the last 48 hours. Don't forget to put your placemat underneath your plate. It can be any color you want it to be, Jack. If you want a pink potato, have a pink potato. This doesn't have to be fancy artwork. Just draw something and then see if you can figure out take five minutes, draw your meal and see if you can figure out where all of those ingredients came from. And then come up and look at my meal and see if there's anything shocking there. I thought you all were better cooks than this. Tell me where did you have a burger? Where did that come from? I'm sure. Move on. I said it doesn't have to be burger. Austin? What did you have? I labeled it. Okay. So where did it come from? You have no idea. Okay. Okay. So where did it come from? You have no idea. Taylor? Where's your food coming from? I don't know where it's coming from. Okay. You must have potatoes? No. Okay. Start passing these around and see if you can figure out where they came from. Read the label. It'll tell you. Alright. Call. That's where you get milk. I'm sure we already did that. Put an X. Put an X if you know where your food came from. Put an X on the map. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Look at it. Look at that. Look at that. There, there. Where did the bananas come from? Look. It's on the sticker. It's got spanish on it. Okay. Where? Where? Illinois. Illinois. Where's that from? Yes. This is Illinois. Cassie's down. I'll be the runner. Oh, my gosh. Oh my gosh. I'll be the runner. Thank you. I'll be the runner. I'll be the runner. I'll be the runner. I'll be the runner. I'll be the runner. That's the banana salad. Keep this. Keep the food for me. Okay. That's the banana salad. I'm not my favorite. Where are they? From Brazil. Brazil. Wild wonders. I think that they are. At it? Yes. We're on. Not much. What's your meal? The things are on. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Their income relies on bananas and carmel. This is... No, that's for sure. Oh. Yeah. Brazil is the biggest country in South America. The wide eye. I don't think so. I don't think that kind of thing. The wide eye. Where are you from? I don't know. Oh, it's from San Diego. They're like... They've been in trouble before. Ow. They're great. They come from... Mexico. You never know where great people come from. I know. It's a great thing. Okay, let's wrap this up. You all have done a really nice job of drawing your meal. It's from Walmart. Yeah. Oh, God. Hey, I just looked up my name. Yeah, I'm afraid. Grace, give us a thank you. This was a list of these boys. Thank you. We're already... She said she... Okay. You got it? All right. Beans. Beans. Okay, I'll take all the food back, please. No, not yours. Not yours. Okay, could you all tell where your food came from? Kind of. Kind of. What do you mean, kind of?  What could you choose? Trace back. My metallic potato. Where did your metallic potato come from? My grandpa's farm. All right. So that's what we call eating local, huh? Yes. All right. Anybody else able to tell where any part of their meal came from? Franny? My pork rolls come from my... Hey, a pig. That's in my freezer. Okay. All right, good. Does it bother anybody that you don't know where your food came from? Yes, it does. Of course, Jack could say, nope. Why? Why does it bother you? Because what if it's from, like, China or India? I don't know. It'd be, like, shipped over the ocean. Okay, what's it find out on the corned beef? I bought this for a reason. It's in Brazil. And it wasn't to eat it. Of course it wasn't. That's a good idea, Jesse. What does it say? It's from Brazil. Product of Brazil passed under Brazilian government inspection. It was probably made by slaves from Brazil. Where to think? Where to think? Do we have any idea what the inspection standards are in Brazil? No, they could be nothing.  Okay, thanks, Trent. All right.  It could have been. If it was inspected, it probably was inspected. Okay. Do we have a little bit better idea of inspection in Wisconsin versus Brazil? How many of you want to come and eat this when you fix it? No.  Where'd this come from? California. What do we know about tuna production in Thailand? Darrell. We don't know, do we? Is there a message here? Tomatoes, where were they? Mexico. In a greenhouse in Mexico. What are wild wonders? Tomatoes. How about the bananas? Trisha told me a story about bananas and I might never eat them again. Where, Carter? One, I want to hear the story and two, Guatemala pretty much lives off of bananas. Yeah. You can probably hear the term the banana belt. My banana came from Ecuador where I ate this morning and I lived in Ecuador as a volunteer and got to see banana production up close and personal and they use a lot of pesticides which, you know, like Trent said, pesticides are a tool that we use here and I think the point Jesse's making is here, today in this room we had 20 farmers go through the pesticide applicator training certification. It's a certification that farmers in Wisconsin and all across our country have to go through every five years, they have to get the certification and re-certify. So they take a class, they have to pass an exam and that allows them to purchase chemicals and to apply chemicals. So there's some pretty strict standards here that require a strong understanding of how to use pesticides. In Ecuador there's nothing like that. And here we learn a lot about personal protective equipment when you're using pesticides for example.   So to me since we can't grow bananas here in the United States and if you want and we love to eat bananas right this country I did get to work with some farmers who were selling them organically and if you can get organic bananas you might avoid some of those problems but again, you need to make sure that they're inspected by the USDA because if it's an organic organization of Ecuador you know what the standards are. So a lot of people say well who cares if it's organic if you don't eat the flesh but we talk about sustainability in terms of the environment and the community the employees who have to work on those farms for about ten cents an hour and the environment the water that they're going to drink that has chemical bags floating around so it's one of the things that we talked about there how many of your meals were sustainable sustainable is can be conventional production or it can be organic or it can be your meals were sustainable anything shock you here? yes y'all going to go home and read labels now and only eat from the garden in the freezer? no alright this little exercise was to just kind of open your eyes to see where your food might come from because any of you do any direct marketing to consumers of anything you produce on your farms alright why do those consumers buy from you Blake? it's convenient okay, Trent why do the consumers buy from you? they know you you don't have to go to some stranger's house to tell them what they want to buy do they trust you and trust your production practices? Doyle, you sell right to consumers? you sell some pork to consumers? okay, and why do they buy from you? Franny, you sell direct to the consumer? and why do they buy from you? okay good, so anybody else have any comments or questions? you can all pass the marker somewhere and take your plates home for a souvenir post it on the ceiling the last thing that we're going to do tonight, or maybe I should say the next thing is I have a little powerpoint to share with you that I think will kind of give you a better idea of what sustainability might look like because can you tell us from the discussion that Tricia left that sustainability means different things to different people and there really isn't a cut and dried definition it should be that will work can anybody see this? a short and sweet powerpoint it's going to show us a little bit about a farm called Full Circle Farm and by the time we get through the powerpoint maybe you'll figure out why they call it Full Circle Farm they are a sustainable farm this farm is an actual farm in Iowa that has been going for many many years is it self-sustaining use? self-sustaining use is sustainable self-sustaining to me that means that you produce everything that you need in life and I think that as consumers we're always maybe going to have to buy something I am anyway, I can be partially sustainable but self-sufficient not being trained are there people that are self-sufficient in the world? self-sufficient farmers so everything they grow they're growing for their own consumption maybe they trade some so these farmers depend a lot on solar energy versus fossil fuels who knows what the difference is Brandi fossil fuels are like air and stuff who else wants to try fossil fuels fossil fuels are they're refined refined oils left over from dead animals and organisms or maybe it's gas or diesel they retain and recycle nutrients on their farms they don't use a lot of inputs and the environment is very important they preserve it and they restore it and that's to protect water and support wildlife this is a farm that's economically profitable they make money, this is how they make their living and they support their community so as livestock producers how does your enterprise support your community? do you buy anything downtown? yes and we've already talked about some of you direct marketing do you support your local locker plants and feed stores that sort of thing? okay this is a grass based farm but they also feed some grain as you will see this farm has Angus cattle and some sheep they raise one forest sheep who's heard of those? okay the sheep people have like I said they use as much pasture as they can because grass captures solar energy and the cattle consume the grass and they fertilize the pasture with their manure so they are really recycling those plant nutrients aren't they? they're eating grass do humans eat much grass? no so they are consuming a resource that we don't eat directly do we? they also grow corn and sorghum together and they feed their cattle this mix sorghum is what would I call it? it's a grain they're probably harvesting they're like a forage yeah so they grow these two together they chop some and feed it as a green chop and the next slide or two you'll see that they also fence these fields and let the cattle what they call strip grazing so they grow these together kind of in a combination this is an organic farm they don't use chemical fertilizers or pesticides but when they grow more than one crop together that helps keep the pests away there's their electric fence so they use strip graze to crop so if they make the cattle do the work and graze the cattle are walking around harvesting the grain aren't they? so then they are not using as much gas to diesel the fossil fuels to get that harvested and they're also saving labor because does it take somebody to drive the tractor and open the gates even in the winter when grass isn't growing they're still feeding hay at that time but the cattle stay out on the pastures so they're still depositing manure and still fertilizing aren't they? and then as we have talked about with some of you selling direct to consumers their cattle are processed at a local market so they're supporting someone local in their community and they're direct marketing to consumers so that's two ways that they are supporting their community you see that community is on our board there are those clump horse sheep and they're a breed of sheep that do really well in a grass based kind of diet they do the same thing with them they're processed locally and sold locally do you think that they can demand a premium price for their beef and lamb demand it? not necessarily demand do you think that consumers are willing to pay more if they know where if they know where these animals are coming from and how they've been raised and fed and they like the quality of the product they're buying so that might be one way to set off offset Trent you talked about organic crops not yielding as much so you can command price on the other end where you're selling you might be able to get more money for it yes you might be able to sell chicken they also have chickens they sell eggs and they even take food scraps I'm assuming all vegetable scraps from a local camp and compost it they do a lot of composting because what does compost do to fields and gardens okay is that also something that's benefiting their community and their environment and the garbage from a camp that they would throw away and turning it into food for their soil they grow vegetables and they sell them through a CSA anybody know what a CSA is community supported agriculture where the consumer buys a share for a year and then they are guaranteed so many weeks of fresh produce it can't be just vegetables and fruits some of them include eggs some include dairy some include meat they're set up in many different ways they also sell to grocery stores and restaurants and they have some woods and some prairies they have people come out they're doing some agritourism anybody do agritourism on their farms I think we did it we brought in some people so look around at okay we do a cut amount of small scale people like to come out and see the lambs I don't charge them anything I probably could make money but I don't I just do it because it's fun but they get people to come out and ride around on a wagon and look at their animals and the grass they harvest wood from their wood and they're cutting down trees that are probably dead or blown down by the wind so they're cleaning up their wood lots at the same time they have a pond they use their pond in many ways for recreation, for fishing to water their vegetable crops and to water their livestock they do educational field tours and community picnics and that's the end of the slide show now why in the world would they want to name their farm full circle farm what do you think they produce a lot of their own and like recycle so is it a circle mostly in their community they produce and sell in their community how about environmentally are they doing a circle there how they're growing the crops and then they're distributing it and eating it and then they're used as composting and how about spreading manure how are they doing that organically they have their cattle out on pasture year around and then they so and how about the full circle with the economic portion of sustainability are they making enough to support their family questions, comments all right do you have one more handout I think does this give you an idea of what sustainable might be I told you parents can't talk what are they advertising as gas fed no they do not because they feed grain and in the notes I'll let you read my notes because it said most people in Iowa like feed that has some grain fed so that's why they feed that corn because there are strict standards for all the crops thank you all right you have a worksheet so this will be next time be due next time on March 21st well you need to turn it in you can't turn it in now no so you need to you're old enough to be responsible Franny yes turn it on the next put your name on it can you all think of three production practices that you do on your farm with your livestock if you do some crops you could do that I want you to go home and talk about this you don't have to come up with this all on your own have a discussion at home and see if you can come up with three practices that you do that are sustainable then we also want you to interview two people could be family members try to get some differences in age even differences in generations like interview somebody old like me and see what they think sustainable is and maybe interview your parents or an aunt or an uncle or whoever you choose and see if those definitions are different does that sound too hard but it's due next time and you know that I'm kind of a stickler on requirements I have to put a couple of requirements in so that you'll you do have to earn your trip that's right sure alright


Good afternoon. Thank you for coming to the New America Foundation. My name is Peter Bergen. This is a really wonderful event that we're going to have today for remembering Ambassador Holbrook and also the book The Unquiet American, which I think may be one of the best book titles of all time for anybody who knows Ambassador Holbrook. And we have a wonderful panel to talk with us today. We're going to be starting with Kathy Martin, who was, of course, married to Ambassador Holbrook, who has been a long-term board member of New America, who has been essential to New America's growth over the past decade. The author herself of, she's just starting on her eighth book, which is going to be a memoir to some degree of her life with Ambassador Holbrook. And after that, we'll hear from Rufus Phillips, who was Ambassador Holbrook's first boss, who went to Laos in the mid-50s as a CIA officer, was essential to setting up the civilian support program in Vietnam, was an early kind of, one of the first people to warn President Kennedy that things were not going quite as everybody, some people were suggesting in Vietnam. Then we'll hear from David Road, who's, and also Rufus Phillips has this wonderful new book, relevant new book, Why Vietnam Matters, which Ambassador Holbrook wrote the forward to. Then we'll hear from David Road, who two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who knew Ambassador Holbrook, both in Bosnia and in Afghanistan, Pakistan. He'll focus on Bosnia. And then we'll hear from Alexander Evans, who's a British diplomat, who's now an academic at Yale. In fact, he's both an interesting kind of mix of both a diplomat and an academic, who worked for Ambassador Holbrook when he was special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And finally, from Shamayla Chowdhury, who was a senior fellow here at New America, who was also director on the NSC for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also worked for Ambassador Holbrook. So we have a wonderful, we're really looking forward to this. Thank you for all of you for coming and doing this. Thank you, Peter. Should we speak from there, or what is the? Stand up. Stand up? Oh, okay. No uncertain terms. Well, good afternoon. Thank you, Peter, for that wonderful introduction of a really superb panel. Thank you for assembling. I can't think of a panel more qualified to speak of the many facets of this man. It always takes one minute, and I'm fine. This has been a great adventure putting this book together, because to contain this large figure within covers is not an easy task, but I think we've come close to doing that. And I need to thank Samantha Power and Derek Chalet, who both have day jobs in the White House for doing this in record time and for rounding up writers of the quality of David Road and the others, Strobe Talbot, John Alter, Roger Cohen, Richard Bernstein, et cetera. I had a minimal role. I wrote the introduction, and I was kind of a spur. But I just want to say a few words about the negotiator and the man. Many years ago, before I was married to Richard, the distinguished New York Times correspondent Richard Bernstein said I've only ever met one great man, and that was Richard Holbrook. And I said, really, why is that? And he said, well, because Richard Holbrook is changing the world. And after reading this book and after the terrible year that since he left, I agree with that. He did leave the world a different place than he found it in the following ways. Well, obviously, he ended Europe's nastiest war since the Second World War, which in itself is significant. But he also started Europe's most vibrant cultural center, which arguably the American Academy in Berlin is. But above all, I learned this past year, he changed the world by mentoring. He has left, I think his key legacy really, is that he left behind a generation of diplomats, of intelligence agents, CIA agents, humanitarian workers in the field who somehow were touched, transformed, inspired by Richard, and who will carry on that whole Brookian spirit. And what is that whole Brookian spirit? Well, Richard's brand of diplomacy was one human at a time. He was impatient with bureaucracy and with the endless diplomatic social niceties. Richard was about getting things done and about breaking down barriers between people and between cultures. The way he worked, and Shamile will tell you more about this, the way he worked, the AFPAC case, was a holistic approach. It was not about diplomacy. It was not about military. It was not about civil society. It was not about rebuilding Afghanistan's agriculture. It was not about empowering women. It was about all of that. And that's really, I observed him do that in the Balkans as well. The Dayton Accords was not about ending a war. Yes, it did end a war. But it was also about creating a new society, a new society which, however imperfect, thrives and has not reverted to those ancient ethnic hatreds that it was predicted it would revert to at the first opportunity. Not a shot has been fired in Sarajevo since 1995 in anger. So that was Richard's brand of diplomacy. And he left people to carry it on. And that, I cannot think of a better legacy than that. In recent days, there in reviews of the wonderful biography of George Kennan, there have been comparisons made between George Kennan and Richard Holbrook. And indeed they were both singular figures. And I suppose in common also neither one was Secretary of State. I would like to attack that bit of conventional wisdom about Richard's thwarted ambition for not becoming Secretary of State. Let me tell you, you don't get to be Secretary of State if the people that you back for president don't get to be president. The people that Richard backed as a Democrat were Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. So it's no mystery that none of them became Secretary of State. Richard was a very old fashioned public servant. And a president called and gave him an assignment. Richard said, I am there, sir. However impossible that assignment. And the last one was pretty close to impossible. But from what I understand, he's the things that are working on the ground there, including now finally the beginnings of negotiations with the Taliban were planted by Richard. So I think he was right to take that mission impossible and it wouldn't have occurred to me to discourage him from that. The other contrast with Kennan is that Richard was the world's most gregarious human being. George Kennan was a loner who has often been called a misanthrope and an elitist. Richard was the opposite of that. Plus Richard put human rights centrally in his brand of diplomacy, which for Kennan in some ways a more conventional and a more academic diplomat, human rights did not factor in. So I wanted to point that out. I also wanted to correct another sort of bit of conventional wisdom and that is that Richard was a kind of a bull in a china shop diplomat. Well, in fact, Richard spent a great deal of time cogitating his next move. He calibrated his moves quite precisely, even for the most part his famous eruptions were calculated for diplomatic effect, not always, but for the most part he was a disciplined thinker. And last summer, that is the summer before, I saw him when he would go into that think mode where he was unreachable, where he would kind of space out. I saw him working AFPAC, like a Rubik's Cube. And I said, what's going on there? And he said, I think I've got it. And I think I see a way to make the pieces fit. And I said, well, that's good news for all of us. Would you care to share that? And he said, no, I think I need to tell the president first. This was September 2010. And I'm not sure he did get to tell the president, but I hope so. Anyway, I am deeply grateful for the New America Foundation on whose board I proudly serve under the absolutely inspiring leadership of Steve Cole who honors us today with his presence. Thanks, Steve, for being here. Steve was just back from a great trip and has produced an absolutely fascinating and groundbreaking article in the current New Yorker about Mula Omar that I recommend. It's a great pleasure for me to be here with you and to talk about Richard. And after we hear from the distinguished panel, I hope we can exchange in a conversation and forgive my emotionalism. I'm Hungarian. Thank you. Well, that's a hard act. I think I was Richard's first boss, as many of you may know, but not all of you. And I need to set the circumstances under which this occurred. I had been asked by the Kennedy administration, and I was 32 at the time, to go out and see how the aid program, our economic and social assistance program, could be reorganized in Vietnam to support counterinsurgency. And at that time, I was no longer in the military or in the CIA. I was out in the private sector. And so I went out and what I found was that all of the assistance was concentrated in Saigon. And the aid mission, which had a little over 200 people in it, only three of which were outside of Saigon. Yet the whole insurgency and the whole basic problem in Vietnam was out in the countryside. So the plan that I came up with was essentially to turn the mission upside down to create a special office to put people out in the provinces who would be USAM provincial representatives working together with the province chief, Vietnamese province chief and a military advisor, and decentralized funding out there to actually support social and economic development down at the village level. And this was the program that Richard walked into. He came out in May of 1963. And I remember meeting him. He was this tall skinny, skinny kid with curly hair, who was impressed you as being very bright, but also brash, inquisitive. And so I sent him along with his companion, who also came out at the time to work with a regional representative we had. The way we set up was a very flat organization in contrast to bureaucratic hierarchies. We had the central headquarters in Saigon, which was very small, basically. And then we had some regional reps who were not directly in the chain of command. They were there to support the provincial reps. And then we had about 40 some odd people eventually down at the provincial level. And so I put him with one of the regional reps, and we really didn't have much of an orientation program. It was really learned by doing. Well, when he stepped off the plane in Saigon, he got a whiff of what this thing was all about because our executive officer went out to greet him and said, the first thing he said was, take off those ties and coats. This is a shirtsleeves outfit. And so they did. And the funny part of that is that about a week later, they paid an official call on the American embassy. And of course, they went down in shirtsleeves and they got chewed out for not appearing in ties and coats. Anyway, that was a little bit of the spirit of the place. And so he went around and observed what was going on. He obviously learned very rapidly. It turned out that the representative we had in a particular province down in the south was having problems with the province chief. And I tried to go down and straighten it out, but I couldn't. So I yanked him out. And then the thought occurred to me, well, we've got this, this young replacement, he's completely green. But if he's willing to go, I'll send him. So I called him in. And I told him this is a difficult problem and a difficult promise and a difficult promise, chief. Do you feel you can hack it? And he said, well, I'll give it one hell of a try. And so I said, well, you're it. And so I sent him down there. And he had to live like all the provincial reps on the local economy. The whole spirit of this outfit was very much like that of the Peace Corps, except it was in the war zone. And he started the programs we had had to do with building schools, with self help projects in the Hamlettson villages with with health. We helped train Hamlet militia for self defense. There was just a wide range of things that he was involved in. But he did it extremely well. And I'll never forget his coming back to Saigon, and giving me a briefing. And it was a straight on briefing that he thought he was making progress, but he saw a lot of problems. And I think that that kind of honesty was what was reflective of his career throughout the rest of his life. The other thing that I think is interesting is the kind of collegial atmosphere we had in what we call rural affairs. Because not only did we treat everybody was on a first name basis, but we treated our Vietnamese employees as colleagues. And that struck them as something different. And one of the things I'm very proud of is that one of our assistant provincial representatives who was a Vietnamese afterwards after fall of Saigon came to the US and became the first Vietnamese American elected official in the United States, a member of the city council of Westminster in California. And he ascribed his self confidence in in large part to this experience in working rural affairs. So that was a kind of spirit. And I think that Richard carried that spirit with them throughout the rest of his career. I know that some of us were concerned because we thought maybe he was over ambitious as he rose through the ladder. But I could see that he was ambitious to do something, not ambitious to be somebody. And he talked about that early experience has been in a similar one. And I think it was in that way, I think it was also in a way that he understood that these kinds of struggles, which are ultimately political in nature, decided out on the ground. They're not decided in boardroom somewhere else. And so whenever he went abroad, he would go down to the local level to try to find out what was really going on. And I ran into him. In fact, he invited me to a dinner for him in Cabo. The reason I was in Cabo is a long story, but there I was, I was a volunteer helping the Fair and Free Election Foundation of Afghanistan. But he invited me to this dinner, put me at his table. And during an emotional speech about what we were trying to do, and then talking about what he had learned from being out in the field, of course, he singled me out as he would every time I sat in an audience in which he was talking about something. And that was another, I think, very human quality that he had. He remembered his friends, he remembered his mentors, and he always kept in touch with them and would recognize them. And this is a quality that doesn't, is not common among a lot of people who achieve very high position. So in sum, I think that Richard's life trajectory reflected some of the qualities that we saw early on him, which became, of course, much grander and much more effective over time. And yet there was this human core to him. And I think what he really understood was these kinds of problems that we face in other countries are really about people above everything else. And he was a really a people person. Thank you. Hi. I had the luck of covering Richard as a journalist in, you know, I would argue his two most difficult diplomatic assignments. I was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor in Bosnia when he arrived on the scene there. And then when he arrived in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I was working for the New York Times. I also have a special personal connection with him, and I'll describe later.  What was amazing, I think, about Richard was that his diplomacy often was about individuals. He visited Bosnia as a private citizen first, and you may have heard this story. It's in the book. One of the reasons that he was so motivated about doing something with the war was that he actually met a man who had survived one of the camps that the Serbs had created. It was a Bosnian Muslim. Throughout his life, whether it was HIV positive women in Africa, he would meet individuals that would motivate him to develop pragmatic policies that would help change these situations. And the motor in Bosnia was this man he met, and then Katya talked about a moral threat, a caring about human rights, and a basic belief that the United States could be a force for good in the world. And that's really not in fashion these days. Frankly, post-Iraq, it's sort of, you know, chic, I would say, to think that the U.S. can't do anything positive in the world, and isolationism is much more accepted now. Richard, I think, opposed that view. We make many mistakes. We need to be much more humble, much more patient, and much more thoughtful about what we do and where we go. But I think one of the main lessons of this book and of his life is that we, you know, the United States, and even as individuals, you can do good in the world. When Richard arrived in Bosnia in 1995, then, working for the Clinton administration, as a reporter, I cannot tell you how hopeless the situation was. It was actually multilateralism at its worst. The head of the UN mission was Yasushi Akashi, a very cautious Japanese diplomat. A French general was the military commander of the UN mission, Bernard Jean Vieille, and they were completely opposed to the use of force. And, you know, one other area, and you should feel free to ask questions about this, was, you know, one question is what was Richard's view on use of force? There's questions. Shyamala might talk about his view on the surge in Afghanistan. The view I had very clearly in Bosnia was that he believed in using military force as a tool to move the parties in any conflict towards a diplomatic resolution. He was not a pacifist completely. He was also not a militarist. He knew that they were all tools to come together to hopefully end these conflicts. But we can take questions on that later. My personal link to Richard is that I am, in a sense, Ruvus is his former boss. I am, I guess, his favorite hostage. I was reporting on what turned out to be the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, the fall of Srebrenica. I found mass graves outside of the town of Srebrenica. This was a town that the United Nations had promised to protect. It had taken away the heavy weapons from the Muslims trying to defend the town, sent in several hundred poorly armed Dutch peacekeepers, and then made no effort whatsoever to stop the Bosnian Serb advance on the town. I had gotten in once to Bosnian Serb territory, found mass graves, and gotten out and written the story. I learned of more mass graves. Went in to confirm their existence. I had found survivors who described being taken to these places and somehow surviving during the executions. I was arrested at that second mass grave site. The really personal relationship to Richard and Katya as well, who at that point in 1995 was the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, was that after I was detained by the Bosnian Serbs, my family and my editors from the Christian Science Monitor arrived at the Dayton Peace Talks and Mass. I had essentially created this nightmare for Richard, who already had this impossible diplomatic task of ending this war on the Balkans. He and Katya were tireless at pressuring Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to push the Bosnian Serbs to win my release. I was released because of their efforts after only 10 days. I was incredibly lucky. Literally, I'll never forget Milosevic's these very tall Serbian Interior Ministry troops sweeping into Bosnian Serb territory and picking me up and whisking me off to Belgrade and bringing me home. When I got home, my family regaled me with stories of Richard's very personal and almost physical diplomacy. He was constantly pressuring the Serbs. At that point, I think they would not acknowledge that they had me, so there was an initial push to get them a phone call from me. They described how I would physically loom over the different Bosnian Serb representatives at the talks. It was the vice president, a man named Nikola Koliowicz. It's difficult to describe it. My uncle describes it better, but Koliowicz was playing some sort of game about whether they would call or they would not call. One of the basic things the Serbs can understand is how could Holbrook care so much about one journalist. My uncle describes Richard picking up Koliowicz's hat and sort of toying with it in his hands. The combination of that and Richard standing over Koliowicz looming over him. It was some sort of veiled threat. You may have been there, but something like, you know, I'll take your hat hostage if you don't make this phone call happen. It was all part of this sort of incredible combination of intellect and charm and sort of physicality and tireless energy that he brought together. It worked in my case. He literally told Slobodan Milosevic that he was going to end the peace negotiations, freeze them until I was released. And that was sort of the key factor. And so was Kati's effort, defending me as a fellow journalist as well. Unfortunately, and I can talk about this later, I was kidnapped a second time during Richard's even more difficult assignment dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was we were very lucky with the help of an Afghan colleague, I was able to escape from captivity. And I was flown to the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan. And I'll be honest, Richard teased me and sort of gave me a very hard time. After the Bosnia incident, we were actually sitting in a pew at a friend's wedding the summer before I went off to Afghanistan, I got kidnapped and I promised him it wouldn't happen again. My captors actually, the Taliban who had me took me into the travelers of Pakistan and they googled me. And I'll never forget early in January 2009, when I was a prisoner, they announced your best friends with Richard Holbrook. And I'd never mentioned Holbrook's name intentionally, I didn't want them to, they have these huge expectations what they could get for me. And what they had done was googled us and googled me and somehow and then also seen Holbrook's name in the news as the new special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. So when I arrived at Bagram, and I was told that Ambassador Holbrook was on the phone, and he wants to speak to you immediately. I was very nervous about the earful I was about to get. And that what I had done yet again at his is that when he already faced such incredible challenges. But instead, he was incredibly kind. And he used the seven months I spent with the Hakanis is an effort to better understand the Taliban. He just asked me questions when I got back to New York, you know, who are the Taliban? You know, why are they fighting and what do they want? I saw it as an example of maybe potentially Richard Holbrook mellowed over the years in terms of his reaction to the second kidnapping. But it was more a focus of his pragmatism. And I just want to go back to that that theme where he he just he was looking for solutions. He loved being in the field. He disdained the Washington bureaucracy. He wanted to solve problems he wanted to do, as Rufus said, and he was also driven by this this this morality. And one other thing is that he was and again in terms of our this this time we're in now, he was not a partisan. He worked with Republicans. There's a famous incident where he got Jesse Helms to pay, you know, the backdoos at the United Nations. If there was a Republican who questioned his actions, he didn't immediately question their intelligence, their morality or their patriotism. And I think that's something that's sort of sadly lacking from our politics today. And just lastly, looking at the book which came together beautifully, the best writing in it is from Richard himself. I hope younger Americans will see it as a sort of call to public service. I think he showed how much you can achieve as a public servant. And he sort of counteracts the cynicism I've talked about earlier. And I, you know, I just can't thank him enough for everything he did for me, which is not is a tiny thing compared to the tremendous contribution he made to so many people around the world and in the United States. Thanks. Well, we moved to the we moved to the 2000s. I was I negotiated a cunning 11 month sabbatical in 2009. After spending two years as a British diplomat in Pakistan, and I finally figured out how to spend five months first at Yale and then another sort of six months split between Oxford and Paris. And this is going to be my delicious year of writing and recuperating and thinking about the world. And it was not to be. Barely was I sort of four or five weeks into being at Yale. When I got a phone call from somebody who said, I think you need to think about going down to New York and meeting Richard Holbrook, which I then did. And when when he offered me a position as an advisor in his team at the state department, the principal reaction I got from people I knew in Washington, I'd worked in Washington before in the late 1990s, was commissuration. Most people leaned across and said, well, terribly sorry, it's going to be dreadful. Haven't you heard about what a horrible man he is to work for? He's beastly. Yeah, he's egotistical. He'll demand slavish loyalty. You really won't enjoy it. You'll have no influence. And it was striking just how negative an awful lot of people were. What they knew was the myths about Richard Holbrook, what they didn't know was the man. And it was striking too that one of the people who did know him very well took me aside and said, you will have a wonderful time and this is an important thing to do. And he said, there's one thing you need to recognize about Richard Holbrook. Everything that's written about him is true. And he paused for dramatic effect before repeating one word, everything. And the doomssters were wrong. And in fact, I worked for him for the final year of his life and he was never at any time unpleasant to me. So the myth of Holbrook, the bruiser, is incorrect. I rather like later on coming across a Henry Kissinger quote about Holbrook, which I think is quite apt. It sits on my wall at Yale and it says the following. Kissinger says, I yell at my staff but not at negotiators. Richard Holbrook probably is nice to his staff but yells at the people he negotiates with. And that also was not always true but I think he reserved most of his bark for people outside the group of people who worked for him or indeed the group of people who worked with him. There are five things I really deeply admired Richard Holbrook for and this is after reflecting on the period working in the State Department, particularly as a British person. The idea that you can bring in a random Brit to join a group of Americans to also join a group of people who were outsiders. He was and I think the first thing I admired deeply about him was his intellectual confidence. And that's not just about the ability to think intelligently about the world or about the policies you're dealing with. It's also having a confidence to invite external expertise and to have people around you who don't even share your views or each other's views about what policy course to take. And he wasn't frightened about that level of debate, that level of robustness in policy dialogue. And I think you compare and contrast that to many others who might have the intellectual capacity but wouldn't necessarily have the confidence to deal with that kind of level of debate. I think the second thing and this echoes what's already been said was his commitment to impact. He wasn't just interested in diplomacy for the sake of being a once upon a time a nice office in the State Department. It wasn't a particularly nice office when we were there. He was really interested in what effect would diplomacy have. And he was able I think to distinguish between the ritual, the routine and the real in diplomacy. He knew when routine and ritual had its part to play but he was very focused on trying to get to the real. How would you actually achieve something? That did mean him that he was somewhat intolerant let's say of bureaucracy and not always tolerant of some of the ways that people did things because that was a way that people did things at the State Department. I think the third thing is, and this is perhaps not being commented on so much, I think he showed enormous dignity when his critics inside the Beltway found ways to criticize his performance or his views. Usually unfairly. And I never heard him say anything mean about the people who were saying mean things about him. And that's a striking note of character I think. It's pretty difficult if your efforts are under attack, not to respond in kind, at least in private with the people you work with if not in public with others as well. I think the other thing was he's a role model for people who want to have a career in public affairs and I think now teaching students at Yale to think about careers in diplomacy whether with the United States or with international organizations or other countries. The model of a career in which he had such impact is a real kind of it offers you insights in a way of modeling a career that isn't just based on punching your ticket and getting an identity card to work in a particular bureaucracy. And finally he had what Isaiah Berlin always said was very important in any individual which is he had excellent judgment and I echo the point about that but he cogitated he did think about things. He held his cards to his close to his chest a lot of time so he wasn't necessarily going to reveal his game plan for solving the problem of the day or indeed the problem of the job. But he did think deeply about how to approach it. I think more over his life demonstrated two truths about US foreign policy. The first is that a revolving door really enriches policymaking. If it's used in the right way. If you have somebody like Richard who went off and did so many different things. But rather than just doing each thing in and of itself accumulated the contacts and knowledge and expertise and experiences and then use that in his subsequent public public roles. I think the other thing is how weak institutional memory can be in Washington and that's the negative consequence of a revolving door. And I think having somebody like Richard who was so conscious of the history of US foreign policy and engagement on a range of different issues. The history of US engagement in peace processes in a range of different places. And he was able to bring that knowledge to bear and also recognize when he didn't know but know who he could reach out to whether it was a journalist like David or others he could reach out to. There were of course things he wasn't so great at. He wasn't great at suffering bureaucrats. He didn't always have patients for paper warriors or plodders. And that occasionally showed. But I think his strengths massively outweighed those weaknesses. And actually you want somebody like Richard Holbrook when you're dealing with a problem as complex and as challenging as Afghanistan and Pakistan has been for the United States in recent years. So in conclusion I think Richard Holbrook was a statesman not a bureaucrat. And we should celebrate him for that. And I would say at a personal level I miss him. So I met Richard during his first day as a strap at the State Department. And he had requested a briefing from the Pakistan team and had specifically asked for desk officers to to participate. I was one of those desk officers. And this is something that he was known for. He didn't want to talk to the bosses. He wanted to talk to the people who he knew were working on the issues day to day twenty four seven thinking about these things. Ready to staff ready to brief. So I was one of those fortunate or unfortunate folks. And I have to admit I was nervous. As Alex mentioned there are all these stories floating around about him. One I can remember is that he threw a shoe at someone. Everyone knows the story. And I don't know if it's true or not. But so you know as I was preparing for the briefing. You know I had various colleagues come by my office and say you know he threw a shoe at someone. So just be careful and people were scaring us. So I was nervous. But I prepared and I planned and I studied with my colleagues. And but only when I met him did I realize how much more nervous I should have been. He was a very daunting figure as all of you know. He physically towered above most people and a casual glance from him was by no means casual. He could see right through you and know exactly what you were thinking and maybe know what you were thinking. You know five steps ahead. And he always asked the question that you couldn't answer or the question that you didn't want asked. So I thought OK I can fight fire with fire. I know how to deal with a person like this. So in the briefing he asked very provocative questions and I offered provocative answers. And for those of you who don't know the State Department is not a place where that's exactly discouraged. But it's rarely it's rarely rewarded there. So Holbrook rewarded me by giving me more work. I went home that day and I got a call inviting me to participate in another briefing the next day on Pakistan this time with Secretary Clinton. So I had more homework to do and I was yet I was nervous again. And during the briefing with the Secretary I found myself speaking up again. I just couldn't help it. There was too much to say about the State of Affairs when it came to US Pakistan relations. And this time around I was yet again rewarded with more work. I received an offer the next day to join the Secretary's policy planning staff. And so after obviously I accepted the position and after accepting the position I recalled how Ambassador Holbrook had shot me a huge thumbs up after the briefing. This was essentially his silent approval for speaking up. It had paid off. I had gotten a much better job and he had clearly set me up. So it was just a matter of being in the right place and the right time with him. And he might just change the course of your career or your life. And I thought you know to think he did this with dozens of folks over the course of his career for so many of us from Vietnam to New York to the Balkans Afghanistan Pakistan and now Washington D.C. But these moments of opportunity as we all know did not come free. There was a huge service fee and a rather hefty one at that. So working for him was not very easy especially on Pakistan. The issues were challenging and working for him was just as challenging. And I think if you look at the AFPAC essays in the Unquiet American they clearly indicate that he had a full grasp of the challenges that were coming from Pakistan and the failures of U.S. diplomacy in the region well before he had his job as SRAT. And so he had been waiting on the sidelines for so long that when he finally jumped into the ring he was moving too fast for the bureaucracy to catch up. No idea was revolutionary enough and no and no approach was ambitious enough. He seemed to be telling us at the State Department at the State Department that we simply weren't good enough and we weren't working hard enough to take on the task at hand. He was saying that Pakistan and Afghanistan was a unique problem set and it required an even more unique set of solutions and we had been ignoring that for years. And I think he was right. His public service record on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship specifically tried very hard to offer that unique set of solutions. Unfortunately he wasn't able to see that through. But given the terrible state of affairs between the two countries right now I thought it might be useful to revisit two important strategies he deployed in hopes of offering some guidance for the future. First develop personal relationships with your counterparts at any expense even at the expense of your own patients. Now this might sound contradictory to Holbrook style especially when you look at AFPAC and there's reporting on his difficult relationship with President Karzai. I saw something very different time and time again I saw him throwing himself at people that he knew he was in conflict with or were difficult to work with or simply did not like him. But he knew he had to do it to achieve the broader policy goal. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship today could afford to rebuild some of those personal relationships. Second take action and responsibility when the policy heads in the wrong direction. A lot of this Richard did behind the scenes and no one really saw it. He worked tirelessly to troubleshoot the many problems in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. The government in Pakistan was very weak. Civilians were weak especially as it related to you know helping the United States promote certain issues and interests. One example is the Kerry Luger Berman legislation. This package was intended to be a very historic piece of legislation focused on the Pakistani people but it became a central conflict between the Pakistani civilians and the military. And for those of you know the legislation the military was criticized in the legislation. They felt very threatened by it. There were conditions and what we saw happen in Pakistan was that the military put the pressure on the civilians in response. So instead of letting this problem fester in this already very negative space Richard did something else because he knew letting the problem fester would not advance U.S. interests. He worked very closely with the leadership in Pakistan, talked with Foreign Minister Koreshi who took an emergency trip to Washington to iron out the details with the State Department and Congress so that he could take something more palatable back to his government. Now some may call this meddling it's not our business this is a domestic issue but I call this cleaning up your mess and some of it belonged to others. It wasn't all Richard's mess but he had he felt a strong sense of responsibility to fix this particular issue because if he didn't it would affect all these other issues that were important to the United States. So criticisms of the legislation aside it eventually did stabilize the situation. And I think this is particularly important now it's a huge stark contrast to this past November's NATO strike where neither the U.S. nor Pakistan have yet to give a clear statement on the situation. The conflict has dragged out even until this week when the Pakistani government has denounced the official U.S. findings and the U.S. has yet to formally apologize for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers. And I don't think Richard would be surprised by the current state of affairs. He already knew when he worked on there's an essay in the Unquired American in the Washington Post from 2006 the one on Afghanistan the long road ahead. He knew when he wrote that that the United States would be in Afghanistan for a long time. And a large part of that was because of the enormous crisis in U.S. relations with Pakistan. And even though President Obama has announced an initial drawdown of troops in Afghanistan we still don't know for sure how long we will be in the region nor how to truly address the Pakistan problem. So hopefully we all have a little bit of Holbrook left in us those of us that still work on U.S.-Pakistan relations. So we can start fixing this very important relationship. Thank you very much. So we'll open it to questions and if you have a question just wait for the mic. Where is the microphone? Oh, maybe we don't OK, OK, OK. Go ahead. The differences in the roles in the Secretary's state versus state ambassadors and what circumstances does one supersede the other or if possible come to conflict with different approaches to the same problem? I'm happy to answer it. I think it's a. The Secretary of State is the boss. The diplomats, the ambassadors work for the Secretary of State. So there's a very clear hierarchy once once the policy is set by the secretary by who ultimately gets who ultimately collaborates with the president and the National Security Council. The the ambassadors carry carry out that that policy. Obviously, personal relationships are enormously important. And in the specific case of Richard, he had a very close relationship with with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So there was a there was a great deal of collaboration between the two of them. I think I think Hillary had much to do with with Richard getting this this job, which was arguably President Obama's most challenging diplomatic assignment, which he gave to a man he didn't have any personal relation prior personal relationship to. So but but the the Secretary of State is is ultimately the boss. So raise your hand for in the back, Jennifer. If you could just identify yourself in your affiliation, that would be great. Thank you. I'm Zach Bogovsky from the United Nations Information Center. And I will direct my question to Miss Martin. What was the attitude of Mr. Holbrooke towards the United Nations and how satisfied was he serving as an ambassador in the United Nations? Richard considered the United Nations absolutely indispensable to the world and considered it an imperfect organization as how could it not be imperfect when when it's only as strong as it's hundred and ninety three, I believe now, member states want it to be. He absolutely loved his his two years as ambassador and considered it probably the most fun he ever had in in in public service. We we we had a great time. We we visited 15 African nations on one on a single trip. And it was during that trip that that that Richard was struck by the unbelievable tragedy of HIV AIDS and then succeeded upon returning to the Security Council in in making a health issue, an agenda issue for the Security Council for the first time. And that has radically altered the way the UN deals with HIV to this day and has had much to do with with with turning that that epidemic around. So it was it was it was a great run. He also got as as as David mentioned, he also got the arch enemy of the United Nations, the Republican Senator Jesse Helms to to come to the UN and to and and ultimately to to to pay nine hundred million dollars in in back dues that the US shamefully owed the UN. So it was again, as as so often with Richard, it was a it was a brief period, but an intense period and and one that was that was really focused on on achieving very concrete results in a in a very short time. And that was kind of Richard's specialty. My name is Tara McKelvie and I'm a correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. And I wanted to ask you, I remember I was in Pakistan around the time after the floods and Richard Holbrook was very excited about the possibility of building US-Pakistan relations from the development work that was being done. I want to know if you could tell me what he was worried about about Pakistan, what he talked about you know, in the past year. So maybe that will give us some indication of what to look forward or not to Dredd. I have a mild constraint, which is I'm still serving British officials, so which means I can say nothing in particular but say it extraordinarily well. But I think I think on Pakistan, I mean, I think what was interesting about his approach to Pakistan was a, his curiosity. I mean, he was really interested in understanding not just Pakistan as it is now, but Pakistan as it was and the sort of successive debates about the US-Pakistan relationship and about democracy in Pakistan. I think he emphasized on the positive side obviously things like responding to the floods, but also this intimate, personalized diplomacy with Pakistan's civilian leaders as well as the military. He was pragmatic about the role of the army in Pakistan. He realized that the army in Pakistan was a presence, an institutional presence that was perhaps outsized. But he was also very emphatic about the relationship needed to be with civilians and the civilian leadership in Pakistan. I think he shared the same worries about Pakistan that everybody has in Washington. But he was conscious of the need to actually have a substantive dialogue in private with the Pakistanis and that actually private diplomacy rather than megaphone diplomacy might not solve all the problems with Pakistan but it did at least allow you to have a substantive policy discussion that could perhaps lead to resolution in time. Just to piggyback off of what Alex said because I am free to speak. I've left the US government. Richard used to describe the relationship with Pakistan as two sets of issues. There are issues that are above the waterline and below the waterline and you have to focus on both of them and if done well and correctly, they reinforce each other. What does that mean? So all of the issues that are kind of above the waterline are development issues and responding to crises day to day, aid legislation. These were all things that he knew were important because the relationship was important for other reasons as well, the issues below the waterline which were predominantly security issues, counter-terrorism, the need for Pakistan's cooperation on US interests in Afghanistan and you couldn't have one without the other. You couldn't feasibly ask for Pakistani cooperation on al-Qaida and fighting the Taliban if you didn't address the strategic interests of the country writ large and I think that was the right approach and that will continue to be the right approach whether we're able to actually implement that and move forward within the timeframe that is beneficial to US interests or Pakistani interests. I think that remains a question but I think he was well before his time on this one and I think it's because, and you see it in the book, he had been thinking about these issues for so long, years before and he was able to identify the weaknesses and the vulnerabilities on American diplomacy in Pakistan and in the region and where we needed to focus on and that's why when he came in, he came in so strongly on the relationship side of things. I used to sit in his office and he would call 10 different people all at once while he was having two meetings with us and two separate meetings in the office and calling President Zardari or talking to the ambassador or calling General Petraeus in Afghanistan and some Pakistan related issue. I mean, this was his way of managing a very complex set of issues that were above and below this waterline. Now, in the absence of somebody doing that, it's very hard to manage this type of relationship and sometimes you don't have that type of person and you're lucky if you do and I think when Richard passed away, we really saw it as a unique set of problems requiring a unique set of solutions but it also requires a unique interlocutor and that's who he was indeed and those of us that work on these issues on US-Pakistan relations, it requires a lot of patience and it requires a long-term approach and he had that, ironically enough, for somebody who a lot of us thought was not patient and everything was urgent for him. I think he had that forward-looking vision which you need with a country like Pakistan and I would argue with a region like South Asia. That was beautifully expressed and I just wanna say that Richard treated people with dignity. He did not believe in humiliating people. He believed that every culture deserved to be treated with dignity and he felt that of course Pakistan was a troubling and troublesome ally but that we had no choice but to be intensely engaged and you don't pick your friends in the field. You are dealt a certain set of cards and you have to work them and I know that the day after the Bin Laden assassination, Richard would have been on a plane to Pakistan and he would have been all over that country and working, he knew everybody up and down the chain of command and he would have been intensely refocused on that. You don't wait for a crisis before you present yourself. You preempt that crisis by personal dealings and plus he also didn't want Pakistan to feel that it was a transactional relationship. He wanted the Pakistanis to feel as he once put it to me that there was marriage at the end of courtship, that this was not about a one night stand. In other words, it was a friendship of equals, even if it wasn't. I just wanted to ask Farah Ifshahane who is a distinguished member of parliament in Pakistan and also the spokesman for President Zidari and also the wife of Ambassador Hussain Akhane who is now of course in Pakistan because of the so-called MemoGate controversy and Farah, go ahead. If you had any kind of comments or observations. I just want to say that what everyone here has said about Richard, as a member of the Pakistani parliament, I had the honor and privilege of knowing Ambassador Holbrook at the Pakistani end as a member of President Zidari's team and I also knew him here in Washington as Hussain Akhane's wife and Ambassador Holbrook typified all that was grandest about America and his entire process, his way of dealing with Pakistan and wanting to bring a better relationship between those two is missed and felt painfully, I believe in my personal view, on both sides, no disrespect to anybody in their current positions but Richard broke all boundaries and he really did historic things and I was lucky enough to see a lot of that up close and he and his entire team really made a difference and I think the history books will reflect that. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Jeremy Harrington. I'm a graduate of the Fletcher School. I'm wondering about the panelists' recollections of Mr. Holbrook's views on US policy during the Vietnam conflict, where he saw the lessons learned, the mistakes, the missed opportunities and how those views evolved during the conflict and the lessons he took in its aftermath. I apologize for not reading his introduction to Mr. Phillips' book to kind of preface this question but I'm sure there are a lot of conversations that took place privately over the years. Richard had, I think, developed a pretty complex view of the old Vietnam social situation. He understood pretty quickly that once we became so directly involved with US troops that this was the situation that was not gonna work out, that if there was any chance that the South Vietnamese could have pulled themselves together and developed something in South Vietnam that the South Vietnamese people were supportive and were fighting for, that was one situation. But when we had essentially taken over the war, I think he saw that it was a situation that was not going to end well. He did everything he could to try to focus our attention in efforts in Vietnam on what was called the pacification side of the effort rather than to try to defeat the North Vietnamese militarily, which of course was an impossible task. I think that he probably would have agreed with an observation, although I never heard him say this exactly, that Maxwell Taylor made towards the end of his life, and that was that we were in a situation in which we didn't understand the enemy, we didn't understand our South Vietnamese allies, and we didn't understand ourselves, and by that, our own limitations. Thank you. My name is Zach Moldavium, an Afron journalist working with The Points of America. We talked about the negotiator, and I was in Afghanistan by the time Richard Horbrook was a special envoy for Afghanistan. He didn't talk to Taliban really, while he was negotiating somehow for the peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I remember he had one of the most difficult relationship with President Karzai, particularly during the presidential election that were marred with fraud and other irregularities. I'm wondering if you have any reflections on his position, difficult position with Karzai, and being unable to talk to one side of the conflict was the Taliban. In Afghanistan, also people were saying at that time that there was no actually diplomacy on going in regards to Taliban. The trellis was the commander of ISAF, and that Biden, the military logic, was predominant. And in a way that wasn't leaving enough room for diplomacy to be part of the process, if you have any reflections on that. Thank you. You know, I mean, just for what it's, you know, I think that what we're seeing today with the Taliban establishing the office in Qatar, and I mean, right from the beginning, and correct me, I'm from Rong Alex, or Shamila, or Caddy, you know, one of the first things that Richard Horbrook did, even before he became special representative, was to bring Barney Rubin, who is arguably the world's greatest expert in Afghanistan. I was part of a task force at the Asia Society, even before Ambassador Horbrook was appointed special representative. And he was doing a lot of thinking about how to deal with the Taliban. And Barney Rubin is still the point person, as far as I can tell, for, and obviously much of this is, you know, for very good reasons, isn't widely advertised. Barney has been absolutely essential to the effort to bring not just the Taliban into the negotiations, but people who can deal with the Taliban. I mean, a lot of the problems that we've been having with this negotiation, we don't even know, I mean, we have a better sense now, perhaps, but who exactly are we negotiating with isn't very clear sometimes. I mean, for instance, somebody called Mullah Mansour, who turned out to be a shopkeeper from Qatar, was presenting himself as the number two in the Taliban. I think that sort of speaks for itself. So there was part of the problem was trying to identify the people in the Taliban that might actually speak for Mullah Omar. And I think to some degree, that has been sort of solved. But I think Richard was instrumental in laying the foundations for this process. Now, how the process will develop over time, I think is, we don't know. It took 30 years for the IRA to come to an agreement with the British. And in a sense, this is a much more complex conflict. But I think, Alex, you and Shamaila should chime in, but my impression very strongly is that this was one of Richard's Ambassador Holbrook's legacies was what we're beginning to see the germs of some kind of negotiation today. I mean, all I would have very briefly is, I can't comment on the relationship with President Ahmad Karzai, but I think he was very clear from early on that you require a political settlement in Afghanistan and a political settlement that involves regional partners. I think he was very clear about that vision. I think connecting back to the Vietnam analogy, he was repeatedly, I think, pains to say that Afghanistan is not Vietnam. This is not a direct analog because I think sometimes people attempted to see echoes of US foreign policy past in the present. But he was very interested in what lessons could you learn from the experience of Vietnam? And certainly one of those lessons, it seemed to be that political processes take a lot of time and they take a lot of preparation. And I think that echoes Peter's comments and comments that have been made in the book and by Catty and elsewhere, but this was all about the preparation for a political process. And hopefully we end up with a political process that yields a result. I just wanna add something about Hamid Karzai because Ambassador Holbrook told me in great detail rather directly, rather critical scene with Hamid Karzai, which took place as the very flawed election was happening. And he and Ambassador Eikenbrie went to Karzai and basically Karzai was saying, I've won. This was not all the returns that come in. And Ambassador Holbrook said, well, what if you don't get, I mean, what if it's below 50% and Karzai said, well, I already know it's 54%. He said, how do you know these are not all the returns have come in? And Ambassador Holbrook was very, very insistent with Karzai that basically not only would he be in contravention of his own constitution, but essentially the whole American project and the whole Allied project in Afghanistan would go south if he didn't sort of recognize the fact that there would have to be a runoff election. He was very, very firm with Karzai on this point. Of course, Karzai was quite resistant, but when it came to it, you know, Hammack Karzai did say, well, you know, yeah, we'll have to go to the runoff election. And as it happens, it never went to the runoff because Dr. Abdullah, who was the number two candidate, basically stepped aside. But I think part of the kind of, you know, the reason that there was tension between Hammack Karzai and Ambassador Holbrook was because there were reasons for the tension. It wasn't just that it was a difficult relationship, but there was sort of a substantive reason. I think that that was at the heart of this. And Cady, I don't know if you haven't. I would just like to ask which envoy or foreign minister has an easy relationship with Hammack Karzai? Perhaps. If I can just add, Richard Holbrook was following the policy of his superiors when he was sort of tough with Karzai on the election. He had clear instructions from Washington to do that. There was a belief, I think, at a higher level of the administration that there was a need to get tough with Karzai, that the Bush administration wasn't tough enough. It wasn't, this is one of those, again, those stories that somehow he's too abrasive. That wasn't what happened. And he wasn't super abrasive in that meeting. There were media accounts afterwards that exaggerated the level of the conflict. And in terms of negotiations, it's my understanding he supported negotiations all along. He was skeptical of the surge. He believed in an A surge, probably not one as large as it turned out to be, but in higher level officials did not wanna begin negotiations in 2009. They wanted to let the military effort play itself out. And he played his cards very close to his chest and he advised Secretary Clinton and the president when he could and he followed orders. And that doesn't fit the stereotype, but I think that's true. I'll just say one thing on the reconciliation issue. Before Richard came to the State Department, there was probably some discussion on reconciliation and the concept of talking to the Taliban, but it was not, you could say it wasn't socially acceptable or politically palatable. We just weren't there. And no one was willing or wanted to or ready to sell that concept. And so we saw it happening right before, we knew he was coming, but right before he started his job, this discussion started actually internally in the government and it had never happened before and it slowly became part of our psyche whereas before it never had been. And what I think Richard was trying to do was to sell this concept internally just like you have to sell any kind of war or any kind of political resolution or process. He, I think this was one of his main objectives in taking this job was maybe he wasn't going to be the negotiator, but this was to him an acceptable piece and we had to go there. The timing for that maybe, who knows? And these things do take a long time as Peter said and even now we shouldn't be, we shouldn't think that we're done. This could take 10 years, it could take 15 years, no one knows, but I would credit him with socializing at least the US bureaucracy on this concept. If it didn't translate when he went overseas, I think that's because of taking orders or following directives from his superiors. So. I'd like to comment on something. I think, well I'll just recount and this is nannied up. Last time I saw Richard was at a dinner for someone who'd been out in Saigon and it was held at the press club and there were a lot of press people who'd been out in Vietnam. So during the dinner we was all chit chat and recollections and a lot of funny stuff about what happened during Vietnam, but as we got up to go, I went up to him and I said to him, I said, Richard, does anybody at the top of this administration understand how long this is gonna take? And he said, he looked at me and he thought for a moment and he said, they're gonna learn the hard way. And so, you know, he was a realist and he'd gone through it with the North Vietnamese in Paris and he understood how long these things take with a very, very difficult opponent and with a essentially sort of vastly unglued situation in the country, you know, that you're trying to get into the negotiation process on both sides. So that's just a side comment, but. We have about five minutes so let's just maybe collect some questions and we'll let everybody. So, Jennifer, if you'd just collect, we'll just. Hi, my name's Dennis Grubb and I'm an ex Peace Corps volunteer and part of Richard's curricula is being the Peace Corps director in Morocco in the 60s after he finished in Vietnam as a pacification officer. And I'm wondering whether or not he recounted any of those stories about the Peace Corps to the panel because the pictures I love of Richard Holbrook are, you know, sleeves rolled up as you say, you know, just clogging, slogging along wherever and that reminds me of my Peace Corps days. So I wondered if he had recollected the stories to you all. Great, and just behind. My name's Jonathan Morgenstein and I kind of growing up was in my late high school college years during the Balkans and I always found inspiration since then in Holbrook's work. My question is, if any of you can recall in the last few years him looking back and saying, I wish I had done this differently at Dayton or is this, you know, looking at Bosnia and Kosovo and how it turned out, maybe we didn't fully finish the job and there's something else we could have done either at Dayton or since then. Thank you. I'm behind you, Jennifer. Oh, Daburdin, I came to know Richard in the last 10 years and he struck me as being a hybrid between Brzezinski and Kissinger. One thing Kissinger, I mean, deck dead, he traveled to the Gulf to places like Abu Dhabi and Qatar and he got the Abu Dhabians to really commit large resources for Pakistan and Afghanistan and it was due to the skill to the astuteness to his great mind that I think people should realize that his involvement was not just Afghanistan, Pakistan, he traveled, he spent lots of time. Keri, I'd just like to ask you a question from knowing Richard. He was one of the first American experts who began to question the policy on Iraq within two months. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, good question, and then here in front. Stefan Brathwaite with the Brown University Alumni Club of Washington, DC. I'd like to thank you all for such touching remarks and assure you that the many in the Brown community share a sense of loss for Ambassador Holbrook's incredible service. My question touches on a different geographic zone which is Germany. I'm interested in any reflections you may have concerning his role with the Academy in Berlin. Thank you. Many of those seem to be directed for you. I think... Are we running out of time? We're kind of... One more, one more, okay? No. It's all in the back, there's no affiliation. Richard Holbrook leaves a rich legacy of accomplishments and a rich model for the good public servant. Is there some way to institutionalize this model and his attributes? Well, these are all great questions and I can't thank you enough for your continued interest and your continued memories and keeping him alive and the panel particularly has been extraordinary. I was coming from the first meeting this morning of the American Academy in Berlin Holbrook Center and so this has been a day drenched in Richard's memory so difficult but I feel that some of you share the loss and that's very helpful to me but this is a difficult day. On the subject of Morocco and the Peace Corps, he kept that very much alive and in fact took all of us, the family, on a Peace Corps kind of nostalgia tour several Christmases ago and we drove across the Atlas Mountains and you know what, even today there are people in the souk in Marrakesh who remember him, he was a great bargainer so we went into places and came back with, I could open a Moroccan bazaar from all the stuff that he negotiated for us so the Peace Corps was very important and in fact there is an effort to, I don't know if you're aware of this, to give a prize in his memory for someone who is serving in that mold. It's wonderful to see you old friend and on the subject of Iraq, Richard was absolutely appalled by the reckless execution of that war. He was in favor of, not Richard of course, unlike Bush administration senior officials, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney obviously and the president was not privy to intelligence. However, he felt that Saddam Hussein was a true monster and one of the great human rights violators of our time so therefore he was not opposed to deposing him for on that score but he was appalled at the arrogant lack of preparation for the post-war period and really that was a very painful time for him because he was outside the government unable to serve and watching this disaster unfold because of arrogance and lack of preparation. Let's see, what am I missing here? Brown University, that was lovely. Bosnia, yes, regret for Bosnia. I think he regretted that he agreed to the name, the use of the name Republika Srpska because that was so resonant with nationalism and a backward policy as opposed to healing and nationalism but under the circumstances and I was with him for much of the negotiation, there were so many players and you were dealing with some of the worst people in the world and to get them to agree to anything was not a foregone conclusion by any means. There were a number of times during those talks when it looked like nothing would come of them and in fact the night before the agreement was struck Richard instructed all of us to pack our bags because we were leaving and that was and within minutes bags were outside the American delegation's rooms and the Serbs who were the, actually it wasn't the Serbs who were the Recalcitrant ones at the last. Milosevic wanted a deal, it was the Bosnians who were the holdouts but there were so many pieces it was, I cannot tell you the complexity of those talks and how they were being written every night. The legal papers, the drawing up the boundaries, the drawing up how this new tripartite parliament would work. It was much more than just getting everybody to lay their weapons down. It was building a nation under very intense circumstances and I think he was, I'm happy to say that I did go to Sarajevo with him the year before he died for the first time and wow, that was something. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for coming and thank you to our panel to Rufus Phillips, David Road, Alexander Evans, Shamaila Chaudhary, and to Cady Martin. Thanks. Thank you.