This Town

by Mark Leibovich

  Obama’s national security team—namely National Security Adviser James Jones and his deputy, Denis McDonough—had little use for Holbrooke either. To many people in the White House, Holbrooke embodied the old guard of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. He was also just the ilk of drama queen the No Drama Obama culture could not brook. Vice President Biden described Holbrooke as “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met,” according to Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars. Biden then conceded that Holbrooke’s fanatical energy level and well of relationships in Afghanistan and Pakistan (known as “AfPak,” as Holbrooke insisted on calling it) could make him just the man for the job. But things went south quickly, to a point where Jones suggested to Holbrooke twice in 2009 and early 2010 that he start looking for other jobs. One major sore point involved Holbrooke’s participation in a September 2009 New Yorker profile by George Packer that struck many as needlessly All About Dick. Titled “The Last Mission,” the profile portrayed Holbrooke as heroically obsessed with avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan. The president was not happy, and after the piece appeared, McDonough chewed out Holbrooke and insisted that he stay out of the media.

  Another source of suspicion from the start was Holbrooke’s deep allegiance to Hillary Clinton. Her 2008 presidential campaign, which he supported aggressively, represented Holbrooke’s best hope of being named secretary of state, his dream job. When it was clear that Clinton was not going to win, Holbrooke moved to win favor with Clinton’s former rival, writing memos for Obama and cultivating his foreign policy advisers. One of Holbrooke’s top boosters inside the Obama camp was Samantha Power, who had gotten to know Holbrooke when she was working as a freelance journalist in Bosnia in the 1990s.

  Power resigned from the Obama campaign during the 2008 primaries after referring to Hillary in an interview as a “monster,” but she was brought back after the primaries and emerged as a key foreign policy adviser at the White House.

  Hillary Clinton’s surprise appointment as secretary of state was Holbrooke’s ticket back into the game. Her first choice was to hire Holbrooke as her deputy, but the White House vetoed it. Then at Clinton’s urging, Obama named Holbrooke to be AfPak czar. (Early on, Holbrooke decided to broker a détente between Power and Hillary—the aforementioned monster—as a wedding present to mark her marriage to fellow Obama campaign aide Cass Sunstein. When Power later told the president about this “wedding present,” Obama quipped that “some people just get toasters.”)

  By November 2010, plugged-in observers of the situation assumed that Hillary was the only reason Holbrooke was still in his job. Sure enough, after one of the meetings—in March 2010—in which Jones urged Holbrooke to find other employment, Holbrooke called Clinton in Saudi Arabia to tell her. When she returned, according to an account in Little America: The War Within the War in Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekeran, Clinton told Obama that he was free to fire Holbrooke “over the objection of your secretary of state.”

  Holbrooke’s marginalization at the White House was sanctified in classic Washington form: the humiliating Woodward portrayal. Every few years, the Most Famous Reporter in Washington publishes a new tome on the doings of a particular White House that sets off a familiar sport over who came out best, who came out worst, and who Woodward’s sources were. And in every book, it seems, one actor fares miserably above all others.

  That distinction went indisputably to Holbrooke in Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars, published in September 2010, about the administration’s debates over Iraq and Afghanistan. The book portrayed Holbrooke as a floundering figure in a shark tank. Among the indignities catalogued was an episode from January 22, 2009, the day Obama introduced Holbrooke at a ceremony at the State Department.

  “Mr. President, I want to ask you a favor,” Holbrooke said to Obama beforehand. He asked if the president could please refer to him as “Richard” during the announcement, not “Dick,” which Obama had used previously but that Holbrooke’s wife, Kati Marton, did not care for. Obama obliged, calling him “Richard.” But the request struck Obama as odd. And we know this because Obama told many people about the episode. And Holbrooke was mortified upon learning that Obama had circulated it with such mocking glee.

  To some at least, one of Holbrooke’s more endearing qualities was that he wore his insecurities plainly. He was blatant in assessing his up-to-the-moment status. He unburdened himself constantly on the question of why the president disliked him, why the White House was not listening to him, and why his talents were not appreciated. While nearly everyone in Washington is preoccupied with their place in the pecking order, few were as open about how they were “doing” at a given moment. On Saturday, December 4, 2010, my friends Peter Baker and Susan Glasser spotted Holbrooke at a nearby table of a Georgetown restaurant. Holbrooke’s wife, Kati, had her arm draped around Holbrooke, who kept looking at his BlackBerry and showing it to his wife. Glasser wondered to Baker whether the rumor had finally proven true and Holbrooke had been fired. While he had not been, he had just been kicked again in the stomach: the day before, the president had made a secret trip to Afghanistan with a small delegation of staff and diplomats that did not include Holbrooke. It was the latest in what had become regular slights. Holbrooke’s White House adversaries held AfPak briefings with Obama without telling Holbrooke. They nixed his requests for military aircraft to travel to the region. They tried to exclude him from an Oval Office confab during a visit by Afghan president Hamid Karzai (Secretary of State Clinton intervened and demanded that Holbrooke attend). Glasser, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, had just honored Holbrooke at a fortieth birthday party for the venerable publication that Holbrooke ran in the 1970s. He gave a long speech and stayed late, regaling guests—many of them young Foreign Service types—with stories. Anyone who knew Holbrooke’s predicament would have perceived a man enjoying a salve of recognition.

  Nearly everyone assumed Holbrooke would be gone from the administration sometime in 2010. But Obama did not initiate anything, largely out of deference to Hillary Clinton. One of Holbrooke’s chief nemeses in the White House, National Security Adviser James Jones, resigned in October in part because he was suspected of being a prime source behind the trashing of Holbrooke via Woodward. Holbrooke, meanwhile, was still on the job in early December and determined to survive long enough to negotiate a workable peace in Afghanistan that would be the capstone of his fixated-upon “legacy.” If only he could get through to the president before his time was up.

  Holbrooke could not get his presidential meeting through the regular White House national security channels (McDonough and Jones’s successor, Tom Donilon). The better bet was Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, who was largely responsible for devising Obama’s political rise.

  The beleaguered diplomat felt he had rapport with Axe. Most people who came in contact with him did. Axelrod aptly described himself as a “kibitzer,” not a “policy guy.” He was difficult to dislike, although he had also amassed a share of enemies befitting his long and successful career as a Chicago political operative. Even as Hillary Clinton became an indispensable piece of the Obama team, the Clintons and their many loyalists still reserved a special place for Axe on their dead-to-us list for past sins. For starters, the Clintons were always supportive of CURE, David and Susan Axelrod’s foundation to benefit epilepsy research and awareness. They appeared at CURE functions and Hillary was wonderful and generous upon meeting the Axelrods’ daughter, Lauren. In turn, the Clintons felt betrayed that Axelrod would then campaign so aggressively against Hillary in 2008—his biggest sin coming shortly before the Iowa caucuses, when he seemed to indirectly blame the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto on Clinton’s support for the Iraq War.

  While he complained often about what he called “the palace intrigue pathology of Washington,” Axelrod clearly enjoyed his renown in This Town. He was seen a lot at restaurants and parties, and he
was a good friend to political journalists—and had been one himself years ago at the Chicago Tribune. He was always gracious to the tourists who wanted to take his picture. Holbrooke himself was in many ways a creature of Washington—quintessential, actually, in his fascination with power, status, and day-to-day reminders of historic work under way. But it was a point of great pride for him that Manhattan is where he made his permanent home. He was never shy in running down “the parasitic culture” of the capital. “Washington is the only town where people feel big by wearing pictures of themselves around their necks,” Holbrooke once told Samantha Power, referring to the familiar accoutrement around government buildings. People need these, Holbrooke joked, “to remember who they are.” Removing his tags was the first thing he did every Friday when he got back to his Central Park West apartment. “Richard was an outlier in Washington,” Marton told me. “He was too engaged in the world, and too big of a personality to be contained by Washington.”

  Like Holbrooke, Axelrod was being seriously worn down by the parasitic agents of the capital. For much of 2009 and 2010, the Washington genius set had determined that Obama’s main deficiency was Axelrod’s domain: a “communications problem.” Obama had engineered passage of historic legislation, rescued the economy from collapse, and was killing terrorists like mosquitos, yet was apparently doing a lousy job selling his success. Thus, Axelrod—the communications overseer and revered protector of the Obama message—was blamed for having “lost the narrative.” He took it hard and worried about his standing with the president.

  Axelrod revered Obama, to a degree that he was sometimes teased as a lovestruck groupie. “I’ve heard him be called a ‘Moonie,’” joked Axelrod’s friend William Daley, the future Obama chief of staff. Some of the teasing would spill into ridicule and frustration, much of it disgorged behind Axelrod’s back (the Obama White House in general could be quite passive-aggressive that way). One big Axe critic was Anita Dunn, a top aide on the 2008 campaign who did a brief stint as the White House communications director in 2009. Dunn derided Axelrod to colleagues for being disorganized, hard to persuade about anything message-related, and reluctant to “push back” on the president in meetings.

  Senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, a close ally of Dunn’s, and Axelrod’s rival for first-among-equals status to Obama in the White House, would subtly undermine Axelrod by referring to him to the president as “one of the political guys.” Jarrett, on the other hand, viewed herself—not Axelrod—as a personal custodian of the president’s lofty motives and gifts. One high-level White House official dismissed Jarrett’s role in the White House as “the voice of purity.” Other detractors called her “the Night Stalker,” in part for the regularity with which she would join the president and first lady at the residence after work. Just as the president was special, Jarrett believed that she, too, was special in her role. She was “mindful of being more than just an aide,” said one high-level White House adviser. In an interview, Jarrett said her “first among equals” status with the president had been overstated and mischaracterized. “I think there is a mystique about our relationship that is not reality,” she told me. “I do realize that this has become Washington lore, and I think it’s perpetuated by people who may feel uncomfortable with the relationship we have.” Still, coworkers believed Jarrett could be jealous and protective of her special status.

  After a gunman opened fire at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in June of 2009, killing a security guard, the FBI found personal information about Axelrod on the shooter. Axelrod was then granted Secret Service protection. Jarrett was also given protection (being important enough to merit a Secret Service detail has been a source of intra-office envy through many administrations). While a high-profile White House official—especially an African-American woman, such as Jarrett—could legitimately be considered a more likely target than most, several West Wing officials I spoke to were dubious there had been any special threats against her. They suspected, rather, that Jarrett asked the president to authorize a detail out of “earpiece envy.” “The person Valerie felt threatened by was Axe,” quipped one top aide. Jarrett, who declined to discuss the Secret Service arrangement, has dismissed that notion as ridiculous and offensive. She has maintained that the decision was not hers, and that being accompanied by agents is more of an intrusion than a perk.

  Regardless, Obama’s allegedly close-knit team of advisers was very much a myth at this point. Dunn, who left the White House in late 2009 to run the strategic communications firm SKDKnickerbocker, was resented by some of her former West Wing colleagues over her willingness to represent clients whose agendas were at odds with that of the White House, which she was still advising and in close touch with (her husband, Bob Bauer, was President Obama’s White House counsel). For instance, Dunn was instrumental in helping Michelle Obama set up her “Let’s Move!” program to stop obesity in children. Then, as a consultant, she worked with food manufacturers and media firms to block restrictions on commercials for sugary foods targeting children. (In the two years after she left the administration, Dunn cleared every potential client with the White House deputy chief of staff’s office for approval, according to a high-level White House source; if anyone objected, Dunn would not take on the account.) Obama’s advisers, chief among them Axelrod, also believed that Dunn had fomented a great deal of internal division at the White House during her relatively brief time there. Many top aides also suspected Dunn of leaking anecdotes about internal doings that appeared in books published during the first term. Among those books were Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind and The Obamas by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor. Both books included accounts that were publicly disputed by the White House in an orchestrated push-back effort that, according to sources familiar with the operations, Dunn played a major role in.

  As viciously political as the above-it-all Obama World could be, it was still considered an affront inside to be seen as “too political” or “an operator.” Superior nonchalance, shrugging self-deprecation, and hardheaded wonkishness remained the preferred persona. To behave otherwise, “politically,” was to be like a typical Washington hustler, a throwback to the Clinton era: someone like Richard Holbrooke.

  Finally, Holbrooke succeeded in getting on Axelrod’s calendar for the morning of December 10, 2010. The meeting was brief and to the point. He made his “ask” about seeing the president. Axelrod was noncommittal but not entirely discouraging. Before he departed, Holbrooke mentioned to Axe that it was noteworthy he was still in his job—and that Jim Jones was not.

  • • •

  Friends of Dick were becoming alarmed about his health.

  He was pushing seventy, under crushing stress, barely sleeping, and getting fat. He had acquired that disconcerting “Could drop dead at any moment” look that comes over frantically driven and out-of-shape men of a certain age. Washington is filled with these. Bloated and beet-faced. Russert was like this at the end. Ted Kennedy wore the Death Look for much of his last three decades. “It’s something you can’t do forever,” Axelrod said about the big Washington job. “Or it will kill you.”

  Holbrooke was sweating and out of breath in his morning meeting with Axelrod. He accepted Axelrod’s offer of a cup of water, drank it, and then rushed off for a meeting with Secretary Clinton.

  Clinton had also voiced particular worry about Holbrooke. She can become very maternal about personal health matters. As first lady, when young Chelsea was sick, Hillary always prepared for her a signature convalescent dish of applesauce and eggs. Numerous staffers over the years have stories about Hillary personally coordinating their medical care during health crises. Late in her husband’s second term, she quietly turned over much of her life to caring for her best friend, Diane Blair, who was dying of cancer in Arkansas.

  Soon after he left the White House on the morning of December 10, Holbrooke
showed up in Secretary Clinton’s seventh-floor suite at the State Department’s Foggy Bottom offices. He threw his jacket off and sat down, and his face suddenly became pained and purple. His blue eyes went pale. Blood rushed to his head. “Richard, what’s wrong?” the secretary asked. Holbrooke’s chest heaved and he placed his hands over his eyes.

  “I don’t know,” said Holbrooke. “I’ve never felt this way before.”

  Holbrooke walked on his own to the State Department’s clinic downstairs. The in-house physician was not there, and the wait for an ambulance was interminable—about ten or fifteen minutes, to the frustration of everyone, especially Holbrooke, who remained conscious but agonized. At one point his legs gave out and he fell to the hallway floor. When the ambulance finally arrived, Holbrooke was taken to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Secretary Clinton had called her personal physician to expect his arrival.

  There, Holbrooke was diagnosed with a torn aorta, often a result of high blood pressure. It would require immediate, elaborate surgery. News of Holbrooke’s collapse hit the wires and Twitter. As with every report of a famous person hospitalized, Holbrooke was said to be “in good spirits” (or, if unconscious, “resting comfortably”). Despite intense pain, he remained lucid, chatting with his doctors. One doctor urged him to try to relax, suggesting that he think about the beach or something. “I hate the beach,” Holbrooke said, according to his deputy, Dan Feldman, who was with him. Besides, Holbrooke said, he could not relax because he was in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Ending the war in Afghanistan—that would relax me!” Holbrooke said. After the remark was reported, it became fodder for critics of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, including the Taliban. Either way, Holbrooke would be pleased that his fateful words would be a source of discussion and possibly imbued with historic weight. His archivist could sort it out later.