"It is a minor thing in a major life, but one word I will always associate with Richard Holbrooke, who died on Monday, is slivovitz. That is the name of a plum brandy, glasses of which, in press dispatches from the Balkans in the nineties, always seemed to be slammed down on tables during contentious negotiations in field tents with war criminals. Holbrooke could control those talks. He did it with yelling and wheedling humor, by knowing what to ask and give, and with the aid, as the Times put it in his obituary, of “a tight smile that might mean anything.” And somehow, amid the hopeless-seeming awfulness of Bosnia, he helped make the Dayton Peace Accords happen."
— Amy Davidson in The New Yorker. George Packer’s profile of Holbrooke from last September is a must-read.
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