Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke (24 April 1941-13 December 2010) was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 7 September 1999 to 20 January 2001 (succeeding Peter Burleigh and preceding John Negroponte) and Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 22 January 2009 to 13 December 2010 (preceding Marc Grossman).
Biography[]
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born in New York City, New York in 1941 to a Polish-Jewish turned atheist father and a Jewish mother who converted to Quakerism. He was childhood friends with Secretary of State Dean Rusk's son, and he was inspired by President John F. Kennedy's call to service and served in the Foreign Service in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He continued to rise in the ranks of the State Department before managing the Peace Corps in Morocco from 1970 to 1972, as editor of the Foreign Policy magazine from 1972 to 1976, served as a campaign coordinator for Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential bid, served as an Assistant Secretary of State under Carter, worked on Wall Street from 1981 to 1993, served as Ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1994 (cofounding the American Academy in Berlin), served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 1994 to 1996 (serving as the chief architect of the Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War in 1995), served as special envoy to the Balkans from 1996 to 1999, served as Ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001, served as the lead foreign policy advisor for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and served as President Barack Obama's Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009 to 2010. He was popular in Pakistan for attempting to build relations with the Pakistani government, but he got along poorly with Obama and even worse with Vice President Joe Biden, and he also backed President Hamid Karzai's opponents during his re-election bid. He died from an aortic dissection in 2010.