People Remembered: Richard C. Holbrooke

Richard C. Holbrooke

Richard C. Holbrooke was the speaker at the OPC’s award dinner on April 22, 1999 during which he surprised Endre Marton, the father of Richard’s third wife, Kati Marton, an author and journalist.

The elder Marton was an AP correspondent in Budapest in the 1950s, and he was arrested and jailed, accused of being a CIA agent. During the 1956 anti-communist uprising in Hungary, he was virtually the only link to the outside world, and his dispatches won him the 1957 OPC President’s Award. Marton was the guest of Holbrooke at the 1999 dinner, and – 42 years late – Holbrooke and OPC President Roy Rowan presented Marton the certificate of his OPC award, its delivery delayed by the Hungarian upheaval. Allan Dodds Frank, OPC president 2008 to 2010, has been Holbrooke’s upstairs neighbor in their New York City apartment building for the past 15 years. Frank invited him to the 1999 dinner. “He was a great supporter of the OPC,” Frank said. Endre’s wife died years ago, and for a year or so until his death he lived in New York City with his daughter and Holbrooke.

Holbrooke wanted to be a journalist before he became a diplomat. At Brown University, he majored in history and was editor of the student newspaper. He intended to become a journalist. After graduating in 1962, he applied for a job at The New York Times, but the newspaper turned him down. So he joined the U.S. State Department as a foreign service officer and became a diplomatic troubleshooter in Asia, Europe and the Middle East; negotiator ending the Bosnian war; and most recently President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. One correspondent wrote on the Internet that Holbrooke was “a man who, unlike many officials, had respect for and appreciated the work of foreign correspondents.” Rud Poats selected Holbrooke for his first diplomatic assignment, the Vietnam War. Poats, a UP correspondent in Japan and Korea during the late 1940s and 1950s and later a U.S. diplomat, wrote in an e-mail, “He was one of a half-dozen new foreign service officers that I picked and briefed for their first assignments with USAID – to Vietnam.” Talk about powerhouse neighborhoods! Poats lives in the same Manhattan Central Park West apartment building that houses the Allan Frank and Holbrooke apartments.

Holbrooke, 69, died in a Washington, D.C. hospital December 13 following a 21-hour operation to repair a tear in his aorta. His survivors include Kati, who earlier was married to ABC anchorman Peter Jennings.