Thank you for your service—and I’ll take your word for what you saw.
May the Ambassador rest in peace.
He was extremely capable. I first encountered him when I attended a meeting in 2000 in Tokyo with the Japanese foreign minister (Holbrooke was our UN ambassador at the time). Holbrooke’s mission was to get major countries to contribute more to the UN budget, which was under serious stress. I know, I know, the UN is a dirty word here — but the UN does a lot of good stuff everyday that doesn’t make the news. Anyway, Holbrooke made a very strong presentation on why Japan should do more to contribute, but it wasn’t browbeating or anything like that — his appeal was basically “if you like the many things the UN does right, be aware that all of that is endangered because they’re running out of money.”
As I noted previously, he liked the mission our election team was doing, so we had good relations with him. He didn’t try to micromanage us the way he did other parts of the embassy.
I don’t know how others here will feel about this, but I’m convinced he would have been a great Secretary of State.