Brendan Vaughan
November 2, 2015

David Holbrooke, director of The Diplomat, on what it's like to make a film about your father the international-affairs legend

You think your old man was tough to live up to? Try growing up the son of Richard Holbrooke, the legend of diplomacy who served Democratic presidents from JFK to Clinton to Obama, found time to live with Diane Sawyer for a few years in between marriages, and made a pile on Wall Street when he was politically sidelined during the Reagan/Bush years. Twenty years after Holbrooke pulled off the near-impossible—persuading Slobodan Milosevic and his enemies in the Balkans to drop their weapons at the diplomatic ultra-marathon known as the Dayton Accords—his son, David Holbrooke, has made a documentary about him that premieres tonight on HBO.

David, a filmmaker who also runs a festival, Telluride Mountainfilm, says The Diplomat is an attempt to understand his late father "better in death than I ever knew him in life." The film is also a fascinating, ringside history of post-Cold War America, told through the prism of this one Zelig-like figure, and a moving father-son story that will leave any man who watches it reflecting on his own relationships. You don't have to be Richard Holbrooke, or even close, to hope that your children will be as understanding as David Holbrooke is about all the things you missed when you were still at the office.

GQ: That bluntness that your father was so legendary for as a diplomat—someone in the film calls him "a bulldozer"—how did that manifest at home?
DH: It was… exciting. That's what it was. The bluntness—I never really felt that as a son. There were flashes of anger, for sure. But it wasn't a constant drumbeat. We didn't see each other enough to fight a lot. He was career-obsessed and ambitious and, as my mother says in the film, absent.

What was he like as a father when he was around?
He always wanted to be doing something. It was: "Let's go see a movie! Let's go see another movie! Let's go see a show. Let's go do things." But he was also goofy. And that's the thing that I think is easy to lose in all the public part of it. He was goofy to the point of, "C'mon dad, you're embarrassing me." But he was full of gusto and wanted to soak up things and live life in a really big way. And that was exciting to be around. As my brother says in the film, "Let's face it, his life was more interesting than mine."

There's that amazing moment in the film when you're interviewing Diane Sawyer and she turns the interview on you, saying, "How angry were you at him?" And you say something like, "I didn't have that rage. I just knew I kind of had to figure it out." Is that still your answer?
Yeah, I just wasn't an angry kid. I was a befuddled kid. I wasn't confident. I was tall and awkward. Not a great athlete. I wasn't a great student. And that's the time that I could've used him, but I was never angry about that…I think I was just trying to figure it out on my own. I remember trying to teach myself how to shave.

**Your father had so much success working in so many different parts of the world—assistant secretary of state for Asia, the same job for Europe, ambassador to Germany, his role in settling the conflict in the Balkans, U.S. ambassador to the U.N.—but his hardest and least successful job was his final one, as Obama's special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan. What were the factors that made that so hard for him? **
I think he could have made it work with [then Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai. It was really our president he had trouble making it work with, the administration. Part of it was just style. [Obama]'s one cool customer. And my father's all heat and fire and energy and passion. And look, you're the President of the United States, you decide who you want to work with. But they should have either not hired him or fired him. Instead, they kind of left him dangling. The problem is that the people he was working against were in the administration. It's one thing to say, Okay, I'm looking towards the front. That's what we gotta figure out: Pakistan. But he had to look to the rear. He had to look behind himself, and say, Okay, who in the administration is making this harder for me? He was never given a chance to do the job. "Cruel" is a bit harsh, but it's not entirely wrong. They embarrassed him.

But he also made plenty of mistakes on his own. Clearly and absolutely. He was his own worst enemy, especially towards the end. None of which means he would have wanted to be out of the game entirely. The only thing worse for him than being in the Obama administration would have been not being in the Obama administration.

Do you think that is Hillary wins and he were still alive, that he would be her Secretary of State?
I think in 2008 he would've. In 2016, he would've been 75. And who knows? It's possible. There would have been a lot of other candidates. They had an unusual relationship. That bond. They trust each other. You see that in the film where she speaks about him in such a different way, a thoughtful way, and a warm way. She's very human in the film. One of my favorite lines in the entire film is when she says, on his final day [before he falls ill and dies a couple days later], he was running late for a meeting in her office, and she says, "I saved the big chair for him. I always saved the big chair for him." Hillary Clinton saves the big chair for my father. That's beautiful.
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