Paris: A Love Story (13 page)

In Paris that June, Richard met my family. At lunch at my sister’s house, my father, who considered Peter his son-in-law for life, was reserved. My sister, who had drawn very close to Peter, was also aloof. Lizzie ignored him, pretending he wasn’t there. Chris had no problem with Richard, but was soon off to boarding school. Richard shrugged all this off as perfectly normal. He liked them, and was sure they would come around. He was absolutely right regarding my daughter and my sister.

Richard continued to admire and engage my father. He considered my parents to be remarkable people, whose like we would not see again. Later, when the opportunity for us to buy the small apartment next door to ours presented itself, Richard said, “Let’s buy it for whichever of your parents survives the other.” And so we did, and that apartment became my father’s final home after my mother’s death in September 2004.

•   •   •

During the summer of 1994, Richard and I toured the French countryside, visiting some great restaurants along the way: Guy Savoy, Georges Blanc, and Père Bise were among his favorites. Richard loved the theater of elegant dining, the excitement of the moment when the waiters lift the silver covers in unison, revealing the works of art they contain. He adored the ritual of the pompous waiters, as serious as Shakespearean actors, reciting what we were about to consume, barely looking down at us unworthy Americans.

Sometime during this idyll, Pam Harriman called. She congratulated us on our engagement and said she wanted to host a party in our honor at the Residence. “How sweet!” I said
and we quickly accepted. Several days later, we arrived at the splendid mansion on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. Over lunch, our immaculately dressed hostess, with her lofty helmet of bronze hair, said she had some bad news. August, she explained in her plummiest British accent, means the wives of all the “important people” are out of town, vacationing with their children. Sadly, the dinner she planned in our honor would have to be a stag affair, except for her. So unfortunate. But, she smiled at me and said, we’ll prepare a lovely tray to send upstairs for you, “Katie” (as she called me). I thought Richard was going to spit out his fish. “Pam”—his blue eyes bored into hers—“that is totally unacceptable!” he spluttered. “Under those circumstances, Kati and I are not going to stay with you.” Springing up, barely snatching the napkin out of his collar, he bolted toward the door, with me just behind him.

We checked into the Pavillon de la Reine. If I had not already been in love with him, I would have fallen then. This man knew about loyalty—and priorities.

I also learned something about Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman. The phone was ringing by the time we arrived at our cozy gabled room overlooking the place des Vosges. “Dick,” she cooed at him, “I was able to persuade a few wives to return from their vacations for this dinner. I do hope you and Katie will reconsider.” We laughed at Pam’s ability to turn on a dime when her bluff was called. And we graciously attended the dinner in our honor.

•   •   •

Gradually, Paris became our place. The Left Bank was our side of town—as it had been when I was a student. The Right Bank
was business: the embassy on the Avenue Gabriel, the great hotels around the place Vendôme and the Concorde, the Élysée Palace. In the Latin Quarter, we felt like young bohemians. In Paris, Richard slowed down. One night at Le Coupe-Chou, a romantic little place we found just below the Pantheon, he said, “I love your name.” “I don’t,” I replied. “Kati sounds so . . .
trenchant.
” “Wow,” he said. “That’s another ten-dollar word for the refugee.” And from then on he called me “T for Trenchant,” and pretty soon he was signing his notes to me “T.” “We’re stronger than dirt,” Richard used to say, rather unromantically, I thought. “We won’t spend any time with people who don’t wish us well.” He said that often—and we didn’t.

We got married in Budapest, on Memorial Weekend, 1995. It was a beautiful wedding in an emotionally charged place for me: the garden of the American ambassador’s residence. In my childhood, my sister and I had spent many afternoons playing hide-and-seek there while our parents were inside talking to the ambassador. Marrying Richard in that garden felt like a circle closed. The president of a new, democratic Hungary, Árpád Göncz, and virtually his whole cabinet were in attendance, as well as my brother, Andrew; Richard’s sons; his mother and beloved Uncle Ernie; and some dear friends who had flown in from New York, London, and Berlin. Ambassador and Mrs. Donald Blinken were gracious hosts. I wished that my parents and children had been there. Peter did not encourage their attendance—to say the least—and I decided not to make a big deal out of it. Nothing could really dampen my happiness.

As the freshly minted Mrs. Richard C. Holbrooke, I was about to have an eye-opening experience. Richard and I arrived at the Hotel l’Abbaye de Talloires in Annecy, in the French Alps, for our honeymoon. As my first wifely gesture, I unzipped his suitcase. To my horror, his honeymoon kit contained two suits, one black and one pinstriped, several white shirts, and some funereal ties and a pair of sinister-looking black brogues. “Did you pack for a conference or for your honeymoon?” I asked, Hungarian temper rising. “Gordon must have forgotten where I was going,” he answered, blaming his butler at the Berlin Embassy. “Gordon!” I exploded. But before I could vent further about a man who doesn’t pack for his own honeymoon, Richard had his jacket on and was pulling me toward the door. “Let’s go and buy me clothes
you
want me to wear,” he said, smiling, as if this were all part of his plan. “Your taste is so much better than mine—or Gordon’s.”

Thus did I discover how totally indifferent Richard was to what was on his back. I also discovered the speed with which he could extinguish my temper. Off we drove to the charming Alpine hamlet of Annecy. I can still hear the lady behind the counter of the first boutique we entered. Hearing our tale of a honeymoon emergency, her eyes wide, eyebrows shooting straight up, as if facing two ignorant savages, she blurted out, “Mais, il y a toujours Oxford!” There is always Oxford, the local men’s sportswear store—obvious to any fool. After that, when one of us asked a question with an obvious answer, the other would tease, “Mais, il y a toujours Oxford!”

The summer of 1995 was the savage season of Srebrenica, when Bosnian Serbs under the brutal General Ratko Mladic butchered thousands of their Muslim countrymen, and humbled the UN peacekeepers charged with protecting them. The Balkan wars had turned too murderous for either Washington or the European powers to avert their gaze any longer. Richard was named peace negotiator and had no time for Parisian weekends.

Six weeks after our wedding, I was jolted from early morning sleep by the State Department Operations Center. “Mrs. Holbrooke,” a voice said, “there has been an accident on the road to Sarajevo.” I was now sitting bolt upright. “We do not yet have all the details, but several members of your husband’s team have suffered serious injuries. Your husband asked us to call you and to tell you he will be calling soon.”

As I waited to hear from Richard, I had my first taste of something I was to experience time and again when he traveled to war zones, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The hard knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach—waiting for the phone to ring. I never did get used to those trips.

His call came soon enough. “We lost Bob, Joe, and Nelson,” Richard said, barely above a whisper, meaning Robert Frasure, Joseph Kruzel, and Nelson Drew, three key members of his negotiating team. “Their APC [armored personnel carrier] rolled down the Igman Road. Ours was behind theirs and we just made it.” My husband was alive by a fluke. “I’m bringing their coffins back for burial at Arlington. Please be there,” he said.

I had never heard him so deflated. The deaths were caused by the war, specifically by Mladic’s refusal to grant Richard’s team safe passage, forcing them to take a dangerous, ill-maintained mountain road to Sarajevo.

Secretary of Defense William Perry called next and offered a plane to pick me up at an airstrip near our Long Island home, to fly me to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, in time for Richard’s arrival. My husband looked suddenly old, and sagged with fatigue from a night spent on a military plane, his knees jammed against his friends’ coffins. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my life.

After the sad Arlington farewells to his comrades, and a meeting with President Clinton and his national security team, Richard turned right around, flying back to the war zone. Exhausted, he seemed more determined than ever to bring the parties to the negotiating table.

•   •   •

The war shadowed every day of our first year together. Richard made trips to visit the kids and me at our beach house in Bridgehampton that summer, bringing the Balkan turbulence with him. On August 27, Lizzie, a gifted rider, was competing
in the Hampton Classic Horse Show, and we were hosting a housewarming for our new home. At six o’clock that morning, an NBC crew arrived to set up their equipment for a live interview with Richard on
Meet the Press.
The children and I stumbled sleepily over wires, and watched in dismayed horror as the crew turned our lovely house into a television studio.

Chris and Lizzie and I marveled at how calmly Richard deflected Robert Novak’s grilling. “Do you think it’s helpful to the negotiations,” Novak baited Richard, “to call [Serb leader Radovan] Karadzic a war criminal?” Sitting on our couch wearing shorts, Richard answered, “It’s not a question of what I call him or what you call him. There’s an international tribunal going on . . . At Srebrenica a month ago, people were taken into a stadium, lined up, and massacred. It was a crime against humanity of the sort that we have rarely seen in Europe, and not since the days of Himmler and Stalin. That’s simply a fact and it has to be dealt with. I’m not going to cut a deal that absolves the people responsible for this.”

Listening to his measured, brave words, I was willing to put up with any chaos in our personal life. Later that day, Richard left our housewarming party early to catch a military plane back to the Balkans.

Three months later, I was proud to be by his side at the peace conference in Dayton, Ohio, where from time to time he deployed me. On the opening night, he seated me between Slobodan Milosevic and Alija Izetbegovic, the Serbian and Bosnian Muslim leaders, respectively, who just weeks before had been locked in bloody combat. Richard instructed me to
make them talk to each other. To break the ice, I told Milosevic that I had covered Tito’s funeral in Belgrade in 1980. “We Hungarians always admired Yugoslavia during the Cold War, for its multiethnic socialism,” I said. “What happened to you?” I asked. Milosevic shrugged, as if he were no more than a passive victim of events. As neither Milosevic nor Izetbegovic would even look in the direction of the other, I finally asked in desperation, “How did the war start?” “I did not think it would be so serious,” Izetbegovic answered. Milosevic nodded in agreement. “I never thought it would go on so long.” I was appalled at this passivity in the face of the destruction they had unleashed. Their callousness made me even prouder of my husband.

Those weeks behind the chain-link fence at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base were among my life’s most memorable. To have been present as my husband forged a historic end to Europe’s bloodiest war since World War II was a priceless gift. I marveled each night as Richard plotted the next day’s negotiating strategy against some of the wiliest and cruelest warlords in the world. There was nothing foreordained about the success of those talks. Quite the contrary—most observers deemed it mission impossible. But Richard was an inspiring negotiator and team leader, generally several moves ahead of his foes. Even his eruptions—calculated to shake Milosevic—were usually preplanned. The talks he led in Dayton not only ended a savage war but laid the foundations for a new, multiethnic Bosnia.

I could see, however, that the Balkan tragedy changed him.
“Nothing can be done” was still not in his vocabulary. But to have been as close to the face of evil as he was for the better part of a decade was transformative. A tiny wooden statue of a man with his head bent down and his hands tied behind his back, carved with glass from a piece of wood by a Muslim inmate in a Serb camp, stood on Richard’s desk as a reminder. He was an innate optimist who did not believe conflict between “ancient, ethnic tribes” was inevitable. Something, or, more often,
someone,
had to light the fuse. But I observed some of his optimism give way during those years, to an acceptance that there is such a thing as true evil in the world. How otherwise to explain neighbors and former schoolmates turning on each other with murderous rage in the heart of twentieth-century Europe? He hated cynicism, inaction, and defeatism almost as much as evil. Looking back, I see now how much he changed me, and expanded my world in so many ways.

•   •   •

The day after we returned from Dayton, on November 22, 1995, Peter called. “I’d like to do the first interview with Richard if he wins the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said. “Can you arrange it?” Of course, I said. I knew that phone call must have been one of his life’s toughest. But he was a pro.

Following the signing of the Dayton Accords, Richard left the State Department, as he promised me he would, and moved to New York. But two years later he was recalled to public life when President Clinton appointed him ambassador to the United Nations in 1998.

Richard attacked this appointment with all the creativity and gusto with which he embraced every new task.

We approached his new appointment as full partners. We traveled to a dozen African countries together, and were both shocked by the ravages of HIV/AIDS on the continent. During that exhausting trip, I wrote this letter to my family:

December 12, 1999

Dearest Family,

We started in Mali. I did not expect to feel emotion descending in a plane simply marked “the United States of America” to face the first of many lines of beautifully robed African dignitaries awaiting us. But I was strangely moved. The hotel (named Grand, of course) was very simple and we did not unpack there or anywhere else
for thirteen days. The next day I was to address a conference on media, so I worked on my speech while Richard huddled with his staff. The speech went okay given how tired I was. Nadine Gordimer, Peter Arnett and Charlayne Hunter-Gault also spoke. Richard, meanwhile, was with the President (Mali is in the Security Council this term, hence our stop). Then we were off in a long stream of a motorcade, sirens blaring, back to our plane, our real home. En route, I saw Chinese-style murals urging the laconic populace to excel in sports; business; farming. A tough sell in such a poor, easy-going place.