Stars of David (15 page)

“I was incredibly shy as a kid, and compensated for it by developing this sort of public persona that has become what people think of me. But the way to do that is to walk into the room and say, ‘It's all right. I'm a short, bald person; nobody has to look at me. I'm nobody. Keep going about your business.' It's a very Jewish entrance.

“The whole key to playing George for me, which became my calling card to the world, was that this guy, who's full of piss and vinegar and bravura, is, in the next second, asking, ‘Too much? Did I overdo it?' A guy so fully aware of his own limitations, and self-critical, that it took the onus off of all his selfishness and bad behavior.

“The only way I can function in life as Jason Alexander instead of Jay Greenspan is because if Jason Alexander fucks up, I can go, ‘Hey, I'm only a Jew from Jersey. What do you want from me? I'm playing with big kids out here and it's not me. I don't know how to act, I don't know how to behave, I'm just a Jew. I'm a little, unsophisticated Jew.' I actually carry that everywhere I go.”

Richard Holbrooke

THE PHONE RINGS NONSTOP in Richard Holbrooke's home. It's difficult for him to complete a thought. “Hello? Hey, Claire. What's going on tonight? Is Colin going to be there or not?” We're sitting, on an April afternoon, in Holbrooke's muted study in his apartment on Central Park West—one of three homes he shares with his wife, Kati Marton. Married since 1995, they're a high-profile New York couple: Holbrooke, pictured above with his son, David, was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Carter Administration, managing editor of
Foreign
Policy, U.S. Ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1994, credited for brokering the 1995 peace agreement that ended the war in the Balkans (nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts), and then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001. At sixty-four he is now vice chairman of a private equity firm, Perseus.

Marton, fifty-seven, is a well-respected journalist and former ABC News foreign correspondent who has written five books, including a biography of Raoul Wallenberg, who saved Jews during World War II, and an investigation into the murder of CBS reporter George Polk. She serves on the board of the International Rescue Committee, whose focus is on refugees, and she used to head the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Both are tall and striking, they host star-studded parties with guest lists that include everyone from Bill Clinton to Robert DeNiro, and both have high-profile exes: Holbrooke dated Diane Sawyer for seven years and Marton was married for fourteen years to ABC anchor Peter Jennings, with whom she has two grown children, Christopher and Elizabeth. (Holbrooke has two sons, Anthony and David, from his first marriage.)

Both are also Jewish, though Holbrooke was raised by his German mother as a Quaker, and Marton didn't learn of her lineage until she was an adult. “She was brought up Catholic in Budapest,” Holbrooke says, putting his bare feet up on the coffee table and sipping a can of caffeine-free Diet Coke, “and didn't discover her Jewish background until she was in her thirties. You don't know Kati, do you?” I shake my head. “She's the one you should be talking to for this book; she's got the real Jewish story.”

It's not easy to get Holbrooke's story, because the phone keeps ringing and he keeps picking it up. “Hello?” He starts chatting with someone on the line, deconstructing what sounds like the latest issue of
Foreign A fairs
. “I also thought Les's piece was very good,” Holbrooke says. “I thought Paula's defense was pathetic and Judith's piece was really good. The Milosevic piece said nothing. That was a lost opportunity.”

When he's off the phone, I ask about Slobodan Milosevic—whether comparisons to Hitler ran through his mind as he sat at the negotiating table with the man considered to be the architect of ethnic cleansing. “Milosevic himself was certainly aware of my Jewish background,” Holbrooke allows, “because as a Serb, ethnicity would be exceedingly important. In that screwed-up part of the world—you might call it Southeastern Europe—where the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and the Russian Empire all met and mixed, ethnic identity was a very important thing. And so Milosevic was certainly aware of it.”

Again the phone. “Hello? Yeah, put him on.” Holbrooke stands up from the couch and leaves the room for about ten minutes. When he returns, I make the mistake of asking a question with the wrong information: How meaningful was it to him to be the first Jewish ambassador to Germany? “I wasn't,” Holbrooke corrects me. “Arthur Burns was.” I apologize—my research had led me astray. “I don't think you can find a single statement that I was the first,” he scolds me. Great start.

“Well of course it was significant,” he goes on. “I had expected to be named ambassador to Japan, and then [Walter] Mondale wanted to go to Japan. So when I got the call from Christopher [Warren Christopher, Clinton's secretary of state], I was totally unprepared for it. Never ever had anyone hinted at the possibility of Germany.”

Another call. His assistant patches him through to his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Jennings, in her early twenties. They make a lunch date. “Why don't we go to Michael's?” Holbrooke says to her, suggesting the watering hole for the city's media elite. “I can show you off . . . Or are you ashamed of me? . . . Are you paying or am I paying? I'll pay for all our meals together until you get married . . . One o'clock at Michael's . . .”

Back to the ambassadorship: “The administration asked me to reply in twenty-four hours. My first call was to Les Gelb—this was like seven in the morning.” Leslie H. Gelb, at the time Holbrooke and I meet, is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and an old friend of Holbrooke's. “So Les correctly said, ‘This opportunity is
better
than Japan. It puts you in a new area of the world, it's more challenging, there are more issues.' And he of course was right. And then I called my mother and I said, ‘I've got bad news and good news. The bad news is I'm not going to Japan; the good news is I'm going to be the American ambassador to Germany.' And there was this kind of long pause,” he recalls. “She had not set foot in Germany since 1933.” Trudi Kearl escaped Nazi Germany when she was a young girl. “And here I was, sixty years later to the year, going to Germany. I think she was completely stunned. But she ended up visiting me three times.”

I tell him I read that his mother created quite a stir when she came back to the country she'd fled. “That was a great drama—my mother's return trips,” Holbrooke says with a nod. “She was very ambivalent about it. But she liked the house, she loved the service, she liked the butler—she
loved
the butler; she wanted to take the butler home with us. Who wouldn't? She began to remember things. When the butler served us, she said, ‘We had a butler like that.' For the first time, I got a much deeper sense of the kind of life she lived in Hamburg as a girl, which was much wealthier than I'd realized.”

He says his mother resisted at first getting too relaxed in her home country. “She speaks perfect, accentless German, of course, but at first she didn't want to talk German. Then she started talking
only
German. Then the press did stories on her and she got quite upset because they kept describing her as ‘German-Jewish'—or ‘Jewish-German,' I don't remember exactly—but they kept describing her as Jewish. Felix Rohaytn told me the same thing happened to him.” He's referring to the former financier and ambassador to France. “Felix says that French articles about him always referred to him as Jewish, where American articles never mention it.”

I ask why it bothered his mother to be referred to by her religion. “Felix and my mother, they feel that the reference to being Jewish is subliminal or latent anti-Semitism. They are very clear on this point. They are separated in age by maybe ten years, grew up in the same environment, and they're much more sensitive to these issues than we are. At least than I am.”

So it didn't bother him at all? “I didn't care. It didn't seem to me to be a big deal. In Europe, cultural and ethnic identity seem more important, and I don't believe there is overt anti-Semitism in either country, other than the kind of residual anti-Semitism which exists in so many parts of the world, including parts of the United States. In Germany, the real issue isn't anti-Semitism today, it's antagonism towards Turks. And I repeatedly told the Germans, who are dealing with their responsibility for the Holocaust quite responsibly, that they can be proud of the fact that they faced up to the Holocaust in retrospect, but they ought to not ignore the fact that there are only one hundred thousand Jews in Germany today, but there are four million Turks, and they ought to face up to the Turkish problem that is real and present.”

Holbrooke says he never felt—either in Germany or in the Balkans— that anyone made an issue of his religion. “Never noticed it,” he says. “When I joined the foreign service in 1962, my grandmother was still alive; she was Swiss-Jewish, not German-Jewish, and she said, ‘How can you be a diplomat? Jews can't possibly succeed in the diplomatic world; it's not possible.' I said to my grandmother something like, ‘I don't understand what you're talking about.' It never occurred to me.”

A
New York Times
profile of Holbrooke during his tenure in Germany described how he displayed, in his elegant ambassador's residence, a photograph of his grandfather in a World War I uniform: “I show it to German visitors as a symbol of what they lost,” Holbrooke told the
Times
. When I ask him about it now, he shows me the very picture. “Every German family has a photograph like that. And so I just kept it in the living room. Some people would ignore it; others would stop and stare at it. Some would demand to know why it was there—what was the message I was sending? I said, ‘This is an existential fact; this is my grandfather. You may read anything you wish into this photograph.' And I also said, ‘If history had turned out differently, maybe I'd be Germany's ambassador to the United States instead of America's ambassador to Germany.' My mother didn't like it at all. She said it was a militaristic picture and there are a lot of nicer pictures; she's not into symbolism at all. And it's true; I could have had an ordinary picture of my grandfather. But don't you find that picture—the original, with his handwriting—extraordinary?”

The phone again—his assistant calling. “. . . very much so, but not now. Tell him when I start up to Columbia in about ten minutes, I'll talk to him . . .”

Holbrooke takes another sip of Diet Coke. “I think the most memorable day I ever spent in Germany was the opening in Frankfurt of
Schindler's List
. About fifteen members of Schindler's list—I think they were called ‘Schindler's children'—came to it. And Schindler, as you know, had died a broken-down man in Frankfurt sometime in the 1960s or '70s [1974]. And these were the people who had taken care of Schindler and brought him dinner and watched over him as he declined, after his wife left him. Spielberg and Liam Neeson and some of the cast came. And beforehand, Spielberg went around and talked very quietly with the survivors— some of whom he had interviewed for the movie for research. And then we watched the movie in this large auditorium in Frankfurt—there must have been fourteen hundred people there. Hearing the movie dubbed into German, with the harsh, guttural accents of people saying these grotesque anti-Semitic things in their original native language, was very powerful.

“At the end of the movie, there was complete, dead silence, except for a few people who were crying. Spielberg said, ‘I want to dedicate the show to the survivors who owed their lives to Schindler.' And then Richard von Weizsacker, who was then president of Germany, said, ‘It took an American to make this movie. Only an American could have made this for us.'

“Then Spielberg went around to these survivors again and asked, ‘Is that the way you remembered it?' I heard one old lady say, ‘Of course I remember Goeth—[Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes, was the commandant of the Plaszow Concentration Camp]—on his white horse, just as you have it, but it was much worse than the film.' Spielberg very gently said, ‘I know; that was the most I could manage to put in a movie.'

“Then Spielberg told a very interesting story about how, two or three nights earlier, the film had opened in Vienna, and the Austrians had applauded wildly at the end, and how offensive Spielberg had found that, because, of course, the applause suggested that the Austrians didn't feel connected to these events. If memory serves, the Führer was an Austrian himself.”

Holbrooke said the Holocaust pervades modern Germany. “In Germany, unlike Japan, the Second World War and the Holocaust are
daily
events. You can't move through the job as ambassador—at least not if you have any cultural sensitivity whatsoever—without being constantly reminded of the past. Whereas, had I gone to Tokyo, the Japanese would never bring it up unless you do. But in Germany, it always comes up implicitly or explicitly.”