Holbrooke to undergo heart procedure
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, will travel to New York Thursday to undergo angioplasty due to possible clogged heart valves. Steve Clemons, New America Foundation’s foreign policy head and editor of the Washington Note, broke the news with Holbrooke’s permission after he informed his staff at meeting Tuesday morning. ...
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, will travel to New York Thursday to undergo angioplasty due to possible clogged heart valves.
Steve Clemons, New America Foundation’s foreign policy head and editor of the Washington Note, broke the news with Holbrooke’s permission after he informed his staff at meeting Tuesday morning. From Steve’s post:
Yesterday at 2 pm, Richard Holbrooke was told that he may have some clogged heart valves — and is going in Thursday for an angiogram and further treatment in New York. He was supposed to travel with Jack Lew, Rajiv Shah and others with General David Petraeus on a major AfPak trip this week, but will have to forego that trip.
Holbrooke assured me that this kinds of things are routine now. He shared the news with Secretary of State Clinton last night — and was in the process of contacting General Petraeus during our meeting.
When at the end of his staff meeting he conveyed this personal news to the 50 members of his team, he was very low key and laughing about it. There were looks of concern around the room — but he looked at them in his paternal way paused and said with a wry grin as if he’d never offered this sort of thing to them before "Come talk to me. I want you to share all of your angioplasty stories with me."
We send along our best hopes and wishes to Holbrooke for a healthy diagnosis and speedy treatment. Holbrooke told Clemons he plans to be back to work on Monday.
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
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