FP honors Richard Holbrooke

I’ve already written a bit about the fascinating panel discussion at last night’s Global Thinkers event, and we’ll have much more content, including photos and video, up soon. But the evening’s other highlight was a special award given to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, one of Foreign Policy‘s first editors.

Having already served as a Foreign Service officer in Vietnam and a Peace Corps country director in Morocco, Holbrooke took over as managing editor of FP in 1972 after the tragic death from cancer of its first editor, John Campbell. Holbrooke — now U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan — guided the magazine through its formative years as the United States digested the lessons of the Vietnam War and tried to make sense of the increasingly violent Middle East.

"The five years I spent as editor of Foreign Policy were among the most important in my life and my career," Holbrooke said in his speech last night.

Holbrooke also gave a picture of the atmosphere in which Warren Manshel and Samuel Huntington — who disagreed passionately about U.S. policy in Vietnam — created the magazine in 1970:

"[In 1969] this city was seething in a way that is unimaginable today, even in a time when we talk about the partisan divisions, which evidently divide our city," he said.

Nonetheless, at the time the only major journal on the topic, Foreign Affairs, pointedly refused to publish articles on Vietnam, instead running academic papers with titles that Holbrooke jokingly referred to as "Mexico Looks North and South" and "Whither Spain?"

FP, on the other hand, strove to "debate the big issues: Vietnam and beyond" and wasn’t afraid to stir the pot:

"We printed long investigative articles on Vietnam and the Middle East. We aggravated people enormously — although not the way WikiLeaks has caused problems in the last few days — but people like Henry Kissinger were extremely angry at the magazine for what we published. "

A big part of that voice was Holbrooke himself, who was a major contributor to the magazine even before he took over as editor. In presenting the award to the ambassador last night, Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham took note of one striking example of Holbrooke’s prescience:

"In 1970 there was no WikiLeaks, there was no Internet, but as an example of the quality of Richard Holbrooke’s thought, always, let me read you one sentence excerpted from his article in the first issue of Foreign Policy: ‘The chances of catastrophe grow as organizations grow in number and in size and internal communications become more time-consuming, less intelligible, and less controllable.’"

Working in a similar era of political uncertainty, we can only hope to be nearly as forward-looking as Holbrooke and his colleagues were at FP‘s very beginning.