Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke (April 24, 1941 – December 13, 2010) was the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under the Obama administration, a top-ranking American diplomat, magazine editor, author, professor, Peace Corps official, and investment banker. He was also the only person to have held the Assistant Secretary of State position for two different regions of the world (Asia from 1977–1981, and Europe from 1994–1996).
From 1993–1994, he was U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Although long well-known in diplomatic and journalistic circles, Holbrooke achieved great public prominence only when he brokered a peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia that led to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, in 1995. Holbrooke was a contender in the replacement of Warren Christopher but ultimately lost to Madeleine Albright in 1997 when Bill Clinton chose a replacement for the Secretary of State. From 1999–2001, Holbrooke served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
He was an advisor to the Presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry in 2004. Holbrooke then joined the Presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and became a top foreign policy adviser; Holbrooke was considered a candidate for Secretary of State in a Clinton or Barack Obama administration.
On January 22, 2009, Holbrooke was appointed as a special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan, working under President of the United States Barack Obama and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Holbrooke was born on April 24, 1941, in New York City, to Dan Holbrooke and Trudi Moos (née Kearl). Holbrooke’s mother, whose Jewish family fled Hamburg in 1933 for Buenos Aires before coming to New York, took him to Quaker meetings on Sundays. “I was an atheist, his father was an atheist,” says his mother, a potter now married to a sculptor. “We never thought of giving Richard a Jewish upbringing. The Quaker meetings seemed interesting.”
Holbrooke’s father, a doctor born of Russian Jewish parents in Warsaw, died of cancer. His father changed his name to Holbrooke when he arrived in the United States in the 1930s. Such, however, is the family’s loss of contact with its roots that his original name is unknown.
After Scarsdale High School Holbrooke received his A.B. from Brown University in 1962 and completed a post-graduate fellowship at Princeton University in 1970.
He married Kati Marton in 1995. His marriage to Marton has led him to look more closely at his past. She was born into a family of Hungarian Jews but raised a Roman Catholic. In researching a book about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat in Budapest who saved Jews during World War II, Marton traveled to her native Hungary whence she and her parents had fled the Communists in the 1950s. It was there that an old friend of her mother’s told her that Wallenberg had come too late for Marton’s grandparents. It was the first she had heard about her Jewish roots. Like Madeleine Albright’s parents, Marton’s family hid their Jewish identity when they came to the United States. She learned that one of her maternal grandparents had died in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Holbrooke suffered a torn aorta on December 11, 2010, and underwent surgery at George Washington University hospital in Washington, DC. Holbrooke died on December 13, 2010 from complications of the torn aorta.
source:wikipedia
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