Call Number:

MC296

Repository:

Princeton University Library: Public Policy Papers

Extent:

40 boxes

Language:

English, French, Croatian, Japanese, Bosnian, Chinese, German, and Albanian

Preferred Citation:

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Collection Title, Box and Folder Number; Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Date:

1912-2017 (inclusive) and 1968-2010 (bulk)

Creator:

Holbrooke, Richard C., 1941-2010

Abstract:

Richard C. Holbrooke was an American diplomat who led negotiations at the Dayton Accords for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995. The Richard C. Holbrooke Papers contain Holbrooke's subject files, records of public statements, correspondence, writings and drafts of writings, articles and periodicals, and audiovisual materials.

Richard C. Holbrooke was an American diplomat who led negotiations at the Dayton Accords for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, brokering the agreement to end the Bosnian war.

Holbrooke was born in New York City in 1941. He attended Brown University, became editor of the Brown Daily Herald and graduated in 1962. He joined the Foreign Service, was posted to Vietnam's Mekong Delta and later to Saigon, and subsequently worked on Lyndon Johnson's White House group of staff on Vietnam. He attended the Paris peace talks on Vietnam with the American delegation in 1968.

In 1969-1970, Holbrooke spent a year at Princeton University as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He served as Peace Corps director in Morocco from 1970 to 1972, returning to the U.S. to edit Foreign Policy magazine from 1972 to 1976. During the Carter administration, Holbrooke was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In between Democratic administrations, Holbrooke helped found the consulting firm Public Strategies and worked in investment banking at Lehman Brothers.

Under Bill Clinton, Holbrooke was United States ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1994, and helped to found the American Academy in Berlin while he was there. He served as assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian Affairs from 1994 to 1995, necessitating a focus on the crisis in the Balkans. Holbrooke's memoir To End a War (1998) recounts his experience of the negotiations between the leaders of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio in 1995.

Holbrooke served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001, achieving a settlement of U.S. debt to the United Nations and a UN Security Council resolution on HIV and AIDS. He was foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton's campaign for president, and served the Obama administration as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009 to 2010. Holbrooke died on December 13, 2010, after he was treated for a torn aorta.

The Richard C. Holbrooke Papers contain Holbrooke's subject files, records of public statements, correspondence, writings and drafts of writings, articles and periodicals, and audiovisual materials.

Materials are mostly arranged in the order they were received. Some boxes that had miscellaneous files were moved into appropriate series.