NEW PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF UNITED STATES PRESENTS CREDENTIALS
Press Release
BIO/3244
NEW PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF UNITED STATES PRESENTS CREDENTIALS
19990915 Biographical Note(Based on information received from the Protocol and Liaison Service.)
The new Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, presented his credentials to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 7 September.
Ambassador Holbrooke was confirmed by his country's Senate as the Permanent United States Representative on 5 August. During his career he has been a professional diplomat, a magazine editor, an author, a Peace Corps director, the Chairman of two non-governmental organizations and an investment banker.
He was the United Ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1994 before being appointed by President William Clinton as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs in 1994. During that time, he was the chief negotiator for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia. His most recent position was as a Vice Chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, a New York-based investment bank, from 1996 to 1999. During the same period, he served on a pro-bono basis as the Special Presidential Envoy for Cyprus, and a Special Envoy in Bosnia and Kosovo, where he negotiated the October 1998 agreement, and, after it was violated, delivered the final ultimatum to Belgrade prior to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign.
Ambassador Holbrooke began his career as a Foreign Service Officer immediately after graduating from Brown University in 1962. He was sent to Viet Nam and in the following six years served in a variety of posts related to Viet Nam -- first in the Mekong Delta as a provincial representative for the Agency for International Development (AID), and then as staff assistant to Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1966, he was re-assigned to the White House, working on President Lyndon B. Johnson's staff on Viet Nam. In 1967-1969, he wrote one volume of the Pentagon Papers, served as a special assistant to Under-Secretaries of State Nicholas deb. Katzenbach and Elliot Richardson, and, simultaneously, served as a member of the American Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks on Viet Nam, headed successively by Averill Harriman and Henry Cabot Lodge.
Following these assignments, Ambassador Holbrooke spent a year as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. In 1970, he was assigned as Peace Corps Director in Morocco. In 1972, he left the Foreign Service to become Managing Editor of the quarterly
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magazine Foreign Policy, a position he held until 1976. During 1974- 1975, he also served as a consultant to the President's Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, and was a contributing editor to Newsweek International. In 1976 he coordinated national security affairs for the Carter-Mondale presidential campaign. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, a post he held until 1981. (He is the only person ever to hold the position of Assistant Secretary of two different regional bureaus in the State Department.)
In 1981, he became Vice President of Public Strategies, a consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. He became a Managing Director at Lehman Brothers, a New York investment bank, in 1985. He also served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on America and a Changing World (chaired by Ambassador Winston Lord), and was chairman and principal author of the Bipartisan Report of the Commission on Government and Renewal, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and the Institute for International Economics in 1992.
Ambassador Holbrooke was chairman of Refugees International from 1991 to 1999 and was a member of the board of the International Red Cross. He was the founding chairman of the American Academy in Berlin, a center for United States German Cultural Exchange and the head of the National Advisory Council of the Harriman Institute. He was the director of the Citizens Committee for New York City and twice has been a Director of the Council on Foreign Relations. Other boards include the American China society and the National Committee on United States- China Relations.
He has received 12 honorary degrees from United States and international universities. He is the author of To End a War, and co-author of Counsel to the President,(1991) the best-selling memoirs of Clark Clifford, as well as numerous articles and columns on foreign policy.
Ambassador Holbrooke was born on 24 April 1941 in New York. He has two sons and is married to the author, Kati Marton.
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