Richard Holbrooke, diplomat and troubleshooter, died on December 13th, aged 69.

HIS favourite book was Herman Melville's “Moby-Dick”, and it was pretty clear why. He cited Ishmael's confession near the beginning of his memoir of the 1995 Bosnian peace talks, “To End a War”: “as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” For Richard Holbrooke the remote, the forbidden and the barbarous were as likely to be found at negotiating tables, in cold hotel rooms, or in windowless government offices where men and women struggled to sort out the world, while he banged heads.

He liked Matthew Arnold, too, and again recognised that “thirst to spend our fire and restless force/In tracking out our true, original course”. He tracked his own course through history, more than 40 years at the sharp edge of American foreign policy, working for every Democratic president since John Kennedy: a big, burly actor in his own play, glaring through wire-rimmed glasses or barking into his phone. A crowd of “close friends” eddied round him, all of whom could be nudged, flattered, tricked, and in the end—when the blue eyes hardened and the cheeks puffed out—pushed into doing what he wanted. A bastard, a bully, a bulldozer, an egoist, but also a charmer, full of heart and fun, a great guy to have dinner with, even when—as at Pamela Harriman's in Paris in August 1995—he would get up eight or nine times from the table to take telephone calls, radiating happy self-importance.

Those calls were to organise NATO air strikes on the Bosnian Serb positions round Sarajevo. NATO was meant to operate as a collective; but in the face of the West's craven failure to end the Bosnian war, Mr Holbrooke had more or less singlehandedly decided to play hardball with the Serbs. If they would not make concessions at the table, they would have to be beaten on the ground. He made dramatic appeals to Washington to give him “bombs for peace”. The pleas succeeded.

The Dayton peace accords, signed that December, sealed Mr Holbrooke's fame as a diplomat. Signs of his balance and realism were everywhere, for example his insistence that the new Bosnia, despite including a Serbian republic, should be a properly multi-ethnic state. Recalling first-hand the 1968 Vietnam peace talks in Paris, held up for two months over how to seat the Vietcong, he demanded a table that would seat nine people only, not including the Bosnian Serbs. The only Serb he would deal with was Slobodan Milosevic, a “thug” he tolerated because he could be a thug himself. It was surely not immoral to talk, walk in the woods, down a pear brandy or two together, if it saved lives. As it turned out, he saved many thousands.

In Dayton and everywhere else he was a hard taskmaster, but this was no more than he demanded of himself: shuttling to and fro between continents, staying up sleepless to read a book or to watch “There's Something About Mary” for the fifth time. When he was given a job he did it fast, on his own terms (he was not Mr Obama's “envoy” to Afghanistan and Pakistan, too elegant a word, but his “special representative”, a much wider-ranging brief). And he expected short, direct lines of communication. As early as 1970, in a piece for the first issue of Foreign Policy (a magazine he edited from 1972 to 1977, during a Republican lull), he lamented the mushroom growth of the State Department, where internal communications were becoming “ever more time-consuming, less intelligible and less controllable”. He thus predicted four decades early the age of Wikileaks, though Wikileaks might well have doomed his tactics in Bosnia.

The impossible pursuit

Kennedy's “ask what you can do for your country” had first got him into the foreign service, in the Mekong Delta in 1963, where he handed out cooking oil and thatching straw in a fruitless attempt to win the Vietnamese to America's side. Like the journalist he had meant to be, before the New York Times turned him down, he always tried to talk to locals. In Pakistan he would squeeze his big frame into refugees' tents in Swat, as relaxed as if he were cruising a Washington cocktail party, to listen to the misery of ordinary, frightened folk.

To himself and to others he seemed a natural for secretary of state, but never made it; presidents' minds were set elsewhere. In the Obama foreign-policy cabal he sat awkwardly, a New Yorker rather than a Chicagoan, and a weary-seeming holdover from ancient Democratic regimes. His bluntness played badly in Kabul, where Hamid Karzai sometimes refused to talk or eat with him.

He always insisted that Vietnam no longer haunted him, though the similarities with Afghanistan were inescapable, not least a crushing sense of the limits of American power. Mr Holbrooke, however, still believed that America was the world's problem-solver, and that with “all its will and all its strength” it could put the most benighted spots to rights. Even the Afghan war, perhaps, could be turned round. And so, like Ishmael, he charged boldly on:

and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.