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Date: March 25, 1999
Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke to Speak on "Peacemaking in the Balkans"
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. envoy to the Balkans and mediator of the Dayton Agreement, will deliver the 1999 Cyril Black Memorial Lecture, "Peacemaking in the Balkans" at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on Wednesday, April 7, at 8:00 p.m. in Robertson Hall, Dodds Auditorium.
The former assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, Holbrooke details his experiences with peacemaking in the Balkans in his new book, To End A War. In his long and varied career, he has been a Foreign Service officer, diplomat, magazine editor, Peace Corps director, and an investment banker. In the early 1960s, he spent six years in Vietnam, first as a representative for the Agency for International Development (AID) and then as an assistant to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1966 he went to the White House, to serve as a member of President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam staff. During that time, he wrote one volume of the Pentagon Papers, served as a special assistant to two undersecretaries, and was as a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam.
He subsequently spent a year as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School, and then was named Peace Corps director in Morocco. Following his resignation from the Foreign Service in 1972, he became managing editor of Foreign Policy, a position he held while also serving as a consultant to the President's Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, and as a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine.
He coordinated national security affairs for the Carter-Mondale presidential campaign in 1976, and in 1977 President Carter appointed him assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, a post he held until 1981, when be became vice president of Public Strategies, a consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., and a consultant to Lehman Brothers, where he eventually became managing director.
Holbrooke is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the Citizens Committee for New York City, and the Economic Club of New York. He is the former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, the America-China Society, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and the International Rescue Committee.
Holbrooke's address is the fourth in a series of Cyril Black Memorial Lectures. Black was a distinguished academic who was preeminent in the fields of Russian history and modernization studies. He was a member of Princeton's faculty for 47 years, from 1939 until his retirement in 1986, and director of its Center of International Studies for seventeen years, from 1968 to 1985.
The lecture is sponsored by the Center of International Studies and the Woodrow Wilson School.