'Bulldozer's' New Mission

Richard C. Holbrooke, who has been an author, diplomat, magazine editor, and investment banker, is, as President Clinton pointed out in June 1998, "a familiar face around the globe."

And the diplomatic style he has displayed in his years of foreign service, particularly in his role as architect of the Bosnia peace accords two years ago, has earned him the title of "Bulldozer."

His no-nonsense manner and wrestler's build have created the image of a tenacious fighter, something that served him in good stead in his dealings earlier this year with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as the U.S. and its NATO allies launched air strikes to stem Serb violence in Kosovo.

Holbrooke brings to his new U.N. job an impressive resume. He has held posts in Vietnam, where he was a foreign service officer after graduation from Brown University; Paris, where he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam; Morocco, where he was a Peace Corps director; China, where he helped President Jimmy Carter establish full diplomatic relations; Germany, where he was an ambassador; and the Balkans, where he helped mediate an end to the war in Bosnia.

He was appointed by President Clinton in June 1998 to succeed Bill Richardson as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The appointment, however, quickly became tangled, first in internal investigations at the Justice and State departments into Holbrooke's contacts with former State Department colleagues and then in the Senate.

Despite his varied career, Holbrooke earned diplomatic fame and a Nobel Prize nomination for his work as the architect of the Bosnia peace agreement, also known as the Dayton accords, in 1995.

At that time, he brokered the peace settlement, near Dayton, Ohio, that ended more than three years of war in the former Yugoslavia. From his hard-nosed negotiating in that process, he developed a reputation for direct and aggressive diplomatic style.

Holbrooke's first assignment for the State Department was in Vietnam during the Indo-China wars. After serving in several jobs in Vietnam he joined the White House staff of President Lyndon Johnson. He wrote one volume of the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam and helped to negotiate an end to the war.

In his other careers, Holbrooke, a Woodrow Wilson fellow at Princeton, served as managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine and author of Counsel to the President, the memoirs of Clark Clifford.

In the business world, he has held positions at Lehman Brothers and Suisse Bank-First Boston.

It is the potential for conflict between those business jobs and his diplomatic tasks that has slowed confirmation of his nomination to the U.N. job.

Of German-Jewish descent, Holbrooke was born in New York on April 24, 1941, and educated at Brown University. He and his third wife, the writer Kati Marton, have two sons, both TV producers iNew York.