Holbrooke Gets Senate Nod
Fourteen months after President Clinton nominated him, Richard Holbrooke was confirmed Thursday by the Senate as ambassador to the United Nations.
The cabinet-level job was last held by Bill Richardson, who is now Energy secretary.
The 81-16 vote ended a 14-month odyssey for Holbrooke, 58, the Clinton administrator's top international troubleshooter and the architect of the 1995 agreement that brought peace to Bosnia.
In contrast to the long delay, the Senate debated the nomination for only 35 minutes.
Holbrooke's nomination to succeed Richardson was slowed by Justice and State department investigations of Holbrooke and then by apparently unrelated "holds" slapped on by four Republican senators.
Iowa's Charles Grassley is the last senator to lift his hold. He was upset over the demotion and transfer of a State Department worker who blew the whistle on U.N. waste.
Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told colleagues that in his 27 years in the chamber, no foreign policy nominee "is more qualified for the job for which he was nominated."
And Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., called Holbrooke "one of America's great natural resources. He is a person of ... enormous energy and talent."
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, the only senator to speak against the nomination, called him a "principled man ... I admire his dedication, his tenacity."
But she blamed him for helping to frame a Balkans policy whose purpose she said "is to force factions to live together in an American model. ... I cannot in good conscience vote for someone who has taken our country in the wrong direction."
Holbrooke is a former ambassador to Germany, brokered the 1995 Bosnia peace accord, and was a special envoy in the Kosovo crisis. [Click here for more on the diplomat known as "Bulldozer."]
Some of the investigations that slowed his approval involved possible conflict of interest between his full-time work and his temporary government service as special envoy.