One of the great gifts of the new Trump era is that a whole class of aging A-list establishment types are being discredited and minimized into oblivion. The intensity with which they hang-on is striking.
Due to his genius and his money, the great media entrepreneur Barry Diller won’t soon be minimized. He owns an establishment-friendly, anti-Trump digital publication called the Daily Beast. It is quite publicly committed to furthering the new “resistance.” Fair enough. But, why, oh why, do they feel the need to publish pieces such as this one, headlined: “Richard Holbrooke Would Challenge Trump’s Fictions With Facts. Our great diplomat—and my late husband—would be a one-man wrecking crew today, pulverizing the misinformation spouted by the President-elect. Who will step up in his absence?” The author is Kati Marton, who a few people in New York and Washington may recall as the widow of the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and ex-wife of late anchorman Peter Jennings.
In a repulsively self-serving book a few years back, Marton felt the need to tell the world about the various affairs she conducted while married to her husbands. “While researching her own childhood in Budapest, Marton fell for another man, a distinguished Hungarian. “We spoke the language of my childhood and laughed at the same things,” quoted the Newsweek review of the book. The pages also describe what she viewed as Peter Jennings’ brittle insecurities, including part of a note he allegedly wrote to her saying, “I wish sometimes that I didn’t have these weird bouts of need.”
The friendly reviews praised her for honesty, talking about the bravery of acknowledging problems we all face, or some such blather. Maybe we do all face similar problems, but most people don’t get books published, or gossip pages chattering, when they air their family’s dirty laundry. Imagine if your mother conducted a public exorcism by talking about her selfish needs, her lust, and her thoughts on your father’s deficiencies?
Now the Daily Beast has felt the need to publish Marton on the crucial subject of what Richard Holbrooke would be doing now? By which they mean, in the era of Trump, how the great diplomat who made peace in the Balkans for all time (except for a few years later when hundreds of thousands of Albanians were chased out of Kosovo by the Serbs) would handle the policies of Trump. Among other hugely tangible actions, she says Holbrooke would have been “relentless.” He also would have, Marton argues, done a lot of writing and even more talking. This, we believe.
There is also the claim that, “Richard would have spent all his personal capital on behalf of Syrian refugees.” When you laughed at that one, did you spit out some of your Domaine de la Romance-Conti Montrachet? An unpretentious little grape. 1995, of course, for the year of Holbrooke’s Dayton Accords.
Marton writes that she is asked all the time what Ambassador Holbrooke would have done to restore the very idea of America. The great denouement? She writes that Holbrooke would have looked to the establishment of American Academy in Berlin for the inspiration to bring the world together. Assuming knowledge which alludes even the very well traveled, she writes in the most arch tone, “thus has the Wannsee been transformed into a sort of German-American agora for great minds.” You’re to be forgiven if you did not know that that Wannsee (where the academy is located) is a beach on an inland lake near the outskirts of Berlin, popular with nudists.
Achtung! Little emperors with no clothes.