Death has two faces. One is non-being; the other is the terrifying material being that is the corpse.

—Milan Kundera

1.

Only now, more than three years after he recorded the interview with CNN’s World Report, can one see subtle signs of Richard Holbrooke’s discomfort and unease. It was July 16, 1995, a Sunday, and even as the bloody catastrophe of Srebrenica was playing itself out four thousand miles to the east, the assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs managed to answer Jeanne Meserve’s questions about Bosnia with precision and aplomb. Yet look more closely now at the videotape, study it frame by frame, and you will see that this Sunday afternoon finds Holbrooke pale, unsettled, distracted; for it is five days after Bosnian Serb troops shelled and strafed and finally overwhelmed the “safe area” of Srebrenica, humiliated its several hundred Dutch peacekeepers, and seized its forty thousand or so underfed, sickly, and bedraggled Muslims; and though CNN’s producers had announced for that afternoon a typically self-regarding theme focused on the future—“The Bosnia Quagmire: How close is the United States to being pulled into the mess in Bosnia?”—their guest Richard Holbrooke could not help but be preoccupied with an all-too-painful present.

Even on that Sunday afternoon, as he sat answering the reporter’s questions, Holbrooke tells us in his memoirs,

precise details of what was happening [in Srebrenica] were not known…, but there was no question that something truly horrible was going on.

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September 24, 1998