August 4, 1999
Washington -- The Senate today confirmed veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke as U.N. ambassador, filling a post that has stood vacant through military conflicts in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf.
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.
The Cabinet-level post at the U.N. headquarters in New York has been vacant since Bill Richardson left in September to become energy secretary.
Holbrooke, 58, currently an investment banker, is a former Peace Corps director, ambassador to Germany and assistant secretary of state. Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told colleagues that in his on 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 that 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.''
Clinton first announced his choice of Holbrooke in June 1998. But the selection remained bogged down for eight months in internal State and Justice Department ethics investigations into Holbrooke's business contacts. More recently, the nomination was delayed by individual senators for unrelated reasons.
Today's confirmation vote was all but assured on Wednesday when Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the final senator blocking the nomination, lifted his objections. Grassley is in a standoff with the State Department over its treatment of a career employee he claims was punished for sharing information on U.N. financial irregularities with Congress. But Grassley's tactics created new problems for other diplomatic nominees. Grassley said that to make his point he would block three other pending nominations, including that of Peter Burleigh as ambassador to the Philippines.
Burleigh has been filling in for Holbrooke at the United Nations since September. In New York, Burleigh said he would have no comment on Grassley's ``hold'' on him. Grassley said he was also putting ``holds'' on Carl Spielvogel to be ambassador to the Slovak Republic and Richard Fredericks to be ambassador to Switzerland.
Three other senators had also sought to block the Holbrooke nomination -- Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio -- but they earlier abandoned the tactics. Under Senate tradition, any member without explanation may block action on legislation or a nomination for as long as the majority leader permits.
Several Democrats today criticized the tradition of holds. ``We have lost our sense of proportion,'' Biden said. ``We held up the single most important foreign policy decision to be made by this administration.''
Grassley used the technique to protest the State Department's treatment of a whistle-blower, Linda Shenwick. Grassley contends that Shenwick, who worked at the U.N. mission in New York, was demoted and transferred to a lesser job in Washington in retaliation for telling members of Congress about waste and inefficiency at the United Nations. The State Department has said Shenwick was reassigned because of unsatisfactory job performance.
Since Richardson left the U.N. post in September, the United States launched airstrikes against both Iraq and Yugoslavia. Burleigh, the assistant U.N. ambassador, served a stint as presiding officer of the Security Council and had to deal with the issue of delinquent U.S. payments to the international body.
Holbrooke had been confirmed by the Senate three times previously: in 1977 as assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration, again in 1993 as ambassador to Germany, and later as assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs. He also was a contender for secretary of state in Clinton's second term before the president chose Madeleine Albright.
But Holbrooke, ambitious and with a forceful personality, has produced detractors as well as fans, both in Congress and within the State Department. He has been at odds at times with Albright. And he is a favorite target for Republicans since he's widely viewed as a likely secretary of state if Vice President Al Gore wins the presidency.
