Senate Finally Approves Clinton’s U.N. Nominee

The Senate confirmed veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke as America’s chief representative at the United Nations on Thursday after a 14-month delay that had come to symbolize the sulfurous animosity between the White House and Capitol Hill.

Holbrooke, the driving force behind the Bosnia-Herzegovina peace agreement and President Clinton’s favorite diplomatic trouble-shooter, expects to take office early next week, giving Washington a high-profile voice at the United Nations for the first time since Bill Richardson left last year to become Energy secretary.

As U.N. ambassador, Holbrooke, 58, will be a member of Clinton’s Cabinet, the highest governmental rank of his career.

Although Holbrooke’s recent diplomatic exploits have focused primarily on the Balkans, he has been at the forefront in foreign policy hot spots since 1963, when he began his career at the U.S. embassy in war-torn Vietnam.

“In all my years in the Senate, no one . . . that has come before our committee is more qualified to do the job for which he has been nominated than this man,” Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said during the 35-minute debate that preceded the 81-16 vote.

From the moment Clinton announced his choice of Holbrooke in June 1998, there was little doubt that he would be confirmed if the full Senate got a chance to vote. But Holbrooke was trapped in political limbo, partly of his own making, which the administration seemed unable to penetrate because of conflicts with Republican lawmakers on unrelated issues.

Thursday’s votes against Holbrooke came from 15 Republicans and independent Bob Smith of New Hampshire, who quit the GOP earlier this year to protest what he saw as a leftward drift by the party.

The final obstacles to Holbrooke’s confirmation had been set up by four Republican senators, including Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, using a Senate rule that permits a single member to delay the vote on a nomination for any reason. All four used the “hold” rule to protest unrelated administration decisions. Three removed their holds last month, but Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) kept his in force until Wednesday.

While announcing that he would permit a vote on Holbrooke, Grassley clamped holds on three other ambassadorial appointments, including that of Peter Burleigh as ambassador to the Philippines. Burleigh, a career foreign service officer with 32 years of experience, has been acting head of the U.S. mission to the United Nations while Holbrooke’s confirmation was delayed.

Although Senate holds are not uncommon, they are rarely used against Cabinet-level appointments.

Several Democratic senators objected to use of the procedure in Holbrooke’s case.

“We have lost our sense of proportion,” Biden said. “We held up the single most important foreign policy [appointment] to be made by this administration.”

Earlier, Holbrooke’s nomination was stalled by charges that he had breached conflict-of-interest laws by exploiting his government contacts to advance his private interests as a vice president of the investment banking firm of Credit Suisse First Boston. He settled the dispute by paying a $5,000 fine and apologizing for a lapse in judgment.

Holbrooke accepted the investment banking post in 1995 after resigning as assistant secretary of State for European affairs, the job that he held when he organized the Dayton, Ohio, peace conference, which ended the Bosnia war. During a little more than three years at the bank, Holbrooke spent much of his time as an unpaid White House envoy, mediating between factions on Cyprus and negotiating with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

In the 37 years since Holbrooke graduated from Brown University, he has moved easily between government and the private sector. After his service in wartime Saigon and as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks, he resigned from the foreign service, becoming editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

From 1977 to 1981 he was back at the State Department as assistant secretary for Asian affairs. Then he was managing director of Lehman Brothers before returning to government as ambassador to Germany and later as assistant secretary of State for Europe.