Richard Holbrooke was an American diplomat who helped broker the Dayton Accords and later served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (UN). Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born in New York. He graduated from Brown University in 1962 and joined the diplomatic service as a representative for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Holbrooke subsequently held a number of posts, including member of the U.S. delegation at the Paris Peace Talks over the Vietnam War (1967-1969), director of the Peace Corps in Morocco (1970), and assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (1977-1981).

After William J. Clinton became president in 1993, he appointed Holbrooke as the nation's ambassador to Germany. The following year, Holbrooke became the assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs. In this new position, Clinton tasked Holbrooke with crafting an end to the Bosnian Conflict. Holbrooke oversaw the negotiations that resulted in the Dayton Accords in 1995, including the agreement to deploy U.S. troops as part of a peacekeeping mission led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Holbrooke subsequently served as Clinton's special representative to Cyprus, where he unsuccessfully attempted to forge a compromise between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. In December 1998, Holbrooke was dispatched by Clinton to Belgrade in an effort to avoid military action over Serbia's actions in Kosovo. He was unable to reach a settlement, however, and after the Russians and Europeans followed up with a new set of proposals, which also failed, the Kosovo War started in March 1999. He was then chosen to replace William B. Richardson as the nation's UN representative. Holbrooke endeavored to develop a settlement to the United Nations Dues Controversy, in which Congress refused to pay a portion of the country's payments to the world body. In December 2000, the ambassador arranged a deal in which U.S. dues were reduced from 25 percent to 22 percent and the American share of the UN's peacekeeping budget was cut from 31 percent to 27 percent.

Holbrooke left office in 2001 and entered private business, while also serving as the chair of the Terrorism Task Force of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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