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Reading "Masters and Commanders," Andrew Roberts's magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working prodigious hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s. This doesn't happen anymore, I thought, with the blood pressure and cholesterol medicines many of us routinely take. But it does, as we were reminded by the sudden death at age 69 this week of Richard Holbrooke, who was working prodigiously as Barack Obama's special representative for AfPak, i.e., Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke was known in cynical Washington...

This week, the Globe and Mail asked General Lewis McKenzie (Retired) to write the obituary of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. It was a good idea. The two men had crossed paths more than once on the global stage of the Great Game. McKenzie declined. Holbrooke had just died and the general knew that what he had to say would hardly produce the standard panegyric. When I caught up with McKenzie, he was shoveling snow after a spell away from home. I asked for an interview and to my surprise, he agreed. “I’m just going to tell you what I thought...

Richard C. Holbrooke, 69, passed away Monday after doctors conducted the surgery to repair a tear in an artery in his heart. Most recently he served as the President’s point man in the highly volatile Afghan-Pakistani war zone. World leaders today mourn the death of a diplomat who led the end of the Bosnian war on the 15th anniversary of the peace deal he helped design. Deal Maker Of Respect In 1995 Mr Holbrooke seized the opportunity presented by the Bosnian/Croatian military prowess against the Serbs and the Nato decision after the Srebrenica massacre to finally intervene with air attacks....

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Former Credit Suisse First Boston star banker Frank Quattrone surrendered to federal authorities Wednesday morning and will face criminal charges, prosecutors said. James Comey, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, will unveil the charges at a 1 p.m. ET press conference. Quattrone, a former star banker for CSFB, allegedly advised his colleagues in late 2000 to destroy documents while regulators were investigating the ways Wall Street investment banks were doling out shares of lucrative initial public offerings. The former banker is charged in a three-count criminal complaint with obstruction of justice, document destruction...

NEW YORK – With all the anti-establishment, power-to-the-people refrains sounded in its IPO manifesto, it's curious that Google Inc. chose to reward the most notorious investment bank of the IPO boom to spearhead the initial public offering. Although Credit Suisse First Boston presumably cleansed its reputation two years ago with a $100 million settlement of federal charges, Monday's conviction of the firm's former star banker was a perfectly timed reminder of the greedy past that shadows one of Google's new Wall Street pals. It's not that the search engine company was obligated to jeopardize its chances of a big IPO...

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Credit Suisse Group helped clients in Iran and elsewhere conduct financial transactions in secret, saying Wednesday the Swiss bank "established a business model to allow these rogue players access to U.S. dollars." Mr. Holder and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau detailed a decade-long effort by the bank to carry out transactions from Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. The men announced a $536 million settlement by Credit Suisse, one of several banks accused in a long-running case that has netted roughly $1 billion in fines. The bank, which paid the biggest of the fines,...

The US government already had to crack down on one Swiss bank, UBS, fining it $780 million earlier this year for illegally aiding American citizens in evading their taxes. Now, it’s Credit Suisse in the crosshairs for helping clients in Iran, Libya, Sudan, and other countries perform illegal transactions. The bank has since “accepted and acknowledged responsibility for its criminal conduct” and is now settling with New York City, New York State, and the federal government on fines totaling nearly $1 billion. According to the Wall Street Journal: “The men announced a $536 million settlement by Credit Suisse, one of...

Reporting from Sacramento — The name of Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, a billionaire who has been defending her ties to embattled investment banking giant Goldman Sachs throughout her campaign, appears in the federal investigation of another Wall Street firm tarnished by scandal. Court documents filed by prosecutors in the aftermath of the dot-com bust show Whitman, then chief executive of EBay, listed among about 200 executives who were to receive gifts of deeply discounted stock from Frank Quattrone, then a banker at Credit Suisse First Boston. A star dealmaker during the late 1990s, Quattrone was twice indicted on obstruction-of-justice...

NEW YORK -- The Federal Reserve on Wednesday reluctantly opened the books on its monumental campaign to save the financial system in the midst of the recent crisis, revealing how it distributed some $3.3 trillion in relief. The data revealed that the Fed's aid was scattered much more widely than previously understood. Two European megabanks -- Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse -- were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed's purchase of mortgage-backed securities. The Fed's dollars also flowed to major American companies that are not financial players, including McDonald's and Harley-Davidson, through unsecured short-term loans. The measure, initiated in Jan....

Democrats' hypocrisy on Bolton exposed Joel Mowbray May 5, 2005 Call it the tale of two confirmation hearings. Two of the four men most recently nominated to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations found their candidacies challenged, though they could not have faced more different receptions.  Both men were supremely qualified, but the similarities end there. The divergent paths for each reveal Democrats' rabid partisanship and belies their claims that they oppose John Bolton on the grounds that character matters. Six years ago, Foreign Service veteran Richard Holbrooke was awaiting Senate confirmation.  As former a ambassador to Germany,...

The Obama administration has conducted a vigorous internal debate over its new strategy for Afghanistan, expected to be unveiled by the president in a speech Friday. According to two U.S. government sources close to the issue, senior policymakers were divided over how comprehensive to make the strategy, involving an initial boost of 17,000 U.S. troops. On the one side were Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, who argued in closed-door meetings for a minimal strategy of stabilizing Afghanistan that one source described as a "lowest common denominator" approach. The goal of these...

I first laid eyes on Richard Holbrooke (he won't remember) on Monday evening, September 21, 1992. Some ridiculously wealthy Manhattan socialite had thrown a party for Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, then the new cause du jour, and some boutique human rights group — a bogus one, I realized in retrospect, now defunct, though its chieftain has since moved to greener pastures and is still active — had decided that I might be useful and had flown me up for the soirée. As it was, nobody was interested in me, I had a drink or two, ate some peanuts, and went...

ABC News has learned that Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has died. On Friday, Holbrooke was rushed to the hospital with a torn aorta. He went through more than 20 hours of surgery. Earlier this evening, speaking at the US State Department, President Obama sang Holbrooke's praises and called him "a tough son of a gun." Holbrooke, 69, was a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote a nice story about Holbrooke last year,...

Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke collapsed today during a meeting in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office, officials said. According to Democratic sources, Ambassador Holbrooke, Secretary Clinton's top aide for the region, gasped and was clearly undergoing a medical situation when he collapsed. He is said to have walked out of her office on his own power and was tended to by medical personnel at the State Department before being transported to George Washington University Hospital where to be treated for a blood clot. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley refused to confirm Ambassador Holbrooke's condition, but confirmed...

Bob Woodward's searing critique of the Democrats' war strategy comes as key advisers are leaving and voters lose patience with Barack Obama's promise to deliver 'hope and change'. Alex Spillius reports on an increasingly isolated President. When Barack Obama took office 20 months ago – and what a long 20 months it seems – there was a lot of talk about the great "Team of Rivals" he was appointing around him. Parallels were drawn with the cabinet of substantial talents and big personalities assembled by Abraham Lincoln to rebuild the nation after the civil war. Now, in a new book,...

KABUL, Afghanistan - When Afghan President Hamid Karzai was meeting with provincial governors recently, he looked at his dinner and remarked, "Maybe the foreigners put some poison in my food." This story was told to me by someone who attended the event and said he thought Karzai was joking. But the Afghan leader's remark shows how low U.S.-Afghan diplomatic relations have sunk in a week when Karzai has repeatedly railed against foreigners and declared he won't be anyone's puppet. In recent weeks, Karzai has rushed to Iran and China to prove he doesn't depend solely on Washington and rebuffed U.S....

The single most damning story about President Obama so far is one we know courtesy of his national security adviser, Jim Jones. Visiting the newly installed military commanders in Afghanistan in late June, Jones told General Stanley McChrystal that if he requested more troops any time soon, Obama would have a "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" (i.e., "What the f--") moment. Jones then, in an interview, made the claim--denied by everyone else involved--that military leaders had agreed that when the president earlier sent 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, "there would be a year from the time the decision was made before they would...

A handful of high-ranking Obama administration officials this month delivered private briefings at the annual invitation-only conference held by an elite international organization known as the Bilderberg group. The closed meeting of some of the most powerful business , media and political leaders in North America and Western Europe heard from top Obama diplomats James Steinberg and Richard Holbrooke, who detailed the administration’s foreign policy, while economic adviser Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, also gave a presentation at the heavily guarded seaside resort in Greece that hosted the event. The Bilderberg group, which takes its...

President Asif Ali Zardari vowed on Thursday not to allow anybody to challenge the government’s writ or run a parallel government in any part of the country, and said the government is aware of the problems emanating from extremism and terrorism. The pledge came during talks with US president’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who had called the president over the telephone. Zardari and Holbrooke discussed the threat of increasing Taliban influence in Pakistan. Sources said the call was prompted by US fears that Pakistan was not realising the threat posed by the Taliban – who, Washington believes, have exploited the...

Now that President Obama has announced his new strategy for Afghanistan, you may be focused on the number of new troops that will deploy there: 17,000 on the way, with 4,000 more trainers and advisers to join them by fall. Before you think "quagmire," consider what, to my mind, makes this plan so impressive: The troop increase is part of a much broader strategy encompassing the entire South Asia region. It emphasizes economic aid and diplomacy as much as guns. As Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special representative for AfPak, put it: "The media is talking about a military surge. What Obama...