Hey everyone listening to The Beat with Ari Melburgh podcast. This is Ari Melbert, and this is a beat

podcast exclusive and the debut of a new thing we're going to try, and we'll see if you guys like it or not.

It is called uncorked, the beat uncorked, where we have longer, deeper conversations exclusively

for you guys, our podcast listeners with some

interesting thinkers. Why is it called uncork? Well, you can guess we're going to try having a

little bit of wine with those who want to oblige. And with that, let me see if I can get us uncorked.

Real. Real. This is a real thing that's happening, and I'm pouring a little pino Grigio for a first-time guest, George Packer, a writer for the Atlantic and esteemed

author. His new book is about the famous diplomat, the late Richard Holbrook. Thanks for doing this. Hey, my pleasure, especially with the added benefit of the wine. I think it can't hurt. I am a fan of yours. I've read your books for a long time. Thank you. And it's really great to have you here. So I will cheers you. There's no pressure to have any more wine than you want. I'm going to start, though. And as part of the beat uncorked, if you guys look on social media on the beat with our Instagram, you will see, of course, we are drinking out of MSNBC mom's favorite glass, the beet wine glass, which you can always get at the beat store, which is MSNBC mom's favorite glass, the beet wine glass, which you can always get at the beat

store, which is MSNBC store.com. We have the wine glass. We have other types of glasses, too,

but you don't have to get anything. You can listen to this podcast. It is literally free.

George, I have a lot of parts of the book that I want to read as excerpts for your discussion.

One of the things we like to do is I don't get to do that on TV, and it's so frustratingly limiting sometimes when somebody spends literally years on hundreds of pages and we do a very thin slice.

I really enjoy reading this.

I just finished it, so I have all those notes.

Before I do that, for anyone listening who says, Richard who is Richard Holbrook and why did you

want to write a book all about him? It's a damn good question. He was a diplomat. He served

every Democratic president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. He started his career in South Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer in the Mekong Delta, where the war was at its hottest in the early 60s. He was assistant Secretary of State for East Asia under Jimmy Carter,

participated in normalizing relations with China. His claim to fame was negotiating the end of the

war in Bosnia in 1995. With the Dayton Accords. With the Dayton Accords serving under Bill Clinton

as his Assistant Secretary of state for Europe.

He was Clinton's UN ambassador and did a whole bunch of kind of remarkable things that don't seem so big in retrospect, but took tremendous energy and persistence.

And finally, his career and his life ended with a kind of disappointment serving under

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