“Man, I didn’t want to let him down,” Marton recalled. “By the time we got to Dayton, more than 300,000 Europeans had been killed in this conflict.”
Credit: Skip Peterson
Credit: Skip Peterson
But at first the two leaders studiously ignored each other, directing their comments to Marton or staring off into space. They were deep into the dessert course before Marton talked about her childhood and how much her fellow Hungarians admired Yugoslavia for gaining independence from Moscow. “What happened to you?” she asked. “And how did this war start, anyway?”
Her startlingly direct questions broke the impasse.
“That’s when they started engaging with each other,” Marton recalled. “Each had his own version of how the war started. I knew I had succeeded when they started calling each other by their first names and then they started quarreling with each other about how they first met.”
At the other end of the vast hangar, Holbrooke put his hand over his heart – a secret signal telling her, “You done good, Kati.”
The couple had been married less than six months when the peace talks commenced Nov. 1, 1995. Marton tried to spend as much time in Dayton as she could during the next three weeks, flying back and forth to care for her two young children in New York.
From the very beginning of their marriage, “Richard made me part of his diplomacy,” Marton recalled. Even en route to their honeymoon in the Swiss Alps, Holbrooke was on the phone trying to draw the United Nations’ attention to a sniper attack in Sarajevo.“Nice honeymoon you’re having,” she quipped, but without the least resentment.
“Never once did I feel, ‘This is not what I signed up for,’” she said. “I felt like ‘holy cow, this is historic,’ and I can play a role here, and he wants me to play a role. Richard was a very enlightened man for his generation. He thought of me as a full partner. The 17 years we were married were always a roller coaster, but there wasn’t a day that I didn’t learn something. We really had a blast.”
She had grown up in an intensely political environment. Her journalist parents, who had covered the Hungarian Revolution, were seized from their home when Marton was only 6 and endured years in a Communist prison in Budapest. Her family trauma – and the resilience that resulted in their emigration to the United States in 1957 – only intensified her drive to succeed.Marton landed a job as an ABC News foreign correspondent at the age of 26. She married future anchorman Peter Jennings in 1979, and the couple had two children, Elizabeth and Christopher. They divorced In 1993.
In Dayton, Holbrooke wanted his wife by his side for far more than emotional support, realizing that her profound understanding of the region could prove an asset during the negotiations. “Richard knew he could tell the parties to the conference, ‘Kati knows where you are coming from,” Marton said. “He was the kind of diplomat who used any tools to hand to achieve results.”
It was Holbrooke who selected Dayton as the site for the peace talks, while other players preferred glittering European capitals such as Geneva or Paris or Vienna. Dayton more than met his expectations, holding candlelight vigils throughout the region and welcoming visitors with posters and highway billboards trumpeting “Welcome to Dayton, City of Peace.”
President Bill Clinton gave Holbrooke a wide berth to conduct negotiations as he saw fit. “You could not do this without the full backing of the U.S. President,” Marton said. “Bill Clinton trusted Richard, and obviously he didn’t let him down.”
As the chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Marton played a critical role during the peace talks in helping to secure the release of Christian Science Monitor reporter David Rohde, who had been held captive by Bosnian Serbs since Oct. 29. Rohde had been the first Western reporter to find mass graves where thousands of Muslim civilians had been massacred after the Bosnian Serb capture of the U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica – a tragedy that “finally got the attention of the free world,” Marton said.
Marton talked to Milosevic tirelessly about Rohde, emphasizing the number of renowned journalists on her committee who would continue to draw world attention to his captivity. She warned, “We are going to expose you for who you are.”
Holbrooke, too, urged Milosovic to pressure his ally Radovan Karadzic, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, to release the reporter who had been seized by his militia. At last, in exasperation, Holbrooke threatened to suspend the peace talks until Rohde had been freed.
“You would do that for a journalist?” Milosevic asked in astonishment.
Milosevic blinked, and on Nov. 8 Karadzic sent a message to the Monitor stating that Rohde would be released as “a sign of goodwill and a contribution to the peace talks.” Negotiations resumed.
“Think of that today, when journalists are described as enemies of the people, when an American statesman would halt peace talks in order to free a mere journalist,” Marton said.
It was one of many occasions in Dayton when Marton was afforded a first-hand view of her husband’s mastery of his craft. Just as she was proving herself a skilled if amateur diplomat, Holbrooke was demonstrating himself to be a gifted producer of an event on the world stage.
“He brilliantly choreographed the opening banquet,” Marton recalled. “Richard was among many other things a great showman and choreographer. He was fearless about wielding power and unembarrassed at playing the heavy. Many of his seemingly spontaneous outbursts were actually rehearsed by us the night before, He liked to shake things up, but he always had an outcome in mind.”
Holbrooke, who was then assistant secretary of state, balanced the use of diplomacy in tandem with U.S. military might. When talks faltered, he ordered Tomahawk missiles and B-52 bombers to be flown over the Hope Hotel. “It was his unsubtle way of reminding these warmongers that we are trying diplomacy, but we have other weapons at hand,” Marton said.
Credit: SKIP PETERSON
Credit: SKIP PETERSON
The outcome of the peace talks was anything but preordained, she added: “It was the longest of long shots, given who the players were and given the depth of the hatred and blood lust that ensued. The longer a war goes on, the greater the need for retribution and vengeance, the greater the need to prove that my wound is deeper than your wound.”
Holbrooke practiced a brand of diplomacy Marton has described as “one human at a time,” and he urged her to engage with Milosevic and Izetbegovic during their many walks by appealing to their concern for their grandchildren’s future.
“But I discovered they didn’t have any dreams for their grandchildren,” Marton said. “They had one animating purpose and that was to hold on to power. It was a disillusioning experience, but very enlightening.”
Her long walks with Milosevic did bear fruit, however, at a critical late juncture in the peace talks. The dispirited diplomatic team was hanging out in Holbrooke’s suite at the Hope Hotel. “Talks were stalled, and Richard told us to pack our bags and put our suitcases outside of our door, to let the parties of the conflict know that he was done. We were sitting around in our room, which really looked a like a freshman dorm; it was fairly ripe after two weeks. They had long faces, all these wonderful people, because Izetbegovic was chemically incapable of saying yes to anything. It was inches of territory they were fighting over, but inches of territory with deep historic meaning for them.”
Suddenly Marton glimpsed Milosevic pacing in the parking lot, hands in pockets, his collar turned up as protection from the falling snow. She grabbed her coat and rushed outside, touching the dictator by the arm and coaxing, ‘Come on in, you obviously have something on your mind.’”
Recalled Marton, “He didn’t want to go back to Belgrade without a peace, but he held out until the last minute because he was obviously a hard-nosed negotiator himself.”
Holbrooke summoned Izetbegovic, who sighed and grudgingly acknowledged, “All right, it’s an unjust peace, but my people need peace.”
Holbrooke leaned over to Secretary of State Warren Christopher and whispered, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“They sneaked away like two thieves in the night,” Marton said. “They didn’t want to give these guys another nanosecond to reconsider.”
Marton thought to herself, “‘Holy cow! There is going to be peace. I had been to Sarajevo, which had been reduced to a lunar landscape and ruined buildings and sandbags piled everywhere.”
Before the Dayton Peace Accords, there was widespread fear of a Vietnam-like conflict in the Balkans. Against all odds, that peace has held for 30 years now, without a single American casualty.
“Sarajevo today is restored to its former splendor,” Marton said. “Those beautiful ruined cities are again full of life and rebuilt. I am not saying there is perfect peace and harmony, because there isn’t; you have people with deep, deep grievances and you have Moscow fueling those grievances via Belgrade and the U.S. is not as engaged as they should be.”
Yet the Dayton Peace Accords remain Holbrooke’s proudest diplomatic achievement in a storied career that stretched back to the Vietnam War, when he served as the youngest member of the diplomatic team. “Richard had a Zelig-like ability to be present at every major diplomatic episode as a negotiator.” Marton said. “He learned his lessons from the masters.”
What made Dayton the high point of Holbrooke’s career? “It was a real test of the U.S. role as a post-war power,” Marton said. “Richard saw that if the US failed in this role of ending the most atrocious and violent conflict since the second World War, then we would be a paper tiger. And it was not only a peace treaty that was signed but the Constitution for a new nation, and that was just spectacular.”
Credit: AP File Photo
Credit: AP File Photo
The peace talks are mentioned prominently in Marton’s moving 2013 memoir, “Paris A Love Story,” chronicling her relationship with Holbrooke. The couple maintained an abiding affection for Dayton, coming back when Holbrooke was awarded the Dayton Peace Prize in 2005. After Holbrooke died unexpectedly in 2010, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize has awarded the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award every year to a writer who has promoted peace in their body of work. “He was a man of words and letters, and there couldn’t be a more fitting way to remember the man,” said Marton, who often attends the ceremony to award the prize.
“I have so much admiration for the Dayton community for keeping this going for so many years, particularly now when there is so much pulling us apart,” Marton said. “The United States should be proud of this achievement, and Dayton should be proud, because this was a demonstration that the U.S. is about more than weapons of war; it’s about moral principle. We seem to have forgotten that not only can we do military campaigns, but we can make peace and forge a new beginning from the ashes of war. That was Richard Holbrooke, and that is what happened in Dayton.”
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