Two decades later, as an ambassador to the United Nations, Holbrooke would cajole Indonesia into stopping its genocidal campaign in East Timor; in the late 1970s, however, he was overlooking Indonesia’s brutal repression of the East Timorese in order to push for its purchase of American fighter jets.

It’s a remarkable trajectory that Packer never fully elucidates, except by suggesting that Holbrooke’s Indonesian contacts in the 1970s meant that he could be more effective in the late 1990s, when his transformation into a stalwart humanitarian was complete.

Or almost complete. Later, in 2002, Holbrooke’s reasons for supporting the impending war in Iraq had to do with fear — not just of Saddam Hussein but also of the possibility that “a soft Democrat was politically doomed.” He persuaded Senator John Kerry to vote for the war resolution by warning him of how perilous it was to look weak on national security. “If that was Holbrooke’s main reason for supporting the war,” Packer writes, “it might have been better to be stupidly, disastrously wrong in a sincerely held belief like some of us.”

Better? How so? Intentions seem to matter a lot to Packer — which might explain why, despite his moments of discomfort when writing about the more unseemly displays of Holbrooke’s grasping ambition, he wills himself into giving Holbrooke the benefit of the doubt.

There’s plenty of grasping to contend with, especially after Holbrooke started making money in the private sector between Democratic administrations, working as a consultant to companies like Nike and landing cushy gigs as an (ineffectual) investment banker. Holbrooke and his third wife, Marton, strategized the seating charts for their glitzy dinner parties as if they were drawing up battlefield plans; they obtained a sweetheart loan from Countrywide Financial — which later collapsed in the subprime mortgage crisis — to pay for several of their nine properties (including not one but two houses in Telluride); they both carried on affairs “in a class where affairs were practically expected,” with Holbrooke moving in to kiss a younger woman he worked with without waiting for her explicit consent. “He claimed her in the way of an entitled great man,” Packer writes.

Elite decadence doesn’t seem to be the story Packer set out to tell, but he’s too gifted a writer to fail to notice it (“A whole class of people in Washington and New York sent other people’s children to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq while they found ways to get rich”), even if his affection for his protagonist means that Holbrooke emerges in this account as flawed, yes, and fallibly human, of course, but ultimately meaning well.

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused” — the line is from “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene’s 1955 novel about noble intentions gone awry in Vietnam. Packer quotes it, grudgingly, before adding: “My god, Greene loathed Americans.”

It’s a strange, drive-by generalization to make about an author who infused his novel with an intractable ambivalence. But then such knee-jerk moralizing is, as Packer admits, an American tradition: “We swing wildly between superhuman exertion and sullen withdrawal, always looking for the answers in our own goodness and wisdom instead of where they lie, out in the world.”