A few thousand people will gather today in Washington, D.C. to honor the life of ambassador Richard Holbrooke, one of the world's finest diplomats, whose life ended suddenly one month ago...The ambassador was known to work round the clock, though he never lost sight of personal priorities. He had hired me in 2001 to help build his HIV/AIDS outfit, the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS.

Back in 1995, Holbrooke browbeat President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia into releasing me after Serbian forces arrested me at a mass grave I discovered near the town of Srebrenica, site of the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.

...Thanks to an unwritten agreement between Holbrooke and Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, the American Cultural Center in Belgrade, closed by order of the US government through its now-defunct United States Information Agency in the mid-1990s, was reopened not long after the 1995 Dayton Peace accord -- with Milosevic footing the bill!

Richard C. Holbrooke, the high-octane diplomat who spearheaded the end of the Bosnian war and most recently served as the Obama administration's point man in the volatile Afghan-Pakistani war zone, died Monday at George Washington University Hospital in Washington. Following are reactions to his death.

Richard Holbrooke's successor as Washington's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan will inherit intractable problems not even the "bulldozer" of U.S. diplomacy was able to resolve. The increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan, inseparably intertwined with Pakistan where Taliban fighters have so long been able to seek sanctuary, has baffled U.S. diplomats, politicians and military commanders for nine years.

Here is a word not always associated with Richard Holbrooke: subtle. But subtlety of sorts was one of the secrets of a man who counted as one of the most accomplished, most flamboyant, most impassioned and — after his death at age 69 Monday evening — most memorable American diplomats of recent decades, whose career was a living timeline that stretched from wars in Vietnam to the Balkans to Afghanistan.