“Fall made me really think for the first time in my life,” Gersony says. Fall was the first author whose message Gersony could consciously remember the details of after reading. “Reading Bernard Fall began my journey towards an understanding of what America could do in the world and what it could not do, based not on some lofty ideal of history, but on knowledge and empathy of the human terrain itself, about places and people as they actually were.
“It is all about collecting information and insights from the field, so that we don’t operate with one eye closed. It is about searching out that vital insight about a place that any journalist or relief worker has, but which wonks and highbrow policymakers often don’t.”
This all complemented Gersony’s own experience at this point in his life. School and literature had so far been beyond him. Intellectually, he knew only the most basic, concrete aspects of existence: the commodity trade and the typing-up of casualty reports, memorizing each battlefield death or wound through the movements of his fingers. If the evidence did not exist right in front of him, it didn’t exist, period. And following from that would come his belief in the essential wisdom of the common person, who also knew the world only from the grassroots level in the most immediate, concrete way. He simply trusted people at the bottom, like the plant managers in the Midwest—for whom economics were never abstract—and distrusted people at the top.
It was in this way that he would eventually discover the world of refugees and displaced persons. To him, refugees were people at the end of the chain of events that had begun with decisions made by those at the top and the beginning of the chain.
Gersony was to become the ultimate fieldworker: in continuous, tactile contact with the evidence. And he would let the evidence—rather than theories, of which he knew nothing—always drive his conclusions.
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Today, Gersony’s library in his home, surrounded by woods in Great Falls, Virginia, forty minutes from Washington, is a monument to that sensibility, elaborated on in the course of almost half a century. Amassed over a lifetime of travel, there are practically no books of political science with its grand and abstract theories, and almost nothing on globalization (another flimsy word). Rather, his shelves are packed and cluttered with works of local history, art, travel, and literature about specific parts of the world, since it is often in the guise of fiction where writers can more easily tell the truth. There is little here that is not the product of firsthand knowledge and encounters with terrain. Almost every geography is represented, from the Mosquitia on the Caribbean coast of Central America to the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Gersony seems to have a knack for quickly locating the best that literature has to offer on the area where he has to go next, so that Joan Didion’s Salvador (1983) lies on the Latin America shelf above Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History (1998), where his books about the Balkans are. There are The Lake Regions of Central Africa by the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, published in 1860, and John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, published in 1841. I notice The Bridge on the Drina (1945) by Ivo Andric, the Yugoslav Nobel Prize laureate, and the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs (1964). The best of journalism is here, too, and not just Didion: such as Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Soccer War (1990), essays about coups and upheavals in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East; and Michael Ignatieff’s Blood and Belonging (1994), about the still-resonant appeal of ethnicity and nationalism, despite the optimism of a supposedly unifying world that greeted the end of the Cold War. The entire globe is here in this library, but without exception it is built up from many geographic particulars. The shelves reveal a generalist, who has earned that old-fashioned title by burrowing deep into so many different regions.
Over the decades, with lots of work, he has learned to better remember what he has read, even without typing.
In his basement there are large and detailed maps of the regions where his research left the deepest impact on policymakers: Rwanda, the border areas of Mozambique, Uganda’s Luwero Triangle, and so on. This emotionally wrought son of Jewish Holocaust refugees is a quintessential nineteenth-century man, someone for whom geography and culture are the beginning of all knowledge, one of the very few left in Washington or anywhere; an explorer dedicated to the often unpleasant and often wondrous granularity of places, who, nevertheless, doesn’t quite fit the part.
It all started with Bernard Fall’s ruminations about the ground-level reality of Indochina, which are right here on these shelves. It is in our libraries where Gersony and I meet each other, for I also throughout my career as an author and journalist have been obsessed with specific geographies and the cultures that emanate from them, and are specific to them, and are thus another reason for me to tell his story.
CHAPTER 2
Guatemala
1970–1977
The Gruesome Threesome
The writings of Bernard Fall had focused Gersony’s mind on the problem of America in the Third World. But he was still young, in his midtwenties, aimless, and with few prospects. Gersony was offered two well-paying positions in the commodity trade in the Midwest, which he turned down. It was not a direction where he wanted to go. But in what direction he should go, he just didn’t know.
His path to Guatemala began by accident, with little forethought, on the campus of Long Island University in Brooklyn, where a girlfriend was taking courses around the same time that he was released from the Army.
With her help, he sat in on classes about political transitions taught by Leon Sinder, the chairman of the sociology department and a cultural anthropologist, “a short Jewish guy with a big head of hair,” born in Romania, who had flown over fifty combat missions in the Pacific in World War II. This was an era when college professors had military experience and had actually done something in their lives besides having gone to graduate school—and in subtle and indirect ways they brought these vital experiences into the classroom. Sinder, like Graham Ward, was another person who thought Gersony was someone, or might become someone, when he thought he was no one.
Sinder mentioned to Gersony that a colleague of his was going to lead a group of students on a field trip to Guatemala, and needed a driver and assistant to help him explore the terrain in advance. So at the end of 1969, Gersony went for ten days to the historic Guatemalan town of Antigua, as well as to some Mayan shrines and pyramids. Instantly, he became smitten with the people and the landscape, and while there met a “terribly overweight” Catholic priest from Oklahoma who invited him back. Gersony spent only a month in New York at the beginning of 1970 before he returned to Guatemala. Twenty-five years old with $3,000 in savings, he went to live at the Catholic mission in Antigua, paying $30 per month for room and board.
Bob Gersony in Guatemala in the 1970s.
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Antigua, Guatemala, 1970. A rectilinear town of cobblestone streets and grand Spanish baroque architecture, ringed by three soaring volcanoes in a landscape of lonely, ocean-like vastness; with such fine all-year-round weather that it is justifiably called “the land of eternal spring.” This old colonial capital teems with churches and monasteries, built hundreds of years ago, often in a state of majestic, charred, and rubble-strewn ruin on account of repeated earthquakes over the centuries. The stucco pilasters and pendentives are so intricate as to induce hallucination. There is an Angkor Wat quality to this place, with vines crawling over heaps of fallen masonry. The blazing, loose-fitting costumes or trajes of the indigenous Mayan inhabitants fill the landscape with color: twistingly woven ponchos, the design often specific to each village. The paganized Catholic processions with mahogany-borne floats appear refracted by incense from the swinging lamps.
There is smoke from the lamps, smoke from the volcanoes, smoke from burning wood scarring the white ceilings and porticoes, and dust rising from the por
ous soil, all intensifying the theatricality of the lush forested setting, in which a rugged geography and heavy rains, bringing floods, disease, and landslides, have for hundreds of years hindered development.
The entire visual drama of Spain’s interaction with the New World is condensed here, a place that in the early nineteenth century was the political heart of Central America. Guatemala, geographically tucked away at the bottom of Mexico and utterly absent from world media consciousness, a place you would never think about, is also a place that deeply imprinted itself on Bob Gersony’s memory. In a visual sense, it would be the only place ever to do so.
Though Vietnam put Bob Gersony on a certain path and gave him his worldview, Vietnam was also an ordeal of boredom and psychological survival, something he just had to get through. Guatemala, on the other hand, was sheer exploration and the most adventurous kind of personal fulfillment: something he had never before experienced in his life. This is why Guatemala made such an intense, lasting impression on him. After Antigua, and what happened there, he did not have to remember another landscape quite as vividly.
In Antigua, he was free at first to enjoy the place and absorb its landscape details, since he had as yet no firm plans there. For the rest of his life after Guatemala, everywhere he went he would have to hit the ground running, with enormous pressure on him and a job he had been assigned to do—usually a mystery he was ordered by superiors to solve. In such circumstances, for someone as compulsive as he became regarding work, the details of the landscape itself became more and more of a distraction, since he just couldn’t wait to get to the embassy, and out into the field, to start gathering facts.
Gersony never really did develop an eye for landscape, despite the books he has accumulated over a lifetime. He barely remembers the details of the dozens of Third World capital cities from where he began his forays into the bush, despite the fact that he reads and collects the sorts of books he does out of a conscious dedication to thinking locally; to thinking about the factors peculiar to each country and its geography, rather than in terms of grand schemes and overarching ideas about the world. Bernard Fall taught him why this was important. But it was Guatemala where he first applied this lesson. Respect the landscape, but the solution to each situation will lie elsewhere, in the world of men and women and their decisions. Gersony, in sum, was never a fatalist, one who just gives up on a situation.
Guatemala was the beginning of a life dominated by many places that foreign policy elites ordinarily never think about, and of discovering the world, just as Bernard Fall did, from the ground up.
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Guatemala actually constitutes one of the most famous geographies of the Cold War. Guatemala in 1954, along with Iran in 1953, were the two countries where the Eisenhower administration—specifically the two brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles—most famously toppled democratically elected governments seen to be hostile to American interests.1 In Iran, the CIA, helped by the British Secret Service, deposed prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. A year later, the CIA deposed Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán for expropriating land of the United Fruit Company and, more generally, for adopting a pro-Soviet foreign policy. Had Mosaddegh not been toppled and had his social reforms been allowed to take hold, the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 that brought the radical ayatollahs to power might never have happened. In Guatemala, similarly, the 1954 coup ended years of mild social reforms, and ushered in decades of repressive military rule that spawned leftist rebellions, answered, in turn, by right-wing death squads.2 Guerrilla warfare and assassinations became widespread. It was known as the Thirty Years’ War. American policymakers didn’t care. They were simply not going to tolerate the creation of a pro-Soviet regime of any kind so close to the United States. (This policy was redoubled after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959.) Guatemala was an iconic demonstration of just how tragic the Cold War was for the developing world.
Starting with Vietnam, Gersony had begun experiencing not only the world, but specifically the Cold War itself, at ground level, from the Asian, African, and Latin American periphery where all the violence and casualties of that great global struggle occurred. Thus, as Gersony’s professional life began to take shape, it is important at this juncture—at the very beginning of my story about him—to put the Cold War itself in historical context.
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The United States and the Soviet Union were, in fact, engaged in a conflict over the very definition of European modernity. The two superpowers needed to change the world in order to prove the universal relevance of their ideologies, and Third World elites proved fertile ground for this competition, explains Yale historian Odd Arne Westad. The Cold War ethos “was at least as alluring and evocative as the imperialist ethos that it replaced,” judging by the sense of duty and sacrifice of the advisers on both sides.3 Gersony was to become one of them: a Cold Warrior even as he dealt almost exclusively with the victims, affecting in turn how he interacted with the State Department and other agencies. Indeed, the Cold War in Asia, Africa, and Latin America was more than simply a struggle for geopolitical positioning. It was also a test of the core ideas and values of both superpowers about the very path of historical change. What was at stake was nothing less than the question of whose side history was truly on.4 In fact, the American and Soviet systems were both “imperial in all but name,” observes Oxford historian John Darwin.5 And in this neo-imperial struggle, it all came down to Vladimir Lenin versus Woodrow Wilson: that is, the Leninist model of seizing, holding, and extending state power that so attracted the new Third World elites, who were equally attracted by the Wilsonian model of self-determination and a rules-based international system of which they could be a part. The Leninist model really meant authoritarianism unbridled, whereas the Wilsonian model implied a world of democracies. (The competition between ruthless, top-down control as opposed to one of people determining their own fates is still with us.) It would become a struggle in which whole societies were devastated.6 In short, for the Third World, there was no escape from the Cold War.
For it was a cold war in Europe only. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America it was hot, cinematic, and bloody. The aftershocks would continue beyond 1989. Bob Gersony would have a vivid front-row seat for key parts of it on several continents. And while each Cold War crisis had its own unique origins, Gersony would see them all through the filter of refugees and displaced persons.
Because the Cold War coincided with the collapse of European empires, between 1945 and 1970 (the first half of the Cold War) the number of independent states increased almost fourfold, creating many new battlegrounds. Indeed, twenty years after the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, no fewer than forty new states had been created.7 It was a process that actually began in the midst of fighting Hitler, since World War II had exhausted and demoralized even the victor nations such as imperial Great Britain and France. Already, at the November 1943 conference in Tehran, where Allied leaders gathered to discuss World War II strategy, many critical matters were settled directly by Roosevelt and Stalin, with Churchill, the commander of the British Empire no less, only on the sidelines. And thus as the United States and the Soviet Union quickly rose to dominate the postwar world, there was a striking loss of prestige and influence among Europe’s traditional imperial powers.
In Asia alone, as Westad notes, colonialism “seemed in free fall,” as economic exhaustion in Europe—the upshot of a great depression followed by world war—met with rebellion in the tropics, with indigenous leaders like Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, and Sukarno suddenly emerging to eject British, French, and Dutch imperialists.8 Making matters worse for these old empires was the new Soviet threat to Europe, which required Great Britain and France to reinforce their own defenses at home. One moral justification for European imperialism as it culminated in the ea
rly twentieth century was the promise of improving the lives of those under its rule, but that had become impossible for these economically wearied empires, beset with an overwhelming security challenge in Europe itself.
The United States and the Soviet Union filled the vacuum for the British and French in Africa and Asia. Though the initial American impulse was to look down on colonialism and celebrate the passing of empire, Washington’s immediate fear was that the newly established states would be drawn into the embrace of the Soviet Union. And thus as anti-communism overtook anticolonialism, one imperial age was soon replaced by another, though it called itself by another name: the Cold War.
President John Kennedy was quite blunt about it, believing that the Cold War would be won or lost in the developing world. The establishment of the Peace Corps, with all of its idealistic aura, was part of his realpolitik strategy of heading off the expansion of Soviet influence. By the 1960s, as Europe itself settled into a generally immobilized conflict, violence in the developing world gave the Cold War truly global dimensions. The United States, having already used the CIA to topple regimes in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, now cheered on or supported rebellions and coups in Algeria, Ghana, and Indonesia, to say nothing of what it was attempting in Cuba and Vietnam. Meanwhile, Egypt, Guinea, Mali, India to some extent, and other postcolonial states all looked to the Soviet Union for support. Later Soviet allies would include Syria, Iraq, South Yemen, and Somalia, to name but a few. Then, in the 1970s, almost in unison, came the communist victory in Vietnam and the collapse of the decrepit Portuguese empire in Africa. The secession of Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and the two sprawling colonies of southern Africa—Angola and Mozambique—were all the consequence of a bloodless coup against an out-of-gas reactionary regime in Lisbon. Angola and Mozambique would turn into panoramic wastelands of violent conflict as the United States and South Africa, employing their local proxies, fought the Soviet Union and Cuba, employing theirs. By the early 1980s, three decades after the coups in Guatemala and Iran, superpower conflict in the tropical periphery was at its peak.9
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