The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

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  “The great success and wealth of Bob’s father, coupled with Bob always being an insecure outsider in the State Department bureaucracy, was what ultimately drove Bob’s ambition,” observes Peter Kranstover, a USAID lifer who first met Gersony in Guatemala back in the seventies. “And Bob’s success at State and AID over the decades,” Kranstover goes on, “was built on sheer fastidiousness. He just wears you down.” Indeed, Gersony, a high school dropout, sought acceptance in a world where he lacked the educational pedigree for admission, even as he realized he was the intellectual equal of almost anyone in the room. His obsessive-compulsive approach to work may have derived from this insecurity.

  “Mozambique was the big turning point in Bob’s professional life, when he became a star,” says Dennis King, the senior humanitarian analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, even before Mozambique, Gersony had acquired a certain reputation among State’s normally cautious civil servants.

  “Bob and Fred Cuny, though very different from each other, were each seen as mysterious mavericks,” King explains. “Bob and Fred didn’t tell people what they liked to hear. Bob’s reports especially carried an aura of credibility because they were so long and detailed. There were those in the bureaucracy who resented them both” as private contractors, who had walk-in privileges with assistant secretaries of state. “Unlike Fred Cuny, Bob’s personality was very closed. He didn’t let people in. That only added to his mystique. Of course, Bob and Fred are types that no longer exist,” King goes on. “Now State uses Beltway bandit firms [big corporate consultancies] who charge a lot of money because they have a high overhead, and their people rarely tell you anything interesting.”

  Contrary to Beltway bandit firms, says King, “Bob Gersony was a big believer in not going to secondary sources. He based his research on those who were at the end of the chain of events and decision-making. Thus, it was the refugees who were the real chroniclers of history, in Bob’s view.”

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  As I have already said, because I am writing about Gersony, I will never have to write an autobiography (not that I am important enough for such an endeavor). For we truly have led parallel lives, covering the same countries and crossing paths periodically. I started out as a freelancer living out of youth hostels and cheap hotels for some years, discovering my path largely on my own without connections or professional mentors: except for a short stint as a reporter on a Vermont newspaper. To make a living I was always looking for what “the crowd” wasn’t reporting on, and making that my subject. I was lonely in the way that Gersony was. I listen to him describe his methodology to me, which he discovered completely on his own, and I flash back to what I wrote in my very first book, about interviewing ethnic-Oromo refugees from Ethiopia in 1986 in a camp in northwestern Somalia, unaware then of how Gersony was doing things:

  I interviewed fourteen refugees at Tug Wajale B and another nearby camp in three days at the end of October 1986. Almost all of the interviews were done in isolation; the refugee was moved by Land Cruiser to an area out of earshot from his or her compatriots, where I spent, on the average, about ninety minutes talking to the person. The translator I used was not a member of the Oromo Liberation Front or any other political organization I know of, and he had been highly recommended to me by several foreign relief officials. I tried hard to avoid asking leading questions, and I sought constantly to ferret out inconsistencies in the stories I heard, so much so that one of the women I interviewed accused me of being hostile. Despite all of these precautions, I was impressed with the consistency of the accounts [of rape, persecution, and forced resettlement].1

  Neither Gersony nor I ever used a tape recorder. We are devotees of the pen and notebook. I have filled several notebooks listening to Gersony and nearly a hundred of his colleagues talk about his life. Like me, he is by nature conservative and skeptical of elite opinion, a realist by temperament if not by conviction. In fact, he has never belonged to a community of believers. He has been a realist, humanist, interventionist, and noninterventionist, depending upon what his ground-level research in each situation and each location has revealed to him. The truth is in the field, not in Washington.

  For Gersony, the truth emerges from the bottom up, in the specificity of each conflict zone: places that people in the nation’s capital with their grand schemes only see in shadows. That is ultimately why diplomats and policymakers believed him. Like me, he has always been a freelancer in the spiritual sense: a contractor who has had to get himself hired over and over again by different people throughout his career. He has always been an outlier, never really part of any institution—not an NGO worker, nor part of USAID, the Foreign Service, or any other group. This made him perennially insecure and anxious, as Peter Kranstover says, but it is also perhaps a reason why he never developed an ego, and why he had periodic physical and spiritual breakdowns. But it is also what made him independent-minded. No bureaucracy ever captured him.

  Gersony and I are both introverts who crave solitude, even though we have been forced by circumstances to be extroverts. I love reporting and interviewing people; but I love reading and being alone even more, and so I have always infused my reporting with what I learn from books.

  Gersony likes to think of himself as primarily a great listener. But he has also been a great briefer, and a bit of a sly bureaucratic operator. We both feel ourselves to be cowards, even though we have been forced to continually take risks, both physical and intellectual. Like Gersony, for decades coming home from assignments, I wanted to kiss the ground of my house; even so, we both are away constantly and married women who were comfortable with us being away not days, but weeks or months at a time. We are generalists, not globalists, with quite similar libraries that emphasize books on specific landscapes and human terrains. We both had old fathers who loved us and imparted much vital knowledge to us, but who also didn’t know how to be fathers, and whose own families, by the way, both came from Latvia. And we both “could have gone wrong” early in life, as Ursula Strauss puts it. I wandered around the globe for years in my twenties before I found a direction.

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  Gersony is a character out of a Saul Bellow novel trapped in settings depicted by Joseph Conrad. Like Bellow’s heroes—Artur Sammler and Moses Herzog, for example—he is fearful, neurotic, deliciously ironical, and haunted by guilty memories: a hypochondriac of the spirit who takes nothing for granted; someone with an abnormally dark mood, partly a consequence of the circumstances of his work, but who is also deeply warm, considerate, and loving; a sufferer who internalizes the suffering of others. He is full of confessions with a rich, baroque interiority, and humorous in his very Jewish identity. But rather than inhabit New York or Chicago, the scene of Bellow’s great novels, Gersony spent his professional life in Africa and Latin America, among other such places: locations often deemed hopeless. The characters with whom Gersony had to deal early in his career—the cynical Lucas Garcia in Guatemala and the superficial Perry Seraphin in Dominica—evoke nothing so much as the characters in the desperate backwater of Costaguana, the setting for Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). And as with Conrad in Heart of Darkness (1899), the truly appalling conditions of life and the savage nature of the violence in a place like Mozambique only quickened his sense of humanity, and his realization of the interconnectedness of all humankind, and with it the blunt fact of moral responsibility. He was continually horrified by what he saw, but he was never cynical. He dug and dug for facts, so as to hold people and policymakers to account. He has never succumbed to saying “What’s the use?” In that and related senses, he is not like me at all.

  I can listen to Gersony for hours. He holds you, as with the stories told by sailors in Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900). I trust him. Almost everyone else he met did, too.

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  Gersony’s assignments had taken on a pattern. He flew economy class and stayed at modest hotels, as did I for many years. He ate alone, and sparingly. He worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week. He squeezed in as many meetings as he could in the capital city: with government officials, foreign embassy officers, and the gamut of the NGO community, in addition to interviewing many dozens and hundreds of refugees and displaced persons in remote and dangerous locations far from the capital. And he fed it all into a rigorous analytical framework. As I have observed, he usually avoided journalists. After all, he was filing confidential reports for the U.S. government, and wanted to come to his conclusions on his own; without having them influenced and conditioned by the ideas of other outside observers. The whole point of his investigations was always to be in firsthand contact with the evidence, while at all costs avoiding groupthink.

  Gersony told me that his role model was Philip Habib, a thirty-year veteran of the Foreign Service, who constantly flew around the world, troubleshooting for successive Cold War presidents, and coming back to Washington with real-time strategic analyses of crises in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. But whereas the boisterous Habib worked at the rarified heights of presidents and prime ministers and secretaries of state, Gersony’s analyses came from encounters with refugees and relief workers. It was fascinating, excruciating, grueling, and lonely, but he didn’t know how else to live. Whereas Fred Cuny, Gersony’s friend and competitor, was like Red Adair, the flashy oil well firefighter from Texas, whom the media lionized, Gersony was like a much calmer version of Philip Habib, the deliberate influencer hovering in the background.

  Though it wasn’t only Bernard Fall and Philip Habib that provided Gersony with a compass point. There was also a certain category of foreign correspondent that over the years he privately admired—and which I did, too: men and women who spent their lives abroad, becoming expert on one region after another, whose work periodically overlapped with his own, and who were so dryly objective that you could never figure out how they voted. In particular, he would mention James Brooke, Alan Riding, Shirley Christian, and Jane Perlez, all of The New York Times, who, taken together, roamed all of Africa, Latin America, and East Asia over the past few decades. For Gersony, these men and women were great precisely because they did not usually break front-page stories, but, in his words, “owned page A3 of the Times,” and were therefore even more important because page A3 often featured lengthy, savvy, ground-level situationers of critical and complex countries: again, the realities that Washington overlooked. Because Gersony’s was a lonely professional life, his spiritual comrades in arms were a select and somewhat obscure few who never sought or achieved fame, and were the more serious because of it. He admired them from afar, since, with the exception of Alan Riding, he never met them.

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  But whereas these men and women had each other as colleagues to exchange trade secrets with, Gersony had only his method. Again and again, he goes back to his conversations with refugees, the moments when he has always felt most at peace with himself:

  I had to put the person at ease and keep them confident and talking. So I began, as you know, with eight or ten easy questions. I could see they were pleased with their answers. I believe their greatest fear was not being able to answer well, not to be able to hold up their end of the discussion. I employed translators who were empathetic and respectful, who sent the message that it was all right for people to say things that could come back to harm them and their families, even to cause harm to their relatives still living in the country they fled.

  I had to listen carefully to each sentence, understand what the person was saying through a translator, about an environment that was new to me, with place-names it took a while for me to become familiar with. I had to clarify or ask for details sometimes without appearing hostile or doubtful, assess what they said, try to keep the chronology straight when their narrative jumped around in time, or the translator used the wrong tense in his translation.

  I had to think quickly about how a location, a type of event, a type of victim, a type of weapon, a time of day, might match up with another account I had heard elsewhere. It got complicated, especially as the number of persons interviewed went up into the hundreds in each conflict zone. I made careful, almost verbatim notes, which had to be clear enough so I could read them later. I was constantly thinking about topics I wanted to ask about when the flow of their spontaneous, mostly unimpeded account ended.

  Since I had only one opportunity with each person, I had to make sure I asked every question, cleared up every loose end, did not miss some important clue about some insight or topic that they themselves might not emphasize. Was the person being truthful? Did certain questions make him or her nervous? I had to pace the interview, make sure not to exhaust the person, let them go at their own speed, but not so fast that we missed important details. I couldn’t probe too hard, or make them nervous. I had to be reassuring but not too much. I had to remember that they were exhausted to begin with. Some had just staggered into camp from Mozambique or from wherever, emaciated, having escaped with only their lives.

  Gersony also needed to encourage and appreciate the translator, who was concentrating even harder than he was on the dialogue and on getting it right. He or she was working twice as hard as Gersony, actually. Gersony tried to make sure he or she wasn’t pursuing questions or clarifications of his own that might affect the person’s account. He always had to make sure the translator had enough food, water, and regular small breaks. He had to keep an eye out for anyone who might wander around, or into the room, or to the place behind the tree, and interrupt the flow of the conversation or spook the interviewee. As an interview went on, he had to decide how much more of a benefit the particular interviewee could be in providing information, or whether he should continue to the next person.

  Usually the person warmed to the conversation. He or she liked being appreciated and respected, listened to, with follow-up questions asked at the end showing their message had gotten through. They realized they had something important to say. The tragedies and hardships they had experienced would be used to help their people somehow, they must have believed. There were a few who never wanted to leave, who wanted to just keep talking. During the interviews, he was always thinking where the next stop on his trip would be, where he’d get dinner, where he’d sleep.

  Each person, he told me, required 100 percent concentration. It was a mental strain. At the same time, he had to keep himself detached, not get too absorbed into, or influenced by, the emotional dimension of what he was hearing: not let the drama and heartbreaking events of their accounts move him off an objective center. He usually received reports of abuses by both sides, though in Mozambique it was mostly by RENAMO. The travel was tough, and listening to the accounts of so many traumatized people all day long was a strain.

  At night, he was exhausted, but his mind was running through what he had heard that day, processing it. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep for hours. There were cycles of understanding that affected his sleep. He would have epiphanies, usually after several weeks of interviews, that kept his mind racing for hours.

  I was often living inside the interviews, rather than in the physical environment, picturing what I was being told about. I was not especially conscious of the landscape or living arrangements, which were simple: a cot, a dirt floor, a tent, a room in a school, a sleeping bag, sometimes just a bowl of water to wash and shave with. There were heavy rains. I was often never in one place long enough to clean clothes. I made notes by candlelight, alone in the late evenings with lots of bugs and ticks, and occasional snakes.

  Mozambique marked the culmination of his interview technique. Afterward he made adjustments, but he never substantially improved upon it. He was now at the top of his game, and all his assignments henceforth took on an importance that the previous ones had not
quite had.

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  Yet the loneliness had only intensified as the years went on. It was the very consequence of his methodology. Interviewing thousands of refugees with whom he could not have personal conversations only worsened the situation. In his letters to his girlfriend Ann Siegel he went on about this all the time. After all, he usually could not tell people what he knew, and because he was clumsy at small talk, it was better for him to simply keep away from people, period. He became antisocial. He stayed in his hotel room and ordered room service. Out in the field there were the military roadblocks and the 24/7 security threat. The bad food, the fevers, diarrhea, and exhaustion all added up to frequent depression.

  Oddly, given his life’s work, he was not a very good traveler. Great travelers all possess more optimistic, even happy-go-lucky frames of mind. Great travelers are connoisseurs of landscape who can have an engaging conversation with anybody, and who love fine food and drink, even as they revel in the dangers and deprivations. Gersony, who was all work and bone-dry analysis, was the antithesis of that.

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  Gersony returned home to New York from his trip through southern Africa and Portugal in August 1988, and a few days later his Mozambique assignment officially ended. There were no follow-ups. Nobody ever called to inform him of further developments or to ask his advice about Mozambique. That’s the way it usually was with freelance contract assignments at the State Department. One day you were the center of attention and the next day you didn’t exist.

  Jonathan Moore at Refugee Programs had no new assignment for him at the moment, so Gersony journeyed to the Dominican Republic and soon afterward to the Honduran border on USAID assignments, the later one having to do with the families of U.S.-supported Nicaraguan contra guerrillas. But while Gersony was once again immersed in Latin America, events culminating in the Horn of Africa were of increasing interest to Jonathan Moore.