The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Thus, in 2011, as a result of all the violent chaos, Mexico and the Obama administration initialed Beyond Mérida, a development program to help communities that had been destroyed on account of the original Mérida Initiative. But before money could be spent, a situational analysis on the ground was needed. This is where Bob Gersony comes in.

  He began his research in the three most drug-affected neighborhoods of each of the three most drug-affected cities: Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Monterey. It was no world shaker of an assignment. Sort of like his assignment in Gaza, he merely had to identify activities for high-risk youth that would have a quick impact. And like in Bosnia, he was under pressure to do it quickly. Still, he had 340 meetings with 320 people (20 of whom he interviewed twice). Of course, he saw mayors, other local officials, and NGO workers. But 40 percent of his interviewees were ordinary people. He wandered the streets of these violent, high-crime neighborhoods alone, without a bodyguard but armed with his Spanish, buttonholing people, with sometimes a driver a discreet distance away in some of the neighborhoods. And he never went out after dark.

  The people he met complained to him about burglaries, even as violence had actually come down because the cartels had recently been working their way back to agreements on territory. Nevertheless, the local economies were depressed because many shops had closed, unable to pay the rate of extortion demanded by the newly conceived, post-Mérida narcotics regimes. The local economies had also been hurt by the effect of the Great Recession in the United States.3

  Gersony’s starkest realization was just how out of touch officialdom in Mexico City was. Educated at the finest European and American schools, burdened by too many political science theories, this oligarchic Mexican elite talked to him only in abstractions about the situation in northern Mexico, which might as well have been another country to them: Mex-America, Greater Texas, what have you. “I was like a dentist probing for cavities, searching high and low to identify these new, experimental ideas that officials in Mexico City kept telling me about, but I uncovered nothing. Conversations in Mexico City were like drawing blood from a rock,” Gersony exclaims, in a tone of special pleading, his bush hat touching the top of his glasses. “But while Mexico City was full of pretentiousness and theoretical talk, all the people I found up north, as poor and crime-ravaged as they were, were thoroughly grounded.”

  In particular, Ciudad Juárez set him on fire with the high quality of its local NGO workers and volunteers. Ciudad Juárez was reputed to be the murder capital of Mexico. In this city of 1.2 million at the time, 700 people were murdered in the early months of 2010 alone, and 2,600 had been killed the year before; while 200,000 or more had fled.4

  But Gersony discovered, under the leadership of one Enrique Suárez y Toriello, feet-on-the-ground, nuts-and-bolts, locally driven efforts with little buy-in from Mexico City. For example, there was an “extended hours” program in the most drug-infested neighborhoods. Here troubled youth received help with their homework, had access to recreational activities, music and dance, and ethics training, while their parents were working all day and commuting back and forth for two hours to maquiladoras, factories where products were assembled for export to the United States.

  “Ciudad Juárez is the thing that sings,” Gersony told his USAID superiors when he had finished his assignment. “Build out from it. Don’t do everything. Just replicate one or two things everywhere based on that model.” The boys’ and girls’ after-school model served a similar, fundamental purpose as the capturing of potable rainwater in the West Bank had. There were also remedial learning programs for academically challenged kids who wanted to leave school after the sixth grade, as well as micro-credit schemes. After beginning with a storm of unknowns, with Mexico City elites leading him down rabbit holes about doing something “new” and “experimental,” he had arrived at the mundane obvious. So often it was not about being creative, but merely about being practical. With the lights of El Paso, Texas, in the distance just over the border as evening descended, Gersony found poor and violent Ciudad Juárez to be one of the most inspiring places he had ever been in the developing world. He had come home, almost.

  * * *

  —

  Gersony’s long career was over now. From Guatemala in the 1970s to northern Mexico of the 2010s, it charted the history of humanitarianism since the Vietnam War. After all, the State Department’s refugee bureau, for which Gersony worked, had its beginnings under President Jimmy Carter, when communist takeovers in Vietnam and Cambodia led to a humanitarian cataclysm as millions streamed out of those countries into Thailand and elsewhere. Gersony was still dealing with it while engaged in solving the problem of piracy against Vietnamese boat people in the mid-1980s. The Indochina refugee crisis was also where the NGO industry as we know it today really came into prominence. President Ronald Reagan picked up the torch as his secretary of state, George Shultz, seamlessly combined hard-headed realism with humanitarianism in Africa, exemplified by Gersony’s work in Uganda, Sudan, and Mozambique, where war and famine led to millions of refugees and displaced persons. Indeed, when I began to read about how human rights had only come to the forefront in the 1990s upon the conclusion of the Cold War, it was news to me, since I was one of hundreds of journalists covering the humanitarian catastrophe of the mid-1980s in the war-and-famine-plagued Horn of Africa and Sudan: a catastrophe that the United States played a major role in alleviating and which was front-page news at the time, as was the earlier Indochina refugee crisis. In fact, my first book, Surrender or Starve (1988), was about the humanitarian catastrophe of Marxist Ethiopia during the Cold War, which I was researching when I first met Bob Gersony.

  Of course, those claiming that the end of the Cold War allowed at first for a greater focus on human rights did have an important point. Finally free of the geopolitical nightmare of competing with a worldwide bloc of Soviet-aligned states, the United States and the West in general no longer had the excuse of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses simply because the perpetrators in question were anti-communist. And now because survival was assured with nuclear Armageddon avoided, our higher values could assume their rightful place. Though, at the same time, the very fact that we had been in a worldwide geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union did give us a naked self-interest in engagement with virtually every country in the developing world. USAID’s highwater mark was during the Cold War, when it had intensive foreign aid programs in many dozens of countries. Realism, in the person of George Shultz, a thoroughly decent man and an extraordinary leader of organizations, easily encompassed a concern for human rights during this latter period of the Cold War, when moral action was grounded in strategic needs.

  Alas, realists have lately had a tendency to drift into neo-isolationism. As they would put it, with the Cold War over for many years now, the United States has no need to be as concerned with defending its values abroad as vigorously as in the past, and should therefore concentrate on perfecting its own society at home.

  So was the Cold War—especially the latter part of the Cold War when Bob Gersony was in his prime—an aberration: a unique moment when realism and human rights could be reconciled? No, I don’t think so. Technology is making the world a smaller and smaller place, even as this world becomes ever more crowded, where a crisis anywhere can affect politics everywhere: where, thanks to jet travel, a disease outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa or China can have national security implications for the United States. This is to say nothing about northern Mexico and Central America, whose crises still have an obvious bearing on both our domestic and our foreign policy, a decade after Gersony last worked there.

  We cannot hide from the world. Thus, realism and idealism may be destined to get along somehow, even in a new era of great power competition with China that has similarities with the Cold War. Realism never dies because it is about limits, constraints, and hard choices. But idealism never dies because, ever since the mora
lly urgent messages of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah and the Greek playwright Euripides, it has appealed to the human spirit. The path forward requires mingling the sensibilities of both. That is the ultimate lesson of Bob Gersony’s life.

  EPILOGUE

  Antigua, Guatemala

  May 2019

  The 12,336-foot-high stratovolcano looms over a late-seventeenth-century arch and one-story gridwork of cobblestone streets like Vesuvius over Pompeii.1 There is a stark, monolithic, camera-like sharpness to these houses naked to the sky, with their blotched, conical clay roof tiles and pastel facades effecting the drama of an archaeological site. In every direction you turn, your jaw drops from the breathless intensity of the view. I can see how living here for seven years in his impressionable twenties, almost straight from the grueling horror of Vietnam, obscured in Bob Gersony’s memory all the other landscapes he was to see over the next four decades.

  Gersony is now standing with me down the street from the arch with the volcano just behind it, his hand on the curvaceous grillwork of a window open to the street. “Here in this window is where Max the Wonder Dog would crouch for hours looking at people passing by. This house is where I first lived in Antigua in the very early 1970s.

  “I remember it was a midafternoon,” Gersony says out of the blue. “I was standing outside the front door on this very spot with Terry Kaufman. I’ll never forget his earring and ponytail. He was wearing a pink Mayan traje from Lake Atitlán that day. I had asked him, ‘If we could find native Mayan speakers with at least six years of education and put them together with professional linguists in one-on-three settings, do you think they could learn descriptive linguistics? That way, instead of all these foreigners, it could be the Mayans themselves who would be the linguists for their own language.’

  “ ‘I think it’s possible,’ Kaufman answered.

  “ ‘Would you be willing to help us?’

  “ ‘Yeah, I could come down every summer. And I won’t charge you anything.’ ”

  Gersony smiles at the long-ago memory. Admiring the view, I ask myself, How could Terrence Kaufman have refused such an offer given this setting, where spread out here and there among the one-story houses and loud flowers bursting through all the grillwork are the ruins of baroque cathedrals from hundreds of years ago, their stone and brick formations scarred and dissected and chewed away by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and time itself? Way back then Antigua was an empty stage set for Gersony and his companions, faded and shabbier, yet even more evocative, without the crowds and tourist police of today.

  We wander over to the house built around a courtyard where Gersony, Jo Froman, and Tony Jackson used to live. It is now a boutique hotel bursting with fantasy vegetation and fountains. “Bob Gersony changed Antigua,” Elizabeth Bell, a historian and preservationist who has lived here since 1969, tells me. “The boutique hotels, the perfectly landscaped baroque sites, the small-scale culturally sensitive tourism, it all began with Bob’s network of language schools with its focused, one-on-one approach.”

  * * *

  —

  A little later, I am sitting with Bob Gersony on a bench in the cathedral square, exactly the same spot where he was getting his shoes shined when he met Luis Monzon, the garage worker who agreed to be his friend and teach him Spanish for a dollar a day. It was one of the early turning points in Gersony’s life. That was a half century ago. Gersony is now bald, with a clipped white beard and glasses. He is demonstrably spiritual with his stoic, faraway look and owl eyes, even as his insights remain relentlessly practical.

  Indeed, Gersony spans that yawning gap in sensibilities between idealism and realism, between human rights and national interest. For he was one humanitarian who internalized the interests of state—a reason why he was able to be so effective with officials in making U.S. foreign policy a bit smarter and a bit more humane.

  In the course of over four decades of work, he estimates that he interviewed on the order of 8,200 people around the world in 54 assignments, quite a few of which I have described. It was grueling labor. As Thomas Mann writes, quoting the Letter to the Hebrews, “He who seeketh hard things shall have it hard.”2

  Bob Gersony in 2020.

  “For the most part,” Gersony begins, “I interviewed very busy people. They were people busy collecting firewood in order to survive. They were people on line for water. They were people selling corn and beans for basic sustenance. They were people waiting patiently in a local mayor’s office where everyone was sweating profusely because there was no air conditioner. They were nurses in the middle of a cholera epidemic, getting only a few hours of sleep a night. They were all gracious enough to talk to me. All these people were experts about what they knew. We depend on them to learn about the world.

  “The issue is,” he continues, “how can we turn talking with ordinary people into useful facts rather than a mere collection of anecdotes? One simple way is by constructing a system: interview a large number of people randomly selected, from a variety of towns and villages, and try as hard as you can to eliminate your own passions and biases. For what we can learn from ordinary people is much more than the human rights situation, as absolutely critical as that is, but the political and military situation, too, as it exists in conflict zones. What you learn from refugees and displaced persons you often cannot learn from satellite photos and wire intercepts—you learn the very nuances and texture of situations. And what you learn in the field should be integral to policy formulation.”

  Indeed, everyone who mentored and helped Gersony, from Jonathan Moore and Tim Rieser on the left of center, to Gene Dewey and Andrew Natsios on the right of center, with Brian Atwood, Janet Ballantyne, and Chester Crocker and the mass of the diplomatic cadre in the middle, was united on the primary importance of facts on the ground, and letting the facts on the ground influence policy. The views of all of them, and of Gersony especially, were evidence-based. We have less and less of that nowadays, as mere opinion, often unseasoned, seeps into the media more and more, influencing government decisions, and drowning out old-fashioned reporting in the back of beyonds away from capital cities.

  While not officially a reporter, Gersony was one in a spiritual sense. There is an overwhelming, quiet exactitude about him. Of the nearly one hundred people, including former ambassadors and aid workers, that I interviewed, none contradicted Gersony’s version of events in any substantial way. As much as I tried to find mistakes in Gersony’s memory, I tripped him up only on minor matters. A long-ago colleague from middle Tennessee was really, as I found out, from western Tennessee. A principal deputy assistant secretary of state was really an acting principal deputy assistant secretary of state; a Wednesday years back was really a Monday. He wasn’t infallible, but he was close to being so, since he was always worried about getting things wrong.

  “People imagined Bob as some strapping, Cary Grant figure in a field jacket. But when they met him they found someone touchingly vulnerable and earnest, always shy and nervous before each assignment,” say both Carol Chan and James Fleming of USAID.

  For people in USAID, the State Department, and the other agencies and branches of the U.S. government, getting a briefing from Bob Gersony was almost a kind of respite, since as urgent as his reporting was, all passion was extruded from it. All day long these people had passion thrown at them, and passion can put you on the defensive. Keeping passion out of his briefings was a hard-fought task, because of all the anger that would build up inside him, on account of all the atrocities and bureaucratic stupidities he confronted. It was in talking to me for hundreds of hours that Gersony has finally released his passion, which had been gathering force for nearly forty-five years since the Guatemalan earthquake.

  Gersony’s adult life and work stretches from the Vietnam War to the second decade of the twenty-first century—the Cold War and its aftermath, when the United States was at the center of the
world. It was a time of American triumphs and American follies, much of which were secondary to Gersony’s immediate concerns, even as his labors, practiced in the obscurity of remote places, quietly dignified the idealism of the American brand (in all its self-conceived purity). Indeed, the aim of his fieldwork—investigating human suffering and how to alleviate it—punctuated what American foreign policy was supposed to be ultimately about, and what our national interest was supposed to be a road to. In the best sense of the word, Gersony’s own story has been that of America in the wider world.

  Gersony, who hid from the media and eschewed publicity, because that would have made him less effective than he was, was ambitious mainly as it concerned his search for the truth in a given crisis or situation on a variety of continents. Otherwise, he always felt more secure being virtually unknown and unpromoted. Throughout his life he has avoided dinner parties and diplomatic receptions. I learned about him only by accident, by being introduced to him through a relief worker in the stifling dining hall of the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum in the spring of 1985. I have tracked him ever since, finding myself in many a place around the globe just before or just after he had been there. He was so much more interesting than many of the big shots I have met over the years. The only demand that he ever made of me as a writer was to not betray the people who had helped him in certain countries, where despite the passage of time, their lives (he believes) might still be in danger. To call Gersony great is to diminish him, since greatness usually involves an unusual degree of ambition, concealed or unconcealed. Gersony achieved his ambition, over and over again, by recording people’s stories in his notebooks while under a tree or inside a tent somewhere, with the dulling heat, buzzing flies, and wafting dust intensifying the silence. That was his glory.