ÇWhat adjective should describe “the American” active in foreign policy? Graham Greene chose “quiet” because his character damaged a country that he did not understand. Eugene Burdick and William Lederer used “ugly”.
Robert D Kaplan, one of America’s most thoughtful foreign affairs chroniclers, proposes “good” to describe Bob Gersony, who in “a frugal monastic existence that was obscure and extraordinary” devoted his life to using US power and treasure to serve others through humanitarian action.
Son of Holocaust refugees, he never held a formal government post. Instead, he was a contractor for the state department, USAid or the United Nations. However, his work improved the lives of millions, saving many, and corrected policies that could have been implemented by “ugly” or “silent” figures who did not understand the countries in which they operated.
Gersony’s method was simple: conducting interviews through a trusted translator with individuals fleeing conflict, to remain “in tactile and continuous contact with the evidence”. It was exhaustive work in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, but his information, conveyed to policy makers in highly detailed “Gersony reports”, was essential and often (as in Mozambique and Bosnia) the opposite of what the political community believed or wished to believe.
The truth about a place “comes from the bottom up,” he said, and therefore, “refugees must always be believed.”
Responsibility, absolute integrity, objectivity and daring to speak to authority were his mottos. Their independence meant personal insecurity. He used to share a simple hut with a translator and sleep with his notes under the pillow. Personal dangers and difficulties were part of the job, but in no other way could the truth emerge and a successful policy could be formulated.
“When you hear ordinary people,” believed Gersony, “there is a lot of wisdom.”
Kaplan calls Gersony “a business-oriented mathematical brain with a conservative, non-ideological streak … think of him as an emotionally tortured character out of a Saul Bellow novel, absorbed throughout his life in the dark and dangerous tropical environments defined by Joseph Conrad. “
This is also the story of another era of US foreign policy, in which realism and humanitarianism have combined to include human rights in the national interest, in the context of the Cold War, so often hot in the developing world. Human rights and great strategy complemented each other. Gersony had bosses who were “authentic countrymen … the final selfless civil servants … deeply moral without being ideological, while operating at the top of the power structure.”
Gersony started in Guatemala, where he started a language school and after the 1976 earthquake he worked with humanitarian aid organizations. He took command of the hurricane relief in Dominica, facing the prime minister, saying: “If you delegate power to people, they will not be corrupt”. Moving to El Salvador during the civil war, he recommended massive employment programs for displaced people, building sewage channels and cobblestone streets – practical improvements that also discouraged guerrillas from attacking people.
Their solutions used to be elegantly simple because they provided the dignity of work and reflected what people really wanted. And yet, as Kaplan writes, “He still didn’t have credentials … in the usual careerist sense, he went up as far as he could.” For Kaplan, as for Gersony, “a meaningful life is about truth, not success.”
The tasks kept coming: Vietnamese fishermen in Thailand; Sudan and Chad; Honduras, where its counterintuitive but accurate recommendation, showed once again that “fieldwork at ground level … triumphs over the discussion of great abstract ideas”. In Uganda’s Lower Triangle, he discovered the genocide with the unexpected help of a British officer who advised President Obote. Secretary of State George Shultz cut the aid.
As Kaplan writes, “History has revolved in southern Africa thanks to Bob Gersony.” After an unusual meeting with Shultz and Maureen Reagan, the president’s daughter, the United States did not help Renamo guerrillas in Mozambique. Gersony faced a highly complex situation in Somalia and, after the Rwandan genocide, worked with UNHCR to repatriate Hutus. As one officer said, his unwelcome to tell the truth “stopped the killing machine”. He worked in northern Uganda with World Vision long before Joseph Kony became a hashtag. Knowing the dangers of travel in that region, “he treated the head of the fleet as a high official”.
Gersony worked tirelessly. “If we skipped lunch,” he said, “we could interview one more refugee, and each refugee was precious – you never knew what a big breakthrough in understanding would be.”
As Kaplan admits, his book is also something of his own history, a lament for a time when moderate internationalists dominated both parties and foreign service enjoyed “the last golden age of American diplomacy … when bureaucracy at all levels had enough money and talent rewarded ”to promote“ that tough and moderate national security consensus that no longer exists ”.
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Kaplan does not mourn the end of the Cold War, but he notices the resulting separation between idealism and power.
In fact, Gersony’s career ended in a very different world. Kaplan sees Plan Colombia, an early 2000s effort against leftist guerrillas and drug cartels, as “a precursor to the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq”, where gigantic projects and a “dysfunctional interagency process” often failed for want of perspective. Gersony’s later tasks included tracking food assistance to North Korea, examining the Maoist insurgency in Nepal (and wishing USAid had continued to build roads there) and disaster planning in Micronesia, where “in this emerging naval century … Oceania was indeed at the center of geopolitics ”and control of sea routes.
Can realism and idealism combine again? Only through what the French academic Gérard Prunier wrote about “Gersony’s great respect for factual truth. The world is not just an interpretation or a place for competing narratives. ”In the end, Kaplan de Gersony’s life resembles the advice of another quintessential American, Mark Twain:“ Do the right thing. This will satisfy some people and surprise others. “