The Good American Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Robert D. Kaplan

  Maps copyright © 2021 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Kaplan, Robert D., author.

  Title: The good American / Robert D. Kaplan.

  Description: New York : Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012098 (print) | LCCN 2020012099 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525512301 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525512325 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gersony, Robert. | United States. Agency for International Development—Officials and employees—Biography. | United States. Department of State—Officials and employees—Biography. | Humanitarian assistance, American. | Refuge (Humanitarian assistance)—United States. | Philanthropists—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC HC60 .K3435 2021 (print) | LCC HC60 (ebook) | DDC 327.730092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012098

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012099

  Ebook ISBN 9780525512325

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Lucas Heinrich

  Cover photograph: courtesy of the author

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Mozambique, February 1988

  Many Small Beginnings

  Chapter 1: Vietnam, 1966–1969

  Chapter 2: Guatemala, 1970–1977

  Chapter 3: Dominica, El Salvador, and South America, 1979–1983

  Big Plays

  Chapter 4: Uganda, Luwero Triangle, 1984

  Chapter 5: South China Sea, 1984–1985

  Chapter 6: Sudan and Chad, 1985

  Chapter 7: Honduras, 1985–1986

  Chapter 8: Mozambique, 1987–1988

  Chapter 9: Ethiopia and Somalia, 1989

  Chapter 10: Liberia by Way of Nicaragua, 1990–1993

  Chapter 11: Rwanda, 1994

  The World Is What It Is

  Chapter 12: Gaza and the West Bank, 1995

  Chapter 13: Bosnia, 1995–1996

  Chapter 14: Northern Uganda by Way of Nicaragua, 1996–1997

  Chapter 15: From El Salvador to Ecuador and Colombia, by Way of Africa, 1997–2002 and 2008–2009

  Chapter 16: North Korea, 2002

  Chapter 17: Nepal, 2003

  Chapter 18: Micronesia by Way of Iraq, 2003–2008

  Chapter 19: Northern Mexico by Way of Central America, 2010–2013

  Epilogue Antigua, Guatemala, May 2019

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  By Robert D. Kaplan

  About the Author

  …pessimism…can drive men on to do wonders.

  V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 1979

  Glory is now a discredited word, and it will be difficult to re-establish it. It has been spoilt by a too close association with military grandeur; it has been confused with fame and ambition. But true glory is a private and discreet virtue, and is only fully realized in solitariness.

  Graham Greene (quoting Herbert Read), Ways of Escape, 1980

  PROLOGUE

  Mozambique

  February 1988

  She was a displaced farmer from Chemba, near to the border of Sofala and Tete provinces, in central Mozambique. Her village was at the intersection of the great Zambezi River and one of its tributaries. She spoke to him through a translator in Sena, a Bantu language of the Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe border areas. He had found her wearing a black kerchief and blue blouse. She appeared as “quite self-possessed,” crouching on the dirt floor of the hut, and beckoning him to sit beside her on a chair. The government troops of FRELIMO had fled her village, she explained to him, and RENAMO soldiers closed in from several directions, forcing the villagers to the bank of the Zambezi. FRELIMO, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, had come to power as an anti-Portuguese guerrilla group, with some support from Cuba and the Soviet Union. But it couldn’t control the countryside where RENAMO, an indigenous African, anti-communist insurgency supported by apartheid South Africa, was on the rampage. RENAMO soldiers executed her niece, and soon afterward her niece’s nursing daughter died of hunger and exposure. The woman told him she saw half a dozen bodies up close: of two young boys and other women and children. There were more bodies still, but she didn’t have the courage to look at them. The woman and her own seven-year-old daughter then began to run but were chased into the big river by more RENAMO troops who had just arrived and were shooting at them, spraying the water’s surface with bullets. People drowned, trying to escape the barrage.

  She told him that “she tried as best she could,” but exhausted, made the split-second choice to save herself and in a panic let go of her daughter, “who was swept away by the current and drowned.” She said that “God helped me to an island in the river,” where people from Mutarara, on the far side of the river, came with boats to evacuate them. She remained in Mutarara as a displaced person for five months. But then RENAMO attacked it and she fled again, helped by the cover provided by the outnumbered FRELIMO troops. She then walked roughly twenty miles north to a refugee camp across the border in Malawi. She remained at Makokwe camp in southern Malawi for three months. But “there was no future there,” she told him. So she crossed the border back into Mozambique, where she stayed in a transit camp by a railway yard in Moatize, which was mortared by RENAMO. Then she escaped to a displaced persons camp in Benga, in Changara district, west of Moatize. She had been in Benga four months when he interviewed her on Monday, February 29, 1988, the third person he had interviewed there, according to his diary.

  He remembered each person he interviewed by a distinguishing characteristic that he marked down in his notes. That way he could remember them as individuals, and thus preserve their humanity. This interviewee was “the woman with the black kerchief.”

  “The various expressions on her face, and the way she pronounced the words, were powerful and full of emotion. The moment she told me of letting go of her seven-year-old daughter’s hand in the great River, her hand slowly waved in the air, as if she were letting go again, and again.”

  He had no children of his own yet, though he was already forty-three. But he was torn apart by the image of the woman’s decision between surviving herself and letting her own daughter drown. He never got used to the stories he heard.

  She was the 143rd of 196 refugees and displaced persons of the Mozambique civil war he interviewed, traveling between camps that were separated by hundreds of miles in war zones in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Mozambique itself. He was eating one meal a day, interviewing people like her during all the daylight hours, concentrating hard so as never to ask a leading question. He lived out of a tent with a sleeping bag and mosquito coil, writing in his lined notebook and typing by candlelight as there was no electricity, remembering each voice through his fingertips.

  It was merely another day of work for him, just another assignment, like all t
he others in war and disaster areas of the developing world: assignments which continued—literally one after another—for four decades, on several continents. He was often lonely, depressed, but lived in fear of being promoted out of what he was doing. He was truly calm only while interviewing and taking notes. It was in such moments that he attained the quality of an ascetic, inhaling the evidence almost. For him, listening to these voices was like slow breathing. So he never stopped doing it.

  The surroundings meant little to him. In his mind, the towering and interminable bush of Mozambique had been reduced to the lined pages of his notebooks, where his swift, graceful jottings became a sacred script: all he was able to remember were the stories that these refugees and displaced persons had told him.

  He was not a journalist or a relief worker. He worked for the U.S. government in a very unusual capacity. He deliberately avoided publicity, and thus many of those who flock to war zones barely knew he existed. In any case, as someone who was at heart an introvert, he was easily ignored by them. They made legends out of other people, not out of him.

  I first met him in a cheap hostel in Khartoum more than a third of a century ago as I write these words, and crossed paths with him over the decades in Somalia, Liberia, Ethiopia, the Sudan-Chad border, Nepal, and other places. He was everywhere the news was, and also where it wasn’t. Yet in a certain sense he was invisible, and he was happy that way.

  To the media and the human rights community, Robert “Bob” Gersony was often the forgotten man.

  This is his story.

  It is the story of a son of Jewish Holocaust refugees who dropped out of high school, was awarded a Bronze Star in Vietnam, and then spent forty years interviewing at great length over eight thousand refugees, displaced persons, and humanitarian workers in virtually every war and disaster zone on earth as a special contractor for the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the United Nations. The results were legendary “Gersony reports,” of which Mozambique was one. The story of “the woman with the black kerchief” made it all the way up to Secretary of State George Shultz and Maureen Reagan, whom Gersony briefed days after returning from the field.

  It was a standard pattern for him: living in the bush for many weeks and then briefing high policymakers in person about his findings. They listened to him and often changed policy accordingly—making it smarter and more humane—because of the way that Gersony was able to ingeniously integrate a concern for human rights within the framework of national interest. For the two were inseparable in Gersony’s mind: a mind that eschewed grand schemes and was always emphatically loyal to the minutiae of the local situation, in which each far-flung place was a product of its own unique geography and history. Gersony’s life is about how the granularity of distant places defeats all theories. It is about how if foreign policy ignores the effect it has on individual human beings it descends into a realm of inhuman abstraction.

  Indeed, this is the story of a man who epitomized the American Century more than anyone I know or was ever aware of. His story is that of the Cold War and the post Cold War, of America’s vast moral responsibilities in this world and its total immersion in it, which grew out of both America’s geopolitical necessities and its aspiration to be an exemplar of humanity. It is a story of fieldwork and reporting, of letting the facts emanate from the ground up—what in particular the State Department for so long was so great and indefatigable at, and which he so typified. And it is a story of the last golden age of American diplomacy, as he interacted with ambassadors, assistant secretaries of state, and others who were giants in their day: a day when the bureaucracy at all levels had sufficient money and rewarded talent.

  This is as much a picaresque as a biography: a series of overseas assignments that make up an epic life.

  * * *

  —

  This is also a memoir: of someone else’s life rather than of my own, since he unburdened himself in hundreds of hours of interviews with me, revealing a worm’s-eye view of almost half a century of American actions in the developing world: an alternative history almost. But it is a conventional memoir in the sense that he and I have lived parallel lives: not only working around the world in the same countries—countries often obscure to journalists at the time we were there—but working on our own, usually isolated from colleagues, so as not to have our analyses conditioned by the views of the crowd.

  And yet his effect on American foreign policy in many dozens of assignments was always positive and often dramatically so; he was always helping various administrations avoid pitfalls and do the right thing. I can’t say the same for myself. Though I am proud of my journalism, I am not proud of the effect it has had in some key instances.

  But this is no mere recollection. My subject has kept meticulous daily diaries and personal organizers throughout his career. There are, too, his own published reports and secret cables. In fact, Bob Gersony is an obsessive-compulsive—a characteristic you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with someone who has spent a lifetime in places marked by disease and disorder. Of course, his behavior may be a compensation for those very conditions.

  Think of him as an emotionally tortured character straight out of a Saul Bellow novel, engrossed throughout his life in the brooding and dangerous tropical settings defined by Joseph Conrad.

  It is hard to imagine a better-documented existence than his. I interviewed almost a hundred others who crossed his otherwise solitary path, and who actually do remember him. Speaking to them—selfless humanitarian aid workers and development specialists; diplomats during the State Department’s golden age—I realize that if there were any other life I would have wished to have had, it would be his: a frugal, monastic existence that has been both obscure and extraordinary.

  For a meaningful life is about truth; not success.

  MANY SMALL BEGINNINGS

  CHAPTER 1

  Vietnam

  1966–1969

  Discovering Bernard Fall

  “I was called up but got a medical deferment. But I was sick of people in Manhattan going to school and graduate school and getting unlimited deferments. I had started making $20,000 a year as a commodity trader—a lot of money then. Yet it was a game, not life. So I didn’t wait to be called up. I joined. My country was at war. I felt called to do this. I put a brave face on it, but I was scared. What had I gotten myself into?”

  Vietnam saved Bob Gersony’s life.

  It lifted him out of the darkness of his youth.

  “For me, Vietnam was total immersion in America itself. At Fort Gordon, Georgia, during basic training, real red clay country, I met my first Americans. I met Catholics! I don’t know that in New York I had spoken to a Catholic before! I lived with Blacks. I met hundreds and hundreds of different people in Georgia and Vietnam.”

  There was a staff sergeant (three stripes up, one down on his chevron), a lifer, the senior NCO (noncommissioned officer) in the barracks in Saigon. He was maybe six feet tall with a belly, blond hair, and blue eyes: eyes slightly too close together and sunk into his head more than most. His bed was the first one on the right as you entered the hooch, which Vietnamese women in black pajamas would sweep daily.

  “He was a real atrocity. I was one of two Jewish guys in the hooch—single and double wooden bunks ringed by sandbags where there wasn’t a whit of privacy. I remember a refrigerator at one end filled with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. The staff sergeant would occasionally get loaded and then the real bullying would begin. His abuse was constant. ‘The Jews killed Christ. They control the banks. They run the newspapers. They’re all rich.’ He never stopped. That was all we heard. Nothing original or creative: just a meat-and-potatoes anti-Semite. Nobody said anything or complained about him. Those were tough months.

  “The other Jewish guy in the hooch was among the few Jews I met in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. I met this nice gangly kid from Iowa, Gary Gal
pin, a nerd like me, and others who I stayed in touch with for a few years. Yes, I met my country, the bad and the good.

  “In basic training I had stood out and was offered OCS [Officers’ Candidate School]. But I was happy where I was. I got an award, ‘outstanding trainee of the cycle.’ Later I got a Bronze Star for service, not the much more important Bronze Star for valor. But it was good enough.” The Bronze Star now hangs in his living room, around the neck of a large sculpture of a pet dog from his younger days. “Those were the only awards I ever got in my life.”

  “People in the Army called me ‘Doc,’ short for doctor. I don’t know why. Yeah, leaving Manhattan was like coming out of a cocoon. But I was no hero.” Gersony was a typist in the Casualty and Medical Evacuation Division in Saigon. When the Tet Offensive started, casualties went way up and there was an avalanche of reporting to do, since all the dead and wounded had to flow to the right places. He volunteered to stay for a few extra months and left Vietnam as a specialist 5 (the equivalent of a low-ranking sergeant). His overriding ambition was just to come back alive, even though he was almost never in danger. And that’s been his overriding ambition for over four decades.

  In the years since, whenever he came home from Colombia or Iraq or the Chinese–North Korean border, or wherever he was, he would kiss the floor of his house. He had been scared all his life. He always thought that he would never come home from his assignments. “I’m conservative, a pessimist, I always have to think of the worst in order to prevent it from happening.” From time to time he goes to the Vietnam War Memorial here in Washington and sees names on the wall of people he knew—and was one of—who didn’t make it home.