The Good American Read online

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  “You can’t imagine what a failure I felt like, especially to my father. There was something wrong with me. It was nobody’s fault. I was just fucked up.”

  Bob Gersony’s voice is loud, commanding, declarative, yet on the verge of breaking down into tears of frustration and thus intimate, despite the harsh New York gutturals. He has a clipped white beard and sometimes likes to wear a hat reminiscent of the African bush, which considering what he has done in life is not at all affected. He always seems to be staring into the distance, as if recollecting something, while rolling his head in a way that indicates he has even more to say. He is intense and often appears overwhelmed, as if taking on the pain and suffering of the world. His “look,” when he focuses on a voice he once heard in Mozambique, Chad, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, El Salvador, Nepal, or wherever else he has been, to quote W. H. Auden, “contains the history of man.”1

  Whenever we meet for an interview outside his home, in whatever circumstances, he wears a jacket and tie, bending over at the waist rather than hunching his shoulders—as if bowing to you—in a stiff but formal greeting. He has a touch of the Old World about him, evoking a sense of reverence and authority. I can see why he was called “Doc.”

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  Robert Paul Gersony was born in February 1945 in Manhattan, the son of refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, Grigori and Laura Gersony, who Americanized their names to George and Lola. They were modern Orthodox Jews, whose lives, particularly that of his father, revolved around the synagogue. His father, from Libau, a port city in Latvia, was sent by his family in 1935 to Amsterdam, to be an apprentice to a diamond merchant just as Hitler began to rev up his death machine. From there Gersony’s father drifted to Belgium, France, Portugal, Mozambique (where he jumped ship in Lourenço Marques from a boat going on to Shanghai), and finally came to America, where he arrived in New York from Lourenço Marques with the proverbial $50 in his pocket. He had made his way around Europe and Africa mainly as a grain trader and overseas salesman for the Jaffa Orange Syndicate in British Palestine.

  “My father was smart and virtuous. He was a commodity trader all his life and his word was trusted. It’s not like today in this digital world when every transaction requires documentation.” In the spring of 1940, his father sensed that the Nazis would invade Belgium. The people he knew there said that he was crazy, since Belgium was a neutral country, even though Germany had invaded Belgium only twenty-six years before. But he offered to sell a large shipment of oranges at a much lower price if he were paid in cash immediately. He wired the money to Palestine and escaped to Marseille just as the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland. “In every place my father arrived he had to learn a new language and start a new life. Every time I’ve arrived in a new country over the past four decades I consciously tested myself against the world, the way my father did.”

  “Yes, Bobby’s father, George, was quite resilient, but not unlike so many refugees at the time. He was a tall, heavyset, intimidating sort of man, but so clumsy—George Gersony couldn’t even drive a car,” recalls Ursula Strauss, the wife of George Gersony’s business partner, and the only person alive who knew the family when “Bobby,” as everyone called him then, was growing up. Ursula, in her early nineties, decidedly elegant despite her age, still talks with the British accent she learned at school in Great Britain as a refugee child from Hitler. “George spoke many languages well, but always with such a terrible accent,” she says with a laugh. “George was all business, completely absorbed in his work. He couldn’t make small talk, unless it was about the synagogue. He was just so intense, so impatient: a hard, formidable man, but with a heart of gold, and funny, in an ironic, world-weary, Jewish sort of way. When he screamed, which was often, nobody took him seriously.”

  Bobby was a terrible student. Even with studying he flunked exams. He had severe trouble recalling the meaning of text from memory, and so couldn’t learn in the usual, regimented manner. Just as Bobby inherited his lifelong emotional intensity from his father, he also developed a lifelong hatred of the classroom and formalistic learning altogether: a signal reason why he would spend his life doing fieldwork. Fieldwork was less abstract and helped him overcome his learning disability.

  Lola and George Gersony, Bob Gersony’s parents.

  Ursula Strauss remembers: “While George and Lola knew how to love, they simply did not know how to be parents. Lola was busy with bridge, music, tennis, but not so much with the children.” Stepping into the Gersonys’ home, with Lola’s accent and Zsa Zsa Gabor manner, with all the lace tablecloths, was “like going back to Vienna,” one of Bob Gersony’s early girlfriends says: “His parents were so old-fashioned, they were like my grandparents. They certainly didn’t know how to be American parents.” George was a fairly old father, forty-one, at the time Bobby was born. He had no interest in Bobby’s day at school, for example. “If you couldn’t talk business with George, you practically couldn’t talk with him,” says Ursula Strauss.

  “Bob’s father had all of Bob’s intensity and then some. George Gersony was just so large and imposing: he was absolutely penetrating. His presence filled the room. He was abrupt and full of energy, cutting you off in midspeech to get out of his chair and do something else. He was obviously a genius as well as a horrible parent,” says another of Bob’s former girlfriends.

  “My father was tense. He made me and my sister tense. I got no advice from my father, nothing, even though my parents were constantly being called into school because of my low grades. The only thing I had to keep me company in my room was a typewriter. Throughout my life, I could only remember text through the physical act of typing.”

  In the United States, Gersony’s father had become a broker for edible oils and industrial fats. Eventually, when Bobby was failing one test after another, George had enough money to transfer his son out of the public school system to the prestigious Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, a boarding school near Princeton, a reserve for the WASP elite with its Victorian brick buildings and spacious, tree-lined lawns: the alma mater of such mid-twentieth-century establishment figures as Walter Annenberg and John J. McCloy. “It got me out of my home and away from my screaming father: you see, my father was brilliant, but stressed, nervous, afflicted, he actually broke chairs sometimes. Things would just set him off.

  “There was an English teacher at Peddie, E. Graham Ward, a Harvard graduate, buttoned down, herringbone tweed, always looked at you sideways, then would break the smallest smile. He knew I was always in trouble, but he liked the way I wrote. At first I did well at Peddie. But then the same problems returned. I couldn’t pass tests. I was ‘invited not to come back the next year.’ ”

  Following that, Ward, who went on to become a quite legendary teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, wrote Gersony a letter, saying “You have real talent.” Ward “thought I was someone when I thought I was no one.”

  Back in Manhattan in 1963, Gersony took a summer writing class, and that fall a friend of his father arranged for him to take courses at New York University. At the summer class he had submitted an essay about beatniks in Greenwich Village, in which he argued that they were living aimless lives, critical of society but not really contributing to society either. He was therefore confused about them and what exactly they thought they were doing. He got an A on the paper. So in the fall when his NYU professor asked his students to submit essay samples, Gersony had the idea to submit the same paper that had earned him an A. A few days later the NYU professor walked into the auditorium lecture hall and announced that he would read aloud samples of the best and worst papers he had seen. Gersony, sitting in the front row, was confident that his paper would be among the best—after all, he had already gotten an A on it. But it wasn’t. Finally, the professor told the class about the very worst paper, and
began to read passages aloud from what Gersony had written about the beatniks. The professor alternately smirked, sneered, and delivered the verbal equivalent of a literary hatchet job on Gersony. The paper was full of “pretentiousness,” the professor concluded. “I flushed all over,” Gersony recalls. “I became hot and fearful. I sat in absolute terror that he was going to make me stand up in front of this class of 150 students. I was so ashamed and traumatized that I still haven’t gotten over it. I was too young to understand how one teacher could give an A and another an F to the same essay: how so much of criticism is subjective. I quit school immediately. I never took another class anywhere again. I never actually completed high school. I never had a graduation ceremony of any kind.”

  It was just so humiliating, especially since all the other Jewish children of his parents’ friends in Manhattan were getting high grades and going off to elite universities.

  “Bobby could have gone all wrong,” Ursula Strauss, lifting her eyebrows, tells me in a very knowing manner. “But he didn’t turn out wrong, did he? He turned out quite well. He has real social gifts, you know. He always had girlfriends, and every one of them was delightful and interesting. They all came to his wedding with their husbands and to his children’s bar mitzvahs.”

  His father, at last realizing that his son simply couldn’t manage school, hired him for a short time at his office. Leaving school would be the jump start he needed. Bobby and his father grew closer. After all, George—whose mind worked so fast that he would often skip whole portions of what he wanted to say—could now talk business with his son. The two would often go out to lunch in a basement Greek restaurant near his father’s office, in the Standard Oil building in lower Manhattan, and would take walks on long summer nights. There was even a telex machine in their home that shook and clanged twenty-four hours a day, which constituted a running tutorial on the commodity business. Later on, in Vietnam and elsewhere, his father would write him letters on foolscap about the tallow and oil markets, about this tonnage he had sold, about that Egyptian tender, and so on. Nevertheless, “my father would never believe I could do anything right, after I did not go on in life to take over Gersony-Strauss Co.”

  The truth about George Gersony was that like other Jewish refugees, he kept a lot hidden. That was a reason why he was almost always all business. His sister, brother, and other members of his family and their friends were all murdered by the Nazis and their Latvian allies. When Bobby once asked him directly about all this one evening at home, his father, who was reading a book in bed, turned on his side and cried.

  George Gersony was at this moment, among his many other ventures, selling tallow (beef fat used in the making of soap) to Pakistan under the U.S. government’s PL 480 program, a form of foreign assistance that involved massive and complicated paperwork. It turned out that the young Gersony was very good and very fast at filling out forms. But then, the same weekend that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there was the “Great Salad Oil Swindle” that almost crippled the New York Stock Exchange, and made Gersony’s father go bankrupt. Essentially, a soybean oil trader had gotten $150 million in loans from Wall Street by using tanks filled with soybean oil that he had sold to commodity dealers, including Gersony’s father, as collateral—except that the tanks were really filled with water, with soybean oil floating only at the top. They were practically worthless. “My father was ruined. He didn’t want me in the office during this period and arranged for me to apprentice with another high-strung, tortured Jew, who dealt in, among other things, bird seed and animal by-products.”

  Gersony’s new employer, Francis J. Koppstein, discovered that his protégé, in addition to being good at paperwork, had a quick talent for commodity trading. And so Gersony became a commodity trader like his father: an interlude in his life, but one that would have a profound influence on him, because of the commodity market’s emphasis on statistics, the most basic economic trade-offs, and disciplined, ground-level practicality, all of which would prove tremendously valuable to Gersony later on.

  Gersony was succeeding in life for the first time but completely unsatisfied. Manhattan suffocated him, especially after he had a chance to briefly visit the Midwest to inspect companies with which he and Koppstein did business. That was a trip he would never forget—opening a window on his country and the ground-level truths that the commodity trade offered him. In the middle of the freezing winter of 1964, he visited fifteen meatpacking plants in Green Bay, Wisconsin; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Dubuque, Iowa; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Chicago, Illinois, staying in the suburban homes of the plant managers, talking late into the night with them about actuals and futures. Could beef lips, normally used for rendering tallow and making dog food, also be useful for making other products for Koppstein’s customers in France? And by the way, what about prospects for lard and pork livers? It was those sorts of questions that the nineteen-year-old high school dropout had to deal with constantly on this trip. The real revelation of this journey—and it truly was a journey of discovery—was the clean beauty of middle America and the “salt of the earth” types of people who populated it, and who showered him with friendliness and hospitality: so radically different from the world of Manhattan. Buried in a snowy winter whiteout, the towns of the northern Midwest dramatically widened his horizons.

  Perhaps, deep down in his psyche, Gersony was a wanderer, like his father, always starting over, as his father had begun to do so successfully after the bankruptcy—rebuilding his business from scratch—often in a different part of the map. Gersony at this point in his young life simply wasn’t grounded. School had proved impossible. And he wasn’t quite ready to spend his life in the commodity trade. This is how Bob Gersony found his way to Vietnam: about the last place on earth at the time where one would have expected to find a young Jewish man, who had grown up in a Manhattan apartment filled with art and a grand piano, on West 77th Street facing the American Museum of Natural History—the same apartment where the opera star Renée Fleming would one day live.

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  In Saigon, the head of Gersony’s casualty reporting unit was a Captain John Quandt, an officer with a sharp nose, black hair, and horn-rimmed glasses. His desk faced Gersony’s, so there was no avoiding him, and the two frequently talked. Quandt valued him because Gersony was such a whiz at numbers, record keeping, and typing (over a hundred words per minute), all reasons for the Bronze Star he was later awarded.

  “You should read Bernard Fall,” Quandt casually told Gersony one day during a bull session about the depressing, gut-wrenching material that their office had to process 24/7. Quandt loaned Gersony one of Fall’s books, which Gersony devoured and then returned. “While on R&R sometime later in Formosa, I picked up several knockoff editions of Bernard Fall and again devoured them. My months of reading and typing up casualty reports, plus what I learned from Bernard Fall, revealed to me that Vietnam was not just beyond America’s capability, it was beyond doing, period.”

  Bob Gersony soon after he arrived in Vietnam.

  Bernard Fall in Vietnam in 1967 shortly before his death in the field. His example motivated Bob Gersony’s lifework of deep reporting.

  Bernard Fall was an Austrian-born, French-American war correspondent and historian, who had fought in the French Resistance and later specialized in Indochina in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, just as the Kennedy administration was escalating the war in Vietnam, Fall published Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina. In that book, which profoundly affected Gersony, Fall most famously established his method of digging out ideas from firsthand field experience, rather than from the comfort and safety of a library or a government office in Washington. He was a from-the-ground-up thinker rather than a from-the-top-down one. In 1967, the year before Gersony discovered his work, Bernard Fall was killed by a land mine north of Hue.

  Fall’s message was that nations lose wars because
of incomplete ground-level intelligence of the most profound cultural variety, making them unable to grasp the mentality of the people they are trying to help or change or conquer, a mentality accumulated from thousands of years of history in a specific landscape. The Americans would lose in Vietnam just as the French had lost, Fall predicted, because the Americans were given to abstractions that obscured the cultural reality on the ground in Vietnam.

  Street Without Joy depicts painful marches through roadless jungles by French troops suffering with heavy packs on their backs, in places where scrappy guerrilla fighters are needed rather than common infantrymen. He describes the light and mobile Viet Minh and the plodding French, who needed proper roads and bridges to complete their laborious operations. In the course of a massively detailed, tactical account of French military movements in Vietnam, Fall became the first writer to describe the new Cold War age of irregular fighting, out of which modern counterinsurgency doctrine would emanate. Fall writes about “the tiny human error” in a jungle encounter “which, even in the Atomic Age, still can shape human destiny.”2

  Fall’s passages are filled with tragic human folly. There are the thirty French battalions demoralized by one Viet Minh regiment simply because of the impossible terrain, with its dense vegetation and labyrinthine villages whose populations were antagonistic to the French. The terrain itself kept the French from even knowing where they actually were. In Fall’s account, the French commanders were only just beginning to realize that while the great set-piece victories of World War II were still fresh in everyone’s minds, this new age of Cold War guerrilla fighting would be brutal to such a conventional mindset. Finally, there is la rue sans joie, “the street without joy,” a string of heavily fortified villages stretching from Hue to Quang Tri, through dunes and salt marshes, which would prove agony for the French. With the nearest friendly village many miles away through dense forest, “this was not like Korea,” and thus was a different war entirely. As Fall writes: “Night began to fall over the four thousand villages of the Red River delta, and the night belonged to the Viet Minh.”3