The Good American Page 5
Froman explains: “As a humanitarian, genius, and mensch, Bob Gersony commands my admiration in a way few others do.”
“Bob defied every label. He was an exotic cocktail of a man, with his sincerity, skepticism, courage, and humanity,” says Ann Siegel, senior vice president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and another former girlfriend, who keeps in touch with Bob and his family.
“I had often wondered what Bob would do with all his energy and ideas, after Guatemala had taught him to live dangerously,” recalls British-born Alan Riding, a stringer for The New York Times based in Mexico City in the early 1970s, who would go on to a storied career as a staff foreign correspondent for the Times and author of the classic Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (1985). “Bob and his compañeros Tony Jackson and Jo Froman always greeted me with lots of good gossip about Guatemala’s fraught political situation whenever I would arrive there unannounced.” As Riding explains, “It was a time of fierce repression by the military regime of General Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio, which included a state of siege, death squads, and a succession of murders of supposed leftist and even moderate opponents in [the modern-day capital of] Guatemala City.” Riding himself was once dragged from his hotel during curfew by plainclothed goons who put him in jail until the U.S. Embassy won his release. “Fortunately, Bob’s school in Antigua was not considered a nest of subversion.”
Gersony, Jackson, and Froman were not oblivious to what was going on politically. After all, the house of the president of the much-hated United Fruit Company—a tool of U.S. influence—was practically down the street from them in Antigua. “But we stayed out of politics,” Gersony says. (It was always “we” with Gersony.) “From the military point of view we were not left-wingers. We didn’t tolerate drugs, we insisted on short hair for our students, so we took in no hippies. We were not agitators, but ingenues who were no threat to anyone. In fact, we were setting up a national resource that appealed to both the military and the Left, replacing an old-fashioned, missionary-inflicted model of language study with a homegrown, national approach. Tony went into the Ministry of Education every week to provide a progress report. The only group that didn’t like us were the long-established Wycliffe evangelicals, who with their own linguistics institute saw us as competition.”
By late 1975, still more or less broke and thirty years of age, Gersony realized it was time to leave Guatemala. He could easily “have gone wrong” there, as Ursula Strauss feared, drifting into an unstructured, somewhat aimless hippie lifestyle. After all, it was the place to do it, with such natural beauty and an abundance of drugs. But Gersony was never flaky. And he was never aimless, as his essay critiquing the beatniks, written when he was only eighteen, indicated. The fact that he now wanted to leave Guatemala also showed some degree of ambition.
Actually, Guatemala had given him the semblance of a college education. Though he was training hundreds of others, in effect he was the one being trained. He had learned Spanish fluently, and learned at an expert level the field of linguistics, without becoming a linguist himself. He had also learned to run a business, something that synchronized well with his talents for accounting, record keeping, and commodity trading. He learned, too, from Tony Jackson “how always to be nice to people, how not to be a prick.” He had become well known to Oxfam, the Ford Foundation, the Peace Corps, and other NGOs. And in creating a self-sustaining operation, he had learned that “charity can be a business, that you don’t have to be a naïve idealist to improve the situation of indigenous communities.”
It was starting to become clear that Gersony fell into the category of the “twice exceptional,” or 2e, that is, people who have had exceptional learning issues—those who while growing up could not cope in a traditional school environment—but who are also exceptionally gifted in other ways.
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Two other events further matured and seasoned Gersony during this phase of his life. Early in his stay there, he read a book that he had brought along from his father’s library: André Schwarz-Bart’s 1959 classic, The Last of the Just, about the Lamed-Vov, the thirty-six “just” men of Jewish tradition, who according to legend appear in every generation. Their personal merit keeps the world from entire destruction. They accomplish this task by experiencing and internalizing all the pain of the world. The novel begins with a medieval pogrom and ends as one of the Lamed-Vov comforts inmates in their last moments in a Nazi death camp. The book covers eight centuries of Jewish persecution and suffering. “Rivers of blood have flowed, columns of smoke have obscured the sky, but surviving all these dooms, the tradition has remained inviolate down to our own time. For the Lamed-Vov are the hearts of the world multiplied,” Schwarz-Bart writes.16 Upon finishing the book’s last page, Gersony determined to live up to the standard of the Lamed-Vov.
“The book underlined how I would define integrity. It reinforced how I wanted to act throughout my life. I told myself I would take chances, particularly bureaucratic chances as it would later turn out, by not adopting a policy of keeping my mouth shut together with a go-along/get-along evasion of responsibility. I’m a child of refugees, a member of a persecuted race who lost members of my own family. I would not countenance mass murder in Uganda or Mozambique or other places, therefore. I believed very early in the responsibility to protect, without becoming ideological about it.”
The Last of the Just also left a deep imprint on Gersony because of something that had happened when he was eleven years old. It was Yom Kippur and he and his father sat in special seats close to the bima in the packed Manhattan synagogue, since his father was a major donor. Everyone was quiet, waiting expectantly for the Kol Nidre service to begin. Then a man, inoffensive, invisible almost, walked into the back of the synagogue. He was dressed in his Sunday best, with a tie and vest under a suit. But it was all so threadbare, with holes and stains all over; as if picked up at a Goodwill store. He was clearly a poor man. Suddenly the rabbi’s son-in-law spotted him and asked the man in a loud voice to leave, since the service was only for members of the synagogue—those who had purchased subscriptions. “But I only want to hear Kol Nidre. Then I will go,” the poor man said. “I’m sorry, unless you have bought a ticket, you cannot stay,” the rabbi’s son-in-law replied with mock respect. “Can I give my seat to that man,” Gersony whispered to his father. But his father hushed him up. “And that was it,” Gersony said. “The man had to leave. He was a poor Jew. We should have honored him. Instead, we threw him out, and nobody—nobody spoke up. I was so close to standing up, but I didn’t. At the time I felt that I had had it with Judaism. It formed the kernel of my resolution to always speak out no matter the job and policy consequences. Though I wouldn’t actually fulfill that vow until I read The Last of the Just.”
The other event in Guatemala happened on the morning of August 12, 1973. He was in a bedroom of an enormous old colonial house that he, Froman, and Jackson rented off the main square in Antigua. By this time his school business was set up, and they could afford the house. The phone rang. His number was 406, he remembers. There were only three-digit phone numbers in Guatemala in those days, owing to the paucity of phone lines. Jo Froman picked it up, and heard the terrible news. She will never forget the moment of telling it to Bob. When Bob eventually got to the phone, his father’s voice informed him that his younger sister, Mimi (Cecilia Clare), had died of a heroin overdose. She was twenty-five. He got home that night via Miami and slipped into his old bedroom after midnight. His parents were sleeping and he decided not to wake them. But then the bathroom light went on. His mother and father were in the doorway crying. He started to cry. His father showed him how to arrange a burial. The funeral marked the first time that he gave a speech: about the need to reduce the profit motive from drugs by legalizing some of them, a position he still holds. “Mimi and I were both very smart people who failed early,” he said.
Any deat
h is sad. But the death of a young person, especially within the immediate family, is a weight that never gets easier to bear. As time went on in Guatemala, Gersony became even more organized, and more dynamic. As he turned thirty, it was hard to imagine someone with greater focus and clarity, even though he had no clearly discernible career path yet.
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Then, in the middle of the night of February 4, 1976, the day after he, Froman, and Jackson left the country to meet with Ford Foundation officials in Mexico City—with Gersony not planning to return to Central America—the great Guatemalan earthquake struck, registering 7.5 on the Richter scale: 23,000 people died, trapped in their adobe houses; 76,000 were injured, and thousands more were left homeless. Cities all over the country suffered damage. The Gruesome Threesome immediately returned to Antigua.
Because of the landslides triggered by the quake, much of the country was now inaccessible. Late one night, after initial emergency operations, and after Oxfam’s Reggie Norton had received approximately $1 million in donations, Gersony, Froman, and Jackers were in their house feverishly talking about what to do next with Fred Cuny, a soon-to-be-famous disaster relief specialist who would disappear under mysterious circumstances in Chechnya in 1995, and whose remains were never found. Suddenly Roland Bunch of the Oklahoma City–based World Neighbors charity walked into the room with an indigenous Mayan. Bunch was completely covered in adobe dust. He hadn’t changed his clothes in a week and smelled awful. “Roland was a real sight, a showstopper,” Gersony remembers. Bunch said he had walked into San Martin and some of the other, worst-affected areas and just started interviewing people, for seven days. “We need to respond to what the people think!” he exclaimed. “And what they think is, ‘Stop sending food!’ ” Bunch observed that Guatemala had just experienced one of its biggest maize harvests. Thus, food donations were only making things worse. “The free maize being distributed all over the place has blown away the price,” he said. This simple fact was a revelation to all of them, especially to Gersony, because, in the spirit of Bernard Fall, someone had emerged from the field with news that altered the analysis of elites in Guatemala City and foreign capitals. And he had done this by speaking with the affected people themselves. What Bunch had said also made intrinsic sense to Gersony, steeped as he was in the world of commodity trading.
But appeals had already gone out for food, medicine, clothes, and so on. Alan Riding, who arrived from Mexico City to report on the earthquake for The New York Times, remembers being “most surprised when Bob and Tony Jackson, who were already engaged in emergency assistance, awakened me to the fact that sending in food from the outside was, in fact, counterproductive: although villages were damaged, their land was not. Thus, food donations had the effect of pushing down the local price of basic agricultural commodities that the peasants relied on to make an income.” In other words, as Riding explains, “so-called foreign generosity completely disrupted local markets. But it was Bob especially who made me think about development in fresh ways, and with such warmth, humor, and intelligence.” Of course, Gersony had passed on to Riding what he had just learned from Roland Bunch, whose own wisdom had come from being in personal contact with the evidence at great risk and extreme discomfort, something that made a lifelong impact on Gersony.
Gersony now truly began to think for himself. The peasants did not want to rebuild their homes with clay tiles, which had killed them with their weight and also suffocated them. They wanted to rebuild with sheet iron—galvanized zinc or lamina, to use its other names. It was ugly, which horrified the expatriate aid community with its love of aesthetics, but much lighter and more efficient. Yet prices for lamina had quadrupled. Gersony had the idea to sell the peasants galvanized zinc at a much-reduced price, along with the pressure-treated wooden posts to hold the roofs up. On Reggie Norton’s advice, Gersony went to a roofing factory in neighboring El Salvador with money from Oxfam and negotiated a deal. Here, again, his experience in contracting learned from the commodity trade came in especially handy. The man who had cornered the market on beef lips as a young commodity trader now did likewise with lamina. Within a week, the first trucks arrived, and zinc roofs were selling “like hot cakes” at half price or less to those whose homes had been destroyed. It was quite a sight to see the long lines of small Mayan peasants carrying the zinc-iron sheeting on their backs, held there by a strap tied around their foreheads.
“It concentrated the minds of the NGOs,” Gersony recalls. “For me, the roofing program was an example of business-like accountability with record keeping, receipts, and so on. It reinforced the idea of not creating dependency. All we were doing was giving the poor population a break on the price. They had money from the good harvest, as long as outside donations did not further depress the price of food. The dignity element dominated. However, the NGO community,” he goes on, “whenever a catastrophe strikes, often rush in and create dependency. When you give stuff away, local officials can decide who gets it, based on their connections. But if you merely sell supplies, self-selection kicks in. People who need it, get it. It’s certainly not a perfect approach, but it does, to repeat, emphasize dignity over dependency. Many NGOs [though not Fred Cuny] were antagonistic because we were selling to people that they were portraying in their publicity campaigns as completely helpless.”
Oxfam director Norton adds, reflecting back on decades in the humanitarian field: “The NGO world, when you break it down, is often about buying materials at the lowest prices you can find. It requires a first-rate business mind as much as anything else.”
By the spring of 1976, the roofing program had become self-sustainable, and Gersony was finally ready to leave Guatemala. Oxfam asked him to attend a conference at the presidential palace in Guatemala City that would bring together all the donor countries, in order to provide progress reports. He didn’t want to go. Though still at the very beginning of his career, he already hated those events. But he went anyway and sat at the rear to listen. Suddenly a guy with a big, bushy mustache planted himself in the chair next to him and pumped his hand into Gersony’s. “I’m Fred Schieck, deputy director of USAID [the United States Agency for International Development] in Guatemala. Come back to my office later and let’s talk.”
Bob Gersony with the humanitarian aid worker Fred Cuny in Guatemala in 1976.
USAID, a bureaucracy that grew indirectly out of the Marshall Plan and was established during the Kennedy administration, was essentially the Third World development arm of the State Department, even though the two bureaucracies were distinct and periodically at odds: whereas the State Department was all about influence, USAID was all about getting its projects done, and the two goals did not match up all of the time. Nevertheless, because the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence everywhere, and influence was often (but not always) obtained through foreign aid, USAID combined national interest with humanitarian interest. Unsurprisingly, the people who staffed its bureaucracy were among the most idealistic in the U.S. government.
“Fred Schieck was a fuzzy-friendly teddy-bear type, and he knew all about me,” Gersony remembers. Indeed, Schieck, with his velvety soft voice and easygoing informality, was the kind of guy you imagine always dressed in various shades of brown. The two talked for several hours about the competing philosophies of development aid. Gersony held forth about how the self-selection of beneficiaries reduced middlemen and corruption. Schieck had a master’s degree in business from Harvard. He was also a military gun buff who was grabbed by Gersony’s idea that aid at its most efficient need not be paternalistic, or a handout. Schieck was actually part of a breed that would become quite familiar in the early and middle phases of Gersony’s career: the moderate Republican humanitarian and realist-internationalist, whose spiritual godfather was Theodore Roosevelt. It is a type that barely exists anymore. He was proof that the face of the Cold War—for that was ultimately why Schieck was in G
uatemala—could sometimes be quite benign. Schieck hired Gersony at $20,000 a year to help him manage USAID’s local assistance programs: the beginning of a four-decade relationship with the U.S. government, though Gersony did not know it at the time.
“Bob was young, loud, dogged, a bit foul-mouthed, and yet articulate at the same time,” Schieck recalls about their first meeting. “We at USAID in Guatemala knew what we didn’t know, and therefore viewed Bob as someone who knew his way around the culture and highlands better than we did. The fact that Bob had built a language school system almost from scratch gave him instant credibility, even though his whole approach to aid was so unorthodox.” Schieck was soon awestruck at the caravans of trucks and forklifts that brought the lamina up from the coast into the highlands, where crowds of peasants had collected to buy the roofing materials at bargain prices. “Bob Gersony,” Schieck went on, “was from the start obsessed with accountability, so we hired accountants and auditors for the project, which Tony Jackson helped Bob run from the field.”17