The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Congressional staffers and USAID officials got word of the operation and flew down from Washington to see it firsthand. “We worried about those people too poor to afford the cut-rate building materials, so Bob set up road improvement projects to pay salaries, enabling people to afford the lamina roofs and posts, like a New Dealesque infusion of cash. The Guatemalan countryside began to change from a panorama of picturesque clay-tiled roofs to one of glinting-in-sunlight lamina,” Schieck remembers. “Still, the idea was hard to sell to other disaster zones since it went against the ideology of humanitarian assistance.”

  While the local aid community remained suspicious, the military and the oligarchs worried that empowering the peasants would allow them to rise up and challenge the ruling establishment. One day Gersony was called into the office of the minister of defense, Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, an intimidating man with a mournful and resolute expression and large mustache: a Latin American dictator-type straight from Central Casting. Sitting next to Lucas Garcia was an international aid official, a rival of both Gersony’s and USAID’s approach to rural development in Guatemala. In the presence of that official, the minister of defense, in full military regalia, told Gersony to stop doing his projects aimed at removing the rural population’s dependency on the Guatemalan government and the international aid community. “Do you know what can happen to you? Things happen to people who don’t pay attention to what we say,” Lucas Garcia warned Gersony. Gersony told him he should speak to his superiors at USAID, and then quietly explained his theory of development to him. Leaving the office, the aid official gave Gersony “fatherly advice,” to do what Lucas Garcia had said.

  “I went to bed that night with convulsions, nausea. I was sick and trembling for two days. I was so terrified. I couldn’t eat. All I did was drink liquids. It was the first of my physical emotional crises.”

  Schieck bought Gersony’s safety by making a hefty donation to the local chapter of the Masons, to which many in the upper reaches of the Guatemalan government and military belonged. Lucas Garcia went on to be elected president of Guatemala in a fraudulent election in 1978 and was in power for four years, during which time he murdered and butchered many thousands of people in response to a rebel offensive, and later would stand accused of torture and genocide against the Mayan population. His counterinsurgency modus operandi included the burning of villages and the slaughter of farm animals. Lucas Garcia died in exile in Venezuela. Gersony’s encounter with him was a forerunner to a career in which he would be periodically in danger; in which he never learned how not to be afraid.

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  Gersony had arrived in Guatemala with no Spanish and almost no money. He left as one of the most influential foreigners in the country, with fluency in the language. He still had no credentials, though, and never would. There would never be a title or a degree or an affiliation to his name. Thus, in the ordinary careerist sense, he had risen as far as he ever would. That would always be the essence of his insecurity, even as it was central to his sheer drive, creativity, and unorthodox thinking.

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  In her diary at the time, Jo Froman wrote presciently: “Gersony doesn’t belong to me. He belongs to the world. If you could just have a part of him for a short period in your life, you were forever fortunate.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Dominica, El Salvador, and South America

  1979–1983

  A Packed, Dirty Petri Dish of a Country

  After a year of working for USAID, Gersony finally departed Guatemala. In his early thirties still, he was already a somewhat unusual type: a business-oriented math brain with a non-ideological conservative streak, in a liberal Third World development environment. USAID brought him to Washington to brief the House Appropriations Committee on his philosophical approach to development and what he had accomplished in Guatemala. Gersony told the congressmen that USAID should stay in the business of directly managing projects, rather than going full-bore into giving money to relief charities to do the actual work, since it would keep USAID, or AID as it was known in Washington shorthand, operational, dedicated to fieldwork, and prevent it from becoming a mere agency of bureaucrats unwilling to take risks and responsibility. He also told them about what he had learned from Roland Bunch: that you have to listen to people on the ground who are most affected and stay in direct contact with the evidence. And you had to see individual people in the Third World “as vigorous and commonsensical in their opinions.”

  A member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations was Ed Koch, a Democrat from New York City, who was about to run for mayor there. Koch, a strong supporter of human rights within the context of fighting the Cold War, wanted especially to hear what Gersony had to say about foreign aid. Koch was one of those great practical progressives who linked anti-communism, human rights, and fighting poverty at home with a wheeler-dealer approach to politics. Gersony fervently pitched Koch on a private, business-like approach to foreign aid. He explained how he had learned that many deaths in the Guatemalan earthquake had been caused by heavy roofs falling on people, so he advocated selling them the lamina roofs at a reduced price, and investing the excess aid money in creating jobs and fixing roads and water systems.

  “Don’t give away anything,” Gersony advised Koch, in an echo of Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Make people pay and provide work for them.” Koch, himself a straight shooter, appreciated Gersony’s directness and clarity of mind.

  Koch then asked Gersony what he thought of U.S. government foreign aid in general.

  “Too much of it is a waste of money, since it is not integrated with a plan for governance or business development,” Gersony said.

  Koch smiled.

  “The whole meeting was a classic Bob Gersony performance,” said Charles Flynn, a Koch aide. “Blunt, passionate, well-argued, and against the grain.”

  After Koch was elected New York City mayor in November 1977, he put Gersony in charge of his anti-poverty program under Commissioner Haskell G. Ward. The various fiefdoms that made up the City’s anti-poverty program, especially the Community Development Agency, were rife with corruption. “I feel like I’m in a sewer,” Koch would say, whenever he was briefed on the subject. Koch called those who ran the fiefdoms “poverty pimps.” At one point, Gersony and other staffers were threatened at knifepoint by local Hispanic activists angry at the mayor’s office. Gersony spoke to them in Spanish to calm the situation, asking their help for the translation of certain words, in order to show respect, a trick he had taught himself in Guatemala. As neurotic as he was, he was the opposite of a coward.

  Koch came to realize that he couldn’t take on the whole Byzantine power structure of the poverty program and so much else in the city’s government. Gersony, personally offended by the corruption, however, would not compromise with, or on behalf of, the mayor. “Again, it was a matter of Bob’s absolute integrity,” explains Flynn, who had joined Koch’s mayoral staff. So Koch offered Gersony the more prestigious job of chairman of the Board of Estimate. The Board of Estimate, a body later declared unconstitutional, was where New York City’s opaque, convoluted politics began to resemble the shadowy and interlocking arrangements of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The board had to approve every city contract over a certain amount of money. The mayor, the City Council, the comptroller, and the borough presidents were all represented on it. Thus, it was a perfect venue for backroom deals and blackmail. “It would have meant a lot of personal confrontations, which I dislike,” Gersony says. “For example, the Brooklyn borough president, Howard Golden, was the rudest person I ever met. I just didn’t feel I had the juice for the job. You had to be a real tough prick to run the Board of Estimate.” Gersony turned it down.

  His brief career interlude in city government was over. He hadn’t yet learned how to suffer politicians and their deal-making—how to observe and analyze, but
not always to condemn—often a necessity for getting things done. “New York City was the one part of the Third World where Bob Gersony failed,” observes Ann Siegel wryly. For years afterward, according to Flynn, Mayor Koch would ask wistfully about Gersony, and what he was up to.

  But having realized his limitations through the experience in New York City government, Gersony next called Fred Schieck and Ed Coy, Schieck’s boss in Guatemala, for another assignment in the Third World, where the challenges were in their own way less daunting. Coy was now head of USAID operations throughout the Western Hemisphere. In September 1979, he sent Gersony as his representative to the island of Dominica in the eastern Caribbean, where Hurricane David, a devastating Category 5 storm, had just left three-quarters of Dominica’s population of 75,000 homeless.

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  Dominica, the Windward Islands, the Lesser Antilles, 1979. Mountainous, hot, steamy, with tear-dripping humidity: lush with banana and grapefruit, some dark sand and rocky beaches, but without the white sand that attracts tourists, making Dominica back in the late 1970s different from many other places in the Caribbean; an island of earthern roads and picturesque, faded clapboard houses and shanties. There were political slogans on many a wall: “PJ Big Thief—Alliance Is the Answer,” a reference to former prime minister Patrick John. It was a place debilitated by smallness. The get-up-and-go crowd had already emigrated. Colonized by both the French and the British, English is spoken alongside Creole French and a bevy of hinterland dialects, themselves the product of isolation within separate highland valleys.

  “A Caribbean hurricane makes sounds like out of a horror movie,” recalled Sally Shelton-Colby, the U.S. ambassador to Barbados and the eastern Caribbean at the time Gersony was dispatched there, and someone with many years of living experience in the region. The thirty-five-year-old ambassador, who would later marry the CIA director William Colby, combined an elegant mien with a strong, albeit somewhat self-dramatizing character and sense of adventure. Sally was a staunch Democrat, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, but she was also a firm anti-communist, the moderate Democrat equivalent to Fred Schieck on the Republican side. Indeed, almost every boss Gersony would interact with over the coming decade until the collapse of the Berlin Wall would embody that sturdy, moderate national security consensus that no longer exists: the casualty of the end of the Cold War’s unifying tendency and failed interventions in the Middle East.

  As soon as the hurricane hit, Sally tried to get to Dominica from Barbados to make a damage assessment. An admiral at the U.S. Naval Station in Roosevelt Roads on Puerto Rico picked her up in his official plane and they flew to Melville Hall, the small airport on the northeastern coast of Dominica. Melville Hall functioned as the only entry point by air into the island, and the drive to the capital of Roseau, on Dominica’s southwestern coast, was long, treacherous, and mountainous. The hurricane had made the road impassable; nor was there electricity or water now on the island. The leaves on every tree had been hauled off. “Well man, me house mash down,” many a local said in sonorous Caribbean English. Sally located a missionary with a small plane willing to fly from Melville Hall to Roseau, since the U.S. military plane had to turn back. Without any lights as night fell, Sally arranged for the cabinet members of the island government to line up their official cars with their bright lights on by a sugarcane field outside the capital, in order for the pilot to land on a dirt strip. At Melville Hall, the missionary started the engine but it died. He tried a few more times until it kicked into gear. “The plane rose at the last minute before it hit a mountain. That’s just what you go through,” she sighs. The Foreign Service is like that, she seemed to say: crazy risks that become routine, which the public rarely appreciates or even knows about. And it is no less so in the Caribbean or Central America, whose very proximity to the United States obscures their often dangerous wild-and-woolly aspect.

  Now the hard stuff began: dealing with the new, thirty-six-year-old prime minister, Oliver James Seraphin, known as “Perry.” As Sally explains, “I was worried that the relief supplies we would be sending to Dominica would go to Perry’s supporters,” strengthening his grip on power. This mattered, since “Perry was a bit too close to the Marxist rulers of Grenada,” an island to the south of Dominica in the eastern Caribbean.

  “Perry was young, handsome, charismatic, and well aware of it,” Gersony recalls. “Perry wanted to let the Cubans in and follow Grenada’s Marxist template. But he had a problem. He needed the $5 million that the U.S. Congress had immediately appropriated for hurricane relief, a lot of money back then, especially for a small island. The hurricane was that crucial external event that could reshape regional politics. Everyone was aware that the right-wing Nicaraguan junta of [Anastasio] Somoza fell from power that year because of a train of events that began with his inadequate response to the earthquakes of 1972.”

  Gersony, who arrived on the island shortly after Sally had done her assessment, began to meet with Perry and explain the approach to aid that he had developed in Guatemala. In those days, it was not unusual to have a USAID contractor—someone not even a regular employee—negotiate with a prime minister of a small country. Contractors did not have the negative association that they developed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when the word became synonymous with “mercenaries.”

  “Perry always agreed to see me. He had a sidekick, an oddball evangelical hustler who clearly was angling for influence, and didn’t like my idea of promoting local credit unions to control the $5 million in aid money. Perry wanted the $5 million for himself to give away, so he would get the political credit for it. But that’s not how AID worked. We needed accountability.

  “Dominica,” Gersony goes on, “was like a small experiment in a crystal ball. It was perfect for using the money to pay the peasants to do road repairs, and then allow them to buy the roofs, nails, hurricane straps, and other materials at low prices with the money they earned. I told Perry the villagers would be proud to buy the relief materials, rather than get handouts. He, his evangelical buddy, and I began to have real screaming matches. But Sally held firm. The ambassador doesn’t give an inch, I thought.”

  Bob Gersony in Dominica in 1979.

  “I simply trusted Bob. He was thoroughly knowledgeable and professional,” Sally says.

  The State Department inspector general and the General Accounting Office would later certify that none of the $5 million eventually given to the credit unions was lost or misplaced. Says Gersony: “If you empower people, they won’t be corrupt. Through relief assistance we created a constituency that would later throw out a pro-Cuban populist. Humanitarian aid can be an incredibly powerful tool when done right.”

  Indeed, Perry Seraphin’s downfall soon after was tied to his disagreement with Gersony. At first the prime minister threatened to end the project. Then his supporters, along with an army unit he had mobilized, looted the large warehouse where much of the roofing and other relief supplies were thought to be stored, and distributed them freely about the island. The problem was that only defective, rusted supplies were kept in that particular warehouse, and so it became a public embarrassment for the prime minister. It was a factor in his losing the election the following year to Eugenia Charles.

  Whereas Perry Seraphin was prime minister of Dominica for only a year, Eugenia Charles, sixty-one at the time of her election, would remain in office for fifteen years. A student at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics, her politics were center-right. She was a tough, formidable, don’t-mess-with-me woman, who became known as the “Iron Lady of the Caribbean,” though one U.S. official remarked that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was “like a kitten” compared to Eugenia Charles. More crucially, Charles would provide President Ronald Reagan with the regional diplomatic cover he required for the 1983 invasion of Grenada and toppling of the Marxist regime there, which, in the imper
fect universe of foreign affairs, was easily done with few adverse side effects unlike earlier interventions in Iran and Guatemala.1

  So ended the Soviet and Cuban threat to the eastern Caribbean. American forces captured and deported from Grenada hundreds of Cubans, Soviets, East Germans, Libyans, Bulgarians, and North Koreans.2 “Now we simply neglect the region,” Sally Shelton-Colby laments. “Face it, our aid in the region was all about the Cold War. And some of these small, poor, and troubled islands might in the future be ripe for takeover by international criminal organizations,” as transfer points for narcotics and other contraband.

  Gersony’s firm stand on relief assistance being accountable and empowering had been a factor in the chain of events that led to the end of the communist power play in the eastern Caribbean. But in the midst of it all he had a breakdown. His first emotional-physical crisis had occurred after being threatened by Lucas Garcia in Guatemala. This time, going back and forth between Barbados and Dominica, and back and forth on the awful mountainous road between Melville Hall and the capital of Roseau—working grueling hours seven days a week, always obsessed with logistics and implementation, always fighting with Perry Seraphin—he collapsed unconscious at the USAID mission office in Bridgetown, Barbados. Four days later he was back at work. Tony Jackson, who had followed him from Guatemala to Dominica, backstopped for him in the interim.

  The overseas operations director worldwide for Oxfam, Michael Harris, who had himself visited Dominica following the hurricane, agreed to send Jackson there after Jackson told him he would be working for Gersony. “If anyone can do something about Dominica it’s Bob Gersony,” Harris told Jackson. Such was the thirty-four-year-old Gersony’s reputation by now. But Gersony himself did not internalize this. His two physical breakdowns would set a pattern of overwork tied to insecurity. He couldn’t relax without feeling guilty. And because of a sensitive stomach he would almost never drink alcohol, robbing him of another form of quiet release.