The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian

I’ve never met Bob Gersony. That probably doesn’t seem strange to you. But it is to me.Gersony was a humanitarian, and “The Good American” is his story. It is not an epic story, despite the title. There was nothing epic about what Gersony did with his forty years. He did not achieve remarkable feats of policy – no peace deals; no Nobel Prizes; no nighttime marches of the unfortunate. No clandestine airfields at twilight or discoveries of mass graves. He did not spend fifteen years living in the Congolese camps or caring for those with severe mental deficiencies or running an orphanage of war-children. He is not Mother Theresa or Nelson Mandela.Bob Gersony did assessments for USAID; and some for State. That’s what we call them, the trips around the world to talk to residents of a refugee camp in the Sudan or of the slums above Rio in Brazil. There are a lot of assessment-takers; consultants – a cottage industry living in Vienna Virginia or Bethesda Maryland.I am not trying to denigrate Gersony, or Robert D. Kaplan’s book about him. On the contrary. Kaplan’s representation of Gersony made me think of a line in Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim”:“Time had passed indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead. It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron-grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulder-straps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those uncounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental successes.”As I said I never met Gersony, which is strange. We worked in many of the same places. The difference is the timing; Gersony from the 1970s to the early 2000s – while I started my career in 1999 till now. The sad thing is, as I said, the places are the same. Northern Uganda; Eastern Chad; Honduras; Nigeria; the Balkans. I’ve worked all these places. And I knew so many of the people that fill the pages of Kaplan’s book – but I knew them at the end. Andrew Natsios and Elliott Abrams – people who are the epic characters of the 1980s and 1990s – because that is when Gersony worked.Now the book itself – as I’ve said before it was not an epic story. But I think that was Kaplan’s point. There are of course those tales – even just these days with the fall of Kabul a thousand new stories were written (and yet to be penned – I was involved in a few). Stories of violence and espionage and terrorism and explosions. Kaplan wanted instead to highlight the importance of the steady goodness of an ordinary man. This is Kaplan’s hidden message in a book which – unlike his other works – drips with contempt and exhaustion at America’s modern State Department and USAID, institutions which no longer serve the purpose which they did a generation ago staffed by people who no longer ‘get it’.Gersony got it – and his tremendous value added was to take that common sense and help Washington’s elite to also understand. This, during the days when Washington listened – unlike the current crowd, who only lecture.

true story well told

The Good American, The Epic Life of Robert Gersony, recently published by Robert Kaplan, reads like a thriller. How native-New Yorker Gersony ended up spending seven years in the beautiful colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala and opening a language school, still in business 40 years later, is its own adventure. But the real meat of this books lies in how Gersony did what used to be the job of the Foreign Service and USAID and the UN aid agencies - go out into the field and talk with people to find out what is actually happening and what people really need after a natural or man-made disaster. As bureaucracies grow and journalists rely on soundbites, international organizations continue to provide aid often disconnected from real needs. Everyone wants to be based in Paris, but Gersony spent months in the field in Mozambique, Sarajevo, Sudan and Rwanda, among others, often sleeping on floors (and occasionally eating camel liver), patiently interviewing people. As a result, his information in some cases changed US policy. Gersony notes the book is not about him, but about the 8200 people he interviewed and the many American and international aid workers with whom he worked over 40+ years.Robert Kaplan is intimately acquainted with many of the areas where Gersony, and later his wife, Cindy Davis Gersony, worked and he provides clear and concise overviews of complicated situations. In a recent presentation, Gersony told the story of how Kaplan proposed the book. Gersony, a very private man, demurred: no one would want to read about him. Jokingly, Gersony said that if Kaplan could get a contract, then he would agree. Several weeks later Kaplan returned, contract in hand, and Gersony, a man of his word, had no choice. The result is this fascinating book.

Why might you be interested in a biography of a man you have never heard of? Let me tell you.Robert Gersony, a complicated man, spent his life investigating war zones, disaster areas and difficult policy choices on four continents. Almost all the time, he worked for the US government (a couple of his assignments were for the UN).Gersony developed a unique system of gathering information: he listened to people on the spot. Not ministers and professors: refugees, farmers, people who were being affected by US policies or the policies of their local government that the US would have to respond to. How could Thai pirates be stopped from attacking and robbing Vietnamese "boat people?" Which of two hostile factions in a civil war in Mozambique should the US support? He was sent very early to find out the truth about Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army before anyone knew much about it. He went to the China-North Korea border to find out from refugees whether US food aid was reaching the North Korean people (it was not--the army and police were getting the food).Gersony talked to each refugee for hours, using carefully selected local translators. Often when he talked to hundreds of people, the facts became clear.And as his State Department sponsors learned to trust him, his recommendations changed US policies over and over again, in small ways and large. Almost all improved those policies (Gersony was so convincing that he changed the mind of Sen. Jesse Helms on a matter that had been dear to the Foreign Relations Committee chairman--and Helms's was a mind that was hard to change).Robert Kaplan's life of Gersony is surprisingly good reading. There are lessons here for journalists and countless ones for aspiring diplomats. And one learns about a brave and admirable man who spent his life serving our country in almost-complete obscurity.

Si tratta di un libro straordinario scritto da un grandissimo giornalista come Robert D. Kaplan che ha saputo raccontare la vita do Bob Gersony, un uomo straordinario che con il suo coraggio e la sua determinazione ha salvato migliaia di persone, vittime dei conflitti ignorati o negati in tutto il mondo. Una storia epica, ricca di spunti e di storie inedite, che potrebbe diventare una formidabile serie televisiva! Libro decisamente consigliato, da non perdere!

Como todos los libros de Kaplan: ¡excelente!(Aún sería deseable un poco más barato)