Robert Kaplan’s new book, The Good American, takes as its epigraph V.S. Naipaul’s observation that ‘Pessimism… can drive men on to do wonders.’ It’s tempting to remark that this dry aphorism is as true about Kaplan’s life and work as it is of his subject, the humanitarian Robert Gersony. But in both cases this would be, if not exactly wrong, then incomplete.
Robert Gersony is a man who indeed did wonders. The son of Holocaust survivors, he dropped out of high school, earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam and then, Kaplan writes, ‘spent 40 years interviewing… over 8,000 refugees, displaced persons, and humanitarian workers in virtually every war and disaster zone on earth’. The results were the ‘Gersony reports’, legendary for their granular detail and on-the-ground reporting, which he wrote for the various arms of the US government (and UN and others) that contracted with him over the years.
Gersony, Kaplan writes, was ‘God’s own witness’. He made a difference. On more than one occasion he helped change foreign policy: his admirers included former secretary of state George Shultz. The US government listened to Gersony because he placed his commitment to human rights ‘within the framework of national interest’. They listened because he spoke their language, and because when it mattered he was there. Across scores of countries and over decades, you would find him: quiet, thoughtful and always, always taking notes (he never used a tape recorder). He understood two things above all: that truth lies ‘in the field, not in Washington’ and that ‘geography and culture are the beginning of all knowledge’.
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