THE GOOD AMERICAN

For four decades, a daring American assessed trouble spots throughout the world.

Robert Gersony (b. 1945), the son of Central and Eastern European refugees, spent a productive, interesting career as a special consultant for the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the United Nations, conducting firsthand research on “virtually every war and disaster zone on earth.” Veteran journalist and author Kaplan, who met Gersony in Khartoum in 1985, draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with him, along with abundant additional sources, to create a vividly detailed chronicle of the courageous, challenging life of “the ultimate field worker.” Convinced that “evidence…rather than theories” must inform foreign policy, Gersony conducted long, intense interviews with more than 8,000 refugees, displaced persons, and humanitarian workers, exposing the reality of their experiences. "The most sensitive things they told me on their own,” Gersony said. Kaplan recounts Gersony’s work in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, from Guatemala in the 1970s to North Korea in 2002. Gersony was passionate about human rights, working long hours in dangerous, sometimes life-threatening conditions, and defiant against policy wonks. Much of American aid, he believed, “is a complete waste of money, since it is not integrated with a plan for governance or business development.” After the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, a new optimism arose about the state of the world, which Gersony did not share: “It was another example of Washington elites manufacturing a theory: a theory born with dramatic events in Central Europe that they mistakenly applied to the whole world.” His witnessing of “state failure, rule-of-law breakdowns, genocide, and long-standing ethno-nationalist conflict” sharply contrasted that worldview, but knowledge about the world, Kaplan learned, is gleaned now from consulting groups rather than the kind of research to which Gersony devoted his career.

A life story that reads like an action thriller.