The Good American by Robert D. Kaplan

Author:Robert D. Kaplan [Kaplan, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players, which reminded Gersony of a critical memory from Nicaragua.

“Yes,” Jaentschke answered.

“I don’t know why, but I had a firm instinct that I could have faith in this man,” Gersony says.

Gersony returned to Managua the next day and recommended to Ballantyne a labor-intensive transportation infrastructure program to go along with a reforestation project to plant eight million trees. There would also be the purchase of twenty thousand machetes to clear the bush—and put even more people to work—as well as the importation from Colombia of cica-ocho rice seed for planting.

“The international community is still dividing up aid among the warring groups,” he told Ballantyne. “With my plan, everyone who wants a job will get one, reducing criminality and repairing the underlying causes of dissent.”

Ballantyne hired Gersony for six months to start the project, and Gersony promptly hired Jaentschke to be his foreman. The $5 million project was all done on a handshake. Only someone as self-assured and charismatic as Janet Ballantyne could have pulled it off. It would have been altogether impossible to do in today’s Washington.

The six months would stretch into four years, with Tony Jackson soon brought in as Gersony and Jaentschke’s assistant. Tony settled into a wooden Miskito house on stilts in Puerto Cabezas, where he worked together with a relief worker for MSF-Holland, Rose-marie de Loor, with whom he would fall in love and adopt two malnourished children. Every visiting international journalist wanted to meet and be briefed by Tony, partly on account of his charming theatrical manner and British accent.7

Gersony, as usual, stayed in the background. Ballantyne shrewdly got Cindy Davis a job helping in the demobilization of the contras, so that Gersony would be, for personal reasons, stuck in the country. Cindy, fresh from studying in Antigua, Guatemala, now spoke passable Spanish. Bob and Cindy would later be married on Halloween 1992, at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center, with Janet Ballantyne in attendance, presiding as the virtual godmother of the festivities.

In effect, Violeta Chamorro, Nicaragua’s new leader, had subcontracted the eastern half of her country to Janet Ballantyne, who in turn subcontracted it to Bob Gersony, who then further subcontracted it to Rodolfo Jaentschke and Tony Jackson. Chamorro and Ballantyne had instantly liked each other, and Ballantyne had instantly liked Gersony. With only a small overhead in emergency relief, crime dramatically decreased and commerce blossomed in eastern Nicaragua while Gersony was there. Thanks to Tony and Jaentschke, everything was accounted for with receipts. By the end of the project, Tony would become Jaentschke’s virtual factotum, as though they were brothers in the womb.

The project, which employed over three thousand people, received the highest USAID audit rating: “no findings, no recommendations.”

By the time the project was completed four years later, 500 miles of road would be repaired with picks and shovels, and 411 wooden bridges would either be built from scratch or rebuilt using eight-foot saws. Gersony forbade chain saws, which encourage clear-cutting and would have led to fewer people being employed.

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