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

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

1 " Reading Bernard Fall began my journey towards an understanding of what America could do in the world and what it could not do, based not on some lofty ideal of history, but on knowledge and empathy of the human terrain itself, about places and people as they actually were. “It is all about collecting information and insights from the field, so that we don’t operate with one eye closed. It is about searching out that vital insight about a place that any journalist or relief worker has, but which wonks and highbrow policymakers often don’t. "

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

2 " If the evidence did not exist right in front of him, it didn’t exist, period. And following from that would come his belief in the essential wisdom of the common person, who also knew the world only from the grassroots level in the most immediate, concrete way. "

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

3 " He simply trusted people at the bottom, like the plant managers in the Midwest—for whom economics were never abstract—and distrusted people at the top. "

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

4 " To him, refugees were people at the end of the chain of events that had begun with decisions made by those at the top and the beginning of the chain. "

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

5 " Gersony was to become the ultimate fieldworker: in continuous, tactile contact with the evidence. And he would let the evidence—rather than theories, of which he knew nothing—always drive his conclusions. — "

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

6 " Gersony was to become the ultimate fieldworker: in continuous, tactile contact with the evidence. And he would let the evidence—rather than theories, of which he knew nothing—always drive his conclusions. "

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

7 " Fall’s message was that nations lose wars because of incomplete ground-level intelligence of the most profound cultural variety, making them unable to grasp the mentality of the people they are trying to help or change or conquer, a mentality accumulated from thousands of years of history in a specific landscape. The Americans would lose in Vietnam just as the French had lost, Fall predicted, because the Americans were given to abstractions that obscured the cultural reality on the ground in Vietnam. "

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