Library Articles of Interest

I had my first brush with political instability at age 21, while I was studying at the London School of Economics on a Rotary scholarship. At the end of a spring-break trip to Greece in April 1967, I discovered, on the day before my flight back to school, that the military had imposed a strict curfew and shut down the Athens airport. As I raced back to my hotel to avoid arrest, I saw army tanks moving into Syntagma Square and surrounding the parliament building. “The colonels” – a nasty junta with an ugly agenda – were taking power and overthrowing the rather ineffective King Constantine II and the parliamentary government over which he presided.

From the vantage point of a tourist, a coup d’etat can be chillingly quiet, almost banal. The personal inconvenience was minor: After a dramatic extra day of vacation, I took one of the first flights out. But I still remember the feeling that if things went wrong, I could become one of those “innocent victims” we have all read about, instead of a mere witness to history.

Less than a year later, as a young correspondent in Paris for United Press International, I occasionally reported on the news conferences of various exiled Greek politicians, who were living exceptionally well while they planned their imminent return to restore democracy. They seemed cynical and opportunistic, and because of my unusual personal connection to the story, I felt skeptical of their motives and ambitions. In the end, it took seven years until the colonels were swept from power (in part because of the covert support they enjoyed from the United States).

But the real action for me, in Paris, took place in the streets, when day after day and night after night during the spring of 1968, I covered the worker-student revolt that improbably, but fatally, weakened the authority of French President Charles de Gaulle. Daily life was turned upside down and inside out, as demonstrations and riots – spawned by national boredom, generalized discontent, and young people’s fear of the future – brought an entire nation to a halt.

I sent written reports by teletype and fed radio spots over the phone late at night from friends’ apartments in the war zone on the Left Bank, complete with chilling European police and ambulance sirens, but these could scarcely keep up with the startling developments. In a way, the events of that spring were the obverse of what I had encountered in Greece, and it was thrilling to be there. A stodgy old order was crashing down; there seemed to be few, if any, collateral victims; and this was change you hoped you could believe in.

It was all pretty heady for a boy from a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, who was brought up to believe that America was exceptional, all government officials at every level trustworthy, good easily distinguishable from evil, and political transition something that occurred everywhere in a thoughtful and orderly fashion and for reasons that were readily understood.

The tumultuous events of the late ʼ60s and early ʼ 70s, of course, shook up lives around the world and upended almost everyone’s assumptions about the future. Heroic political figures were assassinated. A brutal and unpopular war in Vietnam scarred an entire generation, and the Pentagon Papers revealed that both Democratic and Republican administrations had systematically lied to the American public about events in Southeast Asia for a quarter of a century. The bundle of scandals that followed, and came to be known as “Watergate,” seemed sure to usher in an era of reform.

It would be comforting to believe, more than four decades later, that these dramatic episodes provided educated people around the globe with useful and durable lessons about how to analyze the big questions facing humanity, and how to manage a calm path through the inevitable chaos that surrounds us. Surely, we now know a bad actor when we see one, and we can easily monitor the pragmatic tendency of well-intentioned Western governments to get in bed with the worst of them. And by now, we certainly have developed road maps for doing good in the world and for leaving our earth, each of us, in better condition than we found it.

Not so fast. Long experience has taught me to doubt my own and others’ capacity to judge wisely the players who stride across the international stage, and to be humble about how much we can improve people’s lives from a distance. It is the former – the quandary over whose noble words to trust – that makes the latter so difficult.

I do not mean to suggest that nothing is ever black and white. It was crystal clear that those Greek colonels who seized power in 1967 were up to no good. But the mainstream politicians who both preceded and followed them have hardly distinguished themselves in their management of the world’s oldest democracy and its economy. And that popular uprising in France in 1968 – authentic, boisterous, and timely though it may have been – ultimately did more to reveal flaws in the system than to repair them.

All these years later, discouragingly, it is still difficult to come up with reliable guidelines for processing and evaluating political change as it occurs. The inability to sustain faith in individual actors can be particularly disillusioning. Take the one-time South Korean dissident Kim Dae-jung. Having endured years of imprisonment and escaped various assassination attempts, Kim, a philosopher and a calligrapher on the side, laid claim to being his country’s greatest progressive hope – surely purer and more promising than the mere politicians who were his rivals. Indeed, while living in exile in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he rallied optimistic overseas Koreans to his cause, encouraged equally by his fiery speeches and his wife’s gentle poetry.

I followed Kim closely and got to know him well, I thought. On the eve of his bold return to Seoul from exile in 1985, I published an article in the New York Times Magazine telling his story. For the journey, he was accompanied by a large delegation of American human rights activists, intent on safeguarding him from assassination on the tarmac, the fate that had met his Philippine counterpart and hero, Benigno Aquino. The whole world was watching, and he settled back in safely. Twelve years later, Kim was elected president. He now had the opportunity to push his policy of greater engagement with North Korea, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. But before long, he emerged as yet another flawed and ineffective leader. His administration faced accusations of bribing the communist regime, and two of his sons went to prison for corruption.

Africa, as it struggles to deal with the legacy of colonialism and the imperative of development, has provided a rich source of promising leaders who at first inspire but ultimately disappoint, and sometimes horrify. During the long struggle to transform Rhodesia, a white minority-ruled redoubt, into black majority-ruled Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe had a reputation as an idealist – driven by principles rather than greed. He was widely admired and aided by a number of Western governments. Now in his fourth decade in power, however, Mugabe has devastated his country’s agricultural sector by seizing and breaking up productive farms, has enriched himself and his entourage at the expense of the national economy, and has squelched virtually all opposition.

During my two-year tenure as director of the Voice of America (VOA) at the end of the Clinton administration, I met many promising African leaders on the rise. Isaias Afewerki, a hero of the decades-long Eritrean war for independence from Ethiopia, was perhaps the most charming of all my visitors at VOA; he talked a good line about his party’s democratic aspirations. But back at home, he failed to hold elections when they were due and imprisoned people for opposing his regime. The organization Reporters Without Borders has estimated that Eritrea’s press, under Afewerki, is one of the least free in the world, on par with North Korea’s.

It should come as no surprise that charming rulers can be vicious, that admirable opposition figures can prove ineffective when they come to power, and that disappointment is often more common than inspiration in a tough and topsy-turvy world that becomes ever more complicated. Or that we can be naive.

Long after we have overcome our often misplaced faith in particular regimes or their leaders, many of us are driven to look for ways to do our own good in the world. This is an instinct that is familiar to Rotarians. There are human rights and social justice initiatives to support, of course, but understandably, we may not always approve of every position they take or how they use their resources.

At Goucher College, a small liberal arts institution north of Baltimore where I have served as president since 2001, we decided a few years ago that it was time to demonstrate our solidarity with endangered professors the world over, so many of whom are unfairly buffeted by political chaos and military conflict. In 2008, we signed up with the Scholar Rescue Fund, a project of the Institute of International Education, to bring to campus an exiled linguist from Rwanda, Leopold Munyakazi. Returning home would endanger his life, we learned. He would teach French for us, and we would, as a community, hope to learn many other things from him.

Not least, this endeavor would make us feel righteous. For here was a clear-cut laboratory of right versus wrong – Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands of members of the once-privileged minority Tutsi tribe had been massacred by the majority Hutu rulers in 1994, in one of the best-documented genocides of recent history. No one unwelcome back in Rwanda could be all bad, we figured. But oh, how complicated this story would become, when only a few months after his arrival, television producers came to our campus to denounce Munyakazi as a war criminal who had allegedly participated in the genocide. After much soul-searching, we suspended him.

The most frustrating element of the experience was our utter inability to establish the facts of the case. To the date of this writing (February 2013), I do not know whether we sheltered a heroic activist-scholar or a genocidaire, as the current Rwandan government claims. And the American immigration bureaucracy, faced with the perplexing question of whether to grant Munyakazi political asylum, has done no better; his appeal is still pending. Meanwhile, Goucher was accused, alternately, of inadequately screening those we selected to influence young minds, or of joining in the persecution of a noble figure by assuming his guilt until he could prove his innocence. Neither set of accusers appeared to have any interest in dialogue with the other.

For several years now, I have struggled with the moral ambiguities of this affair as my personal metaphor for the bigger issues: How can an individual – or an association, or a country, or an alliance – navigate the murky, gray areas while trying to do good in the world? Is it even possible to do good anymore without also inflicting, or being accused of, harm? Are compromises of principle unavoidable? I do not have easy answers, but I believe one must keep trying to figure this out. The risk of naiveté seems to me far preferable to the abyss of cynicism.