DEATH & LIES IN EL SALVADOR : The ambassador's tale - Robert White - Interview

Commonweal, Oct 26, 2001 by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

By the time Ambassador Robert White was posted to El Salvador in 1980, he knew full well that politics could be a deadly affair. At age seventeen, he had joined the World War II Navy, and then served in the Pacific. As ambassador to Paraguay in the late 1970s and, earlier, as a Foreign Service officer in several of Latin America's similarly unsavory dictatorships, he had confronted human-rights abuses, violence, even murder. In El Salvador itself, more than nine thousand people were killed in the year he arrived. But after December 4, when he witnessed the disinterment of four American women murdered by Salvadoran soldiers, his life would never be the same.

Two of the women, Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, had spent the night of December 1 as the guests of MaryAnn and Robert White at the embassy. White didn't necessarily agree with the criticism of U.S. policy that he heard that evening from Jean Donovan, but he was not going to stand by and let Salvador's brutal death squads and their American apologists get away with this atrocity. The experience of December 4 would lead him on an unexpected journey from successful American diplomat to candid critic of U.S. foreign policy.

That journey continues. Last October, White testified in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, about conditions in El Salvador during his time as ambassador. His testimony was part of the evidence brought against General Carlos Vides Casanova and General Jose Guillermo Garcia, Salvadoran military officers now retired and living in Florida. Under the Torture Victim Protection Act, the two were charged in an unsuccessful civil suit with command responsibility for the abduction, rape, and murder of the four American churchwomen. The plaintiffs were the families of the victims, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan. Photos taken two days after the killings show White, fists clenched at his side, turning from the shallow grave; he is quoted in news accounts saying, "This time the bastards won't get away with it....The bastards won't get away with it."

But, they--the colonels, the military, the police, and the oligarchy of El Salvador--did get away with it. Although six National Guardsmen were convicted of the murders in 1984, no one believes they acted independently. Garcia and Vides Casanova, who had tolerated and encouraged those abuses, retained power in El Salvador with the blessings and financial support of the U.S. government and are still fending off lawsuits in the United States. By contrast, Ambassador White, who had flagged the abuses of the military and refused to acquiesce in U.S. military intervention, was forced from the State Department in 1981.

Sitting in his Washington office at the Center for International Policy (CIP) in the spring of 2001, White summons that past, those people and events, with virtually instantaneous recall. A memory for names, faces, conversations, and policy details is among the prized attributes of the effective diplomat. At age seventy-five, White skillfully deploys that asset in recalling the past as well as offering a quick analysis of current U.S. policy in Colombia and Cuba. His light blue eyes are hooded as he remembers the ins and outs of his diplomatic posts in Nicaragua and at the Organization of American States, in Paraguay and El Salvador, and run-ins with Washington powerhouses Jesse Helms and Henry Kissinger. Those eyes open in a steady gaze as he delivers a pithy conclusion or a brief story: "When I was a young officer flying to Latin America, I sat next to Juan de Onis, the New York Times reporter. He asked me who I was and where I was going. I told him I was in the Foreign Service on my way to a new post. He looked at me and said, everyone knows they send the dregs of the department down there. And I said I hear the same thing about the New York Times. We became fast friends."

The former ambassador has described his twenty-five-year Foreign Service career as "failing upwards." "I was fired by the Nixon White House for opposing politicization of the Peace Corps, reprimanded by Henry Kissinger for speaking out on human rights, and finally, definitely dismissed by Alexander Haig for opposing a military solution in El Salvador." A nice conceit, but like many Irish-American Catholics after World War II, White's whole life could be said to have "failed upwards." He was born September 21, 1926, and grew up, the oldest of five, in Melrose, a working-class town near Boston. Melrose was overwhelmingly Protestant, which, White quips, kept you Catholic. He also recalls in lively detail a strong mother, a tight-knit family, a good parish with able priests, and a friend, David Rice, who shared a love of reading and a penchant for debating the truths of Catholicism. Sociologists often refer to White's generation as pre-Vatican II Catholics. He is certainly among those who embraced the changes the council brought to the church and its stance toward the world in the 1960s. Nonetheless, he seems to retain all of the instincts of a sturdy pre-conciliar faith.