Raymond Bonner, a former foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for the New York Times, is author of Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong. This article was published in partnership with ProPublica.

“An ambassador is a gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” It was an English poet, as well as diplomat, Sir Henry Wooten, who coined this aphorism, over four hundred years ago. Through the ages, many a diplomat—too many—has observed the maxim. Robert White was not one. White, who worked for seven presidents, served America by refusing to lie—holding firm even when pressured to sweep murder under the rug by the Reagan Administration—an act of principle and integrity that cost him his career.

White, who died in January at the age of 88, was sent by President Carter to El Salvador in 1980. As hard as it is to fathom today, at that time the tiny nation—White was fond of observing that it was possible to see the entire country from a helicopter at 9000 feet—was on the front burner of American foreign policy, as Syria, Iraq, ISIS, are today. The fear then was Communism. In neighboring Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had overthrown the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled and looted the country for decades, with American acquiescence.


Washington was now worried that El Salvador would be the next domino to fall into the Moscow-Havana-Managua orbit. The country had long been ruled by an alliance of the military and the oligarchy. With support from the country’s peasants, a leftist-revolution led by students was growing.

Carter tasked White with preventing a civil war by assembling a political center, something between the extremist right and revolutionary left. During White’s confirmation hearings, Senator Jacob Javits, the moderate Republican from New York, urged him to be more than a traditional ambassador. “You really have to be an activist and take a chance with your career,” Javits told White. He was and he did.

White was a rarity among diplomats. He not only spoke his mind, he spoke it on the record. During one briefing at the American embassy, after White, dressed in his diplomatic pin stripes, took his seat behind the microphones, the press officer explained the ground rules. “This is for background,” he began. White interrupted, “Hell, no—what I have to say is on the record! You can attribute to me.”

I arrived in El Salvador to report for the New York Times several months after White had taken up his post. He sought to wean me from calling him “Mr. Ambassador,” by responding, “Mr. Journalist.”

The son of Irish immigrants, White enlisted in the Navy when he was 17 and served in the Pacific during World War II; when the war was over, he worked for two years to raise the money to attend college, at St. Michael’s in Vermont. He then got a degree from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, before entering the foreign service—Eisenhower was president, John Foster Dulles secretary of state.

Twenty-five years later, President Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance turned to White. “Secretary Vance had chosen me specifically to go to El Salvador because I liked the human rights policy of the Carter Administration,” White told me last year. “I thought it gave us an opportunity to distance ourselves from dictators, which by definition, are unstable; and to shelter democracy, and allow the democratic elements in these dictatorships of that era to change.”

I interviewed White for a mini-documentary I was working on with RetroReport, the innovative online news organization that revisits and re-reports on old stories as a counterweight to sound-bit journalism. We talked for nearly two hours, and I came away thinking what a tragedy that no one had done an oral history with him. He still looked every inch the distinguished diplomat, dressed in a sport coat and tie; his gravelly baritone voice still had a trace of his New England roots, and his mind was as sharp as three decades earlier. He had not yet been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him.

White often clashed with Latin American dictators, from Paraguay’s Stroessner to Nicaragua’s Somoza—and with Washington. When he criticized the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet for his human rights abuses, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger issued a letter of reprimand; White threatened to resign; Kissinger withdrew it.

When he arrived in El Salvador, White faced a constant stream of atrocities. “Ten bullet-ridden bodies of people who have ‘disappeared’ are found daily on city streets or provincial highways, while the armed forces are increasingly attacking protest groups they describe as ‘subversive,’” the New York Times’ Alan Riding wrote in March 1980. A 27-year-old leftist politician and his 23-year-old Danish wife were picked up the National Police; their tortured bodies were later found by the roadside 40 miles from the capital. When workers went on strike at an American-owned electronics plant, security forces stormed the building, took three workers to a separate room, and shot them in the head. Soldiers killed at least 300 civilians, many women and children, as they were trying to cross the Rio Sumpul into the safety of Honduras. “There were so many vultures picking at the bodies in the water that it looked like a black carpet,” a priest said.

Not long after arriving in El Salvador, White sent Vance a “Preliminary Assessment of the Situation. The 27-page cable is reminiscent of George Kennan’s “long telegram”—which analyzed the political landscape in the Soviet Union in 1946 and set the containment policy that was to guide the United States during the Cold War—and it deserves to be accorded the same place and importance in history.

It was a highly classified “NoDis,” meaning that it was not to be sent to anyone who was not on the short recipient list. It was not declassified and released until 1994. Even then, it has been largely overlooked; I wasn’t aware of it until I interviewed White last year. I was struck at how accurate and prescient his analysis was—and, sadly, how it had been ignored in Washington.

“There is no stopping this revolution; no going back,”

White began. In a sentence, he explained why. “In El Salvador the rich and powerful have systematically defrauded the poor and denied 80 percent of the people any voice in the affairs of their country.”

The government’s security forces must “stop torturing and killing any youth between 14 and 25 because he may be involved with labor unions, church organizations, etc.,” White wrote. He added, “The daily total of dead, many among them teenagers bearing marks of brutal torture, result from right-wing terrorism.”

At the same time, he was fully aware of the threat from the left. “An extremist Communist take-over here, and by that I mean something just this side of the Pol Pot episode, is unfortunately a real possibility due to the intense hatred that has been created in his country among the masses by the insensitivity, blindness and brutality of the ruling elite.”

There was one thing White particularly wanted to be “well understood in Washington.” Yes, Cuba was providing training for some of the guerilla fighters and Russia was supplying some arms. But neither of these has “created this threat of violent revolution but rather decades of oppression and a studied refusal on the part of the elite to make any concessions to the masses.”

White outlined the “main players in this revolution.” They ranged from the “ultra-right,” to the “far left guerrilla groups,” as well as the army and included the Roman Catholic Church, which was led at the time by Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

Romero was the voice of the poor; his Sunday sermons were broadcast over radio, and peasants throughout Latin American tuned in. . White warned Washington in his cable that the archbishop might be the target of an “incident of terrorism.” Attending his first mass after presenting his credentials as ambassador, White heard the archbishop read from a letter he had sent President Carter calling for the cessation of military aid. The archbishop then turned to the Salvadoran military, and concluded the mass with a plea that rings through the ages. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”

The next day, Romero was celebrating a small mass for the mother of the owner of an independent newspaper, which had been bombed two weeks earlier, when a shot rang out. The bullet entered the left side of the archbishop’s chest, hit his heart and lodged in his lung.

White attended the funeral. His presence was a political statement, as much as a religious expression, applauded by the poor and peasants, condemned by the rich and military.

The Salvadoran military and some in Washington sought to blame the assassination on the left, but it was the work of a thirty-five year old former military officer, Roberto D’Aubuisson. Muscular, fit and charismatic, D’Aubuisson was the founder of a political party, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance—and ran death squads, which targeted students, union leaders and peasants. White, again not mincing his words, described him as a “psychopathic killer,” barred him from the embassy and instructed his staff not to meet with him.

White worked tirelessly to achieve a political settlement. But he only had nine months—until Ronald Regan was elected in November 1980. In sharp contrast to White, Reagan’s first ambassador to El Salvador, Deane Hinton, whose mission was to repair U.S. relations with the Salvadoran right, welcomed D’Aubuisson. Hinton developed an “almost father-son relationship” with him, one of Hinton’s aides told me at the time. “He thought he could channel him, push him along the democratic path, and theoretically curb his more violent tendencies. In the process, he created a monster.” (In February, Pope Francis declared Archbishop Romero a martyr, a step toward sainthood. D’Aubuisson died in 1992.)

Reagan’s election cheered those in El Salvador who had jeered White and President Carter for their human rights emphasis. “All my neighbors were delirious with joy,” White recalled, noting, of course, that the ambassador’s residence was in an upscale neighborhood. “There were fireworks.”

White had hoped to wean the civilians on the left from their military counterparts and bring them into negotiations with the government. Reagan’s election put paid to that effort. Three weeks after Reagan’s victory, on November 27th, Thanksgiving Day in Washington, heavily armed men stormed the archbishop’s legal aid office at San Jose High School, where the political leaders of the revolution were meeting. The head of the Democratic Revolutionary Front was Enrique Alvarez, a member of one of the country’s wealthy coffee-growing families, who saw the need for change in his country. Alvarez’s mutilated, bullet-ridden corpse, as well as those of four other political leftists, were found on a popular road, a clear message for others.

When White learned of the murders, he slumped in his chair. “Who am I going to talk to now?” he said; he had lost the hope for a political settlement. In another act designed to send a message, White went to the legal aid offices “to express my feeling of horror and repugnance for the unspeakable crime committed here.”

Reflecting how dramatically the policy in El Salvador was about to shift, Reagan’s principal foreign policy advisor Jeanne Kirkpatrick reacted to murders thusly: “I must say that I found myself thinking that it’s a reminder that people who live by the sword die by the sword.”

The Salvadoran military now believed it could kill with impunity, and immunity. On December 2, 1980, four American churchwomen—Roman Catholic nuns Maura Clarke, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, and a lay missionary, Jean Donovan—were seized at the San Salvador International Airport, taken to a remote spot, raped, shot in the back of the head and buried in a shallow grave. Photojournalist Susan Meiselas captured an iconic image of an anguished White at the dusty gravesite as the partially clad bodies were being pulled from the earth with ropes. White knew immediately that the military was responsible. “The bastards won’t get away with this,” he mumbled. But they almost did, with help from the Reagan Administration.

“The nuns were not just nuns,” Kirkpatrick said in response to this killing. “They were political activists. We ought to be a little more clear about this than we actually are,” she told a reporter for the Tampa Tribune. “They were political activists on behalf of the Frente [one of the leftist guerrilla organizations], and somebody who is using violence to oppose the Frente killed these nuns.” Asked if she thought the government had been involved, she said, “The answer is unequivocal. No, I don’t think the government was responsible.”

Kirkpatrick later denied making the statement. The reporter produced the tape.

Secretary of State Alexander Haig also sought to exonerate the military. “Perhaps the vehicle the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire,” he said in congressional testimony.

The Reagan Administration rejected White’s analysis that this was a homegrown revolution. “We believe that the government of El Salvador is on the front line in a battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere and eventually us,” President Reagan said. El Salvador was to be a symbol of American resolve, where the U.S. would show the Soviet Union it was still a power.

In his trademark pithy language, White mocked the policy: “Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, all the way up to the soft underbelly of Kansas.”

El Salvador was soon receiving $2 billion in foreign aid a year, most of it military, making it the third largest recipient of American largesse. Only the American embassies in Cairo and New Delhi had more personnel.

To carry out its policy, to keep the aid flowing, the Reagan Administration needed public support. The continuing human rights violations, and particularly the killing of the churchwomen undermined that.

Haig summoned White and told the ambassador he wanted him to send a cable saying the Salvadoran government was making progress in the investigation into the murders. White recalled what transpired. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. Secretary, that would not be possible because the Salvadoran military killed those women, and the idea that they’re going to investigate in a serious way their own crimes is simply an illusion.’”

Haig kept up the pressure. “Then I got a call from one of Haig’s aides, saying that, ‘the Secretary is anxiously awaiting,’ my telegram that would affirm that the Salvadoran military were conducting a serious investigation into who was responsible for the death of the nuns.” White said he couldn’t and wouldn’t. The aide replied, “All you’re doing, Bob, is creating problems for all of us.” He went on that White didn’t have to say there was a “serious” investigation. “You just have to say that something positive is happening.”

White stuck to his principles. “I will have no part of any cover-up,” he wrote in a cable back to Washington. “All the evidence we have, and that has been reported fully, is that the Salvadoran government has made no serious effort to investigate the killing of the murdered American churchwomen.”

White knew there could not be a serious investigation because two of the top Salvadoran military commanders, Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia and Col. Carlos Vides Casanova were complicit in the cover-up. (Casanova was later promoted to general and succeeded Garcia as minister of defense.)

That was the end for White. Conservatives had been gunning for White from the day of Reagan’s election.. The president-elect’s State Department transition team labeled White , and some other ambassadors, as “social reformers,” and said he should be replaced immediately.

After the transition team’s paper became public—it was leaked to the New York Times—White called me, and Christopher Dickey of the Washington Post, to the embassy for a briefing. He was visibly angry and characteristically blunt. “When civil war breaks out in this country, I hope they get their chance to serve,” he said. On the record.

Less than two weeks after being sworn in as secretary of state, Haig delivered the coup de grace, personally dismissing White from the foreign service. White was one of the “distinguished victims” of Washington’s ideological battles, in the class with George Kennan, said Senator Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island.

White went out with pride, “I regard it as an honor to join a small group of officers who have gone out of the service because they refused to betray their principles.”

The civil war White had feared raged for another decade. Thousands of Salvadorans were killed, most by the Salvadoran military and death squads, and more than a million were forced to flee the country, thousands risking their lives to cross the Rio Grande. Washington looked the other way, the Reagan Administration requesting, and Congress continuing to send, military aid.

In December 1981, a year to the month after the killing of the American churchwomen, a Salvadoran military battalion, which had been trained by the American army, carried out one of the worst massacres in Latin American history. With helicopter gunships circling overhead, soldiers killed more than 700 peasants in the villages around El Mozote. Escorted by guerrilla fighters , I arrived at the massacre site shortly after, with photojournalist Susan Meiselas; Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post arrived a few days later. The victims included a three-day old baby and a seventy-year old grandmother; Rufina Amaya’s blind husband and three daughters (ages three, five and eight months) were killed; soldiers raped Chona Diaz and her twelve-year-old daughter; villagers were corralled into a church and executed.

A few days after the massacre, President Reagan certified that the Salvadoran government “is making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights,” and that it “is achieving substantial control over elements of its own armed forces, so as to bring an end to the indiscriminate torture and murder of Salvadoran citizens.”

The violence continued. In November of 1989, soldiers attacked the Central American University and murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her 15-year-old daughter. A bullet was fired into a portrait of Archbishop Romero. It was “the final outburst of the delirium that had infected the armed forces and the innermost recesses of certain government circles,” wrote the UN Commission on Truth for El Salvador.

In 1992, the largest leftist revolutionary organization, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), and the government, which was headed by the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (NRA), signed a peace agreement, which was supported by the Bush Administration. And since then, El Salvador has had several democratically elected presidents, which is what White had sought to achieve. The current president is a former revolutionary leader, Salvador Sanchez Ceren. “I know him,” White told me. “He’s a former high school teacher. And he’s a very fine man.”

Robert White’s legacy as a diplomat willing to speak truth to power, in a sense, was further secured when the Obama Administration sought to deport Gen. Garcia and Gen. Casanova, who in the 1990s were allowed into the United States and were living well in Florida. White testified in each man’s deportation hearing, linking them to torture, killings and other human rights abuses. The judges found that the men should be deported, and White’s testimony figures heavily in their opinions, much as he figures honorably in the history of American diplomacy.