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Ambassador John Gunther Dean, who passed away on June 6 at the age of 93, was a unique American diplomat who believed in diplomacy as the way to solve complex real-world problems.
It was this activism that he brought to India in 1985, his last and arguably most important posting, for which he arrived armed with a formidable bio, having served as U.S. envoy in a number of conflict zones. India was different, more challenging.
For nearly fifteen years, India-U.S. ties had been frigid, starting with the negative American position on the 1971 war. Though normalisation had begun earlier, it was Dean’s responsibility to restore the ties. It was not an easy task as the State Department remained sceptical of India and Indian bureaucracy was still rooted in the non-alignment era. Months after reaching Delhi, Dean achieved the unthinkable by striking a personal friendship with none other than Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. During the next four years, the U.S. repeatedly found itself in the midst of controversies such as spy scandals, but on each of those occasions, the diplomat was able to maintain bilateral ties thanks to the close personal rapport that he struck with the political leadership. The access granted by the Indian PM to the U.S. envoy was unprecedented and Rajiv Gandhi often consulted Dean for personal matters, like his children’s education.
Dean used his proximity to the Indian political leadership and the Reagan White House to bring the two countries closer on strategic affairs like high-tech collaboration and regional management. The ‘quantum leap’ in this collaboration came on November 13, 1985, when Rajiv Gandhi set up a team of officials in his office to coordinate high-tech exchanges with the U.S. ambassador.
“I told the U.S. government that the Indians are smart. You have to be with them and help them get whatever technology they want. Otherwise they will get it from somewhere else and we will end up losing India again,” Dean once said to me, explaining his support for greater India-U.S. trade exchange. “We protested when Rajiv Gandhi went for the nuclear submarine, but look, finally, they did get what they wanted and by the 21 st Century they were on the way to build a nuclear submarine,” he would argue. In his communications to the U.S. administration, Dean came across as passionately pro-India and underlined that denying technology to India was not going to deter New Delhi from pursuing what it required.
Dean’s life needs to be celebrated as he was a voice of dissent in diplomacy who spoke truth to power in all the key conflict zones of the world.
On January 22, 1987, Dean wrote to Rajiv Gandhi saying that the U.S. had invested in around 1,100 projects in India: “Most of the joint ventures were carried out since your taking over the helm of the Indian government,” Dean told Rajiv.
Dean however received no credit for having paved the way for high-tech collaboration between India and the U.S., as that sphere was eclipsed by other concurrent developments. By the end of 1987, differences arose over Pakistan’s nuclear plans and the future of Afghanistan. India had worked with the U.S. for a peace plan in Afghanistan, but at the close of the Cold War the U.S. felt Iran was the real threat and misguidedly assessed the extremist factions of the Mujahideen as an effective counter to the Iranian government. As the U.S. and India disagreed on the future of Afghanistan, Rajiv Gandhi went ahead and tried to strengthen the government of President Najibullah, thereby escalating the crisis.
That the peace plan for Afghanistan did not succeed was a lasting regret in Dean’s life. However, it is to his credit that the “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led” peace process that is currently being attempted is essentially the same process that he had championed along with Rajiv Gandhi and Najibullah. Dean will find significant mention in the narrative of the Afghan peace process — it remains the only peace plan so far in the country — as he was one of its co-creators.
Dean worked with equal zeal in all his postings. In Cambodia, he was the last U.S. ambassador before the fall of the country to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Dean was immortalised when he was showcased on the cover of Newsweek magazine as he departed the country, depicted with the U.S. flag folded in a triangle.
In Laos, he tried his best to end the civil war and in Lebanon he actively tried to stop the civil war that had erupted in 1975. He came under rocket attacks and was nearly assassinated in Beirut, which led to a protracted quarrel between him and several Middle Eastern players including Israel. Born to Jewish parents in Germany, John Gunther Dean left Europe and built a new life in the U.S., where he rose through the ranks of the foreign affairs corridors of post–World War II United States. Diplomacy in that period involved dealing with multiple conflicts in Asia, Africa and West Asia. Dean’s style of engaging political leadership was shaped by his continuous service in conflict zones.
A career full of drama ended in high drama when Dean rebelled against the U.S. bureaucracy, which he believed had compromised on Afghanistan and undermined prospects of peace in South Asia. After the aircrash that killed General Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan, Dean asked ‘Who killed Zia?’ and flew to Washington DC to confront the Secretary of State George Schultz. The administration responded with a vengeance against this act of rebellion by a senior diplomat since it had the potential to scuttle the George H.W. Bush’s U.S. Presidential bid. Dean wanted to tell the people of the country that their government did not quite win the Cold War as much as it sowed the seeds for more war. The government froze his clearances and declared him mentally deranged. A heartbroken Dean resigned and settled in Paris, where he worked for years as a top-level corporate consultant. Over the years, Dean recovered from the traumatic experience and put together a massive archive of diplomatic documents that he donated to the U.S. government.
As Dean was buried on June 11 near the French Pyrenees, I recalled a sentence that he once spoke to me: “I am glad that at least the Indians remember me even now for all that I tried to do.” Dean’s life needs to be celebrated as he was a voice of dissent in diplomacy who spoke truth to power in all the key conflict zones of the world.
