Back in the eighties I used to lead delegations to Central America . Usually they were mainly for US
This was during the days when the Reagan Administration was
supporting the rebels against the government in Nicaragua
and the government against the rebels in El Salvador US
On one of my early trips someone recommended that I write
Ted Kennedy's office and ask him if he would send along a letter of safe
passage, just in case we got in a difficult--that is, dangerous--situation. I
hadn't thought about that before, but I wrote to him about it, and a few weeks later I got a
personal letter from the Senator written "to whom it may concern,"
that Stan Duncan was a big deal and was traveling under his guidance and that I
should be taken care of and treated with respect etc. It was great.
Every year after that, just before my trip I would write him
again and every year dutifully he would compose a similar letter. We never met,
but we had a funny relationship. I think I was his pet project, the guy he would write
the annual letter for, and he always asked how I was doing and how the trips
went. I'd always write back saying the trip was fine and all was well, but
never much more than that. He was, after all, Edward Moore Kennedy, the senior
United States Senator from Massachusetts , and
I was just some kid from Oklahoma
I seldom actually needed the letters, but now and then it
felt good to have one with me just in case. I would take it out and show to an official
who was getting a little suspicious about our intentions. We were there usually
as a church group, and that should have been safe enough, but occasionally we traveled
into an area that we weren't certain about. It was important to me to take my
delegations "behind the scenes" in some of these areas to help them
get a real look at what was happening, because our tax dollars were paying for
much of the carnage across the region. And the governments of many of those
countries, especially El Salvador
and Guatemala
There was one time, however--it was March, 1988. I was up in
the Suchitoto region of northern El Salvador El
Salvador
We were visiting villages that had been the scenes of bloody
massacres by the Salvadoran military. We reached the region by pickup, foot,
and hiding under bags of grain on a supply boat going up a river. We got some
good interviews, notes, and pictures, and I was pleased about that, but on the
way back government troops stopped our bus and took us in. They confiscated all
of our bags (which included all of our documentation) and destroyed everything.
And they kept all of us in jail for three days. I don't know about the
others--we were in different quarters--but I was terrified. The guards working
with me grilled me day after day about why I was there and what I was doing and
who I worked for. I couldn't just say that I was there documenting their own
human rights abuses, so I continued my line about doing economic development
research.
Part of my work actually was researching development work in
villages that were being repopulated by people who had fled the killing for Honduras
Finally after my third day someone arrived who could speak
English. He asked me all of the same questions all over again with an
increasingly impatient, angry tone. This time, since he could read, I hauled
out Kennedy's letter. He read it silently several times. Then he slammed his
hand on the table, tore it in half, and threw it to the ground. He said that
this was nothing, it means nothing, it was irrelevant to their questing, and
they still needed to know the truth about why I was there or I would never go
home.
He turned and walked out of the room and left me alone. I
picked up the pieces of the letter and started to put them back into my backpack,
but before I could the door opened again and the guards came in and escorted me
out of the compound and, without a word, pushed me into the street. Moments
later, while still standing there wondering what had happened, my companions were
pushed out the same door.
After I got home I was exhilarated and relieved and I told the story many times to friends
and family, but one person I never told it to was Teddy Kennedy. I have never
written him to thank him for saving our lives.
It's true that he may not have. It's possible that the timing was just right and we would
eventually have been set free anyway. On the other hand, you never know. Our situation
looked pretty grim for a while and who knows how many days would have gone by?
Each day the guards were growing angrier at our silence about why we were there
and what we were really up to.
There's a real chance that none of us would have made it
home had it not been for that yearly letter that Kennedy sent with me, saying (impossibly)
that I was important and that I was to be taken care of and treated with
respect, with the implied threat that if I was not, then there would have hell
to pay from the Senator’s office.
I never thanked him for that and I never actually even met him. I never called up or
wrote or dropped by, and never told him that I might not be alive today had it
not been for his help. Eventually I moved back to the United States and to Boston
Except that maybe in an improbable, unlikely, and slightly
impossible way, it is actually slightly possible that the big ball of life and
fire and laughter and compassion and humor and drive and strength that he was
for so many years might still be with us in another way and in another realm.
Who knows? And if that is so, and if he is perhaps mysteriously or spiritually
or cosmically listening in, then perhaps it is time to finally say thanks.
I never did that when you were alive, Teddy. I never thought
about it until you were no longer alive. But the truth is, I may well be one of
the hundreds of thousands of people across the country and the world whom you
helped over the years in simple and easy, and sometimes heavy and profound
ways. I wish I had said it earlier, but at least I'm saying it now. I might not
be able to be here writing this had it not been for you. Thank you. Thank you a
lot.
