Author’s Note: The Technician is about Orlando Letelier and Michael Townley, but the choices they made didn’t just change history, they also impacted their families. Here is my interpretation of a real story told to me by Orlando’s eldest son, Cristian Letelier.

On the morning of September 11, 1973, Cristian Letelier was a teenager in Santiago, waking up from a night of pool and beers with his cousin. His father, Orlando Letelier, the Minister of Defense, shouted, “The chauffeur is here, but where’s my bodyguard?”

His mother, Isabel, told her husband that the bodyguard had called in sick.

When the phone rang, it was the President. Salvador Allende said that the military coup they’d feared was underway. Orlando offered to be by his side in the presidential palace, but Allende told him that a minister must be in his ministry “to the end.”

Orlando threw on a jacket and sped downtown to the Ministry of Defense, not knowing if he would ever come home—or survive the day.

A few months earlier, Cristian and his three brothers had been living on Embassy Row near the White House, playing high school football and living privileged lives. They had lived near Washington (the youngest was born in Maryland) for over a decade; and had a quaint family ranch near the Shenandoah River where they could escape to rest.

Now, standing on their balcony, the Leteliers could hear fighter jets roar overhead, dropping bombs on the presidential palace just a few blocks away.

Radio reports said that the three branches of the military and the police had besieged the presidential palace and were pounding it with missiles and artillery. A spokesperson for the junta said that all government officials, including ministers, must turn themselves in to the Ministry of Defense by 4:30 PM or face “consequences easy to foresee.”

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Then came President Allende’s final radio address thanking the people of Chile for the opportunity to be their President. He warned not to take up arms against the junta—the people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. Later that night, the Leteliers and the rest of Chile learned that Salvador Allende had taken his own life.

Isabel immediately took charge and must have called everyone she could to find out what had happened to her husband, but there were no answers. None of the other ministers’ wives knew where their husbands were, and it seemed like they had all been detained, or possibly worse.

The next day, Isabel marched to the Ministry of Defense with one of the other wives. Somehow they made it through the military barricade, likely because they knew all the soldiers, and snuck up the stairs to the fourth floor, where the two women confronted the leader of the junta, Augusto Pinochet.

“Where are our husbands?”

Pinochet said they could return the next day, but when they did, the general refused to look them in the eye and just shouted and blamed the military coup on Salvador Allende.

Not long after, Isabel Letelier was placed under house arrest.

Finally, the family got a tip from a soldier’s wife that Orlando was being held at the Military Academy—the same place where he had graduated high school. Then came months of agonizing silence.

Not long after the coup, Cristian and his brother Francisco were out on the balcony when soldiers started shelling a museum across the street. Some “freedom fighters” had holed up inside, and at one point, Cristian pulled his little brother to the ground as a stray bullet ricocheted above their heads.

More than once Cristian was pulled out of a public bus and asked to show his identification. When they realized his last name was Letelier, they’d pull him aside and make a few calls. Realizing he was just a kid, the soldiers would eventually release him.

On the way to school one day, Cristian and his brothers crossed a bridge where they spotted dead bodies tossed on the banks of the river. “Birds were picking at their intestines.” Cristian told his younger brothers to look away.

And then one day a priest visited the family carrying five black stones. They were small and shaped like teardrops, the kind you might find along the shore near one of the volcanoes in southern Chile.

Each stone had a single letter on the front, and they soon figured out there was one for each of the four sons, and one for Isabel.

Cristian stared at the deep, sculptural C carved into the stone:

He then flipped it over and saw, scratched in thin strokes:

It was sent to him by S-26 in 1973 from Isla Dawson. Dawson was an island on the frozen southern tip of the continent, where political prisoners were known to have been taken. His father had signed the stones, S-26. A prisoner number?

Whatever it meant, their father was alive! And not just alive—he was thinking about each one of them. He had picked up the stone to be carved in some private moment when the armed guards were distracted.

A Catholic priest had smuggled them off the island on a barge. They made their way north for almost fifteen hundred miles to a seventh-floor apartment in Santiago. To his family, those stones were the greatest miracle they’d ever witnessed.

By December, under intense international pressure, the junta loosened the communications ban and Orlando was allowed spotty correspondence with his family. Sometimes letters got through and other times weeks went by with no deliveries.

I found some of those letters on a recent visit to the Archivo Nacional de Chile. Among thousands of documents now considered a national treasure, there’s a letter from Orlando to his four sons for Christmas. He was clearly nostalgic and missed his family and had yet to be charged with a crime, because he had not committed one. Nobody knew if he would ever see them again.

He writes, “Out of a desire to serve this country, I did not only give up many things myself, I made you give them up too.”

Orlando Letelier: “Por un deseo de servir a este país, no sólo renuncié yo a muchas cosas, sino que los hice renunciar a ustedes —”

Orlando goes on to tell his sons that life should be built on the foundation of three things: justice, truth, and love. And that to truly know a man, one must never separate any of those things from him.

Orlando Letelier: Pienso que la vida debe reposar fundamentalmente en tres cosas: la justicia, la verdad y el amor. Para ser verdaderamente hombre, no hay que separarse de ninguna de ellas.

Orlando ends the letter by noting that there is perhaps no better occasion to understand the true meaning of human love than the day that celebrates the birth of the one who lived and died for love of men. And, for that reason, they should show “our Isabel” (their mother) all the happiness they can conjure.

Isabel Letelier traveled as close as she could to Dawson Island. She searched the choppy waters of the Strait of Magellan hoping to catch an impossible glimpse of her husband as she held her carved stone on a necklace. People approached her quietly to offer solidarity, because the stone symbolized what could not be said in Pinochet’s Chile: my husband is an innocent political prisoner—and we are not afraid.

Orlando put on a brave face for his family in those personal letters, because the reality of what he endured in detention was a whole other story.

Authors Note: If you’re just joining us, here’s Part 1 of the story about the American who fought a revolution for the love of a woman, and how he ended up changing history and the Cold War.

By 1972, Chilean media was reporting that the anti-fascist group, Movement of Leftist Revolutionaries (MIR), was being armed by the Soviets. The group followed the late Che Guevara and believed the only way to protect the working class and topple a capitalist government was guerrilla warfare.

Michael Townley, an American mechanic who had moved to Santiago for his wife, was a member of the right-wing paramilitary group, Patria y Libertad. He believed they too needed to prepare for a civil war. It was up to them, he believed, to neutralize the MIR and save the country from communism.

Mike learned how to tie and gag someone and how to mix Molotov cocktails. He trained others in his group to make hundreds of them. And in one predawn raid, Mike hurled a Molotov at a municipal lot to scare the pro-government bus drivers defying a transportation strike.

When they discovered that they could steal dynamite from nearby copper mines, Mike learned to build improvised explosives. His militia bombed high-voltage electrical towers, oil pipelines, railway tracks, left-wing media stations, and the private residences of government officials. All together, a hundred explosions terrorized the country and sowed chaos.

Conservative media began brazenly calling for a military coup to overthrow the government, and they were not alone. Polls showed many voters had had enough of President Allende. A loud minority wanted a coup—and now!

It was distasteful to overthrow a democracy, but at least there would be law and order again. People wanted to return to their normal lives. After a coup, they expected the military to hold elections and make things right again.

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President Allende saw “misinformation” in the media as an existential threat and believed much of it was paid for by the Americans. He began to requisition radio stations, fought to control newsprint, and compelled independent and opposition media to merge into a single network. It all fed the flames that he was a liar and an autocrat out to destroy the long tradition of free speech and democracy in Chile.

Mike saw censorship as an opportunity. He had toyed with radios and transmitters since he was a kid in Waterloo. It was virtually impossible for the government to police every frequency, everywhere, all the time; so he built a small radio transmitter that could be strapped to the back seat of a car.

His wife loved the idea of their own pirate radio. So Mariana got busy writing programs, and a few folk songs, about the dire need for change in Chile.

Zigzagging around Santiago, careful not to linger, Mariana’s voice was broadcast on what they called, “Radio Liberación.” Mike estimated they might reach a hundred people from any location downtown. It was fun to do together, but the couple ultimately stopped broadcasting because the impact was too small.

Mike also built a surveillance rig that intercepted radio traffic from the government. He handed the tapes to his superiors at Patria y Libertad and to friends at the American embassy. Leaders of the ultra-right group finally recognized the gringo had talent and was genuinely crazy about Chile … plus his wife was a force of nature and full of ideas.

Mariana was motivated because, having escaped domestic hell in Miami, they were finally “doing something,” and being recognized for it.

At the time, a conservative priest had one of the last right-leaning talk shows on state-run television. But one night, Mike and Mariana noticed that the television program started to flicker to the point where it was hard to understand the priest. It wasn’t the antenna on their TV.

Mike was sure the signal was being jammed and that the device was located near the broadcast. If they eliminated it, they would be heroes to the cause and soldiers defending free speech. Should they find it, they’d also have hard evidence that the leftists were playing dirty.

Mike and a couple of guys drove several hours to a hotel in Concepción and checked in using their real names. They identified the location of the jamming device, broke into the building and found it, just as Mike had predicted. But in the process of disabling the device, a stranger unexpectedly walked into the room.

Some say the man was a painter, others a night watchman, but before he could escape, the saboteurs tied and gagged him with adhesive tape like Mike had taught them. To their dismay, they made the tape so tight that the man suffocated to death. His name was Carlos Henríquez Aguilera.

It was an accident, they agreed, an unfortunate result of what had to be done.

Considering what the government would do to murdering fascists plotting to overthrow the administration, who would believe it was an accident?

As they sped back to Santiago, a police officer stopped them on the highway. Maybe they considered killing the cop if they got wind he was wise to them, but they played it cool and only got a speeding ticket—in the driver’s name.

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Mike rushed home and confessed to Mariana. She was a co-conspirator, after all, and getting caught could ensnare the entire militia—possibly end the movement. She said not to beat himself up: “You did it for Chile.” Whatever guilt he might have had dissolved in his wife’s absolution.

One thing was evident: Mike needed a way out the country—and fast. It was only a matter of time before his mug was on a front page: THE MURDERER OF CONCEPCIÓN

Anxious members of Patria y Libertad stuffed him in the trunk of a car and transported him as close as possible to the border with Argentina. It’s unclear how he actually crossed the Andes; some say they flew him on a private jet, others that he trekked the sierra on foot.

However it happened, Mike managed to reach Miami in time to celebrate his parents’ wedding anniversary. Surprise!

Michael Townley had left the United States to save his family and to stop a revolution, but ended up killing an innocent man and had helped to start one. He was on his way to becoming a cold-blooded technician, but his story was just beginning.

Author’s Note: A thoughtful reader left a comment about how my stories so far were politically biased, which is accurate, because I write creative nonfiction from the perspective of controversial people. Now it’s time to tell the side of the story that’s rarely told anymore.

In the fall of 1969, Michael Townley was a transmission mechanic at an AAMCO station in Little Havana. He had tried selling encyclopedias and then mutual funds, which turned out to be a fraud.

At least he was working with his hands again, the only real talent he had since he dropped out of high school.

He also liked his Cuban co-workers, even if they spent most of the workday bitching about Fidel Castro. Some of them supposedly had connections to anti-Castro heavies who fought in the Bay of Pigs.

Mike wasn’t much into politics, but his wife never liked those Cubans. Mariana thought their “tropical temperaments” made them loud and obnoxious. She called them fascists and anti-Semitic, which she despised because her first husband, the father of her eldest, was Jewish.

But worse than that, she considered them cowards, constantly talking big about how they would hurt Castro from the comfort of Miami like “dogs barking behind a fence.”

Mariana had been unhappy since they arrived. Miami was sleepy compared to New York, where she had lived with her second husband. She was also sick of doing her own domestic chores and missed having a full-time nanny like most families in her home country of Chile.

She had dreamed of a big life traveling the world with interesting people. Now she was married to a common auto mechanic in a tiny apartment, raising four kids a million miles from her family.

She kept close tabs on the politics in Chile because there was a communist running for president. Salvador Allende had campaigned before, but this time everyone agreed things were so bad that he might actually win.

Mariana had been a socialist most of her life, but the idea that the country she loved could become another Cuba was unbearable.

That fall, on election night in Chile, Mike and Mariana were glued to their radios, anxiously awaiting the results of the hotly contested election. It had come down to a three-way runoff and if one candidate didn’t get a majority, congress would have to choose the winner.

Poll numbers rolled in, and by the end of the night, it seemed like even with only thirty-six percent of the vote—the most of the three candidates—he’d have enough to form a coalition government.

Salvador Allende would be the next President of Chile.

Mariana wept for the first time in front of her husband. She told him that she was moving back to Chile with the kids, with or without him. She couldn’t sit around Miami like those Cubans and do nothing while her country fell to ruins.

Mike pushed back, asking if maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for the kids to be in a chaotic environment. He had earned some points as a decent stepdad to her kids and felt like he should have a voice in the matter.

Mariana wasn’t having it; she had to “do something.”

Mike was born in Iowa but moved to South America as an adolescent when his father became the head of Ford Motor Company in Chile. Vernon Townley was said to also work as an informant for the CIA, keeping tabs on the country’s rising communist influence.

Despite Mike’s rebelliousness and lack of a diploma, the young man was hungry to matter like his father, and to be the man his wife wanted.

Before he left for Chile, he contacted a local CIA office to offer his services. He knew Nixon would do whatever was necessary to stop Allende. He was told they would consider it.

Mike packed up the house and met Mariana and the kids in Santiago.

He spent as much time as possible at the American Embassy, where they joked he was like a “barnacle.” With enough exposure there, he hoped to finally land a job as a paid informant. As declassified documents later showed, the Agency eventually “canceled its interest in him as an agent.”

Meanwhile, Mariana had been busy making contacts with the people most likely to actually topple Allende. She visited the headquarters of Patria y Libertad (Fatherland & Liberty), an arch-conservative paramilitary movement that modeled itself, without apology, on fascist street gangs in Nazi Germany.

She wasn’t necessarily fond of the group’s politics—it was a little out there—but she introduced Mike to her new contacts. She said he was good with his hands and an expert in electronics, which was true. He would be a useful agent, she added, but the group’s leaders believed the tall, blond, blue-eyed gringo with the funny accent was probably also working for the CIA.

Even if the United States was on their side, and it was, should things go too far they didn’t want a mole relaying that information.

In the fall of 1971, when Allende welcomed his good friend and ally, Fidel Castro, the opposition flew into a tizzy. Castro was supposed to stay in Chile a few days, but ended up traveling the country for nearly a month, giving fiery speeches about revolutionary unity and the need to nationalize private property to packed stadiums, universities, copper mines, and factories.

It didn’t help the backlash that Allende’s own allies on the far left had already called for a permanent socialist government. For millions of Chileans like the Townleys, Castro was surveying his future conquest. What many had once dismissed as Cold War paranoia suddenly felt like prophecy.

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Not long after, the conservative Supreme Court accused Allende of creating a constitutional crisis. In a series of high-profile cases, farmers, native Mapuche, and political agitators had seized lands that belonged to wealthy landowners. When the court ordered them to vacate, Allende apparently stopped the local police from forcibly removing the squatters.

Concerns mounted that private property would no longer be protected.

Mike and Mariana, along with millions of Chileans, genuinely believed that their country was months away from becoming Cuba, that their children would grow up in a dead-end dictatorship, and that everything they had worked so hard for would be seized by the government. Doing nothing was looking more and more like apathy—even cowardice.

For his part, Mike had finally found a purpose. He had failed at school and at business, but he had an opportunity to help save his adopted country and finally be someone that mattered and the man his wife desired. When he heard rumors that Patria y Libertad was backed by the CIA, it confirmed that he was on the right side of history.

Allende’s overreaching socialist policies, along with interference by the CIA, resulted in inflation that climbed a hundred and sixty percent in 1972, and with it arrived constant social unrest. People had had enough with the breadlines and buying food in a black market that was driving up prices.

Union workers began protesting the government all over the country, culminating in a truckers’ strike that paralyzed commerce for weeks on end.

Even before the strikes, with food dwindling to feed their families, women from middle- and upper-class neighborhoods had gathered in Santiago to bang their empty pots in protest. Thousands marched but the peaceful event escalated to violence when protestors were attacked by leftist counter-protestors, right-wing agitators, and pro-government police.

Augusto Pinochet, Allende’s commander of the Santiago garrison, declared a zone of emergency, banned the marches, and deployed the military with tear gas. Around a hundred were injured, including several gunshot wounds. Mike and Mariana witnessed an unarmed old man beaten to the ground by police.

To Mike and Mariana, that old man could have been them—it could have been anybody. It was beginning to feel like a civil war.

Author’s Note: In Part 1, the Nixon administration assured Orlando Letelier multiple times that the United States was a friend to Chile. Newly discovered documents reveal what that friendship meant…

A year before that white tie event in the State Dining Room, before the fifteen minutes with Nixon, and Kissinger’s denial, there had been a meeting in the West Wing that Orlando Letelier suspected but could not prove. And even if he could, what good would it do? But as his personal and official documents show, he pretty much knew Nixon was full of it.

Nixon was not going to be the president that allowed another communist country in the hemisphere. He saw what happened in Cuba and the last thing the people of Chile needed was a self-destructive communist dictator. Except, of course, Salvador Allende had been elected by the people. The only solution to the problem was to install a dictator.

For that to happen Chileans needed to fear an Allende presidency—and fast. The only way that would happen in a country like Chile with a long history of democracy would be a military coup.

As declassified documents later showed, Nixon’s view was very clear:

The country’s military of course was mostly right wing, but many were also loyal to their elections and constitution. They needed some convincing so the CIA decided the biggest impediment to a coup before the inauguration was General Schneider, the military’s highest-ranking officer and, as it turned out, a stickler for democracy.

CIA agents were able to find and arm a few rogue members of the military with machine guns and set in motion a plan to kidnap Schneider. What they would do to him afterwards was unclear, but he needed to go. The whole thing was poorly planned and the kidnapping was botched when they shot Schneider.

Nixon was anxiously awaiting a call from Kissinger to find out what happened. Here’s what they said:

The whole operation backfired spectacularly. General Schneider’s death became a rallying cry in support of Chilean democracy. There were even rumors in the local press that claimed there had been foreign influence in the General’s assassination.

An experiment was born when Allende was inaugurated as the 29th President of Chile. For the first time the world would see what it was like to have communism in a democratic system. But Nixon’s response had already been decided given the zeitgeist of the Cold War. Even before the inauguration, he had famously ordered the CIA to make the economy in Chile “scream.”

By the time Orlando Letelier became the ambassador in Washington, he had collected at least ten instances where the United States had acted against Chile, including hostile remarks to the press, withholding customary diplomatic protocol, and the cancelling of a visit by U.S. diplomats.

Then someone broke into the Chilean Embassy in the middle of the night. Orlando thought it was suspicious because whoever it was didn’t take any cash or expensive equipment. They just rifled through some sensitive diplomatic documents related to Chile’s copper industry. When he explained this to FBI agents on the scene, they concluded the break-in was too sloppy to be state-sponsored, and left it at that.

Letelier wrote to Santiago, in a letter I discovered, that reporters at the Times and the Post, along with other officials, had good information that the men who broke into the Chilean embassy were the same ones caught the following month breaking into the offices of the DNC at The Watergate Hotel. Who was behind the break-ins was still unknown.

What mattered most to Orlando was Nixon’s economic shock therapy. He wrote a four-page analysis that said the administration was responsible for a dollar devaluation, a delay for international loans, and a ten percent tariff on goods from Chile. In this economic report I found written in Spanish by Orlando, he made it clear to Allende that a trade war was underway.

Nixon’s and the CIA’s efforts to destabilize Chile pushed Allende to make increasingly poor policy decisions in the face of an ongoing economic crisis. The upper classes in Chile were also undermining the economy in response to proposed policies that would lead to the appropriation of private property.

By May 1973 there were so many bread lines and demonstrations, and so much chaos in the streets of Santiago that Allende asked Orlando to return. Too many of his cabinet ministers had been sullied by the press, a military coup was on the horizon, and he needed people around him that he could trust.

The entire Letelier family decided to move back to Chile with their father, even though the boys were perfectly happy in Bethesda. Isabel, ever the fighter and supportive wife, would be by her husband’s side no matter the consequences.

Orlando Letelier started as the Foreign Minister, then in quick succession the Interior Minister, and finally as Defense Minister, the second most dangerous job in a country. He was the head of the military right as whispers of an impending coup to “save the country” were at a fever pitch.

A few months later, on September 11, 1973, Nixon finally got what he wanted. A military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet successfully bombed the government into submission. As insurrectionists marched toward his office in the Presidential Palace, Salvador Allende committed suicide.

Thousands of suspected communist sympathizers were rounded up, severely tortured, killed, or “disappeared.” As a prized government minister, Orlando was beaten, shot in the leg, and sent to a concentration camp off the Strait of Magellan, somewhere between Chile and Antarctica.

What he endured in that year of captivity is for a future story, but Orlando was finally released and then expelled from Chile with a one-way ticket to Venezuela. It was odd that Pinochet allowed him to leave the country and it was a decision that the General would soon regret.

Though Orlando was sequestered in a concentration camp for most of the Watergate scandal that engulfed Nixon, he was released into exile just as the disgraced president resigned. Even if it was too late for him and his countrymen, the whole world now knew what he had been saying for years—Richard Nixon was a liar.

The Leteliers eventually moved back to Washington as exiles. Orlando had been traumatized by the torture and was intensely motivated to get justice for his dead colleagues and those still under arrest without charges. It wasn’t easy; he was, after all, in the country that had created the conditions that led to Pinochet, a staunch new ally in the Cold War.

One of Nixon’s “plumbers” was interviewed by Barbara Walters on NBC’s Today show a few months after the resignation. He told Walters that the CIA had bugged the Chilean embassy in Washington. Here’s a transcript Isabel kept of that conversation:

In time, Orlando Letelier became a singular figure in the global movement to deliver justice to the Pinochet regime. Nobody had a higher profile and he had channeled his considerable contacts to make as much noise as humanly possible to shine a spotlight on the reality in Chile. His efforts did not go unnoticed in Santiago.

On a muggy morning in September of 1976, as Orlando drove by the Chilean embassy where he once lived, a remote-controlled bomb detonated under his car. It killed him and his colleague Ronni Moffitt, a newly married twenty-five-year-old from New Jersey. She and her husband Michael were catching a ride to work because their car had broken down the day before.

Michael was in the back seat and survived the blast. He walked out shouting to anyone who would listen that Pinochet had killed his beautiful young wife.

It’s impossible to know if Kissinger knew about the bomb ahead of time, but five days before it detonated the State Department had written a memo for the Pinochet regime that would have explicitly ordered him to stop murdering political enemies abroad. Before it was delivered, Kissinger killed the memo and ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter.”

In the weeks following the assassinations, the CIA, under George H. W. Bush, steered investigators away from their Cold War ally General Pinochet. The Agency leaked theories that the explosive device used was too crude to be government-sponsored, and instead blamed leftist radicals.

Burying the truth allowed the Nixon and Ford administrations to insulate themselves from headlines about the assassination of a former diplomat they once shared bread with, and a young American woman who bled to death on Embassy Row. Ever the technicians, they saw it as an unfortunate consequence to a necessary evil.

A comprehensive review by the CIA, later declassified, confirmed what everyone at the time suspected or knew: General Pinochet personally ordered the assassination. That document became public forty years too late because Pinochet died of old age before he could be tried for those murders.

It had been a rough, traumatic road from that glittering white-tie dinner at the White House where Pat Nixon signed a menu card for the Letelier boys. But Isabel Letelier kept it among her memories. The signed card outlasted the coup, the torture, the exile, the bomb, the dictatorship, surviving even after democracy returned to Chile and Orlando Letelier’s dream came true. Their son Francisco shared an image of that gold-sealed card in an article he wrote about that time his parents dined in the lion’s den.

Fifty years after the bombing, we as Americans also get to choose what to remember. Are we brave enough to face the whole truth or only remember the skill of our technicians? What Vice President JD Vance recently called a Nixon “renaissance” is a great opportunity to see if we will remember our history in full—warts and all.

Author’s Note: While my first post explored how an American became a dictator's assassin, we must now step inside the White House itself to meet the geopolitical technicians who set it all in motion.

In the spring of 1971, Orlando Letelier arrived with his wife at the White House as the new Chilean ambassador to the United States. Isabel had been teaching Spanish at Georgetown University and helped organize human rights protests to end the war in Vietnam. The glitzy ballroom was packed with dignitaries in white tie from Latin America.

President Richard Nixon had officially invited the Leteliers to the formal dinner in the State Dining Room. The sparkling event was abuzz in more Spanish than English, but Isabel was seated next to First Lady Pat Nixon. The two moms chatted about the Letelier boys who had been raised in Bethesda, where the youngest was born. Mrs. Nixon graciously signed the table’s gold-sealed menu card and added best wishes to each by name.

Despite the pleasantries, Orlando and Isabel felt like they were in the lion’s den. He was there representing the government of Salvador Allende, the first democratic socialist elected in the Americas. Nixon considered him a communist and no doubt a potential proxy for the Soviets, with the added complication that Allende had been chosen by the people in a fair election.

A month before that glitzy state dinner, Orlando had been at the White House for his credentials ceremony and had a private conversation with Nixon. I know what happened in that fifteen-minute conversation because of a cable that I found buried in an archive. It was written by Orlando to Allende, and you can feel him trying to decide how much of the conversation to believe.

Nixon had said he indeed respected Chile’s right to choose its own internal structures. He repeated “self-determination” three times. Orlando wanted the word of the President of the United States to mean something.

Then Nixon raised the thornier issue of Chile aligning itself with extra-continental powers, meaning the Soviets. The message Orlando got was that Chile’s rights were secure so long as they didn’t interfere with the interests of the United States, which included American corporations there.

Orlando told Nixon he “deeply appreciates the values characteristic of the American people,” and meant it. But he added that his countrymen had chosen to build “a socialism of their own.” He expected the United States to respect their right to do so.

Nixon abruptly ended the conversation, saying he would very much like to see the Ambassador again soon for a very frank and direct dialogue. He never met privately with the President again, and about the only thing he could trust from that conversation were the veiled threats.

Any serious politician in Washington, from either party, loathed the idea of Allende’s Marxist government taking root. The fear of “another Cuba in the Americas” was a genuine dread following the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs. Democratically elected or not, the Cold War was the prism through which all actions were justified.

A declassified department memo shows Orlando had also met with Henry Kissinger a few weeks after that fifteen-minute Come to Jesus with Nixon. Kissinger was National Security Advisor at the time and took special interest in the newly elected Marxist in the Americas.

Orlando said there had been reports in the press that the United States was in a confrontation with Chile, which Kissinger dismissed as “nonsense.” America will judge Chile on its foreign policy, "not what it does domestically.” He added that he "will not be the first to break traditional good relations."

All of this was going through Orlando’s mind as Kissinger sat across the room at the white-tie dinner that night. And as the pomp and free wine wound down in the State Dining Room, before the festivities officially ended, Nixon stood before the dignitaries and delivered a nostalgic ten-minute toast about the unbreakable bonds between the United States and its southern neighbors.

“What I am trying to say is,” Nixon told the dignitaries, “that we have a special relationship.” And for good measure, he added, “The relationship is personal over many years, personal going back over so many memories.”

The Letelier family held on to that menu card signed by Pat Nixon, but as events unfolded, the family keepsake became a reminder of what came next.

A car bomb detonated just a mile from the White House nearly fifty years ago. Federal agents arrived to find the bodies former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, and his twenty-five-year-old American colleague Ronni Moffitt. Democrats blamed their deaths on the right-wing Chilean military junta, while Republicans claimed it was a false flag event by leftist radicals.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Eugene Propper and hundreds of FBI agents set out to find the truth in a labyrinthine manhunt that ended eighteen months later with a discovery nobody expected—the man who made and planted the homemade bomb wasn’t a foreign national, it was an American born in Iowa named Michael Vernon Townley.

What kept me up at night about this story was: How did a kid from suburban Iowa wind up planting a car bomb for a foreign dictator?

I’m not a historian or a true crime podcaster. I am a Chilean American writer who arrived at this story at the literal intersection of what fascists call “blood and soil.”

I was born in California, but my mother moved us to Chile in 1981 where she was born. We arrived at the height of General Augusto Pinochet’s iron grip on Chile.

I vividly remember soldiers on the streets of Santiago toting machine guns and being told by my stepfather not to stare at them. There were always stories swirling about suspected communists being taken by masked men in unmarked vans, joining the thousands of “disappeared.”

Most of my family happened to support the military junta and were thankful to have order restored and low crime after three chaotic years under the democratically elected government of the Marxist Salvador Allende. What we didn’t know at the time was how much of that chaos was caused by global forces outside of Chile.

We moved back to Los Angeles a few years later, but returned to Chile a dozen times throughout my childhood. I was raised belonging to two countries, two cultures, and two histories.

Roots in North and South America gave me a profound perspective of what it means to be “American.” That feeling, of being from two places on the opposite sides of the planet, and never fully at home in either, has defined my personal identity.

That duality has led to a lifelong fascination with the connections between my two nations. Over decades, I devoured everything on their shared history because understanding it was a way to understand myself.

In all that reading, I discovered Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File, an eye-opening account of declassified documents that showed how Nixon and Kissinger created the atmosphere for the military coup that ended in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of the Marxist Salvador Allende, and the seventeen-year military junta that followed. That sordid tale of Cold War espionage climaxed in Townley’s bombing on Embassy Row.

The more I learned about Townley, the more similarities I found between us. A childhood moving back and forth between two countries is a rootless existence; it means speaking two languages and being two different people. It means having to fit in where nobody totally accepts you, and never being able to honestly answer the simple question: Where are you from?

Finding my reflection in an assassin was uncomfortable and unwelcome, but rather than look away, I leaned in.

As I went deeper trying to understand how a kid from Iowa became an international assassin, the last thing I expected to find at the center of the conspiracy was—a love story.

Behind the sordid story that ended in the death of two innocent people was a complicated marriage that began with an eighteen-year-old Michael Townley and a thirty-year-old woman on her second divorce with two kids.

What started as a curiosity turned into an obsession. History knew Michael Vernon Townley, but what about Mike? He wasn’t born an assassin. Even criminals are still human beings and products of their environment. I felt a deep and uncomfortable empathy for the man behind the assassin that made me feel like I could write his story in a way that no one else could.

As I tinkered with an outline, I hit a wall. I was in the process of making a deeply flawed and dangerous man relatable and it was creeping me out. Having lived in Chile I understood that his crimes strike at the heart of the political scares that have haunted the nation for more than fifty years. So, even after months of research, I shelved the story.

Six months later, after finishing another project, I returned to the story with a new perspective. Our current culture seems to demand that we reduce historical figures to cardboard cutouts of good and evil. But if we dismiss them as merely monsters, we learn nothing. If we examine how a normal, displaced American boy can be incrementally warped into an unrepentant killer, we unlock a terrifying truth — any of us can be hacked. My discomfort was exactly why I needed to finish the story.

As I fleshed out a new outline, I needed to understand the other side of the bomb. The victim, Orlando Letelier.

I contacted his eldest of four sons through a family connection and over hours of conversations, the chapters based on Orlando’s life multiplied until he became half the story.

Orlando was a man of destiny. He knew his life was in mortal danger but remained determined to find justice at any cost.

The world today needs more men like Orlando Letelier. He was so formidable that General Pinochet was willing to spark a geo-political crisis with a brazen act of international terrorism on the soil of his most important ally in the Cold War.

I also learned that the Leteliers weren’t just Chilean; in important ways they were even more American than the Townleys. Orlando was living the American Dream in Bethesda for ten years where his fourth son was born and where they all attended public schools and universities.

I wasn’t writing a story about Chile, I was writing about the United States. A piece of our own history that we disregarded as someone else’s problem.

My story presented a paradox: the born-and-bred Iowa boy rejected democratic ideals to build bombs for a fascist dictator, while this exiled Chilean family lived, breathed, and ultimately bled for the principles Americans are supposed to champion.

So yes, it was the assassin that drew me, but it was the victim that convinced me to finish writing.

Around the bombing swirled characters you may recognize: Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger. Pinochet and Allende. Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez; the playwright Arthur Miller and the poet Pablo Neruda. And while these historical figures got most of the attention, it was Michael and Orlando who were on the front lines making history.

Excellent books have been written about the legal trials around the bombing and the Cold War complicity of the Nixon administration, but with so much complexity, standard historical nonfiction rarely has room for the terrifying intimacy of the people involved. We know what happened, where it happened, and how it happened, but not enough of the why. It was a door left wide open, and I had to walk through it in a way that could only be explored through creative nonfiction.

My book in progress is called The Technician. A technician is someone who obsesses over the wiring, the mechanics, and the execution of a task while totally divorcing themselves from its moral consequences. Only by writing the story as creative nonfiction can we understand that the bombing is a proxy for how modern atrocities happen, not through cartoon villainy, but through cold, detached optimization.

The Technician is the fullest expression of why I created Walk A Mile: to step into the shoes of controversial people. In this case, not to rationalize their crimes, but to confront the uncomfortable reality of how they became who they are. Because, if not for God’s grace, it could have been any of us.

The story is as relevant as ever. Strongmen are in vogue, and a dangerous fear has returned that makes ordinary people wonder what cherished rights they might trade for a little “order.” The Technician will show how easily a democracy fractures and how painful it is to rebuild.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing on Embassy Row approaches this September 21, I’m far from finished with the story (and I don’t know how or if it will be published). But I feel a need to share what I have discovered along the way, because, as with anything well-researched, The Technician is a window into history, and, more specifically, an interrogation of what it really means to be an “American.”

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Part 5 of The Godfathers, a dramatic retelling of a controversial church group’s campaign to end Apartheid that revolutionized Wall Street. If you missed it, read my intro or start from Part 1.

Dear Walkers,

As Tim Smith and church leaders proved, activism is a game of inches. Even in these dark times for social justice and diversity advocates, everyone would be served to remember that ending racism and bigotry is a journey. As Nelson Mandela said: “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” And as we see in Part 5 of The Godfathers, nobody understood that better than our hero Tim Smith.

In solidarity,

Ryon Harms

Forged In the Crucible

For innovative and relentless advocacy on behalf of the oppressed people of South Africa, Tim Smith received an official letter from the government revoking his automatic visa to enter the country. It was unfortunate, but also a badge of honor.

Fighting Apartheid did as much for Timothy Smith as he had done for the movement. The ad hoc faith community he helped organize to engage General Motors evolved into the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), where he became the shareholder advocacy nonprofit’s head of research and then the Executive Director. 

ICCR expanded beyond apartheid to other causes, including pioneering shareholder resolutions on equal employment and affirmative action; on removing sexist images of women in advertising; to stop strip mining; and irresponsible marketing for baby formula. Many of those engagements resulted in changes like the improvement of working conditions at overseas sweatshops.

Shortly after General Motors' annual meeting, boutique investment firms launched a new kind of mutual fund that included companies focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Alongside the funds, a cottage industry of social and environmental researchers emerged to provide “responsible” investors with data and insights to invest their values. What began as a project for a seminary-school graduate and concerned church groups evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

CSR funds were initially considered “soft” in the rough and tumble world of pit traders and hard-nosed investment analysts. As the funds attracted billions of dollars from charitable foundations, university endowments, and government pensions, even major investment houses started offering their own products for socially conscious clients. 

Cultural norms on Wall Street were changing, in part because social activists had believed others would agree that acting “responsibly” could also be good for the bottom line over the long term. It was possible to invest based on value and values.

Milton Friedman’s Doctrine became a rallying cry for social conservatives looking to stop corporations from becoming what they viewed as overly progressive. Despite the pushback, many of the nation’s largest corporations created high-level committees to oversee corporate social responsibility programs that hired disadvantaged workers and efforts to mitigate environmental pollution.

Responding to pressure from ICCR, Texaco became the first western oil company to withdraw from Southern Africa, which in turn forced its partner Standard Oil to terminate activities. By 1975, four of five American oil companies served notice that they were pulling out of offshore prospecting in the area.

General Motors remained obstinate, but Leon Sullivan developed the Sullivan Principles - a set of guidelines meant to desegregate factories and improve training and promotional prospects for blacks in South Africa. Within a year, Sullivan persuaded ten major corporations to sign the principles that openly flouted Apartheid laws. Of the two hundred American corporations doing business in South Africa, more than half eventually signed on.

Sullivan’s principals put him at odds with anti-apartheid activists. Tim Smith publicly denounced them as a way for companies to whitewash operations in South Africa. Whatever small gains could be gained by black workers would be offset by the continuation of corporations creating products used to suppress the black majority. To anti-apartheid activists, Sullivan’s Principals only polished the chains of black workers. 

By 1980, ICCR was working directly with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize as a spokesperson for the rights of black South Africans. They successfully filed hundreds of resolutions calling on companies to withdraw from Apartheid South Africa. They challenged American Express, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo not to “make any new loans or renew any old loans... until the system of racist laws has been revoked.”

Student-led university divestment campaigns were successful at Michigan State University, Stanford, Columbia, and several other universities. They used church resolutions to force debates at nearly every major university. Within three years, more than a hundred and fifty educational institutions had fully or partially divested from South Africa.

Tim Smith returned to GM’s annual shareholder meeting in 1986. Backed by several major institutional investors, including the New York Employees Retirement System’s $8.5 billion in assets, ICCR’s resolution received nine percent of the vote. Soon after, General Motors announced it would stop sales of military vehicles in South Africa.

Later that year, decades of tireless effort paid off for Representative Charles Diggs as the United States Congress signed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. It imposed sanctions on South Africa with preconditions for lifting them that would essentially require the end Apartheid, including a ban on new investments by Americans.

President Ronald Reagan vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act. He called the National Party an ally of the “white Christian anti-communist west” and the anti-apartheid campaign “creeping international socialism.” Reagan designated Nelson Mandela a terrorist. In a clear rebuke to the popular president, 31 Republicans voted with Democrats to override the President’s veto at the height of his popularity. It was the first time in the twentieth century that a President had a foreign policy veto overridden.

After fifteen years of pressure by social activists, General Motors announced in 1986 that it would sell its assets to a local group and cease operations in South Africa. In an official statement, GM Chairman Roger Smith announced the company was partly pulling out because “we have been disappointed in the pace of change in ending Apartheid.” More importantly, sanctions had finally made it unprofitable as church activists had predicted.

Tim Smith was quoted on the front page of the New York Times, “[GM’s departure] is a tremendously significant decision. Businesses will understand the symbolism of the action, and we expect to see the trickle of companies leaving to turn into a flood.''

Within a month, Eastman Kodak said it would sell assets and halt all product shipments. Coca-Cola announced it would sell its remaining holdings with some proceeds going to local black investors, adding, ''Our decision to complete the process of disinvestment is a statement of our opposition to Apartheid and of our support for the economic aspirations of black South Africans.”

Rev. Leon Sullivan eventually abandoned his Principles, demanding signatory companies to end all commercial ties with South Africa within nine months. He called on companies to stop supplying the Apartheid regime with components, materials, and consulting services, and to ban the use of their trademarks in the country. Within a year, over a hundred American companies sold their South African subsidiaries.

Fifteen years of toil by church activists working on the fringes took off overnight. It was gratifying to have been correct, but even more so to know that each corporate departure added pressure on the South African Government to end Apartheid.

South Africa's economy soon tumbled. A ban on South African participation in international sporting events frustrated many whites. Supporters of Apartheid were no longer accepted in the league of white Christian nations to which they thought they belonged.

Brave South Africans fighting for black liberation, aided by global pressure, brought a reluctant National Party into bilateral negotiations with the African National Congress. Besieged Prime Minister, Frederik Willem de Klerk, met with Archbishop Desmond Tutu to begin negotiations in earnest. As a result, the ban on the African National Congress was lifted and black political prisoners were released, including Nelson Mandela.

Right wing militia groups stormed the South African Capitol to stop negotiations that would lead to the end of Apartheid. Fueled by belligerent rhetoric of right-wing leaders, hundreds of armed white separatists smashed through windows and held senior politicians under siege. Rather than slow change to majority rule, the raid “backfired.”

Even as conditions improved for blacks, church activists held the line. ''Our basic theme is the continuing need for sanctions until there is majority rule,'' said Timothy Smith to the press. “The people we have talked to in South Africa say that pressure should continue. We will be pursuing banks not to roll over loans, companies to cut ties, and the U.S. Government to impose new sanctions.”

After twenty-seven years of imprisonment for being a “communist” and a “terrorist,” Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa on May 10, 1994. Twenty million citizens of all races voted peacefully. As church leaders had desperately worked to ensure, bloodshed from a drawn-out civil war was avoided. Mandela was neither a terrorist or a communist as his actions showed after the election. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and became a global ambassador for racial reconciliation as he worked to create a “rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

Apartheid ended but not before tens of thousands died from uprisings and destitute poverty. How many men, women, and children could have been saved had General Motors and others listened to church activists at that shareholder meeting in 1971?

On a goodwill tour of the United States, Archbishop Desmond Tutu personally thanked Tim Smith and church activists, saying, “your economic pressure on South Africa brought the regime to the bargaining table.”

*BONUS MATERIAL*

Paul Neuhauser, who wrote the shareholder resolution presented by Episcopal Church at General Motors in 1971 and became a co-founder of ICCR, tells his fascinating version of the story of how it all happened.

Part 4 of The Godfathers, a real-life story about a controversial church group’s campaign to end Apartheid that revolutionized the global economy. If you missed it, read my intro or start from Part 1.

Dear Walkers,

I’m so thankful that you’ve made it this far in The Godfathers. Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for as all the efforts of Tim Smith and church activists reaches a historic and dramatic climax. Today’s newsletter will make all the time you’ve invested in this story so worth it!

Keep walking,

Ryon Harms

Moment of Truth

Chairman James M. Roche called to order the 93rd annual shareholder meeting of the General Motors Corporation. Tim Smith found a seat near some friends from the social activist group known as Campaign GM.

As the twenty three members of the GM board took the stage to resounding applause, the nearly two thousand attendees witnessed automotive history. Among the otherwise all-white group of men was the first African American ever appointed to the board of a company in the Fortune 500, and the first at any car company.

Dr. Leon H. Sullivan was head pastor of the large and influential Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia. He famously organized hundreds of local ministers in a campaign to boycott white-owned businesses that refused to hire black workers. The “don’t buy where you don’t work” campaign resulted in tens of thousands of new opportunities for the black community. Church activists could not have dreamed of a better man to represent their interests on the GM board than the “Lion of Zion.”

Beyond his skin color, the rookie board member and six-foot five former college athlete stood out even more on stage next to the frail, ninety-five-year-old Charles Mott at his 59th annual meeting of the Board. The company patriarch had already been on the Board almost ten years when Leon Sullivan was born in a West Virginia slum.

Roche’s search for an African American board member likely began at the previous year’s shareholder meeting. Progressive iconoclast Ralph Nader publicly blasted the Chairman and filed resolutions to combat the company’s dismal record on civil rights, driver safety, and air pollution. “The persons affected by the corporation must be allowed to influence its decisions,” argued his group of legal activists from Campaign GM at the previous shareholder meeting. Less than three percent of shareholders had voted for their resolutions.

Why James Roche selected a black man to the board is unclear. Perhaps he was persuaded by social justice activists that an all-white board looked racist. Maybe he needed a public relations win after Nader's blistering bestseller, Unsafe at Any Speed. Perhaps it was the blowback from the drawn-out worker strike. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t just appoint any black man to the board of the world’s most powerful company.

Dr. Sullivan was more than a black religious leader and social justice activist. Following his boycott campaign in Philadelphia, Sullivan realized not enough black men and women were qualified for the thousands of new roles suddenly available. He founded the Opportunities Industrialization Centers, a job training program that had become the largest in the world by the time of the meeting. Sullivan represented the kind of “self-help” ethos for black empowerment that Roche wanted to project at GM.

Roche never credited activists for inspiring the appointment and denied their obvious influence to the press. Giving the “gadflies” too much credit would have opened the floodgates to more activism. Admitting that his company had bowed to outside pressure would have also detracted from the well-deserved respect of Dr. Leon Sullivan. Roche needed to blunt the inevitable chatter about how the pastor with no automotive experience had been a “diversity hire” selected solely based on skin color.

Upon his historic appointment to the GM board, Sullivan received a call from the outgoing President of the United States:  "Leon, this is Lyndon [Johnson]. What's good for General Motors now really is good for America."

Roche and Sullivan appeared together on the cover of Time Magazine. On Meet the Press, Sullivan insisted he would not be an apologist for tokenism and would resign if black workers at GM had not made large and measurable gains under his watch. He also said, to the ecstatic joy of church activists, “I believe that America, itself, with its industries and business, can no longer underwrite apartheid . . . the United States government ought to declare an economic boycott against the Union of South Africa." 

Tim Smith could have watched that interview a thousand times.

Sullivan made history again when he informed the rest of the GM board that he would vote against them and for the Episcopal Church’s resolution. Nobody on the board, not even Mott, could remember a time when a director had publicly disagreed with management on a resolution.

Beyond appointing Dr. Sullivan, which to Nader and activists was the only real progress, GM created a public policy committee to give matters of community concern "a permanent place on the highest level of management." It formed a committee of noted scientists to explore solutions to environmental problems and allocated millions to fight pollution from its cars and plants. It loaned a million dollars to support low-income housing and deposited millions more in black-controlled banks. Chairman Roche had prepared for round two with activists.

GM’s actions to address activist pressure unleashed a backlash from conservatives. Chief among them Milton Friedman, the highly influential economist from the Chicago School of Economics. Responding to calls for greater corporate social responsibility, the conservative firebrand published the “Friedman Doctrine” in the New York Times.

“What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities?” demanded Friedman, “Only people can have responsibilities.” He saw the trend of executives bending to social activists as “unadulterated socialism.” Executives like Roche were “unwitting puppets” of the intellectual forces that were “undermining the basis of a free society.” He saw the millions being invested by corporations like GM on social causes as spending shareholder money without consent. Far from radical, Friedman’s view was a conservative vision of the status quo.

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, another critic aimed at the church’s anti-apartheid resolution. He was a black, “card-carrying” Episcopalian that had visited South Africa. In his view, the church’s use of 12,000 shares out of 25 million was a clear case of the “flea trying to kill the elephant.” He lambasted the “white liberal establishment” for acting in the name of the oppressed without first consulting them.

James Roche advanced the mundane business on the agenda of the shareholder meeting and then came the moment of truth. It was time to hear directly from shareholders - the fireworks that activists and the press eagerly anticipated, and that everyone else there had dreaded. 

Bishop Hines walked to the podium in the center aisle to address the Board. “To date there has been no indication that the American business presence has been a liberating force in South Africa.” Investments had grown fivefold in the region during a time “marked by the intensification and multiplication of repressive laws, and the gap between the average white and African wages has increased.” General Motors was “increasing the strength and control of the racist dictatorship.”

Defenders of the corporation groaned for all to hear. James Roche replied that no one favored Apartheid. “GM is convinced that the proper course is not to turn its back on a complex situation but to further the progress already being made, and through our operations, work to bring about progressive change.” Which, in a way, was what the churches were doing by engaging General Motors rather than selling its shares.

The treasurer of the American Baptist Home Mission Societies announced that the church had voted its 55,000 shares for the proposal to close South African plants. Adding, “when G.M. contributes to a government that is keeping a large segment of its population in virtual slavery, then we as shareholders with Christian conviction must urge that this arrangement be brought to an orderly end.” 

A professor from Yale said large corporations were “oligarchies” working “unchecked” by outside forces. He warned that if Roche thought he could “go home and think this debate is over,” he was “delusional.”

Chairman Roche ran the meeting with a firm hand, cutting off several rambling activists. At times defenders of the corporation dominated the meeting.

Timothy Smith sensed the time had come and crossed the aisle toward the podium. He was less nervous than he had expected and “heartened” by having heard so many others defend his views. He told the Chairman about his trip to South Africa. He quoted plant managers on the lack of reasoning power and depth perception of black people.

More groans were heard.

It was misleading to say General Motors in South Africa was “apolitical,” explained Smith, when the company’s presence there had such a “strong political and economic effect” in favor of the status quo. General Motors helped diversify, stabilize, and made the apartheid regime self-sufficient.

Smith said his peace and felt satisfied he’d done everything humanly possible to persuade General Motors to leave South Africa.

Several grueling hours into the debate, Roche stumbled, “We are a public corporation owned by free, white…” It was only a millisecond, but the pause drew nervous laughter. Roche finished, “black, yellow and people all over the world.”

And then, Rev. Leon Sullivan rose to his great height and “very dramatically” walked off the stage toward the microphone. Once on the floor he turned around to address the Board directly as if he were a common shareholder.

"American industry cannot morally continue to do business in a country that so blatantly and ruthlessly and clearly maintains such dehumanizing practices against such large numbers of its people." His voice rose to an emotional peak in a baritone that a witness said resembled the late Dr. Martin Luther King: "I hear voices say to me, 'Things will work out in time -- things are getting better -- let us go slow on this matter! And I ask, why does the world always want to go slow when the rights of black men are at stake?” 

Someone shouted, “Right on!”

“And although I know the position I take will lose today,” added Sullivan, “you can be sure that I shall continue to pursue it tomorrow until black people in the Union of South Africa are free.” Sullivan’s speech sparked the day’s loudest applause.

Tim Smith anxiously awaited the vote totals. No way the resolution would ever receive a majority vote, but would anyone beyond the churches vote for the resolution? Would the results be embarrassing or inspiring?

The Episcopal Church’s proposal for General Motors to withdraw its plants and investment in South Africa received support from … 1.29 percent of shares voted or about three million out of 227 million total shares. Put another way, 99 percent of shareholders supported GM continuing operations in South Africa. Shareholders had automatically voted for management at a time when the power of proxy voting had yet to be full understood.

It was a staggering loss, but not unexpected. South Africa was a world away and the lives of poor blacks were irrelevant to most shareholders. In the end, all that mattered to most investors were profits.

Still, church activists captured the moral high ground. They sparked a national conversation and forced the company to take a moral position in public. What had started as a few thousand shares became three million. And as Campaign GM showed, even a minor vote could spark progress. Activism was a game of inches and there was still time for a comeback.

Chairman Roche, who stood on stage for seven bruising hours, concluded: 

“Over the last several years, I personally have been in a position to give serious thought to the pressures for change. General Motors, as we have tried to show, is responding to the demands of our society.” Adding, “I don't think we won a victory. I think we won a vote of confidence from our shareholders. I think we could lose that vote of confidence very quickly unless we respond in the way our shareholders expect us to do to these problems, and that is what we intend to do.”

What Timothy Smith, Bishop Hines, and Leon Sullivan could not have perceived in the moment was that the seeds they sowed made them the godfathers of a new industry that ultimately transformed the global economy.

Part 3 of The Godfathers, a real-life story about a controversial church group’s campaign to end Apartheid that revolutionized the global economy. If you missed it, read my intro or start from Part 1.

Dear Walkers,

Today we walk a mile in the shoes of the Archbishop of the Episcopal Church at critical time in the church’s history. Will he appease disgruntled conservative parishioners or ride the “bucking bronco of a polarized church?” What he decides will help change the course of history, revolutionize the economy, and launch a trillion-dollar industry on Wall Street.

Enjoy,

Ryon Harms

You Are the Church

Back at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Tim Smith spotted a deep purple cassock with a wraparound white collar among the otherwise somber business suits. John Hines, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, was chatting on the opposite end of the ballroom as everyone shuffled toward their seats to start the shareholder meeting for General Motors.

Days before the event, Bishop Hines had dropped a bombshell. In a public letter that made the front page of the New York Times, he urged GM’s Chairman, James Roche, to cease operations in South Africa. “We believe that the Apartheid policies presently pursued by the Republic of South Africa will lead inextricably to great instability and turmoil in South Africa, which would inevitably result in the destruction of the Church’s investments in General Motors.”

Episcopalians numbered in the low millions but had an outsized influence in American politics and business. Its deep colonial New England roots gave the church a “high class” reputation and attendant wealth. In his quest to “erase all vestiges of racism” from church life, Bishop Hines established the first Committee on Social Responsibility in Investments. Its first mission was to identify companies within the church’s massive endowment investments that contributed to or enabled Apartheid.

“That we possess considerable economic power is obvious and undeniable,” wrote the investment committee in a church bulletin. “What has not always been so obvious is the necessity for this Church to use its economic power for Godly purposes in the framing of a more just and equitable society.”

Dozens of companies in the church’s investment portfolio had business interests in the Republic of South Africa. Standard Oil, Texaco, Firestone Tires, and General Motors were found to be “essential to the development of South Africa as an industrial state.”

GM was singled out. It was “quite clear” that since Sharpeville, the manufacturing powerhouse had “willingly” helped South Africa become industrially and militarily self-sufficient. In the event of what church leaders feared was an imminent civil war, the company’s plants would be a critical source of trucks and armored vehicles used to kill and detain civilians.

Since dialogue with management had failed, committee members debated a more aggressive and somewhat unique approach: filing a shareholder resolution. When management at public companies like GM failed to act, resolutions allowed investors to take concerns directly to other shareholders. If enough of them voted in support of the resolution, it could persuade GM’s Board of Directors to push management to act.

Shareholder resolutions were rare and often press-worthy because they pitted shareholders against management. They took on heightened urgency because they were voted on in the short time leading up to an annual meeting. A final vote total also gave coverage on resolutions a satisfying conclusion. It would be a few principled church activists versus the corporate world’s undisputed Goliath. No church had ever filed a resolution and only a handful had ever filed one related to social issues.

Institutional investors like university endowments and public-benefit foundations would be forced to debate the resolution and take a stand. A public contest covered by the national press would also force GM’s management to respond in a way that would appeal to the public, not just the profit instincts of shareholders.

General Motors had made it clear that “a corporation can only discharge its obligations to society if it continues to be a profitable investment for its shareholders.” According to social activists, it was time to rearrange those priorities: a corporation should be allowed to be a profitable investment for its shareholders only if it met its obligations to society.

Bishop Hines moved boldly to file the resolution. 

After seeing the resolution, GM’s Chairman James Roche spoke at the Executive Club of Chicago: “The crusade for radical changes in our system of corporate ownership,” he told members of the Executive Club of Chicago, is “so drastic they would all but destroy free enterprise as we know it.” From the perspective of Roche and most of the investment community, church activists were more concerned with social goals than with the financial health of the company, and thus were not “real shareholders.” To Roche and most of the investment community, activists were trying to achieve in Detroit what they could not achieve on Capitol Hill.

General Motors challenged the resolution at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a final arbiter of what was allowed on a company’s agenda for the shareholder meeting known as a Proxy Statement. In GM’s “no action” objection to the SEC, the company opposed the resolution because “the cost of liquidating the highly specialized facilities in South Africa would be considerable and would also result in the loss of a well‐established source of earnings.”

The Chairman of the Commission at the SEC, who had been appointed by Nixon, by “some miracle” rejected GM’s request and allowed the church’s resolution on the Proxy Statement.

Leading conservatives in the Episcopal Church “staged a revolt” when they heard about the resolution. They called for an emergency late night meeting near New York City where one church leader asked, “Does the Episcopal Church want to stage a revolution in South Africa?” A fair question considering that the Church had provided humanitarian funding for the African National Congress, an organization labeled a “terrorist” group by the local authorities. 

“We are heading down a road not knowing where we are going,” complained another member of the Executive Council. “If we do this to General Motors, we open the doors to examinations of all companies in the United States!” Then came what church activists at the meeting considered the clincher, “The bishops in Detroit are embarrassed!”

Bishop Hines was used to ruffling feathers. He saw sacrifice in the name of standing up for the oppressed as a kind of “ecstasy.” His support for ordaining women and minorities, among other efforts, had provoked dissent, leading some congregations to lose significant membership that drastically reduced tithings and the church’s national budget. Despite the financial costs to the church, he was resolute, preferring to remain “astride the bucking bronco of a polarized church.”

Even liberal activists had qualms. “It seems very strange that the church sold its strongest possession - its moral and theological tradition in order to … fit the slit hole of economic advantage.” They argued, “At no point in Bishop Hines' letter to the Chairman of the Board of General Motors does he refer to God or to moral judgment or to the evil of Apartheid.”

Hines had argued in the letter to GM’s Chairman that Apartheid would lead to turmoil that would be bad for the church’s endowment. One church supporter asked, “Does that sound very convincing to you?” He added, “Even if you could show that turmoil will be coming (you can), it would equally well be argued that the better thing to do [for the church’s endowments] is to get the United States to beef up its support of the armed forces of the Republic of South Africa.”

Late into the meeting, a church elder cleared the air: “We’ve talked about corporations, profits, the health of corporations, even the embarrassment of the bishops in Michigan. What we really should be talking about is the health of people, black people living under oppression.” Eventually, the debate was resolved with an agreement to add a preamble to the shareholder resolution that softened the demands on General Motors.

A church bulletin encouraged local parishes to hold public hearings and invite exiled South Africans to speak to the horrors of apartheid in anticipation of the upcoming shareholder meeting. It encouraged everyone to purchase a share of GM stock so they could speak at the annual meeting in Detroit, though that was controversial as it fed the perception that church activists were not real shareholders. The bulletin also recommended everyone read the report on American corporations in South Africa by Timothy Smith.

However, the Church could not simply file a resolution asking management to do the right thing. They had to address a “material” issue relevant to the company’s bottom line. It couldn’t be “overly prescriptive” or “too vague.” A law professor and member of the Episcopalian investment committee, Paul Neuhauser, was tasked with writing the resolution with help from an experienced legal firm on Wall Street.

Tim Smith helped organize the larger interfaith community of protestant denominations to vote for the resolution. When church leaders realized they held stocks in companies supporting Apartheid, they found themselves in an uncomfortable ethical dilemma. They were living a “schizophrenic existence” where investments clearly did not reflect moral values or church teachings. The nascent coalition of churches took up the ad hoc name: the Interfaith Committee on Social Responsibility in Investment. Combined, they had about $4 billion invested across thousands of companies.

Faith-based investors had environmental and social “filters” for centuries to avoid “sin stocks” related to alcohol, tobacco, weapons, and slavery. Rather than sell or “divest,” church leaders held their shares in GM to engage management in a public debate that the company desperately wanted to avoid.

Click to read Part 4 as Tim Smith and Archbishop Hines upend Wall Street and the economy at a shareholder meeting that changes history.

Part 2 of The Godfathers, a real-life story about a controversial church group’s campaign to end Apartheid that revolutionized the global economy. If you missed it, read my intro or start from Part 1.

Dear Walkers,

You won’t want to miss today’s installment of The Godfathers. After months of frustrating conversations with the CEO of General Motors, Tim Smith fundraises for a two-month visit to South Africa for an up close look at how black workers were treated at American-owned factories. You won’t believe what he found or his dangerous encounter with the Apartheid “Secret Police.”

Enjoy!

Ryon

Crocodile Tears

In July 1970, about a year before the annual shareholder meeting, Tim Smith arrived at the YMCA in Johannesburg. His mission: gather intelligence and write a comprehensive report on American corporate subsidiaries in the Apartheid state. He personally fundraised for the two-month stay by visiting the offices of racial justice groups in Manhattan. Sympathetic church leaders had gone above and beyond, using connections to get him letters of introduction from home offices in the United States to the heads of subsidiaries in South Africa.

Smith may have been the first to visit American-owned factories with the intent to challenge the local government. It was a road fraught with danger as any person advocating economic boycott in South Africa could be tried for treason. Local news reports had warned the public to keep an eye out for “trained terrorists” entering South Africa to “brainwash” youth.

Tim was warmly received by the Managing Director of General Motors South Africa Limited. William Slocum proudly offered the young white Christian a tour of the facilities. As the tour guides walked ahead, Smith snuck a picture of a “whites only” sign above an entrance to the locker rooms and some stairs that were segregated.

Africans “lack reasoning power,” explained one factory guide. They “enjoyed repetitive work,” and had “no depth perception.” Smith bit his tongue to keep the conversation flowing. Quotes like those would be gold for his report.

“I wouldn’t say these people (Africans) don’t have any reasoning power,” reasoned a GM Plant Manager, “but that what they do have is very limited.” GM only promoted black workers when a white person could not be found to fill the role, and, even then, paid them a fraction of what whites earned for the same work.

Back at Slocum’s office, Smith fumbled a bit with his tape recorder. The friendly executive helped the inexperienced interviewer set the machine to record. Slocum was open with the fellow white Christian from a church group back home. He seemed genuinely proud of GM’s role in South Africa.

“The job opportunities we provide would not be provided without us,” he said, adding, “we are in the forefront of progressive change.” Smith wasn’t sure how progressive exactly as the separation of races inside the factory was the same as in the streets. 

General Motors wasn’t the worst of the twenty American-owned factories Smith visited while crisscrossing the country. At Ford Motor Company of South Africa, the Managing Director was shockingly honest: “I don’t mix with [blacks] in the States; I don’t mix with them here, and if I went back to the States, I wouldn’t mix with them there either.” 

Others told him it wasn’t a good idea to raise wages for Africans because they would just waste the money. “If you saw these Africans on Friday afternoon after payday,” explained the executive at John Deere, “you would see that they are not quite human.”

Smith recorded dozens of quotes that would have gotten executives in hot water or even fired in the United States. American companies were withholding workplace rights considered essential back home. To a man, the executives insisted that progress had to happen incrementally in South Africa, lest the nation devolve into communism. Majority rule too soon, they argued, would surely devolve into “complete chaos.”

There was little regard for the daily oppression of black South Africans. As the economy had expanded, Apartheid had hardened. Nonwhites had lost representation in parliament, black opposition parties were banned, and black unions were not recognized. Naturally, executives wouldn’t want to slow the end of Apartheid - their annual bonuses partly depended on cheap labor.

At Goodyear, a sympathetic executive gave Smith a heads up: the Special Branch had phoned to quiz him about their conversation. Smith had a message waiting for him at the Y from a detective requesting an audience. He later met the sickly pale officer with icy blue eyes. He grilled Smith with that thick Afrikaans accent - like an inquisitive Nazi in an all-English war movie. Vhy are you here? Vhy interview so many executives?

Smith told the truth. He was part of a Christian church group doing research. Religious groups weren’t known for interfering in business activities. He wasn’t a journalist or some politician. Smith was honest but careful not to trash Apartheid as the officer dutifully jotted responses on his little notepad. There was no overt threat, but Smith got the message. “Ve’ll be in touch,” concluded the officer.

Tim Smith interviewed scores of executives, union leaders, journalists, publishers, economists, professors, and government representatives. Friendly pastors set up secret meetings to speak with black workers outside factories. His report juxtaposed the views of white Americans and South Africans with those of Africans, Asians, and Cape Coloureds.

Before leaving, an official from the U.S. Embassy in South Africa confided: “I used to hope that we could get the American businesses here to move off their bottoms and do something. But we are putting pressure at the wrong end. The pressure should be applied in New York or in Detroit.”

A Convenient Excuse

Special Branch officers were right to worry about Tim Smith. His explosive report, “The American Corporation In South Africa,” provided invaluable insights for the broader anti-apartheid movement. It was first-hand information never collected before that was hard to dismiss, even for willfully uninformed executives in Detroit and elsewhere.

Interviewing twenty out of two hundred American-owned subsidiaries may not have been a representative sample. A government mandated survey with standardized questions would have obviously been ideal, but that kind of support was “not in the offing.” Still, consistent answers at every subsidiary allowed Smith to confidently conclude: “Fact is that American business and American businessmen assist in perpetuating and strengthening the racial status quo in South Africa.”

Based on his eye-opening report, Smith was invited to present before the Subcommittee on Africa of the U.S. House of Representatives. Charles Diggs, whose district included GM’s headquarters in Detroit, chaired the committee as part of a decades-long struggle for sanctions against the Apartheid regime. As the first African American congressman from Michigan and the founding chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, he’d openly criticized the White House for supporting the white supremacist government in South Africa.

Smith confirmed that American influence had made the Apartheid regime bolder and ever more self-sufficient. American investments in the auto, oil, and rubber sectors assisted in building South Africa’s military potential. Trucks sold to the South African army showed how a “neutral economic investment” aided and abetted the regime.

“When a corporation provides important materials, know-how, or equipment for use directly or indirectly in the process of oppression,” Smith told congressional leaders, “It is both morally and politically implicated in their use.”

A “liberal” company in South Africa was easily classed as exploitative and unjust by international standards. Corporations in the U.S. had recognized by then that hiring, training, and promoting African Americans was necessary to retain social credibility. In South Africa, it was a “non-question.” A full seventy-seven percent of the executives Smith interviewed for his report supported Apartheid as an attempt to “find a solution.”

Even if American corporations provided small gains for black workers, the result was a nation of slightly better fed political and economic serfs. As the former Prime Minister, John Vorster, had plainly stated: "We know one person only to whom we owe an explanation and that is the white worker in South Africa.”

Confounding political efforts during the Cold War was that Nelson Mandela’s banned political party received funding from the Soviet Union. Smith and Diggs understood that accepting those donations was an act of desperation given no western nation would fund their cause. Mandela wasn’t a communist, they argued, nor did he plan to implement a Soviet-aligned government.

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At the height of communist paranoia, President Richard Nixon refused to support sanctions. “We must analyze where our national interest lies,” he had said, “and not worry too much about other people’s domestic policies.” Nixon played into the hands of National Party leaders in South Africa who expertly exaggerated the “communist menace” as a convenient excuse to justify white minority rule.

Social conservatives in America consistently thwarted efforts to sanction white nationalists in South Africa. The Apartheid regime had also banned porn, gambling, works by Marx, Lenin and other “dangerous” socialists. Cinemas, shops selling alcohol, and most other businesses were closed by law on Sundays. Abortion, homosexuality, and sex education had also been severely restricted.

Sweeping government policies would have clearly been preferred to piecemeal corporate action, but church activists and the broader anti-apartheid movement could not depend on the White House. With profitable economic relations and abundant mineral resources, the United States continued to deepen ties with South Africa.

Read Part 3 of The Godfathers where the Episcopal Church holds an “emergency meeting” to decide the fate of a controversial plan that would revolutionize capitalism.

The Godfathers is a real-life story about Tim Smith, a controversial church activist obsessed with applying economic pressure on South Africa to end Apartheid. If you missed my intro, find it here. Otherwise start reading!

The Godfathers

PART 1

A World Away

Timothy Smith was a world away from volunteer work in Africa as he entered the annual shareholder meeting for General Motors in 1971. The yearly gathering transformed Cobo Hall in Detroit into a kind of cathedral for capitalism. Thousands of shareholders and their representatives packed the glitziest ballroom in town to vote on proposals and present concerns to the Board of Directors. Shareholder meetings were normally formal and uneventful, but this one was expected to be unruly and contentious - a serious risk to the reputation of the world’s most powerful corporation, and, to an extent, capitalism itself.

Sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a disarming smile, the six-foot seminary graduate may have seemed mild-mannered, but most attendees that day would soon consider him a dangerous interloper. Truth be told, he didn’t personally own shares in General Motors. He didn’t own much of anything. He studied ethics and religion - not business or finance. In a few hours, the Christian activist would air dirty laundry that few in attendance wanted to acknowledge before a room crawling with journalists.

A hundred rows of neatly ordered chairs faced a stage at the far end of the massive ballroom where the Chairman of GM’s Board would soon preside over the meeting. Shareholders elected the Board to represent their interests, but directors mostly just rubber-stamped management. Dissent in a public forum that was meant to impress shareholders would have made the company look disorganized and incompetent. No board member had ever contradicted the Chairman in public. It was one of many sacred traditions that would not survive the meeting.

Dressed in his best wool suit, Smith meandered among the mostly white men in the ballroom lined with draped blue curtains. One group of somber-looking executives bemoaned the union strike that shut down GM’s factories for months the year before. It had been a sordid and embarrassing fight that resulted in a massive loss of revenue and expensive concessions. Rank and file plant workers were clueless to the real costs of running a business, they grumbled.

Smith had been authorized to attend the meeting as a representative of the United Church of Christ, an influential Protestant denomination with origins dating back to the first colonies of New England. Several other churches had also sent representatives as part of a larger ad hoc coalition that collectively managed pensions and endowments worth billions, including thousands of shares in General Motors.

GM employed over half a million souls with operations on nearly every continent. Its five million cars sold the previous year left competitors in the dust. No company had a higher public profile or was more representative of the almighty power of American capitalism. Church activists were at the meeting to discuss the six thousand workers that made GM the biggest corporate employer in South Africa.

Business was booming in southern Africa. Labor was crazy cheap and products were sold at a premium. An average annual return of seventeen percent made it easy for GM to invest a hundred million dollars in an “ultramodern” manufacturing plant in Port Elizabeth - a mild-weathered beach town with a well-appointed township. Skilled technicians were scarce, but talent could be lured from Europe or North America.

Church advocates desperately wanted General Motors to leave South Africa. It would have been a complete and total loss for the firm and its shareholders, but, to activists, South Africa had a tragic flaw - systemic racism codified in laws known as Apartheid.

Apartheid was how the white minority in South Africa kept the Black majority in a permanent state of subservience. It was a separation of races so severe that it somehow made segregation in Alabama almost look progressive.

Millions of black families had been forcibly removed from their homes in what became “all-white” cities. Stripped of their birthright citizenship, “nonwhites” were herded into reservations that the government considered separate nations. Productive land was reserved for whites, the rest left for everyone else to scratch out an existence. Eighty percent of the country’s people had been corralled into just ten percent of its territory. Overcrowding meant whatever soil could be harvested was soon overworked and infertile. Starvation and malnourishment were the norm.

General Motors didn’t invent Apartheid, but it sold vehicles to the massive police state that ruthlessly enforced it. “Special Branch” police officers patrolled white cities in white vans to round up stray blacks with expired work visas. Half a million Africans were jailed each year for so-called “passbook” violations. Many were beaten, tortured, or killed. Some were sold to white farmers as forced laborers. Apartheid had effectively made it illegal to be black in an African nation.

Activists saw General Motors as a great white whale. Convincing the world's largest company to leave would send a strong signal to the international business community. Ford and Chrysler would likely follow, and, eventually, all American companies would be forced to answer why they operated in a country that treated people like animals. Each departure would be a headline. Headlines kept Apartheid in the national conversation.

If enough companies left, white South Africans would inevitably feel the pain of Apartheid. Lost jobs. Products missing from shelves. Public works defunded. It would only be a matter of time before local voters passed that pain on to the ruling National Party. So long as white citizens were oblivious to the agony of the black existence under Apartheid, the status quo would only strengthen - as it had for more than thirty years.

Americans witnessed the brutality of the Apartheid regime in 1960 when police opened fire on unarmed protestors in Sharpeville, a black ghetto near all white Johannesburg. As many as ninety were murdered, including 10 kids. Hundreds of defenseless men, women, and children were wounded. Photographers captured grizzly images of the Sharpeville Massacre that were broadcast on the evening news around the world.

South Africa was expelled from the British Commonwealth. The United Nations adopted a resolution “deploring the policies and actions of the South African government.” Massive public outcry forced the U.S. and U.K. to discontinue arms deals with the white nationalist government. Hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investments left the beleaguered nation, nearly crashing its stock market.

Not everybody was so principled. Several American corporations doubled down, including GM, Ford, and IBM. Some placed full-page ads in local papers professing continued support for the Apartheid regime. A consortium of U.S. banks gave the pariah government a revolving credit to withstand blowback from a possible “second Sharpeville.”

As Tim Smith had written in a letter to church leaders, “At a time in which political and economic instability was leading to a type of re-evaluation, the natural inclination of profit-motivated U.S. businessmen was to stabilize the economy.”

Leaders of the opposition African National Congress had a policy of peaceful protests, but the massacre spawned a militant wing led by a freedom fighter who had marched with protesters in Sharpeville named Nelson Mandela. “The Spear of the Nation” began a campaign of sabotage that included explosions in public spaces and the mining of strategic roads. These “acts of terrorism” emboldened the National Party to crack down.

By the time of the annual meeting for General Motors in 1971, Mandela had already been in prison for eight years.

Sharpeville eventually faded from the headlines in America. Most people moved on to the next news cycle, but anti-apartheid activists pressed on. If nothing was done to pressure the ruling party to negotiate, South Africa would likely devolve into a bloody civil war. As the international backlash to the massacre showed, outside pressure could weaken the white nationalist party. But so long as foreign corporations remained, the Apartheid state would recover - and emerge stronger.

Tim Smith and other church activists had met with the Chief Executive Officer of General Motors before the shareholder meeting. Thomas Murphy was a devout Catholic known to travel for hours to reach the nearest Sunday mass on business trips. However, the mass starvations and infants dying of malnutrition failed to persuade him.

They then pitched the executive on the halo effect for the brand’s reputation. Progressives would be more likely to buy their cars. College graduates, many of whom had protested Apartheid, would be more likely to work for General Motors.

“I just can’t do it, Tim.” Murphy’s hands were tied. He couldn’t justify a fire sale to shareholders. They had elected him to maximize profits - not to preach.

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Murphy assured church advocates that Apartheid was “economically unrealistic.” There simply weren’t enough white workers to fuel growth over the long term. Soon enough there would be more opportunities for nonwhites to qualify for better paying jobs. General Motors was already paying them more than minimum wage. It was better for blacks to work for enlightened American managers than racist South Africans, he argued.

Divestment at the level anti-apartheid activists wanted would leave thousands of hard-working men unemployed -- creating more hardship for the same people they wished to help. Smith took solace in the words of a leader in the exiled African National Congress: “Economic boycott of South Africa will entail un-doubted hardship for Africans... But if it is a method which shortens the day of bloodshed, the suffering to us will be a price we are willing to pay."

GM had a history of supporting white supremacist governments. Its German subsidiary had produced the “GM Krieg” that made possible the Nazi blitzkrieg of Poland in 1939. When the full extent of GM’s support for the Nazis surfaced after the war, the chief executive officer at the time successfully waved away criticism saying the partnership had been “highly profitable.”

Church activists understood the profit motive. Investing in growth was essential for survival in highly competitive markets like auto manufacturing. But just because something was profitable didn’t mean a company could get away with accessory to murder. Murphy seemed to say his only job was to maximize profits for shareholders, even if it meant making a deal with the devil.

Moral persuasion had failed. Ethics and values were found wanting. Convincing corporate America to leave South Africa would require a significantly broader effort. Within the faith community, many agreed more evidence was needed to justify their extraordinary demands, including on-the-ground intelligence from inside the factories in South Africa. Tim Smith responded.

Read about Tim Smith’s encounter with “Secret Police” in South Africa and his history-making campaign that revolutionized the global economy for good in Part II of the Godfathers.

Walk A Mile is where I publish honest stories based on dramatic moments in the lives of controversial people. (Narrative Nonfiction)

Dear Walkers,

I met Tim Smith a few years ago at a conference for “responsible” investors. There were good speakers, but Tim got the only standing ovation. On stage he seemed kind, humble, and wise; the kind of grandpa everyone should have. But as the tribute video showed, his work was also extremely controversial. Among a lifetime of “achievements” was revolutionizing Wall Street to help end Apartheid - with far-reaching and unintended consequences.

Tim was celebrated that day, but his legacy was soon vilified. Not long after the conference, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others called responsible investing, “The Devil incarnate,” “Communist,” and “Satanic.” Legislators in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere passed bills to outlawed the kind of investing Tim pioneered. At a time when responsible investing accounted for nearly a third of the global economy, a brutal backlash was underway.

I reached out to Tim. He explained that while attacks from Elon and others were particularly “nasty,” mixing money and morals had been controversial from day one. I asked about those early days when he and church activists first used finance to convince corporate America to leave South Africa as a way to pressure the Apartheid regime. I couldn’t resist the irony of how efforts by concerned christians was suddenly “satanic.”

The more Tim recounted from those early days, the more I sensed there were important lessons from the past that could inform the present controversy. Even the backlash had started back then. From Richard Nixon and Nelson Mandela to Milton Friedman and Desmond Tutu, the names have changed but not the eternal debate: What is the role of a corporation in society?

Today, Tim Smith’s organization is in the crosshairs of the U.S. Congress. Several Committees are working to permanently end the industry he started. Federal laws will likely be passed later this year and some industry leaders may be found in contempt. The retirement of millions of hard-working Americans hangs in the balance.

At a time of unprecedented corporate power and influence, the question of what it means to be a responsible corporation has never been more relevant (or so relative). It’s a topic that strikes to the core of business, democracy, and what it means to be an American. Getting anywhere close to a consensus requires far more than a tweet, or a million of them for that matter.

Rather than further inflame the controversy, I decided my contribution to this hot button issue should be an honest and entertaining story that lets readers walk in the shoes of a young Tim Smith, the idealistic seminary graduate that revolutionized Wall Street by mixing morals and money.

My nonfiction story, The Godfathers, will be published as a weekly newsletter over five parts, followed by a research series that exposes the long-lost church archives and old press clippings that drive the story. If you want to follow along, click below to subscribe to Walk A Mile on Substack.

Read Part I of The Godfathers: A World Away