Since retiring from the foreign service, Ambassador White continued to remain active in Latin American affairs working for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, assuming the presidency of the Center For International Policy, participating in various speaking engagements, providing expert witness testimony for legal cases with the CJA, and writing publicly on US-LA relations.
He is most fondly remember, however, for his dedication to the people of El Salvador and the US by his support for policies to try to avert civil war in that country and then to attain justice for those who suffered as a result of the subsequent war between the government and the FMLN.
"During my Foreign Service career, I did what I could to oppose policies that supported dictators, [there was no comma in Ambassador White's original post but Reuters inserted one here] and closed off democratic alternatives," he wrote in an article published in the New York Times in March 2013.
In 1981, as the ambassador to El Salvador, White said he refused a demand by the secretary of state, Alexander Haig Jr., to use official channels to cover up the Salvadoran military's responsibility for the murders of four American church workers.
"I was fired and forced out of the Foreign Service," he wrote. (Reuters)When Ambassador White was appointed US Ambassador to El Salvador in 1980, he tried to support reformist elements in the government and the military and to convince conservative hardliners in both institutions that the US was serious in demanding improvements in the areas of human rights. However, he was undercut by the fact that US military attaches were giving contradictory messages to the Salvadoran right and by the fact that the US had little leverage of the right at this time. Our threats to withhold future aid were not taken very seriously as we were not providing very much at the time anyway. (Stanley)
However, his propensity to speak publicly and his actions would sometimes get him in trouble with Salvadorans on the right and officials in Washington (which wasn't necessarily a bad thing).
"Outspoken and with a track record that included standing up to Paraguay's General Stroessner, White had arrived in early March. Romero was impressed by his meeting with White, and White by the archbishop: his presence at Romero's Sunday mass over the following two weeks was a gesture that did not go unnoticed by any political sector.
White had known the Central American Jesuits and "where they were coming from" since his days in the U.S. embassy in Nicaragua in the early 1970s. He remembered Paco Estrada, provincial at the time, from then and had renewed his acquaintance with him at the meeting with Romero. Within a few weeks White had the first of two dinners with Estrada, Ellacuria, and Segundo Montes.
The Jesuits had asked that the dinner be "off the record," but Ellacuria's carelessness on a trip to Spain in early May breached their own request.. Warming to the Jesuits' company, White told them that if he were a Salvadoran he would be aligned with the guerrillas. No doubt delighted by this admission, Ellacuria repeated the remark, adding "he talks too much for an ambassador," in the presence of one Emilio Zuneda, who subsequently wrote up an "interview with the Rector of the UCA" for the Spanish magazine Ecclesia. The piece was reprinted in the Salvadoran newspaper Prensa Grafica and White had to answer to his bosses in the State Department. (Whitfield)I'm sure that he would have hoped to remain in his post and avert some of the bloodshed that was to come but he was proud not to have betrayed his principles even if it came at the cost of his diplomatic career.
“I regard it as an honor to join a small group of officers who have gone out of the service because they refused to betray their principles,” he said at the hearing.My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.
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