January 5, 2004 - The New Yorker: After graduating in 1972, Dean brother passed up a Peace Corps assignment in Nepal to work full time for McGovern

Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Headlines: January 2004 Peace Corps Headlines: January 5, 2004 - The New Yorker: After graduating in 1972, Dean brother passed up a Peace Corps assignment in Nepal to work full time for McGovern

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After graduating in 1972, Dean brother passed up a Peace Corps assignment in Nepal to work full time for McGovern



After graduating in 1972, Dean brother passed up a Peace Corps assignment in Nepal to work full time for McGovern

To this day, no one knows quite what Charlie Dean was doing in Laos or how he died. Of the four boys, he was the most extroverted—strong-willed and audacious, instinctively drawn to politics and instinctively liberal, always game to provoke Big Howard during dinner-table debates. When he was a teen-ager, he spent several summers as a counsellor in a camp for impoverished black and Hispanic children from New York City. At St. George’s, he was president of his class, and at the University of North Carolina, too, he served in student government. He proved more susceptible to the Zeitgeist than his older brother, and his convictions progressed leftward. In 1972, during his senior year, he became campus chairman of the McGovern campaign. After graduating, he passed up a Peace Corps assignment in Nepal to work full time for McGovern. When that ended in dismal disappointment, he retreated to East Hampton. “Well, I think I’ve finally crashed from a dynamite trip,” he wrote to a friend.

But the next year he launched himself on what was to have been an around-the-world adventure. He sailed to Japan aboard a freighter, went next to Bali, and then to Australia, where he spent nine months working on a ranch. From there, he and a friend headed for Laos. Why Laos, the bombing range next door to Vietnam, where the war, though waning, had not yet ended? Or—if you’re twenty-four years old, fearless, and possessed of a robust sense of entitlement—why not? Charlie and an Australian friend were aboard a ferry on the Mekong River between Laos and Thailand when the Pathet Lao took them into custody. Because they were taking photographs, the Pathet Lao might have mistaken them for spies. Or their crime might have been that Charlie, by virtue of his American passport, was simply the enemy.

Andrée Dean’s burnished memory of her son is that Charlie was the one most like the father. “I think my husband felt very in tune with Charlie,” she told me. “I think he felt Charlie was going to follow in his footsteps. They must have had the same thought processes. He was quite bossy. Used to boss his brothers around. He was very organized. I think that’s what [Big] Howard bonded with. Charlie was shrewd. Smart but street-smart, too. No one tried to talk him out of going on that trip.”

Nor, afterward, did anyone talk much about what had happened, least of all Big Howard, who basically decreed the matter off limits, too painful. The taboo remained until his death, and it wasn’t until the following year, 2002, that Dean permitted himself to go to Laos. There—in part because a Pentagon task force had accumulated much information about Americans missing in Southeast Asia—Dean was able to visit the spot where, he was told, his brother had been buried. Only at that point did the Charlie legend circulate in Vermont; reporters who had been covering Dean for years had had no idea.

In mid-November, it was announced that Charlie’s remains had been found, though not in the place Dean had been escorted to. Confronted with questions from reporters about his emotional reaction to this discovery, he was neither evasive nor indulgent. “When you go through something like this, you have a tremendous sense of survivor’s guilt and anger,” he said. “Anger at the person who disappeared and guilt over the anger. It’s very complicated.” A month earlier—at the time, I was flying with Dean from Detroit to Baltimore—he had even broached the subject with me, in response to my question about his avoidance of autobiography.




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Story Source: The New Yorker

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Nepal; Elections2004

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