CHAPTER 6


Selling My Soul

Our eleven-man team spent six days in Jakarta registering at the US Embassy, meeting various officials, organizing ourselves, and relaxing around the pool. The number of Americans who lived at the Hotel InterContinental amazed me. I took great pleasure in watching the beautiful young women — wives of US oil and construction company executives — who passed their days at the pool and their evenings in the half dozen posh restaurants in and around the hotel.

Then Charlie moved our team to the mountain city of Bandung. The climate was milder, the poverty less obvious, and the distractions fewer. We were given a government guesthouse known as the Wisma, complete with a manager, a cook, a gardener, and a staff of servants. Built during the Dutch colonial period, the Wisma was a haven. Its spacious veranda faced tea plantations that flowed across rolling hills and up the slopes of Java’s volcanic mountains. In addition to housing, we were provided with eleven Toyota off-road vehicles, each with a driver and translator. Finally, we were presented with memberships to the exclusive Bandung Golf and Racquet Club, and we were housed in a suite of offices at the local headquarters of Perusahaan Umum Listrik Negara, the government-owned electric utility company.

For me, the first several days in Bandung involved a series of meetings with Charlie and Howard Parker. Howard was in his seventies and was the retired chief load forecaster for the New England Electric System. Now he was responsible for forecasting the amount of energy and generating capacity (the load) the island of Java would need over the next twenty-five years, breaking this down into city and regional forecasts. Because electricity demand is highly correlated with economic growth, his forecasts depended on my economic projections. The rest of our team would develop the master plan around these forecasts, locating and designing power plants, transmission and distribution lines, and fuel transportation systems in a manner that would satisfy our projections as efficiently as possible. During our meetings, Charlie continually emphasized the importance of my job, and he badgered me about the need to be very optimistic in my forecasts. Claudine had been right; I was the key to the entire master plan.

“The first few weeks here,” Charlie explained, “are about data collection.”

He, Howard, and I were seated in big rattan chairs in Charlie’s plush private office. The walls were decorated with batik tapestries depicting epic tales from the ancient Hindu texts of the Ramayana. Charlie puffed on a fat cigar.

“The engineers will put together a detailed picture of the current electric system, port capacities, roads, railroads, all those sorts of things.” He pointed his cigar at me. “You gotta act fast. By the end of month one, Howard’ll need to get a pretty good idea about the full extent of the economic miracles that’ll happen when we get the new grid on line. By the end of the second month, he’ll need more details — broken down into regions. The last month will be about filling in the gaps. That’ll be critical. All of us will put our heads together then. So, before we leave we gotta be absolutely certain we have all the information we’ll need. ‘Home for Thanksgiving,’ that’s my motto. There’s no coming back.”

Howard appeared to be an amiable, grandfatherly type, but he was actually a bitter old man who felt cheated by life. He had never reached the pinnacle of the New England Electric System, and he deeply resented it. “Passed over,” he told me repeatedly, “because I refused to buy the company line.” He had been forced into retirement and then, unable to tolerate staying at home with his wife, had accepted a consulting job with MAIN. This was his second assignment, and I had been warned by both Einar and Charlie to watch out for him. They described him with words like stubborn, mean, and vindictive.

As it turned out, Howard was one of my wisest teachers, although not one I was ready to accept at the time. He had never received the type of training Claudine had given me. I suppose they considered him too old, or perhaps too stubborn. Or maybe they figured he was only in it for the short run, until they could lure in a more pliable full-timer like me. In any case, from their standpoint, he turned out to be a problem. Howard clearly saw the situation and the role they wanted him to play, and he was determined not to be a pawn. All the adjectives Einar and Charlie had used to describe him were appropriate, but at least some of his stubbornness grew out of his personal commitment not to be their servant. I doubt he had ever heard the term “economic hit man,” but he knew they intended to use him to promote a form of imperialism he could not accept.

He took me aside after one of our meetings with Charlie. He wore a hearing aid, and he fiddled with the little box under his shirt that controlled its volume.

“This is between you and me,” Howard said in a hushed voice. We were standing at the window in the office we shared, looking out at the stagnant canal that wound past the Perusahaan Umum Listrik Negara building. A young woman was bathing in its foul waters. “They’ll try to convince you that this economy is going to skyrocket,” he said. “Charlie’s ruthless. Don’t let him get to you.”

His words gave me a sinking feeling, but also a desire to convince him that Charlie was right; after all, my career depended on pleasing my MAIN bosses.

“Surely this economy will boom,” I said, my eyes drawn to the woman in the canal. “Just look at what’s happening.”

“So there you are,” he muttered, apparently unaware of the scene in front of us. “You’ve already bought their line, have you?”

A movement up the canal caught my attention. An elderly man had descended the bank, dropped his pants, and squatted at the edge of the water to answer nature’s call. The bathing woman saw him but was undeterred; she continued washing herself. I turned away from the window and looked directly at Howard.

“I’ve been around,” I said. “I may be young, but I just got back from three years in South America. I’ve seen what can happen when oil is discovered. Things change fast.”

“Oh, I’ve been around too,” he said mockingly. “A great many years. I’ll tell you something, young man. I don’t give a damn for your oil discoveries and all that. I forecasted electric loads all my life — during the Depression, World War II, times of bust and boom. And I can say for sure that no electric load ever grew by more than 7 to 9 percent a year for any sustained period. And that’s in the best of times. Six percent is more reasonable.”¹

I stared at him. Part of me suspected he was right, but I felt defensive. I knew I had to convince him, because my own conscience cried out for justification.

“Howard, this isn’t the United States. This is a country where, until now, no one could even get electricity. Things are different here.”

He turned on his heel and waved his hand as though he could brush me away.

“Go ahead,” he snarled. “Sell out. I don’t give a damn what you come up with.” He jerked his chair from behind his desk and fell into it. “I’ll make my electricity forecast based on what I believe, not some pie-in-the-sky economic study.” He picked up his pencil and started to scribble on a pad of paper.

It was a challenge I could not ignore. I went and stood in front of his desk.

“You’ll look pretty stupid if I come up with what everyone expects — a boom to rival the California gold rush — and you forecast electricity growth at a rate comparable to Boston in the 1960s.”

He slammed the pencil down and glared at me. “Unconscionable! That’s what it is. You — all of you . . .” He waved his arms at the offices beyond his walls. “You’ve sold your souls to the devil. You’re in it for the money. Now,” he feigned a smile and reached under his shirt, “I’m turning off my hearing aid and going back to work.”

It shook me to the core. I stomped out of the room and headed for Charlie’s office. Halfway there I stopped, uncertain about what I intended to accomplish. Instead, I turned and walked down the stairs, out the door, into the afternoon sunlight. The young woman was climbing out of the canal, her sarong wrapped tightly about her body. The elderly man had disappeared. Several boys played in the canal, splashing and shouting at one another. An older woman was standing knee-deep in the water, brushing her teeth; another was scrubbing clothes.

A huge lump grew in my throat. I sat down on a slab of broken concrete, trying to disregard the pungent odor from the canal. I fought hard to hold back the tears; I needed to figure out why I felt so miserable.

You’re in it for the money. I heard Howard’s words, over and over. He had struck a raw nerve.

The little boys continued to splash one another, their gleeful voices filling the air. I wondered what I could do. What would it take to make me carefree like them? The question tormented me as I sat there watching them cavort in their blissful innocence, apparently unaware of the risk they took by playing in that fetid water. An elderly, hunchbacked man with a gnarled cane hobbled along the bank above the canal. He stopped and watched the boys, and his face broke into a toothless grin.

Perhaps I could confide in Howard; maybe together we would arrive at a solution. I immediately felt a sense of relief. I picked up a little stone and threw it into the canal. As the ripples faded, however, so did my euphoria. I knew I could do no such thing. Howard was old and bitter. He had already passed up opportunities to advance his own career. Surely, he would not buckle now. I was young, just starting out, and certainly did not want to end up like him.

Staring into the water of that putrid canal, I once again saw images of the New Hampshire prep school on the hill, where I had spent vacations alone while the other boys went off to their debutante balls. Slowly the sorry fact settled in. Once again, there was no one I could talk to.

That night I lay in bed, thinking for a long time about the people in my life — Howard, Charlie, Claudine, Ann, Einar, Uncle Frank — wondering what my life would be like if I had never met them. Where would I be living? Not Indonesia, that was for sure. I wondered also about my future, about where I was headed. I pondered the decision confronting me. Charlie had made it clear that he expected Howard and me to come up with growth rates of at least 17 percent per annum. What kind of forecast would I produce?

Suddenly a thought came to me that soothed my soul. Why had it not occurred to me before? The decision was not mine at all. Howard had said that he would do what he considered right, regardless of my conclusions. I could please my bosses with a high economic forecast and he would make his own decision; my work would have no effect on the master plan. People kept emphasizing the importance of my role, but they were wrong. A great burden had been lifted. I fell into a deep sleep.

A few days later, Howard was taken ill with a severe amoebic attack. We rushed him to a Catholic missionary hospital. The doctors prescribed medication and strongly recommended that he return immediately to the United States. Howard assured us that he already had all the data he needed and could easily complete the load forecast from Boston. His parting words to me were a reiteration of his earlier warning.

“No need to cook the numbers,” he said. “I’ll not be part of that scam, no matter what you say about the miracles of economic growth!”