If Marks's father had had his way, his only son would have taken over his insurance business. Perhaps he would have commuted into New York City, as David Marks did for years from their home in South Orange, New Jersey. But his son's road toward bridge-building began with an act of family rebellion: at twenty-two, he made use of his government major and joined the Foreign Service. The State Department originally planned to send him to London, but four days before he was scheduled to depart he was reclassified 1A for the draft. He was told that if he didn't change his assignment to Southeast Asia, he'd probably be called up for military service. Says Marks: "I'm one of the few people of my generation to have gone to Vietnam to avoid the draft."
At first, Marks—who watched the Tet Offensive unfold around him from the rooftop of his Saigon apartment building—believed that the cause was worthy but the strategy inefficient. But then he returned stateside, where he was assigned as an analyst and staff assistant to the director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, whose goal was to harness intelligence from various sources to serve U.S. diplomacy. "They used to say that if you could see what the President is seeing, then you would really support the war in Vietnam," he says. "Well, I was seeing virtually everything that the President was seeing—and the more I saw, the less I was supportive."
‘I didn’t want to throw monkey wrenches into the old system my whole life,’ Marks says. ‘I wanted to build a new system.’So Marks essentially switched sides. He quit the State Department and took a job as executive assistant for foreign policy to U.S. Senator Clifford Case, an anti-war Republican from New Jersey. For three years, he served as Case's principal staffer responsible for what would become the Case- Church Amendment. Approved by Congress in 1973, it ended direct U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. "It was heady stuff," recalls Marks, who still lives in the nation's capital.
What do you do after you craft legislation that ends a war? Pick another battle. In 1974, Marks co-authored (along with Victor Marchietti, a former assistant to the deputy director of the CIA) a controversial exposé entitled The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which claimed to show the inner workings of the organization's clandestine operations and how it had strayed from its original purpose. Before it was published, the U.S. government took the unprecedented step of going to court to censor the book. Seeing it as a straightforward First Amendment issue, the authors figured they would either have to go to jail or flee the country. But after the manuscript was completed, Marchietti (a father of three) had a change of heart and submitted the book to the CIA for clearance.
The CIA demanded that the authors remove 399 passages—some revelatory, some embarrassing, some seemingly innocuous. But the authors pushed back, and eventually 168 passages were censored. Per Marks's suggestion, publisher Alfred A. Knopf released the book with gaps to show the censored passages and with boldface type for material the CIA tried but failed to remove. It proved to be marketing genius, and the book became a bestseller, thanks in large part to the Watergate scandal. "We went from being kind-of outlaws to something close to culture heroes, because what we were saying was consistent with the secret abuse of power people were seeing," says Marks. "The message of the book was that the CIA as an organization was both inept and repressive, and that was what happened to the book. The medium became the message."
In the years that followed, his curiosity piqued by reading about the puzzling suicide of a U.S. Army biological warfare specialist in 1953, Marks combed through 15,000 pages of CIA documents obtained under the newly passed Freedom of Information Act. The result, published in 1979, was The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a book detailing the CIA's secret drug experiments involving chemical interrogation and mind control. In the process, however, Marks discovered that he was more interested in exploring the human mind than the CIA's abuses of it. He began with a selfevaluation and realized that much of his work over the past decade had been adversarial— defined by what he was against rather than what he was for. "I didn't want to throw monkey wrenches into the old system my whole life," he says. "I wanted to build a new system."
In 1980, Marks made his first trip to Esalen, which was then focusing on a Soviet-American exchange program, promoting private-sector initiatives that supplemented formal diplomatic channels and came to be known as "track-two diplomacy." The notion of ordinary citizens making a difference in the international realm fascinated Marks. "I came to understand that there was a way to combine the more political work I had been doing on the East Coast with the work in California, which was more spiritual and people-centered," he says. The nonprofit started out as the Nuclear Network—riding the "No Nukes" wave—but was soon rechristened Search for Common Ground, the first word being as significant as the last two. "We didn't want people to think we had all the answers," Marks says. "We wanted to be about the process."
It is no coincidence that SFCG started growing rapidly (about 20 percent annually) once Marks and his South African wife cemented their partnership in 1994. A well-known peacemaker herself, Collins Marks was on the front lines of her country's transition from apartheid to democracy, even taking a stray rubber bullet to the leg while trying to keep the peace between South African security forces and thousands of township residents. The couple met when Marks traveled to Capetown to film an SFCG-produced television series, and his Afrikaner co-producer asked if he was married. As Marks tells it, the conversation went like this:
"No, I'm divorced, but I'm looking."
"What are you looking for?"
"A tall, beautiful mediator."
"I know her."
They were introduced the next day and married nine months later. "We share a vision," says Marks, "and we have complementary skills." They also share the prestigious Skoll Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship, awarded in 2006, as well as an honorary doctorate from an institution of higher learning in Costa Rica. It's called the University of Peace.