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Chapter 1

The Crisis of Confidence

This chapter explores the domestic and international milieus in which human rights violations became a concern of the American people and their government. Early in the Cold War, policymakers’ fear of communism overshadowed their global humanitarian concerns, but by the late sixties many more Americans were questioning their nation’s ties to undemocratic, anticommunist regimes. This chapter takes a close look at Greece and Brazil, which fell under dictatorial rule in the sixties and became two of the earliest human rights causes in Washington. It also places Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s realist foreign policy alongside activists’ and legislators’ increasing attention to human rights violations. The Nixon administration’s critics raised questions about the lack of democracy and individual liberty in Eastern Europe, South America, and elsewhere, but Nixon and Kissinger remained steadfast in their defense of realpolitik. China also stands out in this story for the almost complete absence of Western attention to its violations during the Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s.

Prologue: Human Rights After 1945

The broad-based international human rights movement that began to coalesce in the middle of the twentieth century drew on diverse origins. Paul Gordon Lauren has aptly described this movement as the convergence point of multiple premodern and modern “visions.”¹ With a nod to some notable antecedents, its roots lay in the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. In the ensuing two centuries, growing wealth and interdependence in the Western world spurred the aspirations of the middle class, workers, women, and ethnic and religious minorities. In the twentieth century, the horrors of two world wars fueled calls for more substantial civilian protections in international law, while advances in communication and transportation increased interconnectedness and the proliferation of liberal ideas.

The carnage of the Second World War—especially the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations—threw into sharp relief the need to address the failures of the Versailles peace and to establish and enforce international rights standards. Accordingly, between 1945 and 1950 the world community created a set of regional frameworks and multilateral covenants.² This period saw a significant change in attitudes toward basic rights and the proper composition of international law, as evidenced by such milestones as the U.N. Charter (1945), the Nuremberg case law (1945–1949), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). The Universal Declaration became the blueprint for national and regional policies, and it remains the most commonly cited document in the human rights pantheon. In effect, a new global vision posited that citizens and states could rightly concern themselves with the well-being of other states’ citizens. The international community was giving unprecedented attention to what Susan Sontag called “the pain of others.”³

American policymakers’ active involvement in these efforts reflected a major shift in domestic attitudes toward internationalism. The failings of prewar unilateralism (or “isolationism”) made the World War II generation far more willing to accept the burdens of Great Power status. Americans were thus at the forefront of the creation and maintenance of the United Nations, the Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. The Cold War then convinced most of the remaining conservatives and unilateralists that faraway events could have dire consequences for American security, and this new, activist attitude became manifest in the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and President Harry S. Truman’s containment doctrine.

Yet despite America’s democratic traditions and its leading role in postwar standard-setting, American humanitarian activism waned after 1950. A combination of Cold War concerns, political realism, lingering isolationism, and domestic racial conflicts kept human rights at the margins of American diplomacy. A general consensus emerged that Washington would back undemocratic but anticommunist leaders in the developing world while also working to undermine or depose left-leaning regimes. Political disagreements remained, but they concerned means, not ends. A 1950 memo from diplomat George Kennan to Secretary of State Dean Acheson regarding Latin America demonstrates policymakers’ tendency to deemphasize democracy and individual rights in favor of the struggle against communism. “We cannot be too dogmatic,” argued Kennan, “about the methods by which local communists can be dealt with” in Latin America. “Where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak” to fend off aggression, “then we must concede that harsh governmental methods of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedure; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternative, to further communist successes.”⁴

True to Kennan’s directive, American leaders of the fifties and sixties typically chose pragmatism and realism over vague standards of universal rights and a costly push for liberal democracy. As the presidential adviser William P. Bundy has written, the moral problem of backing dictators “hardly troubled an America engrossed in what she saw as a major job of preserving the national independence of new nations and protecting them from … totalitarian methods of government.”⁵ Many saw multilateral human rights instruments as threats to U.S. sovereignty, or worried that embracing such instruments would lead other nations to criticize racial segregation in America. Still others simply asserted that moral concerns did not belong in diplomacy, or pointed out that even the best of intentions could generate unforeseen consequences. “How often,” wrote the realist scholar and political adviser Hans J. Morgenthau in 1960, “have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?”⁶

The Cold War thus had a dual effect on international human rights promotion. On the one hand, “rights” assumed a new respectability as Washington and Moscow promoted competing visions of state obligations. On the other hand, national security ideologies were defined in part by repressive domestic policies.⁷ Cold War anticommunism differed from human rights activism, though at times the two overlapped. Anticommunism stimulated the work of ethnic activists who sought to curb authoritarianism in their ancestral homelands, but these desires went unrequited in the fifties and sixties because East/West relations were so poor. America’s support of autocratic, anticommunist regimes also hindered global liberal and democratic developments. This is not to say that Americans were uninterested in civil and political liberties; it is simply to say that their interest was not global in scope. The unique civil rights struggle of African Americans was only incidentally “transnational” for much of the fifties and sixties, though civil rights–era violence did serve as fodder for communist propaganda outlets—unwanted attention that may have speeded the passage of federal civil rights legislation.⁸

As America’s postwar human rights momentum was nipped in the bud, such concerns were largely ignored in the making of foreign policy. True, Americans remained genuinely concerned about communist governments’ transgressions, and criticism of totalitarianism was, in a broad sense, a commentary on individual liberty. American political rhetoric and public opinion posited a “free world” struggle to contain communism, and in the 1960s Congress did hold a few hearings on religious intolerance in the Eastern Bloc. But Americans aimed their reformist energies at solving the nation’s considerable racial problems, not international human rights violations. According to the policymaking logic of the day, human rights were the business of bodies like the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNHRC), not Congress or the president. As the activist Aryeh Neier has argued, multilateral human rights instruments “barely registered on the consciousness of even those most preoccupied with struggles over rights in the U.S.”⁹

The few global human rights issues that confronted the Lyndon Johnson administration (1963–1969) were generally relegated to the U.N. mission. Johnson allowed his representatives to issue mild criticisms of some communist governments, but he did little else, even on behalf of popular causes. Soviet anti-Semitism, for example, spurred the formation of NGOs, rallies in several American cities, and regular pickets at the Soviet embassy, but Washington’s official sympathy was not matched by political will or diplomatic initiatives.¹⁰ Such issues were still embedded in a Cold War ideological framework: just as Soviet propagandists attacked American racism, Americans attacked Soviet anti-Semitism. The Johnson administration encouraged direct appeals from private organizations, but in the absence of a closer East/West working relationship Americans could do little to help Soviet citizens. Besides, few in the mid-1960s believed that letters to the Kremlin would change Soviet internal policies. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, activists’ attention shifted from anti-Semitism to Soviet-Jewish emigration, and this interest would prove to have effects far beyond anyone’s expectations. (Richard Nixon would continue President Johnson’s hands-off approach, but he would find it much harder to sustain his priorities in the face of the Soviet Jewry movement.)

The Johnson administration also avoided a leading role in South Africa and Rhodesia. The global interest in these two states demonstrated that national self-determination and racial equality were two of the most prominent rights claims of the fifties and sixties.¹¹ Many nations, NGOs, and multilateral forums attempted to undermine the South African system of apartheid—white-minority political rule and de jure white social and economic domination—through resolutions, economic sanctions, and boycotts. President Kennedy halted U.S. arms sales to South Africa in 1962, and the following year the U.N. Security Council passed a voluntary arms embargo. The Johnson administration continued Kennedy’s policy, but was unwilling to go beyond concurrence with the international status quo. Near the end of his presidency, Johnson even sought better relations with Pretoria in response to the rise of a radical bloc in the United Nations.¹²

Nor did the United States take the lead when the white-dominated government of Southern Rhodesia declared unilateral independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 as a means of forestalling a transition to independence and all-but-inevitable black rule. The United States endorsed a British-authored sanctions resolution, and Johnson issued an executive order prohibiting Rhodesian chrome imports and American oil and arms exports. He cited the principles of majority rule and national self-determination, though it seems that his chief concerns were domestic African American and liberal opinion, Anglo-American relations, and relations with other African states. Johnson’s U.N. ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, suggested that the United States was obliged to support U.N. sanctions, because to do otherwise would inhibit Johnson’s domestic racial policies and hurt American businesses in Africa. But with Johnson’s attention on Vietnam and Europe, his administration followed the British lead and used American influence only behind the scenes. “There are times when the best policy is to sit things out on the sidelines,” advised one insider. “Any efforts on our part to straighten things out … will be at best useless, at worst counter-productive. So let’s be nice, generous, friendly—and aloof.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk similarly advised Johnson that Rhodesia was “first a U.K. problem, then a U.N. problem, and only then is it a U.S. problem.”¹³

Some Americans opposed the chrome embargo. Not only did it force American manufacturers to buy from the Soviet Union, but Rhodesia and South Africa were anticommunist and arguably better potential allies than the other African states. (Johnson even had to politely refuse Rhodesian volunteers for service in Vietnam.) “I know the Negro has been putting pressure on to break relations with Rhodesia,” one Texan wrote to Johnson in 1967, “but why should we quit buying from a democratic country and buy from our known enemy?” Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) argued that the U.N. Charter did not authorize “interference” in a member state’s affairs. “Rhodesia is just as much a part of the British Empire as the state of Texas is a part of the United States,” he asserted.¹⁴ Few of these critics spoke of the troubling moral issue of white-minority rule, though in light of the many violations taking place in Africa, they were perhaps justified in asking why the United States was sanctioning Rhodesia and embargoing arms to South Africa while otherwise ignoring most of the continent. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations clearly feared losing the friendship of new African states, while Johnson especially worried that a weak policy would alienate African Americans.

It was not until the end of the sixties that American policymakers began to seriously consider the role international human rights should play in American foreign policy. It is perhaps fitting that 1967–1968 proved to be a turning point in the human rights story, for this stands as the modern watershed sine pari of social upheaval, antiwar protests, political assassinations, radical youth movements, and “long, hot summers” of racial antagonism. Tensions extended far beyond American shores, with violent demonstrations and government crackdowns taking place in locales as disparate as Paris, Berlin, Prague, Chicago, and Mexico City. It was also a turning point for American race relations and the civil rights movement. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 precipitated the last of the 1960s riots and ushered in a new set of domestic civil rights goals and conflicts.

In the realm of foreign relations, 1967–1968 witnessed the collapse of the Vietnam consensus and the weakening of the containment paradigm. Every presidential candidate—as well as President Johnson, who withdrew from the race—agreed that America had to rethink its global approach. As the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol noted in May 1968, “Everyone is to some extent aware that American foreign policy, after this [Vietnam] trauma, will never again be the same.”¹⁵ The Cold War became an altogether different struggle, one in which policymakers sought creative ways of decreasing overseas commitments. Other contemporary events also had broad ramifications. The April 1967 military coup in Greece brought a shocking end to democracy in a NATO member nation, while the Soviet arms buildup and the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia convinced American leaders to strengthen transatlantic ties. Not coincidentally, 1967–1968 arguably witnessed the initial stirrings of détente, first between East and West Germany and later between the United States and the Soviet Union.¹⁶ Inspired in part by these developments, some legislators and activists began to challenge the security-centered goals of the containment doctrine.

Vietnam and the End of Consensus

The new diplomatic possibilities of the late sixties emerged from the failure of older ideas. The containment principle, which originated as President Truman’s short-term solution to the problem of communist insurgency in Greece and Turkey in 1947, was the blueprint for American security policy for twenty years. It was not until the Vietnam War became a stalemate that critics began to mount a serious challenge to the containment paradigm. Congressional liberals were ahead of the curve with their moral criticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policy and their fear that the war would undermine the Democrats’ domestic agenda. Early in 1966, before it had become fashionable to criticize the war effort, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) expressed uncertainty and some bewilderment about the bombing of North Vietnam, noting the “serious problem” that Americans were “called upon to make a kind of moral commitment to an objective or to a set of purposes which we do not clearly understand.”¹⁷ Within two years, McCarthy’s sentiments had entered the mainstream. The White House and the Pentagon had long claimed that victory was imminent, but the January–February 1968 Tet Offensive showed that the Vietnamese communists were still able to mount deadly attacks. From that point forward, a majority of Americans consistently told pollsters that the war was a mistake.¹⁸ The straightforward assumptions undergirding containment had been replaced by nagging questions, and even disillusionment; the optimism that had accompanied Johnson’s electoral victory in 1964 and his Great Society program in 1965 now seemed a distant memory. When Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection, his attempt to deliver a message of national unity was overshadowed by his ominous tone. “There is division in the American house now,” he said. “There is divisiveness among us all tonight.”¹⁹

The war’s chief influence on the human rights story was its effect on the American self-image. For a people accustomed to believing in their nation’s basic decency, the war presented a difficult moral quandary. The bombing campaigns, attrition tactics, and search-and-destroy missions not only revived age-old questions about the rights of civilians during wartime, but also convinced many Americans that their nation had become an agent of suffering. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reflected these misgivings when he wrote to President Johnson in May 1967, “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness and in the world image of the United States.”²⁰ President Nixon would later fuel these controversies by expanding the war into Cambodia and Laos and periodically stepping up bombing of North Vietnam. Macabre stories trickling back from combat veterans also spurred questions about the rights of Vietnamese prisoners and American troops alike. For many Americans, the callousness of the war was summed up in what one officer allegedly told a reporter following an artillery barrage on the village of Bến Tre during the Tet Offensive: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”²¹ The source of the quote went unverified, and in fact may not have existed, but the statement became part of the war’s mythology nonetheless. Beyond the stories and rumors were the television and print images of the fighting. It is difficult to prove the impact that news coverage had on public opinion about the war, but there is little doubt that war footage and the Pulitzer Prize–winning images of Eddie Adams and Nick Ut humanized the violence and spawned greater public scrutiny of military decisions in a way that print journalists could not.²²

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, April 1967 antiwar sermon was a fascinating moment in this national transition. Not only was this a turning point in King’s civil rights crusade, symbolizing as it did his movement away from mainstream activism, but his phrasing also anticipated human rights activists’ critique of American foreign policy in the years to come. He offered a moral criticism that emphasized the war’s unjustness and ultimately asked Americans to ponder their nation’s capacity to cause, or prevent, suffering in the world. He lamented the violence, the civilian victims, and especially the paradox that America’s rhetoric of high moral purpose could not mask its support of a corrupt, unpopular government. Despite American promises of peace, democracy, and land reform, he asserted, the Vietnamese people “languish under our bombs.” Children were “running in packs on the streets like animals … degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food,” while others were “selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.” What did Vietnam’s poor think of us, asked King, “as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” America, he proclaimed, desperately needed a “radical revolution of values…. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”²³

The controversial My Lai massacre arguably influenced Americans’ perceptions of their cause in Vietnam more than any single event. My Lai was a South Vietnamese village where American soldiers killed as many as five hundred civilians during a raid in March 1968. The killing was kept secret for many months, but the story eventually made its way to the Pentagon’s top brass. The Army charged several soldiers with misconduct in September 1969, and two months later investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story to the public. In the longest trial in Army court martial history, upward of two dozen officers and enlisted men were charged with premeditated murder and related crimes, though only Lieutenant William Calley was convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison in March 1971 but served only eighteen weeks at Leavenworth followed by three and a half years of house arrest.

The story may not have had such resonance if it had not been for the public release of official photos that clearly showed that most of the victims were unarmed women and children. Once the photos were published, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird privately bemoaned the impossibility of “sweep[ing] the whole thing under the rug.”²⁴ The administration feared that the story could lead to reprisals on American POWs, hinder the ongoing peace talks, and provide “grist for the mills of antiwar activists.” In terms of their ability to bring the violence of the war home to Americans, the pictures were among the most powerful and disturbing in the history of war photography. After seeing them in Time, presidential adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested that the images had irrevocably changed the war effort. “I fear the answer of too many Americans will simply be that this is a hideous, corrupt society,” he counseled Nixon. “It is America that is being judged.”²⁵

As the news media publicized the trials and courts martial between 1969 and 1971, My Lai provoked a great deal of soul-searching and painful questions. Were the soldiers acting on orders against a legitimate threat? Or had the war driven ordinary American boys to become hardened killers capable of slaughtering women and children without remorse? The public reaction was divided and highly politicized. One side saw in the massacre an illustration of America’s dark side writ globally. They were troubled that American soldiers had killed so many innocents, and angry that only one person was convicted of war crimes. “We sense, all of us,” wrote a columnist, “that our best instincts are deserting us, and we are oppressed by a dim feeling that beneath our words and phrases, almost beneath our consciousness, we are quietly choking on the blood of innocents.”²⁶ A former Marine wrote to his senator, “I am today ashamed to be an American…. I feel unclean.” The journalist Peter Steinfels asserted that My Lai was “a cancer in the conscience of America…. Is this nation taking a mass ‘Manson murder’ to its heart as an act of patriotic duty, of soldierly duty? Are our consciences that stunted, our sensitivities so shriveled?”²⁷

On the other side, many refused to believe that a “massacre” had taken place, or simply chalked My Lai up to the ugly realities of war. Some believed that the defendants were being railroaded and that the good name of the United States and its military were being besmirched by the news media and foreign enemies. National Review assailed the “collective madness” of media outlets whose “irrational and irresponsible comment” threatened the Vietnam mission more than all the antiwar protestors combined.²⁸ Others denied that America’s cause in Vietnam was unjust or that American society was “sick.” “I feel [Lt. Calley] is being railroaded,” wrote an Army veteran to his senator. “You congressmen sent us over there, now damn it back us up. War is war. This is a cold cruel fact.”²⁹

The Nixon administration knew that many Americans sought to punish the perpetrators, but it was also clear that domestic public opinion favored Calley. When Nixon commuted Calley’s sentence, one of the prosecuting attorneys complained directly to the president and expressed shock that so many Americans did not seem to grasp the trial’s legal and moral underpinnings—that it was “unlawful for an American soldier to summarily execute unarmed and unresisting men, women, children, and babies.”³⁰ Nixon did not defend Calley, but in his memoir he attacked his own opponents for politicizing the affair and for ignoring North Vietnamese war crimes. “Calley’s crime was inexcusable,” wrote Nixon, but “the whole tragic episode was used by the media and the antiwar forces to chip away at our efforts to build public support for our Vietnam objectives.”³¹ In fairness to Nixon, although his commutation may have seemed insensitive relative to the magnitude of the massacre, he was asking a valid question about the biases behind his opponents’ outrage. But then, it was also true that the soldiers at My Lai had killed hundreds of innocents, and Americans could not punish other nations’ war criminals as easily as they could punish Lieutenant Calley.

In addition to the My Lai investigations, several forums publicized allegations of human rights violations and atrocities in Southeast Asia. In 1971, a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War held a public “Winter Soldier Investigation,” which featured three days of antiwar testimony from Vietnam veterans of all services. The recurring themes in these testimonies were American brutality, arbitrary violence, and violations of the rights of the Vietnamese. Former Marine William Crandall’s opening statement set the tone of the event: “We went to preserve the peace and our testimony will show that we have set all of Indochina aflame. We went to defend the Vietnamese people and our testimony will show that we are committing genocide against them. We went to fight for freedom and our testimony will show that we have turned Vietnam into a series of concentration camps.”³² Critics charged that the allegations were sensationalized or that these veterans were anti-American; others rationalized the violence as an unfortunate reality of war. Whatever the truth, the testimonies were further ammunition for those questioning the morality of U.S. foreign policy. In the eyes of some observers, the war had placed the United States into the ranks of the world’s human rights abusers. When a congressional committee asked the former presidential adviser James C. Thomson, Jr., in 1972 whether a U.S. withdrawal might precipitate a bloodbath in Vietnam, he replied, “It strikes me that the bloodbath danger has to be put in the context of the daily bloodbath we have inflicted on three countries.”³³

For more and more Americans, this moral criticism of the war—its violence, its uncertain purpose, and its ability to turn young men into killers—evolved seamlessly into indignation that the United States was supporting autocratic regimes worldwide. Daniel Patrick Moynihan aptly noted in 1970 that the younger generation, in particular, was “marked by the belief that its government is capable of performing abhorrent deeds.”³⁴ Prominent congressional activists of the 1970s and 1980s like Donald Fraser and Tom Harkin saw Vietnam as the prime motivator for public and congressional examinations of America’s human rights record. In Harkin’s case, this inspiration came in 1970, when as a congressional aide he saw firsthand the infamous “tiger cages” and political prisoners in South Vietnam’s Con Son prison.³⁵

Yet although it is tempting to draw a neat causative line from America’s Vietnam experience to the human rights activism of the seventies, we should be careful not to overstate the case. The war’s opponents rarely framed their charges in the language of “human rights,” and a substantial proportion of Americans continued to support the war effort all the way to the 1973 peace accords. Moreover, as American troop numbers dropped after 1968, so did public attention. In reality, a relatively small number of activists and congressional liberals channeled their outrage about carpet bombing and tiger cages into a broader criticism of American ties to autocracies worldwide.³⁶ Nevertheless, given the scope of America’s long experience in Southeast Asia—a quarter century of involvement, a decade of combat, seven million tons of bombs dropped, nearly three million Americans serving in country, and more than two hundred thousand of them killed or wounded—the war undoubtedly played at least some part in spurring the human rights movement in Washington. The Vietnam tragedy had a considerable impact on American political and cultural life, and it continued to influence foreign policy well into the 1990s.

In the larger human rights story, the war’s effect on Americans’ self-image was only the tip of a very large iceberg. Multiple political, military, and economic failures in the late 1960s and 1970s ushered in a decade-long drop in public trust that was often described as a “crisis of confidence.” This crisis did not “cause” human rights activism in any clear sense, but it did confirm for many Americans what the Vietnam debacle had already suggested: that their nation was no longer exceptional. All signs seemed to point to a decline in American power. As the Bretton Woods system collapsed and the American economy entered a period of uneven growth and high inflation, the U.S. standard of living dropped from first to tenth in the world. American industry faced major challenges from Japan and West Germany—a decline in industrial prowess that paralleled the disturbing decay of America’s cities. The long gas lines and exorbitant heating bills spawned by the energy crises brought home Americans’ reliance on imported oil, while the humiliating hostage crisis at the end of the seventies revealed the nation’s impotence when confronting hostility overseas. For the Anglophone Western world, the crisis of confidence may have been more perception than reality.³⁷ But these economic and political shocks did deepen Americans’ feelings of powerlessness in international affairs while also contributing to political apathy, mistrust of government, and alienation from the democratic process. As John Lewis Gaddis has noted of this era’s anxious insularity, “Americans seemed mired in endless arguments with themselves.”³⁸

This air of gloom had a foreign policy corollary that went beyond Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ “credibility gap.” Just as Americans were increasingly unsure of their nation’s greatness, they were also less willing to believe in its “goodness”—that is, that the United States was a nation that did good things. Every era has its problems and its social critics, but it does appear that Americans grew more pessimistic at the turn of the seventies. The Harris Alienation Index rose from 29 percent in 1966 to 59 percent in 1974, and remained relatively consistent for the next two decades.³⁹ A group of university students told Henry Kissinger in 1971 that their peers felt “alienation” and “really wanted nothing to do with the system.” There was “a general withdrawal from governmental processes,” they said; young people were “no longer willing to believe.”⁴⁰ Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson more colorfully illuminated the public’s contempt for the political culture when he wrote of President Johnson, “When the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the whole structure of government…. And then, to wrap it all up another cheapjack hustler moved into the White House.”⁴¹ The Watergate crisis of 1973–1974 further fueled citizens’ mistrust of their leaders. In a 1974 poll, 71 percent of respondents believed “things are going badly in the country” and 88 percent mistrusted “the people in power.”⁴² Yet despite this extensive list of problems, liberal democratic principles remained important to American national identity. Although fewer Americans believed that their nation could easily solve international problems, many hoped that traditional principles could triumph where flawed individuals had failed.

Crises of Democracy: Greece and Brazil

At the turn of the seventies, several international crises helped bring human rights and humanitarian issues to the attention of the American public. As a result of decolonization, nationalism, ideological struggles, and other factors, the world witnessed an increase in civil conflicts, military coups, famines, and human rights abuses in dozens of countries. These conflicts had a considerable impact on the nascent global human rights movement, and they spurred American political interest in overseas suffering. As activists and the news media publicized abuses, Americans began to ask tough questions about their country’s role. Advocates drew attention not only to the Eastern Bloc, but also to noncommunist states like Iran, South Korea, South Africa, and Paraguay.

Two cases were particularly significant to our story. Washington’s dealings with the dictatorships in Greece and Brazil demonstrate how America’s Cold War strategy evolved at the end of the sixties into a more nuanced approach to allied nations. Both were authoritarian regimes accused of torture, yet both were also considered important strategic partners. Greece was a NATO ally and the historical “cradle of democracy,” while Brazil was a growing economic player in a region beset by ideological divisions and left-wing insurgencies. American ties to these governments engendered tough questions from policymakers and the growing activist community about possible U.S. complicity in human rights abuses. Such questions had rarely been broached before, but the 1967–1973 period saw a significant drop in congressional and public compliance with executive foreign policy.

These two cases show the extent to which America and its politics changed in the sixties. At middecade, America’s chief overseas interests were curbing leftist activity and promoting economic growth, but by decade’s end there was mounting concern about allies’ lack of civil liberties. With respect to Greece and Brazil, this concern took the form of pressure to end military rule, restore constitutional government, and respect individual rights. By 1970, a notable transatlantic movement against Greek and Brazilian torture was forming, and this activism in turn contributed to the development of a broad-based, global human rights movement in the seventies.⁴³ Meanwhile, congressional liberals used Greece and Brazil to make the case for a new foreign policy standard. But these two cases also show how difficult it was for activists to succeed amid America’s multitude of interests and its division of powers. More Americans were talking about human rights at the turn of the seventies, but national security and geostrategy still took precedent.

The Greek crisis arose in April 1967, when a group of colonels seized power in Athens, dissolved the parliament, and formed a ruling junta under the guise of protecting the state against a left-wing insurgency. The coup was the culmination of decades of political instability, during which socialists, conservatives, monarchists, and other factions had jockeyed for power. Although such volatility was a hallmark of Greek political life, the 1967 coup was widely perceived as a shocking end to democracy in the region that had originated the concept. Over the course of seven years, the junta was accused of arbitrary arrests, detentions without trial, torture, and a multitude of other police-state tactics. The initial Western reaction to the coup was overwhelmingly negative. While European governments called for a return to democracy, escaped dissidents brought allegations of extrajudicial internment and torture. Amnesty International sent two prominent lawyers to investigate these allegations in 1968, and their report catalogued the regime’s physical and psychological tactics against an estimated three thousand political prisoners. In November 1969, the European Commission asserted in a damning twelve-hundred-page report that the Greek authorities had done virtually nothing to stop the security apparatus from using torture. Similar journalistic and NGO investigations helped make Greece one of the era’s major causes célèbres. “Hardly a day passes,” stated the New York Times in May 1969, “without fresh evidence from objective sources of tortures inflicted on Greek political prisoners that recall the excesses of Nazis and communists.”⁴⁴ But despite the negative publicity, the junta did not change its tactics. The colonels recoiled from this outside “interference,” and they promised to do whatever it took to preserve “public order and security.”⁴⁵

America’s role in this unfolding Greek tragedy was long a source of controversy. The United States first took a major interest in Greek affairs in 1947, when President Truman asked Congress to appropriate aid to prevent a communist takeover. The Marshall Plan channeled additional dollars, and in 1952 Greece joined NATO. Successive presidential administrations continued economic support and worked to integrate Greece into the Western alliance. These were key turning points in the shift from British to American hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the United States remained Greece’s chief patron up to the time of the 1967 coup. But were U.S. policymakers or covert operatives to blame for the slide into authoritarian rule? Greek liberals, monarchists, and Marxists assigned a preponderance of blame to the United States from the very start. Among the best-known critics was the politician Andreas Papandreou, who assailed the United States for providing arms under the aegis of NATO necessity and “arming to the teeth the military mafia which usurped the government of our country.” Speaking in Washington, he claimed that the level of arbitrary violence in Greece “surpasses the tortures which have been perpetrated at Dachau,” and he openly blamed the U.S. government for the coup.⁴⁶

Papandreou’s version of events was accepted by much of the Greek public, but it greatly overstated American influence. Evidence of significant American involvement has never materialized.⁴⁷ Indeed, in the coup’s wake U.S. Ambassador Philips Talbot privately decried “the rape of Greek democracy” and cabled Washington that Greeks would “long rue this day’s events, whose long range effects are hard to foresee.”⁴⁸ The initial State Department assessment of the new rulers succinctly encapsulated America’s dilemma in the human rights era. “We must walk a narrow line,” it read, “between resisting [the junta’s] embrace and at the same time cooperating with it sufficiently to serve our national interests, which includes gradually moving the government towards constitutional government.” The administration would have to protect America’s global image, retain leverage with the new government, press for the release of political prisoners, and avoid close identification with the regime because, President Johnson’s advisers concluded, “the memory of the ‘rape of democracy’ will undoubtedly … haunt the perpetrators.”⁴⁹ Johnson temporarily suspended full diplomatic relations and halted the delivery of over $30 million worth of heavy weapons.

But geopolitical considerations soon won out. In the eyes of American strategists, Greece was much like South Korea—an allied state in a dangerous neighborhood with many vital interests at stake. Greece and Turkey constituted NATO’s eastern flank, and Greece bordered communist Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. At a time when other regional ports were turning away the U.S. Navy, Greece was providing key facilities. Meanwhile, the June 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors had demonstrated Greece’s value as a bridge to the increasingly important Middle East.⁵⁰ The United States also sought to strengthen NATO in the wake of wavering commitments from France, Denmark, and Norway. American strategists feared that undue pressure would push the Greek junta to withdraw from the alliance, a move that would isolate Turkey and open it to Soviet pressure. The 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia further cemented the value of NATO, and even led the United States to partially lift the Greece arms embargo. Owing to Greece’s strategic position, the Greek colonels realized that remaining friendly toward NATO was a key to retaining power.⁵¹

This, then, was the dilemma for American policymakers: how to maintain the Western alliance, and keep Greece in it, while demonstrating misgivings about military rule and police-state tactics. The heavy arms embargo was not bearing fruit, in part because France was supplying the junta with weapons and because, as James Miller has demonstrated, the junta was unwilling to imperil its rule to placate U.S. concerns.⁵² President Johnson, whose hands were tied with Vietnam and a daunting set of domestic troubles, encouraged the junta to restore democracy, but he also accepted them as anti-Soviet allies and loyal NATO members. This essentially became America’s long-term policy. Although few in Washington were happy with the colonels, the United States tilted in their favor and went on to offer them various forms of support over the next seven years despite their political and civil excesses.

The administration did worry about how Johnson’s political base would respond to a restoration of relations, and they feared that congressional liberals would cut aid in an attempt to force the junta’s collapse. Thus Johnson pointed out Greece’s importance to Israel, as well as the junta’s promise to reinstate democracy. “I believe we can make a convincing case that the foreign policy considerations should override our understandable distaste for doing business with a military regime in a country like Greece,” advised National Security Adviser Walt Rostow.⁵³ At the end of 1967, the administration resumed normal diplomatic relations with the understanding that there would be progress on press freedom, resolution of political prisoner cases, a new constitution, and parliamentary elections. Given the unfavorable attitude among many in Congress and the press, the State Department expected the regime to implement more reforms.⁵⁴ But at the junta’s one-year point (April 1968), U.S. embassy assessments were pessimistic. Bilateral relations were marred by doubts and disappointments, wrote the ambassador, and “we have not been totally convinced of the regime’s intention to remain in power only temporarily.” The embassy also believed some activist claims that the regime was abusing detainees. Nevertheless, Johnson’s advisers concluded that he had few options. As Rostow put it, “The government will probably be in power for some time, so we will have to deal with it.”⁵⁵ Consequently, late in 1968 the administration decided on a partial resumption of military shipments. “The time has come to separate our NATO relationship from our disapproval of domestic Greek politics,” read the policy memo. “It doesn’t make sense to let our security relationships with Greece … deteriorate further.”⁵⁶

From a public relations standpoint, the obvious problem was that American recognition of the junta looked like tacit support for authoritarian rule. The junta’s activities had a limited impact on an American public consumed by everyday problems and the war in Vietnam, but Greece did get some attention from a nascent American activist movement. Limits to democracy and civil liberties received the first and most continuous criticism, but accusations of torture also occasionally came into view. As Barbara Keys has argued, American liberals put torture allegations at the center of their anti-junta activism and in the process transformed the broader debate about U.S. support to dictatorships.⁵⁷ Yet the torture accusations also brought to light a question that would consistently influence debates in the human rights era. Since news reports often contradicted one another and methods of verification were limited, which claims should be believed? In most such cases, the answer to this question spoke volumes about an individual’s ideological stance. If policymakers wanted to maintain an alliance or friendship, they accepted at face value the offending government’s denials and its promises of reform. But if policymakers sought to alter the relationship, they did not accept the denials. In fairness to the skeptics, there were plenty of politicized allegations of rights violations, and the realities of modern propaganda could turn even reasonable people into doubters. But given the large number of firsthand accounts in Greece, by the decade’s end many in Washington were willing to accept that torture was happening and that the United States should address it.⁵⁸

Liberals in Congress took the lead. Their pronouncements and hearings focused on Greece’s lack of democracy, but also veered into broader human rights territory by bringing up torture and civil liberties. Citing America’s “guilt by association,” they called for aid cuts until constitutional government was restored. They also argued that although Americans had no right to tell Greeks how to run their affairs, the U.S. government had a right to withhold American tax dollars. Several even assailed the national security argument by charging that the Greek military was ineffective. “The military value of Greece to the Western Alliance is today negligible,” argued a group of congressmen. “The army has turned into a military shambles, however efficient it may be as a political machine.”⁵⁹ In March 1968, Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) urged the administration to hold off on aid allocations until there were specific signs that Greece was respecting freedom of dissent. Senator Eugene McCarthy similarly declared that the U.S. government was supporting “an overweighted military establishment … not content with fulfilling its purely military function so well defined by Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago.”⁶⁰ A personal visit to Athens convinced Congressman Donald Fraser that American interests were not being served and that Greece was “a full-blown police state.”⁶¹ He and other activists added an oblique Greece reference into the 1968 Democratic Party platform.

These questions about aid to a dictatorship soon made their way into the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), whose deliberations showed that a significant proportion of legislators was now willing to tie U.S. aid to other nations’ political liberties. Senator Pell proposed cutting all weapons and military assistance until Greek citizens had approved a new constitution, but others sought to preserve regional order and minimize overseas commitments. Senator Stuart Symington (D-MO) lamented the dictatorship’s actions, but he maintained that military aid prevented a Vietnamesque boots-on-the-ground commitment. The Greek government “may not be just exactly what we want,” he argued, “but it is better to have them running the government today than it would be to have chaos in Greece.” Senators Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) and Karl Mundt (R-SD) questioned American efforts to change distant societies. “This is paternalism at its worst,” argued Mundt, “and I think we ought to oppose it.” Senator Joseph Clark (D-PA) used moral reasoning to support Pell: “The Greek government represents everything that American democracy is opposed to. It is fascist, it is totalitarian, and they will use these arms to put down their own people…. It is a tyranny of the worst sort.” Senator Frank Church (D-ID) went even further by assailing the entire foreign aid philosophy as “a massive meddling program.” The United States, he charged, was “trying to organize and run and mold and fashion and influence every government in the world … either by the aid we give or the aid we withhold.”⁶²

Several NGOs and journalists emerged in the late sixties to join the dissenting legislators. Organizations like the Washington Committee Friends of Greece and the Council for Democracy in Greece protested the restoration of relations. “Any attitude short of condemnation [by the United States] will be interpreted … as approval and in many quarters as active cooperation with the dictatorship,” cautioned one such organization. Another warned that continued military aid would put the United States “in a posture of favoring a dictatorship over proven democratic allies and over the freedom of the Greek people.”⁶³ When the Greeks announced a continuation of martial law and press censorship in March 1968, the New York Times accused the administration of “appeasing” the junta despite Greece’s questionable value to NATO and of “[doing] everything it can to provide the Athens junta with the prestige and respectability it has hungered after.”⁶⁴

Despite these reservations, most legislators supported the status quo in the belief that cutting aid would reduce American leverage and catalyze Greece’s tilt toward another benefactor. Besides, they reasoned, junta rule was better than disorder or civil war. Public and journalistic criticism demonstrated that the foreign policy consensus was weakening, but it still seemed a safer bet to maintain the relationship. Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for reelection further weakened activists’ cause during 1968. It remained to be seen if a new president would choose the path of stronger bilateral relations, a diminished U.S. commitment, or—as activists hoped—strong pressure to end torture and restore democracy.

Another of this period’s earliest human rights causes was the international campaign against authoritarianism and torture in Brazil.⁶⁵ The Brazilian military deposed the left-leaning President João Goulart in 1964 in response to growing unrest and the perceived threat of a leftist takeover, and for the next twenty-one years a succession of military leaders ruled with varying degrees of coercion. Like Greece, the Brazil case shows the change in American attitudes from the Cold War assumptions of the mid-1960s to Washington’s more complicated global assessment at the decade’s end. American policymakers were generally supportive of the military regime early on, but by 1968–1969 the regime had fewer friends in Washington. Nevertheless, even as the containment consensus was evaporating, American policymakers were reluctant to alter the status quo and punish Brazil for perceived human rights violations.

The 1964 coup was engineered by Brazilians and generally welcomed in Washington. At a time when American policymakers feared another Fidel Castro in the hemisphere, President Goulart was considered too far left. In the words of a National Security Council (NSC) adviser, “We don’t want to watch Brazil dribble down the drain while we stand around waiting for the election.”⁶⁶ The Johnson administration used economic measures to weaken Goulart, and when Brazil’s political and economic troubles culminated in a crisis, the administration offered arms and ships to the Brazilian military. Once Goulart was overthrown, Johnson recognized the new regime almost immediately and told the American people that the Brazilians had saved their republic from Marxist forces.⁶⁷ The United States saw Brazil’s military government as a defender of U.S. interests—anticommunism, stability, and economic development—with progress toward democracy a distant concern.

This Cold War mind-set dominated thinking about such regimes in the mid-sixties. The U.S. embassy expressed satisfaction that the new government had rooted out “communists and other extremists” from government and labor unions and had maintained a semblance of political and economic stability. Even the relatively liberal Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) was willing to give the military government the benefit of the doubt. In a 1965 meeting with the Brazilian foreign minister, Fulbright agreed that some form of authoritarianism was “almost necessary” in the early stages of a poor nation’s development as a form of “collective discipline” that permitted a country to “focus on its real problems.”⁶⁸ Both the State Department and USAID preferred a return to constitutionalism in the hope that this would stabilize the economy, but they had little concern for the individual rights of Brazilian citizens. The regime became a solid American ally and supported the United States in many international endeavors, including voting with the United States in the United Nations, isolating Castro in Latin America, assisting in the 1965 Dominican crisis, and offering gifts of coffee and medicine to South Vietnam.⁶⁹

Brazilian military rule occasioned little political comment in the United States until 1967–1968, when critics began to ask tough questions about America’s authoritarian clients. Early in 1968, the State Department advised against a Washington visit from Brazilian President Artur da Costa e Silva, arguing that his regime demonstrated “authoritarian tendencies” and had not built a credible political base. In light of President Johnson’s troubles with South Vietnam and Greece, advisers believed that a close association with the Brazilian regime would be a political liability.⁷⁰ The real turning point in American perceptions came late in 1968, when a wave of urban terrorism led the Brazilian government to implement Institutional Act 5 (IA-5), a strict measure that dissolved the National Congress and state legislative assemblies, bolstered censorship, and strengthened the state’s ability to detain suspects. IA-5 ushered in the most repressive period of the twenty-one-year dictatorship, and was the impetus for a more substantial American conversation on repression in Brazil. As we have seen with respect to Greece, many legislators were no longer willing to tolerate long-standing Cold War excuses for allies’ excesses. They expressed misgivings about everything from nation-building in South Vietnam to the Alliance for Progress in Latin America because these endeavors seemed to be doing very little for any American interest, whether military, economic, or humanitarian.

Much like the Greek case, the State Department had a hard time formulating an official American response to IA-5. Most foreign service officers (FSOs) viewed it with revulsion, but they had to conduct a delicate balancing act between expressing concern, maintaining the relationship, and respecting Brazilian sovereignty. There were several matters on the bilateral ledger, including USAID project loans, fighter aircraft sales, and a pending coffee agreement. The sums were considerable: Brazil received $2 billion in U.S. aid between 1964 and 1970, the third highest amount behind South Vietnam and India.⁷¹ Exchanges between Washington and the U.S. embassy in Brasilia give us some insight into the dilemma. An embassy official reported to Secretary Rusk that although IA-5 was harsh and the generals were “nationalistic and narrow,” these leaders were also fundamentally favorable to the United States. Rusk agreed that the administration would have to reassure Latin American democrats without pushing Brazil “into further irrational acts affecting our relations” and without “publicly shaking our finger.” Rusk also saw these issues in civilizational terms—that is, that Brazilian customs could not be compared to those of the world’s established democracies. “Brazil’s needs and performance cannot be measured against North American or northwest European standards of constitutional democracy,” he asserted, “nor even easily expressed in Anglo-Saxon terms.”⁷² Such sentiments betrayed a basic ignorance of Brazilian society, and even reflected common Western conceptions of the developing world. But from Washington’s perspective, the bewildering, cyclical political extremes of South America—conflict and instability followed by authoritarianism and order—made it easy to dismiss the dictatorship as a necessary evil.

The junta’s leaders were more than willing to exploit this perspective by insisting that Americans did not understand Brazil’s problems. As a military official told the U.S. Army attaché, “Writers who refer to the democratic anxieties and aspirations of eighty million Brazilians are dreaming if they believe that most of our population even suspects what democracy in the U.S. sense is.”⁷³ Such justifications fit a common pattern among authoritarian regimes. Aware that their practices would offend sensibilities in Washington, they pled that they had acted in the interest of stability and to quell leftist insurgents. They were not simply acting to retain power, they argued, but were protecting their people from terrorist violence and revolutionary agitation. Finally, if national security and anticommunism were not strong enough justifications for North American liberals, the junta asserted that they were offering Brazilian solutions to Brazilian problems—and emphasizing that Americans could not easily grasp their cultural traditions and methods.

The official U.S. reaction to IA-5 was cautious. The Johnson administration first decided to steer a middle course by making a public statement of concern and announcing that the program of aid to Brazil was “under review.” The embassy maintained normal contacts and privately expressed regret at the curbing of civil liberties. But with Congress and the public now more closely scrutinizing allies’ activities and Washington’s commitments, President Johnson had to be more forthright. His administration thus signaled U.S. disapproval by withholding some weapons, $50 million in aid funds, and $125 million in loans. As in Greece, the possibility of more significant measures would have to wait until Johnson’s exit from office, but the broader significance was that the events in Brazil fueled pessimism in Washington that Latin America was evolving politically. The U.S. embassy noted that the government had “moved to a virtual out-and-out military dictatorship” and that “labor, church, students, journalists, intellectuals, and most politicians are shaken and temporarily cowed.” Given such poor prospects, embassy specialists argued, the United States would be best served by a passive approach. Genuine political development could be achieved only “as an extremely long-range result of other fundamental social and cultural improvements,” wrote one embassy official. “We must recognize that our influence on internal political events is marginal at best.”⁷⁴

Nixon, Kissinger, and the Perils of Realpolitik

It would be impossible to understand the emergence of human rights in American foreign relations without understanding the policies of President Richard Nixon (1969–1974) and his closest adviser, Henry Kissinger. The two men are remembered for several international accomplishments, including détente with the Soviets, rapprochement with China, and extrication of the United States from Vietnam. Their human rights record, though, is not held in such high regard. Nixon famously eschewed moralism, choosing instead a more traditional realpolitik quest for peace, stability, and an international balance of power. Yet Nixon and Kissinger played a central, though unintended, role in the era’s human rights politics. First, their pursuit of better relations with the Soviet Union facilitated American influence in the internal affairs of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War thaw encouraged congressional and NGO interest in human rights causes, and it increased the potential for action against communist, anticommunist, and nonaligned states. Second, Nixon and Kissinger’s obstinacy in the face of the growing movement only galvanized their political opponents to work harder. Kissinger, in particular, was a foil for both liberal human rights activists and conservative anticommunists. A third Nixon influence was his attempt to bring white, working-class “ethnics” into the Republican fold. Owing to the period’s shifting voting patterns, these ethnics became a valuable commodity in presidential and congressional elections. Politicians were willing to give extraordinary attention to ethnics’ interests, including human rights in their ancestral homelands.

Despite his administration’s disdain for what he considered moralistic interference in presidential diplomacy, Nixon did show some signs of flexibility. He saw a place for humanitarianism in foreign affairs, but only if these issues did not conflict with his central foreign policy goals. He supported ratification of the Genocide Convention, backed relief efforts in war-torn Biafra and Burundi, and supported the idea of a U.N. human rights commissioner and a State Department humanitarian bureau. But a nominal response to natural and manmade disasters was not the same as having an active human rights policy. Nixon wanted to leave these matters to the United Nations, the State Department, and humanitarian agencies while the White House and NSC handled important bilateral issues among powerful nations.

Nixon’s foreign policy was more pragmatic than ideological. He adhered to a traditional “balance of power” model and argued that the United States should work closely with the Soviet Union and regional powers like Japan, Britain, and China. He paid little attention to much of the rest of the world, except in response to crises. “There are certain countries that matter in the world and certain countries that don’t matter in the world,” he told his chief of staff in 1972. “After you’ve dealt in two summit meetings, one in Peking and the other in Moscow … it is really terribly difficult to deal with even a country as important as Mexico.”⁷⁵ From President Johnson’s failings, Nixon learned to divert the public’s attention from the Vietnam War. True, he maintained the American commitment to South Vietnam, especially in 1969–1970, and he later approached the Soviets and the Chinese for help in ending the war. But he did not let Vietnam dominate his presidency as it had dominated that of his predecessor.

Nixon also rejected Wilsonian idealism. As he told a reporter shortly before the 1968 election, Americans needed to recognize that “the American-style democracy that we find works so well for us may not always work well for others.” This criticism of liberal internationalism was inspired in large measure by the moralistic rhetoric that accompanied the defense of South Vietnam. To Nixon, the United States was in no position to interfere in other nations’ domestic affairs. “That doesn’t mean that I am opting for military dictatorships,” he noted. “[But] for the United States to attempt to say that, well, this nation or that nation doesn’t have the kind of a government that we think is what we would want for it,… that is more than we can take on our plate.” America could perhaps use its influence on behalf of certain freedoms, “but I don’t think we can impose it.”⁷⁶ As president, he summarized these ideas in blunt terms to one of his ambassadors: “We hope that governments will evolve toward constitutional procedures but … we deal with governments as they are.”⁷⁷ This is not to say that Nixon was without optimism. He was, after all, a middle-class Californian who retained at least some of the idealism typical of his generation of political leaders. Yet he maintained a healthy distance from the moral perspective in international affairs. Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko later said of Nixon’s diplomacy, “He always presented himself as a pragmatist … a man who preferred to keep discussions on a purely practical level.”⁷⁸

Nixon laid out his administration’s international policies in a series of four massive foreign policy reports to Congress between 1970 and 1973. The first report’s opening sentence captured its essence: “The postwar period in international relations has ended.” The Vietnam War was winding down; European and Asian economies were challenging the United States; and Moscow and Beijing were engaged in a bitter struggle for leadership of the communist world. Although the United States needed to live up to its commitments, argued Nixon, America’s friends would have to shoulder more of the burden. The United States “cannot and will not conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.”⁷⁹ Although some observers equated this “Nixon doctrine” with isolationist retrenchment, Nixon emphasized that America’s military would remain formidable. Human rights concerns were entirely absent from the foreign policy reports, with the exception of a brief mention of U.N. priorities in the fourth report (May 1973).

Henry Kissinger was at the center of the foreign policy nexus even longer than was Nixon. As national security adviser (1969–1975) and secretary of state (1973–1977), he acted as a constant antagonist to human rights advocates. An academic schooled in the diplomacy of Metternich and Talleyrand, Kissinger was a strong believer in traditional interstate relations and the balance of global power. And like Nixon, he preferred to deal with only the most powerful nations; the developing world mattered little to him, excepting those places where the United States and the Soviets battled by proxy. Kissinger tended to believe that the United States should maintain relations with key states, no matter how illiberal or undemocratic their governments were. In a 1966 essay that would become remarkably self-referential, he argued that a true statesman’s view of human nature “is wary; he is conscious of many great hopes which have failed.” To the statesman, “gradualism is the essence of stability” and “maintenance of the existing order is more important than any dispute within it.”⁸⁰ Kissinger carried these attitudes into the Nixon administration. As he told a group of business leaders in 1971, the administration sought to “reduce dogmatic hostilities around the world. Our policies are not idealistic, moralistic. We do not plead altruism—a tendency far too common in the history of American foreign affairs.”⁸¹

Kissinger’s Machiavellian streak went hand in hand with his pessimistic view of human nature. Growing up Jewish in prewar Germany, he witnessed firsthand the weakness of the Weimar Republic and European democracies in the face of the Nazis’ rise. This lesson in the fragility of democracy may explain, in part, his later willingness to deal with undemocratic governments like those in Beijing and Moscow. And on a personal level, he was more than a little arrogant. “I’ve always acted alone,” he told a journalist in an unguarded moment. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse…. This amazing, romantic character suits me.”⁸² And although Kissinger was a tremendous asset to the Nixon administration, he was difficult to maintain, and his carefully cultivated public image of cool rationality masked his mercurial emotions.⁸³ A Nixon speechwriter suggested that “the care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of [Nixon’s] presidency, but he was worth it.”⁸⁴ Nixon himself was blunter, once telling an aide, “There are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts. Because sometimes Henry starts to think that he’s president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.”⁸⁵

Kissinger’s diplomatic style matched his pragmatism. Because he believed in maintaining personal relationships with important leaders, he was unlikely, to say the least, to assail someone for human rights violations. He argued that American attacks on the Soviets’ record would make superpower conflicts only more likely and that similar criticism of anticommunist states would alienate allies. The real job of diplomacy, he asserted, was to hammer out bilateral agreements based on mutual interest, not to make grand pronouncements of principle that would have no long-term effect. Even when President Nixon supported humanitarian assistance in war-torn regions, Kissinger was largely indifferent. As we will see, scholars, journalists, and activists have not merely criticized Kissinger’s indifference to humanitarianism; several have even accused him of complicity in human rights violations through his support of authoritarian regimes in Chile, Indonesia, and elsewhere.⁸⁶

From our twenty-first-century perspective, Nixon and Kissinger come across as singularly unsympathetic, even antagonistic, toward human rights matters. But it is worth considering their position in a broader historical context. These men practiced a form of diplomacy that had served European and American statesmen for centuries. Only in rare cases had other states’ internal practices concerned executive policymakers in Washington. We must also acknowledge that many domestic and foreign observers applauded Nixon’s foreign policy and his rejection of the American imperium. His détente with Moscow was generally popular in 1972–1973, and he was commended for the opening to China and the accords that finalized America’s Vietnam withdrawal. A relatively small number of Americans wanted Nixon to pursue a more moral course that included human rights judgments. It is perhaps most accurate, then, to say that Nixon and Kissinger were transitional figures whose training and worldview did not prepare them for the human rights activism of the 1970s. The movement was so new and unusual that they tended to believe it was politically driven and largely irrelevant to the real work of diplomacy.

The post-1968 Cold War thaw—of which the U.S.-Soviet détente was an integral part—was the international political foundation on which American human rights policies were built. Moderates in the American and Soviet camps had been trying to engineer a détente since the 1950s, but a viable working relationship had always eluded them. By the late sixties, divisions in both alliances made for a more congenial superpower climate. Sino-Soviet tensions peaked in 1969, when the two nations became engaged in a series of bloody border clashes. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, and Czechoslovakia expressed varying degrees of independence from Moscow. Coincident with this lack of unity in the communist world, France pursued a more unilateral course and withdrew from the NATO integrated military command. And in a process known as Ostpolitik, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt cultivated relations with East Germany and the Soviet Union. Owing to these splits, East/West tensions reached a postwar nadir at the end of the sixties.

Richard Nixon entered the White House amid these shifting alliances. Despite, or perhaps because of, his anticommunist credentials, he was willing to negotiate with the communist states that were, as he put it, “too powerful to ignore.”⁸⁷ In his 1969 inaugural address he signaled to the world, “After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open.”⁸⁸ Because Moscow and Beijing needed Western technology, trade, and recognition, détente would be a logical means to several ends. It would strengthen NATO and prevent America’s European allies from becoming too independent. An engagement with the Soviet Union and China would also allow Nixon to play the two countries against one another. He further hoped to increase his political capital through bold international maneuvers. If he could secure arms limitation agreements, an opening to China, and support in ending the Vietnam War, it would all but ensure his reelection. The more agreeable international environment would then allow Americans to cut defense spending and usher in what Nixon called “a generation of peace.” Thus détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China became Nixon’s top priorities after his first two years in office. Through a combination of ideological flexibility and pragmatism amid changing circumstances, Nixon and his Soviet counterparts overcame the limitations faced by their predecessors and produced numerous results, from trade and arms control agreements to cultural exchanges and joint scientific ventures.

The administration’s emphasis on interstate peace and order would often conflict with the goals of human rights activists. Indeed, although East/West propaganda continued in the détente era, the U.S. and Soviet governments reduced the ideological sniping that had defined the Cold War for over two decades. In the parlance of the day, détente implied noninterference in a nation’s internal affairs. Or as Michael Ignatieff has asserted, it “traded rights for order.”⁸⁹ Nixon and Kissinger came to accept the Soviet Union as a world power whose leaders were more interested in preserving international stability than in fomenting Marxist revolutions. The Soviets, too, argued that détente had nothing to do with individual rights or Westernization of the Soviet Union. A typical Pravda editorial of the period asserted that détente should be defined by a “comparison of ideas and facts … and must not be turned into a conscious incitement of mistrust and hostility, the falsification of reality or, least of all, subversive activity.”⁹⁰

Yet although Nixon, Kissinger, and the Soviets preferred not to make human rights issues a part of détente, they could not control all of the forces unleashed by the Cold War thaw. Détente opened the Eastern Bloc to scrutiny from NGOs, Congress, and ordinary American citizens, and in the long run activists in both East and West became significant actors in international relations. Many observers also held out hope that trade liberalization, educational exchanges, and scientific cooperation would improve the flow of ideas and perhaps decrease repression in the East. Such a decrease would ultimately require activism within Eastern Bloc nations, but détente’s proponents argued that liberalization was more likely if East/West relations improved. State Department experts counseled that détente could even imperil the Soviet system in the long run. An adviser reminded Kissinger in 1970 that “any loosening of Moscow’s control brings East European attempts to reassert independence. In this sense … détente is far more dangerous potentially for them than for us.” The United States could influence Eastern Europe because these people wanted Western technology, capital, and goods—things that the Soviet Union could not provide. “Détente and greater freedom of action in Eastern Europe go hand in hand,” the adviser concluded.⁹¹ Despite this belief in potential benefits for Eastern Europeans, Nixon and Kissinger were unwilling to dwell on it publicly for fear of inflating expectations. They were somewhat more willing to tout these benefits as détente met more resistance after 1972, but they did not want their goals to be overshadowed by concern for human rights.⁹² Nevertheless, while they did not seek to change these societies, détente did offer new opportunities for a wide array of actors to promote reforms in the Eastern Bloc.

Nixon’s opening to China did not have the same effect on human rights promotion. Despite years of Beijing’s abuses, Western activists and politicians paid far less attention to China than they did to the Soviet Union between 1949 and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. On those occasions when Beijing relaxed its grip through mild liberalization programs, some citizens pressed for greater reform, and their assertiveness was invariably met by renewed repression.⁹³ Nixon was hardly alone in disregarding human rights in China; indeed, his White House predecessors and successors acted in much the same way. Because China had long been closed off from the West, Westerners did not have an accurate sense of just how oppressive Mao Zedong’s regime was. When Westerners did hear about Chinese abuses, many dismissed them with the fallback logic that China was geographically distant and culturally enigmatic—that is, that “they do things differently there.” Unlike the Soviet Union, China did not pose an existential nuclear threat to the United States. Also, more Americans traced their lineage to ethnic groups in the Soviet orbit and thus were more aware of Soviet violations than Chinese ones. Human rights concerns did not fundamentally alter the long-term trend of closer Sino-American relations, from rapprochement (1971–1972) to diplomatic recognition (1979) to conditional most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status (1980) to permanent MFN status and billions of dollars in annual trade.

The February 1972 Nixon/Mao summit took up trade, exchanges, and regional matters, and was completely unencumbered with talk of Beijing’s internal policies.⁹⁴ This was consistent, of course, with Nixonian realpolitik. As early as 1969, Kissinger was telling the press, “We have always made it clear that we have no permanent enemies and that we will judge other countries, and specifically countries like communist China, on the basis of their actions and not on the basis of their domestic ideology.”⁹⁵ In Nixon’s eyes, rekindling relations with a large communist country was a delicate mission that could be derailed by a focus on humanitarian issues. He sought only a basic rapprochement that could foster opportunities in other areas.

Although most contemporary observers applauded the opening, the preponderance of evidence shows that Nixon and Kissinger were willing to give up far more than they received. The administration proposed diplomatic recognition of China and support for Beijing to assume the Security Council seat of America’s old ally, Taiwan. They also volunteered a timeline for a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. “After a peace is made [in Vietnam],” said Kissinger in private, “we will be 10,000 miles away, and [Hanoi] will still be there.”⁹⁶ Kissinger went on to provide the Chinese with a great deal of classified information over the next few years. The historian Robert Dallek confirms that “Nixon was eager to flatter Mao,” even to the point of telling the Chairman that his writings “moved a nation and have changed the world.”⁹⁷ Meanwhile, Mao’s government was more than willing to have its humanitarian record ignored. China had endured a long history of outside interference, and “human rights” seemed to many Chinese merely another form of foreign meddling. Mao’s government had earlier pieced together the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in its relations with India—equality, territorial respect, nonaggression, peaceful coexistence, and mutual noninterference in internal affairs—and by the time of Nixon’s opening, these had become China’s foreign policy guidelines. In the human rights era, and especially after 1989, Beijing would defend its domestic policies by elevating the “noninterference” principle to the top of the list.

Not everyone was smitten with the summit or the new Sino-American relationship. Some American conservatives were angry, as were some European and Asian allies. The British ambassador to the United States thought the Sino-American joint communiqué had about it a “distinct whiff of ‘peace in our time.’”⁹⁸ After observing Nixon toast Chinese officials at a state dinner, conservative commentator William F. Buckley concluded that it “was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels.”⁹⁹ But even these criticisms were more “anti-red” than pro–human rights, and most Americans were happy with the summits.

Why did Nixon and Kissinger offer Mao so much? Nixon was far more concerned with electoral politics at home than he was with gaining concessions. If he could forge a Sino-American working relationship, he would score political points for being a foreign policy visionary and gain crucial leverage against the Soviets—both developments that would boost his reelection chances. We must also consider Nixon and Kissinger’s Western worldview. Both men had studied European history and Great Power diplomacy, but knew comparatively little about China. After the summit, Beijing invited congressional delegations to China, and in the next seven years before formal U.S. recognition, around one hundred American legislators visited. Before one such delegation departed, Nixon cautioned them to avoid linking trade with the political relationship, though he admitted that they were linked in an unspoken way because of America’s economic power. “We don’t have to like each other’s systems to work with them,” he concluded. “Frankly, they don’t have anything to sell us.”¹⁰⁰

Given Nixon and Kissinger’s willingness to concede so much to achieve a rapprochement, Mao’s treatment of the Chinese people was nowhere near Nixon’s agenda. The only humanitarian matter raised at the entire summit was the plight of four American pilots who had been imprisoned after their planes were shot down during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Zhou Enlai was clearly interested in removing this obstacle; Beijing released one of the prisoners immediately and freed the others the following year.¹⁰¹ Kissinger later had an exchange with Zhou regarding missing American soldiers and journalists in Southeast Asia, though even here he clarified that he was not making a formal representation, but rather “a personal request” for information. True to his style, Kissinger also showed his hand by noting that the issue was only for public consumption and would not interfere with the relationship. “The families ask us if we have asked you the question,” he told Zhou. “If we could say at a press conference that we have asked you and you have assured us that there are no missing in action, that would be sufficient.”¹⁰² But although the release of the imprisoned pilots and the search for missing soldiers and journalists were humanitarian matters, they had nothing to do with the rights of the Chinese people. Indeed, negotiating for the release of one’s own nationals was a routine aspect of bilateral diplomacy. Margaret MacMillan concludes that the 1972 U.S.-China breakthrough was good for both countries, but she adds that it is possible to ask whether Nixon and Kissinger were too eager for a rapprochement. They offered the lion’s share of concessions, and they made some promises that they could not keep.¹⁰³ The budding relationship had virtually no impact on Chinese internal policies, nor would it in the years to come.

The Ongoing Crisis of Greek Democracy

President Nixon’s preference for realpolitik formed the basis of his policy toward the Greek junta. He was willing to listen to different opinions during his first year in office, but it was not long before he decided to continue, and eventually augment, American support. Nixon publicly backed a return to democracy, but in keeping with his noninterference principle, and because he saw Greece as a bulwark against Soviet power and an important link to the Middle East, he worked to strengthen relations and keep it within NATO. In the words of a senior official, “We have a better chance to influence the [Greek] government to change if we continue to work with them than if we turn our back to them.” Thus Nixon lifted the arms embargo and instructed Ambassador Henry Tasca to stay out of Greek internal affairs.¹⁰⁴ The Greek government reciprocated with a beneficial homeporting agreement for U.S. Navy vessels, but uncomfortable questions about America’s ties to a dictatorship and the efficacy of “quiet diplomacy” became more common in Washington. Nixon’s desire for democracy in Greece may have been genuine, but he did little to bring it about.

Some Americans and Greeks lobbied Nixon to cut ties at the outset of his presidency, and both pro- and anti-junta advocates used anticommunism to bolster their arguments. “You are respectfully asked whether you can tolerate any longer the violation of human rights of your Greek allies and friends,” implored a former Greek politician and torture victim. “Increasing hatred boosts the communist cause and may turn Greece into another Vietnam.” But others asked Nixon to restore ties and end the arms embargo. Congressman Edward Derwinski (R-IL), who was angry that “the American liberal establishment” had ostracized Greece, argued that “logic and American national interest” necessitated full U.S. support. Meanwhile, the junta’s leaders pled for support with a combination of polite inquiries and thinly veiled threats. A bitter Greek general told his American counterpart that U.S. inaction imperiled his nation. “When you at last decide to give us the weapons,” he said, “you will probably find no one here to use them.”¹⁰⁵ But while it was true that Greeks faced some internal threats, the junta also overstated the problem in order to maintain power, and sometimes even to justify abuse of civilians. The communists in the Western world were “using the students as a spearhead,” argued the deputy prime minister. These were “children [who] smoked marijuana and had little sense of reality.” Urging resumption of full political and military ties, Prime Minister Georgios Papadopoulos argued that the regime had remained loyal to NATO and had prevented an economic collapse, a communist takeover, and a civil war. The junta was moving toward democracy, he asserted to Nixon, but it would have to do so at its own pace.¹⁰⁶

Early on, the Nixon administration lobbied for a democratic restoration in the belief that this would enhance stability. In April 1969, Secretary of State William Rogers pressed the foreign minister on a political timetable and on the release of Greece’s eighteen hundred political prisoners, arguing that the United States considered “evolution toward representative government and the application of civil liberties” as important steps. A harsh State Department assessment found that America’s reputation had “to some extent become identified with that of the junta.” There had been no meaningful progress on democracy or on promised economic and social programs, yet the junta seemed to be relying on the U.S. need for Greek facilities. (Europeans, meanwhile, were criticizing the regime while profiting from arms sales.)¹⁰⁷ By the end of Nixon’s first year, Ambassador Tasca was advising that there was no alternative to the dual policy of public support mixed with private encouragement for a return to democracy. Because the colonels were maintaining domestic stability and following a foreign policy generally consistent with America’s, Tasca advised against a “self-defeating” policy of military aid cuts and “quixotic public criticism.”¹⁰⁸

Beyond the domestic political issues at stake, Nixon considered Greek democracy irrelevant to the bilateral relationship. At a time when the United States was the only NATO member granting military aid to Greece (several were selling weapons), he lifted the embargo on heavy weapons in September 1970 in response to a Greek timetable to restore democracy. “The [anti-junta activists’] idea is that the U.S. shouldn’t give arms and then the Greeks would change,” said Nixon privately. “They’d change alright, but the wrong way…. We need the Greeks…. We don’t like the government, but we’d like its successor less.”¹⁰⁹ This resumption of arms shipments forced the administration to defend the regime and to put a positive spin on Greek events, even to the point of stating in September 1970, with scant evidence, that torture had ceased and that political prisoner numbers were falling. Behind the scenes, the United States was dissatisfied with the Greeks’ authoritarianism and their “public relations ineptness,” but Greece’s strategic importance and loyalty to the alliance remained the focal point of Nixon’s policy.¹¹⁰ It is clear, then, that security and continuity overrode any sharp public tones on democracy and human rights. Because Nixon and Kissinger had little interest beyond regional security and the possibility that bad press would hurt their overall foreign policy, from 1970 onward their Greece policy was entwined with détente. The “noninterference” position became a broad cover for Nixon’s desire to free the United States from unwanted commitments, but for better or worse, the United States was now more closely identified with the junta. When Defense Secretary Laird visited Greece in October 1970, his meetings were interrupted by a nearby bomb, and the following month a bomb damaged the statue of Harry Truman in downtown Athens.

In light of Nixon’s unwillingness to pressure the junta, legislators proposed several solutions. Congressional liberals challenged the administration’s line that Greece was fulfilling its NATO obligations. Congressman Don Edwards (D-CA) asserted that Greece’s NATO status was “an excuse for U.S. inaction” because of Greece’s minimal military value, while Congressman Fraser argued that Nixon’s approach contradicted American tradition and alienated America’s friends.¹¹¹ In 1969–1970, Senator Pell’s and Vance Hartke’s (D-IN) proposals to deny new aid were nixed in close votes amid strong lobbying by the Departments of State and Defense. The proposals prompted Kissinger to clarify U.S. aims in private: “We do not give military aid to support governments, but because a country is important to the U.S.”¹¹² Appropriations committees also scrutinized NATO ties and military aid. Congressman Wayne Hays’s (D-OH) 1971 amendment to ban such aid to Greece was a significant milestone in congressional assertiveness, though it allowed the president to grant a waiver on national security grounds, which he did.

In addition to this legislative interest, public opinion ran a wide gamut between those who decried congressional liberals’ “interference” in Greek affairs and those who criticized support to an authoritarian regime. One of Congressman Fraser’s constituents told him to “quit whipping the government of a country that is trying to do a good job…. Let’s give the few rightist countries of the world a chance to prove their mettle before we castigate them.”¹¹³ Another voter wrote to Senator Henry Jackson, “That the U.S. even recognizes such a repressive dictatorship as the Greek junta is unbelievably hypocritical for a country purporting to be the bastion of freedom in the world…. How can we fight totalitarianism of the left while condoning and even aiding totalitarianism of the right?”¹¹⁴ Greek Americans were similarly divided. A Greek Orthodox archbishop wrote to Secretary Rogers that America’s interests “should be with the people [of Greece], and not in the hands of the leaders who form an unacceptable, self-imposed, and self-perpetuating oligarchy.”¹¹⁵ But most favored the status quo. “Is it not a little ridiculous,” wrote a Greek-American voter to Congressman Fraser, “to concern ourselves with the internal affairs of Greece at a time when all congressmen should be devoting all their time and energy to solving the many problems that plague our country?”¹¹⁶ The Order of AHEPA at first lamented the dictatorship’s emergence, but soon accepted the argument that communists had threatened Greece and that military aid should continue. “Greece today is our lone ally in that part of the world,” asserted AHEPA’s president, and “Greek internal politics are the business of the Greek people.”¹¹⁷

Congress and the administration then locked horns over the 1971 decision to homeport part of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet and ten thousand military and civilian personnel in Athens-Piraeus. Homeporting was intended to increase regional capabilities and improve morale by minimizing long family separations, but many interpreted the choice as support for the junta. Two critics, Congressmen Benjamin Rosenthal (D-NY) and Lee Hamilton (D-IN), were eventually proved correct in arguing that the home-porting decision would embolden the colonels. One year after the decision, the dictatorship was still in power, anti-Americanism in Greece was on the rise, and there was no democratic transition in sight. Unless the United States paid more attention to political considerations, argued Rosenthal, “We will not have much prestige left in Greece to use in the difficult times ahead.”¹¹⁸ State Department analysts privately admitted that the regime had stepped up its efforts to emphasize American dependence on Greece. “It is difficult to look to the future with optimism,” they concluded.¹¹⁹ Since the lack of democracy was now the major bilateral problem, Secretary of State Rogers and the U.S. embassy ramped up both private diplomacy and public statements. Rogers even took an indirect stab at the colonels by giving a prodemocracy speech to a group of American FSOs and their families in Greece on July 4, 1972. “Democracy is one of those clear and incisive Greek words that are part of the Western vocabulary,” he stated. “It means simply: rule by the people and for the people.”¹²⁰

The final turning point in the Greek junta’s story came in November 1973, when the hard-line clique of Colonel Dimitrios Ioannidis seized power. Ioannidis’s accession spurred a revealing discussion between Kissinger and his aides, who realized that this backsliding would make the Nixon/Kissinger policy look like a failure. When Ambassador Tasca (correctly) predicted that the regime would not last long and recommended continuing a public prodemocracy stand, Kissinger asked why this was in America’s interest. With so few democracies in the world, why was America being charged with holding Greece to democracy, but not Yugoslavia, Morocco, or Algeria? “Where else are we requiring governments to specify dates for elections?” he asked. “Why is it in the American interest to do in Greece what we apparently don’t do anywhere else?” Kissinger then laid out perhaps the clearest statement of his foreign policy beliefs in light of the era’s new human rights demands: “The Department of State doesn’t have a Political Science Division. It conducts the foreign policy of the United States. It deals with any government—communist or non-communist—within the context of the foreign-policy objectives of the United States. That way you don’t get caught with each individual government in giving approval and disapproval. Why is that wrong?” Ambassador Tasca argued that Greece was receiving so much attention because it had a unique position in Europe and because people believed that the United States could influence it. Kissinger accepted that Greece could be considered a special case, but he argued that the administration should stand by its principles and let the chips fall where they may. “We can survive congressional hearings if we know what’s right,” he concluded.¹²¹

The colonels’ end came about over Cyprus. When the junta fomented an uprising against the centrist Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios, Turkey invaded the island in 1974, which in turn created a whole new set of human rights problems. The invasion was the death knell for the Greek junta. After it collapsed in July 1974, democracy was restored, Greece withdrew from the NATO command structure for six years, and Greek anti-Americanism remained strong for a generation. In the final analysis of America’s dealings with Greece during the Johnson and Nixon years, it is clear that realism consistently trumped liberal idealism. As New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger, an early defender of the junta, wrote of Nixon’s policy in 1973, “All the U.S.A. stands for has been hurt by this; but not our national interests.”¹²² The Greek story also demonstrates the U.S. government’s limited ability to promote democracy, even among its allies. James Miller has correctly argued that Greece’s failure to create a stable democracy between 1950 and 1974 was largely the work of Greek politicians, military leaders, and the monarchy. Yet the United States bears some responsibility. President Johnson, President Nixon, and much of Congress continued to support a dictatorship that was abusing its population. Nixon, in particular, was largely indifferent to these abuses, even when a firmer American position might have encouraged more substantial changes in Greek policies.¹²³

Latin America’s Cold War: The Brazilian Dictatorship

Latin America was not a high priority for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Not only was Nixon generally uninterested in the global South, but he also considered the Western Hemisphere to be beyond the realm of Soviet and Chinese interest. Mark Atwood Lawrence is correct in asserting that the two men sought “low-key preservation of the status quo”—a posture that often meant relying on dictators to maintain stability and fend off leftist threats. This policy succeeded insofar as Marxist influence did not expand into South America on their watch, but in the long run their support to oppressive regimes arguably sowed the seeds of multiple crises.¹²⁴ Nixon’s approach to Brazil must be considered in the context of détente, traditional American paternalism, and South America’s civil struggles. As we have seen, Latin American democracy took a hit in the sixties and seventies. And despite Nixon’s relative inattention, there was no denying America’s unique regional interests and its overwhelming economic and political influence. As Greg Grandin has shown, while Washington backed land reforms and social welfare programs in postwar Europe and Japan, policymakers considered such programs to be dangerous in Latin America. Instead, writes Grandin, the United States “inevitably sided with reactionary civilian and military forces as a bulwark against communism.” True, the United States often had little or no involvement in the region’s coups and atrocities, but it also rarely discouraged them.¹²⁵

Although South America was a low Nixon priority, he recognized Brazil as an important regional ally with a growing economy. Early in his presidency, he sent his erstwhile opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, on a regional tour to collect information and shore up relations with Latin American republics. While in Brazil, Rockefeller was willing to ask tough questions about political rights and censorship, and he toured the empty Brazilian Congress in order to demonstrate American concern over the suspension of political activity.¹²⁶ Rockefeller’s report to the president was rather moderate in its recommendation to recast trade and lending to reflect broader national interests rather than narrow business interests. Yet the report’s grim tone accurately reflected the range of problems in the region and the level of hemispheric skepticism about America’s intentions. Rockefeller also provocatively suggested that these nations’ internal security problems had spurred the authoritarian trend. “Governments everywhere are struggling to cope with often conflicting demands for social reform and economic growth,” he wrote. “Subversive forces working throughout the hemisphere are quick to exploit and exacerbate each and every situation.” He recommended continued military aid and increased arms sales to meet these security challenges.¹²⁷

Some observers have assailed both the Rockefeller mission and the report. The journalist A. J. Langguth asked why Nixon had sent the scion of the Rockefeller steel empire to assess an impoverished region teeming with anti-imperialist and anti-yanqui sentiment. (Riots broke out when Rockefeller visited Colombia and Ecuador, causing Chile and Venezuela to cancel their invitations.) Considering the millions Rockefeller had invested in Latin America, wrote Langguth, it was not surprising that he praised the security forces.¹²⁸ Walter LaFeber similarly criticized Rockefeller’s conclusion that South American militaries were “the essential force for constructive social change.” The preponderance of military coups in the 1960s seemed to have rendered such a sentiment painfully outdated.¹²⁹

These observers were correct in pointing out Rockefeller’s liberal capitalist biases. His report emphasized economic and security policies that would strengthen the rule of law, protect property, and stimulate growth—controversial ideas in a region beset by endemic poverty and wealth disparities. But Rockefeller’s critics understated the level of civil violence in the region. Significant rural, leftist, guerrilla insurgencies developed early in the sixties in Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Colombia. The defeat of many of these groups (symbolized by the capture and execution of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia in 1967) led rebels to transition to urban guerrilla activity. By decade’s end, several such Cuba-supported groups operated in the Southern Cone, including the Tupamaros (Uruguay), MIR (Chile), FAR (Argentina), and ALN (Brazil). These organizations, which tended to draw young members from the educated urban classes, used bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and sabotage to undermine what they perceived as bourgeois decadence and elite domination.¹³⁰ Later, they would focus their acts on repressive military governments.

True enough, these militant groups’ violent acts did not excuse the excesses of which South America’s military governments were guilty. On balance, the region’s authoritarian governments and allied paramilitaries (aka “death squads”) were responsible for more suffering than were terrorist groups. But one cannot comprehend the region’s downward spiral toward authoritarianism without understanding the threat (or at least the perception of such) posed by these groups. Washington policymakers were not alone in fearing another Cuba-like revolution in Latin America; many Latin American citizens had similar fears. Nor can we understand how Americans perceived authoritarianism and human rights matters without understanding the high-profile nature of some insurgents’ crimes. The left-wing FAR in Guatemala killed U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein and two U.S. military advisers in 1968. Two years later the group killed the West German ambassador and kidnapped and released the U.S. labor attaché. The Brazilian Marxist group MR-8 kidnapped and later released the U.S. ambassador, Charles Elbrick, in 1969. The following year, Brazilian rebel groups kidnapped Swiss, West German, and Japanese diplomats, and the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard shot the U.S. consul, Curtis C. Cutter, during a botched kidnapping attempt.

The kidnappers asserted that they were acting to undermine oppressive governments and to free imprisoned compatriots. The kidnappings usually involved a negotiation for the release of political prisoners. (In Cutter’s case, the would-be captors had written a false confession in which Cutter “admitted” he was a CIA agent instructing Brazilians in methods of torture. The note also sentenced Cutter to death.)¹³¹ Such acts did not endear insurgent groups to foreign publics. Among the most sensational cases was the Tupamaros’ kidnapping and murder of the USAID police adviser Dan Mitrione in Uruguay in 1970. His death has been the source of much controversy because of his possible role in training military and police in torture methods.¹³² But at the time of his death, Americans heard a simpler story of a public servant whose murder at the hands of Marxist terrorists left his nine children without a father. Simply put, the guerrillas were unlikely to win friends in Washington by killing U.S. citizens. These groups’ other acts of violence against the state, civilians, and businesses got less attention from the American public than did diplomats’ kidnappings, but they were great fodder for military juntas that wanted to justify their repression. Perceptions mattered. Human rights activists saw right-wing governments and militaries as the sources of many South American problems, while conservatives and practitioners of realpolitik pointed out that much of South America was embroiled in undeclared civil wars. How one perceived these civil struggles said much about one’s perception of the human rights movement and of human rights as a goal of American foreign policy.

Nixon followed many of Rockefeller’s recommendations on Brazil. He sought to bolster the relationship by restoring the suspended aid and accepting the generals’ claim that there was no torture. In the meantime, Brazil’s economic growth—upward of 9 percent in 1970 alone—strengthened the regime’s domestic and international legitimacy and deflected some attention from its excesses. Observers began to refer to the Brazilian economic “miracle.” Thomas E. Skidmore has correctly concluded that American policymakers made “at most a half-hearted attempt” to pressure the Brazilians in 1968–1969, during which the generals successfully waited out the bad publicity.¹³³ The Nixon administration routinely argued that Brazilian political evolution would come about with further economic growth, and also claimed to be using private diplomacy to nudge the dictators toward reforms. But since America’s traditional business and security interests were arguably being met, the administration was unwilling to go much further. Not only was there no consensus that Washington must promote political development, but Brazil was merely one among many authoritarian states in the world. Nixon could count on minimal domestic resistance considering the American public’s limited awareness of Brazilian affairs.

A small number of academics, clergy, exiled Brazilians, and liberal Catholics responded by building a network to publicize the junta’s violations. This movement became a groundbreaking part of the human rights push in Latin America and beyond.¹³⁴ Using information they received from their contacts in Brazil, these activists wrote articles and submitted testimony to congressional committees and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR). They also formed an NGO, the American Committee for Information on Brazil, as a means of collecting and verifying victims’ testimonies.¹³⁵ Established NGOs also became active. The International Commission of Jurists released a scathing criticism of the junta’s tactics in 1970, and Amnesty International soon had nearly two hundred active prisoner cases in Brazil.¹³⁶ At a time when torture was not widely reported in the mainstream press, activists’ legwork led to numerous reports on Brazilian torture in 1970–1971, including dozens of articles in the New York Times and Washington Post. Critics highlighted not only the self-evident immorality of the junta’s tactics, but also America’s guilt by association. A Washington Post editorial stated that the United States was “in danger of getting itself caught up on the side of the oppressors, forced to choose wrong.”¹³⁷ Two syndicated columnists similarly lamented the “tragedy” that America’s support of Brazil was “keep[ing] in unchecked power the most repressive regime in the Western Hemisphere.”¹³⁸

The burgeoning movement against torture might have had more resonance in Washington had it not been for the November 1970 election of the left-wing reformer Salvador Allende as president of Chile. Not only did this event throw a new wrinkle into Nixon’s approach to South America, but as Tanya Harmer has argued, the 1970–1973 Allende presidency was a watershed in hemispheric affairs in that it augmented the “inter-American Cold War” at a time when the Washington-Moscow relationship was at its most agreeable. Following Allende’s accession, it soon became clear that there would be no North-South parallel to the East/West détente. Instead, Allende aligned with Cuba, while the United States aligned with Brazil and the Southern Cone regimes. As Harmer has suggested, these right-wing leaders were hardly pawns of the United States, but rather increasingly took “ownership” of the Cold War in their region.¹³⁹

The Nixon administration offered mild, private encouragement for a parliamentary transition in Brazil, and they acknowledged that the torture allegations were at least partially true. But if there was any indignation about torture in the administration, it took a backseat to the desire for stability. “An aroused [Brazilian] public could well give rise to a deep division within the government on how to deal with the [torture] problem,” suggested the State Department, “in the process possibly weakening the government’s hold on the country.”¹⁴⁰ Nixon summarized his approach in a December 1970 meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, William Rountree. In a world filled with undemocratic states, argued Nixon, the United States would have to be “realistic and deal with governments as they are.” He wanted Rountree to ensure that the Brazilian government and military “do not get the impression that we are looking down our noses at them because of their form of government.”¹⁴¹ The administration would consult with Brazil on political developments, but Nixon drew a clear line at addressing the status of individual Brazilians. When the U.S. embassy received requests to inquire about imprisoned Brazilians, they turned these down as interventions in Brazil’s internal affairs.¹⁴² The Nixon administration considered economic development to be America’s chief long-term interest in Latin America. Meanwhile, Brazil’s economic growth and its diminishing reliance on U.S. aid meant a concurrent decrease in U.S. leverage.

While the administration strengthened relations with Brasilia, congressional liberals grew increasingly vocal. As chair of the Senate subcommittee on Latin America, Senator Frank Church built a reputation as one of the chief political gadflies of the era on the subject of military aid. In 1969, he suggested the unprecedented step of cutting such assistance to Brazil, arguing that military aid fueled anti-Americanism, alienated the American public, and “raise[d] the question of what the United States really stands for.” Church also assailed the Alliance for Progress, to which the United States had contributed $8 billion while nine nations in the region had suffered military takeovers.¹⁴³ President Emílio Médici’s enduring grip on power encouraged more legislators to shed the spotlight on Brazil in 1970, including Senator Edward Kennedy, who embarked on a public campaign against U.S. support to human rights abusers. “Reports of official terrorism and torture [in Brazil] are mixed with incidents of violence committed by opponents of the regime who are denied access to legitimate political channels,” said Kennedy on the Senate floor. America’s support for the regime, he argued, was laying bare the gap between America’s ideals and Washington’s policies. In so arguing, Kennedy was making a clear leap from America’s Vietnam experience to its support of other anticommunist regimes. “We now face a deep crisis in the spirit of the American people because of our support of an unpopular government in an unjust cause in Vietnam,” he asserted. “Our unquestioning endorsement of a government that accepts torture of political prisoners can only exacerbate this crisis.”¹⁴⁴ In retrospect, Kennedy was on the cutting edge in his attempts to loosen America from its Cold War assumptions, though he oversimplified events in Brazil. In reality, many of the victims he championed were also willing to use violence against civilians.

The Brazilian junta lashed out at Senator Kennedy, “international agents of subversion,” and the “morbid and sensationalist” foreign press. Regime representatives admitted that there had been instances of mistreatment, but they pledged that this was not official policy and that alleged “political prisoners” were actually incarcerated terrorists. Besides, they argued, other regimes did much worse. The general message was that outsiders did not understand the threats that Brazil faced. “Do people think this is a picnic?” said the finance minister to an American official. “These terrorists are a bunch of murderers…. We all live in fear.”¹⁴⁵ The Brazilian regime also continued to make the case that things were different in Latin America. “I do not believe that the public is interested in any change in the present regime,” a Médici deputy told a reporter. “The truth is that political liberty, in the sense of liberty to elect the government, is not one of the values sought by our people.”¹⁴⁶ The regime was at least correct in arguing that many foreign critics were working from secondhand information, often had no specialized knowledge of Brazil, and downplayed the violence posed by insurgents. But the regime’s other rejoinders were spurious. In stating that human rights violations were not unique to Brazil, they were essentially admitting guilt. And in focusing their propaganda on a chimerical “conspiracy” of foreign criticism, they were ignoring the substantial wellspring of legitimate domestic opposition. The combination of Kennedy’s statements and the negative international press reports fueled the Brazilian opposition’s call for investigations and reforms.

Concern then shifted to possible U.S. complicity in torture through USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), which had provided funds and training to police forces in several nations since 1957. Because the OPS had trained thousands of Brazilian police officers in law enforcement and interrogation techniques, activists shed light on the small U.S. Naval Mission that was housed in Brazil’s Navy Ministry. Some prisoners claimed that Brazilian security officers had tortured them in this building, and a few added that they had heard American voices in the corridors. Others said that the Brazilian interrogators claimed to have been trained by the CIA. The State Department, meanwhile, vehemently denied that torture was on the agenda of the training programs.¹⁴⁷

It was one thing for American activists to point out that their government was supporting a repressive regime; it was another thing entirely to claim that Americans were training foreign nationals how to torture, or even participating in torture themselves. At the very least, it was significant that so many now believed that their government was directing such morally questionable actions. However, CIA activities were closely guarded, and even congressional committees did not find evidence that implicated the agency or OPS. Langguth published some of the victims’ claims in his 1978 book Hidden Terrors, though he did not uncover much hard evidence that Americans were directly involved in torture. It is now clear that torture was happening in Brazil and that the CIA and State Department were aware of it, but much of the rest is speculation or hearsay.¹⁴⁸ Recently declassified CIA interrogation manuals are intriguing, though confirmation of direct CIA abuse has been harder to come by.¹⁴⁹

But this focus on American culpability deflects attention from the story’s central truth: that Brazilians were abusing Brazilians. Even if some Americans were involved in police training, to claim that they were the architects of extensive detainee abuse is to betray a marked ignorance of Brazil’s troubled, violent history. More important than the claim that Americans were torturing or training others to do so was the perception—both in the United States and in South America—that American support was empowering dictatorial regimes to abuse civilians. The OPS became infamous because of its training in South Vietnam, and activists and journalists naturally began to scrutinize OPS ties to a host of Latin American nations. (A decade later, activists would raise similar questions about counterinsurgency training at the U.S.-funded School of the Americas.)

In 1971, Senator Church chaired SFRC hearings on U.S.-Brazil relations. Together with the debate over aid to Greece, these hearings were among the earliest congressional efforts to investigate and limit U.S. involvement in other governments’ human rights violations. The hearings would last only three days and would include only government witnesses, but the modest agenda could not obscure the provocative precedent. As soon as Senator Church announced his plans, representatives of the Brazilian government and American businesses unsuccessfully petitioned the State Department to stop it. As it turned out, the hearings were somewhat traditional in the sense that the committee did not seek to change Brazilian society or protect the rights of Brazilian citizens. “How Brazilians organize their own affairs and how they treat each other are not proper concerns of the U.S. Senate,” said Church, but the actions of U.S. agencies in Brazil were “proper concerns of all Americans.”¹⁵⁰

The liberal Senator Claiborne Pell—another early advocate of limiting aid to undemocratic governments—had a testy exchange on these points with USAID’s chief public safety adviser in Brazil, Theodore D. Brown. “The thing that arouses me and arouses American public opinion a good deal,” said Pell, “is this use of physical torture. Why is it the Brazilians … use torture as a police method when it will alienate their friends and allies around the world?” Brown first replied that he was “not personally aware” of torture, and then tacitly acknowledged the problem: “Why certain people do things, that is a difficult question for me to answer, sir…. Why do some people beat their wives?” Senator Church then got into a row with Ambassador Rountree over President Nixon’s policy of dealing with all governments. “We not only deal with them,” said Church, “we extend lavish amounts of money…. Can we simply say it matters not what the state of freedom is in any country?” Church went on to succinctly lay out the moral dilemmas Americans faced in the human rights era. “When I go to American colleges and talk to young people,” he told the ambassador, “they ask why have we spent two billion dollars in Brazil when the government there is dictatorial in character, run by military men, any number of Brazilians are said to be mistreated in the jails, where there are recurrent reports of human torture.”¹⁵¹

The congressional hearings process had long served as an opportunity for legislators to question the executive branch on policy matters, but the Church hearings went much further in highlighting the level of skepticism about the moral value of foreign aid. Church and Pell not only doubted that the large aid allotment to Brazil did anything for the United States, but they were unimpressed with the administration’s claims of private diplomacy, and argued instead for strong public condemnation. The hearings were also a different kind of conversation because the senators had been receiving information from nongovernmental sources. Because activists and NGOs had done so much research and writing on Brazil, the senators did not have to rely on the State Department.¹⁵²

Congress did not cut direct aid in 1971, but these hearings set an important precedent for the threat of cutoffs based on human rights concerns. Congress soon terminated USAID funds for Brazilian police training, and the OPS pulled out of Brazil. (Congress would phase out the entire program in 1974.) These hearings also increased the congressional momentum against such regimes in Latin America. In 1971–1972, Senator John Tunney (D-CA), Congressman Donald Fraser, and Congressman Ronald Dellums (D-CA) proposed Brazilian aid cuts until the IACHR could prove that torture had been eradicated. These proposals received no more than about one-third support in each house, but they demonstrated a growing liberal challenge to Nixonian realpolitik.¹⁵³ Meanwhile, the State Department was hardly unified. Ambassador Rountree, who was clearly troubled by the overwhelming evidence of torture, supported diplomatic intercession. Unfortunately for him, when he commented to Washington on the “essentiality of making [U.S. disapproval] clear on appropriate occasion and in appropriate manner,” his superior wrote in the memo’s margin, “i.e. never, and by saying nothing.”¹⁵⁴

The mounting congressional opposition did not prevent the administration from rolling out the red carpet when President Médici visited Washington in December 1971. With both governments seeking to halt the leftward drift in the hemisphere, Secretary Rogers advised Nixon that the visit would provide an opportunity to influence Brazil’s leadership, as “the Brazilians’ objectives parallel our own.” Rogers even put a positive spin on the junta’s domestic achievements. Although many “thinking Brazilians” were “impatient with the slow pace of return to democratic procedures,” the wider public was “enthusiastic about Brazil’s progress.” Terrorism had been reduced, Brazil’s economy had grown, and the regime had permitted some direct congressional and municipal elections.¹⁵⁵ State Department FSOs in Brazil concurred. In the words of a U.S. embassy report, “large segments of Brazilian opinion [are] willing to accommodate themselves to authoritarian government, tainted with chronic, if occasional, abuses of individual rights, so long as it is accompanied by prosperity and a sense of accomplishment.”¹⁵⁶

At their first meeting, Médici implored Nixon not to neglect South America, where the danger from homegrown, Cuba-backed insurgencies was so dire that it “could blow up at any time.” Nixon agreed that regional insurgencies were a problem, and he assured Médici that the United States would maintain a strong front against Cuba. But otherwise he was cautious, asking many questions but promising little. Twice he pointed out that Congress controlled foreign aid, and he frankly noted that many American legislators wanted to limit ties in the belief that Brazil was “not democratic enough.” Médici denied that Brazil was a military dictatorship (he cited as proof the nation’s relatively small army), and he emphasized that the position of Brazil and its neighbors was so tenuous that they needed U.S. military support.¹⁵⁷ Considering that Nixon twice brought up the lack of democracy, we might be tempted to believe that he had misgivings about supporting an undemocratic government. But it is more likely that he simply wanted to clarify that Congress had to be taken seriously and that he did not have a free hand to aid allies as he wished. He may also have been preoccupied by his more important upcoming meetings in Beijing and Moscow. Either way, with respect to Brazil he was essentially caught between three of his central policy positions. He sought to aid anticommunist allies and avoid involvement in their internal affairs, all while decreasing America’s overseas commitments.

At their second meeting, it became clear that the price for Nixon’s support was Brazil taking a leading role in policing the Americas. The two leaders found common cause in curbing the activities of Fidel Castro, the region’s guerrillas, and Salvador Allende in Chile. Médici strongly agreed with Nixon’s statement that the two countries must work to “prevent new Allendes and Castros,” and he made it clear that Brazil intended to play a key role in preventing left-wing incursions. Nixon then made vague promises of U.S. back-channel funding if the Brazilians moved to undermine or overthrow Allende. Each side saw these meetings as a great success—the Brazilian foreign minister even told American officials that the visit “far exceeded our fondest expectations.”¹⁵⁸ Nixon was pleased with the Brazilian leadership from the standpoint of hemispheric security, and he and Secretary Rogers were privately effusive in their praise of Médici. “He’s quite a fellow, isn’t he,” said Nixon. “I wish he were running the whole continent.” Rogers agreed: “God, I’m glad he’s on our side.” The Brazilians did go on to interfere in their neighbors’ political affairs, and Médici became far more active than Nixon in fighting communism in South America.¹⁵⁹

But not everyone was happy with the Médici visit or the state of U.S.-Brazil relations. The Committee Against Repression in Brazil erected a large sign outside the White House that read, “Stop U.S. Dollar Complicity with Brazilian Torturists.” A Brazilian student briefly disrupted Médici’s speech at the Organization of American States by yelling, “Long live free Brazil—stop the tortures!” The New York Times suggested that Nixon’s public inclusion of Brazil among America’s closest allies “will be taken in Latin America as bestowing Washington’s blessings on the less attractive aspects of the junta’s record.”¹⁶⁰ Even some Brazilian military leaders had misgivings, including one general who lamented that the Americans wanted Brazil to “do the dirty work” in the region.¹⁶¹

Although the Nixon administration did not alter its position, the Brazilian case showed that a focused antitorture campaign could raise public awareness of suffering, essentially turning a Brazilian domestic issue into an international concern. Activists’ testimony and images reached the news media and Congress, and this rise in awareness forced the executive branch to reexamine bilateral relations. Antitorture activism on behalf of Brazilian political prisoners contributed to a much broader international movement against torture, including Amnesty International’s groundbreaking global campaign in 1973.¹⁶² These activities would lay the foundations for a strong international reaction to one of the era’s major turning points: the Chilean military’s September 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende. As for Brazil, incidences of torture and disappearances would decrease under the government of General Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979), in part because of international criticism and in part because most of the armed resistance had been subjugated. Many exiles would return following a 1979 amnesty, though the Brazilian military government would remain in power until 1985.