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Chapter 2

The Congressional Challenge and the Ethnic Revival

Washington politics in the 1970s were defined by an inordinate amount of conflict between the executive and legislative branches. As part of a broad-based effort to limit the power of the executive and claim a more prominent position in the foreign policymaking process, legislators played a key role in bringing human rights concerns to Washington. Indeed, Congress became the linchpin by transforming earlier questions about support to authoritarian regimes into firm statutory demands to alter these relationships. Through a variety of measures, the U.S. government became the first in the world to write human rights standards into its bilateral foreign policy laws. Between 1973 and 1979, legislators invoked the power of the purse and amended the Foreign Assistance Act to assess the human rights situation in every nation receiving aid, and they approved over two dozen bills that addressed foreign nations’ human rights practices. Congress also passed country-specific legislation that influenced relations with upward of twenty nations between 1973 and 1984.¹

These moves heartened activists, and at times may even have influenced human rights practices in target countries. But congressional activism was a double-edged sword. Not only did much of this activity antagonize foreign governments, but it also spawned awkward questions about policymakers’ intentions and the limits to American power. Were these pursuits solely intended to improve human rights practices, or were they politically motivated? How could Congress measure success? What if new laws conflicted with American commercial or security interests? And where did legislators draw the line between suitable and unsuitable causes? This chapter explores these questions and explains the pivotal role Congress played in the human rights story. It also highlights those legislators who took the lead in bringing these concerns into the diplomatic realm. Activists and journalists played an important part in providing information and pressuring the powerful, but Congress had the power to pass laws and directly challenge the executive branch. The clearest cases of executive-legislative conflict over human rights in the Nixon-Ford years were the Pinochet dictatorship and the Soviet Jewry movement. This chapter also examines ethnic interest groups’ involvement in the major causes of the seventies.

Congressional assertiveness grew from several sources. Congress had earlier granted President Johnson extraordinary power to wage war and expand social programs, but the combination of endemic domestic problems and the Vietnam stalemate led legislators to openly lambaste the “imperial presidency.” President Nixon aggravated this animosity through his secretive, executive-centered diplomacy. A set of legislators then emerged with a program that one senator defined as “new internationalism”—a posture aimed at demilitarizing foreign policy and pursuing new international priorities.² In 1970, Congress repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and restricted Nixon’s use of the military in Southeast Asia—the first ever vote to limit troop deployments during wartime. Three years later, the War Powers Act required congressional approval for all American military activities. Congress also assumed some oversight of intelligence and pressured President Ford into banning involvement in political assassinations.³ In perhaps the most famous (or infamous) assertion of legislative dominion, Congress refused emergency funds for the final defense of South Vietnam in 1975. These moves led William Bundy to write of these years, “Consensus on foreign policy has disappeared perhaps beyond recall.”⁴

International human rights became a significant battleground in this executive-legislative conflict. The executive had never been required to consider human rights in bilateral relations, but in light of the Nixon administration’s adherence to realpolitik, legislators took the lead in placing these issues onto the agenda. They used the hearings process to gather information and to build support for pending legislation; they mandated human rights requirements in trade and foreign aid; and they passed nonbinding “sense of the Congress” resolutions, which functioned as public position statements on everything from civil liberties in South Korea to religious persecution in the Soviet Union. Congress also required the State Department to create a new human rights bureau and compile “country reports” that would assess the domestic situation within every country receiving assistance.

Legislators were motivated by their constituents’ concerns, by personal political ambitions, and, presumably, by a degree of genuine concern for suffering peoples. But while we cannot prove what was in their hearts, it is easier to demonstrate that their respective positions lined up with their ideological beliefs and their political interests. Liberal Democrats Donald Fraser, Edward Kennedy, and Frank Church took the first major steps by chairing hearings and sponsoring resolutions to limit military assistance to authoritarian regimes of the right.⁵ Conservatives then latched onto the trend to attack détente, left-wing regimes, and economic aid to developing nations. Coalitions occasionally formed across party lines, but rarely across ideological lines. Conservative Democrats were more likely to align with conservative Republicans than liberals of their own party on anti-Soviet proposals. Likewise, some moderate and liberal Republicans were troubled by American support of dictatorships, and thus were often willing to join with liberal Democrats (though liberal Republicans were a rarity by the end of the 1970s). Members of Congress also prioritized specific regions. Conservatives generally fixated on the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, while liberals focused on the right-wing regimes of Latin America. Beyond Latin America and Europe, Congress largely ignored violations in the Middle East and East Asia, though they occasionally spotlighted American allies Iran, South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Africa was also generally ignored, with the exception of Uganda in 1978–1979 and South Africa during the 1980s antiapartheid movement.

The Foreign Aid Battleground

A major factor in the growing congressional interest in human rights was the long-standing debate over America’s program of international economic and military assistance. Foreign aid—the voluntary transfer of public resources from one nation to another—was central to the human rights story because cutting aid was among the most effective methods by which members of Congress could create and enforce a human rights policy. If private diplomacy or public criticism failed to alter an abusive government’s behavior, legislators could withhold funds in order to encourage reforms. The aid-cutting trend and the human rights movement developed for many of the same reasons. The Cold War thaw allowed policymakers to step outside of the assumptions that had long governed aid allocation. At the same time that policymakers were growing wary of overextending the nation’s commitments, the economic troubles of the seventies seemed a poor context for the U.S. government to dispense dollars around the world. Foreign aid was always controversial, and policymakers debated it for two decades before they began debating human rights. Consequently, by the time Congress began passing human rights laws in the mid-seventies, legislators had already grown comfortable with the notion of aid cuts.

The unraveling of the foreign aid consensus predated, and in some ways contributed to, the dissolution of the containment doctrine. In most years up to the mid-1960s, foreign aid exceeded 1 percent of GNP; during the Marshall Plan it even exceeded 2 percent. But when the Vietnam War effort began to look prohibitively costly, more Americans questioned the principles undergirding aid programs. Senator Fulbright, who called foreign aid “one of the most vexing problems of American foreign policy,” joined with congressional liberals to savage the manner in which the paternalistic aid commitment to South Vietnam had evolved into a military commitment.⁶ In the sixties, liberals further argued that foreign assistance was too closely linked to American economic interests and anticommunism. Although aid to South Vietnam financed infrastructure and schools, it also funded the poorly conceived strategic hamlet program and the authoritarian police apparatus. Legislators asked why South Vietnamese leaders seemed unable to improve their popularity or increase their democratic attributes despite being granted such large sums. One early attempt to address these problems, Title IX of the Foreign Assistance Act (1966), proposed making “political development” (loosely defined as more democratic procedures and institutions) a part of USAID decisions. But the effort was not sustained, and USAID’s mandate remained economic development, not the promotion of democracy.⁷

Human rights concerns had little influence on aid debates in the 1960s, but policymakers did question aid to regimes that exhibited poor political development or expressed anti-Americanism. Many liberals and moderates disagreed that a government’s anticommunist credentials were a proper litmus test for receiving aid. These critics argued that aid should only go to the poorest countries or to democracies, a position they justified on both strategic and moral grounds. Meanwhile, conservatives’ criticism of foreign aid was an integral part of their opposition to post-1945 liberalism. Republicans had been somewhat amenable to aid early in the Cold War, but in the sixties they lambasted the exorbitance of aid levels and marveled at how few strings were attached. The United States, they argued, was giving too much money to too many countries, an attitude exemplified in a 1966 Republican campaign slogan: “Why are we losing our money AND our friends?” These misgivings did not stem from recipient nations’ human rights records, but rather nations’ relative alignment with American interests and anticommunism.⁸ Many American voters, too, supported cuts in the interest of anticommunism, isolationism, countering anti-Americanism, or trimming the budget. A constituent wrote to Senator Henry Jackson in 1970, “In every country that we have given aid to that says ‘Go Home Yankee,’ take them off the list of being permitted to receive foreign aid.” Another wrote, “Let’s build a healthy prosperous America if we have a lot of money to spend and the hell with the damned foreigners, let them fend for themselves…. Besides, the more we donate to them, the more they despise Americans.”⁹ That same year, one congressman succinctly described how this new isolationism had affected Congress: “The congressional climate in support of American economic overseas commitments has never been more inhospitable.”¹⁰ Due in part to these reservations, foreign aid declined throughout the seventies and eighties, dropping as low as 0.25 percent of GNP, and this downward trend continued into the twenty-first century.¹¹

Richard Nixon’s approach to the aid dilemma was consistent with his wider foreign policy goals. Publicly, he assured Americans that there were sound moral reasons for foreign aid, but his real interest was using aid to prevent developing nations from turning toward socialism or nonaligned anti-Americanism. He also sought to shift more of the aid burden to America’s allies, multilateral institutions, the private sector, and the developing nations themselves. Reducing direct aid would be a way for the United States to loosen itself from troublesome entanglements and avoid being “blackmailed,” he asserted, though he did not see democracy as a necessary yardstick for aid allocation. “If you go down that road,” he said to Kissinger, “you will have to cut off aid to two-thirds of the ninety countries in the world that get it.”¹² In 1971, the Senate rejected the foreign assistance bill for the first time ever. Emergency legislation allotted some funds, but for the next several years budgets were lower than usual. “Neo-isolationism” was clearly a factor in these trends. Whereas the prior generation of liberals had supported the use of dollars to build up the developing world, those in the 1970s were far more likely to focus on America’s domestic ills. The American public, too, was rejecting broad plans for global melioration. In a 1976 Gallup poll, 23 percent of respondents called themselves “predominantly” or “completely” isolationist, compared with just 8 percent in 1964. Only 7 percent of respondents identified themselves as “completely internationalist” in 1976, while 30 percent had done so in 1964.¹³

Nevertheless, cutting aid and arms exports was controversial on many levels. Military aid constituted the bulk of American foreign assistance, and foreign military sales were among the nation’s largest exports. Such aid and sales strengthened alliances, allowed friendly regimes to defend themselves, prevented the United States from having to commit troops, and helped keep American defense contractors in the black. Not only were American leaders reluctant to abandon long-standing friendships, but after Vietnam they also sought to reduce direct military commitments. Indeed, military aid allocations were a relatively reliable measure of America’s foreign policy priorities. As policymakers shifted their attention away from Asia and toward the Middle East at the dawn of the 1970s, aid to South Vietnam, South Korea, and Taiwan fell considerably, while Israel and Egypt leaped to the top of the list.¹⁴

Arms sales and security assistance decisions were long unencumbered by human rights considerations, but in the seventies policymakers began to ask why the United States was lavishing so many dollars and weapons upon blatantly abusive regimes. As we have seen, Senator Kennedy offered one of the earliest such laments in his 1970 criticism of the U.S. approach to Latin America, where military governments were ruling eleven republics with substantial U.S. support.¹⁵ Kennedy’s statement was noteworthy because he was challenging the Cold War security imperative of arming anticommunist regimes, and he was questioning the moral implications of exporting arms that might be used against civilians—a perspective that grew directly out of the debates over aid to Greece and Brazil. Kennedy’s opponents countered that this aid protected American interests and that reducing it would call into question American power and reliability. The Nixon and Ford administrations generally supported military assistance, and they further argued that any state with a need would eventually find a supplier. “You cannot have military governments that you don’t give arms to,” said Kissinger privately. “They’re going to get it sooner or later from somebody else.”¹⁶ This disagreement would soon be taken up in earnest by the entire Congress, and the new human rights legislation would prove to be a major sticking point between the executive and legislative branches.

Congressional Hearings, Human Rights Laws, and the Dissidents

The hearings process emerged as a key congressional method of challenging the executive. As Robert D. Johnson has pointed out, committee hearings were the only routine public forum in which one branch of government could directly challenge another branch to defend its policies.¹⁷ In the first half of the 1970s, Congress used the process to uncover secret government activities and to assume greater control over defense, covert operations, and foreign policy. In 1971, Senator Sam Ervin investigated allegations that the U.S. Army had spied on civilians. The SFRC then investigated the activities of the State Department and American corporations in Chile. Most significant of all, the 1973–1974 Watergate hearings inhibited Nixon’s presidential abilities and revealed a complex web of illegal and unethical activities. After Nixon’s resignation, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee looked into unscrupulous CIA and FBI activities. All told, these hearings presented Americans with uncomfortable truths about their government, and they spurred legislative action to rein in the power of the executive and reorient foreign policy.

Human rights hearings grew out of this milieu. Earlier attention to Greek and Brazilian internal policies set an important precedent for the threat of aid cutoffs based on human rights concerns, but these inquiries were not connected to a broader movement, nor did they engender substantive legislation. It was not until 1973–1974 that Congress institutionalized human rights hearings as a means of challenging the executive, drafting human rights laws, and laying out an alternative to realpolitik. The SFRC’s 1973 confirmation hearings on Henry Kissinger’s nomination as secretary of state were unexpectedly germane to this burgeoning conversation. An array of groups opposed his nomination, including conservatives who blamed him for the shortcomings of détente and liberals who derided his secretiveness and his possible complicity in human rights violations. Summing up the view from the left, one university professor testified that “illicit wiretapping, deception of Congress and of the American people, secret and massive bombing, and deep involvement in the most brutal use of armed violence against human beings” were sufficient reasons to deny his confirmation. Some senators used the forum to highlight the administration’s secrecy, while others questioned its amoral foreign policy. Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME), a 1972 presidential candidate and Nixon critic, assailed the administration’s “style of operation” in foreign affairs, for which the United States had “paid a serious and possibly dangerous price.” Meanwhile, Kissinger defended his realism. “If we adopt as a national proposition the view that we must transform the domestic structure of all countries with which we deal,” he asserted, “then we will find ourselves massively involved in every country in the world.”¹⁸ Despite the criticisms, the committee recommended his confirmation, and the full Senate confirmed him by a vote of seventy-eight to seven. The nay votes included such unlikely bedfellows as the liberal Democrat George McGovern (SD) and the conservative Republican Jesse Helms (NC).

While the SFRC was considering Kissinger’s nomination, Congressman Donald Fraser became the first to conduct hearings for the express purpose of publicizing international human rights violations.¹⁹ These investigations helped establish him as the preeminent congressional advocate of the seventies. Fraser seems to have been driven to activism more by contemporary events and his personal beliefs than by the interests of voters in his Minneapolis district. Although his constituents were generally moderate to liberal, few had a direct ethnic or religious connection to overseas victims. What is clear is that Fraser was greatly affected by the Vietnam War, the worldwide rise in military coups and civil wars, and America’s ties to undemocratic regimes.