Human Rights in American Foreign Policy. Joe Renouard

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.