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
