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
