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
