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
