and criticism of totalitarianism was, in a broad sense, a commentary on individual liberty. American political rhetoric and public opinion posited a “free world” struggle to contain communism, and in the 1960s Congress did hold a few hearings on religious intolerance in the Eastern Bloc. But Americans aimed their reformist energies at solving the nation’s considerable racial problems, not international human rights violations. According to the policymaking logic of the day, human rights were the business of bodies like the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNHRC), not Congress or the president. As the activist Aryeh Neier has argued, multilateral human rights instruments “barely registered on the consciousness of even those most preoccupied with struggles over rights in the U.S.”9
The few global human rights issues that confronted the Lyndon Johnson administration (1963–1969) were generally relegated to the U.N. mission. Johnson allowed his representatives to issue mild criticisms of some communist governments, but he did little else, even on behalf of popular causes. Soviet anti-Semitism, for example, spurred the formation of NGOs, rallies in several American cities, and regular pickets at the Soviet embassy, but Washington’s official sympathy was not matched by political will or diplomatic initiatives.10 Such issues were still embedded in a Cold War ideological framework: just as Soviet propagandists attacked American racism, Americans attacked Soviet anti-Semitism. The Johnson administration encouraged direct appeals from private organizations, but in the absence of a closer East/West working relationship Americans could do little to help Soviet citizens. Besides, few in the mid-1960s believed that letters to the Kremlin would change Soviet internal policies. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, activists’ attention shifted from anti-Semitism to Soviet-Jewish emigration, and this interest would prove to have effects far beyond anyone’s expectations. (Richard Nixon would continue President Johnson’s hands-off approach, but he would find it much harder to sustain his priorities in the face of the Soviet Jewry movement.)
The Johnson administration also avoided a leading role in South Africa and Rhodesia. The global interest in these two states demonstrated that national self-determination and racial equality were two of the most prominent rights claims of the fifties and sixties.11 Many nations, NGOs, and multilateral forums attempted to undermine the South African system of apartheid—white-minority political rule and de jure white social and economic domination—through resolutions, economic sanctions, and boycotts. President Kennedy halted U.S. arms sales to South Africa in 1962, and the following year the U.N. Security Council passed a voluntary arms embargo. The Johnson administration continued Kennedy’s policy, but was unwilling to go beyond concurrence with the international status quo. Near the end of his presidency, Johnson even sought better relations with Pretoria in response to the rise of a radical bloc in the United Nations.12
Nor did the United States take the lead when the white-dominated government of Southern Rhodesia declared unilateral independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 as a means of forestalling a transition to independence and all-but-inevitable black rule. The United States endorsed a British-authored sanctions resolution, and Johnson issued an executive order prohibiting Rhodesian chrome imports and American oil and arms exports. He cited the principles of majority rule and national self-determination, though it seems that his chief concerns were domestic African American and liberal opinion, Anglo-American relations, and relations with other African states. Johnson’s U.N. ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, suggested that the United States was obliged to support U.N. sanctions, because to do otherwise would inhibit Johnson’s domestic racial policies and hurt American businesses in Africa. But with Johnson’s attention on Vietnam and Europe, his administration followed the British lead and used American influence only behind the scenes. “There are times when the best policy is to sit things out on the sidelines,” advised one insider. “Any efforts on our part to straighten things out … will be at best useless, at worst counter-productive. So let’s be nice, generous, friendly—and aloof.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk similarly advised Johnson that Rhodesia was “first a U.K. problem, then a U.N. problem, and only then is it a U.S. problem.”13
Some Americans opposed the chrome embargo. Not only did it force American manufacturers to buy from the Soviet Union, but Rhodesia and South Africa were anticommunist and arguably better potential allies than the other African states. (Johnson even had to politely refuse Rhodesian volunteers for service in Vietnam.) “I know the Negro has been putting pressure on to break relations with Rhodesia,” one Texan wrote to Johnson in 1967, “but why should we quit buying from a democratic country and buy from our known enemy?” Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) argued that the U.N. Charter did not authorize “interference” in a member state’s affairs. “Rhodesia is just as much a part of the British Empire as the state of Texas is a part of the United States,” he asserted.14 Few of these critics spoke of the troubling moral issue of white-minority rule, though in light of the many violations taking place in Africa, they were perhaps justified in asking why the United States was sanctioning Rhodesia and embargoing arms to South Africa while otherwise ignoring most of the continent. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations clearly feared losing the friendship of new African states, while Johnson especially worried that a weak policy would alienate African Americans.
It was not until the end of the sixties that American policymakers began to seriously consider the role international human rights should play in American foreign policy. It is perhaps fitting that 1967–1968 proved to be a turning point in the human rights story, for this stands as the modern watershed sine pari of social upheaval, antiwar protests, political assassinations, radical youth movements, and “long, hot summers” of racial antagonism. Tensions extended far beyond American shores, with violent demonstrations and government crackdowns taking place in locales as disparate as Paris, Berlin, Prague, Chicago, and Mexico City. It was also a turning point for American race relations and the civil rights movement. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 precipitated the last of the 1960s riots and ushered in a new set of domestic civil rights goals and conflicts.
In the realm of foreign relations, 1967–1968 witnessed the collapse of the Vietnam consensus and the weakening of the containment paradigm. Every presidential candidate—as well as President Johnson, who withdrew from the race—agreed that America had to rethink its global approach. As the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol noted in May 1968, “Everyone is to some extent aware that American foreign policy, after this [Vietnam] trauma, will never again be the same.”15 The Cold War became an altogether different struggle, one in which policymakers sought creative ways of decreasing overseas commitments. Other contemporary events also had broad ramifications. The April 1967 military coup in Greece brought a shocking end to democracy in a NATO member nation, while the Soviet arms buildup and the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia convinced American leaders to strengthen transatlantic ties. Not coincidentally, 1967–1968 arguably witnessed the initial stirrings of détente, first between East and West Germany and later between the United States and the Soviet Union.16 Inspired in part by these developments, some legislators and activists began to challenge the security-centered goals of the containment doctrine.
Vietnam and the End of Consensus
The new diplomatic possibilities of the late sixties emerged from the failure of older ideas. The containment principle, which originated as President Truman’s short-term solution to the problem of communist insurgency in Greece and Turkey in 1947, was the blueprint for American security policy for twenty years. It was not until the Vietnam War became a stalemate that critics began to mount a serious challenge to the containment paradigm. Congressional liberals were ahead of the curve with their moral criticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policy and their fear that the war would undermine the Democrats’ domestic agenda. Early in 1966, before it had become fashionable to criticize the war effort, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) expressed uncertainty and some bewilderment about the bombing of North Vietnam, noting the “serious problem” that Americans were “called upon to make a kind of moral commitment to an objective or to a set of purposes which we do not clearly understand.”17 Within two years, McCarthy’s sentiments had entered the mainstream. The White House and the Pentagon had long claimed
