10

From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s

CARL J. BON TEMPO

On the morning of October 6, 1977, the National Conference on Human Rights (NCHR) brought together an extraordinary collection of human rights activists and policymakers in New York City. B’nai Brith, Amnesty International, the International League for Human Rights, the AFL-CIO, and the International Rescue Committee—to name just a few—and a scattering of U.S. government officials met with the goal of creating a more effective institutional framework for human rights activism. One of the more prominent organizations at the NCHR was Freedom House, a bipartisan, foreign-policy think tank and advocacy organization that was at the center of debates about international affairs in the United States for the preceding three decades. Freedom House’s president John Richardson was a co-convener of the NCHR, its personnel was well represented on the day’s panels, and the event’s main organizer—civil rights activist Bayard Rustin—was a longtime Freedom House member.¹

Rustin’s opening remarks about human rights were capacious and welcoming. “We must oppose the suppression of human rights anywhere, whatever the ideology of the oppressor,” Rustin began. He then took a stab at defining human rights, highlighting the “importance of social and economic well-being for all peoples … I point out that this means stretching the definition of human rights beyond civil and political to include all matters which affect human welfare.”² Yet, about one month after the conference, Rustin received a letter from Ronald Young of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an NGO led by Quakers. Long active in liberal-left politics in the United States and a supporter of the welfare state and civil rights, the AFSC’s foreign policy agenda (nuclear and conventional disarmament, aid to refugees and immigrants, and world peace) reflected those leanings. Young agreed to work further with Rustin to meet the NCHR’s goals, but he also sounded some sour notes. Most pointedly, he stressed, “We were disturbed by a number of speeches … in which the speakers seem to place more emphasis on reasserting a cold war framework than on advancing the cause of human rights.” Instead of the Cold War, Young asserted human rights should be part of a “movement toward social justice, disarmament, and transferring resources from the military budget to programs to meet real human needs at home and abroad.”³ The Rustin-Young exchange highlighted the ideological, political, and geopolitical divides inherent in the human rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Were human rights principles mainly political and civil in nature, or did they encompass social and economic rights as well? Was the Cold War the main front in the battle for human rights—or should authoritarianism of all kinds be subjected to the light of human rights?

The Rustin-Young correspondence raised issues that, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, defined the post-1945 history of human rights: the emergence of multiple and evolving definitions of human rights; the changing place and importance of human rights on the crowded agenda of international politics; and the challenge for nation-states, international organizations, and advocacy groups of translating human rights principles into concrete policy initiatives. During the 1970s, however, with the modern human rights regime almost three decades old, these issues only grew in salience. Disaffection with the Cold War—the governing paradigm of international affairs since the late 1940s—peaked not only in the United States but also in Europe and the so-called Third World. As a result, more political and cultural space opened up in the 1970s for the consideration of human rights ideals and their actualization into policy.⁴ At the same time, human rights, with the stunning growth of NGOs and interconnected transnational activist networks—as well as greater institutionalization within governments and international organizations—had become mass politics, preached and practiced by an ever-wider circle. This expansion gave human rights concerns more prominence but also led to a more raucous and contentious debate about what human rights were, when they ought to be cited, and how they ought to be enforced.⁵

As part of this ferment—symbolized by both the Rustin-Young exchange, as well as the larger NCHR—human rights principles emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a vital part of debates in the United States about politics, culture, and foreign policy. The American Friends Service Committee was emblematic of how liberals and the left answered these questions, offering a vision of human rights that grew in power and prestige during the human rights revolution of the 1970s. On the right and in the center, though, a different vision emerged. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, conservatives trumpeted human rights principles and politics, largely as weapons in the war against communism and the Soviet Union. By the late 1970s and 1980s, Freedom House had emerged as an important proponent of this view. The organization’s broader foreign policy agenda during these years identified the Soviet Union as the chief threat to the United States and the Cold War as the principal framework of international politics. Freedom House’s human rights position tracked along these lines, stressing the Cold War, anticommunism, and political and civil rights to the neglect of economic and social rights. While Freedom House reflected a variety of positions—for instance, Rustin’s capacious definition of human rights—on signature issues of the day, the group found itself more often contesting the liberal-left vision of human rights. As Freedom House dealt with the larger human rights frameworks offered by the Carter and Reagan administrations and as it addressed controversial issues like the Helsinki Accords and the role of UNESCO, it helped consolidate and further elaborate a conservative vision of human rights, grounded in anticommunism and opposition to the Soviet Union, that emerged in the 1970s.⁶

Freedom House formed in the fall of 1941 in response to the threat of fascism. Its original leadership was bipartisan—featuring 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—and included intellectuals (Reinhold Niebuhr), labor leaders (A. Philip Randolph), journalists (Dorothy Thompson), and civil rights activists (Walter White), an eclectic mix the group maintained over the decades. By the 1960s and 1970s, Freedom House claimed several thousand members, most of whom resided in the northeast United States. The majority of Freedom House’s budget came from its investments, its endowment, and the grants it received from charitable foundations. Raising funds became more of an issue in the 1980s. Freedom House’s leadership complained that foundations like Smith Richardson and Olin, who had been supporters in the late 1970s, financed more partisan think tanks in the 1980s, leaving the group in more difficult financial straits.⁷

Freedom House sought to educate the public about the issues of the day and influence policymakers in Washington.⁸ The group tirelessly publicized the efforts of prodemocracy groups in other countries and participated in election monitoring. Like other think tanks, such as the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, it opened research centers dedicated to particular issues (the Center for Caribbean and Central American Studies and the Afghanistan Information Center) and it hosted foreign leaders. Freedom House periodically released policy statements, crafted by its Executive Committee and Board of Directors, which addressed current events and international trends. All of these activities were publicized via radio, television, newspapers, press conferences, and the organization’s own monthly magazine, Freedom at Issue (FATI). Freedom House’s most well-known effort was its annual survey of freedom across the globe, which judged nations on the scale of “Free,” “Partly Free,” and “Not Free.” Freedom House stressed that these judgments were based on rigorous and impartial research and analysis, but the “Comparative Survey of Freedom,” as it came to be known in 1972, often came under critical fire. Nonetheless, the survey was the way most Americans encountered the organization’s work.⁹

It is difficult to measure how much influence Freedom House had either among the public or in Washington. Many of the Reagan administration’s records remain closed, making it difficult to assess the group’s impact on the White House in the 1980s. Yet evidence suggests that the organization did effectively reach politicians and policymakers. Politicians approvingly cited Freedom House statements and the group’s members routinely testified on Capitol Hill.¹⁰ The Comparative Survey’s rankings were regular fodder for reporters, columnists, and politicians—and the State Department often consulted the Survey’s authors as it assessed human rights records.¹¹ This influence in policymaking circles arose because key figures at Freedom House had long experience in government, because the group assiduously maintained its bipartisanship, and because the group’s statements seemed calculated to avoid partisan controversy and embrace consensus rather than advocate bold new approaches.¹²

Freedom House often described its goal as protecting and promoting freedom at home and abroad—yet this depiction obscured more than clarified.¹³ Instead, it is more useful to see Freedom House as an exemplar of Cold War liberalism. On domestic issues, the organization strongly favored African American civil rights and ethnic pluralism, castigated McCarthy’s red scare, and generally supported labor rights.¹⁴ The group concentrated more, though, on the central foreign policy issues of the postwar era. Like other Cold War liberal organizations, it saw the Soviet Union as the main menace to global stability, liberal democracy, and capitalism, and as the chief threat to American national security. It urged that only “clear-eyed realism” and attendant military, moral, and political strength on the part of the United States and its allies could face down Soviet totalitarianism.¹⁵ As such, the organization supported the anticommunist and anti-Soviet foreign policies of the Truman and Eisenhower White Houses. While Freedom House’s leadership divided over Johnson’s 1965 escalation in Vietnam, it rather quickly got behind the war effort, lauding the “nation’s firm commitment” to South Vietnam.¹⁶

As Cold War liberalism buckled in the late 1960s, Freedom House urged a reestablishment of consensus politics and decried the rising anger of the new left and the far right, particularly George Wallace.¹⁷ Anti-Vietnam War protestors were a frequent target, and Freedom House even engaged in some red-baiting attacks on Martin Luther King as he publicly turned against the war.¹⁸ Freedom House’s Board of Directors and the Executive Committee generally supported what it saw as the Nixon administration’s “orderly withdrawal from Vietnam,” but it could not agree on how to publicly announce this position.¹⁹ The group divided over the Nixon administration’s détente policy as well, with some in the organization describing it as “embarrassing” while others saw potential benefits. Freedom House leaders grew more disenchanted with détente as the 1970s wore on, criticizing the policy for according the Soviets too much political legitimacy, for naively downplaying Soviet military advances, and for tolerating Soviet repression at home and in Eastern Europe.²⁰

Détente, of course, was but one response to the foreign policy challenges created by the Vietnam quagmire and attendant political and cultural discord at home. Another—orienting U.S. foreign policy around human rights principles—found advocates across the political spectrum. On the liberal left, a comprehensive articulation of human rights emerged from liberal Democrats like Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative Donald Fraser and a whole host of liberal activists and organizations. These human rights advocates refused to see international affairs solely through a Cold War lens and were deeply suspicious of the efficacy of an anticommunist U.S. foreign policy. They reached these conclusions because they believed global politics rotated on a North–South axis and that the world’s problems—the arms race, poverty, the maldistribution of wealth, ethnic and national rivalries, and the deprivation of individual rights and democracy by rightist and leftist repressive governments—could not be addressed by those mired in Cold War thinking. Instead, they urged participation in international organizations and multilateral efforts. They saw the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights not as some distant star to shoot for, but rather as a tangible guide for American foreign policy.²¹

Human rights principles and rhetoric also found supporters among two sets of conservatives. A group of disaffected liberals—known as the neoconservatives—worried in the late 1960s and 1970s that the Democratic Party and the larger liberal-left alliance had lost its grounding in Cold War liberalism and given way to dangerous radicalism. Neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan urged Democrats to maintain a strongly anticommunist and anti-Soviet foreign policy that used human rights as a cudgel to pound the Soviet Union. Such thinking led to criticism of Nixon’s détente policies as well. Senator Henry Jackson deftly used the Soviet Union’s restriction of the right of Jews to emigrate to bash the Kremlin and the Nixon administration, the latter for tolerating these practices within the détente framework. Jackson argued that Soviet emigration policies and Nixon’s pursuit of détente were an affront to human rights.²²

The right wing of the Republican Party—including Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and Phyllis Schlafly—joined the neoconservatives in blasting Nixon for accommodating rather than confronting the Soviets (and China) and for failing to rebuild the U.S. military. The Republican right initially eschewed human rights principles in this critique of détente, but that stance began to change in the late 1970s. The 1976 Republican campaign platform’s foreign policy planks—large parts of which were drafted by conservative Jesse Helms—praised the Soviet dissident and human rights leader Alexander Solzhenitsyn and called for the Soviets to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and honor the Helsinki Accords’ human rights agreements. The latter was particularly striking, as conservatives earlier had attacked the Ford administration for signing the accords and derided the human rights benchmarks as toothless.²³ Although real differences existed between the neoconservatives and the Republican right, the two groups both wanted an aggressive anticommunist foreign policy that aimed to defeat the Soviets through military strength and moral certitude. For these conservatives, human rights principles were most useful in winning the Cold War.

In this period of fluidity in American foreign policy, Freedom House held fast to its faith in the basic precepts of the Cold War consensus even while acknowledging both an erosion of American power and a drastically reconfigured geopolitical map. As Freedom House declared in late 1970, the first “imperative” of U.S. foreign policy was “To maintain the stability of the present balance of power, and especially the continuing need for an adequate and credible American offset to rapidly expanding Soviet strategic power.”²⁴ Unsurprisingly, Freedom House was slow to engage in the human rights moment of the mid-1970s. Part of this reluctance surely arose from the cracks within the organization’s leadership in this tumultuous period. Yet, Freedom House also was unsure about human rights as a political agenda. Instead, echoing its early Cold War stance, it believed in privileging “freedom” over human rights concerns.²⁵ By late 1976, however, Freedom House began thinking more rigorously and more seriously about the place of human rights in American foreign policy. In part, this new attention grew from an understanding of the newfound prominence of human rights. Self-interest was also in play; some at Freedom House believed the high tide of human rights was the perfect wave to carry the group’s publications and programs to a larger audience.²⁶

Leonard Sussman, the group’s executive director, urged Freedom House members in 1976 to consider how the United States might “more effectively advance human rights abroad.” While a policy statement was never publicly released, the drafts reveal a number of themes that would characterize the organization’s position in the years to come. Freedom House asserted that “a traditional and fundamental American concern for advancing human rights around the world” existed and that “inherent humanitarian reasons” and “pragmatic national interests” were served by the promotion of human rights. Several caveats followed this general endorsement. Freedom House warned against strict laws that might force policymakers to punish human rights violators, noting that the United States had to recognize that “overriding reasons for maintaining relationships with a repressive nation abroad” might exist—though the government should make clear the public’s “abhorrence of repression.” Moreover, any human rights policy had to differentiate between “basic human decencies (the abrogation of human rights) and the actual level of political or civil rights permitted individual citizens in a country.” On this score, Freedom House seemed more concerned with the latter than the former, a privilege that would solidify in the coming years.²⁷ With the Carter administration taking office in the new year, Freedom House would have the opportunity to think about—and critique—policymakers’ efforts to put human rights at the center of American foreign policy.

Soon after entering office, the Carter administration began articulating its vision of a human-rights-based foreign policy. In a speech at Notre Dame in the spring of 1977, Carter questioned the centrality of the Cold War and containment doctrine to American foreign policy. Instead, he described global politics as encompassing the Cold War and “the new global questions of justice, equity, and human rights.” While making clear he wanted to continue détente and to work with the Soviets toward arms control, he embedded this aim within broader objectives, including the promotion of human rights and democracy, the establishment of peace in the Middle East, and the reduction of the global arms trade. At Notre Dame, Carter did not precisely define human rights—other than make plain the assumption that American values and ideals were identical to human rights principles—but Secretary of State Cyrus Vance did later that spring. Vance asserted that human rights encompassed three sets of rights: the “right to be free from governmental violation of the integrity of the body,” the “right to the fulfillment of such vital needs as food, shelter, health care, and education,” and “civil and political liberties.”²⁸ While historians engage in brisk debate about whether Carter’s foreign policy actually accomplished some (or any) of these goals, most agree that he laid out an ambitious agenda and that his administration was a high point in U.S government human rights activism.²⁹

Vance’s definition of human rights was not quite consonant with Freedom House’s, but relations between Freedom House and the administration were not fated to fail. If, as was well reported, the administration was divided between those (in the State Department) sympathetic to human rights and those (in the National Security Council) more partial to a Cold War–based approach, Freedom House actually maintained solid contact with members of both groups. John Richardson, Freedom House’s president, had just finished a tour at the State Department and was on good terms with Patricia Derian, who headed the department’s human rights operation. Most striking, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (who had neoconservative leanings) had been an active participant on Freedom House’s Board for a number of years. Upon leaving for Washington, Brzezinski’s membership in Freedom House was deactivated, but he remained in contact with executive director Leonard Sussman.³⁰

Initially, Freedom House was equally energized by and uncomfortable with the Carter administration’s foreign policy initiatives and emphasis on human rights.³¹ The organization’s emerging critique centered on the fear that the administration was not up to the task of implementing its agenda. At the end of 1977, John Richardson warned Carter’s White House Counsel Robert Lipschutz that the human rights agenda was endangered “due in part to the necessary refinement of early formulations, and in part to a failure, so far, to persuade even the most favorably disposed that there is a considered long-term strategy.”³² (This charge was not unfamiliar; Stanley Hoffman’s scathingly titled “The Hell of Good Intentions,” which appeared in Foreign Policy in the winter of 1977/1978, attacked the administration for failing to understand the relationship between strategy and goals.)³³ Richardson’s solution was for Freedom House and the Center for Strategic and International Studies to organize a conference bringing together academics and administration officials to work through these structural issues.³⁴

But Freedom House’s criticisms were more than just structural or mechanical. In the late 1970s, the group revealed its own definition of human rights, one that was not always in tune with Carter or Vance, much less liberal-left activists and organizations. In 1978, Richardson and Raymond Gastil argued that any effective human rights strategy must avoid “stretching the term ‘human rights’ to cover all sorts of human wants from sound nutrition to formal schooling.” This “stretching” was problematic for two reasons. First, it was impossible for the United States to hold another government to human rights standards if those standards involved state promotion of “human welfare.” Gastil and Richardson suggested a more low-key lobbying approach—an effort not tied to human rights promotion—to encouraging development. Second, the inclusion of social and economic rights under the rubric of human rights would only “confuse American human rights policy which in practice (and of necessity) focuses on political rights and civil liberties.”³⁵ Gastil continued this line of thinking in 1980, arguing that while conventional definitions of human rights had three components—political and civil rights, economic and social rights, and rights to bodily integrity—it was vital for the United States to base its policies on the promotion and protection of political and civil rights. Gastil reckoned that such a focus would encompass the protection of bodily integrity—the prevention of torture, for instance—as this right was subsumed under political and civil rights. At the same time, Gastil reasoned that political and civil liberties formed the basis, and, in fact, were a precondition, of economic development and social rights like education.³⁶

The human rights issue that most concerned Freedom House during the Carter years was the Soviet Union’s and the Eastern bloc’s compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Arduous negotiations among thirty-five nations—hampered by the lack of enthusiasm from the Soviet and American representatives taking their cues from Brezhnev and Kissinger, respectively—produced a wide-ranging agreement in Helsinki. The accords, much to the Soviets’ liking, ratified the postwar political divisions in Europe and guaranteed each signatory’s “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity.” (These conditions fueled the right’s disenchantment with Helsinki and the Ford administration.) The signatories of the accords also promised—at the urging of European governments—to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all” and to “encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms.” In the long term, the human rights benchmarks would prove the most vital of the agreement, in large part because of the encouragement that dissidents behind the Iron Curtain took from them.³⁷

In the short term, though, how was the United States to judge Soviet compliance and to press the Soviets to meet the accords’ human rights stipulations? Shortly after the accords’ conclusion, Freedom House publicly called for rigorous monitoring of the Soviets on all aspects of the Helsinki agreement and soon mounted its own “Helsinki Watch.”³⁸ In fact, Freedom House insisted that only strict oversight could redeem the accords. According to Leonard Sussman, “America and its allies paid a heavy price … immediate recognition of the USSR’s ‘right’ to dominate Eastern Europe” in return for a “promised opening to the East” that “if implemented … could significantly ventilate the closed communist societies.”³⁹ On this score, Sussman echoed conservatives in the Republican Party, except that they were more fixated on the price rather than the potential payoff.

While the accords contained a review process that led to meetings in Belgrade in 1978 and Madrid in 1980, Freedom House insisted that private groups—like the Helsinki Watch—monitor Soviet actions and that the United States and its allies aggressively use the official review process to hold the Soviets accountable. As a result, the pages of Freedom at Issue were filled in the late 1970s with articles about the state of the Helsinki agreement. In advance of the 1978 Belgrade meeting, Freedom House excoriated those in the administration—leaving them unnamed—who wished to abandon the review process because any vigorous discussion of the accords’ implementation might stand in the way of progress on issues like arms control. Freedom House instead urged an “energetic” American posture at Belgrade, as well as the continuation of the summit reviews, “so that human freedom, as reflected in the issues of expanded human rights and information exchange, remains high on the conscience and the agenda of the world.”⁴⁰ The group continued this stance, for the most part, in advance of the Madrid meeting two years later.⁴¹ In looking at the accords, Freedom House focused intently on the codicils insuring a free flow of information between the East and West, unsurprising given the group’s general interest in freedom of the press issues.⁴² By 1980, Freedom House cited the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and crackdowns by Eastern European governments on dissidents as evidence of Soviet noncompliance with Helsinki.⁴³

The overall thrust of these efforts—both to define human rights and to monitor the Helsinki Accords—was remarkably clear. Richardson and Gastil defined human rights as political and civil rights, while all other rights were secondary or logical outgrowths. The definition emerged starkly as the group confronted Helsinki and chose to focus on the particular issues of freedom of the press and freedom of dissent, which did not deviate from its traditional concerns with political and civil rights. More important, Freedom House’s focus on Helsinki’s human rights codicils—and the group’s use of them to criticize the Soviet Union—makes clear it believed that the most striking and pressing human rights issues of the day were intertwined with the Cold War and the rejection of communism. This approach was not limited to Helsinki—for instance, Freedom House in 1979 trumpeted Jonas Savimbi as a human rights leader for his campaign against the Soviet- and Cuban-aligned communist government of Angola⁴⁴—but it achieved its most convincing articulation there.

Ronald Reagan came to office promising a bold reassertion of American power, a more confrontational approach with the Soviet Union, and a renewed emphasis on military strength. Underlying this agenda was a promise to break with what Reagan saw as the impotent foreign policies of the Carter administration. Reagan did believe in human rights, but of a particular kind. For Reagan, communism and Soviet power were the chief affronts to human rights in the modern world. As he declared in 1982: “The record is clear. Nowhere in its whole sordid history have the promises of communism been redeemed. Everywhere it has exploited and aggravated temporary economic suffering to seize power and then to institutionalize economic deprivation and suppress human rights.”⁴⁵ On this score, Reagan borrowed heavily from the neoconservatives and Republican right of the 1970s. Indeed, several neoconservatives joined his foreign policy team.⁴⁶

Freedom House’s leadership understood that Reagan’s election heralded a new era and the organization thought about where it might fit. Sussman described the group’s ideology as “hard-line liberalism,” a clear reference to 1940s and 1950s Cold War liberalism, and he aimed to position Freedom House as an alternative to what he believed were weak-kneed Democrats (“the McGoverns”) and to the Reagan administration, which he viewed with uncertainty. “Certainly we shall have many friends in the new government,” he wrote, “but will we accept all of the objectives the new administration may set for itself and for the country?”⁴⁷ Furthermore, Sussman asked in January 1981, “How do we stand now on human rights in international affairs?” He and other key members answered over the coming months.⁴⁸ Sussman reiterated that human rights were subordinate to a broader agenda of “freedom” and hinted strongly that the Soviets and their allies were the chief threats to freedom. Freedom House leaders recognized that human rights ought to be “one of several factors in the formulation of foreign policy”⁴⁹ but that the U.S. ought not to be “rigid” in pursuing human rights objectives.⁵⁰ Rather, “We may have to support a partly free regime today to prevent a more totalitarian take-over tomorrow. It may be necessary to abide short-term violations of human rights in order to avoid long-term irreversible denials of human rights.”⁵¹ Likewise, Sussman continued to deride the concept of economic rights, insisting that “Rights and liberties are the key to all of society. Given these freedoms, the citizens can choose priorities: more food now, better housing later, or even circuses first.”⁵²

Sussman hoped that this approach might find favor in the Reagan administration, and the first human rights controversy, involving the staffing of key human rights positions at the State Department, indicated that it might.⁵³ Reagan nominated Ernest Lefever as assistant secretary of state for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, a position previously held by the strong human rights advocate Patricia Derian. Critics in the Democratic Party and the human rights community were alarmed by the choice, for Lefever had criticized the Carter administration’s human rights policies, questioned the efficacy of linking foreign military and economic aid to respect for human rights, and seemed to condone torture by rightist Latin American governments.⁵⁴ With the Senate poised to reject Lefever’s nomination, the White House withdrew his name from consideration in the summer of 1981. Rumors flew that the post would remain vacant and the human rights office downgraded.⁵⁵ Freedom House, along with other human rights activists, lobbied the administration against such moves. In early November, the Reagan White House resolved the problem, nominating the neoconservative Elliot Abrams as assistant secretary.

More important, Abrams, Deputy Secretary of State William Clark, and Undersecretary of State for Management Richard Kennedy began outlining the administration’s human rights approach in a memo that soon leaked to the New York Times. The administration saw human rights as “central to what America is and stands for,” but it offered a very specific and limited definition of human rights, one oriented toward the Cold War and the Soviet Union: “‘Human rights’—meaning political rights and civil liberties—conveys what is ultimately at issue in our contest with the Soviet bloc. The fundamental distinction is our respective attitudes towards freedom.” The memo’s authors noted that the United States should call attention to human rights violations among American adversaries and allies. They also declared that “the human rights element in making decisions affecting bilateral relations must be balanced against U.S. economic, security, and other interests.” Thus, a human rights policy under the Reagan administration would always take larger strategic—Cold War-based—realities into account, which seemed to promise cover for rightist authoritarian regimes allied with the United States. Much of this thinking was neoconservative orthodoxy on human rights policy, reflecting, most obviously, the influence of Abrams.⁵⁶

Freedom House was pleased with the statement, and with good reason. On the most important issues—the definition of human rights, the focus on the Cold War, and the place of human rights within a larger strategic framework—the Reagan administration had followed the Freedom House line. It is not clear whether this was deliberate, but the emerging neoconservative-influenced policies of the administration were closely aligned with what Freedom House had been arguing for years. Moreover, Sussman—along with leaders of other human-rights-based NGOs—had met with William Clark in late September in an effort to keep the human rights portfolio active at State. Sussman’s notes of that meeting indicate that “Clark, I thought, acknowledged formally my reference to ‘political rights and civil liberties’ rather than human rights or human needs.”⁵⁷ Sussman followed up by sending a congratulatory note to Abrams that acknowledged the administration’s and Freedom House’s similar thinking.⁵⁸

This close thinking and cooperation continued on another key issue: monitoring the Helsinki Accords. Max Kampelman, chairman of Freedom House’s Board in the early and mid-1980s, was a longtime conservative Democrat with neoconservative ties—he helped found the Committee on the Present Danger—who served as the American representative to the Helsinki Final Act review process at Madrid in 1980. Reagan kept Kampelman in this position, until assigning him in 1985 to head up arms control negotiations with the Soviets. Kampelman fit in well with the Reagan administration’s hard-line approach toward the Soviet Union. He hammered away at Soviet human rights abuses through the early 1980s, decrying the Soviet leadership’s failure to live up to the Helsinki human rights codicils. As an example of his aggressive approach, Kampelman’s opening statement at the 1984 CSCE review conference in Stockholm raised the cases of famed Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, “only one example of the many thousands of other human tragedies that have resulted from the increased repression that we sadly note in the Soviet Union.”⁵⁹ Freedom House, unsurprisingly, supported Kampelman’s efforts at using the Helsinki review process to blast Soviet human rights violations.⁶⁰

Freedom House’s narrow definition of human rights, as well as the trickiness of its relations with the Reagan administration, came to the fore during a controversy over the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The problem originated in the mid-1970s. A group of Third World nations, led by UNESCO’s head, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal, put forward a plan for a “new world information order” that provided guidelines for the relationship between the press and governments around the world. The U.S. delegation at UNESCO, on which Freedom House’s Sussman served, strenuously objected to the proposal, arguing that it attacked freedom of the press, the right to communicate freely and openly, and civil rights more generally. Third World nations responded that the press was Western-dominated and that governments—facing crushing social and economic problems—needed some of the tools the press provided. Such claims, backed by the Soviet Union, only heightened fears in the United States about the goals of the new world information order.⁶¹ A succession of American administrations opposed the proposal from its introduction, but Third World nations and the Soviet Union just as doggedly stood behind it.

Freedom House contended that the proposal, if enacted, would trample on the freedom of the press, a vital and central human right. Moreover, Sussman argued that “Third World regimes” enacted such restrictions “to minimize challenges to the regime’s power,” in turn dealing a death blow to democracy and basic political rights.⁶² Conservatives in the Reagan administration shared these concerns and saw UNESCO and M’Bow as implacable opponents of American interests. In late 1983, the administration announced that it was considering withdrawing the United States from UNESCO altogether by the end of 1984. Sussman and Freedom House responded angrily when they learned of these plans, opening up a significant rift. While Freedom House acknowledged that UNESCO was deeply flawed and antagonistic toward the United States, it also believed that the country needed to remain in UNESCO to reform it. Moreover, withdrawal would only leave the field to the Soviets and their allies. Here, Freedom House’s internationalism ran headlong into those in the administration who were deeply skeptical of the efficacy of American participation in international organizations. The administration paid little heed to these warnings and withdrew from UNESCO at the beginning of 1985. The United States did not rejoin until 2003.⁶³

The UNESCO new world information order controversy revealed that Freedom House did not move in lockstep with the Reagan administration. Yet the disagreement revolved around how the United States should deal with UNESCO rather than a difference in the assessment of UNESCO’s program. Both the administration and Freedom House worried that UNESCO’s new world information order assaulted a particular set of political and civil rights. More important, both believed that UNESCO served as a forum in which Third World nations and the Soviet Union campaigned to recast human rights into “people’s rights.”⁶⁴ People’s rights, according to Sussman, were nothing less than an effort by the Soviets and their Third World allies to overturn the traditional definition of human rights. Two definitions of people’s rights had emerged, one that “would have governments guarantee fulfillment of human needs (employment, food, housing, health care, etc.)” and the other “would emphasize the self-determination of peoples in opposition to neocolonialism and imperialism.” Sussman concluded that “[t]hese two expansions of human rights emphasize the role of the group, not the individual … In the Western approach the individual receives guarantees of rights against the government. In a collectivist system the individual is given duties to perform in the interest of the state, and the state holds ‘rights’ that insure the performance of the individual.”⁶⁵

The price of the ascendancy of “people’s rights” principles and rhetoric was high according to Freedom House’s Raymond Gastil: “The trivialization of human rights into empty rhetoric or the use of human rights rhetoric to clothe or obscure tyranny.” Gastil proposed that Freedom House work to “develop a hierarchy of human rights that would emphasize the dignity of the individual as the core of the concept.”⁶⁶ To this end, Freedom House held a one-day conference in August, 1983—before the UNESCO new world information order controversy emerged fully—that brought together academics, members of the Reagan administration (Charles Fairbanks of the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Alan Keyes of the National Security Council), along with Sussman and Gastil—to discuss “People’s Rights and the Redefinition of Human Rights.” A long, searching conversation ensued, proceeding from the assumptions that the Third World was more interested in “people’s rights” than Euro-American human rights and that the Third World’s embrace of people’s rights damaged the United States in the international arena. Among Freedom House organizers and Reagan administration officials, the rejection of people’s rights—and the reification of a certain brand of human rights that stressed political and civil rights—was never in doubt. People’s rights were merely a difficulty to be analyzed and either transformed or vanquished.⁶⁷

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Freedom House held fast to its beliefs that the Cold War was the defining aspect of international affairs, that the Soviet Union was the chief threat to the United States, and that communism was a dangerous ideology that could not be allowed to spread. The group’s stance on human rights flowed from this larger understanding of global politics: human rights were political and civil rights and human rights principles should be another weapon in the West’s Cold War arsenal. This thinking found few allies in the Carter White House, but such views were commonplace among neoconservatives and the Republican right, and Freedom House proved welcoming of the former and found common cause with the latter. The larger intellectual project of constructing a centrist-conservative alternative vision of human rights principles and policies was well underway by 1980 and achieved a degree of influence under Reagan theretofore unknown.

Freedom House was central to this process: articulating and defining a distinct vision of human rights, demonstrating how it applied to particular policy challenges, and bringing it to the attention of the general public and the Washington policymaking and political communities. Through these activities, Freedom House, as much as other NGOs and activists discussed in this volume, contributed to the human rights revolution of the postwar years. But Freedom House’s larger political and foreign policy outlook, so rooted in the consensus of the early Cold War and resonant with the conservative right of post-Vietnam America, set it apart from those NGOs and activists of the liberal-left. Indeed, Freedom House serves as a reminder that human rights principles and politics were not solely the province of the liberal-left and that the political center and right also launched important efforts to participate in, shape, and utilize the human rights revolution. Too often, human rights scholars have overlooked this history.⁶⁸

In no way, however, did Freedom House vanquish the liberal-left’s vision of human rights, which in some respects grew stronger during the 1980s as its advocates protested the Reagan White House’s foreign policies, not to mention the administration’s “rights” policies in the domestic sphere. Instead, Freedom House offered an alternative to the liberal-left’s—both in the United States and abroad—more capacious vision of human rights that encompassed economic and social, as well as political and civil, rights. Freedom House’s advocacy of its definition of human rights, then, was not a case of a vision lost or an ideological victory, but rather a battle joined. That battle continues to this day in American politics and culture, as well as among human rights advocates of all stripes, in debates concerning terrorism, genocide, religious freedom, and economic and social development.

NOTES

I would like to thank Kristin Celello, Mark Bradley, Ara Keys, and Temple University’s International History Workshop for their helpful comments. Thank you to Dan Linke at Princeton University’s Mudd Library for guiding me through the Freedom House archival collection.

1. Bayard Rustin, “Dear Friend,” June 3, 1977, Box 45, Folder 3, Freedom House Archives (hereafter FHA), Princeton University (hereafter PU); Memorandum, John Richardson to Members, Board of Trustees, September 14, 1977, Box 6, Folder 7, FHA, PU; “Conference Participants,” National Conference on Human Rights,” n.d., Reel 4, Bayard Rustin Papers, Library of Congress.

2. “Summary of Discussion, Meeting of the Steering Committee, National Conference on Human Rights,” August 8, 1977, Box 45, Folder 3, FHA, PU; Rustin to Sussman, September 9, 1977, Box 45, Folder 3, FHA, PU; “Program: Toward an American Coalition for Human Rights,” n.d., Box 45, Folder 3, FHA, PU. For Rustin quotes, see “Bayard Rustin Address at National Conference on Human Rights,” October 6, 1977, Box 45, Folder 3, FHA, PU.

3. Young to Rustin, November 9, 1977, Box 45, Folder 3, FHA, PU.

4. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), especially chapters 4, 5, and 6; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 484–503.

5. Tom Buchanan, “The Truth Will Set You Free: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (October 2002): 575–97; Ken Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1231–50; Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

6. The historiography on Freedom House is very limited and written largely by the group’s members and journalists. See Leonard Sussman, Democracy’s Advocate: The Story of Freedom House (New York: Freedom House, 2002); Diana Barahona, “The Freedom House Files,” Monthly Review Zine, March 3, 2007, http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/barahona030107.html#_edn1 (accessed July 28, 2009).

7. William E. Farrell, “Freedom House Honors Truman,” New York Times, April 14, 1965, 20; Sussman, Democracy’s Advocate, 7–26; “Instructions for Membership List,” Box 6, Folder 6, “Meeting Materials, 1977 January—June,” FHA, PU; “Freedom House Program Audit Committee Report,” November 4, 1974, Box 2, Folder 5, FHA, PU. On Freedom House’s relationship with the Heritage Foundation, see Sussman to John Riehm, April 1, 1983, Box 18, Folder 5, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Executive Committee, September 14, 1982, Box 8, Folder 6, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Kampelman and Riehm, January 18, 1985, Box 15, Folder 10, FHA, PU; R. Bruce McColm to Sussman, “Restructuring Freedom House,” c. 1986, Box 10, Folder 1, FHA, PU.

8. See Sussman to Kampelman and Riehm, January 18, 1985, Box 15, Folder 10, FHA, PU.

9. Sussman, Democracy’s Advocate, 61–63. For an internal critique of the Survey, see “Minutes: Executive Committees Willkie Memorial Freedom House,” December 1, 1983, Box 3, Folder 15, FHA, PU.

10. See, for instance, “Johnson is Backed by Freedom House on Vietnam Policy,” New York Times, July 21, 1965, 3; Memorandum, Sussman to Board of Trustees, December 5, 1975, Box 6, Folder 3, FHA, PU.

11. For newspaper editorials, see, Editorial, “The Fading Ring of Freedom,” Chicago Tribune, January 5, 1973, 12; Editorial, “Perspective on Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, January 9, 1974, 16; Editorial, “The New Colonialism,” Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 1975, 6. For politicians and policymakers, see Ernest LeFever, “Rhodesia: From Irony to Tragedy,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1976, 18; Edward Luttwak, “United States Policy: Between the Two Chinas,” New York Times, August 1, 1977, 14; Patrick Buchanan, “A Selective Policy on South Africa,” Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1978, B4.

12. Members of Freedom House’s leadership included Margaret Chase Smith (former Republican Senator from Maine), Paul Douglas (former Democratic Senator from Illinois), and Leo Cherne (former chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Board).

13. Sussman, Democracy’s Advocate, 4.

14. Ibid., 43–44, 33–35.

15. Ibid., 37.

16. “Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors of Freedom House,” February 25, 1965, Box 1, Folder 23, FHA, PU; Ralph Blumenthal, “Vietnam Backers Urged to Shout,” New York Times, November 29, 1965, 1; “Johnson is Backed by Freedom House on Vietnam Policy,” New York Times, July 21, 1965, 3; “Johnson is Picked for Annual Award by Freedom House,” New York Times, January 28, 1966, 3; John Pomfret, “Johnson Denies ‘Blind Escalation’ in Vietnam War,” New York Times, February 24, 1966, 1; Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks in New York City Upon Receiving the National Freedom Award,” February 23, 1966, American Presidency Project website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=28101 (accessed October 11, 2008).

17. “Both Parties Urged to Shun Radicalism of Left and Right,” Washington Post, September 22, 1968, A5; “Extremes on Foreign Policy Deplored,” New York Times, December 13, 1970, 24.

18. “Freedom House Rips Dr. King Viet Efforts,” Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1967, 13; “McCarthyites, Rev. King Says of His Critics,” Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1967, B10.

19. Memorandum, Sussman to Board of Trustees, November 6, 1969, Box 1, Folder 27, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Freedom House Board of Trustees,” November 10, 1969, Box 1, Folder 27, FHA, PU.

20. “Minutes, Willkie Memorial Building and Freedom House,” May 22, 1972, Box 2, Folder 3, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Board of Trustees, September 14, 1973, Box 2, Folder 4, FHA, PU; quote from Gerald L. Steibel, “Détente Item for Board Meeting, September 24” n.d., Box 2, Folder 4, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Freedom House Board,” October 30, 1973, Box 2, Folder 4, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Freedom House Board of Trustees, Special Meeting,” November 14, 1974, Box 2, Folder 5, FHA, PU.

21. Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States”; David Schmitz and Vanessa Walker, “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights,” Diplomatic History, January 2004, 117–18; Buchanan, “The Truth Will Set You Free.”

22. John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); John Judis, “Trotskyism to Anarchism: The Neoconservative Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995, 123–29; George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998), 304–6; Julian Zelizer, “Conservatives, Carter, and the Politics of National Security,” in Rightward Bound, ed. Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 265–87.

23. Jeremi Suri, “Détente and its Discontents,” in Rightward Bound, ed. Schulman and Zelizer, 243; William Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 163–64; Zelizer, “Conservatives, Carter, and the Politics of National Security,” 269–71; Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 93–96, 142–49; The Republican Party Platform, August 18, 1976, American Presidency Project website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25843 (accessed on August 6, 2009).

24. Quote from “Extremes on Foreign Policy Deplored,” New York Times, December 13, 1970, 24; Robert Scalapino and Paul Seabury, “Urgent: Foreign Policy Debate,” Freedom at Issue, May–June 1972, 1–10; “Minutes, Willkie Memorial Building and Freedom House,” May 22, 1972, Box 2, Folder 3, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Freedom House Board,” October 30, 1973, Box 2, Folder 4, FHA, PU.

25. “Freedom House Program Audit Committee Report,” November 4, 1974, Box 2, Folder 5, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Freedom House, Board of Trustees, Special Meeting,” November 14, 1974, Box 2, Folder 5, FHA, PU.

26. Memorandum, Sussman to Executive Committee, October 6, 1976, Box 3, Folder 8, FHA, PU.

27. Sussman to Smith, September 21, 1976, Box 2, Folder 7, FHA, PU; “Outline of a Draft Statement on Human Rights and Foreign Policies,” September 16, 1976, Box 6, Folder 5, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Boards of the Willkie Memorial Building and Freedom House,” September 27, 1976, Box 2, Folder 7, FHA, PU.

28. President Jimmy Carter, “University of Notre Dame—Address at Commencement Exercises at the University,” May 22, 1977, American Presidency Project website, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=7552 (accessed November 15, 2008). Cyrus Vance, “Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” U.S. Department of State, Bulletin (May 23, 1977): 505–8. See also Schmitz and Walker, “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights,” 119–21.

29. The key works in this evolving literature are Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Schmitz and Walker, “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights,”; John Soares, “Strategy, Ideology, and Human Rights,” Journal of Cold War Studies (Fall 2006): 57–91; Kenton Clymer, “Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and Cambodia,” Diplomatic History (April 2003): 245–78; Robert Strong, Working in the World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2000); Itai Sneh, The Future Almost Arrived: How Jimmy Carter Failed to Change U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008); Scott Kaufman, Plans Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2008).

30. Memorandum, John Richardson to Members, Board of Trustees, September 14, 1977, Box 6, Folder 7, FHA, PU; Richardson to Derian, September, 19, 1977, Box 18, Folder 2, FHA, PU.

31. Sussman to Richardson, March 10, 1977, Box 18, Folder 2, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Gruson, Hauser, and Sargeant, February 10, 1977, Box 23, Folder 20, FHA, PU.

32. Richardson to Lipschutz, November 7, 1977, Box 45, Folder 3, FHA, PU.

33. Stanley Hoffman, “The Hell of Good Intentions,” Foreign Policy (Winter 1977–1978): 3–26.

34. “Draft for Washington Conference in January,” December 2, 1977, Box 45, Folder 3, FHA, PU.

35. “Draft for Wash Post, file John Richardson,” n.d., Box 18, Folder 1, FHA, PU. See also, Richardson, “Human Rights in a Global Context,” April 22, 1977, Box 18, Folder 2, FHA, PU; John Richardson, “Human Rights Strategy,” Freedom at Issue, May–June 1977, 3.

36. Raymond Gastil, “Human Rights: A Policy Guide for the U.S.,” Freedom at Issue, March–April 1980, 12–15.

37. Text of the “Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe Final Act, Helsinki, 1975,” http://www.csce.gov/ (accessed on November 23, 2008). Also see, Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Judt, Postwar, 501–3.

38. Sussman, “Mount the Helsinki Watch, draft,” September 9, 1975, Box 2, Folder 6, FHA, PU; “Mount the Helsinki Watch!” Freedom at Issue, November–December 1975, 4.

39. “Mount the Helsinki Watch!” Freedom at Issue, November–December, 1975, 4.

40. “Public Diplomacy versus Quiet Diplomacy,” Freedom at Issue, May–June 1977, 4–6.

41. “Should the United States Abrogate the Helsinki Accords?” Freedom at Issue, November–December 1980, 7–9.

42. “A Freedom House Advisory: An Analysis of Compliance with the Information Section of Basket Three of the Helsinki Accords of 1975,” Freedom at Issue, September–October 1977, 16–22.

43. “Should the United States Abrogate the Helsinki Accords?” Freedom at Issue, November–December 1980, 7–9.

44. Memorandum, Sussman to Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, November 9, 1979, Box 7, Folder 1, FHA, PU.

45. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on the Caribbean Basin Initiative,” February 24, 1982, American Presidency Project website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=42202 (accessed November 27, 2008).

46. Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, 154–157.

47. Freedom House did have good connections with the administration. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nation’s during Reagan’s first term, was a Freedom House board member and also a leading neoconservative. Memorandum, Sussman to Executive Committee, December 29, 1980, Box 7, Folder 6, FHA, PU; “The Opportunties for Freedom House to Sustain the New National Spirit,” c. 1981, Box 7, Folder 7, FHA, PU; Sussman to Richardson, January 16, 1981, Box 7, Folder 7, FHA, PU.

48. Sussman to Richardson, January 16, 1981, Box 7, Folder 7, FHA, PU.

49. John Richardson “Regarding the draft statement for the Board of Trustees, Master—4th Draft, 3/10/81–LRS,” March 10, 1981, Box 7, Folder 7, FHA, PU.

50. Leonard Sussman, “The Opportunities for Freedom House to Create a New National Spirit, 4th Draft” March 10, 1981, Box 7, Folder 7, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Executive Committee,” February 25, 1981, Box 3, Folder 13, FHA, PU.

51. Richardson “Regarding the draft statement for the Board of Trustees, Master—4th Draft, 3/10/81–LRS,” March 10, 1981, Box 7, Folder 7, FHA, PU.

52. Sussman, “The Opportunities for Freedom House to Help Sustain the New National Spirit, Draft,” February 23, 1981, Box 7, Folder 7, FHA, PU.

53. Sussman to Brzezinksi, March 4, 1981, Box 7, Folder 8, FHA, PU; “Minutes, Boards of the Willkie Memorial Building and Freedom House,” January 26, 1981, Box 2, Folder 12, FHA, PU.

54. Charles Mohr, “Human Rights Choice Abhors Scolding as U.S. Tool,” New York Times, February 13, 1981, 2; Ernest Lefever, “The Tyranny of Chaos—a Footnote on Chile,” Freedom at Issue, January–February, 1975, 23.

55. Judith Miller, “Rebuffed in Senate, Lefever Pulls out as Rights Nominee,” New York Times, June 6, 1981, 1; David Carliner to William Clark, July 2, 1981, Box 7, Folder 9, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Case, Cherne, Richardson, van Slyck, July 7, 1981, Box 7, Folder 9, PHA, PU.

56. “Excerpts from State Department Memo on Human Rights,” New York Times, November 5, 1981, A10; Barbara Crossette, “Strong U.S. Human Rights Policy Urged in Memo Approved by Haig,” New York Times, November 5, 1981, A1; “Reagan Rights Policy Confirmed,” New York Times, November 9, 1981, A4; Editorial, “Human Rights Revisited,” The New Republic, November 25, 1981, 5–6.

57. Memorandum, Sussman to Board of Trustees, November 5, 1981, Box 7, Folder 10, FHA, PU; “Meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Wiliam P. Clark—September 24, 1981,” Box 7, Folder 10, FHA, PU.

58. Sussman to Abrams, November 5, 1981, Box 37, Folder 9, FHA, PU.

59. Max Kampelman, “East-West Relations,” May 24, 1984, Box 15, Folder 12, FHA, PU; Francis X. Cline, “Skeptical Optimist for Talks: Max M. Kampelman,” New York Times, January 20, 1985, 12; “Conservatives Have Some Doubts About Kampelman,” Human Events, February 2, 1985, 2–3, Box 10, Folder 15, FHA, PU; “Ambassador Max Kampelman Links Human Rights and the Conference on Disarmament in Europe, Opening Press Statement in Stockholm,” September 18, 1984, Box 15, Folder 11, FHA, PU.

60. Leonard Sussman, “In Support of the Helsinki Process,” Freedom at Issue, September–October 1985, 14–17.

61. “American Warns UNESCO on Proposed Press Code,” New York Times, October 9, 1980, A7; Jonathan Friendly, “U.S. Press Curbs in Grenada May Affect International Debate,” New York Times, November 8, 1983, A10; E.J. Dionne, “U.S. Weighs UNESCO Pullout Over Budget and Policy Fight,” New York Times, December 15, 1983, A1.

62. Leonard Sussman, “Opposing Assaults on the World’s Free Press,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 1981, 30.

63. Richardson to Reagan, December 6, 1983, Box 9, Folder 1, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Executive Committee, December 14, 1983, Box 9, Folder 1, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Executive Committee, December 30, 1983, Box 9, Folder 1, FHA, PU; Memorandum, Sussman to Executive Committee, February 1, 1984, Box 9, Folder 2, FHA, PU; Sussman to Robert Bartley, September 6, 1984, Box 9, Folder 5, FHA, PU; Abrams to Sussman, August 15, 1984, Box 15, Folder 11, FHA, PU; Sussman to Armacost, November 20, 1984, Box 41, Folder 10, FHA, PU; E.J. Dionne, “U.S. Weighs UNESCO Pullout Over Budget and Policy Fight,” New York Times, December 15, 1983, A1; Richard Bernstein, “Distortion Laid to U.S. on UNESCO,” New York Times, August 9, 1984, A9; Editorial, “The UNESCO Lobby,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 1984, 26; Alex Jones, “UNESCO Reported to Move Away From Issue of Licensing Reporters,” New York Times, November 6, 1984, A16; Frank Prial, “U.S. Move Praised by Conservatives,” New York Times, December 20, 1984, A10.

64. E, J. Dionne, “U.S. Weighs UNESCO Pullout Over Budget and Policy Fight,” New York Times, December 15, 1983, A1; Transcript, “People’s Rights and the Redefinition of Human Rights,” August 24, 1983, Box 52, Folder 9, FHA, PU.

65. Leonard Sussman, “Peoples’ Rights and the Redefinition of Human Rights,” n.d., 1983, Box 52, Folder 9, FHA, PU.

66. Raymond Gastil, “On the Expansion of the Concept of Human Rights,” n.d., 1983, Box 52, Folder 9, FHA, PU.

67. Transcript, “People’s Rights and the Redefinition of Human Rights,” August 24, 1983, Box 52, Folder 9, FHA, PU.

68. See Ken Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (February 2004): 117–35.