it is tempting to draw a neat causative line from America’s Vietnam experience to the human rights activism of the seventies, we should be careful not to overstate the case. The war’s opponents rarely framed their charges in the language of “human rights,” and a substantial proportion of Americans continued to support the war effort all the way to the 1973 peace accords. Moreover, as American troop numbers dropped after 1968, so did public attention. In reality, a relatively small number of activists and congressional liberals channeled their outrage about carpet bombing and tiger cages into a broader criticism of American ties to autocracies worldwide.36 Nevertheless, given the scope of America’s long experience in Southeast Asia—a quarter century of involvement, a decade of combat, seven million tons of bombs dropped, nearly three million Americans serving in country, and more than two hundred thousand of them killed or wounded—the war undoubtedly played at least some part in spurring the human rights movement in Washington. The Vietnam tragedy had a considerable impact on American political and cultural life, and it continued to influence foreign policy well into the 1990s.
In the larger human rights story, the war’s effect on Americans’ self-image was only the tip of a very large iceberg. Multiple political, military, and economic failures in the late 1960s and 1970s ushered in a decade-long drop in public trust that was often described as a “crisis of confidence.” This crisis did not “cause” human rights activism in any clear sense, but it did confirm for many Americans what the Vietnam debacle had already suggested: that their nation was no longer exceptional. All signs seemed to point to a decline in American power. As the Bretton Woods system collapsed and the American economy entered a period of uneven growth and high inflation, the U.S. standard of living dropped from first to tenth in the world. American industry faced major challenges from Japan and West Germany—a decline in industrial prowess that paralleled the disturbing decay of America’s cities. The long gas lines and exorbitant heating bills spawned by the energy crises brought home Americans’ reliance on imported oil, while the humiliating hostage crisis at the end of the seventies revealed the nation’s impotence when confronting hostility overseas. For the Anglophone Western world, the crisis of confidence may have been more perception than reality.37 But these economic and political shocks did deepen Americans’ feelings of powerlessness in international affairs while also contributing to political apathy, mistrust of government, and alienation from the democratic process. As John Lewis Gaddis has noted of this era’s anxious insularity, “Americans seemed mired in endless arguments with themselves.”38
This air of gloom had a foreign policy corollary that went beyond Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ “credibility gap.” Just as Americans were increasingly unsure of their nation’s greatness, they were also less willing to believe in its “goodness”—that is, that the United States was a nation that did good things. Every era has its problems and its social critics, but it does appear that Americans grew more pessimistic at the turn of the seventies. The Harris Alienation Index rose from 29 percent in 1966 to 59 percent in 1974, and remained relatively consistent for the next two decades.39 A group of university students told Henry Kissinger in 1971 that their peers felt “alienation” and “really wanted nothing to do with the system.” There was “a general withdrawal from governmental processes,” they said; young people were “no longer willing to believe.”40 Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson more colorfully illuminated the public’s contempt for the political culture when he wrote of President Johnson, “When the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the whole structure of government…. And then, to wrap it all up another cheapjack hustler moved into the White House.”41 The Watergate crisis of 1973–1974 further fueled citizens’ mistrust of their leaders. In a 1974 poll, 71 percent of respondents believed “things are going badly in the country” and 88 percent mistrusted “the people in power.”42 Yet despite this extensive list of problems, liberal democratic principles remained important to American national identity. Although fewer Americans believed that their nation could easily solve international problems, many hoped that traditional principles could triumph where flawed individuals had failed.
Crises of Democracy: Greece and Brazil
At the turn of the seventies, several international crises helped bring human rights and humanitarian issues to the attention of the American public. As a result of decolonization, nationalism, ideological struggles, and other factors, the world witnessed an increase in civil conflicts, military coups, famines, and human rights abuses in dozens of countries. These conflicts had a considerable impact on the nascent global human rights movement, and they spurred American political interest in overseas suffering. As activists and the news media publicized abuses, Americans began to ask tough questions about their country’s role. Advocates drew attention not only to the Eastern Bloc, but also to noncommunist states like Iran, South Korea, South Africa, and Paraguay.
Two cases were particularly significant to our story. Washington’s dealings with the dictatorships in Greece and Brazil demonstrate how America’s Cold War strategy evolved at the end of the sixties into a more nuanced approach to allied nations. Both were authoritarian regimes accused of torture, yet both were also considered important strategic partners. Greece was a NATO ally and the historical “cradle of democracy,” while Brazil was a growing economic player in a region beset by ideological divisions and left-wing insurgencies. American ties to these governments engendered tough questions from policymakers and the growing activist community about possible U.S. complicity in human rights abuses. Such questions had rarely been broached before, but the 1967–1973 period saw a significant drop in congressional and public compliance with executive foreign policy.
These two cases show the extent to which America and its politics changed in the sixties. At middecade, America’s chief overseas interests were curbing leftist activity and promoting economic growth, but by decade’s end there was mounting concern about allies’ lack of civil liberties. With respect to Greece and Brazil, this concern took the form of pressure to end military rule, restore constitutional government, and respect individual rights. By 1970, a notable transatlantic movement against Greek and Brazilian torture was forming, and this activism in turn contributed to the development of a broad-based, global human rights movement in the seventies.43 Meanwhile, congressional liberals used Greece and Brazil to make the case for a new foreign policy standard. But these two cases also show how difficult it was for activists to succeed amid America’s multitude of interests and its division of powers. More Americans were talking about human rights at the turn of the seventies, but national security and geostrategy still took precedent.
The Greek crisis arose in April 1967, when a group of colonels seized power in Athens, dissolved the parliament, and formed a ruling junta under the guise of protecting the state against a left-wing insurgency. The coup was the culmination of decades of political instability, during which socialists, conservatives, monarchists, and other factions had jockeyed for power. Although such volatility was a hallmark of Greek political life, the 1967 coup was widely perceived as a shocking end to democracy in the region that had originated the concept. Over the course of seven years, the junta was accused of arbitrary arrests, detentions without trial, torture, and a multitude of other police-state tactics. The initial Western reaction to the coup was overwhelmingly negative. While European governments called for a return to democracy, escaped dissidents brought allegations of extrajudicial internment and torture. Amnesty International sent two prominent lawyers to investigate these allegations in 1968, and their report catalogued the regime’s physical and psychological tactics against an estimated three thousand political prisoners. In November 1969, the European Commission asserted in a damning twelve-hundred-page report that the Greek authorities had done virtually nothing to stop the security apparatus from using torture. Similar journalistic and NGO investigations helped make Greece one of the era’s major causes célèbres. “Hardly a day passes,” stated the New York Times in May 1969, “without fresh evidence from objective sources of tortures inflicted on Greek political prisoners that recall the excesses of Nazis and communists.”44 But despite the negative publicity, the junta did not change its tactics. The colonels recoiled from this outside “interference,” and they promised to do whatever