state.”61 He and other activists added an oblique Greece reference into the 1968 Democratic Party platform.
These questions about aid to a dictatorship soon made their way into the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), whose deliberations showed that a significant proportion of legislators was now willing to tie U.S. aid to other nations’ political liberties. Senator Pell proposed cutting all weapons and military assistance until Greek citizens had approved a new constitution, but others sought to preserve regional order and minimize overseas commitments. Senator Stuart Symington (D-MO) lamented the dictatorship’s actions, but he maintained that military aid prevented a Vietnamesque boots-on-the-ground commitment. The Greek government “may not be just exactly what we want,” he argued, “but it is better to have them running the government today than it would be to have chaos in Greece.” Senators Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) and Karl Mundt (R-SD) questioned American efforts to change distant societies. “This is paternalism at its worst,” argued Mundt, “and I think we ought to oppose it.” Senator Joseph Clark (D-PA) used moral reasoning to support Pell: “The Greek government represents everything that American democracy is opposed to. It is fascist, it is totalitarian, and they will use these arms to put down their own people…. It is a tyranny of the worst sort.” Senator Frank Church (D-ID) went even further by assailing the entire foreign aid philosophy as “a massive meddling program.” The United States, he charged, was “trying to organize and run and mold and fashion and influence every government in the world … either by the aid we give or the aid we withhold.”62
Several NGOs and journalists emerged in the late sixties to join the dissenting legislators. Organizations like the Washington Committee Friends of Greece and the Council for Democracy in Greece protested the restoration of relations. “Any attitude short of condemnation [by the United States] will be interpreted … as approval and in many quarters as active cooperation with the dictatorship,” cautioned one such organization. Another warned that continued military aid would put the United States “in a posture of favoring a dictatorship over proven democratic allies and over the freedom of the Greek people.”63 When the Greeks announced a continuation of martial law and press censorship in March 1968, the New York Times accused the administration of “appeasing” the junta despite Greece’s questionable value to NATO and of “[doing] everything it can to provide the Athens junta with the prestige and respectability it has hungered after.”64
Despite these reservations, most legislators supported the status quo in the belief that cutting aid would reduce American leverage and catalyze Greece’s tilt toward another benefactor. Besides, they reasoned, junta rule was better than disorder or civil war. Public and journalistic criticism demonstrated that the foreign policy consensus was weakening, but it still seemed a safer bet to maintain the relationship. Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for reelection further weakened activists’ cause during 1968. It remained to be seen if a new president would choose the path of stronger bilateral relations, a diminished U.S. commitment, or—as activists hoped—strong pressure to end torture and restore democracy.
Another of this period’s earliest human rights causes was the international campaign against authoritarianism and torture in Brazil.65 The Brazilian military deposed the left-leaning President João Goulart in 1964 in response to growing unrest and the perceived threat of a leftist takeover, and for the next twenty-one years a succession of military leaders ruled with varying degrees of coercion. Like Greece, the Brazil case shows the change in American attitudes from the Cold War assumptions of the mid-1960s to Washington’s more complicated global assessment at the decade’s end. American policymakers were generally supportive of the military regime early on, but by 1968–1969 the regime had fewer friends in Washington. Nevertheless, even as the containment consensus was evaporating, American policymakers were reluctant to alter the status quo and punish Brazil for perceived human rights violations.
The 1964 coup was engineered by Brazilians and generally welcomed in Washington. At a time when American policymakers feared another Fidel Castro in the hemisphere, President Goulart was considered too far left. In the words of a National Security Council (NSC) adviser, “We don’t want to watch Brazil dribble down the drain while we stand around waiting for the election.”66 The Johnson administration used economic measures to weaken Goulart, and when Brazil’s political and economic troubles culminated in a crisis, the administration offered arms and ships to the Brazilian military. Once Goulart was overthrown, Johnson recognized the new regime almost immediately and told the American people that the Brazilians had saved their republic from Marxist forces.67 The United States saw Brazil’s military government as a defender of U.S. interests—anticommunism, stability, and economic development—with progress toward democracy a distant concern.
This Cold War mind-set dominated thinking about such regimes in the mid-sixties. The U.S. embassy expressed satisfaction that the new government had rooted out “communists and other extremists” from government and labor unions and had maintained a semblance of political and economic stability. Even the relatively liberal Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) was willing to give the military government the benefit of the doubt. In a 1965 meeting with the Brazilian foreign minister, Fulbright agreed that some form of authoritarianism was “almost necessary” in the early stages of a poor nation’s development as a form of “collective discipline” that permitted a country to “focus on its real problems.”68 Both the State Department and USAID preferred a return to constitutionalism in the hope that this would stabilize the economy, but they had little concern for the individual rights of Brazilian citizens. The regime became a solid American ally and supported the United States in many international endeavors, including voting with the United States in the United Nations, isolating Castro in Latin America, assisting in the 1965 Dominican crisis, and offering gifts of coffee and medicine to South Vietnam.69
Brazilian military rule occasioned little political comment in the United States until 1967–1968, when critics began to ask tough questions about America’s authoritarian clients. Early in 1968, the State Department advised against a Washington visit from Brazilian President Artur da Costa e Silva, arguing that his regime demonstrated “authoritarian tendencies” and had not built a credible political base. In light of President Johnson’s troubles with South Vietnam and Greece, advisers believed that a close association with the Brazilian regime would be a political liability.70 The real turning point in American perceptions came late in 1968, when a wave of urban terrorism led the Brazilian government to implement Institutional Act 5 (IA-5), a strict measure that dissolved the National Congress and state legislative assemblies, bolstered censorship, and strengthened the state’s ability to detain suspects. IA-5 ushered in the most repressive period of the twenty-one-year dictatorship, and was the impetus for a more substantial American conversation on repression in Brazil. As we have seen with respect to Greece, many legislators were no longer willing to tolerate long-standing Cold War excuses for allies’ excesses. They expressed misgivings about everything from nation-building in South Vietnam to the Alliance for Progress in Latin America because these endeavors seemed to be doing very little for any American interest, whether military, economic, or humanitarian.
Much like the Greek case, the State Department had a hard time formulating an official American response to IA-5. Most foreign service officers (FSOs) viewed it with revulsion, but they had to conduct a delicate balancing act between expressing concern, maintaining the relationship, and respecting Brazilian sovereignty. There were several matters on the bilateral ledger, including USAID project loans, fighter aircraft sales, and a pending coffee agreement. The sums were considerable: Brazil received $2 billion in U.S. aid between 1964 and 1970, the third highest amount behind South Vietnam and India.71 Exchanges between Washington and the U.S. embassy in Brasilia give us some insight into the dilemma. An embassy official reported to Secretary Rusk that although IA-5 was harsh and the generals were “nationalistic and narrow,” these leaders were also fundamentally favorable to the United States. Rusk agreed that the administration would have to reassure Latin American democrats without pushing Brazil “into further irrational acts affecting our relations” and without “publicly shaking our finger.” Rusk also saw these issues in civilizational terms—that is, that Brazilian customs could not be compared to those of the world’s established democracies. “Brazil’s