with each side predictably accusing the other of dubious backing and malevolent motives.2
Tensions were high on the Ellipse just south of the White House, where upward of three thousand people were split into pro- and anti-Shah camps with a line of mounted police between them. Many in the anti-Shah group wore masks to avoid (so they said) being photographed and identified by the Shah’s secret police. As each side eyed the other nervously and exchanged insults, the match that lit the dynamite was the arrival of the Shah. When he was ushered out to the South Lawn and his twenty-one-gun salute rang out over the Ellipse, all hell broke loose. The anti-Shah demonstrators attacked the Shah’s supporters with rocks, bottles, fists, and wooden planks that were piled up for construction of the upcoming Christmas “Pageant of Peace.” The younger members of the pro-Shah contingent fought back. Outnumbered and in danger, the police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.
A few hundred yards away on the South Lawn, the ceremony’s well-dressed attendees quickly realized that something was amiss. Carter later recalled hearing in the distance “the faint but unmistakable sounds of a mob” before the gathering was enshrouded in tear gas.3 While his esteemed visitor daubed at his eyes with a handkerchief, Carter spoke of America’s historical ties to Iran, after which the Shah reciprocated by rather ominously stating, “We shall stay, hopefully, always together because basically we believe in the same principles.”4 The entourage then retired to the White House. Back on the Ellipse, the police succeeded in separating the two groups and shepherding them out of the area. All told, there were 124 injuries. The police took extra precautions throughout the remainder of the Shah’s visit, including placing riot police inside the White House fences and sharpshooters on the roof.
Unfortunately for Carter and the Shah, the world news media paid little attention to their words on the South Lawn, instead focusing on the riot—the bloodiest in Washington since the Vietnam War—and its effect on the august ceremony. Newspapers around the world published front-page photos of the dignitaries wiping away tears as Carter spoke at the podium. The footage shocked Iranians, who had never seen their leader in such apparent peril. Many took the riot as evidence that American support for the Shah was on the wane; why else, they asked, would the Americans have allowed these protests to take place? “We learned last night,” said one Iranian in Washington, “that news of our protest efforts had reached home, and the people were rejoicing. When they saw the Shah wipe his eyes from the tear gas, they thought we had gassed [him]!”5
At that evening’s state dinner, Carter tried to make light of the demonstrations. “One thing that I can say about the Shah,” he quipped, “he certainly knows how to draw a crowd.”6 But critics saw very little to laugh about. How could Carter reconcile his desire for close relations with his supposed interest in human rights? Was it not appropriate, they asked, to press the Shah strongly on liberal reforms in Iran? Despite these criticisms, Carter was hardly outspoken in public or in private. Behind closed doors, he asked the Shah if he could ease his domestic security policies, and the latter replied with an unequivocal no. He had to enforce Iran’s laws, he told the president, in order to prevent the spread of communist influence. Most opponents of his regime, he claimed, were “Marxists, anarchists wearing masks.”7 Although Carter would have liked to see more substantive reforms, his administration prioritized a strong, stable Iran, and the Shah seemed the best bet to ensure just that. Because Carter had no viable alternative to the Shah’s rule, human rights would remain, for the time being, a distant priority.8 He offered his visitor a warm toast at the state dinner, praising the Shah’s “enlightened leadership” and extolling Iran as a “stabilizing influence” in the Middle East. “We look upon Iran’s strength as an extension of our own strength,” Carter declared, “and Iran looks upon our strength as an extension of theirs.”9
The violence surrounding the Shah’s Washington visit brought home to President Carter and his allies the problems they faced in trying to make human rights an integral part of American diplomacy. The demonstrations also symbolized the troubles that the Shah, and America, would soon face in Iran. Although the Washington protests were about much more than Iran’s lack of democracy and civil liberties, they signaled the level of Iranian dissatisfaction with the Shah, and they showed Jimmy Carter that a “moral” foreign policy was easier to proclaim than it was to implement. Neither leader could have known just how little time the Shah had left. Demonstrators soon took to the streets of Teheran calling for everything from a parliamentary democracy to an Islamic theocracy. After a year of unrest, the Shah fled his country in January 1979 and Iran became an Islamic republic, ending 2,500 years of the Persian monarchy. On November 4, 1979—almost exactly two years after the Washington protests—Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Teheran and set off the 444-day hostage crisis. Carter later wrote of the 1977 Washington riot, “That day … was an augury” that soon “there would be real grief in our country because of Iran.”10
Carter’s ambiguous position on human rights in Iran exemplified American ambiguity toward human rights practices worldwide after 1945.
Time and again, Americans were faced with a quandary: Should they stand up for liberal, democratic principles and human rights everywhere? Or should they follow a more pragmatic course in pursuit of a narrow set of national interests? Did superpower status oblige the United States to promote human rights around the world? Should America simply lead by example rather than “meddling” in other nations’ affairs? Did moral concerns even belong in foreign policy? How Americans answered these questions is the subject of this book.
Human Rights from Tet to Tiananmen Square
This study explains the emergence and institutionalization of human rights in American foreign policy between 1967 and 1991. The modern international movement rose from the ashes of the Second World War, but for two decades the U.S. government was only a minor participant. It was in the quarter century between the late 1960s and the Cold War’s end that presidents, legislators, foreign service officers, and bureaucrats embarked upon a sustained, though hardly consistent, campaign to address abuses in the Soviet Union, Iran, Chile, South Korea, and dozens of other countries. The most important distinction between these activities and Washington’s traditional diplomatic representations was that human rights diplomacy was carried out on behalf of foreign nationals, not American citizens. Defending American lives and property was a customary role for U.S. officials; addressing the well-being of other nations’ citizens was not. In this new era, Congress held hearings on international human rights, cut aid to abusive regimes, passed “sense of the Congress” resolutions, assailed presidential indifference, and required the executive to produce detailed human rights reports. Presidents and diplomats used a combination of private diplomacy (usually with “friendly,” pro-American clients), sanctions, and public criticism (usually with communist or nonaligned nations) to move governments toward more humane practices. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) expanded in number and influence, raising awareness among politicos and the public alike. These efforts had a notable impact on American diplomacy in the latter years of the Cold War and beyond.
This book addresses several problems in modern American diplomacy and politics. It sheds light on the domestic sources of foreign policy and the conflict between the executive and legislative branches. It explains why human rights policies emerged as such attractive political solutions and considers why these policies were so difficult to implement. It explains why some causes were more prominent in Washington than others. It explores the role of non-state actors in the policymaking process and in the publicizing of human rights abuses. Most important of all, this book challenges readers to ponder America’s role in the modern world. The story told here exemplifies the classic struggle between the realist tradition in foreign affairs, which emphasizes the pursuit of power, stability, and the national interest, and the idealist tradition, which promotes multilateralism, humanitarianism, and international law. President Richard Nixon crystallized the former sentiment with the mantra, “We deal with governments as they are, not as we would like them to be.”11 President Jimmy Carter articulated the latter tradition when he stated, “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.”12
Although the narrative herein begins