RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY NEW BRUNSWICK AN INTERVIEW WITH ARYEH NEIER FOR THE RUTGERS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY SHAUN ILLINGWORTH NEW YORK, NEW YORK JULY 10, 2015 TRANSCRIPT BY JESSE BRADDELL Shaun Illingworth: This begins the third interview session with Aryeh Neier for the ACLU Oral History Project at Rutgers University’s Oral History Archive on July 10, 2015 in New York, New York. Thank you very much for having me here again. Aryeh Neier: Glad to do it. SI: Last time we left off, we were talking about how you left the organization and the job as National Executive Director. You then, the next year I believe, published a book, mostly related to the Skokie case. [Editor’s note: National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie was a famous case in 1977 regarding the right to free speech, in which an ACLU lawyer named Burton Joseph successfully defended the right of members of the National Socialist Party of America-- formerly the American Nazi Party--to march through Skokie, Illinois, which had a large Jewish population. In 1979, Mr. Neier wrote Defending My Enemy: American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois.] Can you tell me about how that came about and why you felt strongly to write on that subject? AN: Well, the Skokie case had attracted a great deal of attention and I was eager to put forward my reasons for wanting to take on the defense of free speech for the American Nazis. I wrote the book at great speed. I knew all the information; didn’t have to do any research. I think it took me less than three months to write the book. It was just something I wanted to do and felt it would be a good thing to do. SI: It was more personal motivation. Was there anybody from the ACLU saying, “Well, we should explain this?” AN: No, no. This was strictly my effort and I didn’t start working on the book until after I left the staff of the ACLU. SI: Which was about a year and a half after Skokie? AN: I left at the beginning of October 1978. The Skokie case had actually endured, I think, for about fifteen months, from March or April 1977 to about June 1978. It wasn’t that long after the end of Skokie that I left. In fact, I think I probably announced my departure before the Skokie case was entirely resolved, but at that point it was fairly clear what was going to happen. SI: Once you left the ACLU, did you want to just spend some time, almost like a sabbatical? AN: Yes, very much so. A few months earlier, in 1978, I had received a call from Robert Bernstein who was the Chairman and CEO of Random House Publishers. He wanted me to join him in creating a Helsinki Watch Committee. He did this because he was, at that point, also the chairman of the Association of American Publishers. In that connection he had travelled to Moscow to sign a copyright agreement with the Soviet Union. While he was in Moscow he visited some of the Russian authors that Random House published and those gave him an awareness of political persecution in the Soviet Union. So he came back eager to do something. There had been a Moscow Helsinki group established in 1976; the members--or most of the members--were being imprisoned at that point and so Bernstein wanted to launch an effort in the United States to assist them. He asked me to join him in this. I agreed to do so. I had known him fairly well because on behalf of the ACLU, we had been active in a couple of cases jointly with Random House. They had published books by former CIA agents and the CIA had tried to 2 censor the books. The ACLU represented the former CIA agents. Random House represented itself in the litigation. We had dealt jointly with those free speech cases, and so that was the basis on which he called me. I helped him put together a Helsinki Watch Committee and we got initial funding for it. Then, after I announced my departure from the ACLU, he and others associated with this effort, asked me if I would become the director of the Helsinki Watch. I said, "No." I said I was tired because of my fifteen years at the ACLU. I was looking for something equivalent to a sabbatical. I made an arrangement with New York University. I became a visiting professor of law at New York University and also a fellow of a newly established humanities institute at New York University. Then I got another call, I think the day after the newspapers carried the story that I was stepping down as ACLU Director. I got a call from the head of a foundation called the Twentieth Century Fund. Their practice was to commission books on public policy issues. It’s now called The Century Foundation. The President of what was then called the Twentieth Century Fund asked me would I like to do a book for them. I said, “Yes.” We worked it out. I gave them a proposal for the book. They gave me a grant for the book. That led to a book I published somewhat later called Only Judgment. In the interim, I did the Defending My Enemy book very quickly. So I spent the time at New York University teaching at the law school, serving as a fellow of the Humanities Institute--none of that took very much time. The work on the book didn’t take very much time. I travelled quite a lot during that period. I had been invited to go to South Africa because there were newly established public interest law centers in South Africa. One of them was being established at Witwatersrand University. It’s known as Wits. The dean of the law school, John Dugard, was stepping down and was becoming the director of this public interest law center. He asked me, would I come to South Africa to advise them on how to operate this public interest law center, and I did. I went to South Africa for a month. It was also during this period that I made my first trip to Asia. The Indian Consul in New York invited me to go to India at the expense of the government of India to lecture at the University of Calcutta and to the Bombay Merchants’ Association. I travelled to India for three weeks. I went to a human rights conference in Italy during this period. I did quite a lot of travelling and spent my time on a fairly relaxed basis for essentially about two and a half years following my departure from the ACLU. Ronald Reagan became President in January 1981. Reagan immediately made clear that he was going to repudiate the human rights policy associated with Jimmy Carter. So I went back to Robert Bernstein, who had asked me to head the Helsinki Watch, and I said, “Now I’m ready to do that on the basis that we would build on the Helsinki Watch, which was focused entirely on the former Soviet Bloc countries.” I said, “I’m happy to do that, but I also want to build it into an organization that would deal with human rights on a worldwide basis.” Bernstein and the others associated with the group agreed. In early 1981, I became the executive director. I had been vice-chair before I was on staff and I retained the title vice-chair, but effectively, I was the executive director of the new organization, which evolved into Human Rights Watch. SI: How did your time at the ACLU prepare you for Human Rights Watch? They are two very different organizations in many ways. AN: They’re very different and yet, I brought to the effort to deal with human rights internationally a lot of what I had learned at the ACLU. It turned out that some of the people with whom I was particularly associated at the ACLU, had also made a transition into working on human rights internationally. At the ACLU, one of the people with whom I had collaborated 3 was a woman from Mississippi named Patricia Derian. I had been very impressed with her and persuaded her to run for the board of the ACLU and also for the executive committee of the ACLU. She had been a housewife in Mississippi. She had started as a nurse, married a surgeon who was a professor of medicine at the University of Mississippi in Jackson, and she started to become prominent in civil rights when Jackson, Mississippi closed its public schools in order to prevent desegregation. As a Jackson, Mississippi housewife at that stage, she led an effort to keep the schools open. That led to her prominence in the civil rights period. When the Democratic Party disaffiliated the Mississippi Democratic Party because it was all white and seated an integrated democratic party at the Democratic Convention in--I guess, this must have been 1972--she became the National Democratic Committee Woman for Mississippi. She was the white National Democratic Committee woman and a black pharmacist from Clarksdale, Mississippi was the National Democratic Committee Man. So she also became a factor in Democratic Party politics. When Jimmy Carter ran for President in 1976, he got to know her. When he became President, she had been active in civil rights in the United States; and she was on the ACLU board.