Spear Carriers for Empire: The Alliance for American Militarism after the Vietnam War, 1967-1988

By John M. Rosenberg B.A., The University of Kansas, 2007 M.A., The University of Kansas, 2009 A.M., Brown University, 2010

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of History at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2015

© Copyright 2015 by John M. Rosenberg This dissertation by John M. Rosenberg is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Naoko Shibusawa, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Robert O. Self, Reader

Date______Samuel Zipp, Reader

Approved by the Graduate School

Date______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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Curriculum Vitae

John Rosenberg was born in Joplin, Missouri on August 27, 1984. He attended the University of Kansas, earning a degree in Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in History with highest distinction, as well as a Master’s degree in history with honors. In 2009, he entered the graduate program in American history at Brown University where he has served as a teaching assistant for courses in U.S. history. He published his first article, “Barbarian Virtues in a Bottle: Patent Indian Medicines and the Commodification of Primitivism in the United States, 1870-1900,” with Gender & History . He has two forthcoming publications. The first, “The Quest against Detente: Eugene Rostow, the October War, and the Origins of the Anti-Détente Movement, 1969 –1976,” will appear in Diplomatic History . His second forthcoming article, To Arms for the Western Alliance: The Committee on the Present Danger, Defense Spending, and the Perception of American Power Abroad, 1973-1980,” will be published as a book chapter in the edited volume, Selling America in an Age of Uncertainty , being published by Bloomsbury Press.

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Acknowledgements

As I began researching this project, a Ph.D. friend told me that she day dreamed of writing acknowledgements during the long days spent hovering over documents in the archive or hunched over her computer at home. At the time I thought she meant merely that the acknowledgements were the last thing one writes for a dissertation, the last step of an uphill climb years in the making. There is some truth to that, but only now do I take her full meaning. It was not until I began to research and write the dissertation that I realized how truly collaborative the process is, and how lost I would have been without the aid of colleagues and friends. Each time one of them lent me a helping hand or offered an insightful critique, I thought of the acknowledgements, my one opportunity to publicly thank them. I am glad the moment has finally come to express my gratitude to the many people who helped me along the way.

First thanks must go to my advisor Naoko Shibusawa. Naoko perfectly balanced the roles an advisor must play: supportive when I need it, and demanding when I need that, too. She has encouraged the best work from me and been my tireless defender. I could not have asked for a better mentor. Robert Self and Samuel Zipp were ideal in their role as dissertation committee members. Both were generous with their time, providing me with stimulating comments on my work. Thomas Zeiler was kind enough to read the chapter on William Casey, and gave me excellent feedback for revisions.

I am of the opinion that the best part of graduate school are the graduate students.

I have been lucky enough at Brown to develop friendships that I value as highly as anything in my life. I want to thank Ania Borejsza-Wysocka, Patrick Chung, Brian

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Druchniak, Sam Franklin, Benjamin Holtzman, Katie Kalafut, Brooke Lamperd, Sara

Matthiesen, Laura Perille, Dan Polifka, Lindsay Schakenbach, and Liz Searcy. All have celebrated with me, commiserated with me, and have been generous enough to call me their friend.

While at Brown, I was fortunate enough to become a member of the K-Team writing group, started by my advisor. These people read through every chapter of this dissertation, offered excellent advice on how to improve the prose and sharpen the analysis, and only rarely complained. Thank you Marc Briz, Sarah Day Dayon, Kevin

Hoskins, Aimie Kawai, Wen Jin, Emilio Leanza, Heather Lee, Ronaldo Noche, Stoni

Thompson, Jonathan Tollefson, Kyle Trenshaw, Bee Vang, and Ida Yalzadeh.

I received generous support for the researching and writing of this dissertation, including the Albert Beveridge Grant of the American Historical Association, the Silas

Palmer Research Fellowship at the Hoover Institution, the Peter Green Doctoral

Fellowship in the History department at Brown University, and a year spent as a

Graduate Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies.

I must also take this opportunity to acknowledge Sheyda Jahanbani, who first encouraged me to pursue a Ph.D. in history, and who has remained a close friend ever since. She and Jonathan Hagel bring much needed levity into my life. Special thanks must also go to Dara and Daniel Igersheim, who were kind enough to open their home, and pantry, to me for three months while I conducted research in Washington, D.C.

Finally, I want to thank my family. My dad Benjamin and my mom Patty have always supported my career, even as they sometimes wondered what this “history thing” was all about. My sisters Erin and Sarah keep me grounded by reminding me that no

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matter where I go in life, I will always be their little brother. And I must thank my brother

Eli for reminding me that there is more to life than work. Namely, Bruce Springsteen.

This is for them.

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Table of Contents

Curriculum Vitae iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “To be Free, Secure, and Influential”: 23 Eugene Rostow, the October War, OPEC, and the Committee on the Present Danger.

Chapter 2: Unleashing” Finance on the World: 87 William Casey’s Pursuit of a New Global Economy in the 1970s.

Chapter 3: “Without Allies We Can Accomplish Nothing”: 143 Bayard Rustin, a Cold Warrior Abroad Pursues Social Justice at Home.

Chapter 4: Jeane Kirkpatrick Offers an Intellectual Defense for 206 Rightwing Dictatorships: Race and Totalitarianism in the Global South.

Chapter 5: The Spear Carriers go on the Offensive during the Reagan Years. 257

Epilogue 307

Bibliography 317

Abbreviations 328

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Introduction

The political campaign to reassert American power abroad after the Vietnam War made for some strange bedfellows. Eugene Rostow was a Democrat, Dean of Yale Law

School, and a veteran of Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy team. William Casey was a conservative Republican and venture capitalist who spent most of the 1970s in the Nixon-

Ford administration. Bayard Rustin was a leader of both the civil rights and peace movements dedicated to the fight for racial and economic equality at home. Jeane

Kirkpatrick was a political scientist and Cold War liberal best known most for her opposition to the “New Class ” of political elites within the Democratic Party. While coming from diverse backgrounds and representing often divergent interests, these four individuals would come together in 1976 as founding members of the Committee on the

Present Danger (CPD). The brainchild of Eugene Rostow, the CPD was a bipartisan group of foreign policy hawks who came together to warn the American public of an unprecedented Soviet military buildup that threatened the world with nuclear annihilation. America, they argued, needed to respond with strength by greatly increasing the U.S. military budget and reestablishing an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy.

Their efforts proved remarkably successful. In 1980, they celebrated the election of one of their own to the White House. More than thirty members of the CPD followed Ronald

Reagan into the executive branch. Their first order of business: the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, ultimately doubling the defense budget by the end of the 1980s.1

1 On the history of the CPD see Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement , trans.

1

Uniting this diverse group of individuals was the fear that the challenges to

American power emanating from the Global South during the 1970s presaged a fundamental threat to their varied interests. The challenges facing the future CPD members included the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973, which revealed the deepening fissures between the United States and its Cold War allies in Europe and Japan. The subsequent oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

(OPEC) exposed the vulnerability of western dependent economies to the collective action of raw material “producer ” nations. In 1974, the Group of 77 (G-77)—an alliance of “developing” nations at the United Nations —announced plans for a “New

International Economic Order” (NIEO) to insure a greater share of global wealth for the decolonized world. Their demands included the right to nationalize the assets of western multinationals, the establishment of “just and equitable terms of trade,” and the right to form “raw material cartels ” like OPEC for other commodities. 2 And stateside, American activists on the Left began to espouse a Third World nationalist ideology that openly aligned the interests Americans of color with those of the Global South. In response, the future members of the CPD independently came to the conclusion that the challenge of the “Third World” must be beaten back by the projection of US power abroad and attacking Third Worldism at home.

Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 149-179; Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment , first edition (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983). 2 Quoted in Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World , A New Press People’s History (New York: New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2007), 189. Prashad argues that the Third World is best understood not as a geographical location, but rather as a project for political and economic equality of the decolonized world. Such a conception allowed a diverse set of national leaders to claim membership in or solidarity with the Third World, even as in reality many of these leaders proved to be dictatorial. I have thus chosen to use Third World only when discussing it as a political and social project, or when quoting my subjects directly. I use the term Global South to refer to the region of the world in which most of the “poorer nations” exist.

2 The “Third World” challenge to Western, and Soviet, preeminence began well before the 1970s. In 1955, representatives from recently decolonized nations of Asia and

Africa gathered for a conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Indonesia’s first president

Ahmed Sukarno encapsulated the spirit of the meeting when he called upon those present to resist both the “economic control” and the “intellectual control ” of the former imperial powers by “mobiliz[ing] all the spiritual, all the moral, and all the political strength of

Asia and Africa on the side of peace.” In 1961, a group of nations led by India, Egypt, and Yugoslavia moved further towards this goal when they founded the Non-Aligned movement (NAM) in Belgrade, which called for the nations of the Global South to organize an alternative bloc to the American and Soviet spheres of influence. 3

While the idea of a Third World had existed prior to the 1970s, events in the first years of the decade combined to make their economic and political challenges to the

United States appear dire to this group of prominent Americans. The Vietnam War was the pivot. Americans had begun the 1960s confident in the supremacy of their military as well as the righteousness of their mission to “contain” communism. The war changed all that. The protracted, bloody conflict in a region with no strategic or economic value to the United States created a maelstrom of protest at home. It fractured the Cold War liberal order that had held sway since 1945. By the end of the war in 1973, over 58,000

American soldiers had gone to their deaths in Vietnam, while U.S. forces were responsible for the deaths of roughly one million Vietnamese people. 4 Americans struggled to understand why the war had happened at all. Many came to question the

3 Ibid, 34, 95-104, Sukarno quoted on 34. 4 Statistic on the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed by U.S. forces comes from Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston, Vu Manh Loi, “Vietnamese Casualties during the American War: A New Estimate,” Population and Development Review , Vol. 21, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), 783-812.

3 logic of containment, and the morality of U.S. interventionism. Their soul searching had significant political ramifications. The Ninety-third Congress elected in 1973 was, according to historian Greg Grandin, “perhaps the most anti-imperial legislature in

United States history.” 5 The Democrat controlled Congress slashed defense spending, and passed new legislation increasing Congressional oversight of Executive actions.

Conservative Republicans and “Cold Warrior” Democrats feared that the war in Vietnam had created a crisis of American will. At a moment when the Global South appeared to challenge U.S. power on all fronts, it seemed that Americans no longer had the strength to defend their interests.

Just as Americans divided over the nation’s defeat in Vietnam, the U.S. economy faltered. At the end of World War II, the United States stood triumphant as the wealthiest, most advanced economy in the world. Its rivals in Europe and Asia lay in utter ruin. By the mid-1960s, however, the economies of Western Europe and Japan had recovered to a point where they could compete with American manufacturers. This was due in no small part to the efforts of American policy makers who, with the onset of the Cold War, had embarked upon a policy to rebuild the shattered industrial economies of West Germany and Japan in order to turn them into “bulwarks” against communism. The Marshall Plan devoted thirteen billion dollars to European recovery, while in Japan U.S. officials led by

Secretary of State Dean Acheson decided on a “reverse course ” in Japan at the start of the

Cold War. Where once Japanese industry was to be dismantled and given to its former colonies in Asia, by the start of the Korean War the United States had decided to rebuild

5 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism , The American Empire Project (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 62.

4 the Japanese economy, and to reinscribe its neocolonial relationships with South Korea, the Philippines, and other nations of the region. 6 The plan succeeded brilliantly. Whereas in 1950 the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Western Europe was below that of

Argentina, by 1973 the GDP of Western Europe was fifty percent greater than that of

Argentina. Similarly, in Japan the GDP per person in 1950 was equivalent to that of the

United States in 1850. By 1973, it equaled those of Europe, and the Japanese now enjoyed a GDP per person equivalent to the United States in 1963. In only twenty-three years they had gained one hundred and thirteen years on their competitors in the United

States. 7

Increased competition from Europe and Japan led to decreasing profits for

American business. In 1970, the U.S. rate of profit from manufacturing had declined by forty percent from its high in the mid-1960s.8 Class tensions at home increased as labor and management struggled to adjust to the end of America’s global monopoly on manufacturing. Adding to these tensions was the fact that American corporations had begun to move their manufacturing bases abroad in search of greater profits from fewer regulations and cheaper labor. By 1971, the rate of production for U.S. multinational corporations was almost four times greater than the value of American exports. 9 That same year, the United States recorded its first trade deficit since 1893, an early indicator of the economic doldrums that marked the decade. Moreover, foreign investment might

6 On the rebuilding of Japan and its impact on the former colonies of the Japanese Empire see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: a History (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 112. 7 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2010), 5. 8 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012), 135. 9 Frederick S. Weaver, The United States and the Global Economy: From Bretton Woods to the Current Crisis (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 46-47.

5 have meant greater profits for American corporations, but it left them vulnerable to the expropriation of their holdings by “host” nations in the Global South. Here too, the challenge from the Global South was more immediate than in years prior as governments began to expropriate the foreign holdings of multinational corporations at an unprecedented rate in the 1970s. The challenge to American authority from the Global

South thus developed in the 1970s just as global developments cast doubt on two

American institutions that just a few years prior had seemed invincible: the U.S. military and the U.S. economy. 10 Everything from the America’s alliance system, to its economic prosperity, to the future of American liberalism appeared in doubt; under threat by Third

World nationalists abroad, and by those at home who condemned American foreign policy as imperialistic.

The subjects of this study —Eugene Rostow, William Casey, Bayard Rustin, and

Jeane Kirkpatrick —responded these threats with a resounding rejection of any critique of

America’s role in the world, including President Jimmy Carter’s decision to make respect for human rights a component of U.S. foreign policy. They demanded an arms increase to demonstrate American strength, increased military support for anticommunist allies combating leftist forces, and the promotion of a free market economy that would protect the property of multinationals and insure that the flow of goods and capital was unconstrained by producers groups. 11 They would find a ready patron from their views in

10 It is important to keep in mind that while American power did decline in the 1970s, the decline was relative. The United States no longer enjoyed the unparalleled military and economic strength it did at the end of World War II, but it remained the richest nation and most militarily powerful nation in the world. 11 My argument builds on the work of scholars who also argue that the reassertion of American imperialism in the 1970s owed to the economic and political challenges emanating from the Global South, but it is a point that, until now, has remained underdeveloped in the literature. See for example: Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and after , 2nd ed, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World

6 Ronald Reagan. In the 1980s, they would go on the offensive in the Global South, masterminding U.S. support for anticommunist forces in Central America, and providing the administration with its bellicosity. When we think of Ronald Reagan’s foreign relations in the Global South, it is largely their ideas and their posturing that we remember.

I argue that while the members of the CPD often spoke of a looming Soviet threat, they were responding to the relative decline in America’s hegemonic power in the wake of Vietnam. Their true purpose lay in reinforcing America’s economic and military dominance in the Global South. The title of this dissertation comes from the prologue to

Chalmers Johnson’ s Blowback , one of several books by Johnson to investigate the causes and consequences of American empire. Although Johnson would become among the most important critics of U.S. foreign policy beginning in the 1990s, he spent the Cold

War as an ardent believer in America’s global mission. A political scientist who specialized in East Asia, Johnson served in the navy during the Korean Conflict, supported the war in Vietnam, and joined the CPD in the name of combating the spread of the Soviet Union. For Johnson, the Soviet threat justified America’ s global military presence. Yet when the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the U.S. military did not demobilize. In fact, it expanded its presence into new nations, particularly those of the

Middle East. This fact threw into sharp relief for Johnson what the Cold War had

“obscured.” As he explained in Blowback , the United States had established an “informal empire…based on the projection of military power to every corner of the world and on

Interventions and the Making of Our Times , New edition (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 333; and Julian Go, Patterns of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 190-205.

7 the use of American capital and markets to force global economic integration on our terms, whatever costs to others.” 12 With the benefit of hindsight, Johnson concluded that he had been a “spear -carrier for empire.” Rostow, Casey, Rustin, and Kirkpatrick were his comrades in arms. This is the story of how and why they came together in defense of

Americ a’s informal empire.

Each of the first four chapters takes one of these individuals as its subject. I analyze their lives from the late 1960s through the 1980 presidential election, emphasizing the moments that led them to become activists on behalf of an aggressive foreign policy. I pay particular attention paid to the ideas that shaped their interpretation of the world. I chose to focus on these four individuals both because of their importance to defending American empire, and the diversity of their backgrounds. While they shared friends in common, none of my subjects were more than acquaintances of each other.

They lived in different cities and belonged to different political, social, and professional circles. For the most part, the individual chapters run along parallel tracks as I emphasize the particular events, conflicts, and ideas that activated each individual. At times, their stories overlap through their mutual participation in private interest groups like the CPD, and ultimately in the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan. 13

Chapter one focuses on the life of Eugene Rostow. It sheds new light on his leading role in the anti-détente movement of the 1970s. Previous scholars have argued

12 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire , First Edition (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004), the prologue and 5-7. 13 I do not pretend that these four individuals were alone responsible for organizing and leading the campaign for American empire. But the views they espoused were not limited to themselves. Other influential figures made similarly racialized, exceptionalist claims about the need to reassert American power in the Global South. Nor did I limit my research to just these four. Other sources consulted include the personal papers of Richard Allen, Clare Boothe Luce, Paul Nitze, and Albert Wohlstetter, as well as the organizational records of such groups as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the Atlantic Council, and the International Rescue Committee.

8 that those on the Right who opposed détente did so out of a moral objection to government negotiations with the “immoral ” Soviet state. My work, however, emphasizes the central role the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and subsequent OPEC imposed oil embargo played in catalyzing the anti-détente movement. Once a supporter of détente,

Rostow became among its most important critics following the events of October 1973.

He was convinced that the Soviets were behind the attack on Israel. Race profoundly influenced this belief. Rostow employed an Orientalist logic that rendered Arab peoples as irrational, emotional, and childlike, wholly under the control of the Soviet Union.

Convinced that the Soviets were bent on gaining control of the Middle East by destroying

Israel, Rostow launched what one historian has referred to as the “first major head-on assault of détente, ” through his leadership of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority

(CDM). 14

This chapter also provides a history of the Committee on the Present Danger.

While all four of my subjects were members of the CPD, it was Rostow who conceived of the organization and led it during its first four years. The CPD has generally been viewed as an outgrowth of the “Team-B report ” which claimed to reveal the growing imbalance between the Soviet and American militaries. I argue, however, that the CPD developed out of the transatlantic meetings of European and American hardliners who were anxious about the deterioration of alliances that became obvious during the OPEC crisis. From these gatherings came the conclusion that alliances were cemented by fear, and that the American and European publics no longer feared the Soviet Union enough to hold the Atlantic Alliance together in the face of the October War and OPEC. The CPD’s

14 Quoted in Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan , Rev. ed. (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1994), 461-462.

9 primary goal was to bring home to Americans the potential danger of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union if the United States did not reverse its policy of “retreat” after the

Vietnam War. But I argue the focus on nuclear war was only a means to an end, a strategy designed to rebuild consensus on the need for an aggressive American foreign policy. Few members of the CPD actually believed a nuclear exchange with the Soviets was possible. The specter of nuclear war, however, provided a potent source of fear that they could draw upon to give their warnings a dire edge.

Chapter two follows the life of William Casey. Most famously Ronald Reagan ’s

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Casey devoted the majority of his life to economic affairs. A Wall Street tax attorney and multimillionaire venture capitalist,

Casey held a number of key economic posts during the Nixon-Ford administrations. He served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as the

Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, and as President of the Export-Import

Bank. From these positions, Casey attempted to transform U.S. economic policy towards the Global South by promoting the privatization of state industries, the creation of capital markets, and the protection of foreign owned businesses from expropriation in those nations. Such policies, Casey believed, would benefit the American economy as it transitioned from a manufacturing to a service-base. Capital in the form of profit from foreign investments and, crucially, the investment of foreign capital in the United States would reverse America’s balance of payments deficit. The United States, meanwhile, would continue to produce high technology goods —computers, aeronautics, nuclear reactors —for which demand would only increase as Global South nations took on the

10 role of global manufacturer. Through William Casey, then, can be traced the transition to the neoliberal era through the perspective of foreign policy. 15

Developments in the Global South, however, appeared to threaten Casey ’s vision for a transformed global economy. The “developing” countries appeared on the verge of exerting more, not less, control over their economies. The number of seizures of foreign owned property by states within the Global South skyrocketed in the 1970s, with 336 instances between 1970 and 1975 alone. 16 The Group of 77’s call for a “New

International Economic Order” in 1975, particularly worried Casey, who correctly saw the document as a rejection of the very policies he had worked to export abroad. Casey was irate over the Ford administration ’s response to these proposals, which, while hardly a capitulation, countenanced some compromises with the demands of the G-77. Casey resigned from the administration, joined the Committee on the Present Danger, and began to develop a close relationship with a kindred spirit on economic issues from California:

Ronald Reagan. Casey served as the chairman for Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, earning the directorship of the CIA for his efforts.

Chapter three focuses on civil rights and peace activist Bayard Rustin. The architect of the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin dedicated much of his life to the pursuit of racial and economic justice at home. By the 1970s, however, he had begun to turn his attention to foreign affairs. Rustin was particularly concerned about Israel,

15 On the history of neoliberalism see The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective , Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), especially Mirowski’s postface; Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, & the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 16 Vernie Oliveiro, “The United States, Multinational Enterprises, and the Politics of Globalization,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective , Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, Daniel J. Sargent, eds. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 140.

11 defending the state against charges of imperialism from black nationalists, and encouraging the federal government to increase its military support. This chapter argues that Rustin’s efforts on behalf of Israel were part of, rather than a break from, the lifetime he had spent as an activist for equality. It came in response to the support black nationalists gave to Arab nationalists in the Arab-Israeli dispute, which Rustin saw as a vital threat to his efforts at reconstituting the liberal political coalition within the

Democratic Party after it had unraveled in the late 1960s. Black nationalism alienated

American Jews who had provided crucial support to the civil rights movement. Rustin sought to discredit Third World nationalism within the African American community in order to re-forge the ties between blacks and Jews. Such a stance put him at odds with the

New Left and even the Carter administration as Rustin grew closer to hawkish Democrats like Eugene Rostow, who brought Rustin into the CPD. Although the potential for a reformed liberal alliance was all but exhausted by the end of the decade, Rustin continued to denounce leftist movements in Africa and the Middle East while advocating for a revival of coalition politics into the 1980s, yet he gave crucial support to the Reagan administration’s foreign policy even as he denounced Reagan’s domestic agenda.

Chapter four takes up the life of political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick won notoriety for an influential 1979 Commentary article in which she argued that rightwing, “authoritarian” governments were less oppressive and more likely to evolve towards democracy than leftwing, “totalitarian” governments. This argument won her the patronage of Ronald Reagan, and became the moral and intellectual basis for his administration’s foreign policy. I explore the ideologies underpinning her thesis.

Kirkpatrick’s argument rested on a combination of a racialized theory of societal

12 development and Hannah Arendt’s distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. I trace the development of her thinking through the 1960s and 1970s.

Kirkpatrick —who had advised Hubert Humphrey during his failed 1968 presidential campaign —drew significant parallels between totalitarian, communist leaders in the

Global South and members of the “New Class ” in the Democratic Party. She asserted that middle Class intellectuals and professionals prevailed in both groups, as did a desire to transform all of society according to a utopian ideology. Like Bayard Rustin, then,

Kirkpatrick drew a troubling link between progressive activists at home and the Third

World movement abroad. Like Eugene Rostow, however, Kirkpatrick would ultimately find much to admire and support in the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.

The fifth and final chapter follows these four as they went on the offensive in the

Global South during the Reagan years. Rostow, Kirkpatrick, and Casey all took up important positions in Reagan’s foreign policy team. Rustin, meanwhile gave the administration his support through his trips to the Global South as an election observer with Freedom House —a rightwing organization which focused on the human rights abuses of leftist governments. Having acted on parallel tracks for much of the previous decade, these four individual’s efforts now converged on two key geopolitical issues: the

Arab-Israeli dispute and the United States’ war against leftist forces in Central America.

Early into Reagan’s first term, Israeli actions put that nation at odds with several key government officials. Both Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of

State George Schultz denounced Israel military actions taken in the early 1980s. These included the bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in June of 1981 and invasion of Lebanon a year later. Kirkpatrick, Rustin, and Rostow, however, gave Israel their unequivocal

13 support and argued for the government’s full backing of Israeli actions. In Central

America, meanwhile, William Casey launched a covert program to provide military aide to anticommunist “contras ” fighting Nicaragua leftwing government. The chapter ends with a discussion of William Casey’s role in the Iran-contra scandal. I argue that, in pursuing alternative sources of funding for the Nicaraguan “freedom fighters ” to

Congress, Casey used a strategy he had developed years earlier on behalf of America’s economic foreign policy during the 1970s.

By emphasizing the centrality of the Global South to the campaign to revive

American militarism in the 1970s, this dissertation offers an alternative to previous scholarship which has focused overwhelmingly on U.S.-Soviet relations. According to this narrative, the Committee on the Present Danger and likeminded groups were motivated by their fear that the Soviet Union had embarked upon a massive arms buildup in the 1970s. Ever suspicious of Soviet motives, they believed that Kremlin leaders had manipulated arms control agreements reached under Richard Nixon and Henry

Kissinger’s policy of détente in order to surpass the United States as the world’s dominant military power. These American hawks thus rejected détente, opposed further arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and advocated for a revamped military combined with an aggressive foreign policy to meet the Soviet threat. 17

To be sure, Rostow, Rustin, Kirkpatrick, and Casey were all committed Cold

Warriors. They interpreted the varied actions of the Global South through an anticommunist lens, imagining the Soviet Union pulling the strings of their Arab, Latin

17 For scholarship that places U.S.-Soviet relations at the center of the domestic campaign to revive American interventionism see Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation ; Anne H. Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Vaïsse, 149-180.

14 American, and African “proxies.” Anticommunism provided them with a common language to make sense of the challenges they faced, and a common danger to unite

Americans around. As historians of U.S. foreign relations have shown, however, the major challenges to American power came not from the machinations of the Kremlin, but rather from the people and leaders of those nations themselves. The proclamation of the

NIEO in 1974, the Cuban intervention in the Angolan civil war in 1975, the Sandinista’s revolution against dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua in 1979, all existed independently from the U.S.-Soviet struggle, even though CPD tried to make them fit within a Cold War framework. 18

My purpose here is not to say that the Cold War did not matter, but to point out that it was only one of multiple factors that propelled the domestic campaign for an aggressive foreign policy forward, and not always the preeminent one. In making this argument, I join a growing list of scholarship that seeks to expand the context of U.S. foreign relations after 1945 beyond the Cold War. In recent years historians have developed a number of alternative frameworks for understanding the international relations in the 1970s. Globalization, human rights, and the pursuit of national liberation in the Global South have all emerged as significant fields of historical inquiry. 19 I situate

18 In the last fifteen years there have been a number of histories that emphasize the independence of “Third World” leaders in their actions during the 1970s. For but two examples see Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and Craig Daigle, The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969-1973 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 19 For recent scholarship that considers U.S. foreign relations beyond a Cold War framework see Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2014); Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post- Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2012). Much of this scholarship has been inspired by Harvard historian Akira Iriye who has long argued for that non-state actors operating outside of a Cold War

15 the story of the CPD and its members within this global context. They viewed reviving

America’s military power, and willingness to use it, as crucial to winning the Cold War, yes. But it was in the Global South where this renewed American power would be deployed. 20

Race provided the lens through which these Americans understood the Global

South. They shared a common perception of “Third World” peoples as backwards, bound by tradition, and prone to anarchic violence. In their minds, the United States could only respond to such people through resolute strength. Even Bayard Rustin, who dedicated his life to opposing racism at home, deployed Orientalist rhetoric when he denounced Arab nations as an undifferentiated collection of “feudal ” states. While race shaped how these four individuals saw the “Third World,” their ability to publicly appeal to racialized sentiments declined as the decade wore on. Overt references to race were untenable by the 1970s in no small part due to the success of the civil rights movement. One of the most fascinating elements of this project, then, has been to see how the racial discourse employed by this cohort changed over time to match the political world in which they lived. This was especially true of Jeane Kirkpatrick. Her early writing displayed open references to racial difference —in the early 1960s she wrote of democracy as a uniquely

“Anglo-Saxon ” trait for which most other peoples were unprepared. In the 1970s, however, Kirkpatrick adopted Richard Nixon’s racially coded “law and order” rhetoric to

framework, see Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (University of California Press, 2002). 20 My argument here is in keeping with Odd Arne Westad’s focus on the Cold War as imperial struggle fought in the Global South see, Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

16 denounce the New Left —which was defined in part by its multiracialism. She would continue to deploy this tactic at the United Nations in the 1980s.21

The unequivocal support these Americans showed Israel beginning in the late

1960s also owed to their views on race. The Democratic members of the cohort —

Rostow, Rustin, and Kirkpatrick —could be counted upon to push for the unequivocal support of Israel by the U.S. government. Indeed, although I did not begin this project with the intention of focusing on U.S.-Israeli relations, it quickly became apparent that

Israel was crucial to galvanizing support for the domestic campaign to reassert American power abroad. Scholarly explanations for the development of a “special relationship” between Israel and the United States in the late 1960s have tended to emphasize either the role of American Jews or Israel’s strategic value to American policy makers. Members of the former group note the disproportionate number of American Jews who belonged to the Democratic Party and organized labor. Following the Six-Days War, they argue,

Israel took on new importance for these Americans, who had feared Israel’s very existence was at stake. 22 Historians in the latter category have noted Israel’s strategic importance to the United States as the most powerful military in a region vital to the economic health of the global economy. 23 While recognizing the importance of both

21 On the ways in which race shaped U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War see among others, Brenda Gayle Plummer, “Race and the Cold War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War , Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, eds. (Oxford, U.K: Oxford University Press, 2013); Thomas Borstelmann, Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 22 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)111-112; Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) 155-178, Vaïsse, 58-62. 23 Little, American Orientalism , 77-115.

17 arguments, I make the case for race as a crucial force shaping support for Israel in the

1970s. Settled by European immigrants and refugees —Israel became, in the minds of

American Jews like Rostow and allies like Kirkpatrick and Rustin —an extension of

Europe. Israelis personified everything the Arabs supposedly were not: democratic, progressive, and civilized. They supported Israel not merely because Israeli’s were Jews or because Israeli interests aligned with those of America, but also because Israelis shared western values and thus could be counted upon to protect western interests, while Arab states could not.24

The story of the CPD and its members is usually told as part of the history of the neoconservative movement. Much of the scholarship on the movement has focused on defining just what constituted a “neoconservative .” The term has been applied to a diverse range of political actors in the forty-plus years of its existence. French historian

Justin Vaïsse has done the most work to bring coherence to the history of neoconservatism. He argues for three eras of the neoconservative movement, with only a tenuous connection between its origins in the 1960s and the movement today. It began as an intellectual movement amongst Old Left intelligentsia in New York City who opposed the “counterculture” of the New Left. These neoconservatives concerned themselves largely with domestic issues: namely fighting for control over the meaning of liberalism with New Left intellectuals in the pages of liberal, largely Jewish magazines such as

Commentary . The second age of neoconservatism began in the 1970s, and was dominated

24 Cultural historian Michelle Mart has also argued for race as a determinant factor in the establishment of a “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. She notes that Americans compared Israeli settlers to American pioneers, while they considered Arabs both “backwards” and “immature.” See Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), X, 66-67, 93.

18 by Cold War Democrats in Washington D.C. dedicated to anticommunism abroad and the welfare state at home. According to Vaïsse, three of the four subjects who make up the core of this study —Rostow, Rustin, and Kirkpatrick —belong to the second age of neoconservatism. A third age of neoconservatism developed in the 1990s. These

“neocons” had always been conservative: men such as William Kristol, David Frum, and

Paul Wolfowitz. 25 They believed American might made right, and that the United States had a strategic interest in spreading its vision of democratic governance abroad, by force if necessary. This is the version of neoconservatism that took root in the administration of

George W. Bush and that continues to exist today. 26

While acknowledging that the scholarship on neoconservatism has done much to reveal the connections between the foreign policy hawks of the 1970s and their modern day equivalent, I have chosen not to refer to the subjects of this study as neoconservatives. I wish to draw attention to the continuities that existed between this set of imperialists and previous proponents of an assertive U.S. foreign policy. Race was one such idea, and their hostile attitude towards revolutionary movements in the Global South was another one. The fear of foreign revolution had influenced U.S. foreign policy since the nineteenth century. This was due in no small part due to the violent, radical changes wrought by the revolutions in France and Latin America. The Haitian Revolution

25 Vaïsse does not consider Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld to be neoconservative themselves, but rather allies of the Third Age “neocons.” Their views lacked the type of universalistic belief that American force could be used to spread democracy. Instead, Vaïsse considers them to be “assertive nationalists” interested in demonstrating American power, but not necessarily in spreading democracy. See Vaïsse, 14-15. 26 On the history of neoconservatism see Vaïsse, Neoconservatism ; John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Gary J. Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Jesús Velasco Nevado, Neoconservatives in U.S. Foreign Policy Under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: Voices Behind the Throne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Similar to Vaïsse, Nevado, a political scientist, divides neoconservatism into two movements: one grounded in the Cold war, and the other in the presidency of George W. Bush.

19 especially frightened American elites as African slaves violently overthrew the white planter class. As such, U.S. foreign policy has tended to privilege stability over revolutionary movements for national liberation, and the United States has intervened militarily numerous times —especially in Latin America —to protect private interests against just such movements. As historian Michael Hunt has argued, “Such revolutions were frightening because they combined pervasive violence, despotic practices, and radical doctrines in a frontal assault on individual liberty and private property.” 27 The opposition of Rostow, Kirkpatrick, Rustin, and Casey to revolutionary movements in

Rhodesia, Central America, Iran and elsewhere reflected these older beliefs.

Similarly, I disagree with the scholarship on neoconservatism that portrays their appeals to democratic principles as an idealistic commitment to spreading democracy abroad. Vaïsse, for example, contrasts neoconservatives with foreign policy “realists” who were willing to “accommodate existing authoritarian regimes.” Neoconservatives, in contrast, believed in the “universalism of democracy.” 28 With the possible exception of

Bayard Rustin, I find little evidence that Kirkpatrick, Rostow, or any other

“neoconservatives” were truly committed to democratic principles. While they often spoke of spreading democracy, their idea of who could participate in such governance was greatly circumscribed by their own views on race and development. Few nations within the Global South, in their minds, were deemed immediately ready for democracy.

27 My understanding of the ideologies that have shaped U.S. foreign policy draws heavily from Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), quote on 117. Hunt identified three ideologies that had shaped U.S. foreign policy from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries: American exceptionalism, racial hierarchy, and a fear of foreign revolutions. Hunt wrote this book, in part, to correct what he saw as the lack of awareness on the part of critics of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy to the long history of the ideas that guided it. Naoko Shibusawa ’s work has also greatly influenced my work. She expanded Hunt’s thesis to include ideologies of maturity and gender see Shibusawa, “Ideology, Culture, and the Cold War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War . 28 Vaïsse, 2.

20 As but one example, Jeane Kirkpatrick —whom Vaïsse argues was indicative of the neoconservative commitment to democracy —claimed that most of the nations that lay outside of Western Europe and North America lacked the cultural and social institutions to support democracy. Their culture and heritage predisposed them to authoritarianism.

They required economic aid to spark industry, and military aid for security as they slowly developed the institutions and mindset necessary for democratic governance. This idea that nonwhites needed to be made “ready” for democracy was not unique to Kirkpatrick or to neoconservatives. Rather, such ideas of racial uplift had been central to the

American imperial venture at least since 1898.29

This project asks how individual Americans from varying backgrounds all reached the same conclusion about the need for a muscular foreign policy. Amidst defeat in war, economic decline, and social upheaval at home, the “Third World” challenge to

American power provided the impetus for a civil rights leader, a former diplomat, a venture capitalist, and a political scientist to come together in defense of America’s empire. They believed that an interventionist foreign policy would create the pliant

Global South the United States required to restore the nation’s economic health and domestic tranquility. The impact of their efforts would be felt most in Central America and the Middle East during the 1980s, and in a U.S. military vastly expanded under the

Reagan administration. In the late 1990s, they would provide the inspiration for a new generation of spear carriers to take up the defense of American empire into the new

29 See for example Louis A. Perez, The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines , (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

21 century, ultimately shaping the foreign policy of George W. Bush. We continue to live with their legacy.

22 Chapter 1

“To be Free, Secure, and Influential”: Eugene Rostow, the October War, OPEC, and the Committee on the Present Danger

Eugene Rostow spent Thanksgiving holiday in November 1975 troubled over the future of American supremacy. Would America’s military power and global influence continue to wane after the Vietnam War? For a year now he had been carrying on a correspondence with friends Paul Nitze and Charls Walker. In letters and meetings, they discussed the need for an organization to dispel the “myth of détente,” to alert Americans to the increasing threat posed by America’s waning strength. Once aware of the danger confronting their nation, the trio believed, Americans would throw their support behind the revamping of America’s armed forces. Such a group would draw on the expertise of prominent citizens from both political parties, insuring a return to the consensus foreign policy of the early Cold War. There was only one thing stopping Rostow, Nitze, and

Walker from taking the next step and starting a campaign like this, none of them wanted to lead it. An undertaking such as this promised to monopolize their already scarce free time. As 1975 drew to a close, however, no one else appeared forthcoming. Détente remained the watchword of American foreign policy, and public opinion remained largely against any sizable increase in spending on defense. While sipping a Bloody Mary at home one day, Rostow came to a decision. “Instead of waiting for someone else to start the project,” he wrote his compatriots, “why don’t we just do it?”1

1 Memorandum from Rostow to Walker and Nitze, 1 December 1975, folder Walker-Nitze Project, box 4, Accession 1985-M-004, Eugene Victor Rostow Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (Hereafter EVR Papers).

23

One year later, Rostow would announce to the world the formation of a bipartisan organization meant to warn Americans of “the Soviet drive for dominance” in the world.

They called themselves the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). The group’s organizers intended the name to emphasize the immediacy of the threat Americans faced, while also invoking the legacy of the previous committee of the same name formed in the late 1940s. That earlier CPD had helped to win public and congressional support for the massive increases to the arms budget in the late 1940s. This new CPD sought to protect the defense budget from any further erosion in the wake of the Vietnam War.

Over the next four years, CPD members committed themselves to reversing the perceived decline in America’s military power. Their call for a return to the bombastic rhetoric and ever-increasing defense budgets of the Cold War’s heyday put them at odds with the administration of Jimmy Carter, who attempted to make human rights the cornerstone of his foreign policy. The CPD became Carter’s most important domestic critic. They used their influence in the press to shape public perception of his foreign policy as weak, vacillating, and incapable of addressing the danger posed by the Soviet expansionism. In 1980, they celebrated the elevation of one of their own to the White

House. No fewer than thirty members of the CPD would follow Reagan into the executive branch, including Rostow and Nitze. Their first order of business: the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, ultimately doubling the defense budget by the end of the 1980s. The CPD’s remarkable success led one historian to label them

“the most important bipartisan rightwing initiative of the times.”2

2 Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 212.

24

The “danger” the CPD warned of was a massive arms buildup by the Soviet

Union in every facet of military strength: nuclear weapons, naval vessels, tanks, planes, and men. Such a buildup, they cautioned, presaged a Soviet lunge for complete world domination, including the potential for a “first strike” against America’s Intercontinental

Ballistic Missiles (ICBM). In analyzing the CPD, historians have tended to accept this explanation for the group’s motives. The French historian Justin Vaïsse has written the most complete history of the CPD. He labeled the organization the “nuclear and strategic” wing of neoconservatism. For Vaïsse, the CPD is best understood as a group narrowly focused on questions of nuclear strategy, owing their intellectual lifeblood to the works of defense strategists such as Albert Wohlstetter.3 Beneath the CPD’s esoteric arguments, however, lay less a fear of Soviet military might than of America’s waning global influence. The warnings of impending nuclear doom were, in reality, more an instrument with which to reshape U.S. policy, a means to an end. This reading is in line with historian Michael Sherry’s argument that the CPD’s mission was far broader than is normally assumed, that is, “to reinstate the centrality of military might in American policy and of the Cold War in American life.”4

In this chapter I use the life of Eugene Rostow to argue that, more than any other single factor, the geopolitical and economic challenge posed by the 1973 October War

3 Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 149-180; Jerry Sanders published the first history of the Committee on the Present Danger in 1983. Sanders recognized that the debate over military budgets rested more on the perception of power than on whether or not the Soviets had actually become more powerful than the United States in military might. Yet Sanders focuses intently on “Military Keynesianism” as the CPD’s motivation, seeing major arms producers as the driving force behind the group. Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1983). 4 Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930’s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 381.

25 and subsequent oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting

Countries (OPEC) spurred rightwing opposition to détente. A key figure in the anti- détente movement, Rostow had supported détente prior to October of 1973. Like Nixon and Kissinger, he viewed it as a means of restoring order to a world creeping toward lawlessness. Even before the fighting in the Middle East had stopped, however, Rostow concluded that détente had been a tremendous mistake. He was convinced that the

Soviets had orchestrated the Arab attack on Israel: détente was a ploy to “lull” the West into a false sense of security, when all the while they were planning to upend the balance of power. Rostow saw in the implications of the war a vital threat to the survival of the postwar alliance. The region’s oil wealth made the Middle East the strategic fulcrum of the Cold War. He warned, “It is a front on which we could lose not merely a battle, as we did in Vietnam, but the war itself.”5 Rostow would go on to become “the scourge of détente,” as Justin Vaïsse labeled him, first through his public statements, then as head of the foreign policy task force for the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM)—a group of conservative Democrats—and finally through his leadership of the CPD.6

In situating the origins of the CPD in the context of the October War and OPEC embargo of 1973, I offer a new interpretation of the conservative backlash against détente. Historians including Jeremi Suri, Julian Zelizer, and Justin Vaïsse have argued that rightwing opposition to détente emanated from a moral objection to American engagement with a totalitarian state. Its opponents wanted to win the Cold War, not

“coexist” with the Soviet Union. Such analyses have focused primarily on the

5 Eugene Rostow, article draft, “The Soviet Threat to Europe through the Middle East,” 2 June 1976, folder June 2, 1976-“The Soviet Threat to Europe through the Middle East,” box 11, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 6 Vaïsse, 100-104.

26 obstructionism of the administration’s opponents in Congress. For example, arch- conservatives like Barry Goldwater and “Cold Warrior” Democrats like Henry Jackson criticized the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) for ceding numerical strategic superiority to the Soviets. Jackson condemned human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, especially the persecution of Jews. He sought to make the granting of “most-favored nation” status to the Soviet Union dependent upon Moscow liberalizing emigration restrictions on Soviet Jews.7 While opposition to Nixon and Kissinger’s foreign policy existed prior to 1973, it was piecemeal and aimed at constraining specific aspects of détente. There was not yet an organized, concerted assault on détente in its entirety. The

October War and embargo would change this, as Rostow would spend the following seven years championing the return of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy.

Race profoundly influenced Eugene Rostow’s reaction to the October War. In both his personal correspondence and public writings can be seen an Orientalist discourse that rendered Arabs as fanatics wholly under the Kremlin’s control. According to

Rostow, the Soviets had “dangled before the eyes of Arabs the irresistible temptation…to drive out the Israelis, as the Crusaders had been driven out many centuries before,” and the Arabs were naively following Soviet temptations.8 In making this argument, I rely on

Edward Said’s foundational scholarship on Orientalism. Eighteenth and nineteenth

7 Jeremi Suri, “Détente and Its Discontents,” In Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, Bruce Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 227- 245; Julian E. Zelizer, “Détente and Domestic Politics,” Diplomatic History, 33 no. 4 (September 2009), 653-670; on Henry Jackson’s opposition to the SALT agreement, and the Jackson-Vanik amendment see, Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 242-260; Vaïsse too argued that the anti-détente movement developed out of an ideological aversion to Kissinger’s “amoral” foreign policy. While he acknowledged that the October War led Rostow to issue a statement repudiating détente, Vaïsse did not develop this argument, nor did he account for Rostow’s early support for détente, see, Vaïsse, 100-101. 8 Eugene Rostow, article draft, “What’s Wrong with Step-by-Step Diplomacy,” February 1975, folder Wa- Wek, box 5, Original Accession, EVR Papers.

27 century European artists and scholars, he argued, had constructed an ideology that defined an “East” in opposition to the “West.” Orientalism deployed a binary logic that posited the East as feminine, emotional, irrational, childlike, and inferior, and the West as masculine, rational, objective, mature, and superior.9 Historian Naoko Shibusawa has highlighted the continuities between Orientalism’s binary logic and U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War. American notions of which people were “ready for self-rule,” for example, relied on discourses of race, gender, and maturity. These markers have enabled foreign policy makers to depict entire countries as “a singular, developing human being.”10 While Arabs for Rostow were feminine, emotional, and childlike, he considered

Israelis, many of whom were his friends, as levelheaded adults. For Rostow, the fight between Israel and the Arab states was also one between West and East.

The influence that Orientalist or racial discourse exerts on an individual is not absolute, but rather contextual. Rostow’s Orientalist interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict depended upon the economic and strategic importance he gave the region, his personal friendship with many Israelis, and the reality of Soviet financial and material support for Egypt and Syria. Elsewhere, Rostow could and did display antiracism as when he denounced the government’s internment of Japanese Americans during World

War II.11

9 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 10 Naoko Shibusawa, “Ideology, Culture, and the Cold War,” The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War edited by Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 32-49, quote on 35; other historians of the Cold War who have used Said’s insights include Douglas Little, American Orientalism: the United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 11 Eugene Rostow, “Our Worst Wartime Mistake,” Harper’s, September 1945; also see, Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 86-88.

28

That Rostow ultimately looked to military spending as the best means to reassert

America’s global influence owed much to his racialized worldview. The leaders of the

Global South, Rostow believed, responded only to power. The perception of American weakness had caused them to align themselves with the Soviet Union. Only strength would convince them to reaccept American preeminence. Even the U.S.-Soviet fight over the nuclear balance was in many respects a fight over how “Third World” peoples viewed the United States. The perception of power mattered as much as actual strength. This was one reason why calls by Rostow and others for increased military spending in the 1970s were short on specifics. Rostow and the CPD, thought in the aggregate. They talked more about achieving an overall increase in defense spending than they did any specific weapons system or product. For Rostow, one of the primary benefits of the military- industrial complex (MIC) was its ability to transmit an image of grand American power and resolve to the world.

Finally, while Rostow and the CPD worked in the interest of the MIC, scholars have misinterpreted the precise nature of its relationship to the arms industry. The CPD is most often portrayed as a lobbying arm for the arms producers: Boeing, Rockwell, and

Lockheed-Martin.12 William Hartung, for example, situates the CPD within the history of

Lockheed Martin’s rise as a major producer of military aircraft.13 Yet the CPD was an effective agent of militarization in large part because its leadership could plausibly deny any relationship with the defense industry. Rostow and his fellow organizers designed the

12 Much of the early scholarship on the CPD described them in just this way, including Sanders; see also John L. Boies, Buying for Armageddon: Business, Society, and Military Spending Since the Cuban Missile Crisis (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 13 William Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 133-135.

29 group’s membership, funding structure, and marketing strategy precisely to counter attacks on the group as a front for the arms industry, a charge they greatly feared even though they were indeed largely separate from the military industry. In doing so, the CPD was able to shape the public debate surrounding American foreign policy as the media came to rely on them as an objective, expert source of information.

This chapter has been divided into two parts. Part I unearths the intellectual origins of the CPD in Eugene Rostow’s campaign against détente in the aftermath of the events of 1973. It traces his early efforts on his own and as part of the CDM, paying particular attention to the importance of race to his worldview. A key insight of this portion of the chapter is that Rostow was far from alone in seeing the October War as breaking the promise of détente. Other Americans and influential Europeans came to a similar conclusion, and together they would construct the idea that would bloom into the

CPD. Part II examines how Rostow, Nitze, and Walker organized the CPD into the most influential foreign policy group of its day. While founded in opposition to détente, the

CPD defined itself against the policies of Jimmy Carter, whose human rights based approach stood in direct contrast to the militaristic goals of Rostow’s organization.

Part I: The Origins of the CPD

Rostow’s Early Support for Détente

As Eugene Rostow prepared to leave his post as Under Secretary of State for

Political Affairs at the end of 1968, events at home and abroad filled him with trepidation over the apparent collapse of the U.S.-led world order established after the Second World

War. In Chicago earlier that year, demonstrators against the ongoing war in Vietnam clashed violently with police outside the Democratic National Convention. Similar

30 protests erupted on college campuses and in cities across the nation as young Americans denounced the war and continuing racial injustice in American society. Nor was the U.S. government the only state facing an internal backlash against its policies. The Soviet

Union put a violent end to Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” when it and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the nation in August 1968, an action that led to widespread protests and denunciations throughout Western and Eastern Europe. On the eve of his departure from the State Department, Rostow shared his anxiety over the state of global affairs in an exit interview with Paige Mulhollan. “It’s a nightmare situation,” he worried to Mulhollan.14

Leaving his hectic post in government behind, Rostow returned to his position as professor of law at Yale University at the beginning of 1969. More than resuming his old job, Rostow’s return to Yale was a true “homecoming.” He had attended Yale as both an undergraduate and a law student. Despite being an American Jew attending a school notorious for its anti-Semitism, Rostow had excelled as a student and professor, becoming Dean of Yale Law in 1955. This is not to say that Rostow’s time at Yale was always pleasant. As both an undergraduate and a professor he had to fight Yale’s quota system that limited Jewish enrollment. He was the Law school’s first Jewish Dean, and one of the first

Jews to achieve full professor status after World War II.15 Moreover, Rostow and his two younger brothers had spent the majority of their childhoods in New Haven. They were born to Russian émigrés who reared them on secular, progressive politics, and a moderate

Zionism that advocated the establishment of a Jewish homeland, but not a state, in

14 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 246. 15Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews at Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

31

Palestine. Eugene took his name from Eugene Debs, the famed American socialist, while his younger brother W.W. Rostow was named for poet Walt Whitman. The youngest

Rostow boy was named Ralph Emerson after the transcendentalist. Eugene and Walt eventually rejected the socialist politics of their parents in favor of the New Deal, and later Cold War liberalism. The break, however, was not a bitter one. Eugene Rostow remembered his childhood fondly, recalling how his father instilled in the boys a “sense of security,” while Walt Rostow remembered a “very, very happy family life.” 16 Thus,

Rostow was returning to the place he considered his “natural home,” one associated with happiness, security, and success.17 If, however, Rostow hoped that coming home would give him respite from the social and political unrest wracking the nation, he was to be sorely disappointed.

Rostow returned to a college campus fulminating with student activism against the Vietnam War. Students were aware of his role in supporting the war while at the State

Department and his brother Walt’s role in justifying intervention in the first place. That

February, several Yale activists “welcomed” him back to campus by hosting the “Rostow

Brothers Film Festival,” a collection of several antiwar films including Inside North

Vietnam. When the newly reappointed professor stumbled upon a flyer advertising the festival, he tore it down. He later explained to the student newspaper, “I didn’t really think it was compatible with the civility of academic life.”18 In April, police arrested four

Yale students as they protested outside the Army’s induction center in New Haven.19

16 On Rostow’s family background and childhood see, David Grossman Armstrong, “The True Believer: Walt Whitman Rostow and the Path to Vietnam” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2000), 26-58, quotes on 37-38. The youngest Rostow brother had little interest in politics. He settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan after the war and ran a women’s apparel shop. 17 Charles W. Sprague, “Rostow and Peck Return to Yale,” Yale Daily News, 6 December 1968, 1. 18 “The Rostow Brothers Film Festival,” Yale Daily News, 14 February 1969, 4. 19 “Four Students Arrested at Induction Proceedings,” Yale Daily News, 8 April 1969, 1.

32

Rostow witnessed such student actions with an elder’s, and a lawyer’s, disdain for the refusal of students to devote themselves to reasoned, detached debate. “The groups I saw this spring,” he commented to a friend, were “the most immature students I have ever seen in their emotional responses to situations, their discipline, etc.”20

Campus protests did not abate in the first years of Nixon’s presidency. In April

1972, just one month prior to Nixon’s scheduled trip to Moscow, several hundred students and antiwar activists charged past a police barricade and into an auditorium where General William Westmoreland planned to address members of the student-led

Yale Political Union. Protesters threw eggs at the lectern where the former U.S. commander of operations in Vietnam was set to speak. Westmoreland never appeared.

Chants of “bull shit” and “Ho Chi Minh” rang out as the Political Union’s president read a brief statement from Westmoreland decrying that “events” had precluded a “meaningful dialogue.”21 Rostow was incensed. He penned an open letter to the corporation published a week after the protest. He demanded an “independent investigation” be convened to determine whether “disciplinary proceedings,” or even “criminal charges” should be brought against those who had participated in the action. He described those protesters as an “unruly mob of legionnaires,” a phrase that evoked both his fear of society descending into anarchy, and one that implied that the protester’s actions served foreign (Soviet) interests.22

20 Rostow to Leon Alexander, 7 August 1969, folder A 1966-1969, box 4, Accession 1982-M-003, EVR Papers. 21 Beverly Wagstaff, “Westmoreland Cancels Speech Due to Student Demonstrations,” Yale Daily News, 5 April 1972, 1, 3. 22 Eugene Rostow, “An Open Letter to the President and Fellows of Yale University, “12 April 1972, folder Westmoreland Incident, box 8, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

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Given the tumultuous environment at Yale, it was not a surprise that Rostow responded positively to Nixon’s proclamation of détente. As Jeremi Suri has argued, détente was “a profoundly conservative response to internal disorder.” It was a policy intended to provide stability in international relations as government leaders sought to address social unrest at home.23 Rather than denounce détente as an immoral agreement with a totalitarian state, Rostow declared the period following the May 1972 superpower summit in Moscow to be “the most hopeful since 1945 for major progress towards the goal of détente, and of genuinely peaceful coexistence.”24 Having left office anxious over the potential spread of “international anarchy,” Rostow had no desire to quarrel with the president’s pursuit of stability abroad.

Indeed, that fall and winter, Rostow expressed far more concern about unrest at home and the future of the Democratic Party than he did for foreign affairs. In August of

1972, George McGovern won the Democratic nomination for the presidency. His nomination further split the party along the axes of race, gender, and age: between predominantly white, male, pro-war and pro-labor Democrats such as Rostow, and a

“New Left” coalition of the young, women, racial minorities, and students. So deep was the divide separating the young leftists from the old that in November Eugene Rostow voted for Nixon. It was the first time, but not the last, that he would vote for a Republican presidential candidate.25 After McGovern’s defeat, Rostow and other “Old Left”

23 Suri, Power and Protest, 5-6. 245-249; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 194-197. 24 Rostow expressed this sentiment in a memorandum on the summit that he prepared for Senator Henry Jackson, Rostow Memorandum, “Talking Points for a Speech on Foreign Policy by Senator Jackson,” 15 June 1972, folder Fosdick, Dorothy, box 3, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 25 When Rostow received a letter from Hillary Clinton in 1991 soliciting campaign contributions, he informed her that he had not voted for a Democratic candidate since 1968. See, Rostow to Hillary Clinton, 10 December 1991, folder Correspondence C-F, box 2, Accession 2001-M-002, EVR Papers.

34

Democrats—Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, and Max Kampelman among them— announced the formation of Coalition for a Democratic Majority in opposition to the

McGovern wing of the party. Although they titled their first statement “Come Home,

Democrats,” a play on McGovern’s antiwar campaign slogan “Come Home, America,” the CDM mentioned foreign policy in only a peripheral way, and then only to attack

McGovern’s “isolationism.” They focused the great majority of their attention on domestic issues, especially the need to repair the party’s relationship with organized labor. The CDM’s early focus on domestic issues was crucial as it was this group through which Rostow would make his first substantial statement against détente. Yet the administration’s foreign policy was a non-issue in 1972, and most of 1973.26

This is not to say that Rostow fully turned away from foreign policy concerns in the early 1970s. He worried a great deal about the potential outbreak of another war between the Arab states and Israel. Like many American Jews, Rostow had been profoundly affected by the Six-Day War in June of 1967. As historian Melani McAlister has argued, American Jews viewed the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors with the fear of a potential “second Holocaust in Israel.” After Israel’s stunning victory,

American Jews became far more committed to the cause of Israel than had previously been the case.27 Prior to the war Rostow’s support for Israel had been moderate. He had even argued against the establishment of a specifically Jewish state in Palestine after

World War II.28 During the war, however, Rostow served on the State Department

26 The CDM statement appeared as a paid advertisement in the New York Times and the Washington Post see, New York Times, 7 December 1972, 14; Vaïsse, 81-100. 27 McAlister, 111-112. 28 For Rostow’s views towards Israel before 1948 see, Eugene Rostow, “Palestine and American Immigration,” The American Scholar, 16 no. 3 (Summer 1947), 291-301.

35 committee in charge of negotiating a settlement to the conflict. He developed close friendships with prominent Israeli’s including foreign minister Abba Eban and ambassador to the UN Gideon Rafael. As we shall see, Rostow came to view Israel’s leaders as exemplary of Western rationalism and Israel as a European outpost in the

Middle East. He identified closely with the Israeli position on the dispute with the Arab states. “The reasons for the stalemate [in the peace process] are obvious,” Rostow remarked in 1972. “The basic obstacle to peace has been the continuation and intensification of terrorist activities, supported or condoned by Arab governments.”29

Cold War considerations also greatly influenced Rostow’s growing concern with events in the Middle East. Although the Soviet Union had supported the establishment of

Israel in 1948, by 1955 Moscow had begun to provide Egypt and Syria with military hardware. The Soviets had supported Arab forces during the Six-Day War.30 In April of

1970, Moscow stationed Soviet pilots in Egypt as part of Egypt’s air defense forces.

Rostow feared that the region was again on the brink of war. “The needle of my private seismograph has broken off under the strain” of the situation in the Middle East, he wrote to Senator Edmund Muskie that spring.31

Greatly influencing Rostow’s “private seismograph” was his Orientalized vision of Arab peoples that characterized them as irrational religious extremists. In March 1970,

U.S. ambassador to Kuwait John Walsh told Rostow that he was of the opinion that to the

Arab’s psychological fixation on hating Israel was the reason for the conflict’s

29 Eugene V. Rostow, Peace in the Balance: The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 272-273. 30 Little, 130, 241-242; Craig Daigle, The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969-1973 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 14-15. 31 Rostow to Edmund S. Muskie, 11 May 1970, folder Mn-Mz (1970-Present), box 3, Original Accession, EVR Papers.

36 endurance, “We simply must realize that the Arabs are candidates for the psycho ward,” he remarked. Rostow responded in kind, “Your stress on the state of psychological disorientation in the Arab mind at this point seems to me absolutely central.” Rostow pointed to Arab religious fundamentalism warning, “The next step will be to begin reading again how events are in the hands of Allah.” He also complained of the psychological damage done to Americans by the Vietnam War. “We too seem reluctant to face reality,” he lamented. In contrast to Americans, however, Arab psychological disorientation stemmed not from any single event, but from a longstanding tension between “Arab loyalties” which led them to desire Israel’s destruction and “their instinct for self-preservation,” which might cause them to make peace with Israel. 32

He blamed the Soviet support for the Arab states for enabling them to continue to reject Israel’s right to exist. In making this argument, Rostow relied on an Orientalized rhetoric that characterized Arab peoples as undifferentiated, driven by emotion. “Israel,” he warned in a 1972 book, “cannot contain the Arab masses if the Soviet Union arouses them to fury and provides their air cover and their cutting edge.”33 In emphasizing the emotional nature of Arabs, Rostow deployed discourses of gender and maturity as well as race. These ideas of race, gender, and maturity were mutually reinforcing.34 That Arabs acted out of emotion feminized them. In their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist they displayed the obstinacy of children. Israel’s leaders, in contrast, maintained the cool rationalism associated with adult, white men. Rostow’s personal friendship with Israeli’s inflected his opinion of their rationality. After a meeting with leading Israeli’s—including

32 John P. Walsh to Rostow, 5 March 1970, and Rostow’s response on 25 March 1970, folder Walsh, John P., box 3, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 33 Rostow, Peace in the Balance, 279. 34 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 38-39.

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Moshe Dayan and Eban—in April 1971, Rostow described his impression. They displayed “no bellicosity,” but rather a “sober…calm and confident” mood. They might have been anxious over maintaining security, but they displayed “nothing like real panic” when discussing the Arab-Israeli dispute.35

Rostow’s identification of Israel with “the West” was part of the growing tendency among Americans to think of Israelis as “surrogate Americans.” According to cultural historian Michelle Mart, postwar Americans came to view Israeli’s as western through cultural and political narratives that compared Jewish settlers to American pioneers. These same narratives portrayed Arabs as “backward” and “immature.” Thus,

Israelis became “insiders” sharing in a “Judeo-Christian civilization” while Arabs remained “outsiders.”36

That the Arab states controlled a vast swath of the world’s petroleum supply made the potential of the Soviet’s incitement to violence all the more dangerous. Between 1948 and 1972, American consumption of oil had risen threefold, but European and Japanese dependence on oil spiked more sharply. On the eve of the October War, oil accounted for

45.4 percent of America’s energy consumption. In Europe, it comprised 60 percent of energy use, 75.2 percent in Japan.37 If Moscow were to achieve control of the region, the

“[o]il essential to the European (and Japanese) economies could be used as a lever of

35 Rostow described his view on Israeli leaders in a memo to Wally Barbour written after Rostow met at length with Israeli officials in the spring of 1971. See Rostow to Wally Barbour, 17 April 1971, folder Ba- Bec, box 1, Original Accession, EVR Papers. 36 Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), X, 66-67, 93. 37 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 76-77.

38 political coercion.”38 Here Rostow proved partially prophetic as the Arab states later used their control of oil for political leverage through OPEC embargoes.

While Rostow believed an eruption of the Arab-Israeli conflict was possible, he thought it unlikely, especially in the context of détente. Ironically, his conviction that the

Soviets gave the orders to the Arab states led him to conclude that an Arab attack on

Israel was doubtful. The Soviets, he noted in a 1972 book, were “not foolhardy.” They had “thus far held back from the course of unlimited proxy war.”39 Détente gave Rostow every reason to believe this policy would continue beyond 1973. In August of that year, he delivered a remarkably enthusiastic summary of U.S. foreign relations. He again credited the increase in trade between the two superpowers for creating a “state of our foreign policy” that was “excellent.” He concluded, “The pressure for restraint in Soviet policy implicit in the tensions of the Soviet-American-Chinese triangle have been reinforced by [Soviet] dependence upon the United States for food, and for badly needed economic technology.”40 As the autumn of 1973 began, Rostow remained certain that détente had forced the Soviets to moderate, if not wholly abandon, their expansionist designs.

The Shock of 1973: Oil, Race, and the Birth of the Anti-Détente Movement

Two months later, on the afternoon of October 6, forces of the Egyptian and

Syrian militaries launched a surprise attack on Israeli military positions in the Sinai desert and Golan Heights. The assault, begun during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, caught

38 Rostow, Peace in the Balance, 254. 39 Rostow, Peace in the Balance, 277. 40 Eugene Rostow, “The Best is Yet to Be,” Remarks at the Yale Law School Dinner during the Annual Convention of the American Bar Association, Washington, D.C. 7 August 1973, folder Freedom House (Leonard R. Sussman), box 3, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

39 the Israeli forces entirely by surprise. The Syrian military threatened to overrun the Golan

Heights while the Egyptian army dug in against an expected Israeli counterattack, which, when it came, resulted in heavy losses for the Israeli Defense Force. On October 13, after receiving a plea from Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Nixon ordered an airlift to supply Israeli with desperately needed military hardware. American C-5A transport planes carried tanks, munitions, and other war materials to the beleaguered Israeli army, giving the Israelis the advantage on both fronts.

The war continued despite a UN security resolution passed on October 22 to end the conflict. With Israel on the verge of enveloping Egypt’s Third Army, Soviet Premier

Leonid Brezhnev threatened to airlift Soviet troops into Egypt on October 24. Nixon responded by heightening the ready status of America’s armed forces to DEFCON 3, two levels from all-out war. Brezhnev relented, and Kissinger convinced the Israelis to accept the ceasefire in exchange for $2.2 billion worth of military aid. The war officially ended on October 26 after 20 days of fighting.41 Over 2,500 Israeli soldiers died in the conflict, with another 5,500 wounded. The cost of life on the other side was far greater. Estimates vary widely, but between 11,000 and 22,000 Arabs died, and between 18,000 and 66,000 were wounded during the war. While Israel suffered far fewer casualties, Egypt’s successful advance across Israeli defensive fortifications had, according to one historian,

“destroyed the myth of Israeli invincibility.”42

For détente’s proponents, the October War stood as testament to the Nixon administration’s ability to conduct a successful foreign policy even when saddled with

41 Little, 106-107, 242-243, Quote on page 243; Westad, 197-199. 42 The October War: A Retrospective, Richard B. Parker, ed. (Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2001), 9.

40 the escalating Watergate scandal. While the conflict brought the superpowers close to war, neither Soviet nor American forces became directly involved in the crisis. America’s ally had emerged victorious, and the Soviets had proved helpful in brokering the deal that ended the fighting. These positive outcomes led Henry Kissinger to conclude years later that the Middle East War of 1973 represented “the most striking example” of détente’s success in achieving the nation’s “strategic aims” with a minimal loss of blood and treasure.43

Eugene Rostow, however, derived a very different lesson from the conflict. He concluded that the war had been the work of the Soviet Union, and détente had been a ruse in service of Soviet expansionism. “The events of October in the Middle East,” he wrote in early November 1973, “should finally dispel the dangerous illusion that the

President has…achieved a détente with the Soviet Union.” The inclusion of “finally” in the statement was more than a little disingenuous given that until the previous month

Rostow had counted as one of those under Nixon’s “illusion.” Now, he believed that every action undertaken by the Kremlin since the détente era began— signing the SALT agreement, convincing Hanoi to accept the Paris Peace accords, importing American goods—was designed to put the West at its ease while Soviet leaders planned their master stroke in the Middle East. “There is no détente,” Rostow definitively concluded, “It takes two to détente” [emphasis in original].44

Problematizing Rostow’s view of the Arab-Israeli conflict was the fact that in the early 1970s it had been the Israelis, not the Arab states, who had refused to come to the

43 Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 248-249. 44 Vaïsse, 101; Rostow refrained from tying his denouncement of détente to the unfolding Watergate scandal. He was committed to maintaining the power of the executive, and considered Nixon’s domestic opponents overzealous and “puritanical,” see, Rostow, “The Best is Yet to Be.”

41 negotiating table. As historian Craig Daigle has noted, Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister

Hafez Ismail met with both Nixon and Kissinger in early 1973 to try to break the impasse that had existed since 1967. Hafez stated that Egypt was prepared to normalize relations with Israel—“ending the state of war,” ending the Arab boycott of Israeli goods, allowing the “free passage of international waterways,” etc. Egypt was not yet prepared to enter into “full diplomatic relations” which meant at the moment there would be no exchange of ambassadors, and no “formal recognition of Israel as a state.” Both Kissinger and

Nixon pressed Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to jump at this opportunity to work towards normalizing relations. She flatly refused. According to Daigle, Meir “considered

Israel militarily impregnable and felt there was no need for change.” She explained to

Nixon, “We never had it so good…The planes are coming in and we are okay through

’73.”45 These words would come to haunt Meir after the war. Despite their victory,

Israelis were horrified at the death of so many young soldiers less than thirty years after the Holocaust. Israelis gathered to protest outside Meir’s residence with signs that read,

“Grandma, your defense minister [Dayan] is a failure and 3,000 of your grandchildren are dead.”46

Rostow’s belief that the Soviets were heavily involved in the conflict’s planning also falls apart under scrutiny. Historians of the conflict have concluded that although the

Soviets provided arms and training to the Arab states in the years prior to 1973, they had almost no prior knowledge of the attack. The war was in large part the work of Egyptian

45 Daigle, 250-258, Meier quote on 258; Daigle also drew vital connections between détente and the October War. He argued that the war was, in part, caused by détente, as Sadat feared that the rapprochement between the superpowers diminished their incentive to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute. 46 Quoted in Shaul Mitelpunkt, “The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations and the Rediscovery of American Empire, 1958-1968,” (Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2013), 134.

42

President Anwar el-Sadat, who hoped that it would force Israel, the Soviet Union, and the

United States back to the negotiating table in order to reach a permanent settlement to the conflict. Destroying Israel was not Sadat’s purpose.47 While the Egyptian president’s motivation for launching the war on Israel was not widely known at the time, tension between Egypt and the Soviet Union could be seen. The Kremlin might have placed pilots in Egypt in 1970, but by 1972 relations between the two governments were strained to the breaking point. In July of that year, Sadat expelled Soviet military advisors from the country in response to the Kremlin’s failure to push for a solution to the Israeli occupation of Egyptian land at the Moscow summit. Sadat’s break with the Soviets made front-page headlines across the United States.48 Given such a public split between a prominent Arab leader and the Kremlin, one might have expected Rostow to at least entertain the possibility that the war was not a Soviet “lunge” for global hegemony.

Yet Rostow never doubted the Soviet role in provoking the war. Race provided the prism through which he viewed the crisis. To those who claimed that the Arab states would be satisfied by “a return of the territories Israel occupied in 1967,” Rostow again appealed to the idea of Arab irrationality and emotionalism. “If this were the case, the

Arab states would have agreed long since to a conference” to reach a settlement. Instead, a “burning Arab conviction” felt by all in the region that “the Balfour Declaration and all that flowed from it was a crime against Arab rights” kept them from making peace.49

47 Little, 106-107, 242-243; Daigle, 4-9. 48 Daigle, 230-237; “Egypt Tells Soviet to Withdraw Military Advisers and Experts, Citing a ‘New Stage’ in Relations,” New York Times, 19 July 1972, 1. 49 Rostow, Draft of “Comment for the New Leader on Professor Morgenthau’s article in the issue of December, 24 1973,” 26 December 1973, folder New-Nz (1970-Present), box 3, Original Accession, EVR Papers.

43

During the months following the war he embarked on a transatlantic mission to convince Americans and allies in Europe that Soviet machinations lay behind the Arab attack. In a draft of an article for The New Republic Rostow declared, “When the Soviet

Union offers the Arabs the glittering dream of Holy War to destroy Israel even men like

King Hussein and Bourguiba, who genuinely believe in peace with Israel, cannot refuse to join the Jihad.” Rostow’s references to “Holy War” and “Jihad” emphasized the significance he placed on Islamic fundamentalism in determining the actions of Arab leaders. In choosing the word “cannot,” as opposed to “will not,” Rostow implied that the decision of Arab leaders to attack Israel was not a rational one. It was not even truly a choice. The Soviets held out a “glittering dream” of holy war, and the Arabs were drawn inexorably towards it. The October War had been “the Soviet Union’s bold attempt to gain control of the space and the oil of the great arc” that ran from North Africa to Iran. 50

Only the “brilliant and courageous success of the Israeli defense forces,” had staved off disaster.51

At stake in the war was nothing short of the survival of the postwar alliance. The

Middle East’s geographic importance meant that the Arab invasion of Israel was aimed

“not only against Israel but also, and primarily, against Europe.” Rostow informed an audience at the NATO defense college in Rome that the Soviets, using their Arab proxies, had launched “a war to outflank Europe from the South, to cut all communications between Europe and Asia, to gain control of the petroleum supplies on which Europe and the United States and Japan depend, and to split Europe irrevocably from the United

50 Ibid. 51 “Middle East Crisis led world to brink, ex-U.S. official says,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 28 October 1973, folder The American Jewish Committee, box 9, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

44

States.”52 The consequences of such a development for the West would be dire indeed.

Cut off from its allies in Europe and Asia, America would have little choice but to cede global governance over to the Soviet Union.

Europe’s divided response over the OPEC embargo only strengthened Rostow’s conviction that events in the Middle East threatened NATO’s very existence. On October

20, OPEC voted to embargo oil shipments to the United States in retaliation for

America’s aiding of Israel—as well as to cut production by 5 percent per month until the reestablishment of the 1967 borders between Israel and its Arab neighbors. U.S. allies in

Europe and Japan were especially hard hit. Almost immediately the price of petroleum quadrupled from $2.70 a barrel in September 1973 to $11.00 a barrel in July 1974. The

“nuclear weapon of the oil embargo” Rostow admonished a British audience in

December 1973, should have led to “a policy of close collaboration among Europe, North

America, and Japan.”53 Instead, most of America’s allies distanced themselves from the

United States and Israel early in the conflict. Far more dependent on oil imports than was the United States, nearly every European state refused to assist the American airlift during the war, openly siding with the Arab states. At the height of the crisis, Rostow expressed his dismay at Europe’s “pro-Arab stand” to Belgian politician Etienne

Davignon: “We are dealing here with a most dangerous Soviet move, like the Korean

War in format, infinitely more dangerous in its implications” [emphasis in the original].54

Once the fighting had stopped, Nixon and Kissinger attempted to form a consumer bloc

52 Eugene Rostow, “The American-European-Japanese Triangle.” 18 January 1974, folder Ta-Tn, box 4, Original Accession, EVR Papers. 53 Eugene Rostow, “Where are We, and Where are We Going? Reflections on the Future of Atlantic Relations,” Prepared for Delivery at the Annual Dinner of the British Atlantic Committee, London, 4 December 1973, folder Miscellaneous-EVR, 1981, box 6, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 54 Rostow to Davignon, 18 October 1973, folder Da-Deb, box 1, Original Accession, EVR Papers.

45 with which to meet the OPEC embargo. In a sign of the decline of American hegemony during the early 1970s, most of the European governments and Japan pursued bilateral deals with the Arab states. The result was a massive transfer of wealth to the oil exporting nations.55

Rostow was not alone in interpreting the OPEC embargo as a Soviet plot to divide and conquer the postwar alliance. The political cartoon (figure one below) provided an illuminating example of how race shaped interpretations of the oil embargo as a Cold

War crisis. Drawn by Israeli-American political cartoonist and Six-Day War veteran

Ranan Lurie, It first appeared in Newsweek International and the New York Times Special

Features Syndicate. Hadassah Magazine, published by the Women’s Zionist

Organization of America, reproduced the cartoon to accompany Rostow’s article “The

Middle East Conflict in Perspective.” The cartoon depicted a brutish Soviet military officer—broad shouldered, thick-necked with a pinched face and leering grin—with an

Arab sheik in his “back pocket.” This indicated both his control over the Arab world, and the secretive nature of that control. It would not be obvious to an opponent staring at the

Soviet soldier’s front that he had such an important “weapon” until he reached back and grabbed it, and he appeared in the process of doing just that. The Orientalized Arab figure had a scraggly beard, shadowy, sinister eyes, a protruding nose, and a smile that displayed only two bucked teeth. In his front pocket—with the word “oil” prominently written—he held a European and a Japanese businessman. That they were shown in his front pocket indicated that the Arab states influence over Western Europe and Japan was well-known. The two figures wore their coats upturned and huddled together for warmth,

55 Stein, 76-77.

46 revealing how the lack of an energy source had left them at the mercy of the oil-rich Arab states, especially in the middle of winter. The message of the cartoon was clear: Europe and Japan were at the mercy, literally in the pockets, of the Arab states, who took their orders from the Soviet Union. That the cartoon appeared alongside Rostow’s article on

Israel’s strategic importance to the United States further evidenced Israel’s role not only as a Cold War ally, but as a defender of Western civilization as well.56

-Figure omitted due to copyright-

Figure 1.

If the Arab states could not be made to see reason, as Rostow believed they could not, then the U.S. government needed to act forcefully. Only by reasserting America’s power could the Arab states be made to submit to the peace process. The United States and its European allies needed to make it “plain” that they “recognize[d] and [would] fulfill their ultimate moral and political responsibility for the existence of Israel.” Then the Arab “dream of destroying Israel…fade from the realm of practical politics.”57 By making it clear that the West would use all its might to defend Israel would the Arabs

56A copy of the image can be found in John Rosenberg, “The Quest against Détente: Eugene Rostow, the October War, and the Origins of the Anti-Détente Movement, 1969-1976,” Diplomatic History, published online 28 August 2014, print edition forthcoming, 17. 57 Rostow, Draft of “Comment for the New Leader on Professor Morgenthau’s article in the issue of December, 24 1973.”

47 break with the Soviets and come to the negotiating table. The same reasoning extended to the protection of western economic interests in the region. “Would there have been an oil embargo,” he queried Hubert Humphrey, “if our forces had been clearly supreme in the

Mediterranean and the Red Sea?” For Rostow the answer was clearly no. The United

States thus needed to adopt a new arms program to demonstrate American strength to the

Soviets and their Arab “clients.”58

Of course, believing that a foreign government will only respond to force is not necessarily evidence of racism at work. The totalizing way in which Rostow rendered

Arab peoples, however, was revealing of how Orientalist discourse inflected his views on the use of force. Rarely did Rostow differentiate between the peoples of the region and their specific heads of government. Instead, he spoke of an Arab world with a “tangible essence”—to use political scientist Mahmood Mamdani’s phrasing—that “explain[ed] politics as a consequence of that essence.” The Arab-Israeli conflict was the result of

Arab pathology, not of specific events, individuals, and choices. All Arabs shared in an irrational fanaticism that necessitated, at the very least, a shift away from the rhetoric of détente and a demonstrable increase of the defense budget. 59

Rostow believe that the first, vital step in this process was for the president and

Kissinger to make a public statement acknowledging that détente was a mistake, and then to proceed with a new, assertive foreign policy. But, as noted above, the Nixon administration showed no sign that they thought the October War had exposed détente.

Kissinger publicly praised Soviet behavior as “constructive” at the Geneva peace talks in

58 Rostow to Humphrey, 12 April 1976, folder Hubert H. Humphrey, box 6, Original Accession, EVR Papers. 59 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Reprint edition (New York: Harmony, 2005), 17.

48

December 1973. Such utterances exasperated Rostow who accused Kissinger of letting

“ego” cloud his judgment. “[Kissinger] just can’t say ‘I am disappointed,’” he complained, “far less that ‘we were had’” by the Soviets.60 Less than three years later,

Rostow would go so far as to draw a parallel between Nixon and Kissinger’s behavior after hostilities had ceased to the Watergate scandal that ultimately toppled Nixon’s presidency. He accused Nixon and Kissinger of having “covered up the Soviet role in the

October War,” in order to “preserve the illusion of détente.”61 With Nixon and Kissinger deceiving the American people, it fell to Rostow to publicize the danger the October War had made evident. But he could not command the attention of the national press, nor the administration, on his own. Rostow thus began 1974 in search of a platform that would enable him to reach more Americans with his dire warning of Soviet intentions. He needed the support of likeminded, influential Americans to show that his was not the only voice being raised in opposition to détente.

Eugene Rostow Launches a “Head-on Assault of Détente”

Other prominent Americans who played leading roles in the anti-détente movement did not necessarily express their opinions in such starkly Orientalist terms as did Rostow. Still, they saw the October War and OPEC embargo as revelatory of Nixon and Kissinger’s foreign policy failures. Nuclear defense strategist Albert Wohlstetter, for example, wrote a highly critical piece for Orbis in February 1974 that identified the

October War as crucial to unmasking détente. He noted that while 1973 began with the superpowers entering a “period of negotiation,” by the end of the year it had become

60 Rostow to Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert Ellsworth, 20 September 1974, folder E (1970-Present), box 2, Original Accession, EVR Papers. 61 Eugene Rostow, “The Soviet Threat to Europe through the Middle East,” 2 June 1976, folder The Soviet Threat to Europe through the Middle East, box11, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

49 clear that ‘“Détente had been stretched quite taut.” This purposeful understatement played on détente’s literal meaning: a “relaxation of tensions.” In remarking that détente had been stretched taut, Wohlstetter denied that it existed at all. Like Rostow, he saw in the Arab-Israeli conflict the most glaring evidence of Soviet duplicity, stating, “The

Soviet Union…was not impelled by its knowledge of the impending attack to consult the

United States on heading it off. Nor did it resist making appeals to other Arab countries to join in.”62 While Wohlstetter would never officially join with Rostow in the CPD, the two men corresponded and read one another’s work with praise. As Justin Vaïsse has argued, Wohlstetter’s highly technical arguments on the strategic balance provided détente’s enemies with a powerful critique of arms control. 63

Paul Nitze too saw the October War as revelatory of Nixon and Kissinger’s failures in foreign policy. Nitze, the son of a wealthy German-American family, had long been a prominent figure in the foreign policy establishment. In 1950, while serving as

Director of Policy Planning for the State Department under President Truman, Nitze authored National Security Directive-68 (NSC-68). This top-secret document became the basis for American Cold War foreign policy. He later served as Secretary of the Navy and negotiator to the SALT talks. It was no coincidence that Nitze resigned from his position on the SALT negotiating team eight months after the October War. Although his resignation letter cited the ongoing political imbroglio over Watergate as the reason for his departure, his disillusionment with détente was as important, if not more so for

62 Albert Wohlstetter, Draft of article “Threats and Promises of Peace: Europe and America in the New Era,” 16 February 1974, folder Writings, Draft of article for Orbis titled “Threats and Promises of Peace.” Feb. 16, 1974, box 170, the Albert J. and Robert Wohlstetter Papers, The Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. 63 On Wohlstetter and his influence on the CPD see, Vaïsse, 149-154.

50 turning him against the administration. Within months of his resignation Nitze began to publicly condemn détente. It had not, he declared, created the “restraints on Soviet ambitions and actions” that its architects had implied it would. The war in the Middle

East clearly demonstrated this fact.64 “The October 1973 crisis marked a watershed,”

Nitze remarked to an audience at Johns Hopkins in May 1975. Before the war, he recalled, many foreign policy experts thought that the relative decline in American influence abroad would be offset by the “economic miracles of Western Europe and

Japan.” Nitze explained, “It was hoped that Europe and Japan were becoming independent centers of power, strong enough to relieve us of many responsibilities which in the past the United States had had to shoulder more or less alone.” But, “In a period of just two weeks in October of 1973, all of these hopeful assumptions were found to be unwarranted.” For all their economic influence, Japan and Western Europe “were almost totally without influence in the situation.”65

For Nitze, the war and subsequent oil crisis proved that Europe and Japan’s prosperity was no substitute for America’s military might. Economic strength “not coupled with other elements of power, diplomatic and military… [was] a source of vulnerability rather than of influence.”66 Nitze, like Rostow, thus concluded that military power remained the defining feature of global politics. His opposition to détente would prove crucial. Besides Rostow, Nitze was the individual most responsible for founding

64 Paul H. Nitze Presentation, “The Impact of the Middle East Crisis on the American Policy to Allies,” 6 September 1974, folder 2, box 198, Paul H. Nitze Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C. (Hereafter PHN Papers). 65 Paul H. Nitze Presentation before the Conference on “OPEC: Confrontation or Accommodation,” The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington D.C., 2 May 1975, folder 9, box 32, PHN Papers. 66 Paul H. Nitze Presentation, “Where we are, How We Got There,” Presentation before the Miami Council on Foreign Relations, 22 April 1975, folder 7, box 198, PHN Papers.

51 and leading the Committee on the Present Danger, and he was arguably its most respected voice on foreign affairs.

Rostow first found substantial support for his position within the Coalition for a

Democratic Majority. Many of the group’s other members were also avowed defenders of

Israel, and near the end of 1973 the CDM had begun to turn its attention towards foreign relations. That the turn coincided with Rostow’s own disillusionment with détente was no coincidence. Rostow was the one turning them. In February 1974, the CDM announced the creation of a “foreign policy task force” under his leadership. The group’s members included old friends from the Johnson administration such as George Ball and Henry

Fowler, union leader Albert Shanker, and other disaffected liberals like Norman

Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Their first priority was producing a thorough statement on their reasons for rejecting détente.67 Five months later, on July 31, the group issued its report.

Titled “The Quest for Détente,” the CDM taskforce’s statement, historian

Raymond Garthoff argued, “[R]epresented the first major head-on assault of the entire

Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente.”68 The report began by reassuring Americans that its authors supported the pursuit of “a state of genuine peace with the Soviet Union.” The

White House, however, insisted on claiming that the goal of détente had already been achieved. The report repeated Rostow’s contention that that the Administration was

“soothing” Americans into an unwarranted sense of security, just as Britain and France’s leaders had done during the 1930s. In truth, détente was an illusion, the report informed.

67 Vaïsse, 101-102, Nitze, who was still part of the administration when the taskforce was formed was ineligible to join. 68Garthoff, 461-462.

52

Far from achieving peace, Nixon’s foreign policy had opened the door to Soviet expansionism around the world. “The pressure of Soviet policy…is strongly felt in the

Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, the North Sea, Southeast Asia, and many parts of the world.” Détente, so far as the Soviets understood the term, did not mean an end to imperial expansion. Rather, it meant only that the two sides had agreed to avoid nuclear war, thus enabling them “to conduct revolutionary and proxy wars at will,” while the Soviet military surpassed the United States in strategic and conventional strength.

While Rostow oversaw the drafting of the report, the Orientalist assumptions so pronounced in his own writings were largely absent here, perhaps because in such

“official statements” groups tended to portray their positions as detached and objective.

The conclusions that followed from those assumptions, however, remained intact. The report posited that the October War had revealed the Soviet’s true motivations. At the inception of détente, each side had pledged to “respect each other’s security interests, and renounce the use or the threat of force.” Yet “there [was] no way in which the patterns of

Soviet action that followed [could] be reconciled with these principles.” Rather, the

Soviet Union had “helped decisively” in bringing about the war in the Middle East, clear evidence of its duplicitous nature. “Since October, 1973,” the report continued, “the

Soviets have continued to provide military aid to the Arab states,” and to support

“Palestinian terrorist and political groups” who opposed a settlement. The OPEC oil embargo, meanwhile, was, according to the taskforce, the result of “Soviet prodding” to the Arab states rather than of their own initiative.69

69 The Quest for Détente: A Statement by the Foreign Policy Task Force of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, folder Coalition for a Democratic Majority, box 4, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

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The only solution to such naked aggression was a return to the military policies and rhetoric of the pre-détente era. “The growing potency of Soviet arms” combined with a “relative decline in American strength” had resulted in an unstable “structure of peace” that continuously threatened to break down under the pressure of Soviet expansionism.

The report concluded with the recommendation that a massive arms program be implemented to “maintain deterrence at the conventional as well as the nuclear level.”

Equally important for the CDM taskforce was the need for the administration to alter the language it deployed in describing U.S.-Soviet relations. “The rhetoric and arguments employed in [Nixon’s] proclamations of détente serve to inspire increasingly strong public demands for a unilateral and massive reduction of our costly military establishment.” 70

The Quest for Détente received scant attention in the press, appearing as it did during the denouement of the Watergate scandal. Just a week after its publication, Nixon resigned from the presidency. The taskforce’s statement was lost amidst the din of media coverage surrounding the disgraced Nixon. The New York Times and the Washington

Post wrote perfunctory summaries of the group’s position in articles buried beneath the juicier intrigues of Watergate. As far as the public at large was concerned, there remained little reason to revisit the nation’s foreign policy.71

One person who did not ignore the CDM’s message was Henry Kissinger. The

Secretary of State, continuing on in his role under Gerald Ford, responded directly to

Rostow to defend his policies. If one defined détente as a “relaxation of international

70 Ibid. 71 Bernard Gwertzman, “Democrats Score Nixon on Detente” New York Times, 1 August 1974, 7; Murrey Marder, “Battle Lines are Forming on Détente,” Washington Post, 1August 1974, A 25.

54 tension,” Kissinger explained, then the administration was “justified in arguing that it exists today.” On the all-important question of the Middle East, he acknowledged that

Soviet arms shipments “ha[d] been troublesome.” But, Kissinger argued, “Following the

October War, Soviet behavior was not unhelpful.” They had, after all, cosponsored the

UN resolution to end the conflict, a fact that Kissinger directly attributed to improved relations between the superpowers.72

Rostow, meanwhile, remained convinced that responsibility for the troubles in the

Middle East lay at the feet of Soviet leaders. Responding to Kissinger’s letter, he wrote “I should deny that there has been any improvement in Soviet behavior in the Middle East.”

The Soviets, he admonished Kissinger, had done “everything they could, short of public intervention, to assure the success of the aggression.” Their support for a cease-fire could be easily explained. The Soviets sought peace “when their proxy war was lost,” and their

Arab forces appeared to be on the verge of defeat. Rostow again connected détente’s conciliatory language with European appeasement of Nazi Germany during the 1930s. By applauding Soviet-American cooperation in ending the conflict, Kissinger had succeeded only in “lull[ing] Western public opinion” into a false sense of security.73

Separating Rostow and Kissinger was more than their interpretation of Soviet behavior in the Middle East. One obvious difference between the two men was

72 Henry Kissinger to Rostow, 19 August 1974, folder Coalition for a Democratic Majority, box 4, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. Kissinger left out of his letter to Rostow the fact that he had pursued a far harder line with the Soviets during the crisis than was widely known at the time. During the crisis, he informed Chinese ambassador Huang Chen, “Our objective is always, when the Soviet Union appears, to demonstrate that whoever gets help from the Soviet Union cannot achieve his objective, whatever it is.” Rostow no doubt would have applauded such a sentiment had he been aware of it, but nothing short of a public break with the Soviets would have satisfied him. Quoted in Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 308. 73 Rostow to Kissinger, 4 September 1974, folder Coalition for a Democratic Majority, box 4, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

55

Kissinger’s willingness to negotiate with the Arab states. In an era of increased domestic and international constraints on U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger hoped to extend American influence by building relationships between himself and world leaders. He personally oversaw the resolution of the crisis generated by the October War, “shuttling” between

Egypt, Israel, Syria, and the Soviet Union to broker a deal.74 Rostow, in contrast, believed that any constraints on America’s ability to use force had to be overcome by convincing

Americans that the nation faced a grave danger. The first step, as Rostow had argued earlier that year, was for Nixon to acknowledge “the myth that his paper agreements of peaceful coexistence with the Soviets reflect reality.”75

Another important difference between Rostow and Kissinger was the role their

Jewish identities played in their professional lives. Kissinger, as Jeremi Suri has argued, worried that his identity as a German, Jewish immigrant would raise concerns about his loyalty. Working in a Republican administration for a president prone to anti-Semitic remarks only increased his worries. Kissinger thus generally downplayed his Jewish identity. When Nixon appointed him to be Secretary of State in September of 1973, for instance, Kissinger privately thanked him for not mentioning his “Jewish background.”

During his negotiations with the Arab states and Israel, Kissinger placed the utmost importance on providing the impression of impartiality. He later stated, “[G]iven the historical suspicions of my religion, I had a special obligation to do so.”76

74 On Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy see Hanhimäki, 302-331. 75 Eugene Rostow, “The Syrian Negotiation and Middle Eastern Peace,” 6 May 1974, folder May 6, 1974- The Syrian Negotiation and Middle Eastern Peace, box 11, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 76 Quoted in Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 250, 252, on Nixon’s anti-Semitism see, 207-211.

56

Rostow, on the other hand, was open with both his Jewishness and his partiality for Israel. That he belonged to the Democratic Party supported by the vast majority of

American-Jews no doubt influenced his willingness to be open with his background. “As

Jews” he had told the readers of Haddasah Magazine in 1974, we feel a deep and natural concern about the well-being of Israel.” Although Rostow always argued that the United

States should support Israel for its strategic importance rather than “out of sentiment,” creating the appearance of impartiality in the Middle East was inconsequential for him.77

While there existed important distinctions between the views expressed by

Rostow and Kissinger, it is important not to overstate their differences. Scholars who focus on the moral dimensions of the anti-détente movement on the Right have tended to portray Henry Kissinger’s policies as fundamentally opposed to the assertive foreign policy implemented under Ronald Reagan.78 Yet there was much continuity between

Kissinger and his detractors on the Right. Kissinger may well have been more willing to negotiate with the Arab states than would Rostow, but this fact did not preclude his own

Orientalist conception of Arab peoples as irrational. “In the nutty Arab world I am sort of a mythical figure,” he remarked to Brent Scowcroft before his departure for Cairo at the height of the October War. “The Arabs think I am a magician.”79 Nor did Kissinger’s efforts to appear impartial toward Israel mean that he actually was impartial. On the eve of the ceasefire set to end the war, Kissinger informed Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that the United States would not protest if the Israeli forces continued attacking the Arab armies for a few hours after the ceasefire was set to take effect. When Meir responded,

77 Eugene Rostow, “The Middle East Conflict in Perspective,” Hadassah Magazine, January 1974, folder Ha-Hd, box 2, Original Accession, EVR Papers. 78 See for example Suri, “Détente and its Discontents,” 241-243. 79 Quoted in Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, 254.

57

“If they don’t stop, we won’t,” Kissinger responded, “Even if they do…” As historian

Jussi Hanhimäki argued in his biography of the Secretary of State, the exchange revealed both Kissinger’s “wish to see the Israelis in as strong a position as possible,” and his

“little respect for formal agreements.”80

Kissinger and Rostow shared the same fundamental beliefs. According to

Hanhimäki, “[Kissinger] operated, essentially, in the same bilateral framework as his predecessors.” Like Rostow, “he was unable to break with some of the persistent paradigms of the Cold War.”81 Kissinger might have preferred diplomacy over the use of force, but he had no compunctions against using covert warfare to achieve U.S. aims as evidenced by his involvement in the CIA’s “economic warfare” against Chile that set the stage for a coup against the socialist government.82 Kissinger was still a Cold Warrior. He explained to Rostow, “I did not disagree with [the CDM statement’s] goals. We do seem to differ on some of the means of their achievement…” 83 In sum, the differences between

Kissinger and Rostow were more tactical than strategic. Neither man rejected the Cold

War, nor did they doubt that the United States was justified in intervening abroad when it served its interests. This truth would become even more evident during the Carter administration. No longer in office, Kissinger would join with Rostow in opposing ratification of the SALT II treaty until the United States had adopted a stronger foreign policy.84 By 1980, Kissinger’s foreign policy pronouncements sounded remarkably similar to those of Eugene Rostow and Ronald Reagan.

80 Hanhimäki, 313. 81 Ibid, xviii. 82 Ibid, 100-105. 83 Kissinger to Rostow, 19 August 1974. 84 By 1979, Kissinger’s public position on the state of American foreign policy differed little from Rostow’s own interpretation, as evidenced by his testimony against Senate ratification of the SALT II

58

In 1974, however, The CDM had failed to move the needle of public opinion on détente and the state of American foreign policy. But a year later inspiration for a new effort to displace détente would come from an unlikely source, France. Rostow and the other members of the CDM had not been the only ones worried over the effect of the

October War and the OPEC embargo on western “will.” As Rostow planned the anti- détente campaign, he remained in contact with prominent Europeans through his leadership of the Atlantic Treaty Association (ATA). Founded in 1954, the ATA functioned as an umbrella group with representative organizations in each of the NATO member countries. In the United States, the Atlantic Council represented the ATA; in

Germany, the Deutsche Atlantische Gesellschaft; in Great Britain, the British Atlantic

Committee, and so on. These individual groups promoted Atlantic solidarity within their own countries. They met once a year under the auspices of the ATA to plan for future efforts in each individual nation. It was at one such meeting that the idea behind the

Committee on the Present Danger began to take shape.

In October of 1975, members of the ATA gathered in Paris for the group’s twenty-first annual meeting. The proceedings were dominated by a paper delivered by

French philosopher Raymond Aron. A committed anti-communist and rival of Jean Paul

Sartre, Aron argued that while interdependence was a fact of life for the Atlantic allies, knowledge of this fact did not automatically “result in the creation of a feeling of solidarity, still less a will for collective action.” The problem facing those opposed to détente, Aron concluded, was that the European and American publics no longer feared the Soviet Union. Alliances needed a common enemy if they were to remain united on

treaty. See, “Statement of the Honorable Henry A. Kissinger With Respect to the Treaty on Strategic Arms Limitation,” before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate, 31 July 1979.

59 the need for a robust defense. “The fear that once cemented the alliance,” Aron reasoned,

“ha[d] dimmed or receded…” Eugene Rostow was taken with the French philosopher’s argument. In his closing remarks, Rostow expressed his admiration for Aron’s paper, declaring it an “arresting proposition, altogether correct.” 85 Just one month after the

Paris meeting, Rostow began to plan in earnest the formation of the CPD.

At stake for the ATA was the West’s continued preeminence atop the global political and economic system. If the NATO alliance collapsed, nothing, Rostow believed, would stand in the way of the Soviet drive to control Middle Eastern oil and with it the global economy. In such an event, Western Europe and the United States would have little choice but to accede to Soviet hegemony, reduced, in Rostow’s words, to “the handmaidens, workshops, and armories of the oil producing states, and their protector, the Soviet Union.”86 This, rather than an actual war with the Soviet Union, was the eventuality that Rostow feared. To convince the public at large of the military requirements for global leadership, however, Rostow would make use of the specter of nuclear annihilation to convince Americans that the future survival of the nation depended upon reasserting American power abroad.

Part II: The Committee on the Present Danger

Eugene Rostow was hopeful that Nixon’s resignation would return American diplomacy to the policies of the early Cold War: close cooperation with European and

Japanese allies, a strong hand in the “Third World,” and tough rhetoric at home all

85 Raymond Aron, “The Ambiguities of Interdependence, Presented at the ATA annual Assembly in Paris, France, 20-24 October 1975, folder Atlantic Treaty Association, box 5, Original Accession, EVR Papers; Eugene Rostow, “The Certitudes of Interdependence,” Closing Remarks to ATA annual Assembly in Paris, France, 24 October 1974, folder Atlantic Treaty Association, box 5, Original Accession, EVR Papers. 86 Eugene Rostow, “The American-European-Japanese Triangle.” 18 January 1974, folder Ta-Tn, box 4, Original Accession, EVR Papers.

60 backed by robust spending on defense. Gerald Ford dashed those hopes. The new president made clear his intention to carry on with Nixon’s foreign policy. Henry

Kissinger remained the dominant force in American diplomacy. He stayed on as

Secretary of State, working on a new SALT agreement with the Soviets. In October 1974, in Vladivostok, he and his Soviet counterpart agreed to a new, ten-year treaty to reduce nuclear weapons deployed on each side. Earlier that same month, Kissinger made his first foreign policy statement under Ford. Defending détente for opening “prospects for a more stable peace,” he went on to address the criticisms leveled at him by the CDM task force publicly. To those who wished to “increas[e] pressure on the Soviet Union,” he warned, “such an attitude would be disastrous.”87

It was around this time that Rostow began to share his frustrations with an old acquaintance who also had long experience with U.S. foreign relations, Paul Nitze.

Nitze was especially concerned with the nuclear balance between the superpowers. He resigned from the SALT talks in 1974 because Kissinger was asking

Americans to “both accept Soviet nuclear superiority and codify it in arms control agreements.” 88 Nitze played a central role in the infamous “Team B” episode at the CIA.

Defense hawks, led by Nitze and conservative historian of Russia Richard Pipes, accused the CIA of soft-pedaling the Soviet nuclear threat. They pressured Ford’s Director of

Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush into giving them privileged access to classified

87 Statement by Kissinger quoted in Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation (1985 edition), 436. 88 Though his stated reason for resigning from the talks was the ongoing fallout from Watergate, Nitze made clear his displeasure with détente in an article for Foreign Policy: “The Strategic Balance Between Hope and Skepticism,” Foreign Policy, No. 17 (Winter 1974-1975), 136-156.

61 data. The resultant “Team B” report painted a dark picture of Soviet capabilities and intentions, providing fuel for future attacks on nuclear arms negotiations.89

The two men were joined by Charls Walker, a Texas lobbyist who would later be instrumental in planning Reagan’s tax policy. They spent much of 1975 corresponding with one another about the potential for a new effort to unite the scattered opposition to détente into a single voice. As the story that began this chapter noted, their efforts did not begin in earnest until the winter of 1975 when Rostow finally decided to organize the opposition themselves. On the surface, their chances of success seemed slim. The three men were at odds not only with the present administration, but also with the majority of the American People. None of them could be considered young, either. All three had arguably passed the peak of their influence in Washington. Would not they be dismissed as “relics” of the Cold War, or partisan quarrelers? These questions dogged Rostow,

Nitze, and Walker as they began planning the committee in earnest throughout 1976.

Their concerns greatly influenced how they organized the CPD’s membership, its financing, and its public face. In so doing, the three would go a long way toward making the CPD the most formidable rightwing initiative of the day.

Looking for a Few Good (Diverse) Members

Their first order of business was deciding whom they would invite to join them in their endeavor. One of the great weaknesses of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority had been its sole affiliation with the Democratic Party. The press easily dismissed the task force’s report as the usual partisan bickering that defined life in Washington. Indeed, the sparse media coverage of the CDM report zeroed in on the task force’s complaint that

89 Sanders, 197-204; Vaïsse, 153-157. Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis, Soviet Strategic Objectives: An Alternative View, Report of Team B.

62

Nixon sought “partisan advantage” in his dealings with the Soviets.90 Hardly the most significant point Rostow had hoped to make. The Ford administration could likewise ignore the CDM’s critiques because they came from outside the Republican Party. As a consequence, the three men placed the greatest emphasis on drawing Republicans into the fold. The press could not dismiss a bipartisan organization as politics as usual. Nor could either party, they thought, ignore a group made up of its own members.

Rostow went a long way towards achieving bipartisan support for the CPD when he won Richard Allen’s support. Allen, a conservative Republican and onetime Nixon advisor, had no love for Kissinger, whom he blamed for his ouster from the Nixon administration. In May of 1975, Rostow had published an opinion piece in the Wall Street

Journal, largely a rehash of the CDM statement from the summer before that caught

Allen’s attention. He wrote Rostow to compliment him on the piece. Rostow promptly returned Allen’s warm letter with a suggestion: why not join him in a bipartisan group to spread the same message? He quickly agreed to join up. His participation not only helped give the burgeoning group the bipartisan support they needed, it also placed the group in contact with Allen’s friend Ronald Reagan, whom Allen convinced to join the CPD shortly after its formation.91 Other important Republican supporters included David

Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett Packard, and William Casey. With Republican participation assured no one could question the CPD’s political motives. This was not a

90 Gwertzman, 7. 91 Allen to Rostow, 13 May 1975 and Rostow to Allen, 19 May 1975, folder A, 1970-1976, box 4, Accession 1982-M-013, EVR Papers; Vaïsse, 163. Allen’s personal antipathy for Kissinger further demonstrates the degree to which the debate over détente was centered personally on Kissinger. Allen relayed his side of the events leading to his dismissal from the Nixon White House to Clark Mollenhoff in 1970; Allen to Mollenhoff, 6 January 1970, folder 18, box 2, Richard V Allen Papers, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

63 question of Democrat or Republican, but of those who recognized the “danger,” and those who did not.

Rostow placed almost as much importance on attracting a diverse membership as he did on bipartisanship. Showing a keen awareness of the importance of newly emergent identity politics, Rostow wanted his group to be a symbolic representation of an

American people united across class, race, sex, and politics. He hoped to make the CPD a

“genuinely national” organization in terms of “geography…the spectrum of the population, and above all women,” the last at his wife’s insistence.92 In truth, Rostow was far more invested in creating the semblance of diversity than in actually drawing from a diversity of opinions. The CPD would be overwhelmingly white, male, and affluent. Still, its organizers did succeed in attracting several prominent women into the group. Jeane

Kirkpatrick was an obvious choice for membership given her longtime involvement with the CDM. So too was Rita Hauser, the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights. Clare Boothe Luce, the former Ambassador to Italy and wife of Time publisher Henry Luce, was the most notable Republican woman to join. Rostow had a much harder time attracting African American support. Bayard Rustin was one of the few black Americans who agreed to join the CPD.93

Membership in the CPD did not give one equal say in the committee. The CPD’s organizers divided membership into two groups. The first was a larger group of

“Directors” whose membership brought much needed diversity to the CPD. Among its

141 original members were Rustin, Luce, and Kirkpatrick. These individuals enjoyed a

92 Rostow Memo to Nitze, Walker, 1 December 1975, folder Walker-Nitze Project, box 4, Accession 1985- M-004, EVR Papers. 93 A complete list of CPD members can be found in Saunders, 154-160.

64 limited role in defining the group’s agenda, but supported the committee’s work via articles, interviews, and speeches. Rostow organized a smaller circle known as the

“Executive Committee” to set the CPD’s agenda. He named himself chairman of this select group. Nitze agreed to serve as Chairman of Policy Studies, while Walker agreed to act as treasurer. They enlisted Lane Kirkland, Packard, and former Secretary of the

Treasurer Henry Fowler to serve as the CPD’s “Co-Chairmen,” highlighting its bipartisan nature. Other members of the Executive Committee included Allen, Max Kampelman,

Richard Pipes, Dean Rusk, and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. Zumwalt’s alarmist reports on the growth of Soviet naval power made him an influential voice in the debates over the military budget.

Along with attracting a bipartisan, nominally diverse membership, Rostow’s other great concern was to protect the CPD’s reputation, especially from charges of collusion with the defense industry. “We are all concerned with the problem of being ‘typed’ as hawks, cold warriors, and tools of the military-industrial complex,” he told former CIA

Director William Colby94 Mindful that critics of Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA) often referred to him as “the Senator from Boeing” or, more crudely, “the whore from Boeing” due to his support for the defense giant from his home state, Rostow was determined to stave off any such attacks. He limited the group’s connections with companies that derived a substantial part of their earnings from the defense industry. No person whose business derived more than 15 percent of their income from military spending could donate or belong to the committee—a limit set to allow for David Packard’s continued involvement. For all their worry over being labeled as shills for the defense industry,

94 Rostow to Colby, 21 February 1977,folder Cl-Cz, box 6, Original Accession, EVR Papers.

65

Rostow and his fellow organizers still consulted with arms manufacturers in private.

Their discussions included one with the Staff Vice President of Rockwell International

William Clark over whom they might choose to run such an organization.95 In public, however, the CPD would isolate itself from any apparent influence by the defense industry. This policy also helped to determine the CPD’s financial structure.

Financing the CPD

For a group that counted several multimillionaires amongst its members, including Nitze, Packard, and Casey, the CPD’s expenditures were remarkably modest.

In its first year of operation, the committee spent just over $98,000 of the less than

$250,000 it had received in donations. Even at the height of its influence during the

SALT battle from 1978 to 1979, the committee spent just over $200,000. Its director,

Charles Tyroler, testily informed the editor of the Christian Science Monitor of the amount when that publication cited a larger sum.96

The unremarkable size of the CPD’s budget was not due to a lack of willing contributors. Rostow, Nitze, and Walker chose to focus on building the CPD’s reputation over its bank account. They saw limiting their funding as a means of enhancing its credibility. They capped the annual contributions from any single source at $10,000.The same fear that led them to bar members of the defense industry from joining the CPD also caused them to prevent persons or companies involved in defense from making donations—except for David Packard. These restrictions on donations were prominently

95 Charls Walker to William L. Clark, 29 October 1975, folder Walker-Nitze Project, box 4, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 96 Memo to Charls Walker, 8 November 1977, box 3, Committee on the Present Danger Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA (Hereafter CPD collection); Tyroler to the Editor of the Christian Science Monitor, 28 March 1979, folder Letters to the Editor, box 18, CPD collection.

66 featured in a pamphlet accompanying the CPD’s first policy statement: “How the

Committee on the Present Danger will Operate—What it will Do, and What it will not

Do.”

Only American citizens could donate to the committee. This fact forced Rostow to decline a $5,000 donation from Israeli industrialist Reuben Hecht. The donation had been arranged by Hecht’s and Rostow’s mutual friends Benzion Netanyahu and his son

Benjamin. Rostow had consulted the Netanyahus about organizing the CPD throughout

1976. He sought their advice on, among other things, public relations strategies as well as which Jewish-Americans he should ask to join or donate. Rostow assured the elder

Netanyahu that while he could not join or donate to the CPD, his influence would be felt.

“I regard our relationship as a continuing one, and expect and want you to participate fully in private conversations with me and other key members of the Committee during the whole period of its existence.”97

In placing so many limitations on donations, Rostow hoped to present the CPD as a grassroots effort funded by small donations by individuals from all walks of life. The reality was far more complex. Most of the CPD’s funding came not from individuals, but from conservative foundations, most notably the various groups funded by Mellon heir

Richard Scaife and the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation. These groups circumvented the $10,000 limit on donations by awarding grants to fund the CPD’s “special projects.”98

80 Rostow met with both Netanyahu’s several times throughout 1976, and described them as having “taken the strongest possible interest in our success.” Rostow to Walker, 1 March 1977, folder Wa-Wh, box 7, Original Accession, EVR Papers; Rostow to Benzion Netanyahu, 28 June 1976, folder Correspondence Committee on the Present Danger, box 7, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers; Rostow to Benzion Netanyahu, 17 March 1977, folder Na-Nev, box 7, Original Accession. EVR Papers. 98 In one notable instance Scaife Family Charitable Trusts awarded the CPD $100,000 for “general operating support.” Richard M. Larry to Rostow, 2 July 1980, folder CPD Foundations: Scaife, box 382, CPD Collection.

67

The donations from foundations ranged anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 at a time.

While Walker could inform his fellow members at the CPD’s annual meeting in

November of 1979 that the group had over $350,000 in capital, he had to admit that foundation grants funded the largest portion.99

Even with wealthy patrons the CPD’s budget paled in comparison to organizations with similar political goals. The budget of the Coalition of Peace through

Strength, for example, dwarfed that of the CPD. An ad hoc group of conservative organizations, including the American Security Council—the lobbying arm of the defense industry, the Coalition spent $10,000,000 campaigning against the SALT II treaty alone.100 If spending equaled influence, the CPD would be rated one of the least influential organizations of the day. What would make the CPD uniquely powerful was the relationship its members developed with the press, who would carry their argument to the American people free of charge.

All of this planning—the solicitation of membership, the search for funds, the decision to use reputation rather than money as their main source of influence—occurred over the spring and summer of 1976, in the midst of the contentious Republican and

Democratic campaigns for their party’s respective nominations for the presidency. One might have expected the group to attempt to influence the selection of the next president of the United States. The race for the Republican nomination appeared especially suited for the CPD to make its debut. Ford found himself in a drawn-out fight for the nomination with Ronald Reagan. The charismatic former governor of California attacked

99 Talking Points for Walker, 8 November 1979, folder 8 November 1979 Conference—Annual Meeting, box 163, CPD Collection. 100 Steven V. Roberts, “Arms Pact Friends and Foes Rally for Senate Battle,” 13 April 1979, New York Times, A2. Roberts credited the CPD for the Coalition’s “intellectual underpinning.”

68 the president on precisely the same grounds as did Rostow’s group: namely that détente had severely weakened the nation’s influence throughout the world. In a February speech republished in the Wall Street Journal Reagan asked, “Does our government fear that the

American people lack willpower?” That was the only explanation Reagan found, or wanted to find, for Ford’s “reluctance to assert our interests in international relations.”101

If Reagan’s position on détente appeared indistinguishable from Rostow’s, there was a good reason for it. Reagan, a foreign policy novice whose decision to focus on détente was more tactical than heartfelt, used Rostow’s arguments to support his own hawkish worldview.102

Rostow and his fellow organizers chose not to involve themselves in the

Republican primary, or the general election. Their decision had much to do with the committee’s diverse political makeup. While some members of the group, such as

Richard Allen, campaigned for Reagan, the conservative Democrats in the group, including Rostow, chose to support Henry Jackson. Still others decided to back Ford, whose position on foreign policy had shifted to the right in response to Reagan. He banned his administration from using the world “détente” to describe his foreign policy.

Despite Reagan’s surprisingly strong showing in the primaries, Ford won the Republican nomination. The deciding factor in the general election had less to do with the state of

U.S. foreign policy than with Ford’s association to Watergate. Tainted by his pardoning of Nixon, Ford lost a close race to Jimmy Carter. The former Governor of Georgia used

101 Ronald Reagan, “Tactics for Détente” 13 February 1976, The Wall Street Journal, 8. 102 Reagan often quoted Rostow in speeches prepared for his radio program Viewpoint. A transcript of the Viewpoint episode “Soviet Superiority,” 1 May 1975 can be found in folder 25, box 39, Citizens for Reagan Records, Hoover Archives, Palo Alto, CA.

69 his Washington outsider status to win first the Democratic nomination, and then the presidency.

Building Influence in the Press

The CPD’s leadership carefully planned their debut so as to emphasize the news- like nature of their reports. Benzion Netanyahu had recommended the CPD announce its arrival with full-page advertisements in the New York Times and other national newspapers, a common tactic for political groups to get their message heard by the public. Rostow and his cohort chose a different approach; they held a press conference.

Less than a week after Jimmy Carter’s election to the White House, on November 11,

1976, the Committee on the Present Danger announced its existence before a gathering of reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. Rostow took charge of the proceedings. Nitze, Fowler, Packard, and Kirkland joined him on stage. Not coincidentally, Rostow, Nitze, Fowler, and Kirkland were all Democrats, while Packard represented the Republicans. Packard and Kirkland together also symbolized the cross- class interest in a new foreign policy: the co-founder of Hewlett Packard and the number two man at the AFL-CIO standing together for a strong defense.

The five men took turns reading a statement on how the CPD would operate, as well as the group’s manifesto, “Common Sense and the Common Danger.” Drafted largely by Rostow, “the key sentence,” as one of the CPD representatives remarked to the press, was that the group was for “the United States to be free, secure, and influential.”103

Each of these was dependent upon the other. American freedom required secure access to the raw materials and trade with the Global South. The stability of this system depended

103 Press Conference of the Committee on the Present Danger, 11 November 1976, folder Present Danger: Initial Press Conference 11 November 1976, box 288, CPD Collection.

70 on America’s influence in the world. Détente had allowed for the Soviet Union to challenge American influence by exacerbating divisions “between the developed states and the underdeveloped world.” The Soviet’s expanding military presence in the

“Southern Hemisphere” was a precursor to their total domination of “the Middle East, the

Indian Ocean, Africa, and the South Atlantic.” To those who would say that Soviet expansion in the Global South did not affect the United States and its allies, the group pointed to the “Soviet-encouraged oil embargoes” in the Middle East as evidence of the

Kremlin’s attempt to defeat the West “by envelopment and indirect aggression.” Now, the Soviet Union had embarked on an “unparalleled military buildup” to complete their

“drive for dominance.” To meet this threat necessitated a headlong campaign to restore

America’s military strength in “our ready land, sea, and air forces,” as well as its nuclear arsenal. Failure to do so would reduce the nation to “second best…in overall military strength,” placing “our national survival itself…in peril.”104

Rostow and his co-leaders girded themselves against press accusations of partisanship and warmongering. Initially, however, the problem they faced was not that the press depicted them poorly, but rather that the press barely paid them any attention at all. None of the TV networks carried stories on the press conference. Other than a few brief mentions in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, the print media also chose to ignore the CPD’s debut. Ultraconservative Ernest Lefever wondered if the strategy of engaging the press had been a mistake. Perhaps the CPD should give up on

104 Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present Danger, Charles Tyroler II, ed. (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey, 1984) 3-5.

71 voluntary coverage by the media all together, and adopt the more traditional strategy of buying advertisements in the press.105

To be sure, the CPD was not without friends in the media. Both Rostow and

Charls Walker could count conservative columnist George Will amongst their press contacts. As early as October 1973, Will was parroting Rostow’s critique of détente in his syndicated columns.106 Paul Nitze, meanwhile, maintained friendly relations with syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. There were also a number of conservative publishers of regional newspapers whom the CPD could count on for positive coverage, such as William Loeb, founder of the New Hampshire Union Leader.

In the years to come, all of these sources would provide sympathetic news coverage of the CPD’s activities. But the group’s organizers had not spent a year carefully crafting the CPD’s membership and financing in order to win over members of the media whose was already guaranteed. They wanted the press at large to sit up and take notice.

The press began to pay more attention to the CPD when its members started using their connections in Congress to influence the makeup of Carter’s cabinet. Carter’s decision to name Paul Warnke as the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in February 1977 created a furor within the CPD. Warnke was a well-known critic of exorbitant defense spending, having written in Foreign Policy that the military budget should “be optimized to deter Soviet resort to force, not to pose a delusive military solution to political or economic situations that may give us concern.”107 Paul Nitze was especially upset over the Warnke nomination. Both men had served as advisers to then

105 Ernest Lefever to Rostow, 16 November 1976, folder La-Lh, box 6, Original Accession, EVR Papers. 106 George Will, “The War and the Myth of Détente,” Washington Post, 16 October 1973, A18. 107 Paul Warnke, “Apes on a Treadmill,” Foreign Policy, No. 18 (Spring 1975), 12-29.

72 candidate Carter, and the President’s decision to choose Warnke for a cabinet post signaled his rejection of Nitze’s hardline foreign policy. Nitze wrote personally to

Senator John Sparkman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warning the Senator, “Mr. Warnke…may not be a qualified student or competent judge of military matters, weapons capabilities, and strategy.” His letter gained him an invitation to testify before the committee where he informed the senators that Warnke’s positions were, among other things, “absolutely asinine.”108

All of this was not enough to deny Warnke’s confirmation, but the unexpected political battle increased press coverage of the committee’s activities. Some of this coverage included the kind of attacks Rostow had feared. New York Times columnist

Anthony Lewis lambasted the CPD for the “venomous intensity” its members showed towards the Warnke nomination.109 Lewis’ attack was the exception, however. Far more members of the press seemed to accept the CPD’s characterization of itself as nonpartisan and educational. Their second policy paper “What is the Soviet Union Up To?” received far more press attention than their first paper published just five months earlier. More importantly for Rostow was the nature of the increased press coverage. He delighted in informing his fellow members that while some in the media initially dismissed the committee as “cold warriors” or “representatives of the military-industrial (or intellectual) complex,” the press now used phrases such as “non-partisan,” and "leading

Americans from all segments of the political spectrum” to describe the CPD.110

108 Quoted in Sanders, 206. 109 Anthony Lewis, “The Brooding Hawks,” New York Times, 10 February 1977, 39. 110 Eugene Rostow to Members of the Board of Directors, 2 June 1977, folder Committee on the Present Danger, box 7, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

73

Near the end of 1977, Journalist David Ensor received an exclusive interview with the CPD’s leaders for National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things

Considered. In the story’s broadcast, he marveled at the CPD’s “scruples,” recounting how Charles Tyroler turned down $10,000 in Ensor’s presence because “it was from a defense contractor.”111 Their careful guarding of the CPD’s reputation had succeeded even beyond Rostow’s expectations. As will be seen below, during the latter years of the

Carter presidency the press would insure that the CPD’s foreign policy pronouncements received equal weight to those of the president, going a long way towards legitimizing their arguments in the eyes of most Americans.

“A Disaster on Foreign and Defense Policy.”

Jimmy Carter entered the White House as a Washington outsider promising to heal the nation from the abuse of governmental authority typified by the Watergate scandal. In the realm of foreign policy, this included learning from the mistakes that led

America into the Vietnam War. If Kissinger’s differences with Rostow were tactical,

Carter’s differences with Rostow were fundamental. His administration attempted to institute a foreign policy that stressed non-interventionism, support of human rights, and a reduced military budget. More than any other president of the Cold War era, Carter represented the potential for a true shift away from the policies of the previous thirty years. Historians from David Schmitz and Vanessa Walker to Robert Strong have argued that Carter’s foreign policy aimed to create nothing less than a “post-Cold War foreign policy” based on a respect for human rights.112 In January 1976, the administration

111 National Public Radio, All Things Considered, 24 December 1977. 112 David F. Schmitz and Vanessa Walker, “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights: the Development of a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January 2004), 113-

74 announced its intention to withdraw American military forces from the Korean peninsula.

The President reduced aid to rightwing authoritarian governments including several Latin

American allies such as Argentina and Uruguay.113

Little of Carter’s intentions were known when the CPD announced their formation in November 1976. As a candidate, he had promised to slash the defense budget by $5 billion, but this and other statements could easily be dismissed as the usual campaign rhetoric used to shore up Carter’s support on the Democratic Party’s left wing.

He had, after all, named Nitze as one of his campaign advisors for foreign affairs. When asked how the CPD would relate to the new president, the members present at the press conference looked to strike a conciliatory note in hopes of gaining the president’s ear.

This led to some acrobatic feats of logic on Rostow’s part. “There [was] nothing incompatible,” he informed an inquiring reporter, with the CPD’s call for “increased effective military strength” and President Carter’s pledge to slash the defense budget by five billion dollars. Nothing incompatible, that was, as long as those cuts resulted from greater efficiency and were coupled with “increased expenditures.”114 Relations between the committee and the president were doomed from the start.

Carter’s decision to name Paul Warnke to head the ACDA, while choosing only one member from the CDM for his administration set relations between the CPD and the

President off to a bad start. But it was Carter’s commencement speech at Notre Dame in

May 1977 that truly signaled the fundamental depth of the differences separating Rostow

144; Robert A. Strong, Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000). 113 Betty Glad, An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) 36, 242. 114 “Press Conference on the Committee on the Present Danger” 11 November 1976.

75 and Carter. Before the graduating seniors, the president blamed the morally bankrupt foreign policies of the past decades—most notably the Vietnam War and support for dictatorships—on an “inordinate fear of communism.” Carter declared his intention to implement a new, moralistic foreign policy predicated on a respect for human rights.

Carter reassured the new graduates that he “believe[d] in détente with the Soviet Union.”

Although superpower competition continued around the globe, the threat of an actual conflict between the two had “become less intensive.”115 In just a few utterances, Carter had refuted the CPD’s entire purpose for existence. There was no present danger, no headlong drive for Soviet superiority in the world, no need to embark on a massive arms buildup. That July, Rostow condemned the new president as a “disaster on foreign and defense policy.” “We shall have to keep our Committee going twice as hard,” he concluded, “as we thought would be necessary.”116

Nearly all of Carter’s foreign policy decisions troubled Rostow, but it was the president’s stance on the arms race, both strategic and conventional, that dominated the

CPD’s attention. The CPD wanted to send a clear signal around the globe that the United

States was once again ready to use force to protect its interests. Instead, Carter cancelled production of the B1 bomber, Rockwell International’s long delayed, and extremely expensive, replacement for the B-52. He also decided not to deploy the neutron bomb, a low-grade nuclear weapon designed to kill people while leaving infrastructure largely intact. Perhaps worst of all, Carter was beginning to make good on his promise to substantially reduce the military budget.

115 Jimmy Carter, University of Notre Dame, Address at Commencement Exercises at the University, 22 May 1977. 116 Rostow to Peter Dominick, 11 July 1977, box 109, CPD Collection.

76

Members of both the administration and the CPD tried to encourage more cordial relations between the two groups. Rostow kept up an active correspondence with both

Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, although much of this correspondence consisted of Rostow criticizing the administration.

In August 1977, the committee received an invitation to meet at the White House with

Carter, Brzezinski, and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. Rostow and Nitze led the

CPD contingent. During the forty- minute meeting with the president, Rostow and Nitze laid out the CPD’s position on US foreign policy. They urged the president to take a hardline with the Soviets in the SALT negotiations. They also proposed a new defense budget “on a scale which clearly and visibly meets the challenge of present force levels and trends in the Soviet American military balance.” The group lectured Carter, “[W]hat we do about maintaining both our strategic and our conventional deterrent capabilities will determine our capacity to keep Western Europe, Japan, and a number of key counties and regions out of Soviet control…”117

Carter’s response to the CPD representatives did not go over well, to put it mildly.

Attempting to defend his administration’s policies, the president displayed, according to

Rostow, a “diffuse mixture of practical comments and emotional irrelevancies” such as

“this is a great country.” Brzezinski acknowledged the meeting had gone poorly, writing in his diary that evening that “the president’s response was excessively defensive and showed real signs of anger.”118 Carter’s irritated, unfocused response left the CPD delegation convinced of his inability to effectively lead. When Rostow reported the

117 Talking Points for Opening Statement by E.V. Rostow, Chairman of the Executive Committee, at a Meeting with President Carter, 4 August 1977, folder Carter, Jimmy (President), box 4, Accession 1985-M- 004, EVR Papers. 118 Quoted in Vaïsse, 172.

77 meeting to his fellow directors, he remarked that Carter’s “personality and style came through as pathetic, almost pitiful.”119

After the disastrous August meeting with the White House, Rostow largely gave up on influencing the administration directly. The CPD now began to attack Carter’s foreign policy in public. One member of the delegation present at the Carter meeting leaked its details to Evans and Novak, who gladly published an account of the meeting on

August 13th Evans and Novak portrayed Carter as overly sensitive to criticism, unwilling to address deficiencies in defense for fear of upsetting public opinion, and feeling

“pick[ed] on” by the CPD.120 Correspondence between the administration and the committee did not entirely shut down at this point, but it was clear that the two sides would oppose each other from this point forward.

SALT as a “Lever” of Foreign Policy

In the majority of the literature on the CPD, the group’s political campaign against ratification of the SALT II treaty stands as its most important legacy. The group proved vital to creating public and congressional opposition to the treaty through its publication of numerous studies purporting to reveal the unbalanced nature of the treaty.

Its members gave interviews and speeches denouncing the treaty and engaged Congress through public testimonies and private lobbying. No man was more important to the

CPD’s anti-SALT campaign than Paul Nitze. The well respected defense expert overwhelmed his audiences—general and congressional alike—with a cavalcade of

“charts and analyses” that Time journalist Hugh Sidney acknowledged were “almost

119 Memorandum for the Files, n.d. folder Carter, Jimmy (President), box 4, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR papers; See also Vaïsse, 171-173. 120 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “A Touchy Carter: Shades of Former Presidents?” Washington Post, 13 August 1977, A15.

78 impossible for laymen to follow.”121 Nitze’s message, however, was crystal clear. The

United States was on the verge of ceding nuclear superiority to the Soviets, and ratification of the SALT treaty would result in a “window of vulnerability” during the

1980s wherein Soviet leaders could launch a preemptive ICBM strike on the United

States capable of wiping out the vast majority of America’s own missile force.

Nitze’s arguments had a profound impact on public and congressional opinion towards the treaty and U.S. defense spending overall. By June of 1979, a New York

Times/CBS poll found that a strong plurality of Americans believed that “the United

States had fallen behind the Soviet Union militarily…”122 The percentage of Americans in favor of a new arms program also increased dramatically. A poll conducted for the Carter administration found that while 20 percent of Americans believed the United States needed to “expand our national defense and strengthen our military” in 1975, that number had grown to 43 percent by 1979.123 The Carter administration attributed the changing public perception directly to the CPD, remarking, “The critics have made the most of pubic mistrust of the Soviets—a feeling that has been reinforced by talk of their ‘massive build-up.’”124 Rostow boasted to George Urban, the CPD “seem[ed] to be recognized as

121 Hugh Sidey, “The White-Haired Hawk,” Time, 26 February 1979, Vol. 113, Issue 9, 17; George Kennan was similarly baffled by the circuitous nature of the anti-SALT arguments, remarking, “I have tried to follow them [the CPD] through the mazes of their intricate and sophisticated calculations of possible military advantage… I come away from the exercise frustrated.” George F. Kennan, “A Current Assessment of Soviet-American Relations,” Remarks before the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington DC, 22 November 1977, folder Anti-Groups: Kennan, box 20, CPD Collection. 122 Hendrick Smith, “Poll Shows Belief Soviet Leads in Arms,” New York Times, 13 June 1979, A15. While polls showed that Americans were increasingly wary of Soviet military power, they also consistently showed strong public support for a new arms agreement. The CPD vigorously challenged these latter polls. They claimed that the questions were too vague, and that when Americans were given specific details on the treaty, a majority of them rejected it. 123 “An Analysis of Current Public Opinion on SALT,” 15 February 1979, folder SALT II Public Outreach, 2/15/79-10/25/79, box 230, Office of the Congressional Liaison Beckel, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA (Hereafter JCL). 124 Alan Raymond, Memorandum for Jerry Rafshoon, Landon Butler, Bob Beckel, 27 August 1979, folder SALT II Public Outreach, 2/15/79-10/25/79, box 230, Office of the Congressional Liaison Beckel, JCL.

79 the ‘official’ opposition” to the administration on SALT II.125 Even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the CPD had won the battle over SALT.

According to Nitze, they had “39 solid anti-votes” in the Senate, enough to prevent its ratification.126

Eugene Rostow remained largely absent from the CPD campaign against ratification of SALT II. This was not only due to the fact that Rostow was not an expert on nuclear policy, but also and primarily because the SALT campaign was only ever a means to an end for both Rostow and the CPD at large. In terms that reflected back to

Raymond Aron’s advice to return fear to the alliance, Rostow described the SALT II campaign as a “lever,” with which turn public opinion towards the belief that America must “restore [its] foreign and defense policy.”127 Few members of the CPD actually believed that ratification of SALT could potentially lead to a nuclear exchange. Even

Paul Nitze, when pressed on the issue, admitted that he opposed SALT less for any of the treaty’s specific provisions than because he feared its cultural and political impact.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he acknowledged, “more important than the specific provisions of the treaty” was that its ratification would

“incapacitate our minds and will.”128

If SALT was a lever to turn U.S. foreign policy in the right direction, the Middle

East remained the focal point of Rostow’s attention throughout the life of the CPD. He

125 Rostow to Urban, 21 May 1979, folder Correspondence 1979-1980-1981 U, box 3, Accession 1985-M- 004 EVR Papers. Not every journalist accepted the CPD as the “official opposition.” James Fallows, for example, published a highly critical article on the group for Atlantic Monthly, but this was the exception, “The Muscle-Bound Superpower,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1979, 59-78. 126 Nitze to Clare Boothe Luce, 12 January 1980, CPD Collection, Box 182, Folder Clare Boothe Luce. 127 Rostow to Urban, 21 May 1979. 128 Paul H. Nitze Testimony before Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “SALT II Effect on Strategic Balance,” SALT II Treaty, Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 9- 12 July 1979, 511.

80 advised the Israeli delegation in the lead up to the historic 1978 Camp David meetings wherein Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace agreement brokered by President Carter. While Rostow celebrated the agreement, he concluded that it had been reached only because the Egyptians feared

Soviet imperial expansion into their territory. Far from an agreement to diffuse tensions in the region, Camp David was, for Rostow, evidence of the extreme tension the Soviet

Union had introduced to the region due to its activities in the Horn of Africa. The success of the Camp David Accords would depend upon the return of an aggressive, confident

United States.129 Any flickering hopes Rostow maintained for Carter to change course in his foreign policy were extinguished, however, by the Iranian Revolution and the second oil crisis. The collapse of the Pahlavi regime at the end of 1978 (discussed in chapter 4) eliminated one of America’s most important strategic allies in the region and sent oil prices skyrocketing for the second time in six years. The price of gasoline rose by 55 percent between January and June of 1979.130

As with the earlier oil crisis, Rostow saw the Soviet Union behind events in Iran.

“The Soviets have fully supported [Ayatollah] Khomeini’s fundamentalist revolt against the modernization of Iran,” he explained in a November 1979 memorandum for Scoop

Jackson.131 In truth, the Soviets had nothing to do with Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran, but Rostow had never lost the conviction that Soviet machinations explained the behavior of Middle Eastern peoples, be they Arab or Persian. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

129 Eugene Rostow, Remarks at Second Annual Dinner CPD, “The Consequence of Camp David: A Dash of Optimism,” 9 November 1978, box 2, Accession 1990-M-076, EVR Papers. 130 Stein, 215. 131 Rostow Memorandum for Senator Jackson, 26 November 1979, folder November 26, 1979-Jackson Materials (Original) Letter, Memo, Memo & Speech Outline, Soviet World Outlook articles, box 2, Accession 1990-M-076, EVR Papers.

81 in December of 1979 did nothing to convince Rostow otherwise. While his more overtly racialized rhetoric had largely disappeared by 1975, it was race that continued to inflect his views, leading him to concoct ever grander conspiracies to explain developments in the region. When, for example, Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September of

1980, Rostow concluded that this too was a Soviet ploy. In a leap of logic that would baffle even those capable of grasping Paul Nitze’s arguments against SALT II, Rostow concluded that the Soviets had both caused the Iranian Revolution, and then when

Khomeini proved uncontrollable, conspired with Iraq to remove him. “The Soviet Union is not neutral in the Iraq-Iran war. It is conducting the orchestra,” he wrote to George

Will shortly after the war began.132

The Carter administration had met the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with a reappraisal of its foreign policy. On January 21, 1980, Carter asked

Congress to approve a 1981 fiscal year budget of $158.7 billion, a 5 percent increase over the 1980 defense budget when adjusted for inflation. 133 He also declared America’s willingness to use force against any nation that attempted to gain control of the Persian

Gulf area in a policy dubbed the “Carter Doctrine.”

One might have expected Rostow and the CPD to rejoice at Carter’s evident conversion from human rights champion to hardline defense hawk. They remained, however, unconvinced. They believed that Carter’s proposed defense budget lacked the sense of urgency the invasion of Afghanistan warranted. The CPD’s official response to

Carter’s proposal complained, “[The administration’s] new budget proposals were in

132 Rostow to George Will, 29 September 1980, folder Rostow-Chron Sept-1980-Dec, box 6, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 133 George C Wilson, “Defense Backers Press for Boost in 1981 Budget,” Washington Post, 1 February 1980, A1.

82 final form months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and are widely recognized as having been designed to secure key Senate votes for…SALT II.”134 The CPD, in contrast, wanted an immediate increase of at least $23 billion to the 1981 budget and another $1 billion to the 1980 budget for immediate weapons procurement.135 Rostow concluded that Carter’s conversion was more rhetorical than genuine. While the president might speak of “rapid deployment forces” and the need to protect western interests abroad, it was clear that he simply would not, or could not, take the appropriate actions.

In truth, by 1980 it was unlikely that Carter could have won over the CPD even if he had adopted all of their policies. What the CPD wanted more than any specific increase in defense spending was a president who could convince the world that

Americans would use any force necessary to protect American hegemony. CPD member

Fred Charles Ikle even wrote a New York Times column advocating a “$1 Trillion” defense budget, less of a realistic goal than an expectation of the attitude they desired in the head of the executive branch.136 By 1980, many within the CPD had begun to look on one of their own as the logical choice to run against Carter in the general election. Ronald

Reagan had been growing in popularity amongst the likes of Rostow and Nitze for some time. While the Republican governor was an unknown quality to Rostow in 1976, by

1980 Rostow had become more familiar with Reagan’s positions and personality through their mutual relationship with Richard Allen. Allen reassured Rostow of the sincerity of

Reagan’s foreign policy pronouncements. Just as importantly, Allen introduced Reagan to Rostow’s intellectual expertise. Reagan, a foreign policy novice, grounded his foreign

134 “Countering the Soviet Threat,” Alerting America, 180. 135 Ibid. 178-179. 136 Fred Charles Ikle, “Defense: $1 Trillion,” New York Times, 5 February 1980, 23.

83 policy views in the expertise of others. Rostow, a Democrat who routinely spoke out against Carter’s policies, proved a valuable intellectual commodity for Reagan, who began quoting the “eminent liberal” in his speeches and radio addresses—much to

Rostow’s delight.137

Rostow refrained from endorsing Reagan officially, as did Nitze, because he wanted to protect the CPD’s bipartisan reputation. In theory, the committee was available to all the candidates for information and advice. In practice, the CPD functioned as the recruiting ground and intellectual backbone of the Reagan foreign policy team. Among the 68 members of the Reagan campaign’s foreign policy “staff” were CPD members

Richard Pipes, Rita Hauser, William Van Cleave, and of course Allen. CPD member

William Casey managed Reagan’s campaign. Rostow, meanwhile, remained officially unaffiliated with Reagan, but in private he relished his committee’s influence on the

Reagan campaign. When the CPD produced its defense budget to counter Carter’s in May

1980, Rostow gloated to a friend that “the Reagan budget group simply fed our May 9 spending proposals into their computer.”138 Rostow also kept up his correspondence with

Reagan and Allen. While he never officially joined Reagan’s team of foreign policy advisors, Rostow still counted as part of the candidate’s “inner circle” according to the

LA Times.139

As the 1980 election entered its final month, Reagan benefitted from his reputation as a strong, capable leader in foreign affairs while Carter remained bound to

137 On Richard Allen’s importance to connecting Rostow and others to Reagan see Vaïsse, 182-183; For an example of Reagan quoting from Rostow see, Ronald Reagan, Reprint of a radio program entitled “Rostow VI”, folder Present Danger: Ronald Reagan, box 168, CPD Collection. 138 Rostow to John T. Connor, 14 August 1980, folder Correspondence, 1979-80-801, C-1, box 4, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 139 Robert Scheer, “‘California Cronies’ Have Reagan’s Ear,” Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1980, A9, A14.

84 the CPD’s depiction of him as weak, insincere in his newly hawkish garb, and incapable of defending the United States. Carter’s failed attempt to rescue the American hostages in

Iran reinforced this view of the President, as bad weather caused a helicopter to collide with a C-130 aircraft killing eight people in the early stages of the mission. The Iran hostage crisis stretched into the fall and, despite the Reagan campaign’s fear of an

October surprise, would hang over the Carter candidacy like a black cloud through

Election Day.

On October 24, 1980, Rostow officially endorsed Reagan for the presidency. In a statement explaining his decision, he compared Carter to McGovern, proclaiming him an

“isolationist, an illusionist about the Soviet Union and many other things.” Reagan, in contrast, “offers us a foreign policy in the tradition of Truman...”140 A militaristic foreign policy, in other words, that would use force to reassert American influence. Eleven days later, Ronald Reagan easily won election to the presidency, capturing all but six states.

Just two days later, on the 6th of November, Rostow rejoiced to his fellow Directors of the CPD at their annual dinner, “The American people are recovering from the trauma of

Vietnam…there is a national consensus in favor of increases in defense expenditure, and a much firmer military posture.”141

140 Preliminary Remarks of Eugene V Rostow, Press Conference, 24 October 1980, folder Rostow- Chronological, September-December 1980, box 6, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 141 Eugene Rostow, “Remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Board of Directors of the Committee on the Present Danger,” 6 November 1980, folder Committee on the Present Danger 1979-1980, box 7, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

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Conclusion

Nearly five years after he had decided to lead a campaign claiming American foreign policy for the hardline, Eugene Rostow had achieved his goals. Defense spending skyrocketed under Reagan. The President added seventy-five billion in additional spending in 1981 and 1982. By the end of Reagan’s second term the defense budget would double in size.142 Overjoyed at the CPD’s success in revamping the defense budget, Rostow hoped to have a similar impact on U.S. foreign relations in the Middle

East, to reverse the perceived weakness in American power that had allowed for both the

October War and OPEC embargo. The people in charge of implementing the nation’s foreign policy would be those who shared Rostow’s outlook, including Allen and Casey.

Rostow himself would join the new administration a bit later than his compatriots.

Reagan chose him to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, making Rostow among the highest ranking Democrats in the Reagan White House. From there, Rostow would join his comrades in taking the offensive in the Global South, especially in the region closest to his personal interests: the Middle East.

142 Hartung, 135.

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Chapter 2

“Unleashing” Finance on the World: William Casey’s Pursuit of a New Global Economy in the 1970s.

On a bright winter’s day in February 1987, Bob Woodward slipped into Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey’s room at Georgetown University Hospital.

Casey had been recovering in the hospital since suffering a seizure in his Langley office on December 15th. Doctors had to remove a cancerous tumor from the left side of his brain, but it was unlikely that Casey would ever recover enough to return to work. After a few pleasantries, Woodward turned the conversation towards the purpose of his visit: questioning Casey on his role in the burgeoning Iran-Contra scandal. U.S. agents had illegally sold weapons to Iran, using the profits from the sales to fund anti-communist

“Contra” forces in Nicaragua. The very day before he was due to testify before the Senate on the scandal, Casey had suffered his seizure. Prior to his illness, the DCI had verbally sparred with Woodward for months in interviews as the reporter completed his book on

CIA covert operations. Now the journalist had the advantage over Casey. The Director lay alone and trapped, prostrate in a narrow hospital bed. “You knew, didn’t you,”

Woodward asked him, “You knew all along?” After a moment’s hesitation, Casey nodded his head. “Why?” Woodward questioned. Casey responded, “‘I believed…I believed.’” He then drifted back to sleep. Casey died three months later, on the morning of May 6th, just one day after Congress began public hearings on Iran-Contra.1

Controversy immediately surrounded Woodward’s story, which he recounted in his book on CIA activities during the Reagan administration. Casey’s wife Sophia flatly

1 Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 504-507.

87 denied that the investigative journalist ever had access to her husband’s hospital room. “I say it’s a lie,” she told reporters after the story appeared in the press. Sophia Casey rarely left her husband’s side during his illness and claimed that family members or his security detail were always with the Director.2 That Colonel Oliver North also named Casey as the mastermind behind Iran-Contra did nothing to resolve the dispute. North was, after all, under Congressional investigation for his role in the illegal operation. It was easy to point the finger at a dead man who could not point back. Questions surrounding the veracity of Woodward’s tale continue to the present day. As recently as 2010, a former member of Casey’s security detail publicly refuted Woodward’s version of events, leading to a quick rebuttal from Woodward.3

Whether one accepts Woodward’s account or not, it is impossible to deny that

William Casey wielded remarkable influence in shaping the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Casey served as Ronald Reagan’s DCI for the first six years of his presidency. Habitually disheveled in his dress and with a mumbling voice that made him difficult to understand, Casey hardly looked to part of a spymaster. But he entered office with a wealth of experience in foreign intelligence. During World War II, Casey served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), airdropping agents into Germany. He returned to the intelligence world thirty-six years later, and established himself as one of the most influential Directors in CIA history. While the head of the CIA normally functioned as a staff position with little impact on the formulation of foreign policy, under Casey it

2 Molly Moore, “Casey’s Widow Disputes Sickbed Account in Book,” Washington Post, 28 September 1987, A21. 3 This most recent exchange was recounted by blogger Jeff Stein: “Woodward dismisses CIA guard's dispute of Casey deathbed visit,” Spytalk, Washington Post, 21 September 2010, accessed on 24 September 2013, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/09/woodward_dismisses_cia_guards.html.

88 became a cabinet level position with an important role in shaping U.S. foreign relations.

It was Casey who formulated the plan to provide material and financial aid to anti- communist militant groups in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan, a policy at the very heart of the “Reagan Doctrine,” which called for aiding anticommunist guerrillas.

Casey’s tenure as head of the CIA continues to define public and scholarly memory of him. His biographer, Joseph Persico, devoted more than half of his book to the six years

Casey served in the Reagan Administration, while academic discussions of his legacy have been dominated by historians of U.S. intelligence.4

Scholars pay so much attention to Casey’s notorious tenure at the CIA that they neglect the significant role Casey played in reshaping U.S. economic policy during the

1970s. Indeed, from the end of World War II to the election of 1980, Casey devoted nearly all of his energies to the world of business, rather than intelligence. He built a personal fortune as a Wall Street tax attorney and self-styled venture capitalist. During the 1970s Casey held a number of key positions of economic influence in the Nixon and

Ford administrations. From 1971 to 1976 Casey served as head of the Securities and

Exchange Commission (SEC), Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, and

President of the Export-Import Bank. Casey was “among the very first to recognize,” a

State Department colleague recalled, “that the United States was becoming a service economy rather than a producing economy.”5

4 Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the CIA (New York: Viking, 1990); On Casey and the CIA see Jeffrey-Jones Rhodri, Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 232-254. 5 Quoted in. Persico, 156. Persico’s biography is especially important in fleshing out the early years of Casey’s life. Unfortunately, the pre-1941 records that Persico relied on in the 1980s did not make their way into the permanent collection at the Hoover Institute.

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Casey saw a potential solution to the nation’s economic troubles in the 1970s, especially the balance of payments deficit—in reorienting U.S. development policy towards the Global South, and he dedicated his time in office to accomplishing this goal.

He wanted to use “U.S. international development policy,” in order “to widen the use of private initiative, private skills, and private resources” in the poorer nations. This meant encouraging privatization of state industries, the extension of private property protections, and the replacement of import-substitution economies with export-oriented ones.6 Central to his program would be the elimination of controls on the flow of capital.

This would enable American companies to more fully take advantage of investment opportunities abroad, while the stability and depth of the American market promised to attract new capital to the nation in the form of securities. The capital that returned to the

United States would help to expand the service sector economy as the finance industry took off. “It [was] vital,” he wrote to Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz in 1973,

“for our talented financial community to unleash itself.”7 Further integration of Global

South economies with the United States would have the added benefit of making those nations more dependent on America, thus “protect[ing] our investments from arbitrary actions by LDC governments,” namely expropriation OPEC-style cartelization.8 Nearly all of the policies that Casey promoted would eventually be adopted by the government.

Today, scholars gather them under the rubric of neoliberalism.9

6 Untitled speech by William J. Casey, 4 June 1970, folder 15, box 78, the William J. Casey Papers, the Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto, CA (Hereafter WJC Papers). 7 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: the Political Economy of American Empire (New York: Verso, 2012), 148-150; Panitch and Gindin referred to Casey’s statement as “prescient.” An untitled copy of the memorandum can also be found in folder 4, box 151, WJC Papers. 8 William Casey, “The United States and the Developing World: A Forward-Looking Strategy,” State Department Memorandum, circa October 1973, folder 4, box 499, WJC Papers. 9 I have also chosen not to refer to William Casey as a “neoliberal” even though the economic policies he favored all fit within our current understanding of neoliberalism. Like neoconservatism, neoliberalism has

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Through Casey we can see how the economic agencies under the Nixon-Ford administrations began to lay the groundwork for such policies to stand upon. Casey vastly expanded the size and the mission of the SEC, using the organization to advise nations such as Mexico on how to develop centralized, open securities markets. At the State

Department, Casey argued persuasively for the elimination of capital controls not only to ease the flow of investment into the Global South, but, crucially, to allow for more foreign investment in the United States. At the Export-Import Bank, Casey gave priority to the export of oil drilling equipment, airplanes, and nuclear reactors. He did so both to diminish the resource dependence that many Americans feared, and to buttress the area of

American manufacturing he believed would survive the transition to a service economy: heavy, high-tech machinery, and electronics. There was no overarching plan to implement these policies on the part of the Nixon-Ford administrations. Casey operated on his own initiative, and there was an opportunistic, piecemeal quality to his activities in these years. But Casey did have a coherent vision for what the United States’ relationship to the Global South that was decidedly neocolonial. They were to provide the raw materials and increasingly the cheap labor the western economies needed to prosper.

For all of his influence in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he nevertheless joined with Eugene Rostow and the Committee on the Present Danger’s campaign to end détente and reassert American power abroad. Casey had by 1976 come to fear the “OPEC effect” spiraling outwards, leading other nations of the Global South to organize into

lacked a consistent definition among scholars, and the term has become a pejorative shorthand for all the evils of the modern global economy. On the history see, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, & the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

91 economic blocs in opposition to the industrialized West. That possibility seemed to be confirmed when the Group of 77 (G-77) at the United Nations demanded a “New

International Economic Order” (NIEO) in 1974. Convinced that Kissinger and Ford were far too conciliatory towards such demands, Casey quit the Republican administration at the end of 1975 and quickly found himself within the burgeoning bipartisan movement of the CPD. Yet, if Eugene Rostow emphasized the importance of military strength to reinforcing an American-led world order, Casey focused more on what economic policies the United States should institute abroad once that order had been reasserted. It was his desire to further integrate the principles of the free-market into U.S. foreign policy that led him to join Ronald Reagan’s inner-circle first as campaign manager, then as the head of U.S. intelligence.10

As with Eugene Rostow, Casey perceived the challenges emanating out of the

Global South through the prism of race. He expressed his vision for a transformed global economy confident in the superiority of western values, and in the American mission to pull the “backward” nations into the modern era. When the people of those nations balked at the intrusion of multinational corporations and the U.S. government into their economies as yet another example in the long history of western colonialism, he blamed their resistance on the lack of work “discipline” of their peoples, concluding that climate and culture had rendered them unready for progress. Rejecting the idea that the Global

North’s exploitation of the South’s economies explained their impoverishment, Casey

10 On the Reagan administration’s impact on economies in the Global South see Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 159-195; Frederick S. Weaver, The United States and the Global Economy: From Bretton Woods to the Current Crisis (New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 62-66.

92 concluded that discipline, applied by the United States, was what the “developing” nations needed.

This chapter traces Casey’s primarily from the late 1960s onward. During the

Vietnam War, Casey would work on behalf of U.S. development agency in South

Vietnam. With the election of Richard Nixon in 1969, he would join the Peterson

Taskforce charged with reimagining the purpose of U.S. foreign aid. The group of businessmen and economists who dominated the taskforce concluded that America’s foreign aid program should be reoriented to encourage recipient nations to foster private initiative to encourage foreign investment, and replacing the import-substitution economic model with export oriented economies. Over the next five years, Casey would use his various positions within the Nixon-Ford administrations to push these same policies on his own before returning to private life in 1975. We begin, however, with a discussion of Casey’s remarkable life prior to the 1960s, when he would go from the

Long Island son of New York City employee, to a master spy during World War II, to a multimillionaire venture capitalist.

From Welfare Cop, to Spy, to Wall Street Elite

William Casey’s life prior to joining the government in 1968 reads like a prototype of the conservative version of the American dream. Born to the middle-class,

Casey rose to the ranks of the American upper-class as a successful tax attorney specializing in helping the wealthy to keep their money out of the hands of the federal government. After serving his nation with distinction during World War II, Casey built a personal fortune of his own through smart investments in information technologies enterprises. He also married, raised a family, attended mass regularly, and gave back to

93 his community, nation, and world, through several charitable organizations. Through all of this, Casey maintained an avid interest in politics. He was a pragmatic, squarely conservative, Republican who worked on behalf of Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign, and who himself unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Republican in 1966. For all of Casey’s conservative bona fides, however, he had not always belonged to the GOP. Like so many of his counterparts on the rising rightwing in the 1970s, Casey had begun life as a Democrat.

William Joseph Casey was born into a middle-class, Irish-American family in

Queens, New York on March 13, 1913. His father, also named William, worked in the city’s street cleaning department. He later took a job working for New York’s nascent employee retirement system in 1920, a position that paid $5,000 a year. His mother

Blanche was a homemaker. Like most Irish-Americans living in New York, the Caseys were both devoutly Catholic and Democratic. The young Bill Casey subscribed to both faiths. In 1930, he entered Fordham University, where the Jesuits reinforced Casey’s devotion to his religion and his party. During his senior year, Casey attended a symposium held at Fordham on the topic of social justice that so impressed him that

Casey decided to enter the social welfare field. Several months later in September 1934,

Casey moved to Washington, D.C., where he began course work at the newly formed

School of Social Work at Catholic University. Casey’s decision to pursue a career in social work was also a practical one: the burgeoning New Deal Welfare state promised to make social work a growth industry. Yet, Casey claimed to be driven by a religious

94 desire to help the needy. “I want to devote my life to remedying the crying injustices of our blind economic system,” he explained to a friend.11

Casey might have moved to the nation’s capital with the noblest of intentions, but he quickly grew disillusioned both with the nature of social work and the plight of the poor. He complained that the school’s coursework centered on “sissy stuff” such as physical and mental hygiene, areas of knowledge that many Americans associated with femininity.12 Casey also began to differentiate between the “deserving” poor, those impoverished through no fault of their own, and the “lazy” poor who merely lacked the will to work. Like many of his generation, Casey’s dividing line between the deserving and undeserving fell along racial lines. During a snowstorm in February 1935, he complained to his parents back in Long Island, “We had a hard time getting the unemployed to clean the streets. They couldn’t see why they should shovel snow for sustenance when the government doles out sustenance to them anyway. Some of these negroes of a certain attitude won’t ever work again.”13 He left the social work program after only one year, returning to New York in 1935. Casey’s experiences in Washington soured him on the new Deal and the Democratic Party. The death of his staunchly

Democratic father in October 1935 freed Casey to complete his, rapid, transition from

New Deal idealist to conservative Republican.

Upon returning to New York, Casey worked briefly for the city’s Department of

Welfare as a “home relief investigator,” a “welfare cop” as his biographer phrased it. The job entailed auditing case files for irregularities and making surprise house calls on

11 Persico, 32. 12 Ibid, 34. 13 Ibid, 36-37, quote on 36.

95 welfare recipients. While Casey’s biographer described him as a “tough but fair-minded investigator,” the clients of the newly converted conservative disagreed. One day Sophia

Kurz arrived at her future husband’s office to find protestors picketing him. Casey proved no happier as a welfare cop than he did as a social worker. “This is women’s work,” he grumbled to Kurz. While continuing to work as an investigator, Casey entered law school at Saint John’s, earning his law degree in only two years.14 Law degree in hand, Casey quit his job at the Welfare agency and went to work for Leo Cherne’s Research Institute for America, helping to translate federal tax law into layman’s terms for the benefit of

American businessmen.

U.S. entry into World War II led Casey away from tax law and into the world of

American espionage. He joined the Navy as a Lieutenant stationed in Washington, D.C.

As with his previous stint in the nation’s capital, he disliked his time in Washington.

Casey hated the prospect of sitting out the war at a Washington desk, no doubt perceiving such an eventuality with the same masculine lens that had led him to so quickly sour on social work as a career. The OSS, the nation’s first covert organization, appeared as

Casey’s last, best chance to get in on the action. Its progenitor, “Wild” Bill Donovan, had been a senior partner of a prestigious New York firm before the war. He drew the group’s leadership from the ranks of New York’s lawyers. Casey’s time in law school and experiences as a lawyer provided him the connections he needed to join this most secret of groups. In November 1943, the thirty-year old Casey reported for duty at OSS headquarters in London.15

14 Ibid, 38-39. 15 Ibid, 53-57.

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During the Battle of the Bugle in the winter of 1944, Donovan—who had risen to almost mythic proportions in the young Casey’s mind—tasked him with developing an intelligence operation inside Nazi Germany, a bold move that the OSS had previously thought impossible. Casey’s agents succeeded in infiltrating Germany because many of them were German trade unionists that had fled the nation for fear of being killed as communists. Casey, still devoutly Catholic with a hatred of “atheistic” communism, hesitated using communist agents, fearful that at wars end these men would be able to seize positions of power in Germany. “I think it’s wrong,” he told Albert Jolis, a fellow

OSS agent and heir to a diamond merchant fortune. Casey swallowed his doubts long enough for his agents to parachute into the heart of Germany. His agents proved extremely effective. One team relayed the location of a power plant in the south of

Germany that was still functioning despite allied bombing. Agents also reported on

German troop movements advancing on Allied positions, and another team successfully pinpointed the location of the railhead in Weilhem for American bombers. All of these actions came early in 1945, and Casey’s rapprochement with the communists lasted only those months. Even before Germany’s surrender, he had decided that communism posed a greater threat than fascism. “The Nazi’s are finished,” he explained to a friend, “but the

Communists are still unbeaten.”16

While Casey worried about the threat posed by the Soviet Union, he returned to the private sector on Wall Street after the war rather than staying with the OSS after it transitioned into the CIA. Picking up where he left off at the start of the war, he returned to publishing reference books. In 1950, Casey opened his own publishing company called

16 Ibid, 68-86, quotes on 73, 82.

97 the Institute for Business Planning to issue books on tax law. He hired a dozen recent law school graduates to help him produce pamphlets and desk manuals with titles like The

Tax Shelter in Real Estate. As one of his employees recalled, the purpose of the books was to help businessmen and investors “legally beat the system” by teaching them “how they could profit from the law’s ambiguity.” For very important clients, Casey gave personal advice. When the heirs to the Du Pont fortune wanted to avoid paying the inheritance tax on their late father’s fortune, they called Casey, who helped them to legally avoid paying the tax. The Du Pont brothers allowed Casey to invest with them in an oil leasing company that, when liquidated, netted Casey three-quarters of a million dollars. He also eventually sold the Institute for Business Planning to Prentice-Hall in the mid-1950s.17

By the mid-1950s, Casey’s tax expertise had made him a wealthy man. He used his wealth to invest in other enterprises, ultimately building a multi-million dollar portfolio. Casey showed a particular keenness for companies geared toward information technologies, an interest he gained as an OSS agent. His Kalvar Corporation, for example, specialized in “information retrieval through microfilm and computer techniques.”18 Information technologies like the ones Casey invested in would later prove crucial to the rise of the finance industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The faster dissemination of information that computers allowed was vital to allowing the rapid trade in securities across the globe. This was not the end of his involvement in the expansion of the securities trade.

17 Ibid, 85-94, quote on 85, Casey’s relationship to the Du Ponts discussed on 94. 18 Biographical Data for William J. Casey, folder VOSS Miscellaneous, box 102, WJC Papers.

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As Casey built his personal fortune, he also became more active within the

Republican Party, providing financial support to his favored candidates. In the 1950s,

Casey dismissed Eisenhower as a political “lightweight” whose loyalty to the Republican

Party was questionable given that before the 1952 election the Democrats had also tried to woo the retired General.19 Neither did he find Barry Goldwater to be a viable candidate for office. Goldwater might have matched his views on conservatism, but Casey found the Arizona Republican too simplistic. He spent the spring of 1964 crisscrossing the country at his own expense trying to prevent Goldwater’s nomination, he later told Jacob

Javits.20 Richard Nixon was Casey’s preferred man in the Republican Party. Casey believed Nixon’s political acumen and vehement anti-communism matched his own.21 He worked on both of Nixon’s presidential campaigns. While Casey was never Nixon’s largest contributor nor his most trusted advisor, he could be assured of a privileged place among the capitol’s elite when Richard Nixon won the 1968 election.

The Peterson Taskforce

In the fall of 1969, President Nixon asked Casey to serve on a committee tasked with reevaluating U.S. foreign development policy. The Wall Street lawyer and former spy might have seemed an odd choice for a taskforce on development, but he fit well in a group that included Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, Harvard

Professor Samuel Huntington, and former Bank of America President Rudolph A.

Peterson, who also served as chair.22 Nixon designated his “Presidential Taskforce on

19 Persico, 92; Casey to Henry Haslitt, 10 November 1951, folder 9, box 85, WJC Papers. 20 Ibid, 116, Casey to Javits, 11 June 1968, folder 16, box 115, WJC Papers. 21 Persico, 114. 22 For a list of taskforce members see Report to the President from the Taskforce on International Development, “U.S. Foreign Assistance in the 1970s: A New Approach,” 4 March 1970, folder 15, box 78, WJC Papers, iv. Nixon announced the formation of the taskforce in September 1969.

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International Development” with reassessing the “underlying rationale of the U.S. aid effort” in the “developing world.” The Peterson Taskforce would have a profound influence over Casey’s future endeavors. The conclusions they reached functioned as a blueprint for how the state could encourage privatization within the Global South.

For much of the 1960s, U.S. development policy was determined by proponents of modernization theory. Most famously espoused by W.W. Rostow, modernization theory presupposed that all nations existed on a developmental trajectory from

“traditional” to “modern” societies—typified by the United States. Social scientists of the

Cold War era believed that government aid could “speed up” the development process in the Global South. Government programs from the Peace Corps to the Alliance for

Progress in Latin America originated from modernization theory. The idea of

“development” was central to how the U.S. government, and the Soviet Union, waged the

Global Cold War. Nations that received American money and guidance, policy makers reasoned, were less susceptible to Soviet subversion, insuring that they remained within the western capitalist system.23

Modernization theorists reached the height of their influence in the mid-1960s.

But by decade’s end the Vietnam War, combined with the failure of U.S. aid to lead to

“democratization” in recipient countries, led to increased criticism of the theory. Nixon’s taskforce arrived at the nadir in the U.S. development program. The year before, his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson had bitterly complained that the Foreign Assistance Act of

23 There is a deep historical literature on modernization theory including Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), among others.

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1968 contained the lowest amount of funding appropriated for foreign aid in U.S. history.24

Though a Republican, and a private citizen, Casey’s charitable activities during the 1960s allowed him to participate in development programs instituted by the federal government. During the Vietnam War, Casey served as chairman of the International

Rescue Committee (IRC), a humanitarian aid group that participated in the strategic hamlet program. Under the program, the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments relocated whole populations from warzones to strategically isolated villages wherein

“development” could take place free from communist infiltration. At the “New Life

Hamlet” in the Binh Duong province of South Vietnam, for example, IRC activities included “health services, retraining, and…work and agricultural projects in chicken raising, planting of home gardens, cultivation of commercial crops, and the construction of fish ponds.”25 Casey traveled to South Vietnam four times between 1966 and 1969 to inspect IRC activities. He paid particularly close attention to the IRC’s efforts at integrating hamlet communities into the national economy. He noted with pride during a

1967 trip that the IRC had provided “power tools” with which refugees would “produce lumber for the construction of refugee dwellings. Once the refugee houses are completed, these tools will be used in processing lumber for sale.”26 He justified his support for the war in Vietnam on much the same grounds as the modernization theorists, declaring to

24 Lyndon B. Johnson: "Statement by the President Upon Signing the Foreign Assistance Act of 1968," October 9, 1968. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed on 16 April 2015, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29165. 25 International Rescue Committee, Inc. “Annual Report, 1968,” folder 1, box 93, WJC Papers, 14. 26 “A Program of Emergency Assistance to the Children and Refugees of Vietnam Progress Report, May 1967, WJC Papers, Box 94, Folder 4. Much of the funding for the IRC’s activities in Vietnam came from the U.S. government. In 1969, for example, 57 percent of the IRC’s total income came from contractual payments by the federal government. Memorandum, 4 June 1970, folder 7, box 94, WJC Papers.

101 his hometown Catholic Newspaper, “[W]e are primarily engaged in helping a people enter the 20th century.”27

This background suggests that Casey came to the taskforce a firm believer in several of modernization theory’s key tenets. In particular, he shared with modernization theorists the belief that the peoples of the Global South existed at an earlier stage of development than did the United States and Western Europe. Yet, in contrast to modernization theorists, Casey believed that privatization of state industries, open capital flows, and a business climate friendly to investment were the policies that would achieve modernity in the Global South. His adaptation of modernization theory supports historian

Michael Latham’s argument that the “neoliberals” of the 1970s and 1980s adopted from modernization theorists “the confidence that development could be achieved rapidly.”

They believed, however, that development’s main goal was to “direct resources and investment to the most productive members of society, a task best left to markets rather than the state.”28

Taskforce members began their work near the end of 1969. In theory their job entailed consulting representatives of all groups with a role in development—the head of

USAID, charitable organizations, etc. In fact, members devoted most of their time to soliciting the opinions of American businessmen. How to use aid to facilitate the expansion of American investments into new markets was their overarching concern.

Among those the taskforce consulted was Paul Volcker, then Undersecretary of the

Treasury for International Affairs. The future head of the Federal Reserve, Volcker joined

27 William Casey, “Vietnam: Asks Firm, But Restrained, Hand in Dealing with Cong,” Long Island Catholic, 9 June 1966, folder 3, box 7, WJC Papers. 28 Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 175-176.

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Casey and the other taskforce members late in the morning of November 29. He offered the Treasury’s vision of a U.S. aid program for “Less Developed Countries” (LDCs).

Noting that part of the Treasury’s responsibilities entailed overseeing American involvement in multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Volcker argued in favor of funneling aid through such institutions.

Multilateral trade avoided the annual budget wrangling by Congress while sharing the cost of aid with Western Europe and Japan. It would, they touted, also allow “the many capital markets throughout the world” to add their resources to development. A multilateral aid program would also “[avoid] the confrontations of bilateral aid,” while allowing for an “international, independent, professional staff” to monitor “the performance of LDCs and suggests ways to improve [emphasis in original].”29

The Peterson Taskforce also solicited the opinions of business leaders who stressed the need for an aid program that would encourage nations to adopt capitalist friendly policies. A little over three weeks after the Volcker meeting, they sat down with representatives from the likes of Standard Oil, First National City Bank, the investment banking firm Kuhn & Loeb, and economist William Diamond of the World Bank. Their agenda for the day: how foster the private sector in the LDCs. The business leaders present reasoned that instead of providing aid for “institution building,” the U.S. government needed to use its aid program to encourage “developing nations” to privatize and liberalize their economies. Aid would be used to restructure the recipient nation’s

29 Treasury Talking Paper on Multilateral Institution before the Peterson Commission, 29 November 1969, folder 9, box 137, WJC Papers.

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“tax policy, credit policy, import liberalization, and exchange rate policy,” in order to create a “better economic environment,” for private, presumably American, business. 30

These business leaders displayed a keen awareness of the potential backlash such policies would have in the Global South. Those present at the meeting also pointed to multilateral institutions as ideal agents to carry out this new aid program. Such organizations were “in a better position to absorb the political fall-out resulting from interfering in the direction of the economies of the LDCs.” Nor did they worry that transferring the responsibility for aid dispersal away from a bilateral model would weaken American influence. “U.S. contributions to multilateral agencies,” they reasoned,

“could be used as leverage on these institutions to assume a larger role in generating policy changes in LDCs.” 31

But what, precisely, did the Peterson taskforce mean by a “better economic environment”? What was development for? The Peterson Taskforce presented its conclusions to President Nixon on March 4, 1970. Titled “U.S. Foreign Assistance in the

1970s: A New Approach,” the report called for a “new approach” to the nation’s development program, one geared more towards fostering private enterprise and reliance of “market forces” than with developing infrastructure. “Rapid economic progress usually has taken place within a favorable environment for private initiative,” the report read. Its authors maligned the use of import-substitution in “developing” world, arguing that such policies increased the cost of production and therefore “retard[ed]

30 Roundtable on Encouragement of the Private Sector in LDCs, 22 December 1969, Washington D.C., folder 13, box 137, WJC Papers. It’s unclear whether Casey personally attended the meeting, though he received a full report. The businessmen and economists present included: George Clark, William Diamond, Julie Esrey, Mark Feer, Paul Firstenberg, Charles Goldman, Richard Henry, Leigh Miller, Richard Richardson, and Rod Wagner. 31 Ibid.

104 development.” They thus ignored the fact that import substitution had allowed for the construction of America’s own an industrial economy, instead positing “trade liberalization” as key to economic development.

The taskforce report also included recommendations for the development of capital and credit markets in aid recipient nations as key to creating the capital necessary for development. “Domestic industry and locally financed investment are the predominant elements in economic progress,” the report stated. Thus, among the key goals of these policies was the enlargement of the entrepreneurial class in the

“developing” world. Moreover, the creation of a group of investors within the “host countries,” able, and willing, to invest in joint ventures with American businesses would help ““reduce nationalist sensitivities to foreign investment.”32 Incorporating the political concerns of Volker and the business leaders they had consulted, the taskforce recommended that the loans needed to these develop these markets come from bilateral and multilateral loans from organizations including the IMF. The authors concluded, a

“predominantly bilateral U.S. program [was] no longer politically tenable.”33

Based on the taskforce’s findings, On April 21, 1971 Nixon submitted the

International Development and Humanitarian Assistance Act of 1971 to Congress.

Among the bill’s most significant components was the establishment of an “International

Development Corporation” (IDC) to replace the U.S. Agency for International

32 Ibid. 33 Report to the President from the Taskforce on International Development, “U.S. Foreign Assistance in the 1970s: A New Approach,” 4 March 1970, folder 15, box 78, WJC Papers.

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Development (USAID). Far more than USAID, the IDC would “work with and through the private sector to the maximum extent possible.”34

The bill, however, never made it to Nixon’s desk for signing into law. It died on the Senate floor in a bitterly contested debate that saw 15 Republican Senators join with

Democrats to defeat the act by a vote of 41 to 27. At issue was not the bill’s reorientation of development towards policies that would foster greater reliance on the market, but rather the cost of the program. Congress refused to support the Nixon administration’s request for $2.5 billion in foreign assistance, from direct appropriation and borrowing authority, in the midst of a recession and continued despondency over the Vietnam

War.35

The Peterson Taskforce represented an early attempt by Casey and others to use the federal government to force liberalization and privatization on the “developing” world. While unsuccessful at the time, the ideas espoused by the taskforce would, in following years, be implemented in piecemeal fashion by William Casey. The economic and energy crises of the early 1970s gave his efforts a new impetus. From 1971 to 1976,

Casey served in three administration posts vital to the U.S. economic policy. He would begin as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission36

34 Special Message to the Congress Proposing Reform of the Foreign Assistance Program, 21 April, 1971, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Richard Nixon, 1971: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, Washington, D.C. General Services Administration, National Archives and Records Service, Office of the Federal Register, 570-572. 35 Murrey Marder, “The Senate Aid Revolt: Blow to Nixon Doctrine,” Washington Post, 31 October 1971, A1, A12. 36 Rudolph Peterson would also continue his interest in reshaping global development policies toward the Global South. In 1972, He became head of the United Nations Development Program, Robert A. Wright, “New Head of U.N. Aid, Rudolph Arvid Peterson,” New York Times, 13 January 1972, 6.

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Expanding Capital Markets at Home and Abroad

When the Nixon presidency began in 1968, William Casey boasted an impressive financial resume. He was widely regarded as one of the foremost tax experts in the nation, an in-demand public speaker on all things pertaining to the economy, and his personal fortune numbered in the multiple millions. He thus made an ideal choice for the chairmanship of the SEC under Nixon’s business friendly administration. In early

January 1971, Casey received a call from Nixon aide Peter Flanigan asking him to become chairman of the SEC. Casey demurred at first, hoping to receive an offer for a foreign policy post, but a personal call from the President convinced him to accept the offer.37 The lawyer who had taught clients how to avoid paying federal taxes was now in charge of regulating Wall Street.

Casey began his job at the SEC in April 1971, in the midst of the gravest economic crisis to face the nation in the postwar era. The cost of the Vietnam War and

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Programs depleted the nation’s coffers, while the

Bretton Woods system’s reliance on fixed exchange exacerbated the nation’s balance of payment’s deficit as dollars and gold left the country at record rates. Increased economic competition from Japan and Western Europe meant that American exports were no longer as competitive at home or abroad as they had once been. That year, the United States ran its first trade deficit since 1893. Increasing rates of inflation and unemployment led

Nixon, keenly aware of his upcoming reelection campaign, to seek drastic solutions to the nation’s economic woes. Over the weekend of August 13 and 14, Nixon and his economic advisors, led by Secretary of the Treasury John Connally, met at Camp David

37 Persico, 135.

107 to hammer out a solution. In a nationally broadcast speech on the evening of August 15, the President announced his intention to suspend the convertibility of dollars to gold, implement an import tax, and even included wage and price controls to control inflation.38 Dubbed the “New Economic Policy,” Nixon’s measures signaled the beginning of the end of Bretton Woods.39

Casey had his own ideas about how to reverse the downward trajectory of the national economy. He advocated that the time had come to expand of America’s capital markets. Traditionally, Wall Street had been run by a network of private clubs and brokerage houses insulated from public view. Casey sought to transform the securities industry by bringing it into the light of day. He wanted to turn the market into an open, systematized, centralized industry available to investors throughout the nation. He outlined his plans in a February 1972 memo titled “The Future Structure of the Securities

Market.” In it, he proposed giving “the public an opportunity to participate in” a “single nationwide market system” where in all participants “would compete under rules assuring responsibility.” 40 Expanding and coordinating the reach of capital markets across the nation would increase the amount of capital available to investors. The new sources of capital that Casey hoped to enlist included “mutual fund managers, pension funds and

38 The deliberations between Nixon and his economic advisors is recounted in Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 23-50. 39 Notably absent from the debates surrounding the economy were Nixon’s foreign policy advisors Kissinger and then Secretary of State William Rogers. Their absence is partially explained by Kissinger’s well known aversion to economics. It was also due to Nixon and his advisors interpretation of the crisis in terms of national interest—one could even say Nixon-interest. The worries of the West Europeans and Japanese, who no doubt would have opposed such drastic changes to an economic system they benefitted from, mattered little to a Nixon hell-bent on improving the American economy before the 1972 election. Connally ably summarized Nixon and his economic advisor’s attitude towards America’s allies when he reputedly remarked to an aid, “My philosophy is that all foreigners are out to screw us, and it’s our job to screw them first,” quoted in Stein, 40. 40 “The Future Structure of the Securities Market,”2 February 1972, folder 1, box 43, WJC Papers.

108 insurance companies.” 41 The idea was to “[scoop] up savings from all parts of this country” to create more liquidity for investment.42

Creating such a system required not the removal of government from the market, but rather an increase in its market presence. Customers in every part of the nation needed ready access to stocks and other financial assets. Only the SEC could both enforce disclosure and disseminate the most up to date information to investors.

According to legal historian Joel Seligman, Casey’s time at the SEC represented “a turning point in [its] history.”43 Under Casey’s leadership, the agency added 458 employees to its staff. From Casey tenure onwards, the SEC turned its energies toward promoting an open, centralized, national capital market. While the single, national market

Casey had envisioned never materialized, he laid the foundation for the remarkable expansion in securities trading over the last quarter of the twentieth century

Casey’s plans to expand capital markets did not stop at the U.S. borders. In March

1972, he spoke before an international collection of securities traders at an event dubbed the “First International Meeting of Stock Exchanges,” in Milan, Italy. He used the occasion to argue for globalizing the world’s capital markets. “Investors today do not recognize geographic or political boundaries,” he reasoned. “Indeed, in today’s world of multinational business enterprise, such restraints have become outmoded and unrealistic.”

Casey recommended foreign governments lift their bans on the movement of capital, while also adopting an internationally uniform system of regulation with minimum

41 “New York, American Exchanges Endorse SEC’s Plan for Institutional Membership,” Wall Street Journal, 28 February 1972, 7. 42 William Casey, “Huge Responsibilities Await the Investment Business in the Coming Decade. Many Changes in Store,” unknown publisher, n.d., folder 5, box 9, WJC Papers. 43 Joel Seligman, The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modern Corporate Finance, 1995 edition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982), 445.

109 disclosure requirements. That such a globalized capital markets system would benefit

American multinationals, Casey readily acknowledged. “United States companies require sound capital markets to finance their operations.” If American multinationals could take better advantage of “foreign capital markets,” then more capital would be available for investment within the United States. Moreover, the growth of foreign capital markets also meant the growth of foreign companies with capital to invest in the United States, a development that “could produce significant potential dollar inflows.”44

Advocating for the financial integration of the world’s capital markets was only part of Casey’s international activities while at the SEC. He devoted a great deal of his time and energy to developing capital markets in the Global South, especially in Latin

America and Asia. As early as June 1971, Casey consulted with SEC Associate Director

Allan Mostoff on how to expand the SEC’s role in “foreign matters.” Specifically, Casey wanted to expand the ability of SEC personnel to advise Global South governments on the creation of capital markets.45 In January 1972, Casey wrote to Secretary of State

Rogers with the idea of setting up a staff group to help “in the development of viable indigenous capital markets.” In the past the SEC had done such work on a “sporadic” basis. Recent developments, however, afforded the SEC the opportunity to take a more systematic approach. Specifically, Casey pointed to a $5 million grant from USAID to the Organization of American States (OAS) to “[implement] its capital markets

44 William Casey, “The Internationalization of the Capital Markets,” address before the First International Meeting of Stock Exchanges, Milan Italy, 15 March 1972, folder 1, box 140, WJC Papers. 45 Allan S. Mostoff Memorandum to Chairman Casey, “The Role of the Commission in ‘Foreign’ Matters,” 3 June 1971, folder 2, box 147, WJC Papers.

110 program.”46 Rogers gladly agreed to Casey’s proposal, giving him the green light to establish a staff group to “deal with requests for such assistance.”47

Mexico was one of the first nations to receive SEC assistance under the new program. In June 1972, Casey dispatched Mostoff to Mexico as part of the OAS program to advise the “Comision Nacional De Valores De Mexico” on how best to regulate the nation’s growing securities market. Concluding that Mexico’s securities markets were still “in their formative stage,” Mostoff wrote back to Casey that this presented the

United States with an “ideal opportunity to guide and direct their future development.”

Similar to Casey’s proposal for the U.S. market, Mostoff recommended Mexico adopt policies to encourage the development of a “unified market system…available to anyone.” He no doubt believed that centralizing Mexico’s securities trade would ease the flow of capital into, and out of, the country. Unsurprisingly, Mostoff argued that such a system be self-regulated because “pervasive government regulation” would potentially

“discourage persons from entering the securities business.”48

In only two years on the job, Casey had vastly expanded the size and the mission of the SEC. He had taken and agency with no official mandate in foreign affairs, and made it an important voice in the international discussions over the future of capital flows. He dispatched his aides to Mexico so that they might develop their capital markets

46 Casey to Rogers, 24 January 1972, folder 14, box 144, WJC Papers. 47 Rogers to Casey, 8 February 1972, folder 14, box 144, WJC Papers; Nixon’s economic advisor Peter Peterson also liked Casey’s proposal to “[help] developing countries better mobilize their own financial resources.” Peterson to Casey, 16 February 1972, folder 14, box 144, WJC Papers. 48 Allan S. Mostoff, “Report on Securities Regulation in Mexico and the Organization and Function of the Comision Nacional De Valores De Mexico,” 13 October 1972, folder 2, box 147, WJC Paper. Casey’s efforts to give the SEC an international role would not come to full fruition until after his death. In 1989, the SEC formed the Office of International Affairs. For a history of the Office, see transcript of the “Fireside Chats-SEC Office of International Affairs,” moderated by Theresa Gabaldon, with Daniel Goelzer, Giovanni Prezioso, 11 March 2008, accessed on 3 January 2014, http://www.sechistorical.org/museum/programs/2008/.

111 in the image of the United States. As much as Casey accomplished at the SEC, however, the position did not afford him the influence over foreign policy that he desired. The SEC was still supposed to act primarily as a regulatory body, and Casey was not included in any of the administration’s high profile discussions on the global economy.

Casey decided to leave the chairmanship after the 1972 presidential election for a new position, one fully committed to foreign affairs. The only problem was that he did not have a specific new post in mind. The day after Nixon’s sweeping victory over

Democratic challenger George McGovern, Casey wrote the president to ask for an appointment in “international, national security, and intelligence affairs.” “If I could serve you anywhere in this area,” he implored Nixon, “I would more than welcome it.”49

As luck had it there was a new position at the State Department that perfectly fit Casey’s combined expertise in international affairs and economics: the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs.

Casey Gets his Dream Job, Briefly

Casey’s request to Nixon arrived as the president began a reorganization of the

State Department to better address economic issues. While the position of Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs was created in 1946, it was subsumed in the office of

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs between 1959 and 1972. The President could appoint one or the other, but not both. The Foreign Relations Act of 1972 reestablished the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs as an independent post.50 With the American economy still shaken from the shocks of the previous year, Nixon informed

49 Casey to Nixon, 8 November 1972, folder 13, box 144, WJC Papers. 50 Department of State News Release, “William J Casey Appointed Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs,” March 1973, folder 1, box 150, WJC Papers.

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Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler that he regarded Casey’s elevation to the State

Department as “perhaps the most important nomination” of his second term.51 On

February 2, 1973, Casey assumed his new office.

It did not take Casey long to make his views known to the administration. He joined in the debate amongst Nixon’s economic advisors over how to address the nation’s balance of payment’s deficit—over the previous two years more money had been leaving the country than was coming in. Traditionally, capital controls had been combined with efforts to boost exports in order to maintain a balance of payment’s surplus. Under the

Bretton Woods agreement, now defunct, capital flows had been strictly controlled by governments and international entities including the IMF. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations had introduced further controls on capital flows in an effort to keep U.S. dollars at home. The Interest Equalization Tax levied a tax on the purchase of foreign securities. Casey, however, entered these discussions as a powerful voice for eliminating all such controls. The United States actually enjoyed a billion dollar net inflow over its trade deficit if one included the “dividends, interest, royalties, etc. from our investments abroad,” he recognized. Increasing the ability of Americans to invest abroad would thus increase the capital flowing back to the United States. Equally important, Casey understood that America’s “[dominance] in computers…medical technology, aerospace, nuclear power,” and “heavy industry,” made the United States an attractive market for foreign investment. By making “securities an export,” the United States could attract even more capital as foreign investors purchased U.S. stocks and other financial instruments. Casey laid out his ideas in an April memorandum to Treasury Secretary

51 Bill Neikirk, “Storm Centers on Economics Post,” Oakland Tribune, 1 December 1972, 4.

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George Shultz. He also took the opportunity to advocate for making the development of

“indigenous capital markets” in the Global South an administration priority. “The poor nations,” he informed Shultz, “will only raise their living standards significantly and become better markets for our goods only as they develop,” their own capital markets.52

Casey repeated much of this argument, down to his choice of words, in a

November speech before the Securities Industries Association. “I believe we can again make New York the headquarters of the world capital markets in an era of huge world- wide investment needs while generating a flow back of dollars to the United States through increased invisible earnings and investment in the United States.”53 In this instance, not only was Casey preaching to the choir, the choir had helped write the sermon. Before beginning his term at the State Department, Casey had written to the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange James Needham to learn what Wall Street wanted the federal government to focus on. Number one on the group’s list was the

“promotion of direct foreign investments in U.S. corporate securities.” 54

Casey was particularly concerned with attracting capital to the “poor nations” of the Global South. These countries needed to “develop indigenous capital markets” in order to create the wealth necessary to purchase the heavy machinery and advanced technology the United States excelled at producing. Casey’s voice helped forge on a consensus within the administration on the elimination of capital controls, which was accomplished in January 1974. Freed from government control, U.S. investors exported

52 Panitch and Gindin, 146-148, untitled copy of memorandum from Casey to Shultz, folder 4, box 151, WJC Papers. 53 William Casey, Address before the Annual Convention of the Securities Industries Association, Boca Raton, Florida, 29 November 1973, folder 8, box 156, WJC Papers. 54 James J. Needham to Casey, 23 February 1973, folder 8, box 163, WJC Papers.

114 their capital overseas. While in the previous year “long term capital outflows” from the

United States were non-existent, by end of 1974 more than $18 billion had flown out of the country. But also as Casey predicted capital invested abroad was offset by foreign investors in Europe, the oil rich Middle East, and Japan who now poured their money into the American market. By decade’s end, 50 percent of global FDI would be located in the United States.55

The international economic vision espoused by Casey and other business leaders and conservative economists did not go unchallenged in the U.S. political sphere. The

AFL-CIO, for one, vehemently disagreed with Casey’s assertion that the “economic interests” of multinational corporations “parallel[ed] the national interest.”56 While Casey extolled the virtues of free flowing capital as head of the SEC in 1971, the nation’s largest labor union introduced a bill, sponsored by Democratic Senators James Burke and

Vance Hartke, to restrict capital flow by regulating oversees investments. Labor unions feared, correctly, that the elimination of capital controls would intensify deindustrialization in the United States as manufacturing moved overseas.

But deindustrialization was exactly what Casey and his allies desired. In a speech before the Overseas Development Council in October 1974, Casey exclaimed, “We want to be able to buy abroad the products that can be better produced there and to sell abroad the products that we can produce better here.” For Casey, the idea was to keep producing only the kind of high technology and heavy machinery that, he believed, the workers of the Global South could not produce. As for the American workers whose jobs would be

55 Stein, 117; Panitch and Gindin, 147-148. 56 William Casey, “Private Investment in the Development Process,” Address before the National Foreign Trade Convention, New York, 13 November 1973, folder 4, box 156, WJC Papers.

115 lost, Casey allowed that some “short run employment dislocations” were inevitable, but in the long term he expected these groups to be absorbed by the service and heavy manufacturing sectors of the economy.57 Liberals, suffering proved incapable of challenging such a confident vision of the future. As Judith Stein has argued, discord among the Democrats blunted their ability to effectively counter the arguments of Casey and his allies. Privatization and free flowing capital ascended without much opposition to economic orthodoxy.58

Casey’s period of influence within the State Department was short lived. In

September 1973, just seven months after joining the department, Henry Kissinger replaced Bill Rogers as Secretary of State. Rogers had been a friend as well as a boss, treating Casey as an equal. Kissinger, in contrast, had little use for him. Mocking his proclivity for mumbling, Kissinger remarked to an aid, “Casey may be an intelligent man, but with those marbles in his mouth, how can you tell?” Kissinger’s well known disdain for economics also isolated Casey in the department. Indeed, Casey would later tell

Reagan that it was Kissinger’s “well known disregard for “economic interest” that caused him to leave the State Department.59

Seething under Kissinger’s domineering style, Casey determined to get out from under his control by taking over the presidency of the Export-Import Bank. In December,

Casey slipped a letter for Nixon to the president’s secretary Rose Mary Woods.

Explaining that he was “most effective and happiest when…running something,” Casey

57 Address by William J Casey, “A Comprehensive Development Policy for the United States,” Department of State Bulletin, 3 December1973, Vol. LXIX, No. 1797, 688-695. 58 Stein, Pivotal Decade, xi-xii; on the debate over Burke-Hartke, see chapter one of Vernie Oliveiro, “The United States, Multinational Corporations, and the Politics of Globalization in the 1970s,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 2010), 21-76. 59 Persico, 159; Casey to Reagan, 21 November 1980, folder 4, box 299, WJC Papers.

116 asked the president for the post. While he refrained from naming Kissinger as his reason for leaving State, Casey made clear his frustration with the new Secretary, concluding, “I am in Washington to be where I can count and be effective.” It is unclear how much attention Nixon, increasingly consumed by the Watergate scandal, gave the letter, but he gave Casey what he wanted. Casey would take over the Eximbank. While the job lacked the access to the president and ability to help set foreign policy, it did have one thing going for it. Henry Kissinger was nowhere in sight.60

It was during Casey’s struggles with Kissinger in the fall of 1973 that the Arab states launched their war against Israel and imposed an oil embargo against the Western nations. While the oil shock rocked Rostow, Connally, and Nitze back on their heels, they served to reinforce Casey’s core belief that the integration of global capital could sustain

America’s economic preeminence. Even before the OPEC embargo, in July 1973, Casey expressed his belief that the flow of wealth from the industrialized nations to the oil producing states represented both a challenge and an opportunity for the United States.

The investment of oil receipts (petrodollars) in western banks promised to extend the financial sector’s reach into the “developing” world. As Casey saw it, western banks had an “unprecedented opportunity” to channel the wealth of Middle Eastern states into global investments. “Oil and money,” Casey foresaw, would travel together in “mutually beneficial multilateral flows.”61 His vision proved prescient, as western banks flushed with funds from the oil producing states hurried to extend new loans to nations in the

60 Persico, 160-161; Casey to President Nixon, undated, folder 19, box 159, WJC Papers. 61 Address by William J Casey, “International Cooperation on Energy,” Department of State Bulletin, 9 July 1973, Vol. LXIX No. 1776, 59-62.

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Latin America, Asia, and Africa.62 In the midst of the energy crisis in December 1973,

Casey had confidence that as “developing” nations acquired more of a stake in the global economy, “they [would] be less likely to take political actions that would disrupt international economic and political systems,” a clear reference to the oil embargo.63

This is not to say that the October War and oil embargo had no profound impact on Casey. They did. Like his contemporaries, he too feared the “cartelization” of raw materials by “producer” nations in the Global South, not only oil, but tin, rubber, and precious metals as well. As oil prices failed to return to their pre-embargo level, Casey blamed energy costs for the economy’s continued struggles with inflation and recession.64

Casey devoted nearly all of his energies while head of the Eximbank (1974-1976) to solving the global energy crisis. His strategy: develop all sources of energy, everywhere in the world to offset OPEC’s monopoly. Casey would seek to enlist oil revenues in the export of American energy technology—from drilling equipment to nuclear reactors—to the Global South. In this way, he reasoned, the United States could diminish “Arab power” while enriching U.S. multinationals and bankers in one fell swoop.

On the Front Line of the Resource War: The Export-Import Bank

“The energy field is where the action will be,” Casey assured U.S. ambassador to

Iran, and former CIA director, Richard Helms in January 1974. Casey was responding to a letter from Helms who, upon learning that Casey was taking over the Eximbank,

Helms, had written Casey with recommendations for bank activities in Iran. American

62 The extension of these loans would go a long way to creating the debt crisis of the 1980s when high interest rates and another oil shock led many nations to threaten default. See Frederick Weaver, 62-66. 63 Casey, “A Comprehensive Development Policy for the United States.” 64 The Chairman’s Statement, “Annual report of the Export-Import Bank, 1975,” folder 2, box 183, WJC Papers.

118 firms faced increasing competition for contracts and sales from Japanese and European companies, Helms warned Casey. It was of the utmost importance that American bidders

“put forward the best combination of low prices and attractive financing.” Helms need not have worried. Embarking on his new post, Casey’s thoughts already focused on the newly capital rich nations of the Middle East. He responded, “I hope to have the bank functioning very aggressively to contribute to the overwhelming task of mobilizing investment capital to meet the needs which higher prices in the new supply-demand relationships are generating there.”65

The administration of Franklin Roosevelt had established the Export-Import Bank during the depths of the Great Depression in 1934. Its purpose: to facilitate the export of

American goods via direct loans to buying nations, loans to exporters, and the provision of insurance against potential losses.66 While the Eximbank’s activities remained fairly low profile throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both business and government turned to the bank as a solution to the nation’s balance of payments and trade deficits in the 1970s.

While in 1969 Eximbank had participated in $2.5 billion in total commitments, that number climbed to $8.5 billion in 1973 with the authority to lend up to $20 billion annually. The majority of these loans went to “developing nations” in Latin America,

Asia, and the Pacific Basin. The bank’s largest customer was Brazil. Early into Casey’s

65Richard Helms to Casey, 13 December 1973, Casey to Richard Helms, 16 January 1974, folder 11, box 159, WJC Papers. 66 For a description of the agency as well as a brief history can be found on the bank’s website. According to the site, during its near 80 years in existence it has financed over $550 Billion in American exports, “primarily to developing markets worldwide,” accessed on 16 April 2015, http://www.exim.gov/about/whoweare/history.cfm.

119 tenure as bank president, Finance Magazine declared Eximbank the government’s

“strongest offset” to the outflow of dollars caused by the hike in oil prices.67

As Casey began his presidency in the spring of 1974, not everyone on Capitol Hill seemed to agree with the financial industry’s glowing endorsement of the bank. With unemployment on the rise and American industry relocating overseas, many in Congress began to view the Eximbank as a danger to American industry. The bank loaned money at a rate well below that of commercial banks—6 percent compared to the normal rates that averaged between 9 percent and 12 percent. This meant that foreign companies could purchase American goods more cheaply than could American companies. Trans World

Airlines (TWA), for example, complained that the airline could not compete with foreign airlines that secured Eximbank loans to purchase Boeing 747s. The increase in protectionist sentiment, combined with Congress’ critical stance on continuing trade with the Soviet Union, led the House to allow the Eximbank’s authority to lend money to lapse briefly in June 1974.68

While some in Congress and the American business community might have questioned the bank’s efficacy, the nation’s largest companies—those that produced the heavy machinery necessary for energy production—put their full backing behind Casey and the bank. Not surprisingly, these were the companies that produced the type of heavy machinery least likely to face competition from the Global South. General Electric (GE) in particular viewed the long term, low interest credit offered at Eximbank as crucial to

67 “Exim Bank: Dynamo for a New Era in U.S. Overseas Trade,” Finance Magazine, June 1974, folder 7, box 504, WJC Papers; Casey referred to Brazil as “the largest Bank customer” in a Public Radio Interview, “Overseas Mission Program 179,” folder 1, box 173. 68 “A Long Look at the Ex-Im Bank,” Wall Street Journal, 28 June 1974, 14, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal actually recommended allowing the Bank’s charter to expire for several years (or permanently).

120 its export business. Amidst the clamor surrounding the bank’s future in the summer of

1974, GE Vice President Hoyt Steele wrote to Casey saying that “General

Electric…[saw] immediate business for fossil power plants amounting to close to $1 billion, the bulk of which will probably require Eximbank financing.” Steele included a list of nations with which GE expected to do business, including $240 million in exports to Venezuela, $100 million to Mexico, and $75 million to Singapore.69 With the likes of

Boeing and GE firmly behind the bank, its existence was never truly in doubt. While

Congress placed certain restrictions on the bank—raising interest rates to 7 percent-8 1/2 percent, adding more Congressional oversight for loans to the Soviet Union—they also raised its lending authority from $20 billion to $30 billion that September.70

Under Casey’s leadership Eximbank began devoting more of its resources to underwriting the export of energy related goods to East Asia the Pacific Basin, and Latin

America. Casey’s emphasis on energy was due in part due to America’s dominant position in the production of the heavy machinery and products of the industry—from oil drills to nuclear reactors. Casey also viewed the expansion of global energy reserves as vital to offsetting the power of OPEC and thus protecting U.S. security and prosperity.

“The surest way to protect our security and economic independence from cartels,” he explained to President Ford in July 1975, “[was] to develop resources and expand supply.

Such a policy necessitated “applying our nuclear power, agricultural, mining and oil finding technology around the world.”71

69 Hoyt P. Steele to Casey, 23 August 1974, folder 2, box 185, WJC Papers, Casey had written to GE earlier that month to solicit a statement in support of the Bank’s operations. 70 “Senate Votes to Boost Ex-Im Bank’s Ceiling on Loans to $30 billion,” Wall Street Journal, 20 September 1974, 6. 71 Casey Memorandum to the President, 3 July 1975, folder 5, box 182, WJC Papers.

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Expanding the nuclear power industry proved an especially significant part of

Casey’s work. The mid-to-late 1970s witnessed a surge of interest in nuclear power as an alternative to oil and coal. In August of 1975, the New York Times reported that the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that global nuclear capacity would reach 755,000 megawatts by 1980, as opposed to the 80,000 megawatt capacity in 1975. Most of the nuclear reactors enabling this “explosion” of nuclear energy capacity came from American companies GE and Westinghouse Electric, and Eximbank financed 80 percent of all exports of nuclear equipment.72 This included much of a $227 million loan to South Korea, particularly hard hit by the hike in oil prices, for the construction of the Kori 1 nuclear power plant near Pusan as well as $248 million for

Kori 2.73 Casey was a central player in trading of nuclear-energy technology.

While the export of energy related products was one way Casey sought to address the challenge posed by OPEC, his other strategy involved, as he explained to President

Ford, “getting the capital accumulating in the oil rich countries invested on long term.”74

Rather than relying solely on Congress and the bank’s own resources for loans, Casey wanted to include petrodollars in the financing of the industrial and energy projects for the “developing” world. As noted above, petrodollar recycling, or “parallel financing” as

Casey termed it, was already taking place via commercial banks in New York and

Europe. Casey, however, wanted to go further. He hoped to directly involve Middle

Eastern Governments in Eximbank projects. Casey traveled extensively in the Middle

72 Ann Crittenden, “Surge in Nuclear Exports Spurs Drive for Control,” the New York Times, 17 August 1975, 1, 28. 73 Richard Halloran, “South Korea Stressing Nuclear Energy,” the New York Times, 9 February 1975, 16; Charles E. Houston, VP of Eximbank, Briefing Memorandum for the Chairman, 30 August 1975, folder 7, box 185, WJC Papers. 74 Casey Memorandum to the President, 3 July 1975.

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East during 1974 to feel out potential government interest in partnering with the bank.

His travels included meetings with Hisham Nazer, President of Saudi Arabia’s Central

Planning Organization, and Mohammed Yeganeh, the Governor of the Central Bank of

Iran. Casey sought not only to enlist oil money in development projects, but also to insure that the financial agencies in the Middle East adhered to Western standards and values.

He considered working with such groups on loans to third party nations as an opportunity to “educate” them on the norms of global investment. He explained to Nazer, for example, that his “financial personnel [would] be getting valuable experience and exposure to investment opportunities.”75 In this way, Casey continued his ongoing interest in standardizing the global financial industry to insure maximum integration.

It is unclear whether or not these Middle Eastern governments ever actually participated in such deals. The records for the Eximbank in this era remain classified.

Yet, Casey’s vision for an integrated network of Middle Eastern money, American expertise, and Global South projects, is provocative when one compares it to the nature of the Iran-Contra program of a decade later. When Congress ended its funding of the

Contra War, Casey would turn to the Middle East, principally Saudi Arabia, to keep the guerrilla army afloat, a strategy he first deployed at the bank in the 1970s.76

Along with integrating petrodollars into the global financial industry, Casey used his time at the bank to enlist capital from the nation’s investment banking sector.

Previous to Casey’s tenure, only commercial banks had participated in financing of

75 Casey to Hisham Nazer, 11 December 1974, folder 11, box 181, WJC Papers; Casey to Dr. Mohammed Yaganeh, 5 December 1974, folder 10, box 180, WJC Papers. 76 One “parallel” investment project that appears to have succeeded involved enlisting the Kuwaiti government in the financing of a Nickel mine in Indonesia. The Eximbank was scheduled to provide$70 million in additional financing. Casey hoped to split the cost with Kuwait, which appears to have been the case, Casey to Amb. William Stoltzfus, 3 December 1974, folder 11, box 181, WJC Papers; “Ex-Im Bank Credit for Indonesia is Tentatively Cleared,” Wall Street Journal, 28 April 1975, 16.

123 international loan projects. Prevented from offering non-governmental securities to their customers, commercial banks had to rely on deposits to fund loan projects. Investment banks operated under no such restrictions. They could offer customers bonds to raise the requisite capital to fund the expensive, massive energy technology exports that Casey favored. His efforts culminated in the first ever issuance of bonds backed by the

Eximbank. The Investment firm Kuhn, Loeb & Company offered public bonds totaling

$367 Million to finance the construction of a nuclear power plant in the Philippines.77 At the end of his first year as bank president, Eximbank had loaned a record $3.8 billion to support American exports in 75 countries, while insuring another $1 billion in guarantees to private financiers.78

As with his time at the SEC, Casey’s tenure at Eximbank had significant ramifications for future transformations to the global economy in the 1980s. The energy crisis of the 1970s hit the non-oil producing nations of the Global South even more severely than it did Japan and Western Europe. “Developing” nations thus relied even more heavily on loans not only to fund new investments, but to cover the interest payments of previous loans as well. As historian Greg Grandin noted, “Between 1973 and 1980, third-world debt grew from $130 billion to $474 billion.” In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fed Chairman Volcker raised interest rates above 20 percent in order to overcome the nation’s decade long battle with inflation. Because Global South debt was

“denominated in dollars,” Grandin explains, “for every point the U.S. Fed raised its rate,

77 Casey Memorandum to the Firm r.e. Robert Rendell, 13 July 1976, folder 14, box 216, WJC Papers, the memorandum concerned hiring Rendell into Casey’s New York law Practice. Rendell worked under Casey at Exim Bank, and helped negotiate the deal with Kuhn, Loeb; John H. Allan, “Interest Rates on Federal Bonds Lowest Since April,” New York Times, 18 August 1976, 67. 78 “Eximbank in the World Marketplace,” Annual Report, 1974, folder 1, box 183, WJC Papers.

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$2.5 billion was added to the interest of outstanding loans.”79 In the ensuing debt crisis, the organizations collectively known as the “Washington Consensus” would force nations seeking debt rescheduling to reformulate themselves into export-oriented, privatized economies.

The origins of such a policy, as well as Volcker’s and Casey’s promotion of it, stretched back to the Peterson Taskforce of 1969. During the taskforce’s deliberations,

Volcker and the other members of the committee presented two options for how the international committee could handle the “debt-servicing problem of LDC’s.” “Creditor nations” could either “take the initiative and reschedule debts in anticipation of future problems,” or wait until “[were] real and already present.” The Treasury representatives feared advised against the first option, fearing that it would lead “debtor countries” to

“lose some of their sense of responsibilities in meeting their obligations by assuming that debt does not have to be repaid.” Although the latter option would “place greater strains on developing nations,” those present agreed that it was preferable because “a case-by- case evaluation could be made and negotiations could be more oriented to specific country conditions.” None present explicitly stated that “negotiations” would include a push for economic restructuring and privatization in the “LDC’s” in exchange for debt- restructuring, but it is unlikely that Volcker, Casey, and their associates had no idea that debt could eventually be used to force liberalization of the global economy.80 Still, as one follows Casey from the Peterson Taskforce through his tenure at the Eximbank, he can be

79 Grandin, 181-184, especially 183. 80 Treasury Talking Paper on Multilateral Institution before the Peterson Commission, 29 November 1969. Historian Greg Grandin has speculated that Volcker and others fully intended for the raising of interest rates to create a debt crisis in the Global South, but there is no evidence that either Volcker or Casey thought this. See Grandin, 184.

125 seen laying the groundwork, intentionally or not, for the use of debt as a tool to reform the global economy.

From the Ford Administration to the CPD

As effective as Casey was in his various positions with the federal government under Nixon and Ford, the policies he advocated encountered intense opposition abroad.

Many states from Asia to Latin America opposed the expansion of multinationals and the free flow of capital as violations of national sovereignty. They banded together in the UN

General Assembly to form the “Group of 77” to demand economic justice for centuries of colonial and neo-imperialist exploitation at the hands of Europe and the United States.

The General Assembly’s one nation, one vote rule gave these states a rare advantage over the wealthier nations of the Global North. The inability of Henry Kissinger to meet these challenges, in Casey’s mind, played a significant role in his decision to quit government service in 1976 in favor of the private sector.

Those nations not openly aligned with either the Soviet Union or the United

States had been working to alter the unequal relationship between the Global North and

South since the collapse of European colonialism in the 1950s. In 1955, Global South leaders from 29 states held an “Asian-African conference” in Bandung, Indonesia to encourage economic, political, and cultural cooperation amongst the former colonial states. The meeting seriously concerned leaders in Moscow and Washington. Yet, as Odd

Arne Westad has observed, “in the period following Bandung…little happened in terms of trade and economic cooperation between Global South countries.”81

81 Westad, The Global Cold War, 98-104, quote on 104.

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Beginning in the late 1960s, however, decolonizing governments began to exert more power over the global economy. The multinational phenomenon might have meant more profits for American, European, and Japanese businesses, but it also increased vulnerability of wealthier nations to the policies of poorer ones. This was especially true of expropriation—the seizure of private property by the state for the public good. The rate at which foreign governments expropriated foreign owned property increased markedly in the 1970s along with the rise of multinational corporations. There were 336 cases of expropriation by poorer nations between 1970 and 1975, which amounted to 58 percent of all the cases of expropriation from 1960 to 1975.82 With U.S. private investment in the Global South totaling $25 billion, and increasing at a rate of 10 percent per year, the threat of expropriation and cartelization required U.S. attention. Casey was deeply concerned with “the potential conflict between developed and less developed countries.” While still in the State Department, he produced a memorandum urging the administration to seek out “means to avoid, lessen, or delay” such conflicts.83 His belief that Kissinger had ultimately failed to heed this warning would in large part lead to his resignation from the administration.

If expropriation represented one challenge to the spread of privatization and multinationals, increasing economic cooperation between Global South states represented another. In the UN General Assembly (UNGA), poor nations gathered to reform the global economy through such agencies as the UN Conference on Trade and Development

82 Vernie Oliveiro, “The United States, Multinational Enterprises, and the Politics of Globalization,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, Daniel J. Sargent, eds. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 144. 83 William Casey, “The United States and the Developing World: A Forward-Looking Strategy,” State Department Memorandum, circa October 1973, folder 4, box 499, WJC Papers.

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(UNCTAD) and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Greatly encouraged by the success of the OPEC embargo, the “Group of 77” proposed a “New International

Economic Order” (NIEO) at the Sixth Special Session of the UN General Assembly in

1974. Among the tenets proposed by the nations were demands for “regulation and supervision of the activities of transnational corporations,” national control of natural resources, the facilitation of “producer associations”—like OPEC—and transferring technology to nations “in accordance with procedures which are suited to their economies,” not, in other words, under the condition that those states reform their economies along lines desired by the lending nation.84

The Ford administration could hardly be said to have been pleased with the Group of 77’s demands, but in the wake of the OPEC crisis they felt weakened and hemmed in by the “producer” states. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan advised

Ford, “For the next generation, the US will be a beleaguered garrison in international forums…We must play hardball.” 85 Yet, Kissinger and Ford intended to concede to some of the Global South’s demands. That September, Moynihan, reading from a speech prepared by Kissinger, committed the United States to, among other things, to stabilize

“the export earnings of developing countries, to create new international institutions to facilitate the transfer of technology, and acknowledged the right of nations to regulate multinationals operating within their borders.” Far from opposing the non-aligned

84 General Assembly, Sixth Special Session, Supplement no. 1 (A/9559), United Nations, 1974, 3201 (S- VI), Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, May 1, 1974; On the Group of 77 see chapter 3 of Vernie Oliveiro’s dissertation, 124-172; as well as Glenda Sluga, “The Transformation of International Institutions: Global Shock as Cultural Shock,” in Shock of the Global, 223- 236. 85 Quoted in John Toye and Richard Toye, “From New Era to Neo-Liberalism: US Strategy on Trade, Finance and Development in the United Nations, 1964-82,” Forum for Development Studies, No. 1 (December 2005), 171.

128 movement’s demands, this speech, as Judith Stein noted, represented “if not a new international order…then a reformed one.”86

Casey was apoplectic over Kissinger’s proposals. Even before the UN speech, he wrote Ford arguing, “Commodity agreements and joint commissions will not develop resources and overcome shortages.” Only government encouraged private enterprises could do that. Clearly displeased with the General Assembly address, Casey declared before a group of corporate directors that “the profit motive should never be apologized for.” America’s ability to reform “developing” economies towards greater “efficiency” was a prerequisite for international investment. Without transforming the economic system within the poorer nations, he lectured, expanding multinationals into new nations became akin to the “adaptation of computerized technologies to la dolce vita.” Welfare supported workers and administrators chosen through “nepotism,” in other words, could not be trusted to work efficiently. “Think of the problem an MNC would have in granting local autonomy to an overseas affiliate in such a place!” he exclaimed to his listeners.

An American businessman who visited a government office out in the boondocks on a weekday afternoon and found no one on duty but the janitor. “It seems they don’t work here in the afternoons,” the American said. “Oh, it’s in the mornings they don’t work,” the janitor replied. “In the afternoons they don’t come.”87

Casey’s reasoning here drew on racialized images of nonwhites as lazy, especially in tropical climes, as implied in his use of the word Boondocks—a Tagalog word adopted by the U.S. military during the Philippine-American War, and his reference to “la dolce

86 Stein, 92; Global Consensus and Economic Development, Address by Secretary Kissinger (delivered by Moynihan) at the Seventh Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly, Department of State Bulletin, 22 September 1975, pp. 425–441 87 William Casey, "International Investment: Constraints and Incentives,” Address Before the Corporate Directors Conference, 16 December, 1974, Washington, D.C., folder 5, box 174, WJC Papers.

129 vita.” This would not be the last time that Casey pointed to climate and work ethic as an explanation for why the people of the Global South needed to be transformed.

Despite Casey’s reservations, it was clear from Moynihan’s UN speech that the

Ford administration would continue its efforts to work with, rather than fully oppose, the

Group of 77. After six years of service in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Casey had grown tired, frustrated, and disillusioned. His successes, though formidable, were of a piecemeal nature. More often than not, Casey’s grand vision of himself as a “shaper” of policy was stymied by an unsympathetic Congress, Henry Kissinger’s jealous guarding of power and opposition to conservative economics at home and abroad. Casey departed

Washington at the end of 1975. Adding insult to injury, upon leaving office Casey discovered that his personal fortune had diminished by some $3 million over the course of his time in government—it was customary for government officials to place their assets in a while a blind trust for the duration of their service.88 A relatively poorer Casey returned to private life in 1976.

Although he had resigned from the public sector, the sixty-one year old Casey had no intention of retiring, choosing instead to return to New York and the practice of law.

He secured a position with a law firm that would allow him to pursue his interests, most importantly to continue pursuing the types of economic policies he had promoted within the federal government. The firm Rogers and Wells fit the bill nicely. Former Secretary of State Bill Rogers served as the firm’s senior partner. He agreed to a deal with Casey that gave him the free time he desired to write, travel for speeches, and, most importantly, become involved in the burgeoning number of elite-run private groups with an interest in

88 Persico, 163-164.

130 shaping American foreign policy.89 Among the most important groups Casey joined were the Atlantic Council and the Committee on the Present Danger.

Just one week after signing on with Rogers and Wells, on January 12, 1976,

Casey received an invitation from Francis Wilcox, Director of the Atlantic Council. The

Council, he informed Casey, was undertaking a study on U.S. economic policy towards the “developing world.” Would Casey like to join “in the deliberations of this Working

Group?” Casey quickly agreed. By June, he was a full-fledged member of the Council.90

Membership in the Atlantic Council gained Casey important contacts with influential foreign policy advisors from the Democratic Party. The group’s leadership included Eugene Rostow as well as Henry Fowler and Theodore Achilles. Joining Casey in the work of drafting the report was Edwin Martin. Martin served as chairman of the group and principle author of the policy paper. He had served as Assistant Secretary of

State for Economic Affairs—during the Eisenhower Administration. Martin had also played an important role in the modernization programs of the Kennedy and Johnson era, overseeing the U.S. dispersal of aid through the Alliance for Progress in Latin America.

When Martin and Casey began work on the report in the winter of 1976, Martin serving as chairman of the World Bank Committee on Food Production in the “developing world.”91

The Atlantic Council’s report, The United States and the Developing World, provides an excellent example of the overlap that could exist between former proponents

89 Ibid, 164-165; as discussed by Persico, Casey also devoted time to writing a history of the Revolutionary War, and a manuscript for a never published book on his time in the OSS. 90 Francis O. Wilcox to Casey, 12 January 1976, folder 2, box 232, WJC Papers. 91 Biographical information on Stanley and Martin comes from: the Obituary by Eric Pace, “Timothy W. Stanley, 69, Expert On Defense Policy and Strategies,” New York Times, 23 September 1997, D27; and the guide to the Edwin M. Martin Personal Papers at the John F. Kennedy Library, accessed 14 November 2013, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/EMPP.aspx?f=1.

131 of modernization theory and the supporters of market-oriented development policies.

Initial drafts of the document began with the heading “What is the problem?” It rather bluntly stated that “the problem [was] that 114 nations,” were “demanding a better deal” in the global economic system. While acknowledging the extreme poverty in which many of these nations existed, the report’s authors concluded that the source of Global South poverty was not exploitation by the industrialized world. Rather, they relied on neo- colonial explanations that laid the blame for global poverty on the pathology of nonwhites. The report emphasized such factors as the tropical climates wherein many poor nations existed, as well as the cultural aversion of these peoples to “the traits that are the foundation of our economies,” such as “respect for material things, for work, for discipline, etc.” In this way, the authors elided the continuance of unequal economic relationships between nations and poverty’s persistence in the Global South in the post- colonial era. The problem lay not with the system, but with its victims.92

Casey shared in the analysis and conclusions of most of the report, except in one telling instance. In the November 1976 draft of the statement, Martin had suggested that one of the criteria the U.S. government should use in evaluating its aid program be how well the recipient state “[utilized] available resources to benefit the population as a whole.”93 Casey found this passage too much like the modernization theory of the 1960s, asking “developing” states to intervene in the private sector. “I think we should concentrate on promoting new centers of initiative and responsibility,” he wrote Wilcox in December 1976. “If you fully use all resources, including labor, and keep people from

92 Edwin Martin, “What is the Problem,” rough draft of working group report on U.S. relationship with Developing Countries, folder 2, box 232, WJC Papers. 93 Edwin Martin, The United States and the Developing Countries, 2nd draft, November 1976, folder 3, box 232, WJC Papers.

132 starving to death the market will handle the distribution,” Casey fully believed—although he never explained how governments should prevent starvation. “I think we should concentrate on promoting new centers of initiative and responsibility and not cloud the issue by getting heavily tangled up in demanding equitable distribution.”94 The group’s final report replaced the phrase “benefit the population as a whole” with a call for policymakers to bear in mind the “number of people benefitting from [economic] growth” when considering an economic aid package. Elsewhere, the group encouraged government support of multinationals as valuable contributors to “development.”95

Casey’s involvement in the Atlantic Council brought him into contact with

Rostow and Nitze as the two Democrats entered into the planning stage for the CPD. A

Republican veteran of the Nixon and Ford White Houses with no love for Kissinger,

Casey made an ideal candidate for membership in the bipartisan group. Rostow approached Casey late in the planning stage, not requesting his support until October 27,

1976. Rostow wrote him, requesting his support in a campaign to publicize “the main problems confronting our foreign policy.96 Rostow’s invitation arrived at a fortuitous moment for Casey. Just that August, the Non-Aligned Movement announced at their 5th meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka their support of the NIEO declaring, “nothing short of a complete restructuring of international economic relations…will place developing countries in a position to achieve an acceptable level of development.”97 Casey found the

94 Casey to Wilcox, 28 December 1976, folder 3, box 232, WJC Papers. 95 The United States and the Developing Countries, The Atlantic Council Working Group on the United States and the Developing Countries, The Atlantic Council Policy Series (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977), 85, 97. 96 Rostow to Casey, 27 October, 1976, folder 3, box 236, WJC Papers. 97 5th Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of the Non-Aligned Movement Colombo, Sri Lanka 16 – 19 August 1976, A copy of the final communique can be found on the Non-Aligned Movement Disarmament Database, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the Monterey Institute of International Studies, accessed on15 January 2014,

133 group gathered at Colombo “sinister in their attitudes towards multinationals, private capitalism, and prospects for economic warfare against the West.” Although the non- aligned movement was not synonymous with OPEC, Casey saw in their pronouncements the potential for sustained conflict between North and South over raw materials if the non-aligned nations formed their own OPEC-like groups. “We may be facing a resource war,” he warned in an intelligence memorandum prepared for the president by the

President’s Foreign Policy Advisory Board (PFIAB). 98 The CPD promised to address this challenge head on, restoring respect for America abroad by flexing the nation’s military muscle. Casey quickly signed on as a founding member.

Casey incorporated the CPD’s arguments into his many public appearances. In a

November 1979 speech to the Long Island Bankers Association, for example, Casey included the nation’s lagging military spending, along with political setbacks, as part of a

“pattern of defeat and failure” that “jeopardized” American access to raw materials and thus domestic prosperity.99 Yet it was at just this moment that Rostow decided to turn the

CPD’s focus onto the negotiations over SALT II. Casey was disturbed. “The Committee on the Present Danger is focusing on SALT to the neglect of other dangers,” he complained to his old friend Leo Cherne. He wanted the CPD to devote some time to the support of “economic revitalization of the countries having market economies.” The

United States, as Casey had been arguing for the better part of a decade now, “[had] the finance and technological power” to do so. Yet the CPD remained wholly committed to

http://cns.miis.edu/nam/index.php/meeting/index?Meeting percent5Bforum_id percent5D=5&name=NAM+Summits, quote on page 63. 98 Casey included these worries in a report to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which he joined shortly after leaving office, Memorandum, “Economic Intelligence for the Future,” 6 October 1976, folder 1, box 188, WJC Papers,. 99 William Casey, “Dangers Ahead,” Speech delivered before the L.I. Bankers Association 28 November 1979, folder 1 box 212, WJC papers.

134 the anti-SALT campaign.100 This is not to say that Casey opposed the mission of the

CPD, he remained a member and named several CPD members—most notably Rostow and Jeane Kirkpatrick—to important posts in Reagan’s transition team. It is more accurate to say that Casey viewed a more overt emphasis on the benefits of the free market as complementary to the CPD’s emphasis on defense.

In 1977, Casey formed his own organization, one designed to explicitly address the “[E]conomic problems…confront[ing] the United States and other countries of the free world.” He joined with Antony Fisher to found the (ICEPS) in 1978—in 1981 they changed the center’s name to the more economical Manhattan Institute. An English libertarian, Fisher had previously founded several influential libertarian think tanks abroad including the Fraser Institute in Canada and the Institute for Economic Affairs in

London. Casey put Fisher into contact with several important American backers including former Treasury Secretary William Simon and Frank O’Connell, Chairman of ultra-conservative millionaire John M. Olin’s Foundation. Casey’s influence insured the

ICEPS received corporate funding from the likes of Exxon, Proctor & Gamble, the Olin

Foundation, and Scaife Charitable Trusts.101 With such generous backers, he and Fisher devoted the ICEPS to book and pamphlet publishing and holding forums, with the goal of changing the “conventional wisdom” that government was the “principal problem solver” of the nation’s economic woes.102

100 Casey Memorandum to Leo Cherne, Bert Jolis, Henry Tasca, 16 June 1978, folder 3, box 236, WJC Papers. 101 Antony Fisher to William Simon, 26 August 1977, folder 4, box 249, WJC Papers. 102 On the mission of the ICEPS and a list of its original members, see ICEPS pamphlet, folder 3, box 249, WJC Papers. Among other activities, the Manhattan Institute provided a home base for such conservative thinkers as Charles Murray, who wrote his controversial attack on the welfare state, Losing Ground, while a fellow at the institute. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984); on the history of the Manhattan Institute, see Alice O’Connor, “The Privatized City:

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Once out of government, Casey became an active participant in business deals between the United States and “developing” nations. His expertise as a tax lawyer, and his connections within the government, made him an important agent between foreign governments and U.S. companies operating abroad. This was especially true of the

Indonesian government. As head of the Eximbank, Casey had the opportunity to meet with the head of Indonesia’s nationalized oil company Pertamina. In the summer of 1976, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) determined that taxes paid by Mobil Oil to Indonesia did not qualify to receive a tax credit in the United States. The Indonesian government could not risk having a tax code that put them at a competitive disadvantage with other oil producing nations. They turned to Casey’s law firm for help. Casey quickly organized a meeting with Treasury Secretary Simon and the Deputy Commissioner of the IRS in order to clarify what the Indonesian Government needed to do to insure tax credits of

U.S. companies in America.103

As Casey did what he could to promote privatization and the global spread of capital as a private citizen, he opposed the economic policies of Jimmy Carter. Carter’s economic policy was a far cry from the Keynesianism of his Democratic predecessors.

He chose Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve in 1979. Still, Carter was no market fundamentalist, and his efforts to place some modest controls on capital distressed Casey.

The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 34 no. 2 (Jan 2008), 333-353. 103 The details of the Indonesia case are known because the U.S. Senate would later investigate Casey’s role in the business deal as a possible violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required persons representing foreign governments to register with the government, something that Casey did not do. Casey would argue that Indonesia was the firm’s client, not his personal client, thus freeing him from responsibility of registering: Anthony F. Essaye to Victoria Toensing, Chief Counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 24 November 1981, WJC folder 2, box 350, WJC Papers; Casey complained about his fee in the case to the partners at Rogers and Wells, noting that even though he had “initiated” the matter with Simon, he received only “a few thousand dollars” from a “six-figure fee,” quoted in Persico, 170-171.

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The Carter administration reduced aid, including Eximbank loans, to several nations whose governments had committed human rights abuses, including Argentina and

Uruguay. In 1978, Carter signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act into law, restricting

U.S. exports of nuclear technology and materials for energy production. “We have hobbled our exporters with restrictions and requirements with which their competitors are not burdened,” Casey lamented in a policy paper prepared for the 1980 Republican

National Convention. “It is clear we must get rid of this fumbling incompetence and this defeatist outlook,” he concluded.104 In Ronald Reagan, Casey would find a kindred spirit dedicated to precisely same vision for a global economy.

Into the Reagan Fold

Prior to 1979, Casey had little personal contact with, or interest in, Ronald

Reagan. While both were members of the Republican Party, as well as the CPD, they existed at different ends of the conservative spectrum. Casey represented the older, established East coast wing of conservatism. Reagan, meanwhile, epitomized the new conservatism of the Sunbelt, which was suspicious of what they viewed as elitist fiscal conservatives on Wall Street. Casey and Reagan learned more about one another in the spring of 1979 when candidate Reagan stopped in New York on a fundraising mission.

Casey, with his Wall Street connections, was a potential fundraising goldmine for a candidate with few ties to the East. Mutual friend William Walsh arranged for the two to meet that March. An amiable conversation ensued, and the two men agreed to a date for breakfast during Reagan’s next scheduled fundraising stop in New York that May. Sitting down to breakfast at the Colony Hill Hotel on Long Island, Casey complimented the

104 William Casey, “A Policy for Survival in a Global Economy,” Report to the Republican National Convention, 15 January 1980, folder 4, box 212, WJC Papers.

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California Governor, remarking that the Republicans would have won the White House had they nominated Reagan “instead of Jerry Ford in ’76.” The kind words sparked a longer conversation on politics and each man’s conservatism. Casey, ever the mumbler, came away from the breakfast greatly impressed with Reagan’s formidable communication skills. “He could be President,” he confided to a friend. That November, it was Casey’s turn to impress to Reagan. He hosted yet another New York fundraiser, at the New York Hilton on the evening of November 9, 1980. In a single night, Casey raised over $800,000 for the Reagan campaign.105

It was good that Casey could raise vast amounts of money for Reagan. For no sooner had the campaign begun than it faced serious financial strains that threatened to torpedo his election-bid. Ironically, a candidate running against profligate spending in

Washington was hindered by his own campaign’s feckless spending. Reagan held the advantage of popular support over his rivals. But he could still lose the nomination if he could not campaign, and he was well on his way to exceeding the $17.6 million Federal limit on “pre-nomination spending” before the primary races were even half over. His campaign manager John Sears maintained a paid staff of over 300 people. Sears’ strategy involved focusing on winning the early eastern primaries, hoping to wrap up the nomination before the Midwestern races. This meant emptying the coffers sooner rather than later. By March 1980, they had racked up a debt of nearly $1.5 million.106 Casey had performed an internal audit of the campaign’s finances and management back in January.

105 Casey’s initial interactions with Reagan are described by Persico, 173-175; also see Casey to Reagan, 29 March 1979, folder 4, box 285, WJC Papers; and Casey to William Walsh, 20 April 1979, folder 7, box 509, WJC Papers. 106 Warren Weaver Jr., “March 1 Reports on Spending Show Bush in Better Shape than Reagan,” New York Times, 26 March 1980, B7.

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He had bluntly informed Meese and Reagan that their campaign was “going broke” and appeared “paralyzed” by internal divisions. Sears’ controlling, jealous personal demeanor alienated the majority of Reagan’s inner-circle. He especially irritated Edwin Meese—

Reagan’s former Chief of Staff in California and day-to-day operator of the campaign.

When Reagan lost the Iowa Caucus to George Bush on January 21, Sears’ enemies lined up against him.107 But who would replace him as campaign manager?

Reagan wrote to Casey the day after his defeat in Iowa to thank him for “com[ing] to the aid of our finance division.” On February 16, Casey again met with Reagan, this time in Boston. He agreed to take over for Sears so long as it was made clear that he was in control of the campaign. Reagan approved, and Casey arrived in Los Angeles on

February 27, 1980 to take up his post at campaign headquarters. He quickly fired half of the campaign staff and forced the remaining workers to take a pay cut.108

With his campaign back in the black, Reagan played effective defense against the higher spending George Bush campaign. Bush won some significant victories, including the Pennsylvania primary, but it was not enough to overcome Reagan’s natural charisma and compelling communication style. 109 With Reagan’s charisma and Casey’s skills at management, they had the Republican nomination sewn up by mid-May.

Reagan’s nomination assured, Casey turned his attention to the general election against Carter. While the incumbent faced some daunting challenges to his reelection

107 Persico, 174-176. 108 Ibid, 175-182; Reagan to Casey, 22 January 1980, folder 4, box 285, WJC Papers; Reagan might have guaranteed him control of the campaign, but Casey still felt the need to publicly assert his preeminence, as when he informed a reporter for the National Journal, “I’m in charge of all areas of the campaign and the day-to-day operations,” Dom Bonafede, “The ‘Liberation’ of Ronald Reagan: A New Staff and a New Strategy,” National Journal, 22 March 1980, 475-477. 109 The tight budget forced on Reagan helped to cost him at least the primary in Pennsylvania where the Bush campaign greatly outspent the Reagan bunch: Hedrick Smith, “Bush is Winner over Reagan, Kennedy-Carter Race is Tight in Pennsylvania Balloting,” New York Times, 23 April, 1980, A1.

139 hopes—most notably the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the Soviet

Invasion of Afghanistan—polls pointed to a tight race.110 The Reagan campaign, and

Casey in particular, feared that the president might reach a deal with Iran to release the

American hostages held in Tehran just before the election, swaying the American public to vote for him. The Republican campaign’s worry over an “October surprise,” as it came to be known, has, in the years following the election—especially in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal—led to charges that Casey met secretly with Iranian officials in

Paris and Madrid to cut a deal. Delay the release of the hostages until after the November election, he supposedly told the Iranians, and President Reagan would unfreeze Iranian assets and provide weapons for the Iranian military, then mired in a war with Iraq. In the early 1990s, Congress launched two separate Congressional inquiries, neither of which came to anything like a decisive conclusion on the veracity of the charge. That Iran released the U.S. hostages only minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address on

January 20, 1981 has only added fuel to the fire of speculation.111

Having steered the Reagan campaign to victory, Casey now awaited the fruits of his labors. The particular “fruit” that Casey had his eyes on was the position of Secretary of State. Early indicators encouraged him that the President-elect might choose him for the spot. Reagan named Casey as “Chairman of the Transition Executive Committee.”

110 A Gallup poll from June indicated that the race was a statistical tie: “Campaign Report,” 16 June 1980, New York Times, B9; Polls throughout the general election continued to show a very tight race likely to come down to election day: “Reagan and Carter even in Washington Post Poll,” New York Times, 14 September 1980, B12. 111 The most important work done on the “October Surprise” is Gary Sick’s October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Reagan (New York: Times Books, 1991). A Naval officer and Veteran of the National Security Council, Sick served as the Carter White House’s point person on the Iranian Revolution and Hostage Crisis. He could thus hardly be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Also see: Bruce Kuniholm, “There You go Again: Gary Sick, Ronald Reagan, and the Iranian Revolution: A Review Article,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 24 No. 1/4 (1991), 61-69; Persico, 192-195.

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Casey let Meese handle the day-to-day operations of the transition team for domestic policy. He took complete control of the transition team for foreign policy. He named the other members of the committee (including Rostow and Kirkpatrick), and provided them with their assignments.112 On November 21, Casey wrote Reagan personally to make his case for the Secretary of State. While he listed his qualifications for a number of posts, including DCI, Casey particularly emphasized his credentials to head the State

Department. “What the State Department needs internally,” he explained to the President- elect, “is to be trimmed down and tightened up, and given a much sharper economic thrust and a tougher minded focus on American interests…” No doubt emphasizing economics and privileging American interests over “the needs and demands of other countries” appealed to Reagan, but, in truth, Casey never had a realistic chance of being nominated to lead the State Department. Dick Allen later remarked that Casey simply

“[didn’t] look like a Secretary of State.”113 He remained a sartorial mess who had never lost his propensity to mumble, or his New York accent.

In late December 1980, Reagan called Casey with the news. He would not be

Secretary of State. “I want you to be the director of the CIA,” Reagan informed Casey.

Clearly disappointed, Casey told the President-elect that he had to think about it. After getting Reagan’s assurance that he would part of the decision making process in foreign policy, he agreed to take the post as DCI.114

112 Persico, 200; Statement of the Honorable Ronald Reagan, Press Release, 6 November 1980, folder 3, box 298, WJC Papers. 113 Persico, 201-203; Casey to Reagan, 21 November 1980, folder 4, box 299, WJC Papers. 114 Persico, 203.

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Conclusion

If someone asked William Casey to summarize his experience of the 1970s in one word, “disappointment” would likely have been his answer. He never achieved the influence in the Nixon and Ford administrations that he sought. Casey was, however, able advocate for international economic policies that would become crucial to U.S. foreign relations in the Global South. In order to be able to compete with Japan and Western

Europe, He envisioned the United States using development assistance to direct aid- recipient nations to privatize their industries, and created export-orientated economies.

The Reagan administration would adopt just such policies in the 1980s. Capitalizing on the debt crisis in the Global South, Washington based institutions including the Treasury

Department, the IMF, and the World Bank, forced structural adjustments on debtor nations that privileged privatization, lowered taxes for the wealthy, and extended protection for private property in what has come to be known as the “Washington

Consensus.”115 Casey applauded these policy decisions that he had long sought to implement, but he was not personally involved in the deliberations surrounding their adoption. Casey was to take on a new mission in the 1980s. As head of the CIA, he would lead the Reagan administrations offensive in the Global South by masterminding the Contra war. As he did so, Casey would draw on his experience pursuing alternate sources of funding during the 1970s to make sure the war in Nicaragua continued.

115 Frederick Weaver, 62-66.

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Chapter 3

“Without Allies We Can Accomplish Nothing”: Bayard Rustin, a Cold Warrior Abroad Pursues Social Justice at Home, 1966-1980.

One hundred and forty-one names appeared on the list of the “founding board members” of the Committee on the Present Danger. Perusing through the roll, one finds many of the names and professions expected in such a group: retired generals, former diplomats, leaders of business and finance, and defense intellectuals. Among the original members of the CPD, however, no name elicits more surprise from contemporary readers than that of Bayard Rustin. Rustin was a civil rights leader who had advised Martin

Luther King Jr. on non-violent protest strategies in the 1950s. With A. Philip Randolph, he organized the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin was also a fixture in the antiwar movement. An avowed pacifist, he served over two years in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. How did this “radical pacifist,” as one historian referred to Rustin, find himself in the company of the militaristic, conservative forces of the CPD?1

As I began seeking to answer this question, I found that Bayard Rustin’s international activism in the 1970s seemed to be defined by contradiction. A pacifist who abhorred war, Rustin became among the most persistent defenders of American military aid to Israel in the entire nation. Dedicated to black majority rule in Africa, Rustin nevertheless became convinced in the 1970s that communists were unduly influencing leftist forces in Angola and Rhodesia. He concluded that an anticommunist white minority government—at least attempting some reform—was preferable to a black

1 Scott H. Bennett, Radical Pacifism: the War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

143 majority government with ties to the Soviet Union. A leading figure in the campaign against the arms race in the 1950s and 1960s, Rustin came to defend the U.S. military budget against those seeking to reallocate its funds for domestic usage. The Rustin of the

1970s seemed to bear little resemblance to the radical, socialist, pacifist civil rights pioneer of the previous three decades.

Once a largely marginalized figure within the historiography of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin has in recent years been the subject of renewed scholarly interest. Historian John D’Emilio and journalist Jervis Anderson have both penned sympathetic biographies that reevaluated Rustin’s importance to the civil rights movement. D’Emilio in particular revealed Rustin’s impact on the thinking of Martin

Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While King had already begun to develop a nascent nonviolent ideology, it was Rustin who encouraged King to fully commit to a Ghandian strategy of non-violent protest in the struggle against Jim Crow.

D’Emilio emphasized that Rustin’s sexuality prevented him from taking a more public role in the movement. The target of repeated discrimination both without and within the movement, Rustin’s legacy to civil rights had been fundamentally undervalued by historians.2

To the extent that D’Emilio, Anderson and other scholars have addressed Rustin’s militaristic stance on international affairs in the 1970s, they have separated it from his role as a social activist. In the mid-1960s, Rustin attempted to translate the momentum of the civil rights movement into a political coalition of racial minorities, white liberals, and

2 John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press); Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: The Troubles I’ve Seen (New York: Harper Collins, 1997); also see I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters, Michael G. Long, ed., (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012); the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy recently named a book award for Rustin.

144 organized labor. Together, Rustin believed, such a coalition could transform the

Democratic Party into a political force capable of achieving economic equality through robust federal outlays, far above the modest spending increases proposed in Johnson’s

War on Poverty. The Vietnam War, Black Power, and rise of the New Left, however, dashed his plans as a younger generation of activists rejected alliance with the generation of older leftists, whom they dismissed as reactionary, racist, and pro-war. Alienated from the politics of the New Left and Black Power, Rustin was said to have “retreated” from domestic affairs during the 1970s. He chose instead to work on behalf of international humanitarian causes such as the refugee crisis in Southeast Asia and efforts to extend democracy abroad. If Rustin interpreted “defending democracy” as lobbying on behalf of military aid to Israel, or warning of communist infiltration in Africa, this was due primarily to the company he kept—liberal friends and Cold Warriors also alienated by the New Left.3

In this chapter I argue that Bayard Rustin’s shift to the right on international relations in the 1970s represented a continuation of his pursuit of social and economic equality at home. Rustin was indeed responding to the challenge of Black Power and, to a lesser extent, the New Left to the postwar liberal order, but he was not retreating. Rather, his transition to foreign relations in the 1970s was intended to discredit Black Power and the New Left at home by denouncing their international ideology. His turn towards militarism grew from the conviction he reached in the mid-1960s that only a political coalition of blacks, trade unions, white middle-class liberals, and church groups could

3 D’Emilio did draw a significant connection between Rustin’s refusal to join wholeheartedly in the anti- Vietnam War movement and his desire to build a political coalition with organized labor, but concluded that by the 1970s Rustin, “Retreated from the role of movement builder and strategist at home,” D’Emilio, 446-447, quote on 478; Anderson, too, explained Rustin’s preoccupation with global events as due to his “wearying of civil rights work in America,” Anderson, 335.

145 overcome systemic inequality in the United States. The Black Power movement in particular worried him as it positioned African Americans as part of a radical “Third

World” that not only rejected the Cold War, but also defined Israel as an imperialist state in the process.4 Rustin concluded that such beliefs blocked the path to reconstituting the liberal political coalition after the Vietnam War. The radicals, he feared, alienated established liberal institutions such as Jewish groups and organized labor. Even as he appeared to tack to the Right on foreign affairs in the 1970s, Rustin’s larger goal remained ending racial inequality at home, which, he believed, “[was] susceptible to solution only through the political process of building coalitions.”5

Rustin’s dispute with Black Power activists over the relationship of African

Americans to the Global South was intimately linked to the debate between Liberals and black nationalists over strategies for progress at home. While pursuing very different strategies, both Rustin and proponents of Black Power were responding to the same fundamental problem: endemic poverty within African American communities. While

Rustin had faith that white liberal institutions could solve economic inequality, Black

Power activists had none. Rustin and black nationalists, most notably Stokely

Carmichael, debated these divergent strategies on college campuses, within the black press, and on television. The question of where African Americans’ interests lay abroad

4 Historians Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch argue for Maoism and China as the inspiration for the prominence of Third Worldism within black radicalism. See, Kelley and Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Fall 1999), 6-41. This chapter, however, emphasizes the importance of the Arab world and the Arab-Israeli conflict to galvanizing the alliance between Black Power and the Third World. For another history that emphasizes the importance of the Middle East in African American organizing see Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 84-124. 5 Bayard Rustin article Draft for the Baltimore Sun, “The Future of Black Politics,” 1976, folder 4, box 40, the Bayard Rustin Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C. (Hereafter BRP). The Library of Congress maintains both a microfilm copy of the collection, and the original documents and boxes themselves. While most scholars who have utilized the collection accessed the microfilm, I was able to use the collection in its original form.

146 was central to this dispute. While Black Power promoted racial solidarity at home and

Third World nationalism, Bayard Rustin paired desegregationist politics at home with an alliance between African Americans and democratic, anti-communist, states abroad. In making this argument, I build on the work of historians of race and the Cold War who emphasized the connections between the history of civil rights and the Cold War. Mary

Dudziak has argued that Cold War considerations were crucial to winning federal support for civil rights legislation. Carol Anderson has shown how the postwar NAACP attempted to bring the freedom struggle of African Americans to the United Nations as a human rights issue.6

The debate between Rustin and Black Power advocates took place against the backdrop of a dire economic situation for African Americans that only worsened in the face of deindustrialization and stagflation in the 1970s. The unemployment rate for

African Americans in 1972 was 10.2 percent, twice that of white workers. It reached a high of 16.4 percent in June 1975, where it barely budged over the next year.7 Not surprisingly given his desire to build a coalition between civil rights groups and organized labor, Rustin’s proposed solution to the nation’s economic woes centered on policies to stimulate economic growth. But Rustin, a political and social activist all his life, did not have a deep understanding of economics and instead relied on postwar liberal economists, namely Leon Keyserling, to form his economic views. He did not go beyond

6 Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Although Rustin had a genuine disdain for communism, part of his reason for rejecting it was practical. While communists provided significant support for civil rights groups in the 1930s and1940s, by the 1950s association with communists did more harm than good for the movement. Civil rights groups became susceptible to McCarthyist attacks. For many, anticommunism was a strategic necessity. See, Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 7 Unemployment statistics are taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/home.htm.

147 the liberal conviction that a growing economy, backed by a robust welfare state, would lift all citizens.

What possible shape a reformed liberal coalition could take looked different as one moved across the decade. While in the mid-1960s there appeared a realistic possibility for a permanent Democratic majority dedicated to achieving full employment and economic equality, by the mid-1970s liberalism’s political possibilities were much smaller. Deindustrialization had weakened organized labor, and white working-class voters who had previously voted Democratic abandoned the party in favor of the

Republicans. Rustin was not oblivious to these fundamental changes in the political landscape. By the mid-1970s his grand dream of an economically just society had been reduced to a commitment to economic growth and full employment as embodied in the

Humphrey-Hawkins Bill. The election of Jimmy Carter, however, would prove fatal to even these modest goals, as the new president chose to fight inflation over unemployment.

Rustin never saw himself as diverting from the values of pacifism that had guided him throughout his life, even as he came to support the Cold War. Rather than contradicting his pacifist ideals, he “bent” his moral beliefs around his defense of Israel and his new status as a Cold Warrior. Rustin’s pacifism did not preclude the use of violence in self-defense, he would claim, only its use as a means of social change. Thus,

Rustin could advocate on behalf of military aid to Israel, for example, without forsaking his pacifism, justifying it as “self-defense.” Whether Israel acted in self-defense or as an aggressor was, and remains, hotly debated. But Rustin relied on the expertise of his friends—in this case members of the Jewish Left and representatives of the state of

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Israel—for information on the Arab-Israeli dispute. As a result, he knew very little about the plight of Palestinian refugees. Rustin’s ability to justify his support of militarism rested on his inability to recognize the inherent bias of the information he received. He sided with those who supported the anti-communist states and their allies because they supported his narrative of a progressive, cross-racial, alliance at home and abroad. He rejected the arguments of Third World nationalists because they did not.

Bayard Rustin may not have seen himself in the 1970s as breaking with his past role as a pacifist and civil rights radical, but by the mid-point of the decade, he had transitioned fully into a Cold War liberal. Where once Rustin had rejected the binary logic of the Cold War, he now accepted its terms as defining global affairs from Africa to

Asia to Latin America. Where once Rustin had rejected the arms race, he now would join the CPD in arguing for its escalation. These positions, while heartfelt, grew out of his determination to reunite labor, liberals, and minorities in a liberal political coalition. In pursuit of allies at home, Rustin became a Cold Warrior abroad.

From Protester to Political Organizer: Rustin’s Life to 1967

Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester Pennsylvania on March 17, 1912. He was raised by his grandparents, Janifer and Julia Rustin, who, as D’Emilio recounted, waited until Rustin was “well into boyhood” before revealing to him that Florence, whom he knew as his sister, was actually his birth mother. Despite this revelation, Julia and

Janifer remained the locus of parental influence in Rustin’s life. This was especially true of Julia who, though a Methodist, had grown up interacting with the Quaker families that populated southeastern Pennsylvania. She instilled their pacifist values in Rustin. It was

Julia also who first taught Rustin to associate the plight of African Americans with that of

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Jews. “My grandmother was thoroughly convinced that when it came to matters of the liberation of black people, we had much more to learn from the Jewish experience than we had to learn out of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”8 Rustin’s identification of black liberation with the Jewish experience remained among his most profound convictions.

Rustin attended two separate colleges—the predominantly black Wilberforce

University in Ohio and the Quaker Cheyney State Teacher’s College close to his hometown. Just prior to attending Cheyney State in 1934, Rustin had officially converted to Quakerism. Rustin enjoyed his time at Cheyney. He took part in an anti-war institute with faculty, and there learned to emphasized the importance of class-consciousness over patriotism. Yet Rustin left the college in 1937, one year short of graduating. According to

D’Emilio, Rustin’s sexuality combined his desire to be a part of a large, vibrant black community propelled him out of West Chester and into New York City.9

The twenty-five year old Rustin immersed himself in the vibrant culture and political life radiating out of late 1930s Harlem. An accomplished singer, Rustin was part of the New York theater scene. In 1939, he was cast as a member of the chorus in John

Henry, starring Paul Robeson—though the two had little interaction. Rustin also threw himself headlong into the hotbed of progressive causes that permeated the city. The movements for racial equality, socialism, communism, and pacifism all vied for his attention. Rustin was initially drawn to the Communist Party (CP) who through their involvement in the Scottsboro Trials had built a reputation for defending the economic and civil rights of African Americans. Rustin joined the Young Communist League, but

8 D’Emilio, 7-12, quote on 11. 9 I have relied on D’Emilio for information on Rustin’s early life. D’Emilio conducted extensive interviews with Rustin’s acquaintances and relied on interviews that Rustin gave in his later years to piece together his boyhood and adolescence. See, D’Emilio, 7-30.

150 he never made the transition to full-fledged communist. Rather, as D’Emilio has argued,

Rustin’s involvement with communism was that of a young man exploring different political identities. He also worked for A. Philip Randolph, the famed civil rights and labor leader whose brand of democratic socialism made him an enemy of communists.10

Near the end of his first meeting with Randolph, who would later become Rustin’s mentor, the older man cautioned the younger against trusting the communists. “They are interested in using civil rights for their own purposes,” he warned Rustin.11

Randolph’s words proved prophetic. During World War II, both the communists and Randolph initially opposed black participation in the war effort. How could the U.S. government ask blacks to defend freedom abroad when they did not even enjoy equal rights in their own country? The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, however, led the communists to reverse course. They asked black Americans to defer the pursuit of racial equality in the name of defeating fascism. For Rustin, this act proved the truth of

Randolph’s warning. “It became clear to me,” he later explained, “that the Young

Communist League was willing to subordinate the fight against discrimination to the interest of Russian foreign policy.”12 Whenever someone asked him about communism, this event, along with the authoritarian nature of the Soviet regime, were the reasons he gave for his antipathy.

If distrusting communists was one lesson Rustin learned as an activist living in

New York, the importance of black-Jewish relations in achieving social change was another. This was especially the case during and immediately following the war years. As historian Martha Biondi has written, “The fight against anti-Semitism” in New York led

10 Ibid, 30-37. 11 Quoted in Anderson, 59. 12 Rustin to John Bruen, Sr., 5 July 1967, folder 7, box 3, BRP.

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American Jews to side with African Americans in several legislative battles. Following the war, for example, the American Jewish Congress (AJC) joined with civil rights groups like the Urban League in challenging the state’s support of racial discrimination in housing. 13 While Rustin did not personally take part in these campaigns—he was in jail for part of the period, and traveling for the peace movement during the remainder—such alliances between blacks and Jews no doubt reinforced the association between the black and Jewish traditions he had internalized as a child.

Along with his interest in civil rights, the peace movement vied for Rustin’s attention in the 1940s. He joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) as a youth secretary in September 1941. Rustin traveled throughout the nation in service of FOR, preaching pacifism from church lecterns and on college campuses. He also investigated, and spoke out against, the forced confinement of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.

Indeed, Rustin refused to separate the cause of pacifism from that of civil rights. Along with FOR’s other black youth secretary James Farmer, he encouraged FOR to redirect its efforts toward racial justice, arguing for nonviolent, direct action campaigns against discrimination, infused by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s campaign for

Indian independence from Great Britain had deeply affected Rustin, who remarked in

1942, “No situation in America has created so much interest among negroes as the

13 Biondi, 15, 117-121; some might wonder why Rustin’s opinion of American Jews did not sour after the Communist Party’s reversal in 1941. After all, many of the CP members were Jewish. Indeed, cultural critic Harold Cruse would famously argue in 1967 that Jews had dominated the CP and had duped African Americans into promoting their interests above those of blacks. See Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: New York Review of Books, 1967), 147-170. While a definitive answer is impossible, if we accept D’Emilio’s characterization of Rustin’s involvement with the CP as more of a flirtation than a genuine commitment, then Rustin also had experiences with progressive Jews outside of communist circles and more in line with Randolph’s brand of democratic socialism.

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Gandhian proposals for India’s freedom.” 14 In April 1942, at the insistence of Rustin and

Farmer, FOR’s National Council approved resources for a pacifist organization dedicated to nonviolent resistance. The resultant Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was to play a leading role in civil rights protests.15

His commitment to pacifism and racial justice ultimately landed Rustin in federal prison. During the war, the government assigned most conscientious objectors to Civil

Public Service (CPS) camps where men, in theory, would work for various peace churches, spreading the message of pacifism in the process. In reality, the camps were run by the U.S. military. Camp residents found themselves isolated from the public doing manual labor that appeared meaningless. Rustin was especially appalled that the government had racially segregated the CPS camps. When he received notice from his draft board ordering him to report for assignment to a camp in November 1943, Rustin refused, declaring that he could not “voluntarily submit to an order emanating from the

Selective Training and Service Act.” Rustin was arrested and pled guilty to refusing to submit to his wartime assignment. In the spring of 1944, a judge sentenced Rustin to three years in prison. He would serve twenty-eight months.16 In that time, Rustin remained an active proponent of nonviolent, civil disobedience. He refused, for example, to sit in the “colored section” at a movie showing. Rustin also demanded he be allowed to visit the section of the prison that housed white pacifists.17 In this way, he kept alive his fight against racial segregation on an individual level.

14 Quoted in D’Emilio, 51; Rustin would visit India in October 1948, meeting with Indian Prime Minister Padit Nehru. D’Emilio, 161-168 15 Ibid, 53-54. 16 On Rustin’s imprisonment see D’Emilio, 72-76. 17 Ibid, 77, 82-83; on Rustin and the WRL, see Bennett, 198, 232-234, 237.

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Upon his release from prison in 1946, Rustin returned to his work for the peace movement and civil rights. He became active in the War Resister’s League (WRL), traveling the world in support of antiwar causes. Rustin also continued to work with

CORE and A. Philip Randolph. At times, these two commitments conflicted with one another. Despite his pacifism, Rustin advocated on behalf of Randolph’s campaign to integrate the U.S. armed forces after World War II, viewing it as an important step toward equality.18 It was during the campaign against a “Jim Crow Army,” as D’Emilio noted, that Rustin seized the opportunity to incorporate large-scale nonviolent forms of civil disobedience into the civil rights movement. Among other actions, he planned to encourage young men to refuse to register for the draft once the new law requiring draft registration became active at the end of August 1948. President Truman’s executive order desegregating the army in July of 1948, however, satisfied Randolph, and the action never took place. But Rustin disparaged the executive order as a half-measure. He struck out on his own to protest outside a Harlem registration center the day the law went into effect.19

Throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s, Rustin devoted himself entirely to organizing nonviolent demonstrations for the peace and civil rights movements. Through his leadership of the WRL, Rustin was involved in two major protests against nuclear testing and the arms race. He helped plan and publicize the mission of the Golden Rule in

1958. A project of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, the mission of the Golden Rule was to sail from California to the nuclear weapons testing site near Eniwetok Island in the

Pacific Ocean. “Come what may,” Rustin proclaimed to an audience of British pacifists,

18 D’Emilio, 146, 210-212. 19 Ibid, 156-158.

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“even if they are burnt to death, they are going to sail into the test area.” The crew twice attempted to enter the test area, and twice the coast guard towed them back to Honolulu where they were arrested.20 Rustin also participated personally in the Sahara Project against French testing of nuclear weapons in the Sahara desert. The plan was to travel through the desert to the testing site, located deep within French Algeria. Rustin loved the plan, hatched by two British pacifists, and a group including him began the long trek across the Sahara in December 1959. As with the Golden Rule, the members of the

Sahara project never entered the test site. French forces twice surrounded and detained them before they could. But the project, according to WRL historian Scott Bennett,

“generated publicity for antinuclear groups and inspired solidarity demonstrations in

Europe, Africa, and the United States.”21

The Sahara Project attracted Rustin because it combined his work in the peace movement with his dedication to the struggle for black freedom. According to D’Emilio,

“What intrigued Rustin was the ‘very direct link between the campaign against nuclear weapons and the struggle of the African peoples for freedom.’”22 While Rustin continued to work with the peace movement in the late 1950s, he began to devote more and more of his time to the civil rights movement. In February 1955, Rustin travelled to Montgomery,

Alabama as Randolph’s representative in Martin Luther King’s boycott of segregated city buses. Rustin sought out the relatively unknown King, offering him the services of a practiced veteran of protest movements. According to D’Emilio, Rustin proved pivotal in developing King’s own adherence to nonviolent forms of protest. “He had what King

20 Quote in D’Emilio, 256; Bennett, 228-230. 21 Bennett, 234; On Rustin’s participation in the Sahara Project see D’Emilio, 279-288. 22 D’Emilio, 280.

155 most immediately needed,” D’Emilio wrote, “extensive experience in nonviolent protest.”23

Rustin proved especially effective at organizing rallies in Washington D.C. He planned a “Prayer Pilgrimage” in May of 1957 in order to force federal action on school integration. The event attracted tens of thousands of people, and speakers included King,

Randolph, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP.24 Rustin’s most famous rally was the 1963

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Rustin had approached Randolph with the idea for the two-day action, and pulled together the support for the March. Named

Deputy Director to Randolph, Rustin oversaw the entire organizing of the March: from finding speakers to the keeping the many sponsoring civil rights groups on the same page all the way down to figuring out how many toilets were needed for the quarter of a million people expected to attend. Held from August 27-28 1963, the March on

Washington was a momentous success. Over 200,000 people had converged on the capital in a stunning display of mass, nonviolent protest. King’s delivery of his “I have a dream speech” in front of the Lincoln memorial remains perhaps the single most recalled moment in the history of the civil rights movement. It would not have happened without

Bayard Rustin.25

After the tremendous success of the March on Washington, however, troubling signs of distress surfaced within the movement. Despite the many successes of the civil rights movement over the previous ten years, it had insufficiently emphasized economic

23 Ibid, 226-231, quote on 231. 24 Ibid, 262-264. 25 On Rustin’s role in planning the March, see D’Emilio, 326-357. That Rustin was named Deputy Director instead of Director owed to the homophobia within American society. In Pasadena, California in 1953, Rustin had been arrested along with two other men on charges of “lewd vagrancy.” Wilkins and other Civil rights leaders believed he had “too many scars” to be Director of the March see D’Emilio, 190-191, 338- 339.

156 inequality, which had only worsened over the period. The riots that erupted in Rochester and Harlem over the summer of 1964, the same summer during which the Civil Rights

Act was signed into law, gave testament to the deteriorating material conditions facing

African Americans. The Harlem riot in particular had a profound impact on Rustin, who personally witnessed the disturbances. On the fourth night of the riot, Rustin attended at the Mount Morris Presbyterian Church in Harlem where several of the speakers spoke of fighting back against police brutality. As Rustin remonstrated those gathered against resorting to violence, the audience—many of whom were black nationalists—booed and jeered.26 After the rioting had subsided, Rustin wrote Whitney Young expressing dismay over the current state of the movement. He had “spent the last four evenings in Harlem trying to calm things and get people to their homes,” and it had left him “terribly depressed.” He remarked to Young that “one of [his] keenest disappointments” was that the March on Washington had not led to an extended discussion of “program and tactics” for the future of the movement.27 The time for that conversation, he decided, had come.

Rustin derived a very clear meaning from the riots over the summer of 1964.

Protest had taken the civil rights movement as far as it could. In February 1965, he laid out his vision for the future of the civil rights movement in Commentary. Titled “From

Protest to Politics,” the article proved an influential statement on the civil rights movement’s dilemma. Noting that the “classical” phase of the civil rights movement had succeeded in destroying the “legal foundations of racism in America,” Rustin nonetheless concluded that protesting was an inadequate strategy to address such “obstacles” to progress as “automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems,”

26 Junius Griffin, “‘Guerrilla War’ Urged in Harlem,” New York Times, 20 July 1964, 16. 27 Rustin to Whitney Young, 29 July 1964, in I Must Resist, 293-294.

157 he concluded, that “[did] not vanish upon [Jim Crow’s] demise.” Challenging the far more insidious economic inequality required a new strategy. The time had come for the

“protest movement to translate itself into a political movement” for power at the national level, for civil rights activists to abandon protest in favor of the ballot box. African

Americans, however, could not “win political power on their own.” Rather, they needed to join groups with “common political objectives.” Only a coalition of “Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups” could take control of the Democratic Party and begin to pursue the goal of “achieving the fact of equality” [emphasis in original]. “We need allies,” Rustin concluded. 28 “From Protest to Politics” was both a call to action for civil rights activists, and a personal statement on how Rustin would now choose to pursue his goals. Where once he organized protests, Rustin would now dedicate himself to fostering alliances between groups of liberals.

Among the most important allies for Rustin was the AFL-CIO and its leader

George Meany. Rustin sought to enlist Meany’s support in the formation of the A. Philip

Randolph Institute (APRI). Rustin, for all his experience, had never led his own organization. The APRI would change that, giving him a financially secure position from which to build a political coalition. But Meany had to be sold on the project. He had infamously refused to endorse the March on Washington, even though Randolph served as a vice president within the AFL-CIO. Rustin thus tailored the APRI’s prospectus to appeal to the labor leader. “The Negro by himself does not possess sufficient economic or political power to effect basic changes,” the prospectus read. “The white community must also be organized and in motion.” Rustin envisioned the APRI “mobilizing” the latent

28 Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: the Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary Magazine, February 1965.

158 potential of “the Negro, Labor, academic and professional communities” into a coordinated movement in “preparation of far reaching social and economic programs…”

Above all, the APRI would provide a bridge between the mostly white labor unions, which had a long history of racial exclusion, and civil rights groups wary of union support.29 Meany was clearly taken by Rustin’s proposal. The AFL-CIO provided the vast majority of the startup funds for the organization, which began operating in the summer of 1965.30

With the APRI ready to launch, and the Voting Rights Act securing African

American access to the polls, Rustin spent the next year developing an economic program around which to unite a liberal political coalition. In the fall of 1966, he unveiled the

“Freedom Budget for All Americans” to the public. Rustin intended the budget as a counter to the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty” program, which A. Philip

Randolph judged a “haphazard, piecemeal” approach to inequality.31 In its place, Rustin proposed an ambitious, ten year plan to eradicate poverty in the United States. It was among the most ambitious plans to address poverty ever produced in the United States.

The Freedom Budget called on the U.S. government to devote $185 billion over the next decade to far reaching social welfare programs. With such funding, its authors believed, the nation could achieve full employment, universal health care, “a decent living standard to those who cannot or should not work,” and provide decent housing for all to “wipe out

29 Bayard Rustin, “A. Philip Randolph Institute Prospectus,” folder APRI Formation, box 3, A. Philip Randolph Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C. 30 APRI began with a shoe-string budget of $36,000, $31,000 of which came from the AFL-CIO; A. Philip Randolph Institute Statement of Income and Expenses, May 1965-August 1965, folder 1, box 7, BRP. 31 Randolph made his opinions on the War on Poverty clear at the press conference announcing the budget, Thomas A Johnson, “10-Year Plan Aims at Poverty’s End,” New York Times, 27 October 1966, 1.

159 slum ghettos.” Finally, the budget included a statement of economic rights, including the right to a decent job.32

The Freedom Budget for All Americans was revolutionary in its aims, but its plan for how to achieve those goals fit squarely within the mainstream of postwar American liberalism. It envisioned no new taxes and no cuts to defense spending. Economist Leon

Keyserling was responsible for the nuts and bolts of the budget. In Keyserling, Rustin found a New Deal liberal who, according to one of his biographers, retained an unbridled faith “that the potential of the American economy was unlimited, and that with proper combination of countercyclical and long-term economic policy, economic growth could produce and maintain abundance for all.”33 Keyserling brought his commitment to economic growth to The Freedom Budget. Employing what he called the “growth dividend,” Keyserling believed that over the next decade the nation would add $2.4 trillion to the economy. By earmarking $185 billion (in 1964 dollars) of this money now to fight poverty, the United States could achieve revolutionary social change without redistributing wealth.34 This claim was in part a political move meant to guard the

Freedom Budget from being tarred by conservatives as socialistic. “We are not trying to rob anyone,” Keyserling reassured Americans at the October press conference announcing the budget. He also imparted his faith in growth to Rustin, who had no background in economics and relied on Keyserling’s expertise. “[Y]ou simultaneously created a realistic, complex, and highly developed Freedom Budget and at the same time made it comprehensible to the people in the ghetto,” Rustin wrote glowingly to

32 “A ‘Freedom Budget’ for All Americans,” October 1966, folder 9, box 21, BRP; Quotes taken from “A ‘Freedom Budget’ for All Americans: a Summary,” January 1967. 33 W. Robert Brazelton, “Retrospectives: The Economics of Leon Hirsch Keyserling,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11, No. 4 (Fall 1997), 189-197. 34 Johnson, “10-Year Plan Aims at Poverty’s End.”

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Keyserling following the press conference.35 As Rustin crossed the nation promoting the

Freedom Budget, he expressed an absolutist commitment to growth. “Those of us who endorse the budget refuse to accept the argument that the United States has limited resources,” he stated.36 As we shall see, growth would remain an article of faith for

Rustin throughout the next decade and beyond.

The Freedom Budget’s ambitious agenda may appear unrealistic in hindsight, but in the moment its goals seemed within reach. The 1964 election had resulted in a landslide victory for Democrats. American voters unequivocally rejected the ultra- conservatism of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. The successful passage of

Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, despite virulent Republican opposition demonstrated liberalism’s political dominance. Rustin thus began the campaign to turn the Freedom

Budget from idea to policy confident that the public was ready for its adoption.37

Initially, Rustin had success in rallying liberal support for his budget. Along with the trade unions, Rustin gained the support of white liberal groups the AJC and

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Civil rights groups including the NAACP and

King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also signed on to the plan.

King even wrote the forward to a version of the budget produced for the public. “We must dedicate ourselves to the legislative task to see that [the Freedom Budget] is immediately and fully achieved,” he proclaimed.38

35 Rustin to Keyserling, 4 November 1966, in I Must Resist, 320-321. 36 Rustin to Robert C. Paehlke, 15 March 1967, folder 17, box 19, BRP. 37 According to D’Emilio, the 1964 election was the prompting force behind Rustin’s decision to write “From Protest to Politics.” See, D’Emilio, 398. 38 Forward to “A ‘Freedom Budget’ for all Americans: A Summary”; On Rustin’s solicitation of support for the budget see D’Emilio, 430-431.

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Even as Rustin built political support for the budget, hope for its success began to disintegrate as the liberal coalition he was counting on splintered over the Vietnam War.

At the very moment Rustin was encouraging activists to leave behind their protest placards in favor of the ballot box, thousands of young people were streaming into the streets to stop the conflict. Rustin too opposed the war. In August of 1964 he spoke at an antiwar rally in Greenwich Village, declaring that America “should withdraw [its] forces from South Vietnam.”39 Yet where previously Rustin had related the antiwar movement to the movement for civil rights, he now attempted to separate the two. Rustin resigned from the War Resisters League in November 1965, admitting that “civil rights matters” had taken him away from the peace movement.40 According to a confidential FBI report,

Rustin advised King to speak out against the war as an individual, but not in his capacity as a civil rights leader. Years later, Rustin confirmed that this was the guidance he gave:

“I argued that he had a moral obligation to oppose the war in Vietnam…but that his notion that he could combine the civil rights and peace struggle was an error.”41

Rustin’s reluctance to speak out more forcefully on the war owed to his commitment to maintaining organized labor’s support for the Freedom Budget. Large segments of the labor Left, and especially the AFL-CIO, supported American intervention in Vietnam. Recognizing this, Rustin and Keyserling designed the budget to elide the Vietnam question altogether. Although the budget made no direct reference to the escalating war in Southeast Asia, Rustin and Keyserling argued that just as it required no new taxes, the Freedom Budget countenanced no cuts to defense spending. Indeed,

39 Quoted in D’Emilio, 409. 40 Rustin to Edward P. Gottlieb, 16 November 1965, folder 5, box 38, BRP. 41 Federal Bureau of Investigation Report re Communist infiltration of the SCLC, 10 August 1965, folder 3, box 46, BRP; Rustin to William S. Feely, 29 December 1986, folder 3, box 46, BRP.

162 they claimed that the defense budget could rise over the next ten years without negatively impacting social welfare programs. When his friend Irving Howe challenged this aspect of the Freedom Budget, Rustin defended his effort to build as large a political base as possible. “I don’t think that one has to be a certified dove in order to be permitted to work conscientiously for the eradication of poverty,” he wrote to Howe in November 1966.42

Rustin was not willing to forsake support for economic equality in the name of staying pure to his pacifist ideals.

Critics of the military-industrial complex (MIC) savaged the Freedom Budget for failing to directly address defense spending. Economist Seymour Melman, among the most important opponents of the MIC during the 1960s, had long argued that defense spending diverted important resources away from social and economic programs. After the October press conference at which Rustin unveiled the budget, Melman wrote a letter to those who signed on in support of the plan. He declared that the Freedom Budget was a

“war budget.” By refusing to make cuts in defense a part of the plan, Melman believed, its authors had given tacit approval to the expansionist, militaristic foreign policy of the

Cold War.

Rustin responded to Melman’s condemnation by arguing that separating the question of defense spending from domestic reform was a political necessity. “If liberals demanded the government choose between guns or butter, he reasoned, the “Republican-

Dixiecrat coalition” would choose guns. This meant that by separating the two issues, liberals would force the government to respond to poverty “whatever may be the extent

42 Rostow to Irving Howe, 10 November 1966, folder 5, box 21, BRP; keeping the AFL-CIO support was especially important for Rustin. Meany supported the war in Vietnam, and the trade union federation provided the majority of the APRI’s funding. John D’Emilio offers a different interpretation for Rustin’s motives. He argues that Rustin’s uncompromising nature made him unlikely to rethink his decision to seek an alliance with labor and the Democratic Party, even in the face of war. See D’Emilio, 447.

163 of its international commitments.”43 In other words, anti-poverty measures would be given short shrift. But if liberals argued that equality could be achieved without altering defense, they would take away the conservative argument that national security took priority over social welfare. Rather than a “war budget,” he concluded, the Freedom

Budget was the only program that offered “a meaningful political alternative to expanded and increased defense spending.”44 Rustin made this claim, however, in an article titled

“Guns, Bread, and Butter,” belying his claim to have provided an alternative to Cold War defense spending. Rather, Rustin had hoped to create a budget that would please everyone, the antiwar crowd and the pro-war groups together. In the domestic turmoil generated by the war in Vietnam, however, the Freedom Budget appeared to give tacit approval to a military apparatus that many on the Left were coming to view as immoral.

The debate over the Freedom Budget was revelatory of a fundamental contradiction within Cold War liberalism. Despite Rustin’s best efforts, gaining political support for a liberal agenda at home depended upon accepting the political consensus on the need to exert American power abroad. It was not just that Keyserling had assured

Rustin that no defense cuts would be necessary to bring the Freedom Budget to fruition, only by accepting the Cold War could the budget hope to win public and congressional approval. Michael Kazin—then a Harvard undergraduate and member of SDS—saw the contradictions within the Freedom Budget clearly, concluding that it promised

“welfarism at home and imperialism abroad.” 45

The Freedom Budget ultimately failed to develop into a full-fledged national campaign as the American Left split into pro-and-anti-war camps. By May of 1967, just

43 Bayard Rustin, “Guns, Bread, and Butter,” War/Peace Report, March 1967, folder 13, box 39, BRP. 44 Rustin to Irving Howe, 10 November 1966. 45 D’Emilio, 437, Kazin quoted in 439.

164 seven months after Rustin announced his plan to end poverty in the United States, the

Freedom Budget lay moribund. Rustin heaped blame upon the young black and white activists at the head of the peace movement for having, in his mind, abandoned the cause of racial justice. “In recent weeks I have been asked repeatedly where I stand on the War in Vietnam,” he wrote that May. “Former civil rights activists, who now devote nearly all their energies to opposing the war,” he complained, “want to know why I don’t do likewise.” Rustin’s response displayed bitterness towards the antiwar movement whom he blame for failing to support the budget. “Unlike many of them, I don’t believe that the civil rights movement is dead, so I am not ready to help bury it.” Rustin considered the antiwar movement’s call for an immediate end to the hostilities both unrealistic and irresponsible. Rather than focus on protesting the war alongside people whose tactics and priorities he opposed, Rustin determined to keep fighting for a more equitable society at home. “My primary responsibility must remain to the freedom movement,” he declared.46

Nearly four years after his most triumphant moment as an organizer, Bayard

Rustin had suffered his greatest defeat with the collapse of the Freedom Budget. The war in Vietnam, however, was not the only issue dividing members of the old Left from the young activists. As Rustin’s disparaging reference to “former civil rights activists” made clear, a growing rift existed within black America as members of the Black Power movement began to challenge older civil rights leaders, such as Rustin, for leadership of the movement. They questioned the benefits of continuing to align African Americans with a white, liberal power structure that had accomplished little in the way of real integration or economic advancement for blacks. Still hoping to reform the liberal political alliance around the need for economic equality, Rustin would reject these

46 Bayard Rustin, “Vietnam: Where I Stand,” Amsterdam News, 20 May 1967, folder 15, box 41, BRP.

165 arguments as reactionary and impolitic. The next section traces how Rustin’s rejection of

Black Power became, in the aftermath of Black Power support for the Arab states during the Six-Days War in June 1967, a rejection of the idea of a progressive Third World as well.

Solidarity with Israel versus the Black-Arab Alliance

Black Power and Third World Nationalism

“The victories of the modern civil rights movement,” historian Clayborne Carson has noted, “were made possible by political coalitions that brought together African

Americans and Jewish Americans.” Jewish groups such as the American Jewish

Committee and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) provided important financial and legal support to the NAACP’s legal battle against segregation. A small cohort of Jewish activists gave early financial support for SNCC, and had joined in the group’s work in the

South. By the mid-1960s, however, individuals on both side of the black-Jewish alliance had begun to question its durability. The sociologist and future critic of affirmative action

Nathan Glazer complained in Commentary in 1964 that many African Americans,

“viewed a Jew ‘not as a co-worker or friend or ally, but, in a word, as an exploiter.’” The race riots that gripped several major American cities in the 1960s strained black-Jewish relations as many if not most of the white merchants in these urban centers were Jewish.

“Given this socioeconomic context,” Carson concluded, “it was hardly surprising that black discontent was expressed through anti-Jewish sentiments.”47

Black Power’s arrival on the national stage in the summer of 1966 further exacerbated tensions between the two minority groups. That June, newly elected SNCC

47 Clayborne Carson, “Black-Jewish Universalism in the Era of Identity Politics,” in Struggles in the promised land: toward a history of Black-Jewish relations in the United States, edited by Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 177-186.

166 chairman Stokely Carmichael uttered the phrase “black power” several times as he and other civil rights activists, including King, marched from Memphis to Jackson,

Mississippi. They made the public trek in response to the shooting of James Meredith, who had begun a solitary “March Against Fear.”48 Black Power was an ambiguous ideology that could mean many things. Most white Americans, however, interpreted the refrain in its most extreme, violent, and separatist, form. Many Jewish Americans viewed

Black Power as anti-Semitic. Indeed, even though Carmichael’s public statements from the summer of 1966 through the first half of 1967 included no attacks on Jews, he faced repeated questions about anti-Semitism within SNCC. This no doubt owed to a group of separatists within SNCC then pushing for the expulsion of all white members from the organization, most of whom were Jewish. While Carmichael opposed this measure, it nevertheless opened him up early on to charges of anti-Semitism.49

Just as most whites interpreted Black Power as extremist, so too did older leaders of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin included. 50 Reaching national prominence just as he was preparing to launch the Freedom Budget campaign, Black Power appeared to threaten Rustin’s proposed Freedom Budget, in effect if not intent. Rustin thus sought publicly to discredit the movement. In September of 1966, he published an article rejecting Black Power for Commentary. With its largely Jewish readership, the magazine gave Rustin an important forum to speak to American Jews. He condemned Black Power as a reactionary, naïve movement. It threatened, he warned readers, to “ravage the entire

48 Peniel E Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights: from Black Power to Barack Obama (New York: Basic Books, 2010); 17-19, on the Meredith March see 118-121; for further reading on the Black Power movement see The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the civil rights-Black Power Era, Peniel E. Joseph, ed., (New York: Routledge, 2006). 49 Carson, “Black-Jewish Universalism in the Era of Identity Politics,” 187-188. 50 On other movement leaders criticism of Black Power, especially Roy Wilkin, see Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, second edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 219-220.

167 civil rights movement” by isolating black America from the liberal, white allies it needed to achieve progress at the national level. Black power was, Rustin concluded, an idea without “any real value for the civil rights movement.”51

As Rustin sought to discredit Black Power during 1966, he also attempted to explain its members’ motivations to Jewish audiences. “They say,” Rustin remarked to an audience of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) in December 1966, “‘the Jews have power. They control the unions. They own the banks…The hell with them too.’” He reassured this audience that such remarks derived not from anti-Semitism but rather from

“frustration” with the persistence of poverty and segregation in America’s urban centers.

If blacks expressed anger towards Jews that was because Jewish merchants were among the few whites with whom urban dwellers had daily contact. He concluded that passage of the Freedom Budget would eliminate Black Power’s cause for being, thus healing the rift between blacks and Jews, its “economic steps will alleviate both white fear and Negro frustration.”52 In this way, Rustin hoped to turn the fear Black Power generated in whites into support for his economic program.

From the summer of 1966 through the first half of 1967, Rustin’s criticism of

Black Power made no mention of Israel, Palestine, or the Third World. The outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors in June 1967, however, brought the question of support for Israel to the forefront of the growing divisions between

African Americans and Jewish Americans. The war began when Israeli Defense Forces, fearing an Arab invasion, launched a surprise attack of their own on June 5, 1967. Lasting six days, the conflict ended in a crushing defeat for the Arab states. By the time a cease-

51 Bayard Rustin, “‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics,” Commentary (September 1966), 35-40. 52 Rustin made these Remarks at a December 1966 meeting of the Jewish National Labor Committee. He would later publish them as “The Negroes, the Cops, the Jews,” Dissent, March-April 1967, 172-179.

168 fire had been declared on June 11, Israel occupied the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. As discussed in a previous chapter, the conflict had a profound impact on the relationship of American Jews to Israel. Many Jews now regarded support for Israel as a central aspect of Jewishness, and a litmus test for determining how other groups viewed Jews.53

The response to the Six Day War within civil rights organizations with a Black

Power perspective, specifically SNCC, threatened to tear apart the already strained bonds between blacks and Jews. A few weeks after the fighting had stopped, SNCC published a newsletter accusing Israel of violent repression of Palestinians before and after the war.

“Did you know,” its asked readers, “that the Zionists conquered Arab homes through terror, force, and massacres,” in reference to the forced displacement of 700,000

Palestinians by Israeli soldiers during the 1948 War. The Newsletter alleged that Israel and pro-Israeli groups within the United States acted as proxies of the American empire:

“the U.S. government has worked along with Zionist groups to support Israel so that

America may have a toehold in that strategic Middle East location.” The drawings that accompanied the article were equally incendiary. They included one of Israeli troops preparing to fire on a group of Arabs shown lined against a wall with the caption, “This is the Gaza Strip, Palestine, not Dachau, Germany.” The newsletter thus equated Israel’s actions with the brutality that European Jews had suffered during the Holocaust.54

53 See McAlister, 111-112. 54 Carson, In Struggle, 267-268; McAlister, 113. The publication of Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in the fall of 1967 further strained black-Jewish relations over Israel. Cruse accused “a great proportion of American Jews” as acting as “an organic part of distant nation-state.” The establishment of Israel, Cruse concluded, had helped to “[enhance] the new status of American Jewry as a ‘have’ group,” further separating their interests from those of African Americans. See, Cruse, 480-481.

169

The newsletter had not been officially endorsed by SNCC. It was, according to

Carson, “written to provoke discussion of the Middle East conflict,” not to serve as a statement of SNCC’s position on the conflict. Still, the newsletter did represent most of the membership’s view of the war.55 Jewish liberals and civil rights leaders quickly condemned the group as extremists. The JLC remarked that SNCC had “now irrevocably joined the anti-Semitic American Nazis Party and the Ku Klux Klan as an apostle of racism in the United States.” Rustin, in a joint statement with Randolph, dismissed SNCC as “a small fringe group” whose views “reflect[ed] a complete divorce from the opinions and aspiration of the mass of American Negroes.” Whereas before the war Rustin had attempted to portray Black Power as separate from anti-Semitism, he now leveled that accusation against Black Power’s representatives in SNCC. “A statement so filled with anti-Semitic venom can only be interpreted,” he explained, “as an attempt to divide the growing alliance of labor, liberal, religious and civil rights forces.”56

For their part, SNCC’s leaders denied that they were motivated by anti-Semitism.

Responding to the criticism of Rustin and others at a press conference, they publicly stated the group differentiated between “Jewish oppressors” in Israel and Jews at large.

The statement of SNCC member Ralph Featherstone, however, belied this justification.

He informed reporters, “[Those who consider the statement anti-Semitic] can’t deny that it is the Jews who are doing the exploiting of the black people in the ghettoes. And there is a parallel between this and the oppression of Arabs by the Israelis.”57 While anti-

55 Carson, In Struggle, 267. 56 The response of labor and the moderate wing of the civil rights movement, as well as SNCC’s statement in defense of the newsletter, were discussed in “SNCC Attack Draws Attacks,” New York Amsterdam News, 19 August 1967, 1-2. 57 SNCC Attack Draws Attacks,” New York Amsterdam News, 19 August 1967.

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Semitism does not wholly explain SNCC’s interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it did play a part.

There was far more to Black Power’s support for the Arab world than antipathy towards Jews, however. Among Black Power’s unifying features was identification with

Third World nationalism. Inspired by anticolonial scholarship such as the work of Franz

Fanon, many proponents of Black Power argued that African Americans existed as an internal colony within the United States, spatially segregated into urban ghettos.58 In this sense, the experience of African Americans mirrored that of other non-white, colonized peoples. Stokely Carmichael in particular grounded his support for the Arab states in a shared anticolonial struggle. Speaking before the Organization for Latin American

Solidarity Conference in Havana, Cuba in July of 1967, Carmichael declared, “Our struggle is to overthrow this system [white Western imperialist society] that feeds itself and expands itself through the economic and cultural exploitation of non-white, non-

Western peoples—of the Third World.”59 He conceived of the Arab states not only as part of the Third World, but as part of a Pan-African movement as well. “They [Israel] are moving to take over Egypt. Egypt is our motherland—it’s in Africa.”60 In this reading, the

1967 War was a war between a white colonial power and the Pan-African world. For

58On anticolonial writings and the Black Panthers see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 224-227; For Fanon’s influence on SNCC see Carson, In Struggle, 192, 198. 59 Quoted in Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas, 2014), 208. 60 Carmichael claimed that prior to the 1960s, he had no knowledge of the Palestinian plight, see Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: the Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] (New York: Scribner, 2003). Yet, as Carson makes clear, he often engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric designed to provoke Jews. In a television interview with journalist David Frost in 1970, for example, Carmichael named Adolph Hitler as “the great[est] white man.” Quoted in Carson, “Black-Jewish Universalism in the Era of Identity Politics,” 189.

171

Carmichael and SNCC’s support of the Arab states, then, was, as Melani McAlister argued, as much pro-Arab as it was anti-Israeli. 61

For Rustin, Carmichael’s development of a Black Power ethos was particularly distressing as he had once been a mentor to the younger man. They met while Carmichael attended Howard University in the late 1950s. Then, Rustin had impressed Carmichael as the embodiment of progressive politics. “At that moment in time, in my life, [Rustin] appeared to be the revolution,” he later recalled.62 By the mid-1960s, however, their relationship had broken down over their divergent political paths. “I don’t know what more I can do about it,” Rustin responded to a friend troubled by the two men’s falling out. “I am afraid that our political differences could only be mended if one of us changed his ideology.”63 As their divergent takes on the Six-Day War revealed, neither Rustin nor

Carmichael was likely to change his ideological views. In the following years the two men moved further apart. As Carmichael espoused a Third World nationalist, pro-Arab ideology, Rustin responded with a vehement denunciation of the very idea of a progressive Third World, especially the concept of an African-Arab alliance.

Rustin in Defense of Israel, Against the Black-Arab Alliance

“If the coalition cannot be reconstituted and rebuilt,” Bayard Rustin asked New

York Times reporter Thomas Brooks in the winter of 1969, “what is the alternative?”

Brooks, a freelance writer who had recently written a history of the labor movement, interviewed Rustin in the aftermath of the United Federation of Teachers’ (UFT) strike in

Brooklyn. The strike had pitted the mostly Jewish teachers against the black

61 McAlister also concluded that the “anti-Semitic expressions” of some African Americans did not “explain the pro-Arab feelings of many African Americans.” These pro-Arab feelings were instead part of a larger identification with the Third World, see McAlister, 115. 62 D’Emilio, 276-277. 63 Rustin to Rabbi Everret Gendler, 11 November 1966, folder 3, box 3, BRP.

172 neighborhoods in which they taught. Rustin and Randolph, Brooks noted, were the only national civil rights leaders to publicly back the UFT, a fact that opened Rustin up to attacks from former allies. In one particularly bitter exchange, Oliver Leeds, the chairman of CORE’s Brooklyn chapter, wrote Rustin in the middle of the strike after the APRI failed to take him off their mailing list. “Man, ain’t you got no pride?” Leeds asked, accusing Rustin of “sucking wind from the holes of liberalized bigots in the UFT.” Even those who continued to respect Rustin found his affiliation with organized labor troubling. Eleanor Holmes Norton told Brooks that she was “one of the few calling herself a black militant who considers that Bayard still has something to contribute to us.” But she argued, Rustin needed to “cut away from the current old-fashioned and machine-driven labor movement.”64

For Rustin, however, there was no cutting away from the labor movement or the

Jewish allies he had found in New York. It was, in many respects, a numbers game for him. The black population alone lacked the size to influence the federal government.

“One tenth of the population cannot go to the Congress for the billions which are needed for jobs, new transportation facilities, new roads, new hospitals, new libraries.”

Accomplishing these goals required the support of labor, of the Democratic Party, of religious groups, and perhaps most importantly, of Jews. While Jewish Americans made up an even smaller portion of the population than African Americans, implicit in his advocacy of close black-Jewish relations was an awareness that Jewish Americans had far more wealth to contribute to the cause than did African Americans. “What people forget,” he would later explain, “[was] that when I was raising money for Dr. King a

64 Oliver Leeds to Rustin, 10 August 1968, folder 13, box 3, BRP; Thomas R Brooks, “A Strategist without a Movement,” New York Times, 16 February 1969, SM24.

173 great deal of that money came from Jewish people…” Rustin also admired the ability of

Jewish groups to unite around an issue. “What Bayard like about the Jews,” an old pacifist colleague recalled, “was how well organized and unified they were. He thought that Jews used every bit of power and influence they had. And he wanted blacks to the do the same…”65 It was not just money, then, but the strength of Jewish organizing that kept

Rustin committed to the black-Jewish alliance. “For the things which must be done,” he implored an audience of the Anti-Defamation League during the strike, “I request the understanding, the cooperation and the aid of Jews.”66

The UFT strike evinced not only the hostility that existed between black militants and Jews within organized labor, it also revealed the degree to which the Arab -Israel conflict had bled into to other points of conflict between the two groups. One night, an unknown person or group of persons distributed a leaflet in the mailboxes of teachers in one of the school district impacted by the strike. It claimed that “Middle East Murderers of Colored People” could not teach black school children.67 While the Arab-Israel conflict was far from the only source of tension between blacks and Jews, it inflected all other points of dispute. As the 1970s began, Rustin determined to resolve this divide in favor of

Israel and the black-Jewish alliance.

Rustin’s first concerted effort on behalf of Israel began in the spring of 1970.

President Richard Nixon proved a less stalwart ally of Israel than had Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon was well aware that the vast majority of American Jews were Democrats who had supported his opponent in the 1968 election. In early 1970, Nixon postponed the shipment of F-4 Phantom Jets to Israel—purchased during the Johnson administration in

65 Quoted in Anderson, 327-328. 66 Quoted in Brooks, “A Strategist Without a Movement.” 67 Quoted in Gary E. Rubin, “African Americans and Israel,” Struggles in the Promised Land, 359.

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1968—in response to the Israeli government’s refusal to return to the negotiating table, and its continued efforts to build an atomic bomb. Rustin sprang into action.68 He organized a group of black labor and civil rights leaders—including Randolph, Whitney

Young, and Roy Wilkins—to speak out on behalf of Israel. That June, the APRI purchased full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The advertisement, “An Appeal by Black Americans for United States Support to Israel,” grounded its defense of Israel in universalistic ideals of democracy and equality. In contrast to the “dictatorial, one party states” that populated the region, Israel, the advertisement proclaimed, had “made tremendous strides toward achieving an equalitarian economic order.” It concluded with an appeal to the U.S. government to aid in the peace process, and to “take steps to help guarantee Israel’s right to exist as a nation.” The statement’s final sentence made clear what “steps” Rustin and the other signatories intended the U.S. government to take. “For the present this means providing

Israel with the full number of jet aircraft it has requested.”69

Critics on the Left condemned Rustin’s plea as a selfish effort to maintain Jewish financial support for the APRI.70 It was a charge that his detractors would make throughout the decade, and a constant source of irritation for Rustin. “I look forward to the day,” he once remarked, when I get a letter from one of my old friends which criticizes a position I have taken, but which does not imply I have taken it for other than

68 Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 104-105. 69 Display ad, “An Appeal by Black Americans for the United States to Support Israel,” New York Times, 28 June 1970, 133. 70 This claim was made by, amongst others, by M.T. Mehdi of the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations in a letter to Rustin that he also sent to the New York Times, See M.T. Mehdi to Rustin, 29 June 1970, folder 13, box 4, BRP.

175 ideological reasons.”71 Rustin always maintained that he supported Israel because of its democratic government and pro-labor policies. The APRI advertisement held up Israel as a model for the type of economic progress he hoped to achieve in America, proclaiming that Israel’s welfare, health, and social services were “more advanced than even in our own country.”72

Yet if Rustin’s motivation to champion Israel cannot be reduced to a “quid pro quo” neither can it be divorced from his efforts towards repairing black-Jewish relations at home. A few weeks after the ad appeared in U.S. newspapers, Rustin sent a copy of the statement to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. He wished the Prime Minister “prompt” delivery of the jets she required. He then made clear that he intended the ad not only to sway the government over to Israel’s side, but to demonstrate the bonds that continued to unite African Americans and Jews. He expressed to her the hope that “the ad will also have an effect on a serious domestic question: namely, the relations between the Jewish and Negro communities in America.” Rustin’s efforts on behalf of Israel were both universalistic and tactical, intended to at once provide support for a democratic state while also reaffirming the “important alliance” between blacks and Jews “for social justice.” 73 Of course Israel did not actually require Rustin’s aid in swaying the American government. Meir and Israel eventually received the promised aircraft in September

1970, but only after the Soviet Union had delivered deliver military equipment and personnel to Israel’s enemy Egypt.

Rustin’s public statement on behalf of providing U.S. military aid to Israel in

1970 was precursor to a larger, farther reaching campaign to win black support for Israel

71 Rustin to James Best, 12 July 1972, folder 3, box 5, BRP. 72 “An Appeal by Black Americans for the United States to Support Israel.” 73 Rustin to Golda Meier, 7 July 1970, folder 14, box 14, BRP.

176 in the aftermath of the October War of 1973. The war had come as tensions continued to trouble a black-Jewish alliance, especially over the issue of Affirmative Action. Many

Jewish Americans opposed Affirmative Action because of the nation’s historic usage of quotas to discriminate against Jews.74 Rustin seized on the war as an opportunity to yet again reaffirm their mutual bonds.

On October 18, 1973, Rustin authored an impassioned statement on the stakes of the conflict for African Americans. “Many blacks,” he acknowledged, “confronted with profound injustice here at home, may wonder about the significance of a war which rages thousands of miles away.” Blacks and Jews, however, were “joined by a legacy of suffering,” and a “common history of triumph in the face of oppression.” After noting the important financial support that American Jews gave to the civil rights movement, and the deaths of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in

Mississippi, Rustin concluded, “our fates—the fate of Jews as embodied in the State of

Israel, and the fate of black people as reflected in their struggle for equality and dignity— are inseparable.”75 Thus, Rustin posited an alternative internationalist ideology to Third

World nationalism, one grounded in universalistic ideals of democracy, and a shared struggle for justice, but also predicated on an acceptance of an American-dominated capitalist system.

74 On Jewish opposition to Affirmative Action see Jerome E Chanes, “Affirmative Action: Jewish Ideals, Jewish Interests,” in Struggles in the Promised Land, 295-321; on the eve of the conflict in September 1973, the disagreements surrounding Affirmative Action received a public airing when the black head of the National Newspaper Publishers, Association Carton B. Goodlet publicly accused American Jews of having “excessive representation” in various American industries and in political office, see James L Hicks, “Head of Black Publishers Scores ‘Jewish Power’: Says Jews Are Taking Advantage of Blacks,” New York Amsterdam News, 29 September 1973, A1. 75 Bayard Rustin, “The Importance of Israel’s Survival, APRI news release, 18 October 1973, folder 7, box 42, BRP.

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Rustin did not stop at trying to convince African Americans that their interests aligned with those of Israel. He recognized that Black Power’s critique of the Arab-Israeli conflict went far beyond black-Jewish tensions at home to include a positive vision of

African Americans inclusion in a progressive Third World. Discrediting this belief was as important to Rustin as was reaffirming the idea of a black-Jewish alliance. In April 1974,

Rustin published “American Negroes and Israel” in The Crisis—the NAACP’s official magazine. Despite the article’s title, Rustin devoted most of its space to debunking the

“so-called third world.” He wrote the article in response to an assertion made by Robert

Browne, the Director of the Black Research Council, to the effect that black politicians supported Israel during the October War for fear of losing Jewish financial support.76 A onetime U.S. aid advisor in Cambodia and South Vietnam, Browne left the government in 1960 because of the “absurdity” of America’s “Vietnam policy.” He married a

Vietnamese woman, adopted her child and moved with them back to the United States.

There, he became involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements, eventually transitioning into a proponent of Black Power and the Third World. It was natural for

Rustin to use Browne’s article to go after Third Worldism.77

Rustin situated Browne’s criticism of civil rights groups within Black Power’s denunciations of Israel as “imperialist” and “genocidal.” Such statements, according to

Rustin, grossly misjudged “the nature of Arab and Israeli societies.” Far from democratic, this “so-called third world” was populated by brutal, authoritarian regimes. Nowhere was this brutality more evident than in the Middle East. “To propose, as some have that the

Arab nations in general and the Palestinians in particular represent a revolutionary

76 Robert S. Browne, “Blacks and the Middle East,” New York Amsterdam News, 27 October 1973, A2. 77 On Robert Browne see, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), especially chapter three.

178 vanguard for the underdeveloped world is simply to ignore the realities of the Arab social structure,” he declared. He described the Arab nations as “feudalistic” societies whose leaders enriched themselves with oil wealth while keeping their people in perpetual poverty through dictatorial methods.78 Such statements—along with participating in a racialized rendering of Arab peoples as an undifferentiated mass of uncivilized, violent beings—either ignored or oversimplified a complex geopolitical situation. He collapsed any distinction between a state-less people and the region’s authoritarian regimes. As we shall see, Rustin also conveniently failed to mention that several of these regimes were

American allies.

In contrast to Stokely Carmichael’s assertion that the Arab states were African,

Rustin posited that Africans and Arabs were historical enemies, not allies. “The conflict between Africans and Arabs dates back many centuries,” he informed readers of The

Crisis. It had been “Moslems” who had first enslaved Africans “on a wide scale,” not

Europeans. Nor was Arab involvement in the slave trade relegated to the distant past.

Arab peoples continued to enslave Africans, Rustin warned his readers. He cited numbers from the Anti-Slavery Society that showed over 500,000 people lived in bondage in

Saudi Arabia alone. For Black Power proponents to suggest that such nations represented the “revolutionary vanguard for the underdeveloped world” belied the historical conflict between “Arab traditions and the traditions of black people in Africa and in the

Americas.” Lest anyone misconstrue his purpose in elucidating the conflict between

Arabs and Africans, Rustin clarified, “The reason for exposing these differences is to

78 Bayard Rustin, “American Negroes and Israel,” The Crisis, April 1974, folder 2, box 40, BRP.

179 address, as directly as possible, the myth of a cohesive, universally progressive ‘Third

World’ of underdeveloped countries.”79

To explain why, if Africans and Arabs were traditional enemies, so many African nations had chosen to break ties with Israel rather than the Arab states after the October

War, Rustin pointed to African dependence on Arab oil. The oil “weapon” had proved powerful enough to “evoke anti-Israel responses” in England and France. “Small wonder,” then, “that the same weapon [was] sufficiently imposing” to affect the foreign policies of the “struggling, impoverished, and often politically unstable nations of

Africa.” With African nations suffering tremendously from the quadrupling of oil prices,

Rustin called the Black Power advocates who had supported the Arab states to account.

“There [was] a lesson in all this” he admonished, for Americans who “uncritically accept[ed] the myth of Third World unity…Those Americans who so enthusiastically greeted the outward appearance of Arab-African unity,” he demanded, “have an obligation to reexamine their political attitudes.”80

Rustin foresaw his critics responding that the Palestinian refugees could not be blamed for slaves in in other Arab nations or OPEC’s hike of oil prices. “Some of Israel’s critics, of course, would argue that they distinguish between the oil sheikdoms…military governments… and the Palestinians,” he remarked. In response Rustin asserted that the

Palestinians were closely related to the “most conservative elements” of “the Arab world.” He supported this assertion by citing Israeli scholar Shlomo Avineri, who argued that the Saudi Royal family bankrolled the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in order to “‘channel’” the Arab people’s “‘Revolutionary fervor into an exclusively anti-

79 Rustin, “American Negroes and Israel.” 80 Bayard Rustin, “Arab Oil and African Hunger,” APRI News Release, 27 June 1974, folder 6, box 42, BRP.

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Israeli direction.’”81 Saudi Arabia was, however, aligned with the United States. In essence, Rustin was condemning the PLO as both too radical and too conservative.

Moreover, the PLO had demonstrated a willingness to use force to achieve its ends.

When Yasser Arafat spoke before the United Nations in November of 1974, Rustin commented that the Palestinian leader had “shot his way into the General Assembly with a machine gun,” accusing the UN of sanctioning “organized brutality.”82

Denouncing the PLO’s use of violence may have seemed contradictory given

Rustin’s support for military aid to Israel. He would later acknowledge that his support for Israel “created a tension” within him. But Rustin was able to resolve that tension without, in his mind, abandoning pacifism.83 Though morally opposed to all violence,

Rustin maintained that the use of violence was legitimate in self-defense. “No one has ever argued that Negroes as individuals should not defend themselves from attack,” he had explained in his 1966 Commentary article on Black Power. Non-violence was meant to achieve social progress, a method for the minority to protest a society wherein “the majority controlled the police.”84 The PLO committed a double sin: resorting to violence not in self-defense, and using it to achieve social change. Rustin thus condemned the

PLO from both a pacifist and an activist stance.

On one level, Rustin’s assertion that the “Third World” did not actually exist was correct. The term has come to signify a geographical space, but as historian Vijay

Prashad has pointed out, the “Third World” was first and foremost an idea and an aspirational one at that. An alliance among the globe’s poorer nations was difficult to

81 Rustin, “American Negroes and Israel.” 82 Bayard Rustin, “The PLO: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?” The Miami Times, 19 December 1974, 5, folder 2, box 40, BRP. 83 Quoted in D’Emilio, 483. 84 Bayard Rustin, “‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics.”

181 sustain. The national leaders of the former colonies may have spoken of socialism and democracy, but in actuality these governments sought to build capitalist economies while maintaining domestic hierarchies through force.85 Certainly many of the Arab governments fit this description.

Yet Rustin’s analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict lacked nuance. There was no room for criticism of Israel for Rustin, who always portrayed the Israeli government’s actions in the best possible light. While he paid lip service to the plight of Palestinians,

Rustin blamed the “misery of the refugee camps” on the Arabs themselves. The continuing existence of the camps was, he reasoned, “as much a result of the unwillingness of Arabs to agree to a permanent settlement as it [was] of Israeli policies.”

Rustin went so far as to accuse Arab leaders—both the PLO and the Arab governments— of seeking to benefit from the wretched conditions within the camps. The camps “for

Arabs are a means of mobilizing moral opinion against Israel,” he reasoned.86 Such cognitive dissonance allowed Rustin to continue to exult in Israel’s achievement of universal ideals. “Given the enormous problems confronting [Israel,] this small nation has achieved a level of racial tolerance that is indeed remarkable,” by which Rustin meant that Arabs who lived in Israel had formal citizenship rights. It was Israel “with her socialistic society and expanding democratic institutions” that “most nearly [had] achieved the egalitarian ideal.”87 “More than ever,” Israel “deserve[d] the support of people of good will and common decency.”88 And “support” continued to mean military aid.

85Vijay Rashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007). 86 Rustin, “American Negroes and Israel.” 87 Ibid; Rustin, “the PLO: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists.” 88 Rustin, “The PLO: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?”

182

As he sought to convince African Americans that the Third World was illusory,

Rustin continued to lobby the government for the continuance of U.S. military aid to

Israel. When peace talks between the Arab and Israeli governments broke down in May

1975, reports indicated that Kissinger and President Gerald Ford blamed the Israelis for the impasse. They were supposedly considering a “reassessment” of U.S. policy toward

Israel, which the country’s American supporters interpreted as a “euphemism for retreat from America’s historic commitment to the integrity of Israel.”89 In response, Rustin wrote personally to Ford cautioning the president against any such reevaluation. He asked for the government’s continued “unqualified support of Israel,” including the provision of

“whatever supplies she needs in order to maintain safe secure borders.”90

In the fall of 1975, Rustin founded the Black Americans to Support Israel

Committee (BASIC). He enlisted support from prominent African Americans including

Andrew Young, Roy Wilkins, and Vernon Jordan. BASIC only ever operated on a shoe- string budget. Despite never spending more than $33,000 in a single year, the organization always operated at a loss.91 Still, it provided Rustin with another institutional seat from which to defend Israel against critics on the Left. No sooner had BASIC formed than it became embroiled in an international controversy surrounding Israel, the Third

World, and the United Nations. In November 1975, the UN General Assembly declared

Zionism to be a form of racism. Led by the Arab states, the vote displayed the growing power of the Third World movement in the General Assembly. The response from Rustin

89 American Jewish Committee, Washington Letter, 22 April 1975, folder Organizations, American Jewish Committee, box 35, Peter Rosenblatt Personal Papers, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, Austin, Texas (Hereafter PRP). 90 Rustin to President Ford, 8 May 1975, folder 8, box 5, BRP. 91 BASIC Partial Listing of Members as of 25 August 1975, folder 10, box 11, BRP; BASIC Balance Sheet, 31 August 1977, folder 5, box 11, BRP.

183 and Jewish American groups was swift and unequivocal. “Zionism was not racism,”

Rustin insisted. Rather, it represented “the legitimate expression of the Jewish people’s self-determination,” no different from the desire for self-determination expressed by

African nations.92 The UN vote led Rustin to revive his career as a protester. On

November 11, he joined a crowd of thousands at a protest against the resolution in the

Garment District of New York City. Other speakers included Israeli Representative to the

UN Chaim Herzog, and U.S. representative to the UN Daniel Moynihan.93

Despite Rustin’s best efforts at “reconstituting” the black-Jewish alliance, divisions over Israel remained. Stokely Carmichael applauded the vote at the UN.

Although he had moved to Africa in the late 1960s, Carmichael often returned to the

United States for lecture tours, and he remained a public, controversial figure. On

November 14th, Jewish activists, incensed at his support of the UN, picketed his speech at

American University. They carried placards reading “All the World Wants the Jews

Dead,” indicating just how emotionally intense the vote was.94 Carmichael was not quieted by the protest. On June 20, 1976 he appeared on Like It Is, a locally produced

New York television program with a predominantly African American viewership.

Speaking with interviewer Gil Noble, Carmichael called Zionism the “major enemy of

Africa and the Arab peoples.” Zionism negatively impacted blacks in the United States.

The federal monies currently being given to Israel rightly belonged to the struggling inner cities, he believed. Carmichael reaffirmed his belief in the black-Arab alliance. Again he declared, “Egypt is in Africa.” If an American Jew could send money to support Israel,

92 Bayard Rustin, “Zionism is not Racism,” APRI News Release, 13 November 1975, folder 2, box 13, BRP. 93 John F Burns, “Huge Rally here Condemns U.N. Anti-Zionism Move,” New York Times, 12 November 1975, 89. 94 Joseph, Stokely, 304.

184 then “an African born in New York” could “do the same thing for Egypt, since Egypt really belongs to him more than Israel belongs to the Jewish man here in America.”

Carmichael thus challenged American Jews who embraced Zionism by arguing that it was African Americans, not Jews, with the closest historic and ethnic ties to the region.95

New York’s Jewish leaders immediately condemned Carmichael’s appearance as both anti-Semitic and anti-American. They demanded that Like It Is provide them with equal time to rebut his incendiary remarks. Noble agreed, but it was Bayard Rustin with whom he sat down with on July 11, 1976. Once more, Rustin gave an impassioned defense of Israel predicated on its adherence to universalistic values. While acknowledging that Israel had taken land belonging to Arabs, Rustin claimed that Israel,

“had never taken an inch of territory from anyone except in a war that somebody else started.” He related his defense of Israel to his experiences with American Jews during the civil rights movement. “I work for the State of Israel because it is a democracy and because Jewish people have made tremendous contributions to our struggle here.” He concluded his rebuttal to Carmichael with one final warning against African Americans aligning themselves with the Third World. “If the United States lets Israel go down the drain in the name of some Third World mythology…then we are going to have trouble here ourselves,” he intoned. “You cannot refuse to defend democracy by choice. It is a pattern. It must be done everywhere by everybody so there is a deep connection between the defense of democracy around the world and here.”96 There was no separating the pursuit of equality within the United States from its defense abroad.

95Like It Is, transcript of Interview with Bayard Rustin, Director of Black Americans to Support Israel Committee,” 11 July 1976, Folder Blacks and Israel, Basic, Carmichael, Stokely, box 9, BRP. 96 Like It Is.

185

It is important to note that Rustin and Carmichael stood at the extreme ends in their opinions of Third World nationalism. As recent works by historian Judy Tzu-Chun

Wu, and American Studies scholars such as Laura Pulido and Cynthia Young have shown, Third World activism within the United States involved a diverse array of people and interests that included feminist, interracial, and interfaith organizing not reducible to either Rustin or Carmichael’s conception of the Third World. Wu, for one, reveals such diverse proponents of the Third World as Robert Browne, who rejected Carmichael’s extremism while still championing the liberating power of the Third World, and feminist activists who organized a series of “Indochinese Women’s Conferences” in Canada in

1971.97

Coming to Israel’s defense was not always easy for Rustin. When South African

Prime Minister John Vorster visited Israel just one month after Rustin’s appearance on

Like It Is, Rustin was dismayed. Critics of Israel had long pointed to its economic ties to

South Africa as evidence of Israel’s hostility toward black Africa, a charge that Rustin denied by pointing out Israel’s persistent denunciations of South African apartheid in the

UN. He wrote to the president of the AJC Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg expressing outrage and betrayal at the visit. “Not only I but every friend of Israel in the Black Community was chagrined by this news…Can it be, we ask ourselves, that Israel is departing from its principles and character and repudiating hostility to apartheid?”98 Hertzberg responded that Israel’s isolation in the world made it necessary to improve relations with South

Africa and he noted that those who denounced Israel for trading with the apartheid

97 Wu, 8-10; Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 98 Rustin to Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, 27 August 1976, folder 10, box 5, BRP.

186 regime made no mention of the fact that “Black Africa” did the same. “If it is wrong for

Israel to have any relations with South Africa, why is it not also wrong for Black African states to have such relations?” Hertzberg’s response seemed to mollify Rustin, who responded that the “hypocrisy that excuse[d] or ignore[d] black Africa’s trade with South

Africa” “deeply troubled” him. “Please be assured,” he wrote Hertzberg, “that I remain committed to Israel’s survival.”99

The Arab-Israeli conflict remained among Rustin’s most important causes throughout the four years of the Carter presidency. Indeed, the Middle East was one source, among many, of tension between Rustin and the president. Rustin felt personally slighted when the administration failed to invite him to the White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in early 1979. But the most serious disagreement between the Carter administration and Rustin came when the president compared the Palestinian cause to the civil rights movement in an interview with the New York Times in August 1979. Rustin fired off an angry letter to Carter proclaiming that there were no similarities between the Palestinians and African

Americans. While the civil rights movement was a “just and noble cause,” the Palestinian cause, as represented by the PLO, was “a movement led by terrorists.”100 Their methods betrayed the hollowness of their cause.

As the decade wound to a close, the Arab-Israeli conflict would yet again exacerbate tensions between African Americans and American Jews. In 1979, it was

99Rustin to Hertzberg, 27 August 1976, folder 10, box 5, BRP; Rustin to Hertzberg, 14 September 1976, folder 3, box 12, BRP. The AJC produced a report on African trade with South Africa in September 1976 which included the correspondence between Rustin and Hertzberg. The AJC promoted its results in black newspapers. See, “Trade Thrives between So. Africa and black nations,” Chicago Defender, 9 September 1976, folder 5, box 12, BRP. 100 Rustin to Carter, 1 August 1979, folder 11, box 16, BRP.

187 revealed that U.S. Ambassador to the UN Andrew Young had met with a representative of the PLO. Jewish groups accused Young of negotiating with a terrorist organization. In the political tumult that followed, Young resigned. African American leaders, including

Jesse Jackson and Joseph Lowery, voiced outrage at the ousting of the nation’s first

African American UN Representative. Jackson complained that Young’s ousting reflected just another example of Jews seeking to exploit their former allies, “The conflict began when we started our quest for power.” He embarked on a ten-day tour of the

Middle East. Included in the trip were meetings with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Jackson urged the PLO to recognize Israel’s right to exist and encouraged the PLO to model itself after the civil rights movement.101 Responding to the visit in the Jerusalem Post, Rustin admonished Jackson for believing that Arafat and the PLO could ever embrace peace. He again labeled them a terrorist group who, because of their reliance on violence, had more in common with the KKK than the SCLC. But after a nearly ten year-long campaign to discredit Black Power’s critique of Israel and support for Arabs as part of the Third

World, Rustin had come no closer to healing the rift between African Americans and

American Jews.

Rustin’s piece for the Jerusalem Post was important for another reason as well.

For the first time, Rustin publicly accused the PLO of being a proxy for the Soviet Union.

Even if Yasser Arafat had a change of heart and embraced nonviolent forms of protest,

Rustin asserted that “it [was] doubtful that the Soviet Union would allow the PLO control to remain in the hands of a born-again pacifist.”102 This conflation of the Israeli-

101 Karin L Stanford, Beyond the Boundaries: Reverend Jesse Jackson in International Affairs (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 56-59 102 Bayard Rustin, “PLO Threat to U.S. Blacks,” Jerusalem Post, 19 October 1979, folder 5, box 14, BRP.

188

Palestinian conflict with the Cold War is revealing of how anticommunism became central to Rustin’s worldview during the 1970s.

Rustin, the CPD, and the Pursuit of Majority Rule in Africa

At the same time that Bayard Rustin sought to discredit Black Power’s Third

World nationalist ideology and align African Americans with Israel, he also began to articulate a zealous anticommunism. Rustin had professed an anticommunist worldview ever since his split with the Communist Party in 1941. Prior to Black Power and the New

Left’s surge onto the national stage, however, his anticommunism had been primarily strategic, used to shield him and his allies from redbaiting. As the 1970s wore on, however, Rustin came to view all leftist movements in the Global South as part of a

Soviet plot for world domination. In making this argument, Rustin hoped to further dispute Third World nationalism by calling into doubt its proponent’s claims of “non- alignment” in the Cold War. Rustin’s newfound stripe of anticommunism also owed to the company he kept in the 1970s. As Rustin distanced himself from the New Left and

Black Power, he drew closer to Cold War Democrats, including Eugene Rostow, Jeane

Kirkpatrick, and Paul Nitze. These people, especially Rostow, had a profound influence on his views toward communism, leading him into the Committee on the Present Danger.

Rustin began to take a more pronounced stand on anticommunism during the

Vietnam War. In 1965 the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called for an antiwar rally open to all political groups including communists. In response, Rustin and other older members of the peace movement, including Muste, Norman Thomas and Robert

Gilmore, drafted a public statement expressing support for the march, but warning its organizers against allowing groups “committed to any form of totalitarianism” from

189 participating. While the letter triggered a fiery response from Staughton Lynd—who accused Rustin of “red baiting” the SDS—in truth the authors of the letter were trying to protect the SDS from such charges.103

By the early 1970s, Rustin’s attack on the New Left and Black Power began to take on a more ideological edge. In an article for the New Leader published in 1971,

Rustin responded directly to the inspiration Black Power advocates took from anticolonial scholarship. In drawing influence from thinkers like Fanon, and voicing anti- capitalist, nationalist, and at times pro-violent ideologies, black militants such as Stokely

Carmichael thought they were developing a radically egalitarian philosophy to combat inequalities within the United States. The reality, argued Rustin, was that these ideologies had been “imported” from the totalitarian states of “China, North Korea, and even

Stalin’s Russia.” In invoking Stalin, Rustin ascribed the very worst of communist inspirations to Black Power. His use of the “imported” was almost certainly meant to evoke the fear of communist infiltration. It gave the impression that Black Power activists had no role in crafting their critique of American society and foreign policy, but were instead merely adopting foreign (Soviet) opinions. Yet if Rustin feared that Black Power owed its radical ideology to communists, he stopped short of accusing its members of being Soviet agents themselves. Rather, Rustin explained away their radicalism as a folly of youth. They had misunderstood “the vital role of politics” in achieving fundamental change, and had instead sought inspiration in a radical, racial separatism that offered

103 D’Emilio, 409-410. The statement created no small amount of tension between the older set of men and younger activists like Staughton Lynd, who accused Rustin of Red-baiting and selling out the peace movement in the name of coalition politics, see: Staughton Lynd, An Open Letter to Bayard Rustin, 19 April 1965, folder 13, box 2, BRP.

190 pride, but little else.104 Thus, while Rustin had begun to tie his critique of Black Power to anticommunism by 1971, he had not yet developed into a complete Cold Warrior.

Beginning in 1972, Rustin would find friends amongst likeminded liberals who would help him to develop a far more fundamentalist anticommunism.

Rustin developed new alliances in the 1970s with individuals who shared his distaste for the “New Politics” on the Left. Like many on the Old Left, Rustin refused to support George McGovern’s 1972 election campaign against Richard Nixon. He saw

McGovern’s antiwar stance and critique of unions as hostile to the interests of labor.

Explaining McGovern’s loss in the November election, Rustin remarked, “[McGovern and his advisors’] style, their tactics, and their attitudes were perceived as antagonistic to the traditional values of working people.”105 Rustin joined with other disaffected liberals including Rostow, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz as founding member of the anti-McGovern Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) in

1972.106

It appears that Rostow had a significant impact on Rustin’s views toward communism during their time together in the CDM. Their mutual affinity for Israel united the two men. Moreover, Rustin, who always professed to be a foreign policy novice, no doubt deferred to Rostow when the latter spoke of a looming Soviet threat. As will be discussed below, Rustin’s pronouncements on the Cold War in Africa mirrored those of

Rostow after 1976. Little exists in the way of correspondence between Rustin and

Rostow. We do know that early in 1976 Rostow included Rustin in a symposium he had

104 Bayard Rustin, “Mobilizing a Progressive Majority,” New Leader, 25 January 1971, folder 18, box 39, BRP. 105 Rustin to Beverly Hurst, 28 November 1972, folder 4, box 5, BRP. 106 On Rustin and the CDM, see Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 91-92.

191 organized on the “critical choices” facing the nation on the Middle East. Sponsored by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, the conference took place in New

York City on January 23, 1976. Rustin found himself in some strange company at the event. He rubbed shoulders with conservative economist Milton Friedman, Admiral Elmo

Zumwalt, and conservative Senator James L. Buckley. An African American socialist, pacifist, civil rights leader may have appeared out of place among so many white conservatives, but their mutual disdain for the Third World had made them bedfellows.

Rustin’s speech that day fit well within the overall tone of the meeting, and revealed how Rustin’s growing anticommunism related to his campaign against Third

World nationalism. BASIC, he reassured those in attendance, could “destroy the myth about the relationship between black Africa and the Arabs, and the myth about the Third

World.” But it could not do so if the Republican administration lied to American people about Soviet imperialism. “The question we face is why Black Americans,” Rustin asked his audience, “should maintain a strong level of support for Israel or support for

American aid to non-Communist forces such as those struggling in Angola when our political leaders gingerly avoid telling the truth about Soviet expansion and Soviet ambitions.” “Mr. Kissinger,” he declared, “is profoundly misleading the American people by not pointing out precisely what the Soviet Union is.”107 Rustin’s own denunciation of détente matched Rostow’s beat for beat, and was likely greatly influenced by the time Rustin spent with Rostow. It was thus not surprising when, less than a year later, Rustin agreed to join Rostow’s Committee on the Present Danger. He

107 Rostow compiled the days speeches into an edited volume titled The Middle East: Critical Choices for the United States, Eugene V. Rostow, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976). Rustin titled his remarks “A Civil Rights Leader Views U.S. Foreign Policy,” 185-191.

192 already accepted the premise that discrediting the Third World depended upon debunking the “myth” of détente. He and Rostow were now allies.

Along with political groups formed to oppose the New Left, Rustin’s work with humanitarian organizations like the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Freedom

House brought him into further contact with anticommunists. As a member of the IRC,

Rustin campaigned on behalf of Southeast Asian refugees displaced by the Vietnam War.

He twice visited refugee camps in Thailand as an IRC representative in 1978 and 1979.

On one such trip, Rustin was joined by fellow CPD and IRC member William Casey, though it is unclear how much contact they had with one another.108 The two men shared a mutual friend in IRC chairman Leo Cherne. One of the organization’s s principal leaders since its founding, Cherne devoted much of the group’s resources to combating communism and aiding its victims. He once remarked, “I hope I’ll be remembered as a cold warrior.” Friends such as these, according to D’Emilio, “inevitably strengthened the anti-Communist inflection of [Rustin’s] outlook,” even if Rustin joined them in “support for human rights.”109

Rustin’s most controversial Cold War stand emerged from his decision to serve as an election observer for the international-rights advocacy group Freedom House. Wendell

Wilkie and Eleanor Roosevelt founded Freedom House in 1941 as a response to fascism in Europe. During the Cold War, Freedom House functioned as a global anticommunist watch group, investigating human rights violations perpetrated by leftist governments, while paying short shrift to the abusive practices of authoritarian regimes on the right.

108 Leo Cherne and William Casey, International Rescue Committee Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees, February-March 1978, folder-IRC Refugees Indochinese in Thailand, Thailand Mission 1978, box 24, BRP. 109 D’Emilio, 480; Leo Cherne to George Meany, 3 April 1978, folder 6, box 24, BRP.

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The group’s director in the 1970s, Leonard Sussman, reached out to the CPD in 1976. He offered to share a portion of Freedom House’s mailing list with the CPD.110 All of this is to say that in choosing to work with Freedom House, Rustin aligned himself with an advocacy group committed to using human rights primarily to criticize leftist groups in the Global South. His work on behalf of Freedom House led him to his most significant break with Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. Ironically, it centered on the Carter administration’s decision to maintain sanctions against the government of Rhodesia.

The white minority of Rhodesia declared their independence from Great Britain in 1965. The British government had made clear that it would only grant independence to a Rhodesian government that represented the black majority of Rhodesians. Rhodesian

Prime Minister Ian Smith thus separated from Britain in an explicit defense of white minority rule. Over the next fifteen years a brutal war ensued between Smith’s government and guerrilla forces in the countryside led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert

Mugabe. Both men were avowed Marxists, while Smith was devoutly anticommunist.

The U.S. government had maintained sanctions against the illegal Rhodesian regime since 1965. But Smith had a good deal of support from U.S. conservatives, especially southerners who drew clear parallels between the situation in Rhodesia and their own fight to retain segregation in the South.111

Rustin had long been a powerful voice against white rule in Africa. As late as

1966, he had even reasoned that in the case of South Africa violence may have been the

110 Leonard Sussman to Charles Tyroler, 4 June 1976, folder Sti-Sz, box 7, Original Accession, Eugene Victor Rostow Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (Hereafter EVR Papers). Although Sussman told Tyroler that Freedom House’s membership list was “sacrosanct,” he offered to provide the CPD with fifteen hundred names of potential donors. 111 On the U.S. relationship to Rhodesia, see Gerald Horne: From the Barrel of a Gun: the United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), quote from Helms on 144.

194 only possible solution given that “no government body or public opinion [could] be appealed to through non-violent action.”112 By the mid-1970s, however, Rustin began to moderate his views on white rule in Africa as leftist forces achieved significant advances on the continent. Once again, Rostow’s influence on Rustin was crucial. As members of the CDM, the two men served together on a panel on the Middle East, Angola and

Soviet-U.S. relations in early 1976. In response to the victory of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1975, a victory made possible with support from the Cuban military, the group produced a memorandum written by Rostow. They criticized Congressional failure to support the anticommunist forces in Angola had enabled “Soviet control” of a nation of strategic value.113 The memorandum urged the

U.S. government to join with South Africa in opposing the MPLA despite the group’s opposition to apartheid. “[S]ecurity issues,” Rostow explained, “often make for strange bed-fellows.”114

In October 1977, Rustin and fellow democratic socialist Carl Gershman penned an article titled “Africa, Soviet Imperialism, and the Retreat of American Power” for

Commentary. The article echoed Rostow’s statement of a year prior. The two men lambasted the Ford administration for having displayed “impotence…in the face of totalitarian aggression.” Rustin and Gershman defended South Africa’s intervention in the conflict claiming that Pretoria had done so at the behest of “the black majority in

Angola, to counter a non-African army.” Criticizing the Carter administration’s failure to

112 Rustin to Mark Helbling, 28 November 1966, folder 3, box 3, BRP. 113 On the History of the Angolan civil war see Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 114 Other members of the panel included Paul Nitze, Norman Podhoretz, and Elmo Zumwalt. For a draft of the statement see CDM Executive Committee Meeting, 26 January 1976, folder CDM Executive Committee Minutes, box 62, PRP.

195 extend U.S. support to anticommunist forces in Africa, Rustin and Gershman nevertheless stated that they remained committed to majority rule in Africa, but moderated their support to fit within Cold War geopolitics. They were for “majority rule and against elements that seek to exploit the issue to advance Soviet goals.” If the choice came down to allowing the advancement of communist forces or supporting the anticommunist, white minority governments, the latter, they believed, was preferable.

Criticizing Carter’s human rights foreign policy, Rustin and Gershman proclaimed,

“[T]he suppression of blacks by whites is not the only human-rights issue in Africa.”

Indeed, they reasoned that a black-majority communist government would be even worse for southern Africa than the current white regimes as communist dictatorships afforded

“less chance of evolving” into democracy than did anticommunist dictatorships. “To concentrate solely on the black-white problem,” they warned, “undermine[d] the moral credibility of the administration’s foreign policy.” Rustin and Gershman concluded with an appeal to the Carter administration to reassert American influence in Africa, “Sooner or later, the United States will have to decide whether it intends to remain the leader of the West,” as it remained, “the only country capable of deterring Soviet expansion.”115

The one time critic of the Cold War now argued for the resumption of the policy of containment in Africa.

It was within this context that Rustin joined a Freedom House delegation sent to observe the elections in Rhodesia in April 1979. The election was fatally compromised from the start. Although Ian Smith intended the election as an “internal settlement” that would allow for black majority rule, he excluded from participation the guerrilla forces

115 Bayard Rustin and Carl Gershman, “Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power,” Commentary, October 1977, 33-43.

196 who had opposed him for fifteen years. Equally troubling were the details of the constitution under which the election was held. Only the white minority had been allowed to draft and approve the document. It guaranteed white control of the police, the military, and the judicial system. It also reserved for whites veto power over any proposed reforms to the constitution. Under such conditions, Smith’s ally Bishop Abel Muzorewa won handily, becoming the first Prime Minister of the newly constituted “Zimbabwe-

Rhodesia.”116

While acknowledging that the election was far from perfect, Rustin nevertheless gave the new government his stamp of approval. “The people of Zimbabwe,” he wrote in

Commentary that July, had voted “in an election that was freer than most held in the developing world.” Declaring it “a further step toward majority rule,” Rustin urged the

Carter administration to lift U.S. sanctions against the new nation asking, “How can you maintain an economic boycott against Rhodesia…and not act against South Africa…?”117

Revealing the Cold War logic undergirding his support for the election, Rustin warned

Carter that maintaining the sanctions would send a dangerous signal to the Soviet Union and the Patriotic Front to “continue fighting,” thus “creating opportunities” for Moscow to intervene.118

Rhodesia’s conservative supporters in the United States, especially archconservative senator Jesse Helms, latched onto the Freedom House report to raise the pressure on Carter to lift the sanctions. The Senate voted by a nearly four to one margin

116 Horne, 164-167. 117 Freedom House News Report, “Elections Judged ‘Free, but not Entirely Fair,’” folder 2, box 22, BRP; “Call elections fair, ask U.S. to lift Rhodesia ban,” Daily News, 23 April 1979. 118 Bayard Rustin, “The War Against Zimbabwe,” Commentary, July 1979, 25-32.

197 in favor of repealing the sanctions in the spring of 1979.119 Despite the pressure Congress placed on the administration, the debate over Rhodesia ended in a rare instance of a president “yielding to the international community rather than to Congress,” as historian

Gerald Horne noted. Carter refused to lift the sanctions, citing the indefensible nature of the constitution. The Zimbabwe-Rhodesian government collapsed early in 1980. In a new election that February, Robert Mugabe won handily, becoming the nation of Zimbabwe’s

“first post-independence leader.”120

Rustin’s involvement in the campaign to lift sanctions on Rhodesia may have seemed a far cry from the pursuit of economic justice at home. It originated, however, from his desire to marginalize the proponents of Black Power and the New Left, and to reconstitute a “progressive coalition of liberals, labor, and minorities.”121 While the possibilities of the mid-1960s no longer existed, Rustin found hope in the election of a

Democratic president in 1976, and in the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill for Full Employment.

Rustin’s hopes would prove misplaced, as the new president privileged fighting inflation over unemployment. In 1980, Rustin would look on in exhausted frustration as the nation elected the most anti-labor candidate to the presidency of the modern era.

Fighting for Full Employment

“There are some grounds for optimism in this crucial election year,” Bayard

Rustin wrote in 1976. Although black unemployment hovered above 10 percent, Rustin believed that the direness of their economic situation had led African Americans to develop a “new maturity” about where their interests lay. While Black Nationalists

119 Horne, 165; Jim Hoagland, “Conservatives Plan Final Attack on Rhodesia Sanctions,” The Washington Post, 13 May 1979. 120 Horne, 165, 263. 121 Rustin article draft, “The Future of Black Politics.”

198 continued to promote Third Worldism, Rustin was heartened by the displacement of “the politics of symbolism” by a new pragmatism on the part of black politicians. They “[had] realized that it [was] more important to work constructively behind the scenes…for legislation that [would] benefit a wide spectrum of Americans, than to issue rhetorical denunciations of white racism.” In other words, Rustin believed that black separatism was giving way to a more overt focus on the economic crisis facing both black and white working Americans. “The divisions which have threatened the coalition have been muted,” he believed. Now was the time to reform the bonds of the liberal political coalition to achieve economic progress for all, and to “make it possible for black

Americans to achieve true equality.” 122

What gains this reformed coalition could achieve, however, differed sharply from the mid-1960s. Where once Rustin had pushed the federal government to guarantee universal healthcare, the right to decent housing, and a guaranteed income, he now focused on promoting economic growth and full employment. For example, Although

Rustin supported affirmative action, he reasoned that any such program was doomed to failure “if it must function within a context of scarcity.” The economic gains of black

Americans during the 1960s were owed not only to the legal successes of the civil rights movement, but also, and primarily, to “the policies of economic growth and high employment promoted by the Johnson administration.” Rustin’s emphasis on full employment was part of a larger trend on the part of antipoverty liberals in the

122 Ibid.

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Democratic Party away from broader claims for a guaranteed income or a “right to live” that existed independently of the labor market.123

During the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries, Rustin joined with organized labor behind Cold War liberal Henry Jackson. He knew little of Jimmy Carter’s background, and disliked what he did know. Responding to Andrew Young’s endorsement of Carter in The Nation in April of 1976, Rustin challenged Carter’s decision to run as a Washington outsider, noting that it was Washington which had provided the support for black progress. “When a politician who calls himself a liberal runs against Washington,” he informed Young, “one must ask how he would govern if he ever made it to Washington” [emphasis in original].124 Even with the shrunken political possibilities of the 1970s, Rustin worried that Carter’s commitment to economic progress was smaller still.

Rustin was especially concerned with Carter’s stance on The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act. Better known as the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, it had been developed in 1974 by liberal stalwart Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative

Augustus Hawkins. A member of the newly minted Congressional Black Caucus,

Hawkins drew inspiration for the bill directly from A. Philip Randolph and Bayard

Rustin. Like them, he viewed achieving economic justice as the fulfillment of the civil rights movement, remaking that “it wouldn’t make any sense to eat in a public restaurant

123 Historian Marisa Chappell has argued that liberals focus on full employment was due in part to conservative attacks on welfare, especially for single mothers whom conservatives portrayed as undeserving. In contrast to the right to an income, full employment had a masculine resonance, evoking images of the male breadwinner and the family as a single economic unit with a patriarch. See Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 126-130. 124 Rustin to Andrew Young, 5 April 1976, folder 10, box 5, BRP.

200 if one didn’t have the money.”125 The bill would require the federal government to develop an economic plan for the achievement of full employment (defined as three percent unemployment) at prevailing wages. It included, as Jefferson Cowie has written,

“a federally mandated and legally enforceable right to a job for every American,” a goal that had been one of the central features of the Freedom Budget as well. The duo introduced Humphrey-Hawkins in 1976. They had amassed an impressive array of liberal support for the bill including the AFL-CIO and Rustin’s A. Philip Randolph Institute.

The bill’s supporters proceeded with the belief that if Americans elected a Democratic president in 1976, he would likely support their goals. They were to be sorely disappointed.126

Rustin’s concern proved to be well placed, as Carter aligned himself with economists who believed that inflation, not unemployment was the issue that most seriously threatened the economy. Conservative economists worried about inflation argued in favor of high interest rates to reign in the money supply and slow economic growth in order to “squeeze” inflation out of the economy. Such policies would benefit the wealthy by insuring that their money did not devalue, but critics claimed that high interest rates would exacerbate unemployment, hurting those Americans most vulnerable to the vagaries of capitalism. The anti-inflationary argument won the ears not only of

Republicans, but also of moderate Democrats like Jimmy Carter. The Georgian Democrat had little affiliation with organized labor. It was Carter and the anti-inflationary elements within his party who were responsible for defanging the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill.127

125 Quoted in Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press: 2010), 270. 126 Ibid, 271-273. 127 Ibid, 275-279.

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As a candidate, Carter had stated his support for “the concept of Humphrey-

Hawkins.” His most important economic advisors, in particular Johnson’s former budget director Charles Schultze, however, opposed Humphrey-Hawkins as inflationary.

Addressing inflation rather than unemployment also appealed to Carter’s technocratic nature, as Cowie has noted. Better to tinker with interest rates than enact legislation that, for good or ill, had the potential to dramatically alter the American economy.

Recognizing the political cost of scrapping Humphrey-Hawkins altogether, Schultze and

Carter instead transformed the bill into a symbolic victory for liberals. They replaced its language of economic “planning” with “targets” and “goals,” insuring that the bill had no enforcement power. When Carter signed Humphrey-Hawkins into law in October 1978, the legislation had been reduced to little more than a declaration of the government’s desire to achieve full employment, without any requirements that it actually be pursued.128

Rustin had clashed with the Carter administration on the president’s comparison of the Palestinians to the civil rights movement, and his decision to maintain sanctions against Rhodesia. These disagreements paled in comparison to Rustin’s profound disappointment with the president’s economic policies. As early as August 1977, Rustin recognized a fundamental contradiction in Carter’s domestic agenda. While his public statements supported “social justice,” and “racial equality,” these ideals clashed with his administration’s emphasis on balancing the budget and controlling inflation. “There can be no doubt,” he warned the president in an APRI news release, “that we are going to judge this administration by its performance, and not by its promises.” By the end of

1978, Rustin had judged Carter’s economic performance an abject failure. “President

128 Ibid, 280-286.

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Carter’s anti-inflation program…suffers from a warped sense of fairness,” he exclaimed.

In choosing to fight inflation rather than unemployment, the president depressed wages while asking little in the way of price control. Throughout his presidency, unemployment for African Americans remained stubbornly high, reaching 13.7 percent in February of

1979.129

If ever Rustin was to criticize the government’s prioritization of the military budget over domestic spending, Carter’s proposed 1979 budget seemed an ideal opportunity. The budget emphasized austerity in domestic programs. Among other cuts, it eliminated $3.4 billion in federal monies meant for public works programs in the nation’s cities. At the same time, Carter proposed raising defense spending by 3 percent, leading even moderate Democrats to express doubt about the wisdom of increasing defense spending while cutting domestic programs. Rustin, however, remained steadfast in his opposition to any linking of the two. While he believed “It [was] of the utmost importance to challenge and publicize the proposed cuts,” as he wrote George Meany,

“some groups opposed to President Carter’s cutbacks have attempted to link these cuts with the whole question of military spending.” Labor needed to oppose “such a strategy” as it would divide Democrats and thus “impede the development of a strong coalition around the budget.”130 Two weeks later, Rustin came out publicly against the austerity measures contained within the federal budget, but he implored liberals to “make [their] case irrespective of the defense budget.” After all, he noted, “the majority of Americans,

129 Bayard Rustin, “A Message to Carter: Performance Not Promises,” APRI News Release, 3 August 1977, folder 14, box 42, BRP; Bayard Rustin, “Carter’s Inflation Program: Punish the Victims,” APRI News Release, 7 December 1978, folder 16, box 42, BRP, Box 42. 130 Rustin to George Meany, 31 January 1979, folder 14, box 7, BRP.

203 myself included, favor[ed]” increases in military spending.131 While only an aside, this last sentence spoke volumes of how far Rustin had come in his support for the arms industry.

Despite his vehement disagreement with Carter’s economic policies, Rustin nevertheless supported the president in the 1980 election. He held no illusions on what a

Reagan presidency would mean for labor and African Americans. He dutifully organized

“The Black Americans to Re-elect the President,” but he devoted more time to attacking

Reagan than to defending Carter’s record. “Ronald Reagan is no Jimmy Carter,” he heatedly wrote to the editors of the New Republic when they suggested that a Reagan administration would differ little from Carter’s. “He is not even a Gerald Ford. He is an ultra-conservative who will dedicate his administration to implementing economic programs which would cause us to look nostalgically four years from now at our current economic woes.”132 On Election Day over fifty percent of voters cast their ballots for

Ronald Reagan. Many of Reagan’s supporters came from the white working-class whom

Rustin had tried for so long to bring into an alliance with blacks and other liberals. His over ten-year campaign to form a political alliance around economic growth, support for

Israel, and the Cold War had failed to reunite liberal America.

Conclusion

Bayard Rustin’s life during the 1970s gives testament to the ways in which anxieties about “Third World” challenges to the United States motivated a diverse contingent of prominent Americans to join a campaign to reaffirm American militarism.

For Rustin, it was the potency of Third World Nationalism within the Black Power and

131 Bayard Rustin, “Defense Spending and the Budget,” APRI News Release, 15 February 1979, folder 17, box 42, BRP. 132 Rustin to the Editors of the New Republic, 10 October 1980, folder 12, box 16, BRP.

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New Left movements that drove him to publicly oppose any group that espoused a Third

World ideology. He saw such pronouncements as a vital threat to the potential for reforming a liberal political coalition capable of pursuing social justice at home.

Rustin was far from alone in seeing in the Third World a direct challenge to his, and the nation’s, interests. For Eugene Rostow, it was the shock of the October War and the power of the oil producing states to divide Western Europe and America that convinced him of détente’s hollowness. For William Casey, the specter of a Global South united into a single economic bloc in opposition to the neoliberal policies he advocated that drove him from the Ford administration and into the Reagan fold. And for Jeane

Kirkpatrick, it was the evident refusal of the Democratic Party to support Cold War interventionism after the Vietnam War that led her to join the Committee on the Present

Danger and the campaign to reassert American power abroad. In the process, she would develop a persuasive and controversial defense of American militarism that would help to define the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan.

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Chapter 4 Jeane Kirkpatrick Offers an Intellectual Defense for Rightwing Dictatorships: Race and Totalitarianism in the Global South.

In August 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick spent her summer vacation in Saint-Remy writing the article that would make her famous. Kirkpatrick, a political scientist at

Georgetown University, loved France. She was a devotee of French cooking, a patron of

Albert Camus, and a student of French history and culture who had studied in Paris in the early 1950s. Yet she took time during her family’s yearly sojourn to France’s

Mediterranean coast not to write about French politics or relations among the NATO member states but to expound on two nations she had never visited and knew relatively little about: Iran and Nicaragua. Both had been stalwart American allies that had recently succumbed to revolutionary movements. Kirkpatrick blamed these “losses” on the

“moralistic” and “naïve” foreign policy of the Carter administration. She also provided a forthright defense of American aid to rightwing dictatorships which posited that it was not only in the best interest of the nation, but morally acceptable as well. After its publication in Commentary, “Dictatorships & Double Standards” quickly gained the attention of Ronald Reagan, who nominated Kirkpatrick to serve as the U.S.

Representative to the United Nations, one of the most public positions in American foreign policy.1

“Dictatorships & Double Standards” remains both influential and controversial.

Scholars credit it with providing the Reagan administration with the justification for its

1 Peter Collier, Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick (New York: Encounter Books, 2012). Collier’s work is the first book length biography of Kirkpatrick, written in consultation with her before her death in 2006. Although it often strays into hagiography, it is an important source of insight into Kirkpatrick’s thinking, not least because of its inclusion of many quotes and passages from her.

206 offensive in the Global South, especially in Central America. Kirkpatrick’s emphasis on the supposed differences between leftwing, “totalitarian” regimes, and rightwing

“authoritarian” regimes was especially influential. She posited that leftist totalitarian states developed due to outside, Soviet influence and sought the transformation of all of society and culture to conform to a utopian vision of socialism. Authoritarian regimes, in contrast, came from within a given society, and sought only to dominate political power, leaving cultural traditions largely intact. Thus, Kirkpatrick concluded, rightwing states were inherently less repressive than leftwing ones and, being endogenous, were also more likely to transition into democracies than were nations with exogenous, totalitarian governments. As historian Greg Grandin has argued, her ideas were especially influential in determining U.S. policy in Central America. Her article allowed the Reagan administration to support “death squads” deployed by authoritarian regimes and “freedom fighting” rebels in the name of defeating Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism.2

Scholars have paid far less attention to Kirkpatrick herself. We know that she was a “neoconservative”—a New Deal Democrat disgusted with what she saw as the anti-

Americanism of the New Left. We know too that she was a self-styled “realist” in foreign policy who nevertheless bought whole-heartedly into American exceptionalism. But the ideologies that underlay these convictions and the experiences that shaped them have remained largely unexplored. In some respects, this is due to Kirkpatrick herself. In contrast to many of her contemporaries, she published no memoirs and left behind no papers accessible to historians.

2 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books, 2006), 73-78.

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The attention Kirkpatrick has received come mainly from historians of neoconservatism. In his history of Reagan Era conservatism, J. David Hoeveler posited that Kirkpatrick blended a conservative, realist position towards foreign policy with a rejection of amoral, realpolitik. Historian Justin Vaïsse would go even further, arguing that Kirkpatrick was not a realist at all, but an avid proponent of spreading democracy abroad. He took at face value Kirkpatrick’s assertion that she genuinely believed that the

United States should promote democracy abroad, just not at the expense of governments fighting a communist, and therefore Soviet, takeover. He concluded that “Dictatorships &

Double Standards” was not a “denigration of democracy,” but rather a “ringing defense of democratic ambitions.”3

I seek to move the scholarship on Kirkpatrick beyond the question of whether she was a “realist” or an idealist by acknowledging that all people carry their preconceived notions of how the world operates with them. Even those proclaiming to be hardnosed realists are in actuality as bound to ideology as the most idealistic internationalist.4

Guiding Kirkpatrick’s approach to foreign policy was the belief—shared by many postwar American intellectuals—that nations developed from traditional, simplistic and authoritarian societies into modern, complex, democratic ones.5 It was this conceit that governed how she thought the United States ought to behave in the world. The prevalence of dictatorships in the Global South owed not to the legacy of colonialism or

Cold War machinations, but rather to the “traditional” cultural and social norms of those

3 J. David Hoeveler, Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 143-176; Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 139-140. 4 Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 5 Naoko Shibusawa, “Ideology, Culture, and the Cold War,” Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, U.K: Oxford University Press, 2013).

208 nations. Carter’s effort to force democratic change on authoritarian regimes failed because such societies supposedly lacked the sophisticated cultural institutions necessary for democracy to function. This totalizing theory of democratic development allowed

Kirkpatrick to write about the situations in Iran and Nicaragua without acquiring expert knowledge of either place. She characterized both nations as traditional societies whom the Carter administration had tried to fast-track toward democracy. It was inevitable that in places lacking the “discipline” and “complexity” of modern societies, chaos would result.

Determining exactly who was “ready” for democracy depended on a racialized division of the world. According to Kirkpatrick, it was the nations of the Global South, the nonwhite world, which lacked the capacity for democracy. To be sure, she never claimed that nonwhites were inherently inferior, and she bristled at charges of racism.

Yet she reified a racialized division of the world between the “modern” West and the

“underdeveloped” Global South. According to Kirkpatrick, some nations just were not ready for democracy. Better to leave them in the hands of anticommunist dictators until they had developed the institutions and the mindset to support democratic governance.

Her “defense of democratic ambitions” sounded remarkably similar to the justifications for empire that accompanied European colonialism.

Her contribution to development theory was to infuse it with political theorist

Hannah Arendt’s analysis on the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt’s most famous work The Origins of Totalitarianism compared Nazi Germany and Stalinist

Russia, concluding that two regimes, while at opposite ends of the political spectrum, represented a new political phenomenon. Both, Arendt argued, developed not out of class

209 antagonisms or societal inequalities, but rather from totalizing ideologies that sought to remake all of human existence in order to achieve a “utopian,” and ultimately

“unrealizable” end. In contrast to other tyrannical forms of government that monopolized political power, totalitarianism’s adherence to ideology—narrowly defined to include

Marxism or a blend of anti-Semitism and racism—meant that totalitarian leaders, once in power, attempted to remake all of society, to redefine human nature with disastrous consequences. “It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power.

Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single exception are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life,” Arendt wrote.6 According to Kirkpatrick, totalitarianism was exactly what the Soviets and their leftist allies were exporting to the

Global South, replacing the “traditional” authoritarian dictatorships with one far worse as totalitarians upended the traditional norms and relations within those societies. She condemned both communists and U.S. progressives for seeking to superimpose “modern” values and institutions on premodern nations.

This chapter traces Kirkpatrick’s life through her interviews, correspondence, and a close reading of her published work. Only when we take her early academic writing into account can we understand in full the guiding logic behind her most celebrated work.

All of the ideas Kirkpatrick put forward in “Dictatorships and Double Standards” were

6 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), 427- 428. Hannah Arendt died in 1975, four years before Kirkpatrick would write her famous article invoking Arendt’s legacy. We cannot say with any certainty what Arendt’s opinion of Kirkpatrick’s writing would have been, but Arendt’s later essays On Violence and On Revolution, indicate that she shared Kirkpatrick’s contempt for the New Left and Third World nationalism. In On Violence, she dismissed the advocacy of thinkers’ like Franz Fanon for violent revolution as indicative of “people exposed to unprecedented events and developments without any means of handling them mentally.” See, Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970) 20. Scholar Kathryn T. Gines argues that Arendt in effect places the blame for anti-colonial violence on the colonized, ignoring “the original or constitutive violence of America’s founding fathers and Europe’s imperialists,” see, Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 2. Still, it remains questionable whether Arendt would have accepted the “other-side” of Kirkpatrick’s argument, that authoritarian governments were worthy of American support.

210 first articulated years earlier. Moreover, this chapter explains how Kirkpatrick, a lifelong

Democrat slowly drifted towards the Republican Party during the 1970s. She felt alienated from the “New Elite,” as she called them, of young, racially diverse Democrats who rejected the Cold War and American exceptionalism, and developed a “New

Politics” that threatened to upend power within the party. As Kirkpatrick grew more isolated from the Democratic Party, her involvement in the Committee on the Present

Danger (CPD) and the American Enterprise Institute drew her toward the right. It was in the CPD where Kirkpatrick came to know Republican Richard Allen. Allen played a crucial role in Kirkpatrick’s rise to public office, first by sharing her article with Ronald

Reagan, and then by recommending her for the job at the UN.7

Finally, In Kirkpatrick’s activism during the 1970s we can see how the “foreign” and “domestic” were intertwined. As she tacked back and forth during the decade between condemning the “New Elite”—her term for what others termed the “New Class” of Democrats in the 1970s—at home and leftist revolutionaries abroad, the two groups blended in her mind. They shared a radical agenda to transform society based on a utopian ideology that promised a better life, but delivered societal upheaval. There was no clear line between her fight to restore the “Old Politics” of the Democratic Party and

American strength in the world. For her, enemies were these enemies were, in a sense, one and the same. It is necessary to mention here that beginning in the 1970s Kirkpatrick would adopt Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” rhetoric of “law and order” for her condemnation of the New Elite, using the racially coded language of law and order to

7 Vaïsse was the first to recognize Allen’s important role as a conduit between Reagan and conservative Republicans. See, Vaïsse, 182.

211 discredit them. As we will see in the next chapter, Kirkpatrick would also use the

Southern Strategy at the United Nations.8

Readers will note that more attention is paid here to Kirkpatrick’s personal life than there was given to the other subjects of this dissertation. As a woman living in a patriarchal society, her decisions about marriage and children affected her far more than they did her male counterparts. The three men of this study were not expected to stay home and rear any children; she was. Nor did they have to marry into an influential political sect to gain influence. Instead, all three could rely on the relationships they formed out of the experiences of college, work, and, crucially, war. A woman raised in the Midwest, Kirkpatrick was reliant at first on her husband’s political connections— especially to Humphrey—for her entrée into the political world. Eventually, however, she would surpass her husband as the family member with the most political connections, becoming the most prominent woman in the Reagan administration.

From the Heartland to the Nation’s Capital Jeane Kirkpatrick, née Jordan, was born in Duncan, Oklahoma on December 19,

1926. Like the other three subjects of this study, her family was staunchly Democratic.9

Her paternal grandfather, Frank Jordan, had at one time been involved in both the

8 On the new class and the New Politics see, Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 51-57; as well as Andrew Hartman, a War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2015). Historian John Ehrman deserves credit for recognizing the links that Kirkpatrick drew between totalitarianism and the reformers of the “New Political” movement within the Democratic Party. The New Politics was a group of young party officials who strove to change nomination rules in order to allow for more participation by minorities and women, resulting in the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. He argued that Kirkpatrick detected in the New Politics—with its desire to quickly reform the Democratic Party into a truly representative body—the same willingness to call into question all societal norms as totalitarians. See, Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 116-122. 9 While Jeane Jordan would not become Jeane Kirkpatrick until 1955, in the interest of clarity I have chosen to refer to her by her married name throughout this chapter. Because sources cited for her pre- married life contain Kirkpatrick’s remembrances in her later years, I believed it would be too jarring for the reader to continually switch back and forth between “Jordan” and “Kirkpatrick.”

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Populist and Socialist parties, but rejoined the Democratic fold during the New Deal.

According to Kirkpatrick, the family did not like to discuss his foray into more radical politics. Her father, Welcher Jordan, was an oil wildcatter—digging exploratory wells in search of black gold. His job brought him into casual acquaintance with Erle P.

Halliburton, a fellow Duncan resident whose company would achieve a certain level of infamy during the Iraq War as the symbol of U.S. corporate interest in the region.

Kirkpatrick’s mother, Leona Jordan, had been a private secretary in Fort Worth before marrying her father. Kirkpatrick proudly described her as “an independent woman of the flapper variety,” indicating that she believed she had inherited some of her mother’s character.10

Although the Jordans eventually moved to Illinois when she was twelve,

Kirkpatrick forever identified herself with the southwestern prairie country. Her remembrances of life in the small Oklahoma town were revealing of how her apparent commitment to racial equality was contradicted by her whole-hearted belief in American frontier exceptionalism. On the one hand, she presented her time in Duncan as teaching her about racial inequality. “The culture that was otherwise democratic, egalitarian, and libertarian,” she recalled, “was saturated with prejudice against blacks. Words like

‘nigger-shooter’ (for sling-shot) and ‘nigger toes’ (for Brazil nuts) were considered perfectly ordinary, conventional language, like all the other names of things.” As a child,

Kirkpatrick did not realize the systemic racism at work in her hometown, where blacks, she later explained, were present in white neighborhoods only as servants. But she claimed to have recognized American racism as a tremendous wrong by the time she was

10 The information on Kirkpatrick’s early life comes from Jeane Kirkpatrick, “An American Girlhood,” Weekly Standard, February 5, 2007; on Halliburton’s importance to Duncan see Collier, 5.

213 a teenager. “That segregation and discrimination violated our basic values was clear to me,” she explained.11

If Kirkpatrick was ultimately able to recognize racial discrimination against

African Americans within her otherwise idyllic hometown, her other remembrances of life in Duncan displayed an unflinching belief in a Turnerian narrative of American development. Growing up in what she described as a “frontier society,” Kirkpatrick accepted Frederick Turner’s vision of an American exceptionalism born out of the formation of racially homogenous communities formed across a purportedly empty continent. “The most remarkable fact about American frontier societies,” she exclaimed,

“was that people who found themselves in the same area found it natural to govern themselves by democratic means.” That these “inclusive” societies both excluded and displaced indigenous and Mexican communities did not factor into her vision of frontier life. Indeed, although there was large American Indians community in Duncan—

Kirkpatrick recalled sharing classes with Native students—she never ceased viewing them as “exotic” and “romantic” beings, “symbols of a vanishing America.”12 This despite the fact that Oklahoma was where the federal government had sent indigenous peoples forcibly removed from their homes. Kirkpatrick cast the emergence of American democracy as the unproblematic tale of Europeans forming relationships of compromise and mutual responsibility in a new land.

Upon graduating from high school in Mount Vernon, Illinois in 1944, where her family settled, Kirkpatrick was set on attending college. She was a gifted student who aspired to attend the University of Chicago. But in a compromise with her more

11 Kirkpatrick, “An American Girlhood.” 12 Ibid. To be fair, Kirkpatrick also described the few Jews living in Duncan as “exotic,” but she did not view them as symbolic representatives of a “vanishing” culture or people.

214 traditionally minded parents she enrolled in Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri instead. A two-year women’s college, Stephens had the advantage of being close to home, but failed to provide her with the academic rigor she craved. After two years at

Stephens, she applied to Barnard College in New York City and the University of

Chicago. Much to her father’s chagrin, she was accepted to both schools. Although

Kirkpatrick was initially determined to attend Chicago, a violent encounter led her to choose Barnard instead. Having moved to the city in the summer, Kirkpatrick was waiting near a bus stop one night when, as she described it, “Some gang members grabbed me and tried to drag me back into the bushes, but I screamed bloody murder and they left. I decided on the spot that Chicago was not for me.” New York, it seemed, was a better fit.13

Kirkpatrick arrived in New York in time for classes to begin in the fall of 1946.

There, she majored in Political Science, and for the first time came into contact with

“radical politics” among the university’s leftist student body. She found them disagreeable. During the 1948 presidential election, Kirkpatrick supported Harry Truman despite the fact that Henry Wallace was the campus favorite. Wallace, she believed, was surrounded by communists, and communists, she felt, “were always defending the indefensible.” Years later, Kirkpatrick would write with pride that she had “resisted, at

21, the temptation of radical politics.”14 She graduated from Barnard in the spring of

13 Ibid. Kirkpatrick shared this story with her biographer Peter Collier sometime in the mid-2000s. Although there is no reason to doubt the veracity of her story, she did not explain why she deemed a New York a safer city than Chicago. Moreover, given her use of criminal metaphors to disparage the New Left and, in the 1980s, the Global South delegates at the UN, it is difficult not to view her reference to “gang members” as racialized. 14 Quoted in Collier, 22. It is unclear how much Kirkpatrick disdained communism “in the moment.” She was recalling events decades after they had happened. Her willingness to study under a Marxist professor at Columbia, and her initial interest in the French communist party indicates that she might not have been as opposed to the radical left as she claimed to have been.

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1948. In the course of four years, she had gone from Missouri to Chicago to New York

City. Her next move would be of a much shorter distance. In the fall of 1948, Kirkpatrick enrolled in the master’s program in political science at Columbia University, just a stone’s throw away from Barnard. There, for the first time she would encounter the idea of totalitarianism as a new, uniquely destructive force in the world.

Her advisor at Columbia was Franz Neumann, a German-Jewish émigré who had fled Nazi Germany before the War. Neumann was among the foremost scholars of

Nazism. He had worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. During the Nuremberg Trials, he helped to prepare the prosecution’s case against the defendants.

Through Neumann, Kirkpatrick began to learn in detail about the inner workings of the

Nazi regime and the horrors of the Holocaust. The details he shared with her shocked the twenty-two year old. “I had lived a pretty sheltered life up until then,” she later recalled.

“It was a deeply disturbing view that I acquired from these documents and from the sense

I was getting of the magnitude of the Holocaust. It changed me forever.”15

If Neumann was responsible for revealing the horrors of the Nazi regime to

Kirkpatrick, Hannah Arendt provided her with the intellectual means to categorize those horrors. According to Collier, Neumann actually introduced Kirkpatrick to Arendt while the latter was giving a series of lectures on totalitarianism in the city. The meeting, and especially listening to those lectures, had a profound impact on Kirkpatrick. Her entire understanding of totalitarianism can be traced to Arendt’s influence. Kirkpatrick’s

15 Ibid, 24-25; Neumann expressed a Marxist politics that, according to Collier, led Kirkpatrick to “privately [wonder] about his worldview,” but he nevertheless proved an able mentor, overseeing her master’s thesis on the British Nazi Party and providing a letter of recommendation when she moved to Washington D.C. in 1953. On Neumann, see the introduction to The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, William E. Scheuerman, ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

216 adaption of Arendt’s conception of totalitarianism and authoritarianism were to become central to her writings on the revolutions in the Global South.16

Upon completing her master’s degree in 1950, Kirkpatrick decided to continue under Neumann’s mentorship for a Ph.D. Her dissertation was to focus on the

Communist Party in France during and following the Popular Front era. Her father, however, was unwilling to continue footing the bill for her education. She needed a job.

Thus, in the summer of 1951 Kirkpatrick moved to Washington D.C. where she took a position with the State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research as she continued to work towards her Ph.D. Her boss was a thirty-nine year old former political science professor from the University of Minnesota named Evron Kirkpatrick. He, like Neumann, had worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II—though it is unclear if either man knew William Casey. After the war, he relocated permanently to

Washington D.C. There, he was a central figure in the so-called “Minnesota Mafia,” a group of influential Midwestern Democrats that included his former student Senator

Hubert Humphrey along with Humphrey’s close friend and legal counsel Max

Kampelman.17 Evron Kirkpatrick introduced Jeane into this circle of influential people, whom she would call her friends for the rest of her life.

He also gave Kirkpatrick her first glimpse inside the Soviet system, tasking her with editing a collection of interviews with Russians about life in prewar Soviet Union.

She could not help but draw connections between the harrowing stories of government brutality she read in these accounts and the evidence of the crimes perpetrated in Nazi

16 Collier, 24. 17 Ibid, 25-26, 33-37; for more on Evron Kirkpatrick’s relationship to Hubert Humphrey, see, Interview with Evron Kirkpatrick by Norman Sherman, folder Kirkpatrick-March 13 1969-1943 Pre-Mayoral, box 148.B.9.10 (F), Hubert H. Humphrey Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, Manuscript Collections, St. Paul, MN (Hereafter HHH Papers).

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Germany. These documents confirmed for Kirkpatrick the vision of totalitarianism evoked by Arendt. The stories “revealed a hell purposefully created by government,” she remembered.18

It was not long before Jeane entered into a relationship with Evron. Although he had been married twice before and had children from one of those previous marriages, the two developed a remarkably strong relationship that would last across both time and space. Kirkpatrick moved to France in the summer of 1952 on a Fulbright scholarship, but the Atlantic Ocean proved no match for Evron Kirkpatrick. He showed up in Paris the next year to profess his love for her. They returned to the states together in the fall of

1953.

One year after her return, Kirkpatrick’s advisor Franz Neumann was killed in a car accident while traveling in Europe.19 With no one at Columbia to replace him, she chose to quit the Ph.D. program. Five months later, she and Evron were married in a small ceremony in her parents’ Mount Vernon house. The following year their first child,

Douglas was born. Kirkpatrick gave up working full-time to stay at home with the child.

It seemed her academic career had ended before it begun.20

On Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism in the Global South

That Kirkpatrick’s decision to marry and have children would slow or halt her career was indicative of a society that expected, and continues to expect, women to be their children’s primary caregivers. Eugene Rostow and William Casey also married and had children, but in neither case did these decisions negatively impact their careers.

Kirkpatrick herself acknowledged this inequality, noting that her husband, “more or less

18 Quoted in Collier, 38. 19 Ibid, 49-51. 20 Ibid, 56-57.

218 went on with his life” while she raised their three children—two more sons were born to the couple in 1958 and 1959. Evron Kirkpatrick became the executive director of the

American Political Science Association (APSA) during the period. “It [rearing children] didn’t have the impact on his life that it did on mine.” In contrast to second-wave feminists, however, Kirkpatrick did not view such inequalities as a problem. “Nor would

I argue,” she continued, “that it should have.” Kirkpatrick always maintained that motherhood was a special calling more important than any of her professional accomplishments. She famously remarked, “Having and raising babies is more interesting than giving speeches at the United Nations. Believe me.”21 It is important to note that she made these quotes years later. Her statements glorifying motherhood were no doubt influenced by her antipathy for second-wave feminism, part of the New Left that she despised. Certainly the period of her life beginning in the 1960s seemed to indicate that motherhood was not her only calling in life.

While Kirkpatrick spent the latter part of the 1950s and first years of the 1960s focused on rearing her three children, she never lost the desire to join academia. When her youngest son entered grade school, Evron’s connections would help Jeane to reenter intellectual and political life. In 1964, New Leader publisher Sol Levitas approached

Kirkpatrick with an offer to co-edit a book on how communist parties win influence and power, especially in the nations of the Global South. When ill health forced Levitas to abandon the project, Kirkpatrick became sole editor, giving her the chance to write the introduction. Published in 1964, The Strategy of Deception provided Kirkpatrick with her first opportunity to deploy what she had learned about totalitarianism in a Cold War context. Communists, she argued, did not achieve power due to the “historical

21 Quoted in Collier, 57.

219 inevitability” of communism’s emergence out of capitalism. Rather, except where they used military force, Communist parties relied on the “political skill of Communist leaders in exploiting their opportunities” to gain influence. The implications of this argument for

Kirkpatrick were profound. Rather than originating from class frustration with economic inequality, Communist parties relied on “alienated” intellectual elites for leadership. This was especially true for the “noncapitalist countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East” wherein “westernized” elites fell victim to the “revolution of rising expectations” and began to manipulate the masses as a means of improving their own position within society.22 This argument effectively delegitimized any demands from, or critiques of society by, Communist parties. Their leaders were not true believers, but cynical tyrants who relied on manipulation and exploitation to gain power, promising equality but offering only repression.

Justifying her argument that communist parties in the Global South lacked a legitimate mass following required a racialized assumption about the nature of the impoverished classes in these societies. According to Kirkpatrick, “The poorest, least privileged classes in these countries are often profoundly traditionalist.” She described such people as though they had lived both geographically and temporally isolated from a larger world marching forward in time, “Their expectations have been undisturbed for centuries.” Such people, for her, could have no interest on their own in the “struggles” of nation-states, nor could they be expected to fully comprehend and accept such

Communist tenets as “collectivization.” Rather, “their political worlds [were] dominated by traditional loyalties and traditional rivalries.” It was only through the “skillful

22 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Introduction: The Politics of Deception,” The Strategy of Deception: A Study in World-Wide Communist Tactics, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, ed., (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1964), xi-xxv.

220 exploitation of traditional conflicts” that Communists won the support of the people in these societies. Communists, she believed, manipulated a “tribal conflict” into a “struggle against the bourgeoisie.” 23 Kirkpatrick denied the rationality of the poor in the

“underdeveloped” world. No impoverished person in a “traditional” society could conceivably read Marx, understand him, and favor his conclusions. If Kirkpatrick rejected Marx’s historical determinism, she accepted the same modernist notion that the world could be divided into “traditional” and “modern” societies and that the latter existed ahead of the former.

There was nothing altogether new in the assertions Kirkpatrick made about the nature of communist parties in Global South nations. Where Kirkpatrick added to the discourse on modernization and race was in her use of Arendt to explain why communists in these nations represented more of a threat to democracy than did anticommunist dictators. While both sets of “nondemocratic elites” came to power through force or manipulation, once in power Communists were distinguished by the degree to which they sought to control peoples’ lives. “The important difference between Communist elites and other antidemocratic elites is found in the way Communist elites use power, once they have achieved it.” Kirkpatrick argued that “Communist elites [were] more repressive than traditional dictatorships because they aim[ed] at revolutionizing society, culture and personality.” She noted that in the colleges and “army barracks of Red China, people

[were] responsible for what they [said] in their sleep.” She contrasted this intense intrusion into people’s lives with the authoritarian governments of Latin America and

Franco’s Spain, who demanded political power, but did not try to “undermine” traditional

23 Kirkpatrick, “Introduction: The Politics of Deception,” xvii, xviii.

221 institutions like the Catholic Church. Here, then, was Kirkpatrick’s first effort to provide a moral justification for U.S. support of rightwing dictatorships in the Global South.

Three years after its publication, investigative journalist Robert Sherill would reveal in The Nation that funding for The Strategy of Deception had come from the

United States Information Agency (USIA), even though federal law prohibited the organization from operating within the United States. The revelation appeared in an article detailing Evron Kirkpatrick’s dealings with USIA and the Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA), both of which provided the APSA with money to publish anti-communist literature at home and abroad. Kirkpatrick denied any knowledge that the book had been funded by the USIA. Sherill argued that Levitas had approached the agency with the idea for the book.24 Speaking of her husband’s involvement with the CIA during these years,

Kirkpatrick would claim to have known little about his participation in CIA operations, but expressed pride nonetheless, “I have no doubt that his activities were honorable and his purposes were good.”25

The revelations of Evron Kirkpatrick’s involvement with the CIA came amidst the increasing domestic criticism of U.S. government activities as a result of the Vietnam

War. That Evron Kirkpatrick was a friend of the Vice President of the United States in

1967 made his activities a target for investigation. As with all the subjects of this story, the antiwar movement had a significant impact on Jeane Kirkpatrick and her husband’s views of the direction of the Democratic Party and the future of American liberalism— which we will discuss later in this chapter. The war itself, however, appeared to have very little impact on Jeane Kirkpatrick’s life. Whereas Rostow and Casey devoted

24 See Robert G. Sherrill’s editorial, “The Professor and the CIA,” The Nation, 27 February 1967, 258-260. 25 Collier, 68.

222 themselves to defending the war, and while Rustin sought to shield the progressive political alliance against the fallout from it, Kirkpatrick appeared more ambivalent toward the war than anything else. She never questioned the morality of the decision to intervene. She and her husband, she later remarked, “[W]ere never under any illusions that Ho Chi Minh was just some peasant nationalist.” At the same time, she did wonder whether it was an appropriate policy to ask Americans to “make impossible sacrifices” that “ordinary Americans can’t understand, identify with or accept.”26 Despite her reservations, Kirkpatrick would not turn against the war until it was a potential danger to her family. She admitted in a 1983 interview with Newsweek that her decision to come out against continuing the war in the early 1970s owed in no small part to the fact that her eldest son was “approaching draft age.”27

One reason why the Vietnam War seemed a secondary concern for Kirkpatrick during the 1960s was that she had focused her attention on another part of the world. In

1963, at Evron’s encouragement, she reenrolled in the Political Science program at

Columbia. Rather than pick up her work on the Communist Party in France, Kirkpatrick decided on a new dissertation topic: a study of the Peronist movement in Argentina.

While she had never been to Latin America, or expressed much interest in the region,

Kirkpatrick believed that it provided her with an ideal setting in which to further her study of what she called “Political systems that are neither democratic nor totalitarian.” In other words, it offered her the chance to study authoritarian regimes.

Kirkpatrick’s political connections insured that conducting the research for such a study would not take her away from her family. She received a grant from the Andreas

26 Quoted in Collier, 63. 27 Michael Reese with Patricia J. Sethi, “Kirkpatrick: On the Outs?” Newsweek, 3 January 1983, 19.

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Foundation, whose founder—Dwayne Andreas—was Hubert Humphrey’s primary campaign contributor. In this instance, it literally paid to have powerful friends in

Washington.28 With financial support a non-issue, she hired International Research

Associates to conduct interviews with Argentinean citizens, but using questions of her design. To her credit, Kirkpatrick translated the answers herself. Still, she was able to complete a dissertation on Argentinean politics without ever visiting Argentina. This fact is not incidental. Her work helped her to build a resume as an expert on the region, giving her a voice in the determination of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s.

Kirkpatrick’s dissertation was eventually published in 1971 under the title

Leadership and Vanguard in Mass Society. She based her analysis on data gathered from over two-thousand interviews conducted in the autumn of 1965. Her stated purpose was to examine what she considered Argentina’s mix of “modern” and “traditional” political processes. Argentina was modern in the sense that the “urban masses” participated in the political process as members of the Peronist movement. Yet its political system also adhered to “traditional Latin politics” in that it was authoritarian. Power rested in the hands of a charismatic individual, “personalismo.”29 Juan Peron had built a mass following of unionized workers because of his use of direct action to address economic inequality. But he also engaged in authoritarian actions, including violence, against his political opponents.30 Rather than condemn Peron as dictatorial, Kirkpatrick argued that

Peronism exemplified how authoritarian governments could enjoy “authentic” mass

28 Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leader and Vanguard in Mass Society: A Study in Peronist Argentina (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1971), xix, xxi; Collier, 62. 29 Kirkpatrick, Leadership and Vanguard in Mass Society, 1-2. 30 On Peronism see, Luis Alberto Romero, A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century, Translated by James P. Brennan (University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), especially chapters four and five.

224 support that was not based on the manipulation practiced by totalitarian regimes.

Peronism was not based on a “utopian” ideology, it did not seek to upend all of society, and its leaders were not “alienated from the remainder of Argentine society” as were totalitarian movements. The goals of Peronists were limited to providing the masses with a larger piece of the economic pie through political power. Those masses appeared willing to accept authoritarian means to meet these ends. Peronism may have been antidemocratic, but according to Kirkpatrick it rested on “mass support for an acquiescence in tyranny.” Kirkpatrick thus implied that the average Argentinian preferred an effective, authoritarian government over an ineffective, democratic one.31

The same racialized logic that could be seen in Kirkpatrick’s previous published work underlay her analysis of Peronist Argentina, but she now added a cultural element to her reasoning. She grounded Argentina’s authoritarian tendencies within a tradition of

“regime instability, direct action, mass participation, and military participation in politics” shared by all nations whose politics and culture emanated from “Latin tradition.” Her definition of Latin America included all the nations between the Rio

Grande and the Straights of Magellan. The values prized by these societies—in particular moral rectitude and deference—made democracy a precarious institution there because such ideals eschewed compromise and cooperation. Kirkpatrick contrasted Latin political characteristics with an “Anglo-Saxon” tradition that placed “compromise as the heart of political process and conflict resolution as the core political skill.” From the Magna Carta through the American Revolution, the Anglo Saxon tradition had predisposed its peoples to value the democratic process. The same could not be said of Latin American nations, or Mediterranean ones for that matter. Kirkpatrick concluded, “The tendency of

31 Kirkpatrick, Leadership and Vanguard in Mass Society, 206-210, 223.

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Argentina to gravitate repeatedly toward and acquiesce in autocracy might be explained by the relatively low requirements of autocracy for compromise, conciliation, and cooperation.”32 While she did not go so far as to say that democracy could not take hold in such regions, the implication, especially when considered in conjunction with her earlier article, was that the development of democracy was a slow, halting process, one that very few nations outside of the Anglo-Saxon orbit had mastered.

Kirkpatrick completed her dissertation in the spring of 1968. That April, she made the journey of more than four hundred miles from Washington to New York to deposit her dissertation. When she arrived on campus however, she ran into an unexpected complication. In protest of the Vietnam War, a small band of students from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had taken over several administration buildings, held a dean hostage for twenty-four hours, and “ransack[ed] the president’s office.”33

Kirkpatrick was forced to make use of the tunnels running beneath the university in order to deliver her dissertation. She was appalled at the students’ actions. She accused them of engaging in “fascist behavior” and a “violent attack on free speech.”34 As the 1968 presidential election approached that same year, Kirkpatrick would shift her analytical gaze away from totalitarian and authoritarian governments abroad to the political upheavals within the Democratic Party. She would draw many parallels between the leaders of the “New Politics” and those of Communist parties operating around the globe.

Kirkpatrick versus the “New Elite” in American Politics

Jeane Kirkpatrick joined the Political Science Department at Georgetown in 1968.

But before she could settle in to her new position, she was swept up in that year’s

32 Ibid, 2, 233. 33 Fred M. Hechinger, “The Radicals ‘Do Their Thing’ at Columbia,” New York Times, 28 April 1968, E15. 34 Quoted in Pat Harrison, Jeane Kirkpatrick (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1991), 68-69.

226 turbulent presidential election. Lyndon Johnson had decided not to seek reelection, opening the Democratic field to her friend Hubert Humphrey. The Kirkpatrick’s joined the Humphrey campaign, bringing their expertise in political science to bear by providing

Vice President with polling data. Three months after braving the demonstrations at

Columbia, Jeane Kirkpatrick joined her husband and eldest son in Chicago for the

Democratic National Convention. There, they witnessed the party had split over the war in Vietnam, with pro-war Democrats backing Humphrey, while the anti-war wing threw its support behind Eugene McCarthy, also of Minnesota.

As the convention delegates debated inside Chicago’s International Amphitheater, some ten thousand demonstrators gathered in Grant Park to protest the war. On August

28, the Chicago police clashed violently with protestors, using tear gas and batons to break up the protests as demonstrators fought back with rocks. The Kirkpatricks were staying at the Palmer House Hotel overlooking the park. They had an unobstructed view of the clash. “It was a searing experience, very traumatic,” she remembered. “It was a real assault on democratic freedom.” Of course, by “it” she meant the demonstrators, not the police response.35

Humphrey won the nomination and faced Richard Nixon in the general election.

Nixon ran on a promise to restore law and order to the nation. “Law and order” played upon white fears of urban riots and “racial disorder.” Relying on rhetoric that evoked racial antipathy without using explicitly racialized language, Nixon—in what has become known as the “Southern Strategy”—appealed to white voters in the traditional

Democratic stronghold of the South. John Ehrlichman, an assistant to the president who would go to jail for his role in the Watergate Scandal, recalled of the campaign, “that

35 Ibid, 71.

227 subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”36 Humphrey’s political team had known during the campaign that the

Republican’s advocacy of the rule of law was seriously damaging the campaign. The

Kirkpatrick’s in particular believed that Humphrey’s perceived weakness on the issue doomed the campaign. Evron Kirkpatrick wrote to campaign headquarters in October

1972, “There is no doubt that this perceived ‘soft’ position on law and order is hurting

Humphrey far more than any position he does or does not take on bombing pauses.”

Kirkpatrick recommended that Humphrey stake out his own hardline position on crime by expressing “his detestation of crime and criminals, agitators, radicals, and disrupters of the social order.”37 Humphrey failed to convince white voters of his tough stance on crime, and lost the election to Nixon. “Law and order,” however, had a clear impact on

Jeane Kirkpatrick, as she would adopt Nixon’s rhetoric in her own rebuke of New Left

Democrats following the 1972 presidential election.

After Humphrey’s defeat, Kirkpatrick receded from Democratic politics. She and her family spent most of 1969 in Aix-en-Provence, France where she indulged her passion for French cooking while her husband taught a course at the local college. When they returned to Washington in 1970, Kirkpatrick threw herself into the job at

Georgetown, advising PhDs and teaching courses in political science. Her courses included one free “mini course” on the dangers of the radical political theories emanating from the Left.38 Her period away from the politics of the Democratic Party would not last

36 Quoted in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Revised 2011, New York: The New Press, 2010), 44; also see Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21 (Fall 200&), 230- 265; Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 37 Quoted in Flamm, 168. 38 Collier, 72-77.

228 long. In 1972, Humphrey again decided to seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency. The Kirkpatricks were again determined to help him do it.

In public memory, the 1968 Democratic convention looms large. Images of bloodied protesters and clouds of tear gas billowing into the sky have been seared into the public consciousness. For many Cold War liberals, however, the 1972 convention in

Miami proved an even more shocking event, and it would prove crucial to galvanizing the growing opposition to the progressive wing of the party. Upon arriving at the convention in July, Kirkpatrick was horrified to learn that many of the demonstrators of four years earlier had arrived in Miami not as protestors but as convention delegates. “On the floor of the Democratic convention in Miami,” she recalled after the election, “Jerry

Rubin commented jubilantly that while he had three sets of floor credentials, Mayor

Daley could not get into the hall.”39 Rubin had been one of the “Chicago Seven” convicted of inciting the riot during the 1968 convention. Daley was the hardnosed mayor of Chicago who many blamed for the heavy-handed police response to the protests.

Adding to Kirkpatrick’s displeasure at the composition of the 1972 delegates was that she herself had attempted to become an official delegate, only to be left out. Instead, many of the delegates were young people serving for the first time.40 Indeed, the delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention were the most diverse group of party delegates in the nation’s history. 36 percent of delegates were women, compared to

14 percent in 1968. 14 percent were black, compared to just 5 percent in 1968, and 23

39 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “The Revolt of the Masses,” Commentary, February 1973, 60. 40 After his defeat at the convention, Humphrey wrote the Kirkpatrick’s with his thanks and condolences for Jeane Kirkpatrick’s own defeat see, Hubert Humphrey to Dr. and Mrs. Evron M. Kirkpatrick, 3 August 1972, folder Kampelman Correspondence with Hubert H. Humphrey office, General Correspondence 1972, box 26, Max M. Kampelman Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, Manuscript Collections, St. Paul, MN (Hereafter MMK Papers).

229 percent were under thirty, an increase of 21 percent from the previous convention.41

Where once observers would have seen a convention hall lined with old, white men chomping cigars and wearing suits, they now saw young women and men with long hair, afros, and dashikis. There was not a cigar in sight.

What accounted for this dramatic reversal in the makeup of the Democratic Party?

The Members of the New Left had pursued a “New Politics” in the aftermath of the 1968 election in order to increase their representation in the party. At the 1968 convention, antiwar groups believed that the leaders of the Democratic Party had “marginalized them,” in historian Judith Stein’s words, and set about reforming the Party rules to make the nomination process more open. McCarthy supporters, and those of the deceased

Robert Kennedy, used their influence to force the party to appoint a commission on the delegate selection process. The man in charge of that commission was Senator George

McGovern. When the committee reported on its findings in April of 1970, “It decided to revolutionize, not reform, the process,” as Stein noted. The changes established quotas for women, the young, and racial minority delegates. The commission also limited the number of delegates the state central committees could appoint up to 10 percent of the total number. 42 The changes helped George McGovern to narrowly win the Democratic nomination. For Kirkpatrick, the results of the rule changes came as a bitter surprise.

“George McGovern was the only candidate who understood the rules…It was a revolution by rule changes,” she lamented.43

41 Figures can be found in Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working- Class (New York: the New Press, 2010), 105. 42 Stein, 52-53. 43 Quoted in Collier, 84.

230

That Kirkpatrick failed to see the McGovern nomination coming added to the sour taste left by the convention. In a December 1971 memo from the Kirkpatricks to

Humphrey’s campaign leaders, the duo predicted Edmund Muskie would be Humphrey’s competition for the nomination, with Ted Kennedy a possible third contender if he chose to run. McGovern, they assured the Humphrey team, was not a threat. “Having gone nowhere thus far, it is probably safe to say [McGovern] is not likely to do so.”44 In their defense, few pollsters had given McGovern much of a chance at the nomination before

1972. But then it was Kirkpatrick’s job within the Humphrey campaign to poll likely voters and predict which way the political winds were blowing. She had not realized until it was too late the momentous impact the rule changes had on the nomination process.

The nomination of George McGovern as the Democratic Presidential Candidate in

1972 sparked a backlash among Cold War Democrats in which Jeane Kirkpatrick would play a leading role. As with Eugene Rostow, she voted for a Republican presidential candidate that year for the first time in her life. She also began to meet with other Cold

War Liberals dismayed by the Miami convention and McGovern’s nomination. This group included Max Kampelman, Ben Wattenberg—a former speechwriter for Johnson— and Commentary publisher Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, among others.

Together, they would launch the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) after

McGovern’s defeat in the general election that November. The same organization that would give Eugene Rostow his first institutional support in the anti-détente campaign

44 Memorandum from the Kirkpatricks, 14 December 1971, folder Humphrey 1972 Campaign, Presidential Humphrey Polls 1969-1971, box 20, MMK Papers.

231 began with the goal of opposing the New Politics within the Democratic Party and the policies that had led to McGovern’s nomination.45

Between 1973 and 1975, the CDM succeeded in eliminating quotas from the delegate selection process. They then defeated efforts by reformists to “[reinstate]

“‘quotas through the back door,’” by convincing the Task Force on Party Rules—whose members included Kirkpatrick—to only allow challenges to a state’s convention delegation based on its adherence to “an approved state action plan,” and not on the

“‘biological’ makeup” of the delegation.46 While the CDM did not entirely neutralize the members of the New Politics, they were proving their ability to fight and win against their foes. But who were the CDM’s foes? What unified the members of the New

Politics? Jeane Kirkpatrick would spend the mid-1970s seeking to answer this question.

Her analysis would draw heavily upon the racially coded language of criminality, while also drawing important connections between the “New Elite” in the United States, and totalitarian groups abroad.

Kirkpatrick’s first attempt to define the members of the New Politics came in the form of a postmortem on the 1972 election for Commentary. The election, she remarked, had resulted in “a landslide defeat for the majority party” for the first time in the nation’s history. Like many critics of identity politics stated at the time, and since, Kirkpatrick blamed the landslide defeat on the New Elites disdain for the “traditional political culture” of a majority of Democratic voters. McGovern, she wrote, had been nominated by a “revolutionary elite” led by the young, college-educated representatives of the middle-class as well as minority groups led by women, Latinos, and blacks. Kirkpatrick

45 Vaïsse, 86-96. 46 Ibid, 96.

232 described these young Americans as “alienated,” “idealistic,” and committed not to reforming society, but to transforming it. These people favored ideological purity over pragmatic politics, rejected materialism, and considered American wars immoral. They had arrogantly assumed that a majority of working-class voters would side with them for reasons of party loyalty and the economic gains McGovern promised. Small wonder, then, that voters defected en masse to Richard Nixon, who cast himself as defender of

American values. McGovern’s defeat, in retrospect, was entirely predictable given his attack on the values of the majority of Democratic voters. “Only the completely dispirited would fail to defend their way of life against an enemy,” she lectured her readers.47

Law and order rhetoric featured prominently in Kirkpatrick’s discussion of the

New Elite. She juxtaposed a law abiding, orderly, “Old Politics” with the violent, anarchic, “New Politics.” “The Old Politics assumes that it is the function of government to protect and preserve domestic tranquility, to foster respect for the law of the land.” The

New Politics in contrast, “has roots in the tradition of civil disobedience. Its dominant style is moral outrage, tinged with violence.” As noted above, race was deeply embedded in such discourse, a fact that of which Kirkpatrick was well aware. Indeed, she integrated her emphasis on law and order with more directly racialized depiction of the New Elite as criminal. The “new political ethic,” she wrote, “preferred the nation's enemy, apologized for rioters, shielded black extremists,” and, “‘understood’ young revolutionaries.” They projected an image of “drugs and disorder, of an irrational politics smacking of fascism, of anti-Americanism, of disregard for loyal service to the party, of mistreatment of labor representatives and white ethnic groups.” Who were the members of the New Politics then, for Kirkpatrick? Nonwhite, disorderly criminals, or at best apologists for criminal

47 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “The Revolt of the Masses,” 61.

233 behavior. She opposed this figure to the image of the typical member of the Old Politics that was “law-abiding, hard-working tax-paying provider.”48

In 1976, Kirkpatrick expanded her analysis of the New Elite into a full academic book, publishing The New Presidential Elite. The study was the culmination of four years of research based on 1,336 interviews conducted by Kirkpatrick and her research team at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1972—though the vast majority of the study was dedicated to the Democratic respondents.49 Kirkpatrick had intended the study to focus on the new role of women in national politics—a subject of a previous book.50 Questions ranged from how respondents felt about the party reforms to their thoughts on the participation of the National Women’s Political Caucus, to how strong was their party loyalty. As she read over the answers provided by respondents,

Kirkpatrick found little to differentiate male from female respondents. Instead, the data revealed “extraordinarily interesting implications…for aspects of politics unrelated to sex.” She decided to turn the book into an academic study of what she believed to be a new class of political elites within the Democratic Party. In a bit of irony for a book that began as an explicit study of women in politics, she chose to employ only the male versions of the impersonal pronoun in the interest of style.51

48 Ibid, 60. 49 Jeane Kirkpatrick, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics (New York: Russell Sage Foundation and the Twentieth Century Fund, 1976). 50 Jeane Kirkpatrick, Political Woman (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The book grew out of a symposium that gathered together female state legislators from across the nation in May 1972. Kirkpatrick used the study as a critique of the modern feminist movement, which she condemned for its hostility to cultural norms. She noted that the vast majority of women she interviewed identified with traditional gender roles, were married with children, and were able to participate in politics because their husband could provide the necessary income. Kirkpatrick’s book concluded that while sex barriers existed in politics, they could be overcome by women with high self-esteem and a strong support network. That such a vision of politics would limit political opportunities to wealthy, white women, went unspoken by Kirkpatrick, but was clearly implied in her celebration of the accomplishments of this privileged cohort. 51 Kirkpatrick, The New Presidential Elite, xviii.

234

While her first statement on the New Politics drew heavily on law and order discourse, The New Presidential Elite adopted a Cold War lens, as Kirkpatrick drew significant comparisons between the New Elite in America, and the leaders of communist parties abroad. Drawing from her friend and mentor Harold Lasswell’s work, she defined the New Elite as “symbol specialists” drawn from the ranks of the “clergy, teachers, college professors, social scientists, social workers.” Symbol specialists, she argued, had been at the heart of “most of the twentieth century’s revolutionary regimes (communist, fascist, nationalist).” Like the communist party leaders she had described in the Strategy of Deception, symbol specialists were “experts in the production, manipulation, and communication” of the symbols Americans use to give meaning to events. Both the elite within the New Politics and the elite within communist parties abroad placed themselves in opposition to the dominant culture, seeking to replace it with their own. Kirkpatrick attributed this last similarity to the lack of power each group enjoyed under “democratic, capitalist regimes.”52 She contrasted symbol specialists with the traditional leaders of the party who were “material specialists,” businessmen and laborers who produced goods.

This latter group approached politics in a “pragmatic” manner, willing to compromise in order to achieve mutual ends. Symbol specialists, however, employed a “rational” approach to politics that valued “ideological consistency” and deductive logic irrespective of empirical evidence.53 While she did not go so far as to accuse the leadership of the New Politics of being communists themselves, the implication was that they had a similar predisposition to totalitarian policies far more destructive than any of the policies of the Cold War Democrats.

52 Ibid, 356-357. 53 Ibid, 204, 246, 355-359.

235

The New Presidential Elite appeared in the same year that Jimmy Carter won the presidential election and Eugene Rostow formed the Committee on the Present Danger.

Like Rostow, Kirkpatrick was initially ambivalent over Carter’s election, but would soon determine that his foreign policy threatened America’s standing in the world. In her most famous essay, she would accuse the Carter administration of succumbing to the same ideological dogmatism that plagued the New Left within the Democratic Party. In the process, she would complete her transformation from a political scientist whose skill lay in analyzing elections to a foreign policy expert capable of articulating a vision for

American foreign policy in the Global South, especially Latin America.

Dictatorships and Double Standards

By the 1976 election, Jeane Kirkpatrick had once again turned her attention towards foreign affairs. There were several reasons for this shift. First, the Coalition for a

Democratic Majority itself had begun to focus more on foreign policy in the aftermath of the 1973 October War in the Middle East. Eugene Rostow named Kirkpatrick to his foreign policy taskforce within the CDM. With no foreign policy experience, Kirkpatrick relied on Rostow and the other members of the committee to formulate her critique of the

Nixon-Kissinger policies. Even recalling the events decades later, in a 1999 interview, her analysis of détente did not differ from that of Rostow. “The main criticism of détente was that it didn't work,” she remembered. “We lost military superiority,” she continued, and concluded that “American passivity” had encouraged the “Soviets”—a group that included leftist forces in the Global South—to expand.54

54 Transcript of Interview with Jeane Kirkpatrick, February 28, 1999, accessed on 1 September 2014, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-19/kirkpatrick1.html.

236

Most important of all to Kirkpatrick’s worry over foreign policy, however, was the fall of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese, epitomized by the capture of Saigon by North Vietnamese forces in April of 1975. More than the abject defeat of the South

Vietnamese army, the American Congress’ refusal to countenance last minute military aid to save the government shocked Kirkpatrick. On April 10, 1975 the president had gone before a joint session of Congress to request $722 million in immediate arms funding for the beleaguered South Vietnamese army. Republicans and Democrats flatly refused. As reported by the Washington Post, “Not a single clap or other supportive gesture” met Ford’s call for military aid. Even Henry Jackson, the coldest of Cold

Warriors, realized the war was over. “Oh it’s dead,” he said of the president’s request, “I don’t know of anybody on the Democratic side who would vote for it.” 55

A despondent Kirkpatrick wrote to Hubert Humphrey expressing her

“indescribable distress and anguish” over the government’s failure to act. Many of the

Democrats who had refused to support military aid had done so for pragmatic reasons.

They saw the support for military aid as politically unpopular and unlikely to alter the conflict’s outcome. Kirkpatrick, however, seemed to blame the moralistic approach to foreign policy advocated by the New Elite for the failure to support Saigon:

I regard the U.S. refusal to provide material aid to South Vietnam today, in its hour of greatest need, as the most shameful display of irresponsibility and inhumanity in our history…The quality of South Vietnam’s beleaguered government—is no more relevant to whether this country should grant them military aid than was the moral quality of individual Jews first imprisoned then exterminated by Adolph Hitler.56

55 Spencer Rich and Richard Lyons, “Cool on Arms: Hill Prospects Bleak on New Viet Arms Aid,” Washington Post, 11 April 1975, A1. 56 Quoted in Allan Gerson, The Kirkpatrick Mission: Diplomacy without Apology at the United Nations, 1981-1985 (New York: The Free Press, 1991), xiv. Gerson served on Kirkpatrick’s team at the UN, his book is a defense of her record.

237

Here Kirkpatrick articulated her belief in the inherently totalitarian nature of communist forces by comparing the North Vietnamese to Nazi Germany. By invoking the Holocaust, she painted the situation in the most starkly moral terms possible, dismissing the cries of the South Vietnamese government as trivial in the face of overwhelming evil. This would not be the last time she would accuse Democrats of refusing to support a government for either political purposes or a destructive commitment to sacrificing the nation’s anticommunist allies over their moral objections to the authoritarian nature of such governments.

While Kirkpatrick had twice campaigned for Humphrey’s presidential candidacy, there was good reason to suppose she had intended her letter to him not as a search for solidarity, but as a rebuke of his evolving stance on the use of force. Humphrey was no dove, but after his return to the Senate in 1971, he became highly critical of sending U.S. military aid abroad. The Vietnam War had convinced him that arms often did more harm than good, and that the United States might be better off focusing its aid policy on development. As chairman of the Senate’s foreign aid authorization subcommittee,

Humphrey had an influential voice in debates over when to open the Congressional purse strings and for what reasons. He used that voice to argue against providing military support to South Vietnam as well as to the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Instead, he advocated for increasing funding for food, job training, and “human development” in

Africa and other impoverished parts of the Global South.57 Upon receiving Kirkpatrick’s

57 Evidence of Humphrey’s aversion to providing military aid can be found throughout the pages of the Washington Post in the winter and spring of 1975, see “Letters to the Editor: Sen. Humphrey on His Role in Aid Funding,” Washington Post, 24 February 1975, A23; Mary Russell, “Humphrey Urges Lon Nol to Quit,” Washington Post, 10 March 1975, A1; Rich and Lyons, Cool on Arms: Hill Prospects Bleak on New Viet Arms Aid.”

238 letter, Humphrey decided against a personal response. He handed the job off to aide Dan

Spiegle, writing, “I would think that you could handle [the letter] from Jeane Kirkpatrick as well as I can.”58 Over the course of four years, Humphrey and Kirkpatrick had moved to opposite ends of the spectrum on the question of the use of America’s military power.

It was not just that the United States had refused to aid an ally under threat from a communist government that worried Kirkpatrick. She primarily feared the message this refusal sent to the world. “That [the fall of Saigon] was seen as in the world as a very large defeat for the United States,” she later remarked. She worried that American defeat would leave the impression among the nations of the Global South that the balance power had tilted in favor of the Soviet Union. What galled Kirkpatrick was that Congress and the American people seemed unaware of this changing perception. “I don't think most

Americans were quite aware of how widely this [transformation of the balance of power] was perceived.” It was thus for remarkably similar reasons to Eugene Rostow that

Kirkpatrick decided to join him a year later in the Committee on the Present Danger. She feared what he feared, not a war with the Soviets, but the desire of many within the

Western alliance to transcend the Cold War. “What concerned us in the Committee on the

Present Danger most wasn't military power, quite frankly” she remarked in a moment of candor. “[M]ilitary power, to be sure, never exists in a vacuum, it exists on the basis of views, of opinions, of convictions, of will. We were concerned about the weakening of

Western will,” she concluded.59 The need to restore the opinions and convictions on

58 Memorandum to staff from Hubert Humphrey, 16 May 1975, folder HHH Memos to Staff Jan-May 1975, box 148.A.12.3 B, HHH Papers. Humphrey would continue to oppose military aid in support of anticommunists in the Global South, rallying the Senate in December of 1975 against extending U.S. involvement in the Angolan civil war, see Spencer Rich, “Senate Moves to Bar Aid: Senate Moves to Block Aid to Angola,” Washington Post, 18 December 1975, A1. 59 Transcript of Interview with Jeane Kirkpatrick, February 28, 1999.

239 which American interventionism rested first drew Kirkpatrick to the CPD and the realm of foreign policy.

To be sure, Kirkpatrick was never the most active member in the Committee on the Present Danger. She, like Bayard Rustin, was a “Director” of the CPD rather than a member of the Executive Board. She thus enjoyed only a limited say in committee publications and activities. She was not much involved in the CPD’s campaign against

SALT II. Yet if she was not a leader of the committee, her involvement in the CPD was vital to her future role in the Reagan administration. As we shall see, the connections she developed there brought her to Ronald Reagan’s attention. Kirkpatrick herself looked back on the CPD’s achievements with pride. “We advocated rebuilding Western strength, and we did that with Ronald Reagan, if I may say so,” she declared.60 But, before

Kirkpatrick could relish in a Reagan presidency, she first had to contend with President

Jimmy Carter, a man whose foreign policy she would come to view as the embodiment of the New Politics’ ideological approach to foreign affairs.

In later years, Kirkpatrick would argue that she had disapproved of Jimmy Carter from the start. She claimed to have first encountered his people during the 1976

Democratic National Convention in New York City. Serving as Scoop Jackson’s representative at the convention’s platform hearings, Kirkpatrick—along with fellow

CDM member Ben Wattenberg—argued for inserting a human rights plank in the party platform. They succeeded. The plank, as historian Barbara Keys has noted, “[R]ead like a recitation of the priorities Jackson, [Patrick] Moynihan, and the CDM had been touting.”

Employing a narrow definition of human rights as political rights, they reprimanded the

Soviet Union, and demanded the release of all political prisoners and the liberalization of

60 Ibid. She also claimed to have voted for Gerald Ford over Carter in the general election see, Collier, 91.

240 emigration policies.61 The “Carter forces,” Kirkpatrick recalled, had attempted to keep this human rights plank out of the party platform. “[W]e had a debate, a significant debate in the Democratic Party Platform Committee hearings on the inclusion of a human rights plank…The Carter forces in the Platform Committee opposed this.” Kirkpatrick saw in their opposition early evidence of Carter’s determination to force his version of human rights reforms on governments allied with the United States, and “under attack” from leftist forces.62

In this instance, at least, there is good reason to suspect that Kirkpatrick’s memory was faulty. She appeared to have conflated two disparate factions within the

Democratic Party. The principal opponents in the Democratic debate over human rights included U.S. Congresswoman and feminist Bella Abzug, as well as antiwar activist Sam

Brown. Both felt that the human rights plank did little to address U.S. support for rightwing regimes. The Carter people, however, stayed on the periphery of the debate.

According to Keys, Carter’s commitment to human rights during the 1976 campaign was tentative at best. He sought to find a balance between the old and New Political wings of the party. In the latter stages of the campaign, Carter gestured toward Jackson’s version of human rights in his sole campaign speech on the subject, made at a September meeting of the Jewish rights group B’nai B’rith. He focused much of the speech on condemning

Soviet abuses, including the emigration issue, while he passingly referenced the abuse of

61 Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 234; Democratic Party Platform of 1976, 12 July 1976, The American Presidency Project, copyright 2014, accessed on 16 April 2015, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29606. 62 Transcript of Interview with Jeane Kirkpatrick, February 28, 1999.

241 power among American allies such as Chile and South Korea.63 It was not self-evident when Carter took office that he and Kirkpatrick would be at loggerheads.

Indeed, Carter’s early foreign policy decisions earned Kirkpatrick’s approval. The president’s initial foray into human rights continued the anti-Soviet rhetoric of his campaign. Carter personally wrote to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov—whom Gerald

Ford had famously decided not to invite to the White House. The response from

Kirkpatrick and the CDM was overwhelmingly positive. Three months into Carter’s term, they authored an open letter praising the president. “Your forceful stance on human rights is a clear announcement that America is rediscovering its moral spirit,” they declared.

The letter placed Carter’s stance on human rights within a long Democratic tradition of moral opposition to Soviet tyranny that stretched from Truman to Johnson. They concluded by assuring Carter that he could count on the CDM’s support. “Hang tough,

Mr. President,” they cheered.64 This was to be the last time that either the CDM or

Kirkpatrick would favorably compare Carter to Truman.

Carter’s commencement address at Notre Dame in June of 1977, as discussed in chapter one, signaled his move away from a foreign policy based on hardline anticommunism. So too did the Carter team’s choices for the secondary and tertiary positions within the administration. Given Carter’s campaign speeches, his employment of Paul Nitze as a foreign policy advisor during the campaign, and the success of the

CDM in drafting the human rights plank of the Democratic platform, the CDM leadership had high hopes for placing its members in government posts. Despite receiving a long list of potential candidates for foreign policy jobs, the administration chose to appoint only

63 Keys, 235-237. 64 Ibid, 253-254; for the letter, see “Dear Mr. President,” n.d., folder C.D.M. Executive Committee Minutes, box 62, the Peter R. Rosenblatt Papers, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX.

242 two CDM members, and only one of those to a foreign policy post. Peter Rosenblatt was named ambassador to Micronesia, which led CDM members to remark resentfully, “They couldn’t give us Polynesia or Macronesia, only Micronesia.” They now knew that their influence within the new administration would be miniscule. Kirkpatrick herself had been on the list as a potential candidate for assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, but did not receive an appointment. Instead, Carter named men and women outside of the CDM circle, some of whom Kirkpatrick and others considered to be their enemies from the leftwing of the party—such as Allard Lowenstein, Andrew

Young, and Leslie Gelb.65 It appeared that Carter had declared his opposition to the Cold

War foreign policies of his predecessors.

At the same time that she began to sour on Carter, Kirkpatrick was growing closer to conservatives. She had been a staunch Democrat her entire life, but now that she was among Republicans, she found that she liked them. In 1977, the president of the

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) William Baroody invited Kirkpatrick to spend a year at the institution. The conservative think-tank was gaining a reputation as an important source of conservative ideas from neoliberal economics to interventionist foreign policy.

There, Kirkpatrick walked the hallways with Republican stalwarts Antonin Scalia, Robert

Bork, and the “Godfather of neoconservatism” Irving Kristol. Her time at AEI also enabled her to engage more in foreign policy debates. This was especially true for Latin

America. Among the Latin American leaders whom AEI invited to speak during

Kirkpatrick’s tenure there was El Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, whose regime she would defend as it battled leftist guerrillas in the 1980s with American

65 Collier, 91-92; Keys, 254.

243 support.66 Kirkpatrick’s relationship with AEI was a lasting one. She eventually became a senior fellow at the institute.

Kirkpatrick spent most of Carter’s presidency among the conservative critics of his foreign policy. Two global events in 1979 confirmed for her and her allies that

Carter’s foreign policy was saddled with a naive moralism that endangered national interests. Both the Iranian Revolution and the overthrow of the Somoza government in

Nicaragua appeared as dramatic failures of a human rights based foreign policy.

Under the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iran counted among America’s most important Cold War allies. The Iranian government provided oil to western nations and served as a bulwark against Soviet and Arab nationalist influence in the Middle East.

Americans looked upon Iran as a model of capitalist development, and the U.S. government showered the Shah’s regime with economic and military aid. By 1978 however, economic stagnation, government corruption, and the repressive nature of the

Shah’s CIA-trained security forces (the SAVAK), had brought the country to the point of revolution. The regime’s decision to publicize a “vicious personal attack,” as one historian termed it, of the exiled religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini in January of that year led to massive demonstrations across the nation. The Shah attempted to address the growing unrest through the alternation of violent repression and gestures toward liberalization that had been his hallmark, but to no avail. U.S. government officials and political leaders, for their part, were distracted by the unfolding Egyptian-Israeli Peace process, and thus failed to recognize the Pahlavi regime’s dire position until November of

1978, at which point it was too late. Although National Security Advisor Zbigniew

Brzezinski wanted to employ the U.S. military to save the Shah, Carter decided against

66 Collier, 95-96.

244 an intervention à la the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad

Mosaddegh. The Shah fled Iran with his family on January 16, 1979, traveling first to

Egypt and later the United States.67

In Nicaragua, too, a long time American ally was forced to flee his country in

1979. Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza’s family had ruled Nicaragua since 1936.

Like Iran, the Nicaraguan regime benefitted from high levels of U.S. economic and military aid. Also like Iran, Nicaragua faced a growing opposition in the 1970s due to poverty, government corruption, and repression. Corruption in the wake of the 1972 earthquake that leveled most of Managua sparked a wide-scale uprising against the regime. Somoza himself diverted millions in reconstruction funds for his own use. This led to increased urban and rural support for the leftist, anti-Somoza Sandinista National

Liberation Front (FSLN). So too, did the 1978 assassination of an anti-Somoza newspaper publisher by elements within the Nicaraguan National Guard. In the aftermath, even large swaths of the Nicaraguan upper-class abandoned Somoza. While no fans of the radical Sandinistas, the Carter administration again refrained from directly intervening to save its ally, and Somoza resigned as president and departed the country on July 17, 1979. In the space of six-months, the governments of two of America’s most important regional allies had collapsed.68

Viewing these developments from a distance, Kirkpatrick decided to write an article explaining to Americans how the Carter administration’s foreign policy had led to

67 James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 216-260, quote on 234. 68 Morris H. Morley, Washington, Somoza, and the Sandinistas: State and Regime in U.S. Policy toward Nicaragua, 1969-1981 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 56-58; David F. Schmitz, The United States and Rightwing Dictatorships, 1965-1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 181-191.

245 both of these tragic outcomes. She asked her assistant at AEI to send her “everything [she could] find on the Sandinistas, Carter policies in Central America, etc.” Based on what the assistant forwarded her in France, Kirkpatrick set down to write in August of 1979.

Three months later, on November 1, 1979, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” appeared in Commentary. Kirkpatrick laid the blame for the “loss” of both Iran and

Nicaragua squarely at the feet of Jimmy Carter. She charged the administration with forcing the Nicaraguan and Iranian regimes to “liberalize”—meaning institute democratic reforms and respect for human rights—as those governments faced vital threats to their existence. U.S. insistence that these regimes liberalize their policies had led both Somoza and the Shah to doubt American support. Kirkpatrick went further, accusing Carter of

“actively collaborat[ing] in the replacement” of both leaders. According to her, the administration had insisted on viewing the “insurgents” in both nations as “evidence of widespread popular discontent and a will to democracy,” instead of as Soviet agents.

Rather than oppose the forces of the Iranian Revolution and the Sandinistas, the Carter administration insisted on seeing in both the potential for a democratic future, when the opposite was true.69

In actuality, U.S. foreign policy toward both nations was not nearly as moralistic or unprecedented as Kirkpatrick implied. Historian James Bill argued in his classic work on U.S.-Iranian relations that the Carter administration diverged little from previous administrations in its policy towards Iran. The United States continued to lavish the regime with military aid. If they sought to nudge the Shah toward liberalizing his rule, they did so with kid gloves, making it clear that the Pahlavi government would continue to enjoy the full support of the United States. Far from collaborating with the Shah’s

69 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” Commentary Magazine, November 1979, 34-45.

246 enemies, Carter refused to send any representatives to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini as the Iranian government collapsed. His failure in Iran was not due to his human rights policy—always of secondary concern for a nation of such vital importance. Rather, the administration’s true failure lay in its inability to recognize the seriousness of the threat facing the Shah until November of 1978. By then, nothing short of full U.S. intervention could have saved the regime, and possibly not even that.70

Kirkpatrick was on firmer ground when applying her argument to Nicaragua. The administration cut off economic aid to the Somoza regime in 1977 in response to the regime’s human rights abuses. It also drastically reduced military aid to the regime in

1979. Yet Kirkpatrick’s effort to deny that the Sandinista’s strength came from their popular support in Nicaragua—by highlighting their ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union— has also been repudiated by scholars. It was precisely because the Sandinistas were joined by large swaths of the population in the mid-1970s that they succeeded in ousting the

Somoza regime.71

Throughout the article, Kirkpatrick invoked the specter of McGovern in subtle ways meant to tie Carter’s foreign policy to the moral absolutism of the New Elite.

Kirkpatrick did not directly state that Carter had adopted McGovern’s foreign policy—a charge he could have easily refuted by pointing to his own public opposition to

McGovern at the 1972 convention. Instead, without ever using the words “McGovern” or

“New Politics,” Kirkpatrick aligned Carter’s foreign policy with those forces by claiming

70 See chapter seven of Bill, 216-260; Recent historical scholarship on the Iranian Revolution has supported Bill’s argument, see David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 72, 91-96; Schmitz, 171-181. Schmitz gives a more appreciative analysis of Carter’s human rights policy vis-à-vis Iran than did Bill, but he stops far short of tying the administration’s efforts to liberalize the regime with its eventual collapse. 71 Morley, 56-58, 92-114; Schmitz, 182-190.

247 that he was invested with same ideological absolutism that characterized those groups in her mind. “The foreign policy of the Carter administration,” she wrote, “is guided by a relatively full-blown philosophy of history which includes…a theory of social change.”72

In particular, she accused the administration of employing modernization theory to guide

U.S. foreign policy. Carter, Brzezinski and Vance, Kirkpatrick believed, had adopted modernization theory’s view of history as a progression from traditional, hierarchical societies to modern, democratic ones.

For Kirkpatrick, the modernization theory of progress reduced history to a set of forces that were impersonal and irresistible. “The best any government can do is to serve as a ‘midwife’ to history,” she complained, “helping events to move where they are already headed.” Although it was the Kennedy and Johnson administrations most closely associated with modernization theory, she believed Carter had given the theory a new, dangerous spin by extending U.S. support to “all change that takes place in the name of

‘the people,’ regardless of its ‘superficial’ Marxist or anti-American content.” She implied that Carter’s version of modernization theory had grown out of the beliefs of the

New Elite. His “mistakes and distortions [were] all fashionable ones. His assumptions

[were] those of people who want badly to be on the progressive side in conflicts between

‘rightist’ autocracy and ‘leftist’ challenges, and to prefer the latter, almost regardless of the probable consequences.” 73 Just as the members of the New Politics preferred ideological purity over electoral victory, so too did Carter, Kirkpatrick reasoned, prefer being “right” to protecting U.S. interests.

72 Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” 38-39. 73 Ibid, 43. Of course, as noted in chapter two, the heyday of modernization theory came in the 1960s within the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.

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The double standard that Kirkpatrick complained of was the Carter administration’s seeming unwillingness to apply the same human rights standards to leftwing regimes. If Carter was to pressure rightwing allies on human rights abuses, she concluded, he ought also to seek to “destabilize” leftwing dictatorships as well. That the

United States maintained sanctions against many leftwing regimes—Cuba comes to mind—went unmentioned by Kirkpatrick. So too did the fact that, as discussed above,

Carter selectively applied his human rights policy to the nation’s rightwing allies.

The ideological dogmatism of the New Elite also explained why the double standard existed. Marxism, with its symbolic “invocation” of both Christian and democratic values—progress, egalitarianism, brotherhood—held a natural appeal for many leftwing Americans. Liberals and some Christian groups—Kirkpatrick failed to elaborate which ones—tended to accept leftwing dictatorships while condemning rightwing ones. The former “[spoke] the language of a hopeful future while traditional autocrats speak the language of an unattractive past.” Carter in particular, she charged, had been duped by leftists’ proclamations of progress. An “egalitarian, optimist, liberal,

Christian…Carter [was], par excellence, the kind of liberal most likely to confound revolution with idealism, change with progress, optimism with virtue,” she believed.74

Carter may not have considered himself a member of the New Elite, but readers could be forgiven for leaving Kirkpatrick’s article with the impression that he was George

McGovern’s southern doppelganger.

In place of the ideologically based foreign policy of the Carter administration,

Kirkpatrick appealed for “a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by Soviet-

74 Ibid, 42.

249 sponsored subversion.”75 It was in essence a call for a return to the interventionist policies of the early Cold War. Provide military and economic aid to rightwing allies whatever their abuses, oppose all leftists as Soviet agents. When in doubt, send in the marines. While Kirkpatrick’s foreign policy prescriptions were unimaginative, what made her article unique was how she constructed a moral justification for a militaristic, interventionist foreign policy to counter Carter’s own appeals to morality in U.S. foreign relations.

“Dictatorships & Double Standards” is most often remembered today for the distinctions it drew between rightwing and leftwing dictatorships. Drawing on the lifetime she had spent theorizing about totalitarianism, Kirkpatrick claimed that there were “systemic differences between traditional and revolutionary autocracies that have a predictable effect on their degree of repressiveness.” Here again, she noted that while

“traditional autocracies,” or authoritarian regimes, adhered to cultural and social norms, totalitarian states upended them. Totalitarian regimes were more repressive, and therefore more worthy of U.S. censure, than were authoritarian ones. Kirkpatrick went further, reasoning that because traditional autocracies permitted “limited contestation and participation,” they were more likely to develop into representative democracies—with gentle nudging from the United States during moments of tranquility—than were totalitarian states. “The history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves,” she concluded.76 Militarists now had a moral basis on which to justify supporting anticommunist dictatorships beyond appealing to the dangers of Soviet expansionism.

75 Ibid, 34. 76 Ibid, 44.

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The more overtly racialized language that characterized Kirkpatrick’s earlier writings on authoritarianism and totalitarianism was largely absent here. Ideas of racial difference, however, especially the notion that nonwhite societies were often not conducive to democracy, continued to shape how Kirkpatrick understood the

“developing” world. For all the opprobrium she heaped on modernization theory, she never questioned its most basic assumption: that different societies existed at different stages of progress, with Europe and the United States representing the most “modern” states. Kirkpatrick characterized rightwing regimes in the Global South as “traditional autocracies” where the people enjoyed “habitual rhythms of work and leisure,” and

“habitual patterns of family and personal relations.” Attempting to produce “perfect democracy overnight” in societies lacking lacked the “complex social, cultural, and economic” institutions on which democracy depended was doomed to failure. Such institutions took decades, even centuries to develop.77 Thus, Kirkpatrick rejected not the idea of traditional versus modern societies, only the notion that the United States could aid in a relatively rapid transition through modernization’s stages. Rather than providing a truly moral justification for U.S. foreign policy, Kirkpatrick’s argument effectively abdicated any responsibility the United States might have to push democratic reforms.

“Dictatorships & Double Standards” benefited from the propitious timing of its publication. Just under two-months after it appeared in Commentary, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This action appeared to prove what the CPD and Kirkpatrick had been saying for several years: the communists were on the march. Kirkpatrick’s star shone brighter now than at any previous moment. As the new decade began, both

President Carter and Governor Ronald Reagan would seek out her advice and approval.

77 Ibid, 44.

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In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter asked for a meeting with the CDM to discuss the state of U.S. foreign policy. He chose to meet with the CDM, as opposed to the more influential CPD, because he was attempting to shore up the support of rightwing Democrats before the election season. CDM leaders— including Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, Elliott Abrams, and Ben Wattenberg—met with

Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on the morning of January 31, 1980. The group decided to divide the responsibility for the various topics of conversation among the individual participants, with Kirkpatrick chosen to speak on U.S. foreign policy in Central America. The meeting did not go well. The

President was defensive, and the CDM insisted on attacking his record. The conservative

Democrats were so intent on accosting Carter for his mistakes that at one point Max

Kampelman had to intervene on the president’s behalf, reproaching his fellow members for “talking about yesterday” when the future was what mattered.78 It is unclear from the record whether Kirkpatrick was among those on the offensive against Carter. Whatever her role, she left the thirty-minute meeting more convinced than ever that he was “a disaster,” as she remarked to Midge Decter. She concluded, “I am not going to support that man.”79

But if not Carter, who could Kirkpatrick support? Surely not Teddy Kennedy, who challenged Carter that primary season for the Democratic nomination that primary season running from the left, the opposite direction that she was moving. It was during this moment of indecision that her involvement in the Committee on the Present Danger became crucial to her transition to the Reagan camp. CPD member Richard Allen was

78 Quoted in Vaïsse, 135. 79 Quoted in Collier, 107.

252 also Ronald Reagan’s main foreign policy advisor. Allen had given Reagan a copy of the article to read on the plane as he made his way back to California from Washington.

Reagan had been duly impressed by Kirkpatrick’s unapologetic defense of American interventionism. He called Allen as soon as his plane landed. “Who is she?” he wanted to know.80 Allen set up a meeting between the two. He had long considered it his job to lay the groundwork for a potential Reagan administration by winning over as many conservative Democrats to Reagan’s side as possible. “My job was to bring [Kirkpatrick] to Reagan,” he recalled. Allen included Kirkpatrick in a foreign policy briefing for

Reagan to be held in a suite at the Madison Hotel in Washington. William Casey was also there, as was Paul Nitze. Reagan again complimented her on the Commentary article. For her part, Kirkpatrick came away impressed by Reagan’s commitment to defending U.S. interests in the Global South. “At least he wouldn’t start by destabilizing the government of Guatemala,” she remarked to her husband after she had returned home from the meeting.81

Allen organized several more meetings between Kirkpatrick and Reagan before she finally agreed to endorse him for the presidency. Allen was ecstatic to have

“converted” a lifelong Democrat of the Humphrey wing to Reagan’s side. A year later he was quoted as saying that he “took her down to the Potomac and baptized her” as a

“Reaganaut”—a term he coined himself. When an interviewer brought up this remark

80 Ibid, 105; James Conaway, “Jeane Kirkpatrick: The Ambassador from Commentary Magazine,” 1 November 1981, Washington Post Magazine, SM10. 81 Quoted in Collier, 109.

253 years later, Allen was horrified at giving such a self-serving quote, and denied having said it at all, “It had to be a joke,” he remarked.82

Whether he “baptized” Kirkpatrick or merely “converted” her to the conservative camp, Allen secured Kirkpatrick’s support for Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.

He also deserved some credit for her eventual position within the Reagan administration.

After the election, Caspar Weinberger d asked her to join him in the Department of

Defense. Allen had a higher post in mind. He recommended her to Reagan as the U.S.

Representative to the United Nations, a highly public post for someone whose name the general public had yet to hear. Reagan loved the idea. Like many conservatives, he disdained the anti-Americanism and pro-Third Worldism at the UN. An American exceptionalist of Kirkpatrick’s intellectual pedigree would give his administration a determined, eloquent voice in what he considered hostile territory. “Let’s do it,” he said.83 A few weeks later, Kirkpatrick received a phone call from the President-elect.

When she asked how the new president was doing, he got right to the point of the call,

“I’ll be better if you’ll agree to be our next ambassador to the United Nations,” he told her. Kirkpatrick graciously accepted.84 She would be the nation’s first woman representative to the UN, and as we will see in the next chapter, among the most controversial in the position’s history.

82 Conaway, “Jeane Kirkpatrick: The Ambassador from Commentary Magazine”; Richard Allen Interview, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Ronald Reagan Presidential Oral History Project, 28 May 2002. 83 Richard Allen Interview, Miller Center/ The desire among conservatives to take a confrontational stance was well illustrated in a 1981 article on Kirkpatrick for U.S. News & World Report, which declared that the United States was “fed up with being the United Nation’s favorite whipping boy,” see Dennis Mullin and William D. Hartley, “Behind U.S.’s Tough New Line at the U.N.,” 9 November 1981 U.S. News & World Report, 36-37. 84 Quoted in Collier, 114.

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Conclusion

This chapter has argued that Jeane Kirkpatrick’s greatest impact on political and international history lay in her ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate issues. She combined Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism with development theory’s racialized division of the world between “modern” and “traditional” societies.

Where conservative, authoritarian regimes employed violence to maintain their rule, totalitarian governments used violence to reshape society towards an illusory utopia. In nations that lacked the complex social structures and cultural values to support democracy, authoritarianism offered its people at least the comfort of traditional life with the potential of developing into a democratic state—a development that could be delayed indefinitely. Her theory deployed a logic that eschewed specificity. The Sandinistas could not, in her view, have the support of the Nicaraguan masses, because no traditional people would have lent their support to totalitarians who wanted to destroy their culture.

Her conclusions found ready acceptance with Ronald Reagan and his advisors.

As Kirkpatrick refined her conclusions about the relationship between totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and development in the Global South, she grew more and more disenchanted with the Democratic Party. The emergence of the New Elite alienated her from the party. They condemned American militarism, attempted to hastily transform the party into a more representative body, and were willing to stand on principle even if it meant losing an election. Kirkpatrick concluded that they were a dangerous New Elite with more than a little in common with the intelligentsia who led communist parties abroad. As we will see in the next chapter, just as Kirkpatrick drew on

255 international discourse to describe her opponents at home, so too would she use the rhetoric of law and order to make sense of her opponents at the UN in the 1980s.

Of the four subjects of this study, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Casey, and Eugene

Rostow all met Reagan’s election with something like jubilation. Only Bayard Rustin opposed his election, even though he, Kirkpatrick, and Rostow were all Democrats. One reason, though hardly the only one, Kirkpatrick and Rostow could support Reagan was that both of them could expect to be named to posts within the new administration. Each of these three had been drawn separately into the campaign to reassert America abroad.

But they would begin their time in the new administration together, and Rustin, though outside the halls of power, would lend them his support. Together, they would launch an offensive in the Global South during the 1980s, with dramatic consequences for the regions of the Middle East and Latin America.

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Chapter 5 The Spear Carriers go on the Offensive during the Reagan Years.

The first meeting of the president-elect and his “Interim Foreign Policy Advisory

Board” was a star-studded affair. Held in Washington D.C. over the weekend of

December 12, 1980, the meeting included such foreign policy luminaries as Henry

Kissinger, former President Gerald Ford, and Secretary of State designate Alexander

Haig. While Kissinger and Ford received the majority of press attention, it was the CPD members present who spoke the language that Ronald Reagan wanted to hear. William

Casey served as chair of the advisory board, and both Eugene Rostow and Jeane

Kirkpatrick belonged to the group. When Kissinger remarked on the importance of maintaining career bureaucrats at State, Kirkpatrick had an able reply. Sitting between

Kissinger, the former Secretary of State, and George Shultz, the future Secretary of State, she argued that the Reagan administration needed to be staffed with “Reaganauts” who would, “infuse the bureaucracy with the direction it needed.” Reagan, an observer reported, “nodded vigorously.” Eugene Rostow also earned the new president’s approval by telling Reagan what he no doubt already believed. Rostow warned the president-elect against viewing the Soviet Union as “just like us.” He emphasized, “The Soviet culture is not like ours, and it is not ‘a gentleman-culture.’” Reagan’s retort matched Rostow’s impugnation of Soviet masculinity, “I promise I won’t even kiss Brezhnev,” he assured

Rostow. After years of frustration, Rostow, Kirkpatrick, and Casey finally had a seat at the table.1

1 William Safire, “The Human Element,” New York Times, 15 December 1980, A23; Notes for E.V.R. Comments on December 13, 1980, Summarizing Memorandum of December 8, 1980 to William J. Casey, folder December 8, 1980-EVR’s Memorandum for Dec. 12-13 Meeting of the Interim Foreign Policy

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Meanwhile, Bayard Rustin was appointed to no transition committees. He attended no meetings with future administration officials, and he enjoyed no exchanges with the new president. His lukewarm support for Carter, and his impassioned denunciation of Reagan’s domestic agenda precluded him from sharing in the fruits of his allies’ victory. Reagan’s actions over the first year of his presidency did little to ingratiate him to Rustin. He accused the Reagan administration of “insensitivity” and a “lack of compassion” at home, noting, among other things, that the president’s plan to cut social security benefits would leave many elderly Americans living below the poverty line.2

Rustin tried to use his contacts within the administration to moderate some of Reagan’s proposed budget cuts. He sent a personal appeal to Casey in April of 1981 asking him to help reverse Reagan’s decision to cut $42 million from Department of Labor contracts designed to “serve minority and other disadvantaged youths,” but to no avail.3 Despite his vehement opposition to Reagan’s domestic agenda, Bayard Rustin never ceased his support for the anti-Third World, Cold War oriented policies espoused by the new president.

This chapter follows Eugene Rostow, William Casey, Bayard Rustin, and Jeane

Kirkpatrick as they took the offensive against the Global South in the 1980s. Rostow,

Kirkpatrick, and Casey all took prominent positions within the Reagan administration.

Rostow became Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), charged with overseeing the nation’s arms control efforts. Jeane Kirkpatrick became the

Advisory Board, box 2, Accession 1990-M-076, the Eugene Victor Rostow Papers, Yale University Sterling Memorial Library, New Haven, CT (Hereafter EVR Papers). 2 Bayard Rustin, “Social Insecurity,” New York Amsterdam News, 26 September 1981, A4. 3 Copy of mailgram from Bayard Rustin to William Casey, 14 April 1981, folder 16, box 5, the Bayard Rustin Papers, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter BRP).

258 first woman to represent America at the United Nations. William Casey became Reagan’s

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although Rustin took no official position within the new administration, his continued a liberal imprimatur to Reagan’s foreign policy via his missions with Freedom House.

They exerted an influence over the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s that went beyond the power normally exerted by these positions. When Israel launched several aggressive campaigns aimed at Arab states and the PLO in the first two years of the Reagan administration, they supported the Israeli government against opposition in the UN, in the press, and even within the Reagan administration. Israel’s destruction of a nuclear reactor in Iraq and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, frustrated and angered Reagan officials—in particular Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State

George Shultz. Rostow, Kirkpatrick, and Rustin defended Israel’s actions in public and in private, claiming that Israel was entirely justified in the actions it took. In Central

America, this same group—particularly Casey, Kirkpatrick, and Rustin—proved vital to implementing U.S. military support for the anticommunist regime in El Salvador, and the

“Contras,” the anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua.

Although none took the top positions in the administration’s foreign policy team—Secretaries of State and Defense—the management style of Ronald Reagan allowed them to have an outsized voice within the administration. First, Reagan made both Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Casey members of his cabinet. He named them both to the National Security Council, (NSC) and in addition named Casey to the ultra-elite

National Security Planning Group (NSPG), insuring them an equal voice at policy meetings. Aiding them in their ability to influence foreign policy was Ronald Reagan’s

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“hands-off” approach to foreign policy. Reagan was notoriously inattentive to American foreign relations, preferring to focus his energy on his domestic agenda. Reagan’s first

Secretary of State Alexander Haig recalled, “Bill [Casey] and I both recognized that his span of attention and his interests were terribly narrow…Ronald Reagan knew little about foreign policy and cared less.”4 Reagan’s light touch created a power vacuum that CPD members could use to their advantage. In the process, Casey and Kirkpatrick formed a close working relationship due to their shared belief in American militarism.

The determination of Casey, Kirkpatrick, Rostow, and Rustin to go on the offensive in the Global South did not go unchallenged. Relative moderates in the administration—most notably George Shultz who took over as Secretary of State in mid-

1982—blocked rightwing efforts to increase their hold on U.S. foreign policy. Among other actions, Shultz prevented Kirkpatrick from becoming National Security Advisor in

Reagan’s second term. Congressional and public opposition to American interventionism also limited how the United States could use its military force under Reagan. The

Committee on the Present Danger had succeeded in convincing a majority of Americans that the nation required a revamped military. Most Americans, and the Democratic- controlled Congress, however, remained circumspect about sending in U.S. soldiers into protracted conflicts. Even though Reagan embarked upon a massive military buildup upon entering office, his administration’s ability to deploy overt American power abroad was limited.

It was in no small part due to these limitations that Central America became the locus of American militarism during the Reagan administration. The region had counted

4 Quoted in Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the CIA (New York: Viking, 1990), 305.

260 little in the calculations of Rostow, Casey, Kirkpatrick, and Rustin prior to the 1980s.

Central America contained no vital raw materials like the Middle East, and the nations of the region were ruled over by brutal, pro-American dictators. The triumph of the

Sandinistas over the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, and the civil war in El Salvador, however, created the opportunity for the Reagan administration to flex its military might in the region. As historian Greg Grandin has argued, it was precisely because Central

America could be “easily ignored” that it became the “workshop” for militarists within the administration. Reagan essentially gave Casey and Kirkpatrick a free hand in Central

America. They turned the ideas they had promoted in the 1970s into action during the

1980s. It was the people of those nations who would suffer the consequences. The wars they supported killed over 300,000 people during the 1980s years, and turned millions more into refugees. 5

This chapter is organized around the efforts of these four to define U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and in Central America. Sections addressing these two regions are interspersed with closer examinations of the impact that Jeane Kirkpatrick and

William Casey had at the United Nations and the CIA respectively. At the UN,

Kirkpatrick would deploy the language of “law and order” to describe representatives of

Global South nations in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Through her we see how imperialists collapsed the distinctions between leftists at home and “Third World radicals” in the Global South. Casey, meanwhile, brought his concern to use the government to aid private enterprise, and vice versa, with him to the CIA. Under his watch, the CIA courted American businessmen to a greater degree than ever before. Most

5 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 69-73.

261 infamously, his determination to find “alternate” sources of money for CIA activities that

Congress refused to fund would set the stage for the greatest scandal of the Reagan Era:

Iran-Contra.

In Defense of Israel

Supporters of Israel no doubt began the Reagan years assured that America’s special relationship with Israel was secure. During the election, candidate Ronald Reagan assured voters of his unwavering support for Israel as a Cold War ally. But Israeli actions throughout the first two years of Reagan’s presidency exasperated several members of his cabinet, particularly Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State

George Shultz. Although Israel’s actions did not presage a break between the two nations, it was far from a given that the administration would support the Israelis unequivocally—a sharp contrast from today when administration support for Israel, is, at least in public, absolute. On the frontlines defending Israel to both the administration and the American public were Rostow, Kirkpatrick, and Rustin.

The first serious disruption in U.S.-Israeli relations came in June of 1981 when

Israeli jets bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor. The Israeli government had feared that the reactor, then under construction, might be used to make a nuclear weapon. Although the

United States was not yet openly supporting Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, relations were moving in that direction. Secretary of Defense Caspar

Weinberger was incensed that Israel would take such an action without even consulting the administration. At a National Security Council meeting following the attack,

Weinberger urged Reagan to respond strongly to the Israel’s aggressive action. It is not clear what precisely he recommended the president do, but Israeli Prime Minister

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Menachem Begin accused Weinberger of advising Reagan to cut off all aid to Israel, a charge Weinberger denied.6 The president did issue a statement condemning the bombing, and the U.S. government delayed shipment of F-15 fighter jets to Israel in response.7

The fallout over the raid might have been worse, however, had it not been for

Rostow and Kirkpatrick’s intervening on Israel’s behalf. Rostow used his personal friendship with Israeli officials to reassure them of Reagan’s support. “There may be people in the Administration,” he wrote Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ephraim

Evron “who want to disengage from Israel, but…that is most emphatically not the

President’s policy.” Rostow counseled Evron to lay low. “Keep calm and let there be a period of silence about all phases of the episode.”8 That it was outside the mission of the head of the ACDA to speak for the president in matters regarding foreign policy appeared to not occur to Rostow.

At the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick also came to Israel’s defense. The Iraqi government introduced a UN resolution that called for an arms embargo of Israel and demanded repayment for the destroyed nuclear reactor. Through skilled negotiations at the UN,

Kirkpatrick was able to reduce the resolution to a mere condemnation of Israel’s action, with no actual ramifications for Israel. Kirkpatrick also sparred with some in the administration over the language of the resolution, which she believed was too harsh towards Israel. “The State Department wanted to keep the word ‘aggression’ in [the

6 William Claiborne, “Some Begin Claims on Raid Turn Out to Be Erroneous,” Washington Post, 17 June 1981, A22; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Anti-Begin Backfire,” Washington Post, 24 June 1981, A21. 7 Bernard Reich, “The United States and Israel: The Nature of a Special Relationship,” in The Middle East and the United States: a Historical and Political Reassessment, David W. Lesch, ed., 2nd edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 231-232. 8 Rostow to Evron, 22 June 1981, folder E, box 1, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

263 resolution],” she confided to aide Alan Gerson. She successfully negotiated to keep the word out of the Security Council resolution, but having done so she saw no alternative to the United States voting to approve this now entirely symbolic censure of Israel.9 Even when voting to censure Israel, however, Kirkpatrick made sure that her body language displayed her commitment to protecting its interests at the UN. When the U.S. delegations turn to vote came, she partially raised her hand in the affirmative, with a moribund expression on her face. Afterwards, she stated publicly, “[N]othing in the resolution will affect my Government’s commitment to Israel’s security.” The Israeli government still rejected the UN resolution as “one-sided,” but they could not have been unhappy with Kirkpatrick’s efforts on their behalf.10

Just six months after the affair over the raid in Iraq, Israel again drew the ire of the international community and the administration when it announced the annexation of the Golan Heights in December 1981. The region had been under Israeli occupation since

1967 when they had captured the region from Syria during the Six-Day War. By officially changing Israel’s borders for the first time since 1967, Israel had violated the

Camp David Accords. Begin’s move to annex the Golan Heights had caught even his own cabinet by surprise.11 Once again, the Reagan administration was chagrined that

Israel had taken a unilateral, destabilizing action in the region. Appearing on “Good

Morning America,” Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger condemned Israel’s decisions

9 Allan Gerson, The Kirkpatrick Mission: Diplomacy without Apology at the United Nations, 1981-1985 (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 14. 10 Bernard D. Nossiter, “Israelis Condemned by Security Council for Attack on Iraq," New York Times, 20 June 1981, 1; Peter Collier, Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick (New York: Encounter Books, 2012), 132. 11 David K. Shipler, “The Golan Heights Annexed by Israel in an Abrupt Move,” New York Times, 15 December 1981, A1; Bernard Gwertzman, “Israel’s Decision to Annex Golan Upsets U.S. Aides,” New York Times, 16 December 1981, A1.

264 as a “violation of the United Nations resolutions and therefore the Camp David agreement.” He concluded, “We are very unhappy with it.”12

Enter Eugene Rostow. The day after Weinberger’s television appearance, Rostow wrote the Defense Secretary a sharply worded letter refuting his charges against Israel. “I don’t know where you got your legal advice before saying what the papers attribute to you on the subject,” Rostow insisted, “but the Israeli statute is not an annexation; it is not in violation of Resolution 242” [emphasis in original]. Extending Israeli law to the Golan

Heights, but not referring to the move as an official “annexation,” he believed, protected

Israel from charges of wrongdoing. Rostow claimed the authority to speak on this subject as “architect of Resolution 242,” a gross exaggeration of his role in drafting that document. Rostow concluded by cautioning Weinberger against such emotional outbursts in the future. “What happens next remains largely up to us. It won’t help if we get angry or excited, and shoot ourselves in the feet,” he lectured.13 Rostow also wrote a worried letter to Kirkpatrick, confiding in her that the administration was repeating the same error it had made in June by not forcefully supporting an ally.14

Rostow claimed that his mandate as Director of the Arms Control and

Disarmament Agency allowed him to comment on foreign policy. This was a broad reading of the position. Formed in 1961, the ACDA was an independent agency responsible for investigating and approving all potential arms sales by the U.S. government. The ACDA also played a leading role in arms control negotiations with the

12 Martin Schram, “Weinberger Hits Action by Israel,” Washington Post, 16 December 1981, A1. 13 Rostow to Weinberger, 17 December 1981, folder W, box 2, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 14 Rostow to Meese, 16 December 1981; and Rostow to Kirkpatrick, 17 December 1981, folder W, box 2, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers.

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Soviet Union.15 But the organization generally did not comment on foreign policy.

Rostow, however, could not help himself. Former ACDA official Thomas Graham recalled “Rostow’s inability to refrain from offering unsolicited advice on the Middle

East at interagency meetings,” a tendency that rubbed others in the administration the wrong way.16

Rostow’s presumption to comment on U.S. foreign relations certainly irritated

Weinberger, who responded to the letter with a calmly worded letter that nevertheless made clear his displeasure at being the target of Rostow’s lecturing. “Your letter of

December 17 is discouraging,” he began. “It seems that I have been in full agreement with the State Department’s views on the legal significance of the recently enacted Golan

Heights legislation only to find myself in conflict with your own.” Weinberger then commenced to do some lecturing of his own. He explained to Rostow that Resolution 242 did not sanction unilateral acquisition of territory, that Israel’s lack of a formal declaration of annexation did not mean that they had not effectively done so in the Golan

Heights, and that Syrian “intransigence” in the peace process was “quite simply not a legitimate basis for the action to be taken”—an overt reference to Rostow’s justification for the annexation. Rostow must have known he had crossed a line with Weinbeger. He responded by reassuring the Defense Secretary, “I admire you and your conduct of your office.” He suggested the two of them meet for a lunch to “get to the bottom of our

15 There was some early confusion regarding Rostow’s role as head of the ACDA. The administration named retired Army Lt. General Edward Rowny to head up the SALT negotiations. Rowny had been considered for the ACDA job, and he initially attempted to position himself as Rostow’s equal, arguing that he should report directly to the President or Secretary of State. The administration, however, made clear that Rostow was the man in charge of overall arms control negotiations, ordering Rowny to report to Reagan through the ACDA. See, Michael Getler, “Reagan to Name Rowny as Salt Negotiator; Confusion on Role Seen,” Washington Post, 10 April 1981, A32. 16 Thomas Graham, Disarmament Sketches: Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 116.

266 differences.”17 It is unclear whether any such meeting ever took place, but over the next six months two men’s relationship would further deteriorate over Israeli actions in

Lebanon.

Kirkpatrick came to Israel’s aid at the United Nations. Just as Iraq had six months prior, the Syrian government brought a UN resolution forward that called for stiff penalties to be meted out against Israel including an embargo on arms and economic aid.

Although the measure would always have been vetoed by the United States, Kirkpatrick kept it from even coming to a vote in the UN Security Council. She convinced two of the council’s “Third World” representatives—Zaire and Panama—to abstain from the vote.

This left Syria with only seven out of fifteen yes votes on the resolution, not enough even for a symbolic victory. The Syrian government ultimately withdrew the resolution. It was rumored that Kirkpatrick had promised Zaire and Panama economic and military aid in return for abstaining. She denied having “bribed” the two nations, but did admit that she had told them, “We have every intention of being reliable friends,” a message that certainly connoted increased aid if it did not outright promise it.18

Nearly one year after Israeli jets had struck Iraq, the Israeli military invaded southern Lebanon. Lebanon had been locked in a brutal civil war for seven years, and the

Israeli military took it upon themselves to root out the Palestinian Liberation

Organization’s (PLO) base of operations in the country in response to PLO raids into

17 Weinberger to Rostow, 21 December 1981, and Rostow to Weinberger 23 December 1981, folder Weinberger, Caspar, box 2, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. 18 Bernard D. Nossiter, “Syria Fails in U.N. Bid to Penalize Israel on Golan,” New York Times, 16 January 1982, 6. Bernard D. Nossiter, “For Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Frustration is Part of the Job,” New York Times, 21 January 1982, A12.

267 northern Israel.19 Once again, Weinberger emerged as the administration’s main opponent of the Israeli action. While Secretary of State Haig remained largely silent on the invasion—he was on his way out of the administration after a disastrous tenure that saw him alienate potential allies such as Kirkpatrick through his jealous guarding of power.

Reagan and Kirkpatrick both gave pat responses deploring the violence on both sides, but refrained from blaming the Israeli government for its actions. Weinberger, in contrast, firmly stated that Israel’s resort to force was unwarranted, and he blamed Israel for the human toll the conflict had taken. “There are tens of thousands of people who have been killed and wounded now in Lebanon who had nothing to do with any side of this conflict,” he told reporters.20 The fighting, however, did not stop, and within one week of the invasion Israeli forces had reached Beirut.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon precipitated the most serious break yet in Eugene

Rostow’s fraying relationship with Weinberger. In late June, someone, possibly Rostow, leaked to Washington Post journalist Jack Anderson that the ACDA had warned the

Secretary of Defense that an Israeli invasion of Lebanon was likely five months prior to the actual war. Weinberger, Anderson’s article claimed, had ignored the prescient warning. “[T]he president never saw the pinpoint prediction. Defense Secretary Caspar

W. Weinberger spiked it,” he charged.21 This was true to a point. ACDA employee

Joseph Churba had indeed predicted the Israeli invasion. But Weinberger’s failure to relate Churba’s warning up the pipeline owed to the note Rostow had appended to the

19 Douglas Little, American orientalism: the United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 111. 20 Bernard Gwertzman, “Reagan’s Advisers Said to be Divided on Lebanese Crisis,” New York Times, 21 June 1982, A1, A10. 21 Jack Anderson, “Israeli Push into Lebanon was Predicted,” Washington Post, 22 June 1982, B15.

268 front of the report. There, Rostow referred to the “genuine Israeli grievance” precipitating an invasion into Lebanon: the presence of the PLO in the southern part of the country.

Weinberger misunderstood the report as a recommendation by Rostow that the United

States thus support the Israeli action, not a prediction. This explains Weinberger’s curt response to the memorandum, which focused on the inadvisability of an Israeli invasion, but not on Churba’s assertion that an invasion was likely whatever the American policy.22

Up to this point, Bayard Rustin had remained largely silent about the tensions between the United States and Israel during the Reagan administration’s first year. He had spent much of the year focused on domestic issues, and preparing for a Washington

D.C. rally to protest Reagan’s anti-labor agenda. He and Lane Kirkland—now president of the AFL-CIO after George Meany’s death—helped to organize a 260,000 person

“Solidarity Day Protest” on September 20, 1981. This was the largest demonstration the nation’s capital had seen in twenty years. Coming a little over a month after Reagan’s firing of striking air-traffic controllers, the protest revealed a deep national unease with

Reaganomics.23 The protest drew inspiration from the 1963 March on Washington, although Rustin had not organized this most recent march. But unlike Rustin’s famous protest, Solidarity Day failed to lead to any tangible changes in the administration’s policies.

The din of criticism that followed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, however, drew

Rustin into the debate. He was particularly concerned that the media had exaggerated the

22 Rostow to Weinberger, 7 January 1982, and Weinberger to Rostow, 26 January 1982, folder Weinberger, Caspar, box 2, Accession 1985-M-004, EVR Papers. Churba’s memorandum refrained from making a judgment as to the desirability of an Israeli attack, it only stated that one was likely. 23 Eric Pianin and Warren Brown, “Crowd Proclaims Labor’s Solidarity: 250,000 March in City to Reaffirm Labor’s Solidarity,” Washington Post, 20 September 1981, A1.

269 loss of life and the destruction of property by Israeli forces. The International Red Cross had estimated that over fourteen thousand people had died over the course of the two week invasion in June of 1982, with another twenty thousand injured.24 That August,

Rustin organized a fact finding mission to Israel and southern Lebanon in order to reach his own conclusions about the behavior of the Israeli military over the previous two months. The trip exemplified Rustin’s problematic modus operandi for investigating human rights abuses by governments he supported. He was entirely reliant on Israel for information and access to areas impacted by the war. According to Rustin’s own summary of the mission, he began his journey by meeting with top Israeli officials in Tel

Aviv—Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir among them. While he and his team spent two days interviewing Lebanese, only one member of the group actually spoke Arabic, and they were entirely reliant on the Israeli military for transportation and security. His report displayed no awareness of how these fact might have influenced his impression of the situation: Might the Lebanese residents have been hesitant to criticize the Israeli invasion with Israeli soldiers nearby? Did the Israeli military take Rustin’s team to areas that had seen relatively little combat? Rustin concluded that the Israeli estimates of Lebanese casualties—which placed the number of dead at under one thousand—were accurate.25

24 Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, Second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 255-257; The Israeli government denied that the casualty rate had been so high, claiming that between 460 and 407 civilians had been killed. "Israel, Disputing Red Cross, Lists Casualties," New York Times, 23 June 1982, A8. 25 Bayard Rustin, “The Israeli Incursion into Lebanon: A personal report and reflections on my trip to Israel and Lebanon, August 15-23, 1982.” folder 8, box 14, BRP. It appears that the Red Cross did inflate the number of casualties in the early days of the conflict, but, as Times reporter David K. Shipler noted that July, the number of casualties was far greater than the figures quoted by the Israeli government. He also noted that the Israeli military had prevented American observers from entering the devastated refugee camps, a practice no doubt continued during Rustin’s visit a month later. See Shipler, “Toll of Lebanon Dead and Injured is Still Uncertain in Chaos of War,” New York Times, 14 July 1982, A1.

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Given the nature of Rustin’s mission to Lebanon, it hardly came as a surprise when he concluded that the Israeli invasion was both warranted and executed in exemplary fashion. “The U.S. media have failed the public and have not provided

Americans with an accurate picture of what transpired during the two-month-long conflict,” he charged in an op-ed for the Miami Times. The Israeli army scrupulously adhered to a code of conduct unprecedented in the annals of war.” With this corrective,

Rustin hoped that the press would now “dispassionately” gather the facts about Israel’s action in Lebanon. Such reporting would “reassure Americans of Israel’s firm commitment to the protection of innocent lives…”26

Six days prior to the publication of Rustin’s op-ed, Israeli troops stood by during a massacre of Palestinian civilians in West Beirut. The Israeli military in Lebanon had surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Both camps had been home to PLO members, but under a U.S. brokered ceasefire, the PLO fighters had evacuated Lebanon the previous month. Convinced that Palestinian “terrorists” remained in the camps, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to allow a group of fifteen-hundred

Phalangists—rightwing, Christian Lebanese who had long feuded with the Palestinians— to enter the camps. Over the course of the evening from September 17 to September 18,

1981, Phalangist forces murdered between eight hundred and one-thousand men, women, and children in the camps.27 The killings sent shockwaves across the world including in

Israel where a judicial committee was set up to investigate the incident. In the pages of

Ha’aretz, Israeli military correspondent Ze’ev Schiff compared the killings to the

26 Bayard Rustin, “The Truth about Lebanon,” Miami Times, 23 September 1982. 27 Little, 294-295; Bayān Nuwayheḍ al-Ḥout, Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Colin Shindler, Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream: Power, Politics, and Ideology from Begin to Netanyahu (London; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 159-170.

271 pogroms that Europeans once perpetrated against Jews. “A war crime has been committed,” he declared.28

The massacre also had a deep emotional impact on Reagan’s new Secretary of

State George Shultz. Shultz had just assumed the position from Alexander Haig, whose paranoid attempts to monopolize authority over U.S. foreign policy had alienated him from most of the administration. Shultz was beside himself at the news, especially reports that Israeli troops had “fired illumination rounds throughout the night,” so that the

Phalangists could continue the killings. A clearly pained Shultz approached Kirkpatrick following the massacre. “I don’t know how you feel,” he said to her, “but I feel as though my hands are covered in blood. American weapons for Israel made possible the murder of women and children in the refugee camp.” Kirkpatrick’s response was so indifferent that even her biographer called it “unflinching” and “unsympathetic.” “Well,” she said, “I don’t feel as if I have blood on my hands. We didn’t kill anyone. And, as I understand it,

Israelis didn’t kill anyone either. I doubt that American weapons were used by the

Phalangists.”29 This was to be the beginning of a contentious relationship between the two that would see Shultz playing the moderate to Kirkpatrick’s hardline stance. After the massacre, Reagan ordered one thousand U.S. Marines—who had recently been deployed to Beirut to aid in the evacuation of the PLO—to reenter the city in order to protect the camps. Rostow, for once, remained judiciously silent on U.S.-Israeli relations.

The same could not be said for Bayard Rustin, who would be pulled into the investigation surrounding Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s responsibility for the

28 Quoted in Shindler, 160. 29 Quoted in Collier, 160. Collier takes this account from a draft autobiography that Kirkpatrick began but never finished.

272 massacre. According to the Israeli investigation, Sharon had approved the Phalangists’ entry into the camps, telling an American official, “They can kill the terrorists.” While the commission found Sharon innocent of directly causing the massacre—presumably because he had erroneously assumed the Phalangists would limit themselves to murdering “terrorists” —they concluded that he should have known one was likely. The commission recommended that he resign from office, which he eventually did, but

Sharon remained in the Israeli cabinet. 30

Rustin’s piece for the Miami Times made no reference to the killings. Over the course of the investigation, he remained largely silent. Two years later, however, lawyers for Sharon asked Rustin to testify on Sharon’s behalf in a libel suit against Time magazine. The suit centered on the February 21, 1983 edition of Time wherein the magazine reported on a secret appendix to the Israeli report detailing Sharon’s discussion with Phalangist leaders prior to the massacre. According to the article, Sharon had

“discussed…the need for the Phalangists to take revenge” for the assassination of one of their leaders.31 Denying that any such conversation ever took place, Sharon sued Time magazine for $50 million. Rustin readily agreed to testify on Sharon’s behalf.32 On the witness stand for a mere five minutes, Rustin praised Sharon as “an important general, politician and humanitarian.”33 Time and Sharon ultimately settled the suit for an undisclosed amount. Rustin’s testimony was likely not decisive, but it did give further

30 George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 105-106, Sharon quoted on 105. 31 William E. Smith, Harry Kelly, and Robert Slater, “The Verdict is Guilty,” Time, 21 February 1983. 32 Arnold Foster to Rustin, 2 October 1984, folder Sharon, Ariel Libel Suit Against Time, box 35, BRP. 33 Arnold H. Lubasch, “Sharon, Completing His Testimony, Says Time Article Created ‘Hatred,’” New York Times, 28 November 1984, B6.

273 evidence that even into the last years of his life he never questioned his unwavering support for Israel and its leaders.

While the tensions between the United States and Israel did not entirely subside after 1982, events in the subsequent months pushed any problems the administration might have with Begin’s government to the background. In October of 1983, the group

Islamic Jihad detonated a truck bomb at the U.S. Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241

Americans. Any lingering unease between the allies was subsumed as the blame for the bombing eventually settled on Iran. Still, in a first two years marked by frustration, it was

Rostow, Rustin, and Kirkpatrick who worked hardest to keep the administration committed to Israel, whatever its actions. Unexpectedly, Kirkpatrick proved to be the most effective advocate for Israel, even though of the three she had the least personal experience with that nation. Her job at the UN placed her on the front lines of the diplomatic debate over Israeli actions. It was to the UN that the Arab states brought their grievances against Israel, and it was there that Kirkpatrick proved most valuable to Israel and the administration. But how did Kirkpatrick view her role at the UN? How did she make sense of an international body that many of her allies dismissed as a playground for

“Third World” dictators?

Jeane Kirkpatrick Takes on the “New Class” at the United Nations

On February 4, 1981, Vice President George Bush swore in Jeane Kirkpatrick as the nation’s first female Ambassador to the United Nations. The next month, she arrived at the UN headquarters in New York City. Having advised Reagan to staff the government with loyal “Reaganauts,” Kirkpatrick took her own advice, recruiting people who would “share the orientation of this Administration,” as she put it. Her hires included

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Carl Gershman, who co-wrote with Rustin the Commentary article on Soviet imperialism in Africa; Ken Adelman, who would take over the ACDA after Rostow’s firing; and

Allan Gerson, who served as her legal counsel and wrote a book on Kirkpatrick’s time in the Reagan administration. Kirkpatrick entered office with a clear vision of her and her team’s mission at the United Nations: “to restore United States strength and influence in the world, a determination to regain self-respect and the respect of others.”34 Kirkpatrick was to practice “diplomacy without apology,” to champion American morals and objectives while brooking no opposition from the Non-Aligned Movement or the “Third

World.”35

The United Nations that Jeane Kirkpatrick entered was defined by the vast expansion in membership resulting from decolonization. From an original 51 members in

1945, the UN had grown to include 157 nation members by 1981. While the big powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Great Britain, France—exerted tremendous control over the UN Security Council due to their veto powers, the one nation, one vote structure of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) gave the nations of the

Global South a numerical advantage over the wealthy nations of the industrialized world.

In the UNGA geopolitical power was symbolically reversed, and the decolonized world was able to achieve victories over the dominant powers, from the proclamation of a “New

International Economic Order” by the Non-Aligned movement, to the vote declaring

Zionism a form of racism.

34 Bernard D. Nossiter, “New Team at U.N.: Common Roots and Philosophies,” 3 March 1981, New York Times, A2; Collier, 118-123. 35 “Diplomacy without Apology,” was Allan Gerson’s phrase for describing Kirkpatrick’s mission at the UN see, Gerson, The Kirkpatrick Mission: Diplomacy without Apology at the United Nations, 1981-1985.

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Kirkpatrick looked on the General Assembly as a cliquish, raucous collection of representatives only interested in protecting their interests and scratching the backs of their allies. “The African bloc supports the Arabs on all matters attacking Israel and the

Arabs agree to support the African bloc on all matters attacking South Africa,” she complained resentfully. She noted morosely that while U.S. allies, especially Israel, were routinely castigated for human rights abuses, “Uganda was never targeted…Neither [was]

Ethiopia, nor Vietnam, nor any other member of the Non-Aligned bloc or African bloc or

Islamic Conference.” She accused the Western Europeans, the only “bloc” sympathetic to the United States, of having surrendered “Western values” in their determination to

“understand” rather than challenge “their Third World accusers.” The General Assembly belonged to the Global South. “The UN is their place,” she concluded. 36 Kirkpatrick was determined to go on the offensive.

Kirkpatrick’s strategy at the United Nations centered on using America’s financial contributions to the body, and to individual nations, in order to assert U.S. influence.

Sometimes, as in the case involving Zaire and Panama, this meant implying American beneficence in return for acting in U.S. interests. Most often, however, Kirkpatrick threatened critics of U.S. policy with the loss of financial aid. When Cuba introduced a resolution to declare Puerto Rico a “colony” of the United States, for example, she warned representatives of Zambia and Uganda that “she would never forget their vote on this issue…and neither would the Reagan administration.”37 Kirkpatrick also “enlisted,”

36 Quoted in Collier, 125. 37 Ibid, 129.

276 according to Collier, the aid of U.S. ambassadors to deliver similar messages across the world. Her efforts paid off when the UN voted down the Cuban sponsored resolution.38

In one well-publicized incident, Kirkpatrick fired off a blistering letter to Non-

Aligned nations in response to a document produced by the group that excoriated U.S. actions in Latin America and the Middle East while never mentioning the abuses of the

Soviet Union. Kirkpatrick mailed the letter to 40 nations, all of whom had financial relations with the United States. “Your Excellency,” the letter began, “I think you no more believe these vicious lies than I do, and I do not believe they are an accurate reflection of your Government’s outlook. And yet,” she continued, “what are we to think when your Government joins in such charges, for that is what you have done for failing to disassociate yourself from them.”39 Her disapproving letter was successful in garnering contrite responses from several governments, and the enthusiastic approval of the

American press. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed “Jeane Kirkpatrick strikes back,” while the New York Post wrote admiringly, “At last a challenge to the lies of the nonaligned.”40 The most ringing endorsement for Kirkpatrick’s letter came from the president himself. “Boy, that letter was just great,” Reagan told her. “You’re taking off that big sign that we used to wear that said ‘kick me.’”41

As with her writings on Latin America and the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, race inflected Kirkpatrick’s views on her nonwhite colleagues at the UN. Just as

38 Ibid, 128; “U.N. Supports U.S. over Puerto Rico,” New York Times, 25 September 1982, 3. 39 Bernard D. Nossiter, “Mrs. Kirkpatrick Asks 40 Nations to Explain their Anti-U.S. Stand,” New York Times, 14 October 1981, A1. 40 “Jeane Kirkpatrick Strikes Back,” Chicago Tribune, 17 October 1981, S8; New York Post quoted in Collier, 128. 41 Quoted in Miller Center, “Interview with Kenneth Adelman,” University of Virginia. 30 September 2003, accessed on 11 November 2014, http://millercenter.org•/president/reagan/oralhistory/kenneth- adelman.

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Kirkpatrick had invoked law and order to discredit the New Left after the 1972 election, she now applied the same strategy to the UN. She routinely used criminal metaphors when describing the behavior of Global South nations in UN debates. Public discussions at the United Nations, she charged, “[M]ore closely resemble[ed] a mugging than a political debate.” The “victim” of these crimes was generally either Israel or the United

States, whose actions were overly scrutinized by “Third World” countries. She vented her frustration at such behavior in an op-ed for the New York Times in 1983. She complained of an “all-too-familiar scenario” at the UN. Speaking before the Security Council and the world press, “bloc” members would denounce some U.S. or Israeli action in a procession of speakers, all of whom accused one or both of these nations of “genocide.” “The goal,” she charged, “[was] isolation and humiliation of the victim—creation of an impression that ‘world opinion’ [was] united in condemnation of the targeted nation.” This was a favored tactic of Kirkpatrick and conservatives, to recast the United States and Israel as victims of unjust collusion by the “Third World.” While the Arab states, as has been shown, and other nations were responding to actual physical violence, Kirkpatrick focused on the “verbal violence” being perpetrated against the United States and its allies at the UN. 42

Kirkpatrick had originally titled her Times opinion piece “Gang Rape.” When she shared a draft of the piece with aides Gerson and Gershman, however, it was not that the title drew on an image of nonwhite peoples as typical perpetrators of violence to defame

UN diplomats that raised their eyebrows, nor was it the absurd notion that somehow the

42 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “U.N. ‘Mugging’ Fails,” New York Times, 31 March 1983, A23; on “mugging” as racialized, see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978); also see Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash, Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21 (Fall 2007): 230– 265.

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United States had become a helpless, feminized victim of an aggressive sex crime. “It was not that the metaphor was not appropriate,” Gerson recalled, “It was that few would believe it.” Not many people had seen “informal consultations” at the UN, he believed, so readers might conclude that Kirkpatrick was being hyperbolic. The metaphor was “apt,” he concluded, but not judicious.43 Gerson recounted this episode in a book meant to celebrate Kirkpatrick’s time in office. The use of metaphors of criminal and sexually violence to represent the actions of Global South representatives was not something he felt he had to hide, or justify in hindsight.

Related to Kirkpatrick’s use of criminal metaphors to describe the UN were the parallels she drew between the UNGA and the New Left. She had posters of Mayor

Richard Daley hung throughout the office to serve as a model for how the U.S. staff should approach the United Nations, casting them in the role of the no-nonsense, “law and order” mayor who squared off against anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic

National Convention.44 In a 1982 interview with Georgetown’s Peter Krogh, she explicitly evoked Richard Nixon’s campaign rhetoric when she spoke of the need for the

“moderate,” “silent majority” of people to speak out against the extreme rhetoric of their

UN representatives.45

A 1983 article for Regulation—the Cato Institute’s journal—revealed the great degree to which Kirkpatrick viewed the Third World representatives at the UN as analogous to New Left advocates in the United States. Addressing the efforts of UN

43 Gerson, 189-190. 44 Collier, 126-127. 45 “A conversation with Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick,” The Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital Archives, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., 1982, accessed on 11/13/2014, http://hdl.handle.net/10822/552710.

279 agencies to regulate the activities of multinational corporations, she complained of an

“ideological distortion” wherein representatives from the G-77 engaged in “class warfare” against the United States. Citing such examples as the World Health

Organization’s adoption of an infant formula code in response to the Nestle boycott,

Kirkpatrick charged that an elitist class of UN bureaucrats were exploiting real health concerns to run roughshod over European and American companies. “Too often,” she believed, UN regulators were “caught up in a very crude kind of anticapitalist ideology that is more concerned with restricting and discrediting multinational/transnational corporations.” This new breed of UN bureaucrat, she believed, represented the expansion of the “new class” to the international realm. She concluded, “[A]ll of us need protection against the arrogance of the new international ‘new class.’”46

Jeane Kirkpatrick’s impression of the United Nations was colored both by her reliance on racially based metaphors of criminality on the part of Global South delegates, and by her close association of the UN bureaucrats with her adversaries in the New Left.

She viewed her job as defending the United States combatants against a numerically superior enemy. She went on the offensive, bullying and cajoling her opponents, with some noted success. She was the Reagan administrations unapologetic, forceful public defender. But she made herself a lightning rod for criticism from American progressives, and her brash, aggressive stance on foreign policy alienated important members of the administration such as George Shultz. Both domestic criticism of her role in U.S. foreign policy, and Shultz’s determination to limit her influence in the administration would

46 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Global Paternalism: The UN and the New International Regulatory Order,” Regulation, January/February 1983, 17-22.

280 come to a head as she, Casey, and Rustin pushed for American intervention in Central

America.

Reasserting American Power in El Salvador and Nicaragua

That Central America would be ground zero in the Reagan administration’s offensive in the Global South owed partially to circumstance. The Reagan administration entered office in 1981 with America’s rightwing allies in the region either deposed or under attack from the left. In Nicaragua, the leftist Sandinistas had overthrown the U.S. ally Anastasio Somoza in 1979. In El Salvador, leftist guerrillas united under the

“National Liberation Front” (FMLN) were engaged in a civil war with the nation’s rightwing junta. These conflicts created the opportunity for the U.S. to display its renewed resolve, but it was the region’s relative obscurity in geopolitics that made it attractive to the hawks in the Republican administration. Because the Soviets, bogged down in their own war in Afghanistan, would not provide the kind of support in Central

America that it had in Vietnam, Reagan did not have to worry about U.S. involvement spiraling into another protracted war. The United States could exert its will there cheaply, and with almost no loss of American lives. Secretary of State Alexander Haig made this point clear to Reagan early into his term, assuring him, “Mr. President, this is one you can win.”47

Eugene Rostow remained mostly absent from the discussions over U.S. aid to

Central America. He lacked a personal connection to the region and was not a member of the National Security Council and thus had no say in the setting of foreign policy in the region. His absence, however, mattered. Part of the ACDA’s job was to monitor the

47 Quoted in Grandin, 72.

281 transfer of arms abroad, certifying that sales and transfers were legal. The ACDA, as one scholar has noted, was intended as a “civilian counterweight” to the military, meant to act as a brake on the spread of arms.48

During Rostow’s tenure at the ACDA, however, the amount of American weapons going to the Global South ballooned. According to the Congressional Research Service, During

Rostow’s one full year of leadership at the ACDA in 1982, U.S. arms transfers to the

“Third World,” reached a record high at $15.3 billion.49 In Latin America, arms transfers included the sale of F16’s to Venezuela, and millions of dollars in military aid to El

Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In short, Eugene Rostow’s contribution to the administration’s offensive in Latin America was to stay out of the way.50

But what would American interventionism in Latin America look like? Haig urged the president to “go to the source” of communism in the region and blockade Cuba.

Other officials, however, recognized that while the Soviets would not go out of their way to support leftists in Central America, Cuba was a different matter. William Casey and

Jeane Kirkpatrick had, if not a better idea, at least a more practical one. At a meeting of the National Security Planning Group in early March of 1981, Casey recommended that the United States allocate $19 million in support of anti-Communist guerrillas in

Nicaragua. Reagan signed off on the plan on March 9. Casey would subsequently oversee the arming and aiding of the Contra forces, and serve as the point person between the

48 Jesús Velasco Nevado, Neoconservatives in U.S. Foreign Policy under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: Voices behind the Throne (Washington, D.C. : Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 141. 49 Richard F. Grimmett, “Trends in conventional Arms Transfers to the Third World by Major Supplier, 1976-1983,” Congressional Research Service, the Library of Congress, 7 May 1984, accessed 3 July 2014, http://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/index.html. 50 Dan Morgan, “U.S. Policy on Weapons Sales In Third World Is Loosening: Reagan Administration Easing Arms Sales Policy in Third World,” The Washington Post, 1 August 1982, A1.

282 administration and Congress on the Nicaragua operation.51 Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, urged

Reagan to restore the military aid to El Salvador suspended by the Carter administration.

She also recommended abandoning Carter’s human rights policy with one that would “be more effective.” By “effective” Kirkpatrick meant a policy that would refrain from criticizing government’s strategy of facing “social conflict and chronic problems with maintaining order,” as was the case in El Salvador. In other words, so long as the civil war continued, the United States should ignore human rights abuses on the part of the regime.52

Kirkpatrick had written her recommendation for how the Reagan administration should approach human rights in Latin America just after the election. Events soon put her to the test. On December 2, 1980 members of the El Salvadoran military kidnapped, raped, and murdered three American nuns and one laywoman who had been doing missionary work in the country. Commenting on the killings to the Tampa Tribune that same month, Kirkpatrick coldly remarked, “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists…on behalf of the Frente [FMLN].” Haig echoed Kirkpatrick’s point three months in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee when he conjectured that “the vehicle the nuns were riding in” when the military stopped them

“may have tried to run a roadblock.” In this way, the administration attempted to shift the blame for their deaths from the El Salvadoran military to the nuns themselves by tying them to the leftist forces. 53

51 Persico, 262-265; Bob Woodward, Veil: the secret wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 117. 52 Kirkpatrick, “United States and Latin America: Urgent, Unnecessary Problems,” , i, 13, folder 5, box 292, The William J. Casey Papers, the Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto, CA (Hereafter WJC Papers). 53Cynthia Arnson, Crossroads: Congress, the President, and Central America, 1976-1993 (Penn State Press, 1993), 62-63.

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Both comments were roundly criticized in the press and in Congress, but did not prevent the administration from instituting a new policy of support for the El Salvadoran government. U.S. financial aid to the regime increased fivefold between February and

March of 1981, including $35 million in military aid. The administration also a dispatched military advisors to the country in order to help train El Salvadoran troops.

The logic the administration used to justify its support for El Salvador came directly from

Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” The State Department issued a

White Paper in February asserting that the FMLN were agents of the Soviet Union and

Cuba. The government, in contrast, was depicted as a moderate, reform minded entity gaining in popular support among the people. “All this,” historian David Schmitz has argued, “was designed to make it look as if the insurgency was an illegitimate, outside invasion of El Salvador,” with the government playing the role of indigenous, and thus legitimate, authoritarian ruler.54

The Democratically controlled Congress, however, was not so eager to embrace the El Salvadoran government. While the administration insisted that El Salvador’s rightwing government was a moderate, democratizing regime fighting a Soviet and

Cuban-led insurgency in the countryside, Democrats countered that the regime was a brutal dictatorship that used death squads to silence dissent. In response to the murder of

American nuns and other atrocities, Congress rejected over 60 percent of Reagan’s aid requests for the nation. 55 Of equal importance, in May 1981 Congress passed a measure mandating that the administration “certify” every six months that the El Salvadoran

54 David F. Schmitz, The United States and Rightwing Dictatorships, 1965-1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 202-216, quote on 205. 55 William M. LeoGrande, Our own backyard: the United States in Central America, 1977-1992 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 149-170; Schmitz, 202-216.

284 government was making progress on human rights in order to maintain aid. There were deep flaws in the law. The President, not Congress, determined whether “progress” had been made, and Congress had no authority to override his decision. Still, the certification measure forced the Reagan administration to publicly justify its policy in El Salvador, or face the loss of funding.56

The El Salvadoran elections scheduled for March of 1982 became a litmus test on

Reagan’s policy towards El Salvador. The Reagan administration intended the election to prove to Americans that the party in power—the Christian Democrats—enjoyed the support of the majority of Salvadorans. The U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador anticipated,

“The elections [would] indicate very clearly that the vast majority of the people of this country [were] in favor of something different than these five or ten or fifteen thousand misguided individuals that [were] trying to destroy the country.”57 The elections came at a critical moment. In December 1981, over 700 villagers at El Mozote were massacred by

U.S. trained El Salvadoran troops, one month before the administration was set to certify that progress had been made on human rights. This event did not stop Reagan from issuing just such certification. The administration dismissed the event by claiming the villagers had died in a “firefight,” not a “massacre.”58 The administration needed something positive, however, to hang their hats on. The election of 1982 was it.

It was during the election that Bayard Rustin entered the debate surrounding U.S. aid to El Salvador. As he had in Rhodesia during the 1970s, Rustin joined Freedom

56 Arnson, 69-71. 57 Quoted in LeoGrande, 158. 58A decade later, investigators would exhume several mass graves at El Mozote that proved a massacre had taken place. In one grave site alone, they found the skeletal remains of 131 children. Many of the dead had been shot by U.S. made M-16 rifles. Arnson, 89-90.

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House to travel to the Central American nation in order to observe the elections.

Accompanying Rustin on the mission were Freedom House’s Executive Director Leonard

Sussman, Freedom House scholars Bruce McColm and Raymond Castil, and human rights advocate Frances Grant. The team met with government officials, including

President Jose Napoleon Duarte, and election candidates. On the day of the election,

March 28, they visited polling stations in the cities of La Libertad, Santa Anna, and San

Miguel. The State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and

Humanitarian Affairs Elliott Abrams personally saw to it that the El Salvadoran government provided the observers with security and transportation.59

The Freedom House team concluded that the election was a tremendous success.

85 percent of eligible voters took part in the election. The ruling Christian Democratic

Party won a plebiscite of the votes. The official Freedom House report on the election declared, “The sizeable turnout demonstrated the determination of the Salvadoran voters to fulfill their civic obligation even in the face of possible danger.”60 Rustin personally applauded the election, writing that high voter turnout should serve as “a shining example” for Americans, especially the “fifty percent of eligible voters who did not vote in the 1980 presidential election.”61 The results seemed to confirm the Reagan administration’s support for the Salvadoran government.

The Freedom House observation report became a key document in the administration’s quest to prove that the El Salvadoran government was reforming. The president’s July 1982 certification of human rights progress in the country included the

59 Elliott Abrams to Leonard Sussman, 12 March 1982, folder 14, box 21, BRP. 60 “Report of the Freedom House Mission to Observe the Election in El Salvador, 28 March 1982,” folder 14, box 21, BRP. 61 Bayard Rustin, “El Salvador’s Elections,” APRI News Release, 7 April 1982, folder 2, box 43, BRP.

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Freedom House report praising the March elections. The New York Times likewise cited the observer mission’s rejection of the criticisms leveled at the election as “neither based on any substantive evidence nor compelling in its argumentation.”62 With such support, the Reagan administration was able to keep aid flowing to El Salvador, albeit at a diminished rate. Congress ultimately froze foreign aid to the El Salvadoran government at 1981 levels: $26 million in military aid, $40 million in economic aid.63

The high voter turnout and ruling party’s victory, however, belied serious issues with the election that fatally undermined its credibility. First, none of the center left or far left parties participated in the election. These groups feared that if they did so they would be executed by government troops—as had happened several times in 1980. Second, while the Christian Democrats won a plebiscite of the votes, the far-right National

Republican Alliance party (ARENA) would have taken control of the government if not for American intervention. The ARENA party benefitted from the financial support of El

Salvador’s oligarchy. They also relied on the network of death squads from which the group’s leaders were drawn to form the party’s infrastructure. They ran on the promise to crush the guerrillas and the Christian Democrats. In short, the ARENA party was decidedly not a group the Reagan administration could claim as a moderate, democratizing force. But following the election ARENA members formed a coalition government with other rightwing parties and made plans to declare their leader—former death squad leader Roberto D’Aubisson—president. The only thing that prevented

D’Aubisson from assuming the presidency was the Reagan administration’s warning that

62 Presidential Certifications on Conditions in El Salvador, Hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 3 August 1982; Bernard Weinraub, “Is El Salvador Making Progress on Human Rights?” New York Times, 24 July 1982, 2. 63 Schmitz, 213.

287 an ARENA victory threatened all U.S. aid to El Salvador.64 None of this made it into the

Freedom House report, however, and the administration continued to provide financial aid to the regime throughout the 1980s. For a nation of less than five million people, the administration ultimately provided $6 billion in total aid, trailing only Israel and Egypt as the largest recipients of U.S. aid.65

While the war in El Salvador would continue to raise tensions between the administration and Congress, increasingly after 1982 it was Nicaragua that dominated the public discussions about U.S. policy in Central America. There, the Reagan administration embarked on a covert operation to train and fund Nicaraguan dissidents in

Honduras to engage in guerrilla warfare against the Sandinista government. This was ultimately what the Contras ended up doing, but it was not how the Reagan administration initially sold the funding operation to Congress. They claimed that arms from the Sandinista government were being illegally smuggled from Nicaragua into the hands of El Salvadoran rebels. Congress had agreed to allocate funds for the Contras on the grounds that the group would interdict the transfer of weapons between the two nations, not to engage in open warfare with Nicaragua.

Yet warfare was exactly what the Contras were engaged in. Contra guerrillas based in Honduras routinely crossed the border into Nicaragua, striking at Sandinista soldiers, blowing up bridges, and attacking villages. Ironic for a “covert” operation, all of this played out on the front pages of America newspapers.66 At the head of the Contra

64 LeoGrande, 159-165. 65 Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 238. 66 See for example Stephen Kinzer, “Nicaragua Rebels said to Step Up Combat Activity,” New York Times, 26 August 1983, A1.

288 program was William Casey. For Casey, arming the Contras became something like an obsession. The program reminded him of his days in the OSS parachuting secret agents into Germany to disrupt Nazi industry. He began to refer to the group as “freedom fighters” in his public addresses, a phrase quickly adopted by the president. Under

American patronage, the Contras grew from a modest force of 500 into a 10,000 man army by the spring of 1983. 67

The growth of the Contras and reports of their guerrilla activities in Nicaragua severely worried members of Congress fearful of another Vietnam War. Even sympathetic members of Congress began to conclude that the administration, and especially Casey, was purposely misleading them on Nicaragua. After a fact-finding mission to El Salvador in the spring of 1983, Daniel Patrick Moynihan came away convinced that “the [C]ontras hadn’t interdicted a shotgun. That’s when I began to think that the administration’s real intention was to overthrow the Sandinista regime.”68 That

October, House Democrats, led by Massachusetts Democrat Edward Boland passed a measure banning all aid to the Contras by a vote of 227 to 194. Only the intervention of

Republican Barry Goldwater kept the measure from passing in the Senate. The Contras would be granted an additional $24 million in support in 1984. Still, the Congressional message to the administration was clear. They would not tolerate American aid for regime change in Nicaragua. Ultimately, Casey would circumvent Congress, a move that would lead directly towards the Iran-Contra Scandal.

Throughout the life of the Contra program, Kirkpatrick was Casey’s closest ally in the administration. The two had known each other a little prior to the 1980 election,

67 Persico, 361. 68 Quoted in Persico, 336.

289 but their similar points of view and mutual presence on the National Security Council turned the two into friends. Casey even felt comfortable enough to share with Kirkpatrick his misgivings about Reagan’s stewardship of foreign policy. “I just wish the guy would get a deeper handle on things,” he confided to her at a cocktail party. By October of 1983, the two had grown so close that when William Clark vacated the position of National

Security Advisor, Casey decided to push Kirkpatrick for the job. At a meeting of the

National Security Policy Group, Casey argued that as NSC advisor Kirkpatrick would

“galvanize conservatives,” and “give [the administration] an articulate public spokeswoman.”69 Opposing her nomination was George Shultz. He and Kirkpatrick had never warmed to one another. He saw her as too conservative and too hawkish, while he wanted to turn the Reagan foreign policy towards a more moderate stance and reconciliation with the Soviets. She saw him as a rival and refused, according to her aides, to develop any kind of working relationship with him. Dead set against her taking a more prominent position in the administration, Shultz threatened to resign if Reagan named her to the post. As a result, Casey’s efforts failed, and Bud McFarlane was chosen as National Security Advisor.70

Despite never receiving a top-level position in the administration, Kirkpatrick nevertheless became one of the administration’s most important spokespersons for its

Central American policies. She wrote articles for the Washington Post, and appeared on news programs such as Face the Nation to promote support for the Contras as

“democratic loving” freedom fighters combating Soviet imperialism. She referred publically to Contra leader Enrique Bermudez as a “great man.” Bermudez returned the

69 Ibid, 349-351. 70 Collier, 159-162.

290 compliment by naming a unit within the Contra army “the Jeane Kirkpatrick Brigade.”71

While her unapologetic defense of the administration’s foreign policy lionized her among conservatives—Casey spoke of running her for president—it further alienated her from the Democratic Party and liberals.

She became a popular target for protest. In a series of actions that evoked the

1960s, student and faculty protesters harangued Kirkpatrick across American college campuses. On February 2, 1983, hundreds of student protesters at the University of

California, Berkeley, interrupted a speech by Kirkpatrick, briefly forcing her from the stage. She eventually returned and read her speech over the shouts of the students, but cancelled a lecture she had intended to give the next day. When Kirkpatrick and other conservative commentators descried the action as an attack on free speech, the students responded by accusing Kirkpatrick herself of complicity in efforts to curtail freedom:

“We cannot help but find it somewhat inconsistent that you [Kirkpatrick] feel such great concern for your own freedom of speech while blithely accepting ... so much misery and lack of freedom throughout the world.”72 Similar protests took place at the University of

Minnesota, and the mere threat of a protest led Kirkpatrick to cancel a planned commencement address at Smith College. The faculty at her alma mater, Barnard, voted to oppose Barnard’s plan to award Kirkpatrick with the Medal of Distinction at its commencement address in May of 1983. Explaining the faculty’s decision, Chemistry professor Barry Jacobson said, “We feel that we cannot separate her achievement from

71 Ibid, 155. Kirkpatrick remained an unequivocal champion of the Contras for the rest of her life, keeping a Contra battle standard “on proud and provocative view in her office at AEI.” 72 Lance Morrow, “Holding the Speaker Hostage,” Time, 11 April 1983, 102-103.

291 her politics. To give her an award is to accept her policies.” Kirkpatrick ultimately decided not to accept the award.73

The vehemence of the public protests against her further alienated Kirkpatrick from the Democratic Party. So too did the party’s intense criticism of Reagan’s Central

American policy. The Democratic controlled Congress, for example, had limited the administration’s funding of the Nicaraguan Contras via the Boland Amendment, which prohibited military support “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of

Nicaragua,” though humanitarian support was allowed.74 The 1984 Democratic Party

Platform explicitly rejected Kirkpatrick’s famed article, stating that it was “useless” to draw “distinctions between ‘totalitarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ regimes.” The DNC platform devoted over two thousand words to denouncing Reagan’s actions in Central America declaring, “Since [Reagan] took office, the region has become much more unstable; the hemisphere is much more hostile to us; and the poverty is much deeper.”75 While

Kirkpatrick’s support for a Democratic candidate in 1984 was already a long-shot, the nomination of Carter’s former Vice President, Walter Mondale, assured that she would once again back Ronald Reagan.

Kirkpatrick’s decade long journey away from the Democratic Party came to completion in August of 1984 at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas.

She had never before attended a Republican convention, but now she had been asked to speak at one. Allotted three minutes to discuss U.S. foreign policy, she and her aides

73 Suzanne Daley, “Barnard Award for Mrs. Kirkpatrick Fought,” New York Times, 1 May 1983, A48; Collier, 156. 74 Grandin, 136; as we will discuss later in this chapter, the Boland amendment helped lead to the Iran- Contra scandal. 75 Democratic Party Platforms: "Democratic Party Platform of 1984," July 16, 1984, Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed on 16 April 2015, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29608.

292 produced a twenty-minute speech. In a now classic speech, she heaped opprobrium on the

Democrats, dismissing their foreign policy as part of a “blame America first” tendency visible within American liberalism since the Vietnam War. Her speech provided defiant rejection of New Left critiques of U.S. foreign policy as immoral:

They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do - they didn't blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians - they blamed the United States instead.

But then, somehow, they always blame America first.

When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the "blame America first crowd" didn't blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.

But then, they always blame America first.

The American people know better.

They know that Ronald Reagan and the United States didn't cause Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, or the repression in Poland, or the brutal new offensives in Afghanistan, or the destruction of the Korean airliner, or the new attacks on religious and ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, or the jamming of western broadcasts, or the denial of Jewish emigration, or the brutal imprisonment of Anatoly Shcharansky and Ida Nudel, or the obscene treatment of Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, or the re- Stalinization of the Soviet Union.

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The American people know that it's dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems that we did not cause.

They understand just as the distinguished French writer, Jean Francois Revel, understands the dangers of endless self-criticism and self- denigration.76

As she repeated the line, “But then, they always blame America first,” the crowd began to chant along with her. The speech evoked a similar sense of victimhood to

Kirkpatrick’s attitude towards the United Nations. In both instances, conservatives believed, leftists ignored many abuses of the Soviet Union and “Third World” revolutionaries, and unfairly blamed the United States for the world’s many evils.

She added to this feeling of victimization a warning that such “self-denigration” endangered national security as it led Americans to doubt the rightness of their global mission.

Kirkpatrick’s “Blame America First” speech was her greatest public triumph. The phrase has endured as conservative shorthand to dismiss liberal criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. The rapturous applause that greeted the speech may have gratified Kirkpatrick, who had spent the previous year being booed across college campuses. After years of being denounced and rejected by the left, she had found acceptance and celebration on the right. While Kirkpatrick would officially remain a Democrat for another eight months, the RNC speech signaled the culmination of her decade long transition from Democrat to Republican.

76 Jeane Kirkpatrick “Blame America First,” delivered before the Republican National Convention, Dallas, TX, 20 August 1984, accessed on 16 April 2015, http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/conventions/san.diego/facts/GOP.speeches.past/84.kirkpatrick.s html. Kirkpatrick’s referred to them as “San Francisco Democrats” because that years DNC was held in San Francisco.

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Central America provided the Reagan administration with a “workshop,” in historian Greg Grandin’s words, wherein hardliners could institute militaristic policies with, it was thought, minimal political fallout. From arming and training government troops in El Salvador to constructing an entire army of anticommunist guerrillas in Nicaragua. The imperialists at the center of this project were also at that center of those policies. Rostow made sure that the ACDA did not interfere with increased shipment of arms to the region. Kirkpatrick helped to develop the policies, and defended them in public. Rustin gave U.S. aid to El Salvador his imprimatur as a lifetime member of the peace movement. But William Casey was perhaps the individual most responsible for implementing the administration’s policy in the region. With overt operations politically untenable, it fell to the Central

Intelligence Agency to implement U.S. aid to the Contras. The final section of this chapter delves deeper into Casey’s leadership at the CIA, especially on the scandal he helped to create.

William Casey’s CIA

Whether one viewed him as an “autocratic” Cold Warrior or a dedicated patriot,

William Casey was, by 1986, widely considered “the most influential director of the CIA since Allen Dulles,” according to U.S. News and World Report. During his five-year tenure at the agency, Casey had overseen a massive expansion of the CIA’s budget—to about three billion dollars a year.77 In contrast to previous Directors of Central

Intelligence (DCI) who provided the president with intelligence and carried out his orders but did not set policy, Casey carved a place for himself at the tables where the decisions

77 Robert A. Manning, Steven Emerson, Charles Fenyvesi, “Casey’s CIA: New Clout, New Danger,” U.S. News and World Report, 16 June 1986, 24-31.

295 on foreign policy were made. As had Jeane Kirkpatrick, Casey made the elevation of DCI to a cabinet level position a precondition for his acceptance of the job. He was a member of the National Security Council, and the National Security Planning—limited to himself, the President, the Vice-President, the secretaries of State and Defense, and the National

Security Advisor.78 These positions insured Casey an influential voice in Reagan’s foreign policy. William Casey was, in other words, a vital piece of the “Reagan

Doctrine,” providing the fortitude and the muscle to back up Reagan’s promise to

“rollback” communist forces throughout the Global South.

Central to Casey’s goal of combatting “Third World” revolutionaries was the courting of the American business community. Early into his tenure as DCI in April

1981, Casey addressed members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at the Shoreham

Americana Hotel in Washington D.C. on April 28, 1981. Casey focused his presentation on what he called “the tide of nationalism…running strong in the less-developed countries of the world.” “There is hostility and negativism toward free enterprise,” he warned this audience of businessmen, “There are potential dangers there for American,

European, and even Japanese multinational corporations.” This was not only a thinly- veiled reference to the ever-present fear of expropriation, but also an explicit warning that

American businesses might find themselves the target of terrorists. American victims of terrorism, he informed his audience, who no doubt needed no such reminders, tended to be “businessmen or diplomats,” those who “[were] symbols of western power and wealth.” Casey added to this the danger of cartelization in the Global South. The United

States was in danger of losing access to both petroleum and non-petroleum natural

78 Persico, 227.

296 resources as developing nations transferred “ownership and control of natural resources…from commercial to state control.”79 In such a situation, soliciting private business in the development process was imperative. In a later address, Casey would describe private enterprise as America’s “greatest asset in the Third World,” capable of outspending the Soviets in economic aid.80

Throughout his tenure at the CIA, Casey would do much to integrate the worlds of business and covert warfare. Historian Andrew Friedman has written of the resurgence of covert warfare under Casey as functioning “under a businesslike corporate veneer.”

Aid for the contras was funneled through dummy corporations and private contractors to

Contra leaders who were themselves businessmen. In this sense, the CIA’s war in Central

America is best seen as a complement to Reagan’s global economic policy.

“Empowering” the military elite in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Friedman explains, was as vital to the “development” process as was economic restructuring.81

Among Casey’s favorite means of soliciting the support of businessmen was to give them privileged access to the nation’s spy center. He routinely invited businessmen, and they were almost all men, to tour CIA headquarters. According to Persico, between

1984 and 1985 alone more than three hundred business executives visited Langley.

There, Casey solicited not just their political support for the intelligence community, but their actual aid in conducting intelligence work. “Corporate executives and experts returning from overseas trips,” he informed his audiences, “have been invaluable not only

79 Remarks of William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, At the International General Session of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Shoreham Americana Hotel, Washington, D.C., 28 April 1981, folder 5, box 303, WJC Papers. 80 William Casey, “Regroup to Check the Soviet Thrust,” Wall Street Journal, 22 April 1983, 28. 81 Friedman, 235-238.

297 in providing information but in giving us leads to people willing to make available information which may be critical to our national interests.” What Casey wanted from

American business was information. What products were foreign nations buying? What did business representative see on their trips abroad? Whom did they meet with? Casey assured business executives, “You have my personal promise of confidentiality.”82

Casey’s vision for a renewed corporate-CIA alliance went beyond Central America.

He greatly expanded the agency’s use of “Non-Official Cover” (NOC) agents abroad.

Most CIA agents operating abroad enjoyed “official cover,” jobs with the State

Department that afforded them diplomatic immunity if discovered. NOCs (pronounced knock), were stationed as employees with American businesses and afforded absolutely no protection if discovered operating abroad. As such, the NOC program remains among the CIA’s most secretive operations. While NOCs had existed since the agency’s founding, their numbers had dwindled as the CIA came under attack from liberals in the

1970s. Casey reversed this trend, tripling the number of NOC agents in the CIA’s employ by 1986. These men and women gathered information, and recruited foreigners as CIA informants. The NOC program was perhaps Casey’s most enduring, and least publicly- known, legacy as DCI. In 2003, one NOC agent made international headlines when a member of the Bush administration leaked her name to a Washington Post reporter.

Valerie Plame had been recruited into the CIA in 1985, just as Casey was ramping up the

NOC program. As Robert Dreyfuss, the reporter for Mother Jones who wrote on the

82 Quoted in Persico, 456.

298 activities of the NOC program, wrote in 1995, “William Casey's ghost haunts the Central

Intelligence Agency.”83

While the NOC program remained largely hidden from public scrutiny, the CIA’s covert war in Nicaragua played out on the front pages of American newspapers. Casey hated to reveal anything about the operation, but the law required him to keep both House and Senate Intelligence Committees apprised of CIA activities. Casey downplayed the

CIA’s role in the Contra operation, and stuck closely to the administration’s claim that it was not seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government. CIA operatives advised and trained Contra forces, he claimed, but did not engage in any covert activities themselves.

Although Democratic members of Congress expressed skepticism towards Casey’s claims, the administration maintained enough support to keep the program going through

1983.

In March of 1984, however, the CIA would embark on a series of activities that would finally lead Congress to cut off aid entirely to the Contras and set the stage for the

Iran-Contra affair. The CIA began to mine Nicaragua’s harbors. From a “mother ship” manned by CIA agents stationed in international waters, teams of “specially trained

Latinos” deployed mines into the harbors of El Bluff, Corinto, and Puerto Sandino via cigarette boats. Casey, as required by the law, had informed the Senate Intelligence

Committee of the mining operation back in September of 1983, but he had tucked his 25- word reference to the action within a laundry list of activities being undertaken by the

Contras. Nowhere did he admit that it was the CIA itself mining the harbors.84 When

83 Ibid, 456; Robert Dreyfuss, “The CIA Crosses Over,” Mother Jones, January/February 1995, 38; on Valerie Plame see her memoir Plame, Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent was Betrayed by Her Own Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). 84 Persico, 373.

299 knowledge of the CIA’s role in the mining operation broke even Casey’s allies in the

Senate were incensed. Conservative Republican Barry Goldwater wrote Casey an open letter, published by the press, expressing his outrage at being misled by the DCI. “It gets down to one, little, simple phrase,” he wrote to Casey, “I am pissed off!”85 Another

Republican Senator on Intelligence Committee, David Durenburger remarked to Time,

“There is no use in our meeting with Bill Casey. None of us believe him.” Casey’s mastery of obfuscation had lost him the confidence of the Senate. On October 12, 1984, both houses of Congress passed the second Boland amendment barring all U.S. aid to the

Contras. The measure was attached to the annual appropriations bill to fund the government, so Reagan had no choice but to sign it into law. The Contra program, it seemed, was dead.

Except William Casey was not willing to let it go. Even before passage of the

Boland Amendment, Casey had begun planning for alternate sources of aid from third party countries. During the spring and summer of 1984, he approached Israel about securing arms captured from the PLO in Lebanon, South Africa for arms taken from its war with Angola. He arranged for Saudi Arabia to provide the Contras with one million dollars a month in aid. He also convinced Israel to provide them with weapons seized from the PLO during the Lebanon War. His plan had much in common with Casey’s previous attempts at the Export-Import Bank to solicit funds for development projects in the Global South from other nations. If it could work for economic development, why not for rolling back communism? Casey raised the issue of third party support for the Contras to the president and other leading cabinet members at a June meeting of the NSPG.

85 “Goldwater Writes CIA Director Scorching Letter,” Washington Post, 11 April 1984, A17.

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Secretary of State Shultz was skeptical of the idea, remarking “You can’t do indirectly what you can’t do directly.” But Casey won the president’s approval, provided he obtain a legal opinion from the attorney general supporting the legality of the operation.86

Thus, when Reagan signed the Boland Amendment into law in the autumn of

1984, he did so knowing that his DCI had found alternative sources of funding for the

Contras. There was one problem, however. The Boland amendment clearly forbade the

CIA or any other government agency from aiding the Contras. Who would supply the rebels with their funds and weapons? Who would continue to solicit other nations, and private businesses, for support? Casey thought he had the solution. He saw a loophole in the Boland Amendment through which to squeeze the funds for the Contras. The law banned aid from “any other department, agency, or entity” within the U.S. government.

But what about a council? The National Security Council was technically an advisory board for the president. Unlike the CIA, the NSC did not have to report its activities to

Congress, insuring that the contra operation could go through the NSC without alerting the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. Of course, one could have easily read

“entity” to include a council, and certainly Congress had not intended to leave any wiggle room through which the administration could squeeze Contra funding. Yet Casey had found a plausible, to his mind anyway, workaround of the Boland amendment.87

Casey even had a man in mind for the job: a Marine Lieutenant Colonel named

Oliver North currently assigned to the National Security Council. The two men had

86 Persico, 399-401. Persico’s account is supported by released CIA documents see, Supplemental Assistance to Nicaragua Program, Secret, Memorandum Excised Copy, 27 March 1984, collection Iran- Contra Affair, Digital National Security Archive; Nicaragua, Memo for the record on meeting with William Casey, William French Smith and others regarding third-country support for contra, secret, memorandum, 26 June 1984, collection Iran-Contra Affair, Digital National Security Archive. 87 Persico, 398.

301 gotten to know each other over the previous few years because their offices were on the same floor. Casey kept an office on the third floor of the Executive Office Building across the street from the White House Oliver North’s office was just down the hall.

Thirty years Casey’s junior, North began to visit the DCI for advice. His responsibilities at the NSC included Latin America. Casey saw in North an energetic, true believer who could be counted on to follow orders. His proximity to Casey also meant that the elder spymaster could keep a close eye on North, who had no experience in covert operations.

For example, when North needed to set up a clandestine bank account to store the Contra funds, Casey showed him how to do it. North and the NSC gave the CIA plausible deniability with the assurance that he would be kept well informed of the NSC operation.

88 Through him, money and arms continued to flow to the Contras, with the knowledge of the president, and with Casey’s offering sage advice when necessary.

At the same time that the NSC was funneling aid from foreign governments and private donations to the Contras in Central America, administration officials, in particular

Casey and NSC advisor Robert McFarlane, were hatching a plan to secure the release of seven American hostages currently being held by Hezbollah. Among the hostages was the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, who had been kidnapped in March of

1984. The plan was as follows: using Israel and an Iranian arms dealer named Manucher

Ghorbanifar as intermediaries, the United States would sell anti-tank missiles to Iranian

“moderates” who would then put pressure on Hezbollah to release the hostages. Locked in a brutal war with Iraq, Iran badly needed the weapons. McFarlane received the

88 Ibid, 397; for a recent, thorough account of the Iran-Contra scandal see Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence, KS: The University of Kansas Press, 2014), 47.

302 president’s approval for the operation in July of 1985. What would make this operation so reprehensible to the American public when it became known in 1986 was that the

Reagan administration had spent so much time condemning Iran as a terrorist state. At the very moment the NSC was planning to sell weapons to Iran, Reagan described

Kohmeni’s regime as “a new, international version of Murder Incorporated…Let me make it plain,” he avowed, “America will never make concessions to terrorists.” A month later the first arms shipments arrived in Iran.89

Given that the arms for hostages program was run through the NSC, given the clandestine nature of the operation, and given that Oliver North’s responsibilities included antiterrorism, it was not surprising that he eventually took a leading role in the dealings with Iran. In January 1986, the president authorized a modification of the plan.

Rather than Israel delivering the weapons, and then being restocked by the United States, the Americans would take over direct control of the sale of weapons to Iran. North was now in charge, with Casey’s absolute support. It is unclear from the record who first thought of diverting profits from the sale to the ongoing contra operation. North claimed it was Ghorbanifar or possibly an Israeli agent, but in December 1985 North had already determined to use proceeds from a sale of missiles to fund the Contras. While he denied having been the originator of the plan, North testified that he thought it a “neat idea.”

Here then was the genesis of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Diverting profits from one

89 Byrne, 59-71. The arms for hostages program was a complete disaster. With few intelligence assets inside Iran, the CIA had no idea who the “moderates” that were supposedly receiving these weapons included. The CIA was dependent on Ghorbanifar for information. Moreover, the administration vastly overestimated the Iranian government’s influence over Hezbollah. The initial delivery of weapons in August produced no hostages. After a second shipment of weapons in September, hostage takers released Reverend Benjamin Weir—held since May 8, 1984—near the U.S. embassy in Beirut, but CIA agent William Buckley was never released. He had died while being tortured, probably before the first arms shipment had occurred. See Byrne, 72-75.

303 transaction to another operation or department was illegal. All excess funds were to be handed over to the Treasury. Once North took money from the hostages deal and spent it on the Contras, he unequivocally violated federal law.90

The story broke in the fall of 1986. Iranian officials and radicals within Hezbollah leaked information on the U.S.-Iran dealings to the press. The Lebanese paper Ash-Shiraa published a report on the hostage swap deal on November 3, 1986. From there, it became an international scandal. At the same time, the contra operation was also coming undone.

The Sandinistas downed a plane carrying weapons intended for the Contras in October

1986. The lone survivor of the crash, American Eugene H. Hasenfus, implicated the CIA in the operation. The subsequent investigation by the Justice Department uncovered the connection between the two separate scandals, and the whole façade crumbled.91 North testified, to the nation’s rapt attention, before a joint congressional committee in July

1987, where he pinned responsibility for the Iran-Contra scandal on the now deceased

William Casey. He even accused Casey of ordering him to destroy documents relating to the operation when it went public in November.92 In return for his testimony, North avoided prison both for the diversion of funds and for lying to Congress when he was initially interviewed.

Did Casey know about the diversion of funds from the Iran operation to the campaign in Nicaragua? It is likely, but impossible to say with certainty. Ultimately, the question seems a minor one when stacked up against what Casey did know and what he did do. He masterminded, with Reagan’s approval, a plan to keep the Contras funded and

90 Ibid, 157, 163-164. 91 Ibid, 251-252. 92 Bob Woodward, “Casey Depicted as Overseer,” Washington Post, 9 July 1987, A1.

304 to keep Congress in the dark. This violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Boland

Amendment and the wishes of the majority of the American people. He knew, as did

Reagan, about the arms for hostages deal, and gave it his enthusiastic support. In all of this, he was motivated by a virulent anticommunism, yes, but also by a vision for a future global economy predicated on the free market that he had backed since his days in the

Nixon and Ford administrations. He foresaw the executive branch calling upon resources from other nations and private companies or individuals to fund and implement policies that the U.S. Congress could not, or would not, support. His death saved Casey from having to answer to the charge that he did not believe the American people had a right to decide their own foreign policy.

Conclusion

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 allowed Eugene Rostow, William Casey,

Bayard Rustin, and Jeane Kirkpatrick to take the offensive in their war against the Global

South. While their power was limited—by a Congress opposed to intervention, by a public wary of another Vietnam War, and by moderates within the administration skeptical that force was the solution to all problems—they nevertheless exerted tremendous influence over U.S. foreign policy. Having felt themselves under attack by

“Third World” forces during the previous decade, they went on the offensive in the

1980s. They defended Israel’s aggressive actions in Iraq, its annexation of the Golan

Heights, and its destruction of the PLO in Lebanon, even as those same actions outraged world opinion and alienated several members of the administration. Jeane Kirkpatrick threatened and cajoled Global South delegates in the UN, while William Casey sold

American business on the importance of intelligence. They were crucial to the planning,

305 implementing, and publicly defending the administration’s interventions in Central

America. Through all of this, they maintained a righteous, defensive, unapologetic tone that has become the hallmark of foreign policy hawks. When we think of Reagan’s foreign relations in the Global South, it is their policies we remember, the policies of unequivocal support for rightwing forces no matter the wishes of Congress or the

American people.

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Epilogue

For the four individuals of this study, the 1980s marked at once the peak, and the end of their influence over foreign policy. Both William Casey and Bayard Rustin would die before decade’s end. Eugene Rostow and Jeane Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, faced significant opposition that forced them out of the Reagan administration. Afterward, they would recede from the national spotlight as the United States once again reached a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. As the Cold War came to an end at the beginning of the 1990s, however, the policies they had fought for in the 1970s and 1980s would define U.S. foreign relations in the new era.

William Casey did not live to see the end of the Cold War, and the controversy surrounding his actions in the Reagan administration followed him literally to the grave.

Even during funeral mass at St. Mary’s Church in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island, he was not immune from criticism. Bishop John McGann reserved time in his homily to preach against the administration’s Central American policy. There, before Casey’s wife and children, with President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady sitting in the first pew, and with various cabinet members, scattered throughout the church, the bishop condemned

“the violence wrought in Central America.” He added, “I cannot conceal nor disguise my fundamental disagreement on this matter with a man I knew and respected.” Later in the service, Jeane Kirkpatrick came to her fallen comrade’s defense, praising Casey in her eulogy for “Supporting the Nicaraguan freedom fighters.”1 What Casey most desired was a global economy transformed to serve the market. He sought a world wherein American

1 Steven V. Roberts, “Contra Controversy Raised at Casey Funeral,” New York Times, 9 May 1987, 1.

307 business could operate freely, moving their manufacturing operations and their capital to where ever profits could be maximized while working in conjunction with the government.

A little over three months after William Casey’s death, Bayard Rustin followed.

He fell ill after returning from a Freedom House observation mission to Haiti in July of

1987. Shortly after returning to New York, Rustin began suffering from abdominal cramps and a fever. A doctor informed him that he had contracted intestinal parasites.

Despite being put on medication, Rustin’s health failed to improve. On August 21 he was checked into Lenox Hill hospital, where doctors determined that his appendix had burst and performed emergency surgery. In the early hours of August 24, 1987, Rustin suffered a fatal heart attack as he lay recovering from the surgery in the hospital.2

It would be wrong to reduce Rustin’s life in the 1980s to the time he spent promoting aggressive actions against “Third World” forces in the Middle East and

Central America. At home, Rustin remained devoutly committed to expanding equal rights for all. He even took up a new cause in the 1980s, that of gay rights. Prior to the mid-1980s, he had never publicly spoken about his sexuality, even though, according to his biographer, it was “a matter of public record.” At the urging of his partner Walter

Naegle, however, he began to accept invitations to address gay rights groups. In 1985,

Rustin joined a group lobbying New York City’s government to add sexual orientation as a protected category under the city’s human right’s code. The measure had first been proposed in 1971, but the rising rates of violence against gay men in the city—due in part to what historian John D’Emilio called the “deeply rooted antagonisms” revealed by the

2 John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: the Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 492- 493.

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AIDS crisis—gave the measure a new impetus. Rustin provided a prominent, respected face to the revived movement. He wrote personally to Mayor Ed Koch and members of the New York City council. To the African American members of the council, Rustin wrote that their refusal to support the bill was “tantamount to the filibustering that succeeded in blocking the Civil Rights Legislation in the U.S. from 1876 until 1964.”

The city council approved the bill in March of 1986 in no small part due to his efforts.3

The eulogies that followed Bayard Rustin’s death gave testament to the remarkable breadth of causes he had fought for in the lifetime spent as an activist. The

War Resister’s League, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation, Freedom

House, The American Jewish Committee, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, all mourned his passage. The majority of eulogies emphasized Rustin’s leading role in organizing the

1963 March on Washington, and his tireless pursuit of peace and social justice. There was also tension present in the eulogies of those seeking to reconcile his progressivism with his foreign policy views. The playwright Joseph Walker wrote that Rustin would “be remembered by many as an unequivocal apologist for Israel, an unreconstructed Cold

Warrior and a too-close companion of the United Federation of Teachers/AFT and the national AFL-CIO when these bodies were out of step with the aspiration of Black communities and world realities.”4 But Rustin himself never saw his actions as out of step with either the Black community or with world realities. His desire to achieve lasting economic justice at home gave meaning to both his foreign policy conservatism. If to the outside observer the Rustin of 1987 appeared to have little in common with the pacifist

3 Ibid, 488-489. 4 Joe Walker, “Philosopher, Strategist,” New York Amsterdam News, 29 August 1987, 15.

309 civil rights leader of memory, Rustin never ceased believing that he was acting in service of the goals laid out at the 1963 March on Washington.

Eugene Rostow would live to see the new millennium, but his time in the national spotlight came to an early end. After less than two years on the job, Eugene Rostow was fired from the ACDA in January of 1983. A number of factors combined in the lead up to his dismissal. First were his efforts on behalf of Israel, which alienated Secretary of

Defense Caspar Weinberger. Rostow also got into conflicts with Congress over his choice of personnel. Conservative Senator Jesse Helms and Rostow had been at odds since Rostow’s nomination to the post—Helms had wanted Lt. General Edward Rowny for the job and was the only member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee to vote against Rostow’s nomination.5 Rostow’s decision to name two veteran diplomats, Robert

Grey and Norman Terrell, for deputy positions at the arms control agency led to a protracted confrontation with Helms. The fight lasted from March 1982 through the New

Year. Helms and his coterie of conservative Republicans threatened to filibuster

Rostow’s choices. Rather than withdraw either man from consideration, Rostow made their confirmation a matter of principle. That fall, he threatened to quit if Reagan did not come out in support of his nominees—on whom the president had refrained from commenting—a threat that quickly leaked to the press.6

Then, in the fall of 1982 Rostow took the action that precipitated his firing. Ironically, it was his unauthorized agreement to an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

5 Thomas Graham Jr. Disarmament Sketches: Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 105. 6 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Rostow Threatens to Quit,” Washington Post, 20 August 1982, A15; Graham, 106. According to Graham, Rostow was inclined to accept a compromise that would have allowed Grey’s nomination to go through, but Terrell and Grey convinced him not to budge on the issue.

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Specifically, it was an agreement on the presence of Soviet medium range missiles in the

Eastern Bloc targeted at Western Europe. In 1979, NATO had announced a “two-track” policy wherein NATO nations would seek to negotiate the removal of the Soviet missiles until 1983. At that point, NATO forces would deploy their own intermediate range missiles—Pershing II and Tomahawk missiles—in Europe. Rostow chose his old

Committee on the Present Danger co-founder Paul Nitze to head the negotiating team in

Geneva, insuring that any potential deal would have to go through the nation’s most skeptical defense expert.7 On July 16, 1982 Paul Nitze reached an informal agreement in the ongoing negotiations over Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) with Soviet negotiator

Yuli Kvitsinsky as the two men walked together on an estate outside of Geneva.

Subsequently dubbed the “walk in the woods episode,” it ended with the two men agreeing to a deal that would have left each side with some intermediate range missiles deployed. This contradicted Reagan’s stated aim of a “zero-zero” solution wherein both sides removed all intermediate range missiles from European soil. When Nitze and

Rostow presented the proposal to Reagan and his cabinet a few days later, there was some initial interest in the agreement, according to Nitze. Ultimately, however, Reagan decided against pursuing the package for fear that the Soviets would seek to leverage more concessions out of America’s desire to reach an agreement.8

Rostow, however, believed that the administration should have done more to pursue the deal. According to George Shultz, he made his opinions known both within the administration and to his friends in America and Europe. This was, it turned out, the

7 On the history of the ACDA, and Rostow’s tenure there, see Graham, 105-117. 8 Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision, a Memoir (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), 376-389. According to Nitze, the Reagan administration was open to the agreement,

311 last straw for Reagan. The president had “lost confidence” in Rostow. It fell to Shultz to break the bad news. “It was a difficult meeting,” Shultz recalled, “I don’t think he had ever been asked to leave a job before.”9 Although Reagan claimed to regret accepting

Rostow’s resignation, Rostow disclosed to reporters that he had been forced out. “[I]n recent days it has become clear that the president wished to make changes,” he declared in a public statement. “In response to his request, I have tendered my resignation.”10

After less than two years at his post, Rostow was back on the outside looking in.

There remains the question of why Rostow, who spent so much of the 1970s warning Americans of Soviet duplicity, would support an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union that, in part, ended up costing him his job. If one recalls, however, that

Rostow’s efforts of the 1970s were geared towards restoring a belief in American strength and resolve at home and abroad, then his support for Nitze’s plan becomes more understandable. Rostow never cared much for the issue of missiles in Europe because for him there it was a distraction from the American nuclear umbrella. It was a sideshow to the primary task of restoring confidence in America’s strategic superiority. Rostow was supremely confident within the first year of Reagan’s term, the administration had already gone a long way towards achieving this goal. “President Reagan,” he marveled,

“has accomplished a political miracle in putting a cap on the rate of growth of the welfare state…and at the same time getting a big increase in defense spending.”11 With a defense increase and an aggressive stance towards the Global South assured,

9 George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 161. 10 Michael Getler and Walter Pincus, “Reagan Fires Rostow in Shake-Up of Top Arms-Control Aides,” Washington Post, 13 January 1983, A1. 11 Rostow to Ambassador Nuri Birgi, 10 August 1981, folder B, box 1, Accession 1985-M-004, Eugene Victor Rostow Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (Hereafter EVR Papers).

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Rostow could support a limited arms agreement with the Soviet Union because he believed the perception of American power had been restored across the globe.

After leaving office, Rostow accepted a position as a professor of law and diplomacy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. But his period of national influence was over and so too was the organization that he founded. The

Committee on the Present Danger continued to operate throughout Reagan’s term in office, but at a fraction of its former influence. Its members largely agreed with the

Republican administration’s policy towards the Global South, even if they looked on

Reagan’s relationship with Gorbachev with skepticism. Besides, what alternative to

Reagan existed? There was certainly no one in the Democratic Party the CPD could support. The “danger”—nuclear destruction—that the CPD had built its influence waned as Reagan and Gorbachev defused the tension surrounding arms control, and as the

Soviet empire began to disintegrate at decades end. The group limped on for a few more years, officially disbanding in 1992 after the Soviet Union finally collapsed.

Rostow, for his part, continued to write on foreign affairs, to be a staunch advocate for Israel, and to believe that Soviet machinations lay behind all of America’s troubles in the world, especially in the Middle East. He celebrated the U.S. bombing of

Libya in 1986 not as a strike against “aggression by terrorism,” but rather as a “more active defense against the process of Soviet expansion.”12 Any Middle Eastern nation not aligned with the United States was, in his tortured logic, subservient to Moscow. He had difficulty adjusting to Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to leadership of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rapprochement between the two superpowers. He never stopped fearing that

12 Eugene Rostow, “The Reagan Doctrine—A first Step,” folder April 11, 1986 & April 18, 1986 the Reagan Doctrine—A First Step, box 2, Accession 2003-M-053, EVR Papers.

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Gorbachev was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, promising peace while seeking to further the

Soviet Union’s goal of world domination.13

Jeane Kirkpatrick also left the Reagan administration under less than ideal circumstances. Once her path to National Security Advisor had been blocked, she chose to resign from the administration after the 1984 election rather than continue to serve as the U.S. representative at the UN. After leaving the administration she did not recede from the public eye as had Eugene Rostow. In no small part because of the success of her

RNC speech, Kirkpatrick was now a sought after voice in the public discourse on foreign policy. She signed a deal to write a column for the Los Angeles Times for $100,000 a year and began to make over a million dollars a year in speaker fees. While they had always been well off, the Kirkpatricks could now afford to buy, rather than rent, a place in

Provence to spend their summers, as well as a new house in Bethesda, Maryland.

Politically, Kirkpatrick remained just the hardliner that Shultz had feared. She embarked on a “Contra” tour across the United States in order to raise money in response to

Congress’ refusal to aid the Nicaraguan guerrillas. Like Rostow, Kirkpatrick was also a firm critic of Reagan’s rapprochement with Gorbachev, whom she described in print as a

“wolf in dove’s clothing.” She spoke out against those in Congress and the administration who urged Reagan to cut ties with Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Kirkpatrick even began to throw barbs at Reagan, warning that his “hell-bent” pursuit of an arms agreement with the Soviets would convince Europeans that the United States was selling them out to quell the domestic uproar over Iran-Contra, and so that Nancy Reagan might

13 Eugene Rostow, "Why the Soviets Want an Arms-Control Agreement, and Why They Want it Now,” Commentary, February 1987, 19.

314 fulfill her “dream of having her husband enter history as a peacemaker.”14 As the Reagan administration came to a close, Kirkpatrick—while far from an opponent of the administration—could hardly be said to have been happy with the overall direction of

Reagan’s foreign policy in the latter half of his term. Like many other aging Cold

Warriors, Rostow and Kirkpatrick were much happier amidst a deep freeze than in a thaw.

By the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Eugene Rostow, William Casey,

Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Bayard Rustin had all ceased to influence U.S. foreign policy. Yet their emphasis on the need for a foreign policy towards the Global South that was aggressive, unapologetic, and backed by a robust defense budget would continue to reverberate into the new century. In 1997, a new group of imperialists would come together to fight against yet another “drift” in American foreign policy. Led by future stalwarts of the George W. Bush administration Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and

Dick Cheney, the “Project for a New American Century,” (PNAC) issued a clarion call for American empire. PNAC’s “Statement of Principles” mirrored the Committee on the

Present Danger’s own battle cry of thirty years ago. Just as the CPD questioned whether

Americans still had the will to lead in the post-Vietnam War era, so too did PNAC wonder, “Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to

American principles and interests?” The policy prescriptions offered by this group took direct inspiration from the CPD and its success in the Reagan administration: “[A] military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign

14 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Gorbachev: Wolf in Dove’s Clothing: His Appeal to American Feelings is Slyly Disarming,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1985, D5; Jeane Kirkpatrick, “The ‘Dump Marcos’ Frenzy puts the Rest of Asia at Risk,” Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1985, A5; Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Good Intentions Aside, INF will be Chilling to Europe,” Los Angeles Times, 11 October 1987, C7.

315 policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.”15 After 9/11, PNAC would institute just such a foreign policy, insuring “our greatness” in a new age via protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the violent fallout from which continues to plague the world. The legacy of the spear carriers for empire reverberates still.

15 PNAC disbanded in 2006, and their website no longer exists. Their reports and publications can still be accessed, however, via the internet archive. See, “Statement of Principles,” 3 June 1997, accessed on March 8, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20050205041635/http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.h tm.

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Abbreviations ACDA—Arms Control and Disarmament Agency ADL—Anti-Defamation League AEI—American Enterprise Institute AFL-CIO—American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations AJC—American Jewish Congress APRI—A Philip Randolph Institute ATA—Atlantic Treaty Association APSA—American Political Science Association ARENA—National Republican Alliance party BASIC—Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee CORE—Congress on Racial Equality CDM—Coalition for a Democratic Majority CIA—Central Intelligence Agency CPD—Committee on the Present Danger CP—Communist Party DCI—Director of Central Intelligence FMLN—National Liberation Front FOR—Fellowship of Reconciliation FSLN—Sandinista National Liberation Front G-77—Group of 77 ICBM—Intercontinental Ballistic Missile IMF—International Monetary Fund IRC—International Rescue Committee JLC—Jewish Labor Committee LDCs—Less Developed Countries MIC—Military Industrial Complex MPLA—Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola NAACP NAM—Non-Aligned Movement NIEO—New International Economic Order NOC—Non-official Cover NSC—National Security Council NSPG—National Security Planning Group SEC—Securities and Exchange Commission OPEC—Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries OSS—Office of Strategic Services PLO—Palestinian Liberation Organization SALT—Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty SCLC—Southern Christian Leadership Conference SDS—Students for a Democratic Society Conference on Trade and Development UFT—United Federation of Teachers UNGA—United Nations General Assembly UNGA—United Nations General Assembly USAID—United States Agency for International Development UNCTAD—United Nations USIA—United States Information Agency WRL—War Resister’s League

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