Senator Jackson and Human Rights

Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA) spent all his adult life in public service, and most of it in the U.S. Congress. He used his influence, which at his death was very large, to advance those causes which embodied his deepest principles and convictions, including human rights. Jackson saw himself as a link in a chain extending deep into the past and far into the future, made up of all those committed to freedom, peace and social justice. A man who reveled in the political process, he believed that means are just as important as ends. For this reason, he shunned and disdained demagoguery, even when employed in a good cause. Sen. Jackson was committed to the rule of law, the centrality of reasoned discourse, and a view of politics as the art of the possible. He combined an absolute commitment to human rights goals as the core of U.S. foreign policy with a pragmatic insistence that his actions produce results rather than rhetoric.

Like the Founding Fathers, Sen. Jackson believed it was “self-evident” that all persons are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In domestic affairs, this conviction impelled him to become a staunch friend and legislative advocate of the civil rights and labor movements. From the start of his career in public service as County Attorney in the rough-and-tumble lumber town of Everett, Washington—when he ran the pro-Nazi “Silver Shirts” out of town—to his early days in the Senate—when he helped to bring down Senator Joe McCarthy—to his emergence, in the 1970s, as the hope of the oppressed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, he was an uncompromising and tenacious foe of the bigots and bullies of this world, of all those who, believing that might makes right, would trample on the dignity of their fellow men.

Jackson’s foreign policy views were strongly shaped by the experience of the Second World War. He especially took to heart the fate of his parents’ native Norway—the relative ease with which Norway was overrun by the Nazis at the onset of the war, and the horrors which the Norwegian people had subsequently to endure. “Norway had a thousand years of freedom,” he once observed. “They had clean air, clean water, clean land, a great environment. They had one of the highest (living) standards in the world. They had one of the first health programs, dating back to the turn of the century. What good did it do then when the hobnail boot took over in the spring of 1940?” Thus, Jackson concluded, “the first priority is survival. If you can’t take care of that one, you can’t take care of the others.”

Jackson’s belief that the first national imperative is survival was strongly reinforced by the advent of nuclear weapons. It led him to become a great student of defense matters, and a tireless advocate of deterrence, both nuclear and conventional. In Henry Jackson’s view, maintaining our deterrent capacity—with all that entails in terms of the expenditure of resources and the mobilization of scientific skills—was essential to preserving the peace and protecting our freedom and that of our allies.

But in addition to looking after its own defense, Scoop Jackson believed that the U.S. had to be actively engaged in building a world where freedom flourished. As a staunch civil libertarian, he understood that if human rights were extinguished in the rest of the world, our own human rights would be imperiled. We would become an isolated country, culturally and politically, and the task of maintaining confidence in the vitality of our own democratic institutions and traditions would become increasingly difficult. For this reason, he concluded, a concern for human rights “isn’t something we add on to our national policy. It is at its heart. We can content ourselves with nothing less than resolute efforts to safeguard civil and religious liberties, to oppose all forms of discrimination at home, and to champion international human rights abroad.”

Because Jackson was so deeply committed to the cause of human rights, he was critical of self-styled foreign policy “realists,” who tended to question the role of human rights concerns in the conduct of American foreign policy. In his view, “without an increasing measure of individual liberty in the Communist world, there can be no genuine (Soviet-American) detente, nor can there be more real movement towards a more peaceful world.” A detente policy which failed to advance human rights, Jackson often said, “is like a body without a soul,” doomed to failure.

Jackson’s belief in the vital connection between respect for human rights and the prospects for peace led him to identify closely, both ideologically and personally, with the great Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov. In his 1975 Nobel Prize address, Sakharov declared: “International trust, mutual understanding, disarmament, and international security are inconceivable without an open society with freedom of information, freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the right to travel and choose the country in which one wishes to live.” Henry Jackson totally endorsed these words. For his part, Sakharov is reported to have said, “Jackson knows how to make things happen. He is our champion.”

Jackson’s commitment to the civil rights movement and the labor movement was not all that unusual: many “liberals” shared these concerns. Scoop’s commitment to a strong defense posture was also not unusual: many “conservatives” shared these concerns. But, beginning in the mid-60s, the combination of a strong “liberal” orientation domestically, and a strong “conservative” orientation in foreign affairs, proved to be quite unusual. To the media in particular, Jackson was a perennial paradox, and reporters were at a loss to understand how he could reconcile domestic “liberalism” with foreign policy “conservatism.” The paradox, however, was apparent rather than real. Both Jackson’s domestic and foreign policy views stemmed from a bedrock commitment to human rights and social justice. Jackson was a defense specialist by necessity, a civil libertarian by choice.

That political commentators could find Jackson’s overall political stance so puzzling is a measure of how far American politics in general have been transformed since the end of the Second World War. Before 1966 the entire, Democratic party establishment shared his domestic and foreign policy views. Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey all combined a commitment to domestic reform with an internationalist and anti-communist foreign policy. Yet as a result of the “cultural revolution” which engulfed the nation in the ’60s and ’70s—a revolution which, in the name of “idealism,” was hostile to the exercise of American power abroad and urged Americans to “come home”—the establishment view underwent a major modification.

Sen. Jackson, however, refused to abandon the foreign policy ideals of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Throughout the worst storms and ravages of the “cultural revolution” he adhered staunchly to the conviction that the maintenance and enhancement of American power was vital to the survival of liberty and human rights in the world. In many respects, his political career paralleled that of Winston Churchill. During the 1920’s, Churchill and other British Conservatives, such as Stanley Baldwin and

Neville Chamberlain, shared a foreign policy consensus that included the need to contain Germany and maintain a strong defense posture. By the late ’30s, however, various pressures had led the others to change their position. Churchill, however, did not change—and neither did Jackson. Both men shared a consistency of viewpoint that reflected an underlying strength of character.

If Jackson’s political views set him apart from many of his colleagues, his political skills made him a formidable advocate. He was a master of the “three r’s” of political leadership: being right, being reasonable, and being ready. He was what Plato called a cunning idealist, a man whose political intelligence matched his devotion to principle. Three qualities, in particular, characterized Jackson as a politician.

The first quality was prudence. Sen. Jackson understood that virtually all decisions in public life are taken in a “fog of uncertainty.” Such decisions, moreover, often have unintended consequences. This is especially the case in foreign affairs, where the principal actors are not even playing by the same set of rules. To reduce the element of uncertainty, Jackson became a close student of foreign policy, and invited some of the country’s foremost scholars to testify before his Subcommittee on Government Operations. Yet the Senator knew that no amount of scholarship can eliminate uncertainty altogether. Thus, he recognized the importance of a prudent approach to issues of foreign and domestic policy. Whatever else they might accomplish, Jackson believed that public officials, like physicians, must strive in the first place to do no harm. He never gave way to the temptations of rhetoric, of looking good at the expense of doing good, of substituting glib generalizations for specific knowledge of the problem at hand.

Besides being a prudent politician, Sen. Jackson was also a persevering politician. He constantly emphasized the need to stay the course, to take the long view in a political struggle. He understood that change takes time, that nothing worthwhile is accomplished overnight, and that victory in politics often goes to those with the greatest staying power and perseverance. “We are not among the faint-hearted,” he would say, “nor do we tire of the struggle. We are convinced that persistence has its rewards, and we will persist.” Nowhere was this view more appropriate than with regard to human rights, where progress is often so frustratingly slow. Jackson built with an eye to long-range, permanent progress, rather than illusory quick fixes.

Finally, he had an uncanny sense of political timing. He knew that every once in a while “windows of opportunity” opened up in domestic and foreign affairs. The art of politics, he felt, consisted in knowing how to recognize and exploit such openings. To Jackson, being a successful politician was not unlike being a successful jockey: when a gap appears in a crowded race, the skilled politician, like the skilled rider, surges through it to victory.

These political skills were most in evidence in the course of the prolonged battle over the Jackson Amendment. Since the Jackson Amendment was the first statute in this century linking trade and human rights, a few words about its immediate background are in order.

The Jackson Amendment came into being as a result of the confluence of three factors: the ongoing Soviet economic crises, which forced Soviet leaders to look to expanded commercial relations with the United States in order to import advanced technology, including computers, and large-scale quantities of grain; the rise of the Soviet Jewish emigration movement, which refused to be intimidated by Soviet authorities, and insisted on the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel or the West; and the revulsion of Western public opinion at the repression of Soviet Jews wishing to emigrate, and especially at the imposition, in 1972, of a “diploma tax,” which required Jews wishing to leave the Soviet Union to pay exorbitant sums of money to “compensate” the state for the costs of their education. This “diploma tax” became an insurmountable obstacle to further emigration, precisely as its sponsors had intended.

It was at this crucial juncture that Henry Jackson saw an opportunity to strike a historic blow for human rights. In October 1972—less than two months after the imposition of the “diploma tax,” and at the very time that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were concluding a trade agreement—he introduced an amendment to the Trade Relations Act that would refuse trade benefits, including “most-favored-nation” tariff treatment (MFN), credits, credit guarantees and investment guarantees, to any “non-market economy country” which denied its citizens the right to emigrate or which imposed more than a nominal tax on emigration. Seventy six senators co-sponsored the Jackson Amendment.

Although the Nixon White House, along with the Departments of State, Treasury and Commerce, and most of the business community, vehemently opposed the Jackson Amendment, charging that it posed a major obstacle to an expanded U.S.-Soviet commercial relationship, the amendment was not, in fact, designed to torpedo Soviet-American trade relations. Rather, it sought to use the prospect of expanding trade as a means of securing freer emigration, for Jews and non-Jews alike, from the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Jackson Amendment was an exercise in political prudence. It did not seek to condition Soviet-American trade on wide-ranging institutional reforms within the Soviet Union, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, or freedom of assembly. Jackson well understood that the Soviets would not trade these for any economic package, no matter how large. The concessions he sought were minimal ones: an end to the “diploma tax” and a greater level of emigration from the Soviet Union. There were no provisions in the Jackson Amendment which destroyed the power of Soviet authorities, or which placed the vital interests of the Soviet state at risk.

Nor did the Jackson Amendment constitute, as the Soviets liked to claim, unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, Senator Jackson constantly pointed out that the Amendment drew its inspiration from Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—”the right of everyone to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” “The obligation to respect the right to emigrate,” Senator Jackson pointed out, “has been freely undertaken by the signatories of the Declaration of Human Rights, the International covenants on Human Rights, and the Helsinki Accords. In voluntarily joining in these international agreements, the Soviet Union, too, committed itself to honor the right of a person to choose his country of residence.”

Nevertheless, despite the firm basis of the Jackson Amendment in international law, President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger—then at the height of their power—strongly opposed it as contrary to the spirit of detente. Senator Jackson’s struggle with the administration lasted for two years, during which time his perseverance and tenacity were tested to their utmost limits, as the administration pursued what at times amounted to a vendetta against the Jackson Amendment. He took on virtually every major center of power in our society, but he did not waiver. He viewed this as a human rights issue which in good conscience he could not abandon.

Finally, a compromise was worked out. The Senator agreed to include a “waiver provision” in his amendment, which, in essence, allowed demonstration of good faith about future Soviet behavior to replace current emigration practice as the criterion for granting trade benefits. In return, President Ford provided Jackson with Soviet assurances about increasing emigration. In December 1974, Congress passed the Trade Relations Act, including the modified Jackson-Vanik Amendment. [Rep. Charles Vanik was the amendment’s sponsor in the House.]

Five days after the Amendment passed, the Soviets launched an all-out media assault against it. On January 10, 1975, the Soviets unilaterally repudiated the October 1972 Soviet-American Trade Agreement. Senator Jackson’s critics were quick to blame the Jackson Amendment for this denouement. Recently both former President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger have criticized the Jackson Amendment, claiming that freer Soviet emigration occurred despite, not because of, Jackson-Vanik. It is not my purpose here to reopen old wounds or re-enter into polemics. Suffice it to say that their understanding of the effects of the Jackson Amendment is substantially at variance with facts they too often overlook.

What critics of the Jackson Amendment invariably fail to point out is that at the same time it was passed, Congress also considered and passed the Stevenson Amendment to the Export-Import Bank Bill. The Stevenson Amendment imposed a ceiling of $75 million per year on credits to the Soviet Union. Secretary Kissinger later called this ceiling “peanuts in Soviet terms.” It is more than likely that it was the Stevenson Amendment, rather than the Jackson Amendment, which undermined the Soviet-American trade agreement. Once such a low ceiling on credits was in place, it no longer paid for the Soviets to conclude a trade agreement with the United States. The quid pro quo had been eliminated.

Yet despite the Soviet repudiation of the agreement, the Jackson Amendment has had, and continues to have, a major impact. In fact even as it was making its way through Congress in 1973, the Amendment helped to secure freer migration from the Soviet Union. This happened because the Soviet authorities revoked the “diploma tax” and increased the number of exit visas in the hope that Congress would reward them by defeating the Amendment. Thus, thanks to Senator Jackson, emigration from the Soviet Union in 1973 reached what was then a record high of 35,000.

The history of emigration from the Soviet Union since 1973 is a complicated story, with alternating periods of liberalization and repression. What is clear, however, is that Jackson-Vanik has served, essentially, as a catalyst to hasten the emigration process, and to reduce or moderate such constraints as the emigration tax. While the overall state of Soviet-American relations may well play a greater role than the Jackson Amendment in determining Soviet emigration policy, the fact remains that tens of thousands of Soviet Jews and Christians owe their freedom to the Jackson Amendment. There is no other human rights statute which has had comparably wide-ranging effects, or which has succeeded so brilliantly in placing a critical human rights issue—freedom of emigration—at the forefront of public discourse.

With his sponsorship of the Jackson Amendment, Sen. Jackson became a hero to the Soviet Jewish emigration movement. Yet the Jackson Amendment applied to non-Jews as much as to Jews, and Senator Jackson was also responsible for securing the freedom of many Soviet Christians. It has also had a positive impact on the emigration policies of other Communist countries. In 1975, for example, when Romania became eligible for credits and Most Favored Nation status, it was Senator Jackson who played a major behind-the-scenes-role in convincing the Romanians to liberalize their emigration practices. Every year, the President is required, under the terms of the Jackson-Vanik waiver provision, to certify to Congress that Romania is taking steps toward eased emigration procedures. As a result, the emigration of Jews, etnhic Germans and Baptists from Romania has increased dramatically. In 1982, when Romanian authorities decided to impose an education tax on all emigrants, President Reagan sent a message to President Ceausescu informing him that if the tax remained in place, he would be unable to recommend certification. The tax was subsequently removed—another victory for Scoop Jackson.

Although Senator Jackson is best known for his human rights activities on behalf of Soviet and East European citizens, his concern extended to other communities in other parts of the world, as well. For example, Senator Jackson was one of the first Americans to call attention to the plight of Lebanese Christians forced to endure the de facto rule of the P.L.O. He was also deeply concerned about the human rights situation in Central America, insisting that our Central American policy take into account both our strategic interests and our human rights concerns. “Our security aid,” he declared, “should be understood in one way: it is a shield behind which endangered nations can protect themselves from external threats as they work to rectify injustices, build democratic institutions, and hold free and fair elections. Our security assistance ought not to be the main focus of national debate, for it ought not to be the foundation of our policy toward Central America.” The Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, which appeared after Jackson’s death, is dedicated to him.

Sen. Jackson’s constant emphasis on human rights helped to make it a major foreign policy issue. The cause of human rights was subsequently taken up by Jimmy Carter, a political figure who, prior to his election in 1976, had evidenced no great interest in the subject. Yet President Carter’s notion of an adequate human rights policy was very different from Senator Jackson’s, and Scoop became a sharp and outspoken critic of Carter’s approach. On April 24, 1980, speaking to a Coalition For a Democratic Majority dinner honoring Andrei Sakharov, he drew attention to the administration’s “double standard” in human rights policy:

I know that many here tonight share my continuing dismay at an American policy on human rights that finds it convenient to criticize the petty dictatorships, with which the world unhappily abounds, but inconvenient to speak out about the Soviet system that inspires repression around the world.

Thus it is that the administration speaks more about the abuse of human rights in Chili, the Philippines, Argentina and Guatemala, while speaking less about the violation of human rights in the Soviet Union. So the administration brings home our Ambassador from Korea because liberties of South Koreans have been violated—but finds it impossible to summon our Ambassador from Moscow when the freedoms of so many Soviet citizens are trampled.

For too many officials, the intensity of the struggle for human rights abroad is inversely proportional to the power of the offender. We even have certain officials who subscribe to a unique arithmetic: they think that if a human rights standard is a good thing, then a double standard must be twice as good.

Only with sensible priorities can we hope to forge an effective policy out of the impulse to support the cause of international human rights. Only by reasserting our concern at the denial of basic rights in the Soviet Union can we make credible our concern about basic rights elsewhere.

Senator Jackson’s criticisms of President Carter’s human rights policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union was part of a more fundamental dispute with the administration. For the Carter administration, concern for human rights expressed itself primarily in a policy of abstention—of curtailing economic and military assistance, of withholding diplomatic support, of not getting involved. For Jackson, on the other hand, concern for human rights implied an activist foreign policy aimed at resisting Soviet (and Soviet-inspired) aggression and upholding the balance of power.

As prudent politician, Jackson recognized that in pursuing its human rights policy the U.S. must employ a broad range of instruments and techniques. Thus, though he sharply criticized the Nixon administration for purporting to rely exclusively on “quiet diplomacy” in facilitating Soviet emigration, Jackson was not against quiet diplomacy in principle. He knew that in many cases it can play an invaluable role. For Jackson, whether to resort to traditional or public diplomacy was a question of tactics, to be decided on the basis of effectiveness. His aim was to achieve results, not to engage in ineffective gestures.

Henry Jackson distrusted emotionalism in politics, believing instead in the importance of objective analysis. He understood that a policy which is not carefully and deliberately crafted can inadvertently cause a great deal of harm to innocent men and women.

Perhaps his combination of a passionate commitment to human rights, and an equally passionate commitment to deliberate and conscientious decision-making, is the most important political legacy of Senator Henry Jackson. Since the founding of the Republic, many Americans have believed that it is necessary—as Jackson himself put it—”to hasten the evolution of humanity toward a decent respect for the human person.” Sen. Jackson taught us that such an undertaking is not only necessary, but also possible.

Author

  • Joseph Shattan

    Joseph Shattan was Policy and Programs Officer at the State Department's Human Right Bureau. In 1980 he served as Policy Director of the coalition for a Democratic Majority, the "Jackson Wing" of the Democratic Party. The views expressed herein are Mr. Shattan's alone and do not necessarily coincide with those of the State department.

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