MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Jimmy Carter was a Sunday school teacher for much of his life, and he was not above preaching when the moment demanded it, including two leaders of what was then the Soviet Union. Carter put human rights at the center of American foreign policy, and our next guest is here to reflect on why that mattered and how it may have helped to change the trajectory of the Cold War. Stuart Eizenstadt was a top domestic policy advisor in the Carter White House. He went on to write a biography of President Carter and to serve as U.S. ambassador to the European Union. And, ambassador, you're joining us, of course, as we remember the 39th president, who died over the weekend, so allow me to begin by offering my condolences on the loss of your former boss.
STUART EIZENSTADT: Well, thank you. It's a 55-year relationship.
KELLY: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's go right to that point I was just making that President Carter elevated human rights to become his top priority in U.S. foreign policy. I wonder if you could paint me a specific picture. What did that actually look like in the late 1970s, middle of the Cold War?
EIZENSTADT: So the Cold War is raging, and the Kissinger-Nixon foreign policy was called realpolitik. That is, if a country was pro-American, it didn't really matter what they did internally to their own people. And Jimmy Carter saw human rights abroad as the other side of the coin to civil rights at home, and he was a great civil rights champion, even coming from the Deep South.
EIZENSTADT: This happened to us in the first week of the administration. We got a letter secreted out of the Soviet Union from Andrei Sakharov, the great pro-democracy advocate in Russia. And it basically said to the president, it's very important that you break from the Nixon-Kissinger policy and that you speak up for human rights. You've talked about it in the campaign. You must do so. And there was a huge debate, Mary Louise, about whether we should do this. I mean, is this a way to start the relationship with the Soviet Union? And the president made a decision, and it was hotly debated that, yes, I'm going to do it.
KELLY: When President Carter said, OK, I'm going to listen to Sakharov, to this Russian dissident; we're going to elevate human rights, was that part of a master plan to unravel the Soviet Union, or was this something else?
EIZENSTADT: I don't think we thought it would unravel it but that it would weaken it. We were in a hot competition all over the world, and the president thought that if we could show that our foreign policy matched the values of our constitution - that it would be a tremendous instrument in encouraging the third-world countries, as they were called at that time - in Africa, in Asia and even in Latin America - not to go over to the Soviet orbit. So it was a very conscious decision. It was not just done lightly.
And he applied that to the Latin American countries. We cut off arms to a half a dozen countries - Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay - because of their human rights violations. And that ended up releasing thousands - literally thousands of political prisoners and, down the road in the early 1980s, leading those autocratic military dictatorships into democracies. And that together with the Panama Canal, which was our toughest battle with Congress...
KELLY: This was giving control back to Panama over the canal.
EIZENSTADT: Yeah. And that really - it really created a whole new era in U.S.-Latin American relations.
KELLY: Let me bring us full circle by asking this, ambassador. Every president comes to office with his own goals, his own values but, of course, must also govern within the particular moment in history in which they find themselves. So my question - to what extent was Carter able to elevate human rights because Americans in that moment were hungry for it in the wake of Vietnam, in the wake of Watergate?
EIZENSTADT: Let's remember that Carter was the only Democrat elected between 1968 and 1992. So there had to be some particular moment in time, and it was Watergate. But when we talk about Watergate, it was not just covering up the theft. It was the abuse of the CIA. It was a misuse of the FBI. It was targeting political enemies. And Carter, coming out of Georgia as an outsider, talking about the fact that, I will never lie to you; I want a government as good as its people, that I'm going to reform the CIA and I'm going to reform the FBI; we're not going to have an imperial presidency - it struck a raw nerve.
All his other Democratic opponents who are much better-known - he started at 1%. They were talking about traditional Democratic issues. That was not Carter's message. And that's why human rights were the flipside of civil rights, and civil rights writ large was not just helping women and African Americans, which he did. But for him, human rights meant that we were going to show the best of American values in the Cold War and that that, together, yes, with hard power was going to be decisive.
And that, again, struck for exactly the reasons you mentioned. We had gone through the horrible 58,000 deaths in Vietnam. We were supporting military dictators simply because they were supposedly pro-American, although they stood for nothing that the U.S. believed in. And here - let's go back to founding principles, and let's enunciate a policy abroad that stands for the best of America. So that really touched a nerve in the American people.
KELLY: That is former Carter advisor and biographer Stuart Eizenstadt, one of many voices that NPR is bringing you today as we remember the life and legacy of President Jimmy Carter. Stuart Eizenstadt, thank you.
EIZENSTADT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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