A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
unheralded life. Gregorian, who happens to be of Armenian descent, agreed. In December 1983 Kathleen Teltsch, Lemkin’s old friend from their days together at the early United Nations, wrote a short New York Times story on the New York exhibition.6After the three-month exhibit, Korey published several op-ed pieces on the need for ratification in America’s major dailies.7
With the Holocaust now a topic for public discussion and debate, convention advocates began doing what Cambodia advocates had done: They linked their efforts to the Holocaust. Proxmire did so frequently. He trumpeted the tales of ordinary Poles who had refused to “stand idly by” during the Holocaust. “Mr. President, can we do any less than the Chrosteks and the Walter Ukalos? They did what they could to stop the monstrous actions of the Nazis. Will we do what we can to prevent a future Holocaust? Are we willing, at long last, to join the other 96 nations which have ratified the Genocide Convention?”8 He invoked the death of Anne Frank. On her birthday he declared,
Mr. President, no treaty signed by this country could ever make up for the loss of Anne Frank and 6 million others who perished in the Holocaust. But we have an obligation to join with the other nations that have already ratified the Genocide Treaty to make clear to them that we share their sorrow at the tragedy that claimed Anne Frank’s life. We need to make clear, Mr. President, our intention to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. We need to make clear that we will bring those who would commit genocide to justice.9
Around the fortieth anniversary of the Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Proxmire specifically highlighted America’s wartime indifference. During Hitler’s Third Reich, he noted, seventy-eight speeches had been made in the U.S. House of Representatives about the persecution of the Jews in Europe. “Yet despite the speeches and the resolutions,” he said, “the killings went on, the cries of the dying went unheeded, and our immigration policies remained unchanged. Is it any wonder that Hitler dismissed foreign outrage with the quip, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’”10 When Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel made his first trip to Germany, Proxmire linked it, too, to ratification. “How can we sympathize with Mr. Wiesel’s cause without taking action? The Genocide Convention establishes the mechanisms for action…”11
Although Proxmire cultivated the image of himself as apolitical, he made an acutely political case for passage. Neither he nor the other supporters of the convention relied primarily upon moral argumentation, which was slowly drifting out of fashion. Like Lemkin, they went out of their way to demonstrate that nonratification was damaging America’s interests. If Lemkin had instinctively wooed government representatives by describing the cultural losses they would endure, Proxmire and other advocates argued that American nonratification was undermining U.S. Cold War diplomacy. “It’s clear that our failure to ratify…has been one of the most useful propaganda clubs the Soviet Union has ever had,” Proxmire said in a 1986 speech, “and we’ve handed it to them on a silver platter.” UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the previous fall. “It is contrary to our national interest,” Kirkpatrick said, to fuel anti-American propaganda by refusing “to reaffirm clearly and unequivocally U.S. support for the objectives of the Convention.” Proxmire quoted Kirkpatrick and asked, “Is Ambassador Kirkpatrick some type of one-worlder internationalist? Is she easily duped by Soviet or Communist trickery?”12 The Soviet Union had ratified the genocide convention in 1954, an act the New York Times described as analogous to Al Capone’s joining the “anti-saloon league.”13 Proxmire agreed that the Soviets were hypocrites who had no intention of heeding international law simply because they had agreed to it. Still, he believed the United States should not remain aloof from the international framework. It was the only major power that had not ratified the convention.
The Soviet representative at the UN Human Rights Commission and at the review conferences for the Helsinki accords frequently undercut U.S. criticisms by saying a country that had not even contracted to the genocide convention had no right to lecture the Soviet Union on human rights. “Why permit Communist nations, which all too often only give lip service to these obligations, to take the moral high ground in these debates?” Proxmire asked. The United States could use the convention in its diplomatic arsenal. “It is unlikely that genocide will be committed in any Western democratic nation. It is more likely that genocide will occur in non-democratic, totalitarian or Communist states,” he said. “We cannot do moral battle against genocide with one hand tied behind our backs.”14
Proxmire’s staff collected a running tally of embarrassing clashes between U.S. and Soviet representatives in international settings, which they showered upon senators. At one meeting of the UN Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination, Proxmire recalled that Morris Abrams, the U.S. member of the commission, had urged the need for “forceful measures of implementation” to confront racial discrimination. The Soviet delegate promptly turned to Abrams to inquire whether the United States had ratified the genocide convention, the most basic of all human rights treaties. Chastened, Abrams quietly stated his “regret, of course, that my country has not ratified the convention on genocide.”15
Rita Hauser, President Nixon’s delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, had testified before the 1970 Senate Committee:
We have frequently invoked the terms of this Convention…in our continued aggressive attack against the Soviet Union for its practices, particularly as to its Jewish communities, but also as to the Ukrainians, Tartars, Baptists and others. It is this anomaly…[that] often leads to the retort in debates plainly put, “Who are you to invoke a treaty that you are not a party to?”16
Although Proxmire had relayed many of these tales on the Senate floor and the Soviet tactic had long been publicized, he believed President Reagan, the renowned Cold Warrior, would be more annoyed by the Soviet debater’s move than his predecessors had been. Reagan would not wish allow the "Evil Empire" to claim any patch of moral high ground.
Proxmire was backed by the grassroots ad hoc committee, which tried to generate bottom-up pressure. With the November 1984 presidential election approaching, Korey worked behind the scenes to lobby the foreign policy advisers of the incumbent Reagan and challenger Walter Mondale. He struck out with the Mondale campaign, but in early September one of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers casually called to say that the president was prepared to change his position on the genocide convention and support ratification. Korey was floored.
In each presidential election cycle, it had become a tradition that the candidates would use the B’nai B’rith annual convention as an opportunity to address the Jewish community. On the eve of the 1984 convention, State Department spokesman John Hughes publicly announced that President Reagan would endorse the genocide convention. “The commitment of our country to prevent and punish acts of genocide is indisputable,” Hughes said. “Yet our failure to ratify this treaty…has opened the United States to unnecessary criticism in various international fora.”17 In his first term Reagan had not supported the convention. In fact, when Republican Senator Charles Percy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held hearings on the treaty in 1981, not a single representative of the Reagan administration had turned up to testify. But in his B’nai B’rith speech, thanks partly to the lobbying of nongovernmental advocates and the proven unwillingness of Proxmire to let the issue drop on Capitol Hill, the president (and candidate) changed course. The Soviet rebuttals irritated him. Reagan’s advisers also believed that the president could gain at least a few Jewish votes by supporting the measure. But perhaps most crucial, with only three weeks remaining