LETTER TO GEORGE BUSH FRON NANCY J. BRUCKER

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• Collection: General CIA Records
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• Document Page Count: 17
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 12, 2002
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: December 23, 1976
• Content Type: LETTER

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December 23, 1976
Mr. George Bush
5161 Palisade Lane NW
Washington DC 20016
.Dear Mr. Bush:
Because of your interest in the subject, I have
marked for your attention a feature in the current
issue of Skeptic.
If you would like to respond, we would be. pleased
to consider your comments for inclusion in the
letters section of the forthcoming issue.
Cordially,
Nancy J. Brucker
Associate Editor
NJB:cmb
Esecuere Req ts~
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812 ANPCAPA STRET ? SANTA E ARSARA, CAl1FORNA ? 93101.18051965-7021
 UNITED STATES MISSION TO THE UNITED NATIONS
PRESS RELEASE
799 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10017
FOR RELEASE AT 9:00 P.M., EDT Press Release USUN--130(76)
Tuesday, October 26, 1976 October 26, 1976
CHECK TEXT AGAINST DELIVERY
Address by Ambassador William W. Scranton, United States
Representative to the United Nations, to the Appeal of Conscience
Foundation, Annual Award Dinner, Hotel Pierre, New York, New York,
October 26, 1976.
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FOREIGN POLICY AND THE AMERICAN PURPOSE
Conscience -- conscience and the purpose to life which springs
from it -- are what the Declaration of Independence, the American
Revolution and our free American society are. all about. This year --
our nation's Bicentennial -- is a time for America to make a special.
effort to reevaluate and perhaps redirect our national life so as
to affirm the values our nation began with. It is good to make
such a reexamination, no matter what we find. And what we find is
an America, engaged in free and open debate preparatory to a
national election in stark contrast to most of-the world where
governments by power groups are separated from popular control.
The contrast today is as sharp.as it was two hundred years ago.
But when we try to examine our foreign policy
at our Bicentennial, to determine just how to pursue and its goals
foreign policy in light of what America stands forintthe world, s
we soon find ourselves a little puzzled.
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SCRANTON -2-
One is tempted to ascribe that confusion to the charges
and counter-charges hurled in an election year. But it is more
than a partisan matter; it runs deeper and it is more widely
shared. Some people question what we stand for in foreign
affairs, whether our ideals are being compromised for national
survival, and even if the United States still represents its
original values.
When debate turns to morality in foreign policy, my thoughts
return to the purpose and hopes with which we set about the
American experiment. To Thomas Jefferson's words a few days
before he died when he wrote of the Declaration of Independence:
"May it be to the world what I believe it will be: to some parts
sooner, to others later, but finally to all; the signal of
arousing men to burst the chains...."
And to Lincoln's words a few decades later when our people
were divided, confused and about to plunge the Republic into
civil war. Speaking under the full weight of American history,
the President-elect returned to the Declaration for guidance and
saw "something in the Declaration, something giving liberty not
alone to the people of this country but hope to the world."
"It was that which gave promise," he said in clarity at that
tormented moment, "that in due time the weights should be lifted
from the shoulders of all men."
Now we find ourselves asking, are the words of Jefferson, and
Lincoln part of our heritage or are they simply a part of our
history?
And there is the puzzle of our relationship with our allies
and our adversaries. Take the case of Korea, for example. South
Korea faces the very real threat of aggression by North Korea and
is virtually surrounded by the Soviet Union, North Korea, and
China. Unarguably American support is needed for peace and
stability on the peninsula. Yet just as unarguably, the Seoul
Government offends our concept of human rights. Our public
speech and writing today, at the time of our Bicentennial, is
full of the question: Should we support countries which do not
meet our human rights standards? And if we must do so, how shall
we speak to ourselves and to others about this necessity?
And how will the way we speak affect us as a nation, effect
our goals and our spirit?
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SCRANTON
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Then we look at the USSR: a regime which not only offends
our dedication to human rights but which has declared itself
our ideological opponent. In exercising detente we wonder once
again if we have abandoned the path of our Founding Fathers.
Last Tuesday brought news of yet another instance of unashamed-
barbarism in the. Soviet Union -- when a group of Jewish dissidents
inquiring about delays in obtaining exit visas.: reported that
they were taken out into the woods near Moscow and beaten by
Soviet plainclothesmen and later were arrested.
Where is our commitment to transcendent principles -- the
ultimacy of freedom and the individual human soul -- that
America as ideological and diplomatic leader of the Western
world today must display? What part of our ideology justifies
cooperation with such a regime? Simply put, it is this: today
in a world dominated by tension between nuclear superpowers,
events on any continent can jar the delicate web of global balance..
The probable alternative to peace is not just war but mutual
annihilation. One of our primary foreign policy goals is
therefore to maintain that peace, to reduce suspicion and
rivalry. We must work with nations governed by systems of all
types to replace conflict by dialogue and reciprocal exchanges:
in trade and economics, to reduce armaments and enhance security,
and to set standards for-human rights. Yet we must remember
always that whatever relaxation of tensions occurs, there
should be no illusion that fundamental political and ideological
differences will vanish in the process.
These subjects go beyond questions of partisanship. They
are fundamental to a universal ambiguity in this Bicentennial
year, an ambiguity which precludes feelings of comfort and
confidence.
Yet the question goes deeper still. At the same time that
we are wondering. how best to advocate human rights, throughout
the world many tell us that our notions of human rights lack
the priority we assign them, that our system in fact has
nothing to offer and that our notions of human rights are a
bourgeois anachronism of no relevance to the world that is to
come -- and even worse, they are telling us that our-notions
of human rights are nothing but a cloak for our naked and
narrow self-interest. .
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This is a challenge that we can and must meet. To
understand how it came about, to understand the danger that
it poses not only to our self-confidence but to the future of
the world's freedom, we must understand first of all that our
awareness of human rights and of the natural dignity of human
individuals are special in this world.
Before becoming a place, or even a people; America was
an idea in the minds of a few -- the idea that men and women
can live together in a society without surrendering their
rights as individuals. That uncommon source separates one
revolution and one nation from all others before or since
uniquely it came on behalf, not of a certain class, creed or
special interest, but of mankind as a whole.
Our idea recognized human rights not as unique in concept
but inherent in the nature of man -- man's basic instinct and
desire for freedom and individual opportunity. Human beings
are individuals, not just members of political corm-nunities or
parts of various social institutions. Government cannot
simply take what it wants from the individual; government
must deal with the individual according to the terms of the
contract that the individual has made with it. In short,
there exists a limit on the state's right to interfere with
the rights and freedoms of the citizen because individuals
have rights.
Today all of this seems so natural to us that it appears
strange even to talk about it. The idea of liberty lies at
the very heart of this country's founding and its purpose..
"Inalienable Rights", the words in the very first sentence of
the Declaration of Independence, brought our nation into
existence. The idea of liberty is the single most important
animating principle of our Constitution and of our people.
The purpose of this liberty has been the individual, his
energies and creative capacities, and how best to free those
energies. Perhaps more than anything else this has been the
chief theme of our whole history, both at home and in our
dealings with other nations. It has been the engine of our
stunning history of economic development. It was the engine
of our bloody but necessary civil war. It brought us out of
our isolation and onto the international scene. We have gone
to war for it notably in the American Revolution and World
War II, and we have made peace with it foremost in our minds.
To this day it remains the most powerful argument for our
social system.
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In today'46xceedingly complex polit cal world of some
150 internationally recognized sovereign states, only a pre-
.cious few embrace the concepts of human rights and freedoms
of the individual which we cherish. The thoughts of freedom,
of responsibility and of the individual, we find, are unique
products of our Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian tradition.
In-other parts of the world the relationship between
citizen and state differs profoundly. Broadly speaking two
other views of human rights are held, one within the Soviet
system and another within the developing world. In the Soviet
systen. any genuine respect for human rights encounters the harsh.
opposition of basic Soviet dogma: that individual rights stand
in the way of a planned and directed society and only a central
political authority can properly guide economic development and
insure an equitable distribution of property. To view human
beings as essentially free is absurd, they say, for since
powerful social forces and economic systems make man what
he is, individual rights really have little meaning. The
Constitution of the USSR promises protection for most of the
rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
but it does so only in the context of "Fundamental Rights and
Duties of Soviet Citizens", emphasizing the duty of every
Soviet citizen to refrain from any activity contrary to the
interest of the State. In the UN General Debate last month,
one Eastern bloc foreign minister underscored this distinction,
one which nullifies any protection of individual human rights,
...an individual may exercise his rights," he said, "only as
a member of a broader community."
In the developing world some ideas of human rights also
differ from ours. Some nations newly freed from colonial rule
kept the systems they inherited. But others have turned to a
new ideology called development. With masses of people in
dismal living conditions, the striking need seemed to them
primarily material and technical, and progress measured only
in terms of sheer economic growth.
To a people whose condition made them incapable of exer-
cising basic rights and freedoms, these leaders asked, of what
value are such concepts? To a starving man what does freedom
of speech matter? To an illiterate what is freedom of the
press? If material needs are the most important, this group
concluded, then collective economic rights are the most
important rights. Thus, the right to economic development
replaces the right to private property, the right to political
stability replaces the right to political dissent, and the
freedom of the government to define the nation's self-image
replaces freedom of the press.
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This differs fundamentally from the Communist ideology for
it is not concerned with the theological importance of planning but with
the practical need to achieve certain economic ends. Its allegiance
is to expediency.
. Four and a half years ago in testimony before a House Sub-
committee, Rabbi Schneier stated of the situation in Northern
Ireland, "Yes, we are dealing with religious factors but it
is a complex problem that involves economics, it involves
civil rights, it involves political rights, so we are not
dealing with a religious problem, per se." He could as easily,
have been speaking of any of the other issues that face us
today, for everyone of them involve economics and development,
cultural tradition, ideology, and the question of freedom.
We must defend our idea of liberty for the sake of economic
development itself. We must insist again and again on what we
have learned from our own economic history: that liberty is
the spur to economic development, not its enemy. If a nation
wants economic progress, if it wants economic well-being more
widely dispersed among its people, only individual citizens,
,not enforcing governments, can bring that about. For countries
grow economically when the inventiveness, creativity and freedom
of their citizens are unfettered, not when the vital energies
of their people are locked and chained. So to countries who
tell us they are too poor to afford our notions of human
rights, we respond with the conviction that promoting and
cherishing freedoms is a condition of better living.
American policies, foreign or domestic, have a single
source -- our determination to carry on the original values
of our revolution, the values of human rights and individual freedoms.
Foreign policy in this turbulent and nuclear world must be
based on certain idealistic but practical precepts: first,
our closest affiliation is with the countries whose culture
or concepts or convictions coincide with ours, the countries
of the Western world, especially Western Europe, some of our
neighbors in this hemisphere, and Japan. Nations joined with
us in dedication to human rights and individual freedoms.
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Second, we work with developing countries in our common
interest to bring them lasting economic betterment, aiding and
abetting them in every way we know how to see that human. rights
and freedoms become part and parcel of that betterment.
Third, because this is a nuclear age which can literally mean
the decimation of mankind, we should negotiate with the Soviet -
Union and the Soviet sphere to reduce armaments and enhance security,
to offer measured but normal relations, with the.degree of normalcy
contingent on their performance under the judicable standards agreed
at Helsinki. At all times working through the Helsinki accords to
pressure the movement of that totalitarian system toward standards
for human rights. This we must do.
Finally, to people everywhere who yearn for freedom and.
human rights, we shall continue to offer hope. And that is not a
hope produced by huge expenditures for arms or a hope linked to our
possession of overwhelming power. It is the hope Lincoln and
Jefferson spoke of, a hope we fulfill when our actions reflect
what we stand for.
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