Quellenzur Geschichte derMenschenrechte

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Interview

Prof. Dr. Anthony Lake and Dr. Daniel Stahl (Coordinator of the Study Group Human Rights in the 20th Century), meeting for the first time, started their conversation in the morning, April 9, 2019, and – after a break – ended in the afternoon. The Study Group Human Rights in the 20th Century are grateful to the Institute for European Russian and Eurasian Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs (George Washington University) for providing us with a room for the interview.

Stahl
Can you tell me something about your family background?

Lake
They always observed my child rights... Well, let me see, my father was English and came to the United States with my grandfather, who was a professor at Harvard – not a classic immigrant story in that he went from Oxford to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rather privileged. My mother was the daughter of journalists; she grew up in Washington. My father quit Harvard and went to work in a textile mill and then worked his way up in a textile company. He was a passionate New Dealer and liberal Democrat and one of the few Democrats in New Canaan, CT, where I grew up. My mother was a moderate Republican, as was my grandfather, who worked in Eisenhower's¹ campaigns and was also a journalist. And she was a member of the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.² In New Canaan we had a number of Jewish friends. So one of my earliest memories is learning about the Holocaust. And that made a huge impression on me, of course.

Stahl
At what age was this?

Lake
Probably from eight years on. I grew up in New Canaan amid the arguments that my father had with all his friends about politics. I was a little rebellious in public school. I got in trouble in various ways. So they shipped me off to a boarding school in Massachusetts. And from there, I went to Harvard.

Stahl
What kind of trouble?

Lake
Well, I had skipped a grade. So I was smaller than everybody else. I think this did shape my view of rights, except I didn't think of it in those terms, because since I had skipped a grade and was younger and smaller than everybody else in public school, in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grades, and I was mercilessly bullied, which has always given me a hatred of bullies and oppression of various kinds. I know that sounds too grand. At the preparatory school, I was also rather rebellious. I remember reading the Communist Manifesto at lunch, not out of belief but just to irritate the faculty, which was very conservative.

Stahl
Reading the Communist Manifesto in the 1950s was not very common.

Lake
At a conservative time in any case. I didn't like the conformity and being told what to think. I was later on the school’s Board of Trustees. I was at the retirement ceremony for a teacher who had taught a course in history and also in current events and who believed that the magazines Time and Newsweek were too liberal for our tender eyes, so we only read US News and World Report, which was more conservative. I would challenge him. At his retirement, actually I was thrilled when he said after a few drinks that he wanted me to know that I was the biggest pain in the ass of any student he'd ever had in his 50 years of teaching. It pleased me greatly.

But I was hardly eccentric. I just would argue. We had a debate about the 1956 election between Stevenson³ and Eisenhower. In retrospect, I think Eisenhower was an excellent president actually, but I disagreed with some of his policies. In any case, at the time, we had a debate in front of the whole school, and then there was a vote. I realized that the only Democrats in the school were on the debating team with me. The rest were all Republicans. So it was liberating when I got to Harvard.

Stahl
You said your mother was involved in the NAACP. Do you remember some of her work? Did she talk about it at home?

Lake
I assume so, but she certainly pushed me in the direction of civil liberties in the United States, as a Republican, yes.

Stahl
And your father, was he also politically involved?

Lake
Not terribly, no. He was just arguing most of the time, but strenuously. Since he was English but an American citizen, around the time of Dunkirk⁴ he had joined the American Navy because he wasn't allowed to join the British Navy and felt passionately about World War II. So I grew up with the notion of a world of good guys and bad guys. I later learned it was more complicated.

Stahl
How present was McCarthyism in your life?

Lake
Oh, very much so.

Stahl
Do you recall some incidents?

Lake
I certainly remember McCarthyism, and I certainly remember both my parents' anger at him. And I still remember my mother's pleasure when Margaret Chase Smith,⁵ a Republican senator, stood up and led the charge at getting McCarthy censured in the Senate. Times have changed.

Stahl
You were talking about these professors who had very different point of views on politics. Do you recall a teacher or professor who had an influence on your political thinking?

Lake
Political thinking is too grand a phrase for this. There was a teacher, John Briggs, who was the coach of the squash team and also the debate coach. I probably learned more there than in my classes about how to do two things: one, to make arguments that try to be clear and have a logic to them, and two, to be skeptical because before you can debate properly or before you can do diplomacy, you have to understand what is on the mind or the likely arguments of the person with whom you're going to debate or negotiate and then shape your own arguments to anticipate them and to try to appeal to their beliefs.

Stahl
In 1957 you started to study at Harvard University.

Lake
American history.

Stahl
Why did you choose history?

Lake
Especially eighteenth-century religious history. Because it fascinated me, and I liked history. I did not like government as it's called at Harvard or politics or political science or whatever because there they are giving you theories that explain everything. Politics and international relations are far too complicated to be reduced to theories. History dealt more or less in facts of different kinds. The facts can conflict, and of course, historians pick and choose their facts. So there is no such thing as perfect objective history. But I liked studying facts.

I was inspired by what Kennedy was saying about America's role in the world for good and promoting democracy.

Stahl
You joined the State Department in 1962. You once stated “I joined the foreign service inspired by President Kennedy's call to defend democratic values.”⁶

Lake
I had taken the exam for the foreign service together with an application for a scholarship at Cambridge University. Every year, Harvard sends two people to live in particular rooms in Cambridge with no exams. You can just study what you wish. So that appealed to me because I didn't know whether I wanted to join the foreign service – I'd passed the exam – or whether I wanted to become an academic and pursue American history, especially American colonial history.

While I was at Cambridge, Kennedy⁷ had just been elected, and I was inspired by what he was saying about America's role in the world for good and promoting democracy, etc. Should I tell you a quick anecdote? Most of my friends or many of my friends were from Thailand or Asia. While I had signed up to study international economics, for reasons I don't understand since I didn't like economics, and by the way, I was assigned a young Indian tutor and I completely blew him off because I was bored by economics. His name was Amartya Sen.⁸ When he later won the Nobel Prize for economics, I remember thinking that I sort of missed an opportunity there!

In any case, since my friends were from Thailand, I started studying Asia on my own and tried to learn Chinese, which you can't do by yourself. I decided that I wanted to join the Foreign Service and that I wanted to go to Asia. Vietnam looked like an exciting place.

So I asked to go to Vietnam. They, of course, immediately said yes, assigned me to Vietnamese language training because my job was going to be and was at least part of the time to go out and drive around in villages to see how the war was going.

So I got back to Washington, got married, joined the foreign Service, was assigned to Vietnamese language training – and then I was drafted. At the time, no draftees were going to Vietnam. So I was going to go to Fort Dix, New Jersey, rather than to Vietnam. So I asked the State Department to get me deferred from the draft.

They wrote a letter, and it was supposed to say, “Mr. Lake is now assigned to Vietnamese language training,” but there was a typo, and it said, “Mr. Lake is not assigned to Vietnamese language training.” The draft Board got upset because I had lied to them, they thought. So I got the State Department to correct the letter. It just got very complicated. The draft board asked me to come to Torrington, CT, to meet with them. They had three questions for me. One was, “What's the State Department?” And I explained that it was like the Peace Corps kind of. And they said, “Oh, okay.” Two was, “Where's Vietnam?” because Vietnam wasn't as big an issue then. And I said, “It's next to Laos,” which is where there was a big crisis at the time. And then they said, “Well, you say you're studying Vietnamese.” I hadn't said that. I said, “I'm assigned to study Vietnamese.” I'm afraid, for the only time in my life, I fudged a little bit (smiles). And they said, “So talk Vietnamese to us.” So I counted to 10 in Chinese, which is all the Chinese I remembered from trying to learn it. And they said, “Okay. You're deferred.” So I went to Vietnam as a foreign service officer, and I think I'm the only American who beat the draft to go to Vietnam rather than to stay out of Vietnam. Says something about my intelligence.

Stahl
What seemed so appealing to you about East Asia? Was it just because of your friends, or was there something else?

Lake
Oh, I loved the philosophy, reading Lao-Tse and about Taoism and Buddhism, and I loved the culture. It was new to me, and I loved the subtleties.

Stahl
Going back to the Kennedy election, were you also involved in the Kennedy campaign?

Lake
Yes, come to think of it, I was the President of the Harvard Freshmen Young Democrats until I dropped out of the Young Democrats. I still got involved somewhat at Harvard in 1960, talking to friends, etc. I can't remember if I did campaigning. I probably did, handing out leaflets or something.

On election night, Kennedy came to Boston and there was a parade. I went with a group of friends and stood on the street, right in the front. When the motorcade came by, the crowd surged forward and I was almost thrown into Kennedy's car. And there he was waving at the crowd. Obviously I didn’t exchange words with him, but I was right next to him.

There was a sense not only of movement and power and all that, but of things happening. He exuded power, I just wanted to follow it. And as I wrote afterwards, that is extremely dangerous. One has to keep one's hand on one's wallet, if you see what I mean, and not let it be picked by the powerful. Keep thinking for yourself, in other words. But at least I understood the emotion.

Stahl
Which aspects of Kennedy’s agenda seemed most appealing to you?

Lake
Well, it wasn't put in terms of human rights, but it was that America was going to be promoting democracy and good around the world and do so in an assertive way. That was very exciting. Not so much the anticommunist part. I remember, when I was in prep school on vacation at home, we went to see the Moiseyev ballet in New York. At the end, all of the dancers were waving at the audience, and we were all waving back. I remember thinking that it was just a nice moment of getting over the whole Cold War construct. So while I was in favor of the promotion of democracy and all of that and had no love of communism, mostly on the grounds it doesn't work, I was motivated by a more positive vision than by the part of Kennedy that was simply opposed to the Soviet Union.

Stahl
Did you see this new administration as an opportunity to bring the Cold War to an end?

Lake
No, not to win the Cold War, but at least to defend freedom against those who were against it. But of course, when I got to Vietnam… I don't know if you've read The Quiet American by Graham Greene. When I read the book on the way to Vietnam, I thought it was ridiculous because it's about a young American, actually a CIA person, while I was in the foreign service, who is looking for a middle way in Vietnam that we could support as a way of defeating the communists there. He dies in the end but is sort of an innocent – homicidal innocence. It’s set during the French campaign. I remember thinking, “That's ridiculous. They were the French. Where were the Americans? We believe in freedom. We're not colonialists. We won’t lose.” And then when I got to Vietnam, I discovered that there wasn't a whole lot of democracy or freedom to be supporting on any side. That's when I began to have doubts about strict ideologies.

Stahl
These doubts came after you arrived in Vietnam?

Lake
Well, after a while when I was in Vietnam.

Stahl
So when you went to Vietnam, you saw that as a chance to defend democracy against the spread of communism?

Lake
Well, the spread of attacks on freedom generally, including communism certainly. I couldn't find democracy when I got there. The Diem regime,⁹ which was overthrown in my first eight months there, was horrible. The Buddhists were rising against them, Buddhist monks were burning themselves on street corners,¹⁰ and it was brutal. I became known as a Buddhist sympathizer in the embassy because I thought that the Buddhists were oppressed and that there might be a kind of a third way.

Stahl
And did that cause you trouble within the staff of the embassy or the diplomatic corps?

Lake
No, no, I was promoted. Well, that came during the second half of my time there. During the first half, I began in the visa section. Then I was the ambassador's staff assistant, Henry Cabot Lodge's¹¹ staff assistant. And then when he left, I went to the job I was trained for. I went up to Hue in central Vietnam, which was the center of the Buddhist movement, and did provincial reporting. I had a Jeep Station Wagon and drove into the villages and then reported back to the embassy on what was going on, including when I saw some barbaric things.

If I could come back to my point about empathy, I still have a very vivid memory of being invited to a battlefield just outside of Hue in 1964. We'd heard the fighting going on. Oddly enough, I was the senior American official in central Vietnam because, while I was only 25 years old, I was the Vice Consul in Hue. There were two of us, and, perhaps because there was a lot of violence, the other one had spent most of his time in Saigon. So I would be there by myself.

I was invited to go out and visit this battlefield. I remember walking down this trail with Vietnamese military officials. They'd left a number of the bodies of a local Vietcong unit that had been defeated, and I saw one body that had been defiled and an old woman squatting by the side with no expression on her face at all. 45 minutes later, when I walked out, she was still squatting by the body. It was obviously her son.

At the end of the trail, just before it got to the river, a route for the Vietcong to safety if they could get across the river, there was a ditch. And in the ditch, they had been caught by so-called Quad 50 – four 50 caliber machine guns on the back of an armored personnel carrier. It had caught them in the ditch. There were a number of bodies, all facing the APC, the machine gun. And right at the corner where the ditch bent was a young man who almost made it around the corner and then had been hit in the legs and bled out. The others were all very tough looking. He had glasses like yours, rimless glasses, that were twisted around his head, his face contorted in fear. He hadn't quite made it. And he was almost my age, about my age, looked like a student.

I just stood there for a while asking myself why he was there. What had led him to come to that and what was he thinking? I was probably completely wrong in what I was thinking about him, and I certainly wasn't trying to turn him into a hero or anything else. But he was terrified. It made me think much harder about why he had joined the enemy. It’s still very vivid in my memory, but it brings me back to the point about empathy and trying to put yourself into somebody else's shoes. And then you learn from it.

I was still working away on Vietnam but with increasing doubts and questions.

Stahl
Why did they show you this battlefield?

Lake
Because I was the senior American official, and it was a victory and there were damn few of those victories.

Stahl
Afterwards, you observed the whole escalation of the Vietnam War from very close up.

Lake
Yes, because then I was assigned to the Vietnam desk when I came back to Washington, and then went from that to being the staff assistant to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Vietnam, and from that to then being the staff assistant to the Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach,¹² who I loved working for because he had a skeptical turn of mind. And while he was like all of us, he had questions about the war, Johnson had great confidence in him. He was a very rational and very smart man. He'd been the Attorney General before that.

I was still working away on Vietnam but with increasing doubts and questions. I wasn't quite prepared to say that I was against the war as a whole, but I kept arguing together with some other younger friends that supporting a corrupt government in Saigon was simply not going to work and that we had to find alternatives.

I was beginning to understand – well, I had when I went into the villages – what the root problem was, which was that we, the Americans, were looking at everything through the lens of an ideology, an ideology in which I insist I believe, but nonetheless through a prism like that. And we were missing what was really driving the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front. And that was not so much an ideology, though they were indeed communists, but nationalism. Vietnam had stood up against the Chinese for 2,000 years. They'd stood up as best they could against the Japanese. Then they had defeated the French. And now they were fighting the Americans. They wanted a unified independent Vietnam, independent of the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans, anybody. In the villages, sometimes when I would go in and the Vietcong had been there, the night before in one case or in the recent past, you could sometimes see their propaganda on the school blackboards. And it was never about communism, socialism, or any ideology. It was always about how the Saigon government was the running dog of the Americans, and we are fighting for the independence of Vietnam.

I was once going to write a book about how nationalism is something we just don't ever understand enough. I remember I used to say that, if something was going wrong in the United States and the Canadians came in to fix it, even if I agreed with what the Canadians were trying to fix, I wouldn't want them telling us what to do.

Stahl
Did you establish contacts to Vietnamese people during your first stay in Vietnam, who somehow shaped your views on Vietnam?

Lake
Some. I got to know some younger Buddhists very well in Hue. They didn't like the communists, and they hated the Saigon government, which had been oppressing them. And they hated the South Vietnamese Army. They were being oppressed by all sides. Later a particular friend was tortured and had his teeth removed and then killed.

Stahl
Did you stay in contact with him after your return to the U.S.?

Lake
No, I didn't have any way of doing that.

Stahl
When you were discussing the strategy on Vietnam in the State Department, did you try to come up with new proposals?

Lake
Yes, there were a few of us. One group of “doves” would meet to think for new diplomatic initiatives. And some of us had what I used to call the clean colonel syndrome in which we couldn't bring ourselves to say we can't win. We thought it was a horrible mistake, but we couldn't quite say we should just get what we can and get out. But we knew it was going badly, and we knew how corrupt the Saigon government was and how brutal. So we argued for the clean colonel, i.e. some younger military person who could find ways to promote non-corrupt colonels to general and fight the war with some values that we could stand for.

Stahl
Did you have the impression that you were strongly opposed by the upper echelons?

Lake
Oh, yes. Not by Katzenbach, who was skeptical, as Lyndon Johnson knew. I've written about this and I used to teach my students about this, the problem of conflicting loyalties. Because the State Department, even while I was in disagreement, was my tribe. That's where my loyalty was. So I was damned if I was going to criticize on the outside the people I was working with

. But on the inside, I would occasionally get in trouble.

At the time, the Secretary of State was Dean Rusk,¹³ who was a hawk. He was being challenged by Senator William Fulbright¹⁴ of Arkansas, who was holding the Fulbright hearings against the war.¹⁵ There was some sort of meeting in the State Department, and I had spoken up. Afterwards, I got a letter from a Navy captain who was assigned to the State Department saying that he was appalled by what I had said in that meeting. He said that the president knew more about Vietnam than we did – not true – and that I had sounded just like Senator Fulbright!

And then I had dinner with my parents who were visiting Washington. My father was opposed to the war because he had a bartender who had been a French legionnaire and had convinced him that the United States could not win. And my father in any case thought it was wrong. But I couldn't agree with him without being disloyal to my colleagues in the State Department. So at the end of it, he suddenly yelled, because he had a temper, and the whole restaurant could hear him, “You sound just like Dean Rusk!” So it was a lose-lose proposition.

Katzenbach was a good man as well as very smart. He finally decided that I'd been working on Vietnam for almost six or seven years, and that I really needed to get away. So he suggested at the last minute that I go to graduate school in Princeton. He made a couple of calls. And so in 1967 I was assigned, thanks to him, to go to the Woodrow Wilson School. (Next to the Elliott School here the best graduate school in the country!)

Stahl
And why did he do that?

Lake
I think for my sake. He could see how frustrated I was even though I was getting promoted.

So I went to work for Henry Kissinger, and I became the person doing all his work on Vietnam.

Stahl
This was at the time when the war increasingly escalated. Did you stay in touch with your colleagues at the State Department during your time at Princeton?

Lake
Yeah. At Princeton, I studied Vietnamese history and had an opportunity to learn more of the background of Vietnam, understanding more and more about Vietnamese nationalism, about Vietnamese society and became thus more and more convinced that we could not win. While I was on the Vietnam desk, Henry Kissinger¹⁶ was a consultant and I'd gotten to know him. Oddly enough, he was a skeptic about the war. But for different reasons than mine. Mine were primarily about the boy at the end of the ditch and all the Americans, Vietnamese and others who were dying for what I thought was a stupid policy. He thought it didn't make sense actually because he didn't think it was in the American national interest, rather like George Kennan,¹⁷ more of a realpolitik, interest-based view. Our commitment ran beyond our interests. Mine was a more values-based and interest-based view.

Anyway, as I was about to graduate from Princeton, he needed a special assistant. I had gotten myself assigned to be the Consul in Bukavu because I enjoyed small posts. He convinced me to go to work for Richard Nixon,¹⁸ who I had always disliked. So I went to work for Henry Kissinger, and since he didn't trust his own staff, I became not only his special assistant overseeing stuff in the office, but the person doing all his work on Vietnam and then traveling with him to the secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris, etc.

Stahl
Why didn't he trust his staff?

Lake
They were from the State Department I guess, as was I, but anyway, he trusted me. And he could. I didn't talk to people about what I was doing.

Stahl
And why did he trust you?

Lake
I don't know. Maybe I should rob banks. I just look trustworthy, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, we became quite close. I told him at the beginning that I had reached the conclusion that we were going to lose or that we could not win and that, therefore, we needed to negotiate the best deal we could as soon as we couldn't get out. In fact, he convinced me to work for him when he told me, “We're going to end the war in Vietnam.” And I realized, no matter how much I disliked Nixon and the people around him, I couldn't go to Bukavu and not try to help end the war. And then of course, we started arguing immediately. To his credit, he would listen to me. He wouldn't agree with me, but at least he'd give me an opportunity to argue.

Stahl
But in the end the Nixon administration did same thing the Johnson administration had done, by trying to stop the war, they escalated it more and more.

Lake
Well, that's where we disagreed. And this is a whole other topic. I do believe you have to combine power and diplomacy, and I have always disagreed with or told students who believed that there are alternatives or colleagues at the United Nations who said, “Why are they using power? They should be doing diplomacy instead,” diplomacy without some kind of leverage is feckless. And the use of power without diplomacy is homicidal. You need to combine them.

In any case, he did let me argue with him. There's something called the effectiveness trap. James Thomson wrote an essay on what happened in Vietnam, it's brilliant.¹⁹ And the effectiveness trap is that officials, especially at the beginning of administrations tend to say, “If I protest too much on this issue, I will lose my effectiveness on the next issue. So I'm not going to speak up this time, and that way, I'll be more relied on and then the president will listen to me the next time around.” And it's always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and you never speak up. It's a powerful trap. You do need to be effective. I did argue with him because that's why he wanted me there, in a way to hear the counterarguments. And of course, he won every argument because he was my boss, though I thought he was wrong.

A week before the invasion of Cambodia, he called a number of us into his office. He said that the South Vietnamese were going to go into Cambodia with American forward air controllers in a week or so. He trusted us not to say anything and we didn't.

And, he asked, what did we think? Since I'd been arguing with him, I took the lead in arguing as to why all of us thought this was a bad idea. I remember vividly at the end, he said, “Well, Tony, I knew what you were going to say.” And I remember thinking to myself, “I can leave,” because I'd wanted to leave for some time because I hated the Nixon White House.

I thought to myself, “I can leave.” And another guy, Roger Morris,²⁰ and I then wrote a joint letter²¹ of resignation dated the day of the invasion, gave it to his military assistant Al Haig, General Haig,²² and asked him to give it to Henry, which he did. He wasn't pleased.

The State Department tried to keep me in the State Department then and offered to assign me somewhere else, but it seemed odd to resign in protest from the White House and then go to Paris with the State Department. So I gave up my career.

By the way, then Nixon, with Kissinger's approval and others, tapped my telephone. Six months later when I went to work as the Foreign Policy Coordinator for Senator Muskie²³ when he ran for President, I later learned that they were picking up advanced word of Muskie's speeches by listening to my home telephone, which is not democracy in action.

I used to tell my students that perhaps the most patriotic moment of my life practically was when I was sitting in my living room two years later when I learned that my phone had been tapped. It was on the front page of the New York Times. I walked across the living room to get my American history book from college off the shelves and looked up the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment and confirmed that my democratic rights had been violated and that this was perhaps the only country in the world where I could sue the President of the United States and the FBI and the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, etc., on an equal basis in an American court of law. So I sued them supported by the ACLU.²⁴

Stahl
Did you win?

Lake
No. The court threw the lawsuit against Nixon out after a year or two on the grounds he was acting as the president but the others were still in it. And the case went on. This would've been in about 1973 or 1974. In the late 1980s – the court case had dragged on and on and on – I ran into Kissinger at a function, and I repeated to him, “Look, I don't want any money,” although the Safe Streets Act of 1968 said you got $100 a day from everybody you were suing for the whole course of it. So there was a lot of money involved. I said, “I don't want any money. I don't even want $1. But I want a letter saying that it was wrong and that I'm a patriotic, loyal American,” because even my mother wondered why I was getting my phone tapped. We eventually negotiated a letter, and I have, on the wall in my study at home, a letter from Henry Kissinger saying that it was wrong and that I was a loyal citizen and official.

Stahl
So your relationship with Kissinger didn't break at this point?

Lake
No, we still smile at each other when we see each other, can't say we agree on very much. Oh, and the first article that the guy I resigned with, Roger Morris, and I then wrote was on lying around Washington and why government lies are so corrosive.

The next was a short article called “The Human Reality of Realpolitik,”²⁵ which comes back to human rights in a way because what we were arguing is that foreign policy, national security policy is not a game on a game board, and nations are not blocks of wood markers on a game board. They are comprised of human beings. And foreign policy should be made with an awareness of the human reality, not just so that so that you don't kill people unnecessarily, but so that you know what the hell you're doing because, if you're not looking at the human reality, then you blunder because you're bound up too much in abstractions, ideologies, etc.

It was a little controversial. We were invited to the State Department and met with officials about it. And they said, “Well, we can't do that because that's not how the Soviets think.” But it is very important how you relate foreign policy to domestic policies because the fact is, when you take actions abroad, it is not that they are serving or not serving the national interest. I've written speeches for a number of presidents. Presidents like to say there is a national interest involved here and it's how I define the national interest. In fact, there are many interests on each issue. An action abroad will help some Americans, but not other Americans, just like a domestic policy, so you ought to be thinking about that. And obviously, when you take an action abroad, it's not affecting that other country's national interest. It's affecting some of their people one way and some of them another. It's a much richer analysis when it's more realistic. What we were arguing is that this is not hard. It's not soft. It's not hawkish. It's not dovish. It's real.

Stahl
So you reclaimed realpolitik for you?

Lake
Well, I'll come to it when I get to the 1970s, but it was sort of based in this human reality argument.

Stahl
Talking about human reality, when did you learn about the atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam? Do you remember when you first got that information?

Lake
Yes, I was on an airplane when word of the My Lai Massacre²⁶ came in. Well, obviously, I knew about atrocities, but they were more by the Vietnamese than by the Americans, torture, etc. When I was in central Vietnam, suddenly all these guys appeared in suits with Sten guns or something on their backs, wandering around the villages, sort of standing out like a sore thumb. But they were there because they were killing people suspected of being Vietcong. I reported this to the Embassy. Stupid as well as wrong.

After some floods, which were very exciting – I got flooded out of an army base, and we had to walk through rice paddies with people on our backs. Anyway, there wasn't a lot of rice left. So the Saigon government was handing out leaflets saying, “Write on the back of this leaflet the name of Vietcong, and we will give you some rice.” They were turning these over, and I was quite sure these guys were killing people just on the basis of that, and they could've been anybody. They could've been rivals in love. They could've been people they owed money to, anybody.

Stahl
So this had happened during your first time in Vietnam?

Lake
Yes, I reported this to the embassy and said this is outrageous, etc., etc. I heard a Vietnamese officer talking about shooting unarmed prisoners. Not so much Americans. But anyway, I was in the plane with the Nixon White House when word of My Lai was mentioned.

Stahl
Was it immediately after My Lai happened in early 1968 or 14 months later when the news came out?

Lake
I can't remember now. I think it was when the news came out. I just don't remember, I'm afraid. The immediate reaction was, “Oh my God, how do we deal with this,” not, “This is wrong.” It was a public relations problem.

Stahl
Do you recall the year?

Lake
Well, it must've been 1969 or early 1970.

Stahl
Did this experience contribute to your decision to resign?

Lake
No, not centrally.

We must also say that we are appalled by the attitudes of leaders and this administration on racial issues and their cynical approach to other domestic problems.

Stahl
I read your letter of resignation. There you wrote, “We must also say that we are appalled by the attitudes of leaders and this administration on racial issues and their cynical approach to other domestic problems.” I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about these domestic problems.

Lake
Well, we didn't work on them, but you could just hear the racist comments by all the senior officials. My colleagues knew that I had been or was a Democrat, even though I was a foreign Service officer and I never talked about politics. But they knew. And then Nixon knew. So Nixon knew that Kissinger was harboring this Democrat. I know this for a fact, which contributed to my phone being tapped and after I left and was working for a Democrat running for president, having the tap on for a while.

Stahl
Did you see a connection between this domestic racism and the foreign policy arena where you were involved?

Lake
Yes, it all comes back to a lack of concern for other human beings, which brings us to human rights.

Stahl
Afterwards, you joined the Muskie campaign. Why did you decide to become more involved in politics?

Lake
I'm trying to remember. Well, I'd always been sort of political at College, I was always very interested in politics. The Nixon people knew I was a Democrat, in part because I used to ride a motorcycle to the White House.

Stahl
That meant being a Democrat?

Lake
Well, I walked in one morning with my helmet under my arm, and I didn't have time to go to the office before I rushed into the White House mess to grab a little breakfast. That's why I had my helmet with me. You sit at a round table unless you have a guest. I sat down at the table with other officials. And somebody said, “Is that a motorcycle helmet?” And I said, “Yes.” And this person worked in the public affairs department. So they said, “Do you ride a motorcycle to the White House?” And I said, “Why, yes, I do.” This was early on after I got there. And they said, “Would you mind if we had the Washington Post Style Section do an interview with you?” And I said, “Why ever would you want that?” And they said, “Well, what a great story, young Republican rides motorcycle to the White House,” so human interest. And I said, “Well, I do ride a motorcycle, but I'm actually a registered Democrat.” I could've announced that I was a Soviet agent. There was a hush. And I'm sure the word then spread around.

Stahl
So how did you come to join Muskie's campaign?

Lake
Oh, I think I must've met Cyrus Vance²⁷ somewhere. I think he recommended me to Muskie.

Stahl
And why Muskie?

Lake
Actually, we had to push him on Vietnam because he was rather cautious, being from Maine and a centrist. But I thought that he was a practical, pragmatic liberal. And I've always been attracted to practical, pragmatic liberals.

Stahl
So at this time, who were the other Democratic candidates?

Lake
Oh, there were a number of them. The main one was, of course, as it turned out, George McGovern.²⁸ And this was painful because a lot of my friends were working for McGovern. It took us a while to convince Muskie to come out strongly against the war. McGovern just captured the antiwar movement.

Stahl
So why didn't you join him?

Lake
Because I'd already joined Muskie.

Stahl
But you were not against McGovern?

Lake
Oh, not at all. Most of my friends were working for McGovern. And after McGovern beat Muskie for the nomination, I worked some for McGovern. But I thought it was doomed, and it was doomed. He carried two states, I think. It was a landslide for Nixon.

Stahl
So you were in the Muskie campaign mainly working on Vietnam?

Lake
Foreign policy generally, yes. On his staff, as Foreign Policy Coordinator. I was very junior and worked with outside senior people, Clark Clifford²⁹ and Paul Warnke³⁰ and various others.

Stahl
How big was this team on foreign policy?

Lake
Too big. Well, we organized something like 300 or 400 volunteers in various task forces. I guess I had one or two younger people working with me. I was 30-something, 31 or 32. Part of the problem was Muskie was so convinced he was going to win that he was investing too much on the policy side and not enough on the political side, which contributed to his defeat. But it was mostly that the antiwar movement was very strong and supported McGovern in the primaries, and we lost.

Stahl
When this campaign failed, you started to work for the International Voluntary Service?

Lake
Well, first, I wrote my doctoral thesis. I'd done well enough at Princeton, so they allowed me to write my doctoral thesis. I was doing that at night sometimes. After Muskie lost, I finished writing it and then went to IVS, yes. I couldn't write about Vietnam because I knew too many secrets still, and I didn't want to do that. So I wrote it on American policy towards South Africa in the Nixon administration and then I turned it into a book tangentially on American policy toward Southern Rhodesia.³¹

Stahl
Why South Africa?

Lake
Because it wasn't Vietnam and I hated Apartheid. And it interested me.

Stahl
So it was a way to express your criticism of American foreign policy without talking about Vietnam?

Lake
Kind of, yeah. And so many people were writing about Vietnam. Well, and it was an interesting subject. Then the Carnegie Endowment asked me to come and do a project on Southern Rhodesia, turning my thesis into a book about the American policy toward Southern Rhodesia, and I learned a lot about it from my thesis on South Africa. So I could use a lot of that.

Meanwhile, the Council on Foreign Relations was looking for somebody who could put together a group of essays from various points of view about the war in Vietnam and its legacy. They wanted somebody who was not for the war but was vaguely respectable. So they asked me to do that book. I did the two books, one that I was writing and then editing the other one that was called The Legacy of Vietnam, various authors from different points of view.

Stahl
And then you started working for the International Voluntary Service. Can you explain briefly what kind of organization it is?

Lake
It was founded in the 1950s, and it was a precursor of the Peace Corps. We had volunteers – it wasn't a big organization, but we had 100 or so volunteers in a lot of countries where the Peace Corps couldn't go because it was official, Algeria and various places. I loved it.

Stahl
What was your main task?

Lake
I ran it. Its Chair was Nick Katzenbach, who I'd worked for in the State Department. I had to look for places where these volunteers could go, and to try to find people who would like to volunteer, not just Americans, but from around the world, mostly technical, agricultural people, English-language teachers, etc.

Stahl
At this time, did you think about going back into politics?

Lake
No, not really. I never thought I would again after resigning that way.

Stahl
But then you joined a presidential campaign again.

Lake
Well, yes, in 1976, I had been asked to do the foreign policy section of the Democratic platform or advise them on it, and I had been asked by a campaign in 1976 to advise them. And then there was Jimmy Carter.³²

Stahl
And you also advised him.

Lake
Yes, some during the campaign, but then they asked me to go to Atlanta, Georgia, around Labor Day to work on a team preparing for a transition if Carter won. There were about 10 or 15 of us (most of whom then went into the Carter administration), putting together briefing books on foreign and domestic policy.

We identified the various issues that he would face if he won and then got people to write short notes, maybe two-page papers from different points of view on each of those issues, generally within a Democratic perspective, but with somewhat opposing views so he had real arguments for real different options. And then we all watched on television and were astounded when he won. And of course, human rights were a big part of it, playing against the excesses of Nixon/Ford.³³

I was then in charge of the transition going back to the State Department, which was of great interest to reporters. I used to sneak in when I would be going up to meet with the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, as the head of the incoming transition.

After Carter assumed presidency, perhaps the most interesting issue was how you integrate the human rights approach of this new administration with the real-life diplomacy around the world.

Stahl
In this transition period, did human rights already play a role?

Lake
Yes, of course, and that's what I want to get into, some of the complexities, if I could. So yes, Carter had, out of a deep belief, I think partly religious, campaigned on human rights as a way of making a distinction between him and the realpolitik excesses of Nixon especially on the Vietnam War, etc.

When he then got elected, I managed the transition for foreign policy and defense, preparing the papers and working on personnel issues. Then Vance, who I'd gotten closer to, asked me to be the head of the policy planning staff, but to make it very operational. So rather than simply doing long-term planning, he wanted me to attend his daily small group staff meetings to review press guidance and be in charge of speeches. That was his idea, not mine, and it did not make me popular. Every interagency paper and White House meeting, he wanted my staff to go over together with the bureaus who were in charge of producing the papers. So we were really deeply into the business of the whole State Department.

I was 38 or something, and this didn't make me or my staff popular. But it was useful because I saw our job mostly as trying to integrate the various policy approaches. Rather than predicting the future, although we were looking at the longer term as well, if we were doing X in Asia but we're doing Y in Africa, then we had to look at that and say, “Wait a minute. We have to find some way of encompassing both to bring some coherence.”

It was always a joke between me and Vance to try to get him to be more conceptual in how he looked at American foreign policy because he was very lawyerly. I've got a Peanuts cartoon he sent me in which Lucy is looking sort of into the middle distance. And somebody says, “What are you doing?” And she says, “I'm conceptualizing.” Vance sent it to me with some exclamation marks.

But anyway, perhaps the most interesting issue was how you integrate the human rights approach of this new administration with the real-life diplomacy around the world. There were two questions here. The first was, what do we mean by human rights, and second, how are we approaching them? Vance was asked to give the speech sort of laying out the State Department and administration approach on what we mean by supporting human rights.³⁴

Stahl
You wrote that speech?

Lake
I oversaw it. I've forgotten who actually wrote it, but it involved Pat Derian,³⁵ who was the new Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, and all the bureaus, who disagreed with her. I'll come back to that.

I learned a lot in the process of writing the speech. Then I learned a lot about Washington through the reaction to the speech. In any case, the speech essentially argued, I think properly, that human rights, as Carter had used them, as today the UN and everybody else tends to use it, were understood as being simply political and personal rights, but that they also included economic rights, social rights, cultural rights, etc., etc., as in the Universal Declaration. And these collide in the real world. When you say human rights, you have to take all of them into account, but we gave primacy, as I recall still, to the classic, political sort of popular conception of human rights as Carter had during the campaign.

Secondly, there's no one size fits all in how you pursue them. And it may be with one country that sanctions work, but in another country, it may be positive inducements. It may be targeted sanctions. It may be broad sanctions. It may be quiet diplomacy. It may be public diplomacy. It depends on the country because what matters is the results, not public posturing. It's complicated. But overall, this was at the center of our policies, but we were going to be practical in how we approached it.

Then I was asked to brief the State Department reporters on the speech. All hell broke loose. It didn't go over well because they wanted that one simple definition.

Even at the UN recently, I had to remind people that there are more than political rights that we're talking about here. And I don't mean only political rights and rights of the person. I mean economic rights as well. And that's complicated. So let's think about it in complex terms and then find simple ways forward to actually do things.

Stahl
You could have said, “Let's concentrate on political rights.”

Lake
But it is more complicated than that. And I don't believe in concentrating only on one kind of rights.

Stahl
Why?

Lake
Because then you're narrowing your vision, and in the end, what matters is not legal charters. What matters is human lives. I used to negotiate a lot with the Chinese government, whose human rights violations in political terms are terrible. On the other hand, it's lifted 1 billion people out of poverty, and they have a right not to live in poverty, according to the Universal Declaration. So let's think in a little more complex terms about, for example, how you encourage them to pursue more equality in the economic sphere, while pushing them on individual rights, etc.

I hate “isms” because they're the enemy of progress. I never lectured my students that you should believe this or that, but at the end of the course, I would say, “I've actually been using as a framework my own sort of a liberal view. And that involves three things. How you do each of the three is up to you. First is, as you're thinking about policies: clear principles. But if you're only doing principles, then you're simply becoming an ideologue, and you're not much use. So you combine it with pragmatism, and you use the pragmatism to try to achieve results for your principles. But if you only have pragmatism, you become a rudderless opportunist, and you're not going in any particular direction. You have to harness the pragmatism to the principles. And then third, skepticism. Be skeptical about what you're doing. Be skeptical about what others are doing so that you learn from that, and then you can improve the pragmatism and test the principles. But if you're only a skeptic, then you become a cynic, and you're going to burn in hell. So it's all three that you have to do and just try to figure out the complexities and think for yourself a little bit.”

Stahl
I was reading some of the memoranda you wrote during this time, the first years. In one from November 1978, so this is almost two years after taking office, you wrote, “We are correct to give priority to rights of the person.” And you also say, “Opinions are divided within this building on this issue, however, over whether we are correct in refusing to accept that a less developed country’s government’s efforts to improve the economic lot of its people should be deemed to compensate for its political shortcomings.”³⁶

Lake
Right. That's what I personally believe. But priority, not a singular focus. A lot of my job was trying to negotiate the differences between Pat Derian and the geographic assistant secretaries, who thought all this human rights stuff was getting in the way of their diplomacy, and Pat, who thought that that was getting in the way of her human rights campaigning. And my view was, “Let's marry the two together if we can.”

Stahl
So you saw yourself as a broker.

Lake
Absolutely, and I did a lot of that for Warren Christopher,³⁷ who was then the Deputy Secretary of State, who was sort of in charge of this.

Stahl
How would you describe your relationship to Derian and the geographic offices?

Lake
I think generally pretty good because the geographic people knew that I wanted to get things done diplomatically. And Pat knew that I was a believer in rights. And again, I was just trying to take complex factors and help put them into a relatively simple way forward that reflected these things and that would get things done. Getting things done is not always the prime concern in the State Department, I might add as a still a loyal foreign service officer. So it would sometimes get edgy, but never as edgy as it would be between the two sides.

Stahl
You said that there are tensions between political and social and economic rights.

Lake
Absolutely. And different constituencies.

Stahl
Can you give some examples how these tensions materialized in political affairs you had to deal with?

Lake
I have to go back and think of them again, but obviously, if you're doing sanctions, the Economics Bureau's not going to like it. More broadly, in American society or in the foreign policy community, if you take the economic rights and put them above all the others, and that tended to be the way on the left, then Castro is right and the Chinese are right. To lift people out of poverty, it's seen at the left as necessary to infringe on the other rights because capitalism is corrupt, and therefore, only communism can force people into economic equality, economic equity. Equality, opportunity, and equity seems to me still very important.

So that's one bunch. And the other bunch were the political rights, i.e. the promotion of democracy, in which I also believe. I believe strongly in all three. The promotion of democracy tended to be caught up in the Cold War as a way of going after communism, going back to the Kennedy times and before. And that tended to be the neoconservatives and the conservative Democrats and the others who believed most in freedom, but political freedom.

The third was what's most often, perhaps, thought of as human rights: the rights of the person. Freedom from torture; legal rights. And that tended to be the liberal left of the Democratic Party. I also believe in these.

Stahl
I would like to hear more about one of the situations where you had to handle these tensions.

Lake
Yes, but people don’t generally argue them in terms of rights, but in terms of policies. You seldom hear a Marxist say “I am supporting the economic rights in the Universal Declaration against the other two.” Or a liberal say “We must sacrifice some economic equity for the sake of democracy.” You see what I mean? Because that would be unpopular. So nobody sees it that way.

And one way or another, I have, it just occurs to me, in my career been in different stages between all three. When I was at UNICEF at the UN, I was really pushing on economic equity and got all of our offices to be working in the poorest communities and out there, while at the same time on the other rights.

I guess it must've been in the late 1980s. I was on the board of Freedom House, promoting the democratic rights. Most of my fellow board members were more conservative than I was. At various times, I worked with the ACLU. And in fact, the ACLU supported me in my suit, defending my individual liberties against the government.

Then what's interesting is how you support all of them and fight the ideologues in each camp.

The question of whether we ever should oppose basic human needs loans was more difficult, and controversial within the State Department.

Stahl
Let’s take a look at one field of foreign policy: foreign aid. Here the tensions between different rights could become very strong.

Lake
Indeed.

Stahl
How did you handle the situation when it came to foreign aid to countries where individual human rights, personal human rights were violated?

Lake
I would come back to the original point of what's going to work. For example, I was a strong supporter of sanctions against South Africa. This was not cutting off aid but was going farther and actually sanctioning South Africa, which was not a universal opinion. I think a South African newspaper named me as one of the ten most dangerous Americans while I was at the policy planning staff. And actually, the sanctions did work in South Africa. In other places, they don't work, they simply make it worse. Again, it's the human reality. You have to look at the actual society and what will happen. In fact, generally, sanctions work when they start to hurt those who are in power. In South Africa, when it began to hurt white businesses, that had an effect.

Stahl
And you were not afraid it would hurt the people who were already suffering?

Lake
Of course. I looked carefully at the statements by the ANC and others, who were saying, “Yes, bring them on,” who could speak for the poor people. But in other places, they just hurt the poor and don't have any effect and shouldn't be done. But look at the human reality in those countries.

Stahl
In another memorandum to Vance you wrote about the problem of international financial institutions giving loans to developing countries. And in this memorandum, you wrote in 1978: “The question of whether we ever should oppose basic human needs loans is more difficult, and controversial within this building…. Opposition to needy loan would be for tactical reasons: because it seemed the course most likely to produce improvements in a particular human rights situation.” And then you say, “SP³⁸ -- your office -- believes we should always support IFI (International Financial Institutions) loans, which would serve basic human needs.”³⁹ Can you explain your reasoning leading to this suggestion?

Lake
Well, I don't remember the memo, obviously. But going back to our framework of three different kinds of human rights and how you resolve the differences, then some would argue that, in all cases, the democratic rights, the freedom rights, take precedence over the economic rights, which include basic human needs, or the rights of the person.

I think what we were saying there was, first of all, staking out a bureaucratic position on behalf of the basic human needs loans because they're not so popular in the State Department. Secondly, if they're serving basic human needs, then presumably, those are people in dire need and living in terrible poverty. And therefore, they would meet the test of how severe is the abuse in each category of rights.

If one category is being abused but not terribly, and the other is they're suffering terrible abuse, then you take that into account in deciding which way to go when they come in conflict. And here, obviously, if the political people in the State Department are trying to deny a basic human needs loan for political purposes, I think on principle we were saying no.

It comes back to the question you asked me about the people of South Africa if you're sanctioning South Africa. And there, as I said, the answer was that, when the leaders of the people who were being abused say, "Yes, put on the sanctions, for the sake of our longer-term future and because we're suffering so badly under Apartheid," then that would take precedence.

But generally, I would think basic human needs in countries where there's dire need should take precedence.

Stahl
You just said that these social and economic rights were not so popular in the State Department.

Lake
In the political sections, I mean. In the geographic bureaus, yeah.

Stahl
Did you have to do a lot of convincing to do and did that change during the Carter administration?

Lake
No, not essentially. These were not political appointees generally. Some of them were. It wasn't convincing them so much, but convincing the Secretary or the Deputy Secretary so that they ruled in our favor whatever we were recommending. Sometimes, I sided with them against the human rights people. It wasn't always one way. But it was always basically about what's best for the people in that country, according not just to us but to their leaders.

Stahl
How did you know what was best for the people in the country? Did you maintain many contacts to these different countries, to the opposition?

Lake
No, there are articles, and there are opposition people who are speaking out, not directly to me, but they were speaking out, as in South Africa. And if you go back over the record, you'll see how often the ANC and others said that they believed there should be more sanctions.

Stahl
I would like to understand your role within the State Department a little better. What is the role of the Director of Policy Planning, and how did you try to fill this position?

Lake
Well, as I said, Vance appointed me to the position. And it varies. I came under criticism from time to time especially in the academic community for not doing enough long-term planning and getting too involved in operations. I was very involved in the negotiations that led to Southern Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe,⁴⁰ and I worked very closely with the Assistant Secretary for Africa because I'd done the book on Southern Rhodesia.

I was criticized for being too operational. But as I said, I got very involved in decisions on aid. My staff and I did the speech writing for Vance, did a lot of the press guidance together with the geographic bureaus and others all of the inter-agency papers, went over them to see if one geographic area was more or less consistent in our approach with another. It never is, but at least we tried to think about it and to think about the longer-term implications of what we were doing.

But I was convinced then, and I'm convinced now, that if you're not involved as a voice in the operations, then you may write interesting papers but they get filed away. Nobody can predict the future. I think Samuel Goldwyn, the movie producer, said that only an idiot would make predictions, especially about the future.

And since you can't predict exactly what something's going to look like five years from now, there's no point in trying to write contingency papers for it. But you should be thinking about what the overall strategy is and what you're trying to accomplish in the longer term.

Stahl
That was what many considered the main role of the director?

Lake
Not usually before I was doing it, but it became more so afterwards.

Stahl
How did you did you deal with human rights in regions as diverse as the Middle East and Latin America? What was your approach to bring them into a coherent pattern of human rights policies?

Lake
That was not easy. But as I was saying earlier, the issue here is people's lives, not abstract concepts of human rights. It could very well be that in a country in Latin America, you take a different approach than you would in a country in Asia or Africa or someplace in Europe, depending on what our judgment is and what will have the best effect.

I have always argued for combining principle and pragmatism, principle and practice, into one thing rather than seeing them as opposite. And I continue to believe, as I said this morning, that principle without pragmatism is simply about looking good or taking fine positions, but not having much effect. And pragmatism without principle, including especially human rights, but also just dealing with human reality, is aimless and opportunist. Both in government work and in abstraction it's really interesting how you combine the two. But a lot of people don't like it because it involves compromise between conflicting goals and conflicting needs.

Stahl
When you say you became involved very much in operational work, ...

Lake
At Vance's request, let me note, yes.

Stahl
... which were the cases where human rights played a major role?

Lake
Everything. That's my point. You cannot separate human rights from diplomacy and foreign policies. Because you're dealing with the lives of the human beings in the countries that you're dealing with. So even purely “diplomatic” approaches affet people and their rights.

Stahl
So can you give me an example of one situation where you became involved in the operational side and how you tried to solve the human rights problems involved in this problem?

Lake
Given human nature, there will always be abuses of human rights everywhere, including the United States, and I suspect here at George Washington University. But again, by trying to bring that perspective into the discussions and everyday diplomacy and issues, everything from South Africa to the battles between Vance and the State Department and Brzezinski⁴¹ on policy towards Africa, where Brzezinski was seeing it very much as a part of the game board and therefore was part of the competition with the Soviets, which was the so-called “globalist” perspective. Vance and his people were more “regionalists,” who were saying, “No, we have to deal with African issues on their own.”

In my view, they were combined. I was saying that, both for the sake of human rights in Africa or just welfare of Africans, that we had to deal with African nations as Africans and not as pieces on the global Cold War game board for the sake of our relations with Africa and for the sake of African people and their rights of all kinds, but that that was also the best way to compete with the Soviets in Africa because that increased our influence in Africa and provided a better model than what the Soviets were providing. I remember Vance, who didn't like that, the last part of the formula, once saying in front of others on an airplane, “You sound just like Henry Kissinger.”

Stahl
He said that to you?

Lake
Yes, because I was saying that a regionalist approach is also the best globalist approach. And he just wanted a regionalist approach without my adding on, “And it's the best way of competing with the Soviets.” So that piece of it sounded like Henry Kissinger. And I know that Brzezinski, who later became a friend, thought that I was a dangerous regionalist because I wasn't talking enough about the Soviets.

Stahl
I was wondering what you would consider your main contribution to the human rights policies of the Carter administration?

Lake
I think, as in Vance's first speech on it, trying to encourage people to see it in all its complexity and then find clear answers to the dilemmas among the different kinds of human rights and to be practical then country by country and situation by situation and trying to see how to get the best results rather than being dogmatic about it.

I think U.S. foreign policy became more humane during the Carter presidency.

Stahl
And as this policy progressed over time and the Carter administration came closer to its end, how did you see the development?

Lake
I don't think it developed very much between the beginning to the end. In terms of a big doctrinal change.

Stahl
How did U.S.-American foreign policy change during the Carter presidency?

Lake

I think it became more humane, or at least tried to. And in terms of relations with the Soviets, I think it moved more and more over time to a harder position as Brzezinski generally gained more influence vis-à-vis Vance. It was interesting, and I can't remember the details of it, but after the election, Carter went back more towards his original views, which were more like Vance's than Brzezinski. I just remember being struck by it because I think he was trying to look tough during the election against Reagan.

Stahl
In a memo from 1980 you made a suggestion regarding Argentina. Back then Argentina was ruled by a military junta. Videla⁴² was leaving and another man was coming in.⁴³ And you suggested then in this situation, "Explore with the new President Elect, whether anything can be done to provide some information on the fate of disappeared persons through some intermediary such as the church, but do not make accounting for the disappeared a central requirement for improving our bilateral relations. ... Without sacrificing principle, maintain a somewhat lower profile on Argentine issues in international for a, such as at the UNHRC, letting others take the lead where possible.”⁴⁴ All this was supposed to prevent Argentina from entering into a too close relationship with the Soviets. I was wondering if this episode is an example of a broader development taking place in human rights policy. Were the costs of human rights policy becoming too high over time in your view? And is this episode an example of a broader development taking place in human rights policy?

Lake
No, I don't think so. Well, who wrote the memo besides me?

Stahl
William Bowdler.

Lake
It sounds to me like a compromise between the two of us in which we'll try to find out about the missing, and we're not going to give up on principle. That would be Policy Planning's part. But we're not going to push the Argentineans too hard in order to maintain our influence. And I suspect, in our thinking, it was also, if you push them hard right at the start, you probably won't get a good answer. Do you fish? If you have a fish on the line and you yank too hard, you can snap the line. So you have to be a little delicate about how you do it. But I'm sure that was a compromise between the two. It didn't reflect a shift away from human rights, no.

Stahl
But a lesser emphasis on human rights?

Lake
No, in Argentina, as you're trying to help orient a new government. But I would say, in retrospect, I probably wanted it stronger on human rights, but at least we got human rights into the mainstream policy still.

Stahl
Did you really perceive a threat that the Soviet Union was becoming too influential in the South American right-wing dictatorships, or was that more a position that was coming from the Bureau for Latin America? Was that a real concern to you?

Lake
No, not especially, I don't think. But we didn't know who the new leadership was going to be there. I'm trying to remember. I don't think there was a lot of concern. Nicaragua was becoming a big issue and the Sandinistas.⁴⁵ We didn't like Somoza⁴⁶ particularly either. I wrote a book about it. I just don't remember about Argentinian specifically. And the fact that I don't remember means that I don't think we were terribly concerned.

Stahl
Can you give some details about how the fear of Soviet influence and human rights policies intermingled in your position towards Nicaragua?

Lake
I think we were working hard to try to find a solution between Somoza and the Sandinistas, neither of whom we liked. And that really didn't have very much to do with the Soviets, I don't think.

Stahl
What was your position in regard to Nicaragua?

Lake
I'm trying to remember now, even though I wrote a book about it,⁴⁷ but I know we were all wrong, including me, which is why I chose that as a topic for a book. We were trying to find some middle ground, and I guess there wasn't one.

Stahl
One idea of Carter’s human rights policies was to improve the moral standing of the United States on an international level. Do you think that you succeeded?

Lake
Yes, I think so. But you can't measure it.

Stahl
But did you have some indications?

Lake
Again, take South Africa, where we were being attacked by the right-wing white press in South Africa. I remember going to South Africa and meeting with ANC and other leaders in the anti-Apartheid movement, one of whom got arrested on the way to come and see us. And that was sending a message certainly to the South African majority. So yes, but you can't measure that, I don't think.

To come back to Argentina, the balance of the memorandum may not have been what I wanted, but at least it was an example of doing what we were trying to do, which is to integrate human rights into mainstream policy decisions. That is the crucial question.

And I used to say that we had to get away from having human rights concerns as an annex to the main paper because here's our diplomacy. And then Annex A, oh, we have these human rights concerns. It should be integrated into the main options. That had not been true before, and it wasn't true afterwards.

Stahl
Coming to the end of the Carter administration, did you have the impression that these policies within the United States helped in the process of election and gave Carter a good standing in the population, or was it more of a hindrance?

Lake
I think it did. I think it did early on as a change from the Nixon/Ford/Kissinger years, where majority opinion was not favorable, honestly, towards them after Nixon. I think, by the time Reagan came in, it was less of a help. And if anything, because of Afghanistan and Iran and the hostages, Carter was seen as very weak. And I think probably human rights was seen in the same light. But you'd have to look at polls or something at the time. I don't think it came up much in the 1980 election.

I don't know. But that raises the issue of how you make human rights popular because I think the human rights community makes a mistake on this – not the NGOs. I worked with Human Rights Watch. I was with the ACLU, with Amnesty International in various ways. And I give money, even with my limited means. I admire them hugely, and they're better at this. But the UN generally and often human rights advocates make the mistake I think of turning all this into a legal issue.

While the Universal Declaration is very important and the 1951 Convention on Refugees, etc. are all very important, and international law is very important, the arguments can often be abstract. It's much more powerful if you use specific examples of the suffering of people whose rights are being denied, as the NGOs do, rather than argue it on legal grounds because this is a violation of some treaty or some covenant or something. You see what I mean?

Which brings me back to my point that the concept of human rights is really based I think and has evolved by human beings over time through empathy. So if I come to an audience and say that what is happening to the Rohingya refugees,⁴⁸ who are stateless, is a violation of this convention or that convention, I'll be met with a bit of a yawn, whereas if I say I have met, as I have, with women who have been raped and their husbands killed and their children killed or I've met with these children who were drawing pictures of their fellow schoolmates being killed by the soldiers, etc., it connects. And then I say, “And their rights are being violated.” But the rights have to be about human beings rather than an abstract issue. And that's why I think, in 1980, I honestly don't remember them coming up very much.

Stahl
Would you say that there are too many human rights laws?

Lake
Non, no. Human rights laws are a good thing. Of course, however, they don’t have a political base unless you connect to the lives of human beings and their rights, understand me? But if we walked out this door and you saw some child being abused, would your first thought be, “That poor child. That's horrible. I'm going to try to stop it,” or, “That child's rights are being violated”? We have to connect the two.

That's my point. But in the human rights community – not in the NGOs who are on the frontlines working on this – but in some of the human rights community and the academic world and at the UN, the argument centers too much on they have violated this rule or that rule. That is an essential part of the argument, but let's not forget the people.

The separation of children from parents at the U.S. southwest border⁴⁹ or the denial of asylum claims is a violation of international law, but it's also putting kids in cages. So let's somehow put the two together rather than simply arguing on legal grounds.

Stahl
Making human rights too much of a personal story can also be problematic. Organizing events with refugees in Germany, sometimes you hear the argument: “Don't bring me to the next podium where I am being presented as the suffering victim.” It can be problematic to present personal interest stories in order to make a case for human rights.

Lake
When I was using the stories of these women and children, I would never name names. And when I was at UNICEF, I banned the use of starving children or children who are about to die by our national committees who were raising money. It would be a terrible violation of the privacy of the child and of the parents who were grieving.

I agree with you. Much better are the stories of people like the fellow that I was on a panel with who started a company making yogurt out in the West here. He was an immigrant and is very successful now. I've got a T-shirt that I wear to irritate people sometimes that says, “Immigrants make America great.” No, the positive message is always better. But you can talk about victims while preserving privacy.

Stahl
Coming back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan won the election, what were your thoughts about the future of human rights policies at that moment?

Lake
I thought we were going to have a fight to keep it alive, keep it on the radar. I went to my farm in Western Massachusetts and was a working farmer while teaching at Amherst and Smith and Mount Holyoke and the five colleges up there. You can't make a living on a farm. And it was a lovely life. I did not go to meetings in the Council on Foreign Relations or get very involved. I wrote some books.

Stahl
Why did you decide to leave politics behind you?

Lake
Because I love farming!

Stahl
Why didn't you choose to keep on fighting for human rights?

Lake
I didn't because I wasn't in Washington, DC. I didn't get very involved in the 1984 or 1988 campaigns. And then in 1992, my book agent and publisher asked what I wanted to write the next book on. I decided I would write a book looking back on the Democrats and presidential elections and foreign policy and why we always screwed it up.

I was interviewing various Democratic candidates or their staffs, most of whom or many of whom were saying that, since George HW Bush⁵⁰ was the foreign policy President that they weren't going to say anything about foreign policy, which I thought was a big mistake.

And then I met Bill Clinton⁵¹ in the fall of 1991, who was then the Governor of Arkansas and not well known. We had a long talk and he wanted to talk about foreign policy. I loved the way he was very worried about the people who lived in my little town in Massachusetts because the economy was not doing well by them, and he seemed to really care about them. We had a good talk. Afterwards, he and his wife asked me to coordinate foreign policy in his presidential campaign. I decided that would be interesting. So I did it.

Stahl
Had you expected a comeback in the political arena?

I was very struck with how, after we had discussed the paragraph or the issue, Clinton would say, “Yes, I believe that. That's right.” Generally, candidates are more worried about whether other people will believe it.

Lake
No.

Stahl
So it was just this meeting with Bill Clinton that changed your mind?

Lake
Yes.

Stahl
How many people did he gather to work on foreign policy in his campaign ?

Lake
He had some friends who did foreign policy, but I was the senior foreign policy adviser. I then asked my friend Sandy Berger,⁵² who had been a deputy on the policy planning staff and who was a friend of Clinton's and who had introduced us because they had worked together on the McGovern campaign, to join me as the co-senior adviser. So the two of us then put together a foreign policy operation, once again of dozens or hundreds of people.

Stahl
Why do you think Bill Clinton hired you?

Lake
It's always a mystery to me as to why someone would hire me.

Stahl
But you have a guess?

Lake
I had done it before. We seemed to agree on the issues. Well, actually, the first thing he did was to ask me to write a speech, to put together a speech for him at Georgetown, his first foreign policy speech.⁵³

I consulted with some of the people he'd already been talking to and various others and wrote a speech – I've forgotten with whom. And then in the fall of 1991 I went down by myself to Little Rock to meet with him for a day. And we went over each paragraph of the speech on different topics and then talked about its background. It was about two-thirds of a day. I was very struck with how, after we had discussed the paragraph or the issue, he would say, “Yes, I believe that. That's right,” and then we'd go on. Generally, candidates are more worried about whether other people will believe it rather than it reflects their own views, but he was putting it together, and I was very impressed. And then it just went on.

Stahl
What were the main points of this speech?

Lake
I can't remember now. I'm sure that we at least talked about, again, this view of you have to look at what's happening to the people in a country rather than account it as a game board. And one of the things that impressed me very much was, after we'd been in a new administration for a month or so, there'd been a threat against the former President Bush from the Iraqi intelligence people. They were trying to blow him up. It didn't work. But we had to respond.

After much discussion with the military and others, the senior officials, we decided to send Tomahawk missiles into the Ministry in Baghdad. But Clinton was very much of the view that we had to do it in a way to limit the collateral damage – the innocent civilians. So we did it at night. And then he wanted to know what the neighborhood was around it and whether we could keep people from getting killed in the surrounding neighborhood. And I never heard officials doing that before. I remember admiring it, and it wasn't a sign of weakness. It was a sign of wanting to know the reality.

Stahl
You were appointed as Clinton’s National Security Advisor in 1993. In this position you could shape American foreign policy in a decisive way. The Cold War had just ended. What were your expectations for the new era?

Lake
The President is “decisive.” But it was a great chance to have some influence. To come back to the three categories, our emphasis was more on the democratic rights than on the individual rights and the economic rights. And that was largely because of our interests in NATO enlargement, etc., and the promotion of democracy, which was a unifying point for the whole Democratic Party because of the differences there had been between the folks on the right, the neocons, who wanted to promote democracy, but in a much more hawkish way and in a more anti-Soviet way, and the rest of us, who were more on the rights of the person, classic human rights, the civil liberties side. And we had all agreed that we wanted to promote democracy.

And in the wake of the Cold War, there was an opportunity to try to bring us together then about promoting democracy through peaceful means around the world. So that was the first sort of doctrinal speech I gave under Clinton was on the promotion of democracy.

Stahl
The so-called enlargement. Who came up with this concept?

Lake
My staff and I with Clinton and many outside advisors. And that was related in turn to NATO enlargement because we were not doing NATO enlargement primarilyfor the sake of containing Russia. And in fact, at least Clinton and I were saying that an enlarged NATO was open to Russia if it was democratic, but the NATO enlargement in our view was helping to encourage Eastern European states to resolve their border disputes and to embrace democracy because that was the condition of joining NATO. And since they were scared of Russia, that helped them adopt more democratic principles and practices, human rights in action, unless you're going to define human rights only in terms of individual liberties.

Stahl
At the same time, the policy of enlargement created suspicion within the Russian government, which eventually backfired.

Lake
Well, some, yes, but I think it's more because of Putin⁵⁴ than because of NATO enlargement. If Yeltsin⁵⁵ had chosen a different successor...

Stahl
But if you apply this method you always suggested to try to get into the mind of the other people – wasn’t it foreseeable that sooner or later a Russian president would react to NATO enlargement?

Lake
We knew that they didn't like it. And that's why we went a little slowly, and that's why we kept emphasizing to them NATO is open to Russia itself. Clinton talked about a Kantian peace throughout all of Europe, including Russia, all in a NATO that would be, as I used to say, an OSCE with teeth.

Then we worried about whether that vision was going to upset the Chinese. So we made it clear this was defensive and not so much a military alliance – just as NATO had helped Western Europe stay at peace. I used to make this point all the time that, in arguing with various colleagues for a NATO enlargement, that of course the Russians didn't like it, but we were keeping it open for the Russians. And it's a question of when, not if.

But I used to say, “There are two futures here. Imagine a future in which Russia becomes more democratic and at peace with its neighbors. And then we can have this vision of a Europe whole and free, or if Russia goes in the opposite direction, at that point, the Eastern European are going to be saying, ‘Protect us. Protect us.’ And if we say no, then we're Neville Chamberlain.⁵⁶ And if we say yes at that point, then we really have a crisis with the Russians.” So it's better if we expand NATO over the coming years.

My point is, just imagine now if NATO had not been enlarged what would be happening. The Poles and the others would all be clamoring for Western protection. And you could have the sort of crisis we almost had over Georgia then all through Eastern Europe.

Stahl
When I hear you talking, it sounds almost like back in the 1990s NATO was a human rights project.

Lake
Yes, absolutely.

Stahl
Would you say that was also your conviction at that time? Did you see NATO as a human rights tool?

Lake
I wouldn't call it a human rights tool. But it was a pro-democracy tool, yes. And democracy is one of the three baskets of human rights. It promotes the other two. And I'm still proud of it. That's why I'm happy to come here to GW and argue it with anybody.

I don't think Clinton was anxious to be seen as a part of the legacy of Jimmy Carter.

Stahl
When Clinton hired you, did he also try to connect to the Carter administration and Carter's approach to human rights policy?

Lake
Not too much, no. Publicly, because Carter was very unpopular at the end. And I think that, by the end, he had not given human rights a terribly good name because it was perceived as “soft.” And again, my point is that it shouldn't be seen as soft or hard or anything else. It should be seen as integrated into a foreign policy. You see what I mean? So I don't think he was anxious to be seen as a part of the legacy of Jimmy Carter. And they weren't close friends.

Stahl
And how did you see it? Did you try to pick up some of the Carter policies?

Lake
Well, of course. That's what I believed under Carter, it's what I believed under Clinton, the same thing. But I certainly never tried to portray Clinton as in the legacy of Carter because that would've not been a happy moment. So for example, Clinton and Carter got into a bit of a spat over Haiti. I had promoted the invasion of Haiti⁵⁷ because the sanctions weren't working, and I'd opposed the sanctions. It's a very complex story. I was working with Aristide⁵⁸ when he was here in Washington in exile. He was the legitimately, democratically elected President of Haiti, who’d been overthrown by the military. And the military were suppressing dissent using machetes to go after people who were protesting for democracy. Their human rights were being horribly violated, an argument we were explicitly making. The sanctions were simply putting the people into deeper misery. There were more and more refugees coming out, which was then a problem for us on how you deal with the refugees.

I was arguing for a humanitarian intervention and to throw out the military and restore the democratically elected President and then don't occupy the place, which was a horrible mistake in the past, but at least give them a democratic chance. Finally, Clinton agreed. American troops were actually in the air when Cédras⁵⁹ fled. Jimmy Carter was not on the same wavelength we were on this. He was actually in Haiti together with Colin Powell⁶⁰ and Sam Nunn⁶¹ at the time.⁶² And so he wasn't happy with Clinton or with that. So that was another reason not to try to wrap Clinton's policies in Carter's legacy.

Stahl
Wasn’t this also a departure from Carter's human rights policy – to intervene militarily?

Lake
Yes, we were intervening on behalf of people who were being abused by their government and then not trying to stay. And Carter was more hesitant about our doing it.

Stahl
He would never have done that?

Lake
Probably not. And the Haitian people just got a chance for a while. I was a little disappointed with what then happened, but it was better than it had been.

Stahl
That was actually a very new development in foreign policy, to use Article 7 of the UN Charta as a tool to implement democracy and defend human rights.

Lake
Yes, there's been an evolution, as I'm sure you're very aware of, international law on this. When I was working on Southern Rhodesia back in the 1970s and I wrote pamphlets on calling out American businesses that were supporting the white minority regime, etc., you had to show that an internal situation of horrendous abuses of human rights by the white minority there were a threat to international peace. And otherwise, there was no consensus, international consensus that an intervention would be legal or sanctions would be legal. But it evolved. By the 1990s and certainly after 2000 and the responsibility to protect, you didn't have to show that it was a threat to international peace. You could simply show that it was a violation of various conventions, which is a very positive step forward.

Stahl
So you also tried to promote this new development?

Lake
Implicitly. I think it just was happening.

Stahl
When you compare the administrations of Carter and Clinton, how important were human rights? Did it become more important under Clinton or less?

Lake
I think it was more integrated, but it was less of an issue because Carter had made it an issue in the campaign as sort of a signature for him, and less so for Clinton. But democracy and the promotion of democracy was more important under Clinton as a part of broadly human rights. Well, we did a lot of things.

I remember constantly raising political prisons in China in my conversations with the Chinese. With China, we tried a new approach, which didn't work initially. It was basically saying, “We're not going to sanction you now,” and then put it as a sort of a vaguer future threat or something. I can't remember details. But it wasn't working. And so the President decided –this probably would've been in 1995 or late 1994 – that the White House would speak more directly with the Chinese, as had been the case in the past.

The Chinese were sending missile tests over Taiwan to try to influence the election there. So we sent an aircraft carrier taskforce through just to remind the Chinese that they shouldn't attack Taiwan or threaten to. Clearly, we weren't communicating well. Therefore, we invited my opposite number, though he's not formally a “National Security Advisor,” but still the President’s chief foreign policy person, over to Washington. We went outside Washington and spent two or three days at an estate in Virginia just talking about each side's views and everything.

I remember saying to him, “I know that you have a reputation of being a hardliner in Beijing,” because he did. “And I know that you think I'm a hardliner on human rights and the future of China. And why don't we for our discussions let history decide that because I think I'm right, and you think you're right. And we'll discuss these issues. But let's discuss how we make progress in our relationship, including that.” At first he looked shocked. The State Department person taking notes looked really shocked when I said that. And then the Chinese official smiled and laughed and said, “Okay. That's good.” Then we had very frank discussions. And then I went to Beijing and met with the President and Foreign Minister and Prime Minister and laid out a view of what China's role could be and their view of what we could do.

I got State Department talking points before going to China. Then my staff was massaging it, the way that always happens. I didn't think they got it, so I got in the CIA analyst. I said, “Pretend that you're the Chinese. What's really going through your mind here?” It's true still today that what was in their minds was the memory of the unequal treaties and the way the Europeans have enforced a position of inferiority on them. They are, after all, the “Middle Kingdom,” and they weren't going to have that. So don't try to threaten them or push them too hard in a way that would recall the nineteenth century, but work on it with respect and as if we're on an equal playing field. And that helped a lot and allowed me to take very strong positions, and they took very strong positions. And then we would talk them through.

We established a strategic dialogue in which it became regular for the two sides to exchange views and to try to at least understand each other's positions in thinking, which were very different. But it's the beginning of being able to work out something serious. And I would always raise in those talks the issue of political prisoners and -- I can't remember if I called it human rights, but I was only talking about the rights of people, yes.

Stahl
Another issue at this time strongly connected to human rights was UN peacekeeping, which went through quite a rough time. There were a lot of peacekeeping missions going on. I would be interested in what your views on UN peacekeeping were.

Lake
Strongly in favor of it, fighting for it, trying to keep Congress from killing it. After Blackhawk Down,⁶³ when the President met with the members of Congress in the Roosevelt Room, and they were saying, “Just get out of Somalia.” I absolutely explicitly remember saying to the President, “If you immediately withdraw American forces and UN peacekeepers and just shut it all down, you're going to put a target on the backs of every American and UN soldier around the world. Don't give in too quickly. He then negotiated with the members of Congress an extended withdrawal rather than getting out immediately, which is what they wanted.

And then Madeleine Albright⁶⁴ and I did PD 25⁶⁵, which has been wildly misinterpreted as being our pulling back on peacekeeping. In fact, it said in the first two pages that UN peacekeeping can be strongly aligned with American interests or something. We have a stake in UN peacekeeping, etc., but we need to be practical at how we go about it and ask the hard questions and then laid out some questions as a way of trying to convince conservative critics of UN peacekeeping that we were serious about it, and it was going to be a practical approach. It was not a way of not doing peacekeeping. On the contrary.

Stahl
But at the end, it was mainly the U.S. opposition to increase funding for peacekeeping that brought UN peacekeeping into trouble. Boutros-Ghali⁶⁶ had his Agenda for Peace,⁶⁷ his reform agenda. He wanted to strengthen peacekeeping transforming it more into an instrument of human rights protection. That was one of the key points of this agenda for peace. The U.S. government opposed this suggestion and instead demanded a narrow catalog of criteria for peacekeeping.

Lake
I'm sure that that was, at least from my point of view and Madeleine's point of view, a way of keeping the Congress onboard when there was strong opposition. I don't recall opposition – maybe in the Pentagon – but I don't think from the State Department or the NSC staff or US/UN. Please call me if you discover otherwise, but I think this was a rearguard action to try to keep it alive.

And look at it today. It's still the same. It's always the same argument because the U.S. pays a very high proportion of it. There was also an issue that we had to sort out about the role of American troops in peacekeeping and whether they would come under the command authority of a non-American commander. Our answer was that a UN commander from a different nation could have operational control over American forces, but not ultimate command authority. In other words, the U.S. still would do promotions and had ultimate control of whether they would stay or leave or whatever so that we could assure the Congress that we weren't simply turning over American troops to foreigners, but that they could have operational control, which we negotiated with the Congress.

Stahl
So the Congress set strong restraints on peacekeeping?

Lake
The conservatives hated it, yes, and they hated spending money on it, and it's true today, for many members of Congress.

Stahl
So your view on UN peacekeeping was that this certainly was a good instrument to protect human rights?

Lake
Oh, absolutely. Both Madeleine and I and Warren Christopher,⁶⁸ thought so, absolutely. But we had to address the hard questions because we inherited the operation in Somalia. And I think it saved a lot of lives, as a credit to Bush. But we inherited this with no strategy, no timeline, nothing. And then it got worse and turned into a disaster.⁶⁹

Stahl
But when you inherited the Somalia mission, you saw that as a positive opportunity?

Lake
It was saving lives, yes.

Stahl
After you left office, Clinton formulated the following doctrine in 1998: “We can say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa, or Central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it's within our power to stop it, we will stop it.”⁷⁰ Would you have subscribed to this statement during your time as Security Advisor?

Lake
I don't remember, but I'm sure I would’ve, although I don't like doctrines because they're rigid. There's the doctrine of containment that I used to argue against. I was for containment of the Soviet Union, but I was against doing it as a doctrine, which then works its way into the public holding a president accountable for rigidly implementing that doctrine. And then with containment, it meant that any president that allowed the communists to get one square inch of territory violated the doctrine of containment, even if it wasn't in the American interest to try to stop it. But presidents love doctrines because their name is on it.

Stahl
Presidents and also journalists – at least as long as they are catchy. We have to move on from the Clinton era and come to the time when you left office. In 1997 you were considered for the post of CIA director. That's not a post one would usually think of for someone who was strongly involved in humanitarian and human rights issues.

Lake
No, that's true, but on the other hand, I was also strongly interested in what's going on in foreign societies and trying to understand nations as collections of human beings with their own internal politics, culture, etc.

For example, when I was in policy planning in the late 1970s, there was a briefing on Yemen, which at the time was divided between Northern Yemen and Aden in South. The briefing was all about the communists in the south and the non-communists in the north, seen strictly through an American prism. At the end of the briefing, one of the junior folks from the CIA, the expert who hadn't spoken very much – his boss had done the briefing – drew me aside and said, “It's actually all about the tribes.”

Similarly, on Somalia, we began to shift our policy when Ambassador Bob Oakley⁷¹ came to meet with me. He said, “You're going after Aidid. You're looking at it in the wrong way of just Aidid against the UN and the peacekeepers. But you need to look more at the clans and Aidid's relationships with others.”

I think Clinton was looking forward to my working more on the analytical side at the CIA than on the covert action side, but I was interested in potential reforms. And I'm very grateful to Richard Shelby,⁷² the Senator from Alabama, who suddenly became the Chair of the Intelligence Committee and then blocked any vote in the committee for letting it go to the floor. I had the votes. He hated Clinton because he had been a Democrat and became a Republican. And Clinton had done some things then in Alabama to get back at him. And I was out there, so I became roadkill. And I'm very grateful to Shelby for that because I never could've worked at UNICEF if I'd been in the CIA. But back then I was pissed, as I wrote in a statement that The New York Times published.

Stahl
Did you come up with the idea to become the Director of the CIA?

Lake
No. I guess it was Clinton's.

Stahl
Why did he choose you?

Lake
I think because he trusted me, and he thought I could do good analytical work and help reform the CIA.

Stahl
These reform ideas you had ...

Lake
I think chances were I would've failed.

Stahl
This time you didn’t go back to your farm.

Lake
No. I was a Special Envoy to Haiti and a Special Envoy during the Ethiopian/Eritrean war,⁷³ shuttling back and forth and in the Algiers Agreement helping to stop the fighting there, which I enjoyed, and I actually was proud of my role there. As presidential envoy I was working as the facilitator with the former Algerian Prime Minister representing the Organization of African Unity. The two of us were going back and forth between the parties. I had a staff from the State Department and the Pentagon helping me, working on ways to end the fighting, including in the end a transitional security zone between the two countries. And the fighting stopped after tens of thousands of deaths.

And oddly enough, a year or two later, I got an email. I was just getting rid of emails. But the title on it said, “Thank you for saving my life.” It was from a young Eritrean, who was on the frontline and was going to be killed the next day because their position was about to be overrun, when we got the Algiers Agreement. The fighting stopped, so he lived. He said he was now a human rights lawyer in London. And I think of that as one specific result because a peace agreement is simply a piece of paper. What's important is what happens then in the lives afterwards and at the time.

Stahl
What exactly was your role in this negotiating process?

Lake
There were just two of us, the Algerian representing the OAU and me representing the U.S. He and I would go back and forth between the president and the prime minister and then held meetings in Algiers between the two sides.

Stahl
Did the United States have their specific interests in this region, or was it just to get a peace deal?

Lake
We don't want fighting there. Ethiopia was an ally, especially vis-à-vis Somalia, and we just wanted to stop the fighting. I don't think the U.S. was prepared to send peacekeepers. But I never said we weren't. I was in direct touch with Kofi Annan,⁷⁴ who was my friend, about UN peacekeepers, who then went there in the transition, to the security zone.

Yes, during the Obama campaign, human rights had become a side issue in foreign policy.

Stahl
Afterwards, you joined a presidential campaign for the fourth time.

Lake
Not full time. I was giving a speech in Chicago soon after 9/11, raising skeptical questions about the Patriot Act, arguing it was an infringement on American civil liberties with my friend Abner Mikva,⁷⁵ who had been the White House Counsel under Clinton, Judge Mikva. It was on a Saturday night at the Episcopal Cathedral in Chicago. Hundreds of people in the audience, all of them over 70, Saturday night – who would want to go there and talk about this? Afterwards, a woman said she wondered if I would offer foreign policy advice to a state senator who was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate. I'd never heard of him, but I said sure. I'm not going to say no. It turned out it was Barack Obama.⁷⁶

So I started talking to him over the phone about the speech he gave on Iraq, opposing the war in Iraq. I liked him over the phone because he would make fun of me. And then I saw him at the Democratic Convention giving an electrifying speech. I thought, “Wow, that was the guy I'd been talking to on the phone. That's really something.”

Then he called me when he was thinking about running for President, asked if I would be his senior foreign policy adviser. I said fine and asked my former staff member Susan Rice⁷⁷ to join me as I'd asked Sandy Berger with Clinton. I asked her if she would be the co-head of it. So Susan and I put together teams working on different issues and advising during the campaign.

I made it clear at the very beginning that I did not want to go back in the government, and I was not asking for anything.

Stahl
According to news coverage, you were later considered as a candidate for the State Department.

Lake
No, I don't think so. Election night was great, we had a lot of friends over to the house, and we were all celebrating. As we were going to bed at about 1:00 in the morning, I could hear all this noise outside the front door. So we opened the door and you could just hear all this cheering around Washington, never seen anything like it. So we got in the car, my wife held up an American flag and I held an Obama poster with one hand while I drove with the other, and we just drove slowly through these crowds, and people were high fiving, it was so exciting.

The next morning, I sent him a rather juvenile email saying something about how I had been proud to play a small part in the booster phase, the first stage of a rocket that was now going to soar across the heavens, but I was dropping away with the booster phase. Thank you very much.

Stahl
The emphasis in foreign policy was mainly on Iraq.

Lake
A lot of it was about Iraq, of course. And on human rights, I think we were never completely in sync because I was more interested in human rights and he was a little more cerebral, his approach to issues.

Stahl
Can you specify this?

Lake
No, because it was just a feeling, but generally I liked him very much. I admired him. The inaugural, I had never been more excited at a political event than his inaugural, the first African-American President and that I'd been privileged to play a small part in that. I thought it was terrific. I campaigned for him in about 20 states and my wife and I raised money for him, she more than I because she'd been an investment banker.

Stahl
But human rights had become a side issue in foreign policy by then?

Lake
Kind of, yes. I don't think it was explicit. I think we did talk about the responsibility to protect and Darfur. And that raises an interesting issue, for which I have to go back to Bosnia, where my staff and I had developed the so-called endgame strategy. It was opposed by both the State Department and the Pentagon, and the Europeans, who were saying, “Don't rock the boat too much by being too forceful in Bosnia,” in part because UNPROFOR,⁷⁸ the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia, was very vulnerable to the Bosnian Serbs, who were literally taking UNPROFOR soldiers and chaining them to antiaircraft guns when they were firing at American and NATO planes.

The UN and NATO, – also the Europeans and the U.S. were somewhat at odds. So when we did the endgame strategy, we decided – I was in an alliance with Madeleine Albright at the UN – that we were going to have to, one, increase our military power there and start bombing more Bosnian Serb installations, etc., two, bring a more flexible diplomacy and get Sarajevo to agree to some adjustments in their position, and three, be prepared to shut down UNPROFOR after the coming winter so that there would no longer be a hostage – so that Europeans would be in a better position to take an assertive stance because the war just had to stop.

Then I traveled around Europe. The president sent me off over the objections of the State Department and the Pentagon, but mostly the State Department. I met with foreign ministers or prime ministers in the European capitals. To my great surprise, they agreed with me on what I said was the president's position. I said to them, “The U.S. is going to do this anyway, but we hope you'll come along. Together, we can succeed, and separately, we'll probably fail.” I met with the Russians. And there was a general agreement. And that led to Dayton⁷⁹ and ended the war.

The reason I tell you this is that we faced an interesting dilemma there because UNPROFOR was doing good work in delivering humanitarian supplies and doing human rights work. But it was helping to perpetuate the war, which God knows is violating the rights of the people in the area by killing them and starving them.

When I was at UNICEF then, I came under pressure from the British and the French and the Americans when we were helping children in Syria. (I traveled there a number of times on both sides of the lines.)

We were under pressure to send assistance to children only in the areas being held by the opposition to Assad,⁸⁰ but not to work in the government controlled areas. I just refused and we went on working in the government areas because children didn't decide whether to be in this area or that area. We had to help them.

I remember saying to them that it was somewhat the same calculation on Bosnia and that if they wanted to shut down humanitarian operations in the government controlled areas, at I would hope the whole UN would consider it only if they could show us that it was part of a realistic plan to end this war. But in fact, all they were doing was they had a very rigid position which looked good publicly and was pro-human rights: Assad has to go immediately, which he was never going to agree to, but they weren't using any power. They could've threatening the us of Tomahawk missiles early on and go to Assad and say, “If you fly and drop barrel bombs or anything else on civilians, then we are going to take out the airfield that they flew from.” And since he was dependent on airpower to stay in power, I think even that threat would have moved him if there could've been a little more flexibility on the diplomatic side to allow him to stay in power until there were elections six months later or something. You couldn't agree that he could stay forever, but at least some flexibility of some kind.

They could never tell me that they had any serious plan for ending the war. So I said, “Well, thank you very much. Then I have no serious plan to stop our operations in government areas.” And I saw the children who were getting medical attention and supplies, although not enough, as a result.

At UNICEF, I pushed for equity and reaching the most disadvantaged. Whose rights were most abused.

Stahl
Refugee children were becoming more and more of an issue.

Lake
Yes, refugee children are among the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged.

Stahl
How did you come to this position as Director of UNICEF?

Lake
I can't remember exactly because I'd said to Obama, “I don't want anything.” In 2010, I was leaving Penn Station in New York for some meeting and heard on the phone or something that the Head of UNICEF was going to be leaving. I had been the Chair of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF since 2000, raising money for UNICEF in the United States. I loved UNICEF. I did “trick or treat” for UNICEF when I was a kid.

I remember saying to myself, “You know, as much as I love teaching at Georgetown, that would be fun, and that would be something I could really throw myself into,” even though I was 70 by that time.

I told Susan Rice, who was the UN Ambassador, that that is a job that would interest me. She went to Obama, and Obama went to Ban Ki-moon.⁸¹ Ban Ki-moon had a private lunch with me and said, “I'd like to have a proper process here and look at other candidates from other countries,” because Obama said, “This is the only candidate from the U.S.” And I said, “Of course.” They went through the process, but it's always been an American. So amazingly, they chose me. It was the best job I ever had. We were working mostly on basic economic issues, education, etc., for the children. But of course, I also had an interest in the more classic human rights and the human rights as defined by the UN.

At the UN human rights seemed to be seen as the violations of the rights of the person more than civil liberties or economic rights. It's something I used to point out at the UN in the meetings, senior official meetings from time to time because I think that's too narrow a focus, and it's not seeing the tradeoffs among them.

There was an interesting dilemma, though, because at UNICEF, our people would hear about political rights being violated, but we don't do politics at UNICEF, and if we got too involved, say, in Myanmar, we'd just get thrown out of the country, and then we couldn't help the children if we spoke out too much, but I hated not speaking out. So I worked out arrangements, informal arrangements with Human Rights Watch and others where, if I heard things, I would tell them about it so that they could then pursue it, for example, when I went to the Rohingya camp just after the influx of refugees from across the border and saw the dire straits these refugees were in and are in.

Human Rights Watch gave me the names of some of the refugees I should talk to that they knew about who could have particularly strong stories about what happened to them in Myanmar before they were able to escape. Then I did a press conference with another UN official, where I showed pictures drawn by children without saying their names, children's pictures of their schoolmates being killed or their homes being burnt. So there I did speak out about the abuses of all their rights within Myanmar. But our country rep there couldn't do it without getting thrown out.

In my last talk to the board, just before the election here – I said we have to recognize that, in country after country, partly from refugee inflows, partly for other reasons, in country after country around the world, there is a growing rejection of human rights by people who do not see in their own daily lives the benefits of globalization and economic growth, it's not coming to them. For example, in the United States, there's a very strong correlation between the people who voted for Trump and the people who did not believe that their children would have better lives than they do.

So I said to the board, “There is a growing rejection of the political class of the last 70 years among people who have not seen the benefits of globalization in their lives. Even more worrisome a weakening of democratic institutions, which we're seeing in many places in Europe, in the United States, Philippines, etc. And even worse than that, weakening of values that are behind the whole UN systems of international law, etc. We are on the defensive. And the only answer to that is not by saying, ‘This is a violation of this convention,’ or using only the rhetoric of human rights,” I said, “We must achieve results in people’s everyday lives. And that is why the UN needs to work ever harder at helping governments achieve those results, rather than simply giving great rhetorical speeches about human rights and all that.” And that's what I believe now because those speeches are falling on deaf ears with the 40 percent who support Trump in the United States, for example.

We had better get serious, get practical in how we do this. I'm all for the Human Rights Council blasting this country or that country for their excesses. And they should go on doing it because it calls attention to the human rights abuses. But we also have to get serious about the results in people's lives and doing more for the Rohingya and – well, you get my point. Or as I used to say at UNICEF in the all-staff meetings, every time they'd all sort of chant along with me, “There are three things we need to achieve in our work for children, results, results, and results, not only rhetoric, rhetoric, and rhetoric.”

Stahl
Thank you so much for this extensive interview.

Zitation

Biographical Interview with Anthony Lake, 09.04.2019, in: Quellen zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte, ed. by the Study Group Human Rights in the 20th Century, URL: www.geschichte-menschenrechte.de/anthony-lake