‘That mad hatters tea party on the East River’: Conservative journals of opinion and the United Nations 1964–1981

The quote from the title of the chapter comes from comments written in a column of Reagan’s from the beginning of January in 1978. Ronald Reagan, “Taking a Look at UNESCO,” Human Events, 17 January 1978, 7. While Reagan wrote a large number of his radio commentaries, the syndicated column was mainly ghost written by public relations strategist, Peter Hannaford. Peter Hannaford, e-mail message to author, 2 June 2013.

Abstract

During the 1960s and 1970s the Right viewed the United Nations as an institution that had lost its way. Writers for the journals of conservative opinion believed America’s complacent position toward the UN’s anti-western attitudes were representative of a nation that was no longer confident as a leader in the world. It was a course they were determined to change. The actions of National Review, Human Events and Commentary were not singularly responsible for the success or failure of American policy at the UN, but the language they employed contributed to the tone Ronald Reagan used during his presidency.

Notes

The quote from the title of the chapter comes from comments written in a column of Reagan’s from the beginning of January in 1978. Ronald Reagan, “Taking a Look at UNESCO,” Human Events, 17 January 1978, 7. While Reagan wrote a large number of his radio commentaries, the syndicated column was mainly ghost written by public relations strategist, Peter Hannaford. Peter Hannaford, e-mail message to author, 2 June 2013.

¹ Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan that Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 167. Reagan wrote the majority of those broadcasts following his loss of the presidential nomination in 1976. Prior to that campaign Peter Hannaford wrote most of them and forwarded them to Reagan for his approval. Peter Hannaford, e-mail message to author, 2 June 2013.

² Gerhart Niemeyer, ‘The Collapsing UN.’ National Review, 21 April 1964, 314.

³ Jeremy Beer, Nelson O. Jeffrey, and Bruce Frohen, eds., American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006), Google Books, 12 March 2015, https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1497651573; Russell Kirk, ‘Ten Conservative Principles’ The Russell Kirk Center. Web. 26 January 2015; Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton eds., The Conservative Press in Twentieth Century America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 450; Lisa McGirr also argues that to many the UN possessed traits of a communist ideology that stood at the core of so much of what conservatives distrusted about New Deal liberalism. ‘It represented a form of government centralization where decisions were made by distant powerful elites; it included among its members communist and socialist countries; and it celebrated cultural and moral relativism, with its emphasis on international understanding.’ Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 176. Ernest Van den Haag, a professor of sociology, who wrote frequently for National Review was a harsh critic of the organization, using words like ‘vegetate and atrophy’ in describing how the United States should treat the world body. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 247. ‘The UN is, in other words, an elaborate consummation of everything the Liberal believes,’ wrote conservative journalist and activist M. Stanton Evans in 1966, ‘a laboratory experiment in the workability of liberal doctrine, with all the favorite shibboleths set up, staffed by secretaries, committees and bureaucracies, lavishly financed by the American tax payer.’ M. Stanton Evans, The Politics of Surrender (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1966), 137; Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 241; Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Post War Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 28.

⁴ Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations (New York: Vantage Books, 2006), 30.

⁵ Kennedy, The Parliament of Man, 121.

⁶ Rosemary Righter, Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order. (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), 93.

⁷ Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 137.

⁸ ‘The UN was a place that was not friendly to liberal democratic values and they [the Third World] pushed an agenda within the UN system very aggressively that was unfriendly to what the United States stood for in the world.’ Author phone interview with Carl Gershman, 12 December 2012.

⁹ Jenkin Lloyd Jones, ‘The Irresponsible Weak in the United Nations,’ Human Events, 11 January 1964, 13.

¹⁰ ‘Secularization of the U.N,’ National Review, 21 January 1972, 23.

¹¹ John Chamberlain, ‘U-Thant’s Hypocrisy on ‘Human Rights’ in Hungary,’ Human Events, 2 April 1966, 7.

¹² Douglas C. Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 199.

¹³ Hans Sennholz, ‘Ominous Change in UN Membership,’ Human Events, 28 March 1964, 1.

¹⁴ Barry Goldwater, ‘Will US Make Russia Pay Her UN Bills?,’ Human Events, 30 January 1965, 1.

¹⁵ Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 3; Suzanne Clark, Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2000), 1. The type of rhetoric that Goldwater was applying about the US refusing to push back against the aggression could be classified as what historian Natasha Zaretsky calls ‘a crisis of masculine authority.’ Natasha Zaretsky, ‘Restraint or Retreat? The Debate over the Panama Canal Treaties and US Nationalism after Vietnam’ Diplomatic History 35, No. 3 (June, 2011):550. Many of those on the Right resented the United Nations who had ‘foisted freedom on largely primitive and unprepared African tribes and had produced chaos, communism and neo colonialism.’ Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, 246.

¹⁶ Barry Goldwater, ‘Will US Make Russia Pay Her UN Bills?’ Human Events, 30 January 1965, 1.Representative Pearson (KS). ‘Non Payment of United Nations Dues.’ Congressional Record 111 part 15 (15 August 1965): S20608. Web. 14 June 2013. Senator. Mundt (SD). ‘US Capitulation at The United Nations.’ Congressional Record, 111 part 15 (17 August 1965) S20625. Web. 14 June 2013.

¹⁷ Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), 264.

¹⁸ James Burnham, ‘Why Do We Take It?,’ The Third World War (Hereafter, TWW), National Review, 12 January 1965, 20. In comments from 1968, National Review referred to the UN as ‘impotent, a crumbling monument to the internationalist aspirations of liberalism, a gathering place for Afro-Asian minipowers to rally against the remnants of nineteenth century European colonialism while twentieth century Soviet colonialism consolidates its grip on Europe itself.’ Michael W. Flamm and David Steigerwald, Debating the 1960s: Liberal, Conservative and Radical Perspectives (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2008), 116.

¹⁹ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘The United States in Opposition,’ Commentary, March, 1975

²⁰ Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 56. Paul Seabury to Norman Podhoretz, 24 November 1974, Box 330, Part I, Daniel P. Moynihan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

²¹ John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Policy 1945–1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 80.

²² Daniel P. Moynihan to Norman Podhoretz, 27 December 1974, Box 330, Part I, Moynihan Papers.

²³ As Thomas Borstelemann discussed in his work The Cold War and the Color Line, the drive for independence in Africa and the battle for civil rights in America inspired both to continue to maintain their focus and determination. Thomas Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 46–47.

²⁴ The issue of foreign oil also played a prominent role in the debate between North and South. Libya’s decision to successfully demand larger royalties from its foreign clients was an example for nations within the Arab region as well as those in Africa and other disadvantaged areas that the Western idea of the fairness of free markets was a false premise. Righter, ‘Utopia Lost,’ 106.

²⁵ Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper and Row Publishing, 1979), 345.

²⁶ Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 57.

²⁷ Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neo-conservative Right (New York: Public affairs, 2010), 155.

²⁸ Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 57. Daniel Patrick Moynihan with Suzanne Weaver, A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1978), 55.

²⁹ Author phone interview with Carl Gershman, 4 December 2012.

³⁰ Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 221.

³¹ Moynihan, ‘The United States in Opposition,’ Commentary, March, 1975, 37.

³² Ibid., 43.

³³ In an analysis of the climate of the UN during the 1970s, historian Gil Troy writes: ‘the rhetoric was of neocolonialism and racial discrimination, of developing countries pitted against developed countries and multinationals The language shifted from individual rights to national grievances, from aspirational to confrontational’ Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 31

³⁴ Righter, Utopia Lost, 93.

³⁵ As historian Jennifer Bair describes the NIEO, ‘At its core, the NIEO was a plan to transform what was, from the perspective of this coalition, a profoundly inequitable international economy biased against the global south. This program of structural reform and global redistribution was presented as a precondition for meaningful development in the Third World but also as a natural and necessary extension of the anticolonial project more broadly, since sovereign equality among states required economic as well as political self-determination.’ Jennifer Bair, ‘Corporations at the United Nations: Echoes of the New International Economic Order? Humanity 6, No.1 (Spring, 2015): 159.

³⁶ Moynihan, ‘The United States in Opposition,’ Commentary, March 1975, 36.

³⁷ Bernard D. Nossiter, The Global Struggle for More: Third World Conflicts with Rich Nations (New York: Harper and Row Publishing, 1987), 60–61.

³⁸ Righter, Utopia Lost, 108.

³⁹ Human Events and National Review took different positions when it came to America’s role at the UN. While a number of Human Events columnists argued for US withdrawal from the UN, those like Buckley and Burnham at National Review felt that the country should remain there. Burnham believed that ‘it was time to deflate the pretentions’ of the world organization. In order to achieve that objective, the United States should ‘no longer vote on substantive matters in the UN’ Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, 248. The debate over the success or failure of the NIEO continues even in the most recent scholarship. As author Nils Gilman argues there continues to be debate among historians about whether the economic initiative was a failure or a success. ‘In fact, as several essays… demonstrate, the failure of the NIEO was the result of a deliberate and concerted strategy on the part of leaders in the North, compounded by strategic choices on the part of the South.’ However, as the author argues there was a positive legacy as well, ‘a key underlying economic objective of the NIEO, namely, to improve the South’s economic position in the global economy, has in fact been realised, albeit unevenly.’ Nils Gilman, ‘The New International Economic Order, A Reintroduction,’ Humanity 6, No.1 (Spring 2015): 10.

⁴⁰ William F. Buckley, Jr., ‘The Breakdown,’ On the Right, 17 December 1974, Buckley Online, 3 April 2015. Web. Alice, Widener. ‘UN Plans World Economic Order.’ Human Events, 1 November 1975, 13.

⁴¹ Robert W. Tucker, ‘A New International Economic Order?,’ Commentary, February, 1975, 39. Podhoretz views against the idea of economic redistribution was reflected by economists P.T. Bauer and B.S. Yamey in their article, ‘Against the New Economic Order,’ published in the magazine in the spring of 1977. The argument stated that ‘foreign aid to poor countries by rewarding the policies that caused impoverishment,’ actually retarded Third World development. Balint, ‘Running Commentary, 145.

⁴² Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 133. As Norman Podhoretz said of Moynihan during that period in 1975: ‘Americans loved him because he was the first public figure in a long time to assert, in language that was simultaneously blunt, eloquent and credible, that the United States, as leader of the ‘liberty party’ stood for something precious in the world.’ Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 352.

⁴³ Carl Gershman, ‘The World According to Andrew Young’ Commentary, August, 1978

⁴⁴ ‘Would Young Destroy Western Civilization?,’ Human Events, 12 February 1977, 6. ‘Andrew Young was awful at the UN He was music to Soviet and radical revolutionary ears,’ Human Events editor Allan Ryskind said when recalling Young’s time at the UN Allan Ryskind, e-mail message to author, 28 June 2013.

⁴⁵ Carter viewed his agenda in extending America’s hand to the Third World as something that was a new and different type of American foreign policy. ‘I tried to speak in a clear voice,’ Carter wrote in his memoirs, ‘and let our influence be felt in regions where our country had long ignored the cries for an end to racial prejudice. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 154. As part of his foreign policy objectives, Carter sought to ‘de-emphasise Third World conflict and competition and implement a regionalist approach where Third World nations in particular, would be considered outside of the framework of East-West relations.’ Donna R. Jackson, Jimmy Carter and the Horn of Africa: Cold War Policy in Ethiopia and Somalia (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2008), 28.

⁴⁶ Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power: American Diplomacy In the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 7.

⁴⁷ Joshua Muravchik, The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemma of Human Rights Policy (Blue Ridge Summit: University Press of America, 1986), 14.

⁴⁸ Biographer Andrew DeRoche comments that Young tried to clarify his statement about Cuba by arguing that Castro’s choice to position troops in Angola had nothing to do with Havana trying to extend communism but a clear indication that the Cuban leader was standing up against African racism. On his statement about American prisoners, DeRoche argues that those negative comments were actually part of a ‘pro American interview’ in which Young was referring to former Civil Rights activists from the 1960s as well as those who had protested the Vietnam War. Despite Young also stating that those people were often not held in jail for long and praising the US legal system, the comment still created a great deal of controversy. Andrew J. DeRoche, Andrew Young: Ambassador for Civil Rights (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 77, 102.

⁴⁹ Author phone interview with Carl Gershman, 4 December 2012. Carl Gershman, ‘The Rise and Fall of the New Foreign Policy Establishment,’ Commentary, July, 1980. Historians Thomas McCormack and Jerry Sanders make the argument that Gershman’s characterization about that new establishment could also be ‘managerialists who came away from the Vietnam experience convinced that they needed to reject the Manichean logic of the Cold War.’ Zaretsky, ‘Restraint or Retreat?, 538.

⁵⁰ Nick Thimmesch, ‘Andrew Young: Our Foot-in-the-Mouth Ambassador,’ Human Events, 12 March 1977, 10; ‘The Andy Young Conundrum,’ National Review, 29 April 1977, 481.

⁵¹ Representative Hyde (IL). ‘UN Ambassador Young.’ Congressional Record 123 part 15 (7 June 1977) H17699. Web. 28 June 2013; Representative. Ashbrook (OH) ‘Impeach Andrew Young.’ Congressional Record 123 part 29 (4 November 1977) H37393. Web. 28 June 2013; Representative Ashbrook (OH). Cited Carl Gershman, ‘The World According to Andrew Young,’ Commentary, August, 1978; ‘The World According to Andrew Young.’ Congressional Record 124 part 21 (12 September 1978) H29040.

⁵² M. Stanton Evans, ‘Andrew Young – Apologist For Marxist Repression,’ Human Events, 2 September 1978, 9.

⁵³ Allan C. Brownfield, ‘A Close Look At Carter’s Radical Fringe,’ Human Events, 11 November 1978, 1.

⁵⁴ ‘Andy Young’s Legacy,’ Human Events, 25 August 1979, 1; ‘Young in Perspective,’ National Review, 14 September 1979, 1135; Allan C. Brownfield, ‘A Close Look at Carter’s Radical Fringe,’ Human Events, 11 November 1978, Series 3, Box 108, Ed Meese Files, Campaign Operations, 1980 Campaign, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA.

⁵⁵ Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 6.

⁵⁶ Peter Collier, ‘Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick (New York: Encounter Books, 2012), 99.

⁵⁷ Collier, Political Woman, 99. Bartlett C. Jones, Flawed Triumph: Andy Young at the United Nations (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996), 124.

⁵⁸ William, F. Buckley, Jr., ‘Can Mr. Carter Really Mean What He Says?’, 27 May 1977, The Daily Telegraph, Buckley Online, Web. 14 June 2013. Buckley also clearly saw the double standard argument in Carter’s foreign policy as it disturbed him that Carter was willing to ‘invoke sanctions against Ian Smith’s white Rhodesian regime and Pinochet’s Chile but not against the Soviet Union.’ John B. Judis, and William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 396.

⁵⁹ Jeane Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards,’ Commentary, November, 1979, 34.

⁶⁰ Collier, Political Woman, 102.

⁶¹ Jeane Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards,’ Commentary, November, 1979, 38.

⁶² Peter Hannaford, e-mail message to author, 2 June 2013. According to Kirkpatrick, ‘Reagan had been in Washington and Dick was driving him to the airport to go home. When he got out of the car, Dick gave him the article and said: ‘I think you’re going to like this.’ Reagan called him from a stopover and said, ‘it’s a terrific article.’’ Collier, Political Woman, 105. According to Allen’s memory of the event: ‘Reagan called me immediately upon reaching home. ‘What you gave me to read was extraordinary!’ he said. ‘Who is this guy Jeane Kirkpatrick?’ Richard V. Allen. ‘Jeane Kirkpatrick and the Great Democratic Defection,’ New York Times, 16 December 2006, A 17.

⁶³ Collier, Political Woman, 105.

⁶⁴ Peter Hannaford, e-mail message to author, 2 June 2013.

⁶⁵ Richard Allen. ‘Jeane Kirkpatrick and the Great Democratic Defection,’ New York Times, 16 December 2006, A 17.

⁶⁶ Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary, 161.

⁶⁷ ‘Ronald Reagan and the United Nations: Diplomacy Without Apology.’ Reagan’s Country, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Member Newsletter, 2. Web. 3 November 2014. Author phone interview with Carl Gershman, 4 December 2012.

⁶⁸ Collier, Political Woman, 127. In testifying before Congress in 1983, Kirkpatrick on how the UN could be ‘made a more effective instrument for problem-solving and peace-making among nations, an institution which helps resolve difference rather and exacerbate them.’[1] Among her recommendations was to make ‘voting behavior, in multilateral organizations like the United Nations, one of the criteria we employ in deciding whether we will provide assistance, and what type of assistance and in what amount.’ To help implement this recommendation, Congress required the State Department to track how individual countries vote in the UN and report the results to Congress in its Voting Practices in the United Nations report each year since 1984. Each report includes tables listing the percentages with which countries voted with the US on UN Security Council (UNSC) and UNGA resolutions, including consensus and non-consensus votes and votes deemed ‘important’ by the State Department. These reports serve as a unique and valuable source of information for gauging support for US priorities and policies and show that, to the detriment of American interests, the US is often in the minority at the UN’ Brett D. Schaefer and Anthony B. Kim, ‘UN General Assembly: Foreign Aid Recipients Vote Against the U.S,’ The Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2013, Web (26 May 2015).

⁶⁹ Collier, Political Woman, 122–123. Author phone interview with Carl Gershman, 4 December 2012.

⁷⁰ William F. Buckley, Jr., ‘St. Jeane of the UN,’ 27 January 1984, National Review Online, 8 December 2006. Web. 3 November 2012; Mary Schwarz, ‘Jeane Kirkpatrick: Our Macho Ambassador,’ National Review, 21 January 1983, 46–52; Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism, 152.

⁷¹ Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine, the Rise and Fall of the Neocons (London: Continuum, 2010), 171; Balint, ‘Running Commentary, 161; Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: US Human Rights Policy In Latin America (Washington, DC: The Century Foundation, 2004), 148.