173. Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski) and the President’s Assistant for Communications (Rafshoon) to President Carter 1
SUBJECT
- Human Rights Speech
With the possible exception of peace in the Middle East, no aspect of your foreign policy is more popular or more widely known than human rights.
Although you have frequently commented on human rights, you have never delivered a major, prepared address devoted exclusively to this vital subject. We believe the time has come for you to do so.
The 30th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers the kind of opportunity that will not recur during your first term. You can use this opportunity to put your views about human rights on the record in a careful, comprehensive way.
We strongly recommend that you deliver a major address on human rights to the audience that will assemble in the East Room on Wednesday. We also recommend that you speak from a prepared text, and that the text be distributed to the media in advance. Along with our guidance, this will alert the press to its importance, and will make it very likely that the New York Times and other newspapers will print it in full—with major positive impact on an important national elite and media audience. ICA will see that the text receives extensive international distribution.2
This draft3 is designed to be philosophical, and at the same time strongly committed in tone. It is designed to reaffirm the human rights [Page 550] policy; to outline its successes and its hopes; to show how your personal commitment to it arises from your personal experience; and to place it in the context of both American and world history.
(The sentence about “messiahs” on page 3 is, of course, a response to the Jonestown horror.4 It is designed to exert moral leadership by getting down to the fundamentals: whatever the cause, the murder of children is unacceptable.)
NOTE: As an alternative to a prepared speech, we have also attached talking points.5
- Source: Carter Library, Office of the Staff Secretary, Handwriting File, Presidential File, Box 111, 12/5/78. No classification marking. The President wrote “Jerry” and his first initial in the top right-hand corner of the memorandum. An unknown hand added “Wednesday, 12/6/78, noon” to the subject line.↩
- The President wrote “ok” in the right-hand margin next to this paragraph.↩
- Attached but not printed is a draft copy of the speech, December 4, and talking points prepared by Presidential speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg.↩
- Reference is to the mass suicides committed at the Peoples’ Temple, a religious commune led by Jim Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana, in late November 1978. The Peoples’ Temple had come under scrutiny by relatives of sect members, who alleged that Jones had enslaved and mistreated many of his followers. Leo Ryan, a Democratic Representative from California, flew to Georgetown, Guyana, on November 14 in order to investigate conditions in Jonestown. Several of Ryan’s aides, Department of State officials, U.S. journalists, and families of sect members (hoping to aid in the defection of their relatives) accompanied Ryan. Ryan, three journalists, and a defector were killed and seven others injured as they attempted to leave Port Kiatuma, where the delegation had chartered two planes to return to the United States. Following the ambush, Jones instructed commune members to commit suicide by drinking a cyanide-laced beverage. See David Binder, “Coast Congressman Believed Slain Investigating Commune in Guyana,” The New York Times, November 19, 1978, p. A–1 and “Guyana Official Reports 300 Dead At Religious Sect’s Jungle Temple,” The New York Times, November 20, 1978, p. A–1.↩
- Attached but not printed. Brzezinski added the following handwritten notation: “A speech would have much more impact. ZB.”↩