Patricia Derian (1929-2016)

Much of our history has been created by women whose names most people don't remember or never even knew. One of those women, Patricia Derian, died late last week.

Derian was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs under President Jimmy Carter. She was the second person to hold that office, but the first to make it matter. Derian was noted for her willingness to speak truth to power, both in confronting dictators abroad and in addressing her colleagues within the U.S. government who were skeptical of the need for, or the wisdom of, a human rights policy. She once walked out of a dinner being hosted in her honor by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos to go to the prison where Benigno Aquino, a Filipino democracy advocate, was being held. It is no exaggeration to say that thousands of people around the world owe their lives to Derian's insistence, sometimes over the opposition of more cautious officials in the State Department or the White House, on naming and shaming the leaders of repressive regimes.

On two recent research trips to the Carter Library, I have seen ample evidence of Ms. Derian's impact on U.S. foreign policy--and on world events. I have also seen evidence of the obstacles that she had to overcome in order to ensure that the United States was on the side of the oppressed rather than their oppressors. Patt Derian deserves to be remembered.

Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016)

Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest best known for his opposition to the Vietnam War, has passed away in New York City just days short of his 95th birthday. He is regarded as one of the most influential American Jesuits of his time both for his protests against war and nuclear weapons and for his writings, which included a body of poetry as well as works on theology, spirituality, and social protest.

In 1967, Berrigan, his brother Philip, and two others--"the Baltimore Four"--were arrested for pouring blood on draft records in protest against the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he joined a tax protest against the war. Then, on May 17 of that same year, he participated--with "the Catonsville Nine"--in the destruction of draft records using homemade napalm outside the offices of the Catonsville, Maryland draft board. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison but escaped and spent four months as a fugitive--in order to draw more attention to his protests against the war--before being captured at the home of theologian and activist William Stringfellow. Berrigan was released from prison in 1972.

In 1980, Berrigan turned to anti-nuclear protests at a General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six others--"the Plowshares Eight"--hammered the nosecone of a nuclear missile (symbolically beating swords into plowshares) and poured blood on files. The group was charged with a wide range of crimes, but after ten years of trials and appeals, all were sentenced to time served. The 1980 protest was the beginning of the Plowshares Movement, with which Berrigan was active throughout the remainder of his life.

Even after he had turned 80, Berrigan continued to protest war and injustice. He protested the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo. He also participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Berta Cáceres (1973-2016)

Ilisu (Turkey) . . . Three Gorges (China) . . . Glen Canyon (United States) . . . Itaipu (Brazil/Paraguay) . . . Sardar Sarovar (India). These are some of modern history's most controversial dam projects. Each one promised electrical power, flood control, water for irrigation, and more. But each one also threatened to destroy human communities, wildlife habitats, cultural artifacts, and more.

Add to the list Agua Zarca (Honduras), a planned series of four large dams on the Río Gualcarque. On Thursday the river lost one of its most determined defenders, Berta Cáceres. In a town called "Hope" (La Esperanza), Ms. Cáceres was assassinated by armed men who invaded her home as she slept.

Cáceres was the co-founder of an organization called the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (Copinh). A member of the Lenca ethnic group--the largest in Honduras--Cáceres led Copinh through years of protests against the plan to dam a river the Lenca deemed sacred. At times, Copinh filed legal challenges and lobbied the government to try to prevent the dams from being built. At other times, protesters physically blocked construction crews from gaining access to work sites. The efforts Cáceres made to try to stop the project gained international recognition last year when she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. 

Ms. Cáceres, who was 44 at the time of her death, had four children. She had been threatened with rape and death, she had been followed, and several of her supporters had been killed. No suspects had ever been arrested for the killings or for the threats. After a visit in December 2013, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights noted "a complete absence of the most basic measures to address reports of grave human rights violations in the region." As in Nigeria, Ecuador, Sudan, and Myanmar where oil interests colluded with corrupt governments to violate the rights of indigenous peoples, those supporting the Agua Zarca project in Honduras appear to have turned the government against its own people. Regardless of who actually killed Berta Cáceres, the Honduran government bears responsibility for its failure to protect her and for its failure to pursue justice in the cases of the other peaceful protesters who have been murdered.

For more on the work done by Cáceres and Copinh in an effort to stop the construction of dams on the Río Gualcarque, watch this brief video portrait from the page dedicated to Cáceres on the Goldman Environmental Prize website.

Saints . . . and Sinners

In many of the churches of Western Christendom, yesterday was All Saints' Day, or the Feast of All Saints, a day set aside to remember those who have died in Christ. It is ironic, then, that word of Willis Carto's death came yesterday. And it may be perplexing that I would break a long (unintentional) silence on this blog to note his passing. But to note his passing is not to mourn it.

Six months ago, I would not have known who Willis Carto was. But in the course of conducting research at the Reagan Library on the ratification of the Genocide Convention, Heather Odell and I came across a large number of letters sent to the White House (primarily in April 1985) to express opposition to U.S. ratification of the 1948 treaty that defines genocide and obligates states to prevent and punish its commission.

The letters came mostly from people who were members of or were influenced by a right-wing organization called the Liberty Lobby. Willis Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in 1958 as a means of promoting his extremist views. According to his obituary in the New York Times, "Mr. Carto raised funds to finance a right-wing military dictatorship in the United States, campaigned to persuade blacks to voluntarily return to Africa and, most influentially, started newsletters, a journal and conferences of academics and others to deny the scale, and even the existence, of the Holocaust." It is not hard to understand why his organization would have campaigned against ratification of the Genocide Convention. What is hard to understand is why so many Americans would have joined the campaign--the Times notes that there were 400,000 people on the Liberty Lobby's mailing list in the 1980s--and why eleven Republicans in the Senate would have opposed ratification to the bitter end.

Carto's views were, according to his friend Louis T. Byers, "those of a racial nationalist." He magnified his influence by keeping himself and his views out of the limelight and enlisting supporters through appeals to the Constitution (the Genocide Convention would supposedly require the U.S. to turn over its citizens to a World Court in violation of their constitutional rights), to historical objectivity (Carto's Institute for Historical Review and its journal published "scholarly" articles that questioned the accuracy of existing research on the Holocaust), and to American exceptionalism (the Liberty Lobby suggested over and over that America's greatness would be undermined by any form of obeisance to international law). Without understanding the larger narrative represented by the Liberty Lobby and the Institute for Historical Review, many Americans lent their names to Carto's worldview. The same sort of thing happens today when people argue that dominant groups--not racial minorities or women or the poor--are the primary victims of discrimination or that climate change is not happening because there was a harsh winter or, on the basis of a headline or two, that immigration endangers our society.

Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that support for racist organizations is always and only a product of ignorance regarding the larger narrative. After all, there are racists among us and, if we are honest with ourselves, we each harbor our own evil impulses. Carto's life should remind us of what evil impulses look like when given full expression. His obituary is repulsive. But the history of the Liberty Lobby and the Genocide Convention should also remind us that "principled opposition"--to civil rights, to help for refugees, to the right to health care, to conservation of the Earth--may sometimes be, in reality, nothing more than a rationalization of evil.

Glen Stassen (1936-2014)

Glen Stassen--theologian, ethicist, social critic, disarmament advocate--passed away in Pasadena, California on April 25, 2014. Stassen was a leader in the Nuclear Freeze movement in the United States during the 1980s and the founder of the Just Peacemaking Initiative in the 1990s. At the time of his death, Stassen was a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Ieng Sary (1925-2013)

Brother Number 3, Ieng Sary, has died in Phnom Penh at age 87 while standing trial for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed as part of the Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979. His case in the mixed UN-Cambodian tribunal called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), designated Case 002, will continue with his co-defendants, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. Ieng's wife, Ieng Thirith, was also a co-defendant in the case before her dismissal due to advancing dementia.

Ieng was a co-founder of the Khmer Rouge along with his brother-in-law (and Brother Number 1), Pol Pot. He served as foreign minister during the Communists' genocidal rule in Cambodia, a period in which approximately 1.7 million people died from executions, starvation, and forced labor as the Khmer Rouge attempted to return Cambodia to "Year Zero." Ieng persuaded many educated Cambodians who had left the country to return to help rebuild it; most were subsequently imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

Ieng's death before the conclusion of his trial has highlighted one of the most significant problems with the ECCC. The long delay in its creation coupled with its very slow pace of operation has severely limited its ability to prosecute those who were most responsible for the destruction of Cambodia in the 1970s. Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998, well before the tribunal began its operations in 2006.

To date, the ECCC has spent $175.3 million and has completed one trial, that of Kaing Guek Eav ("Comrade Duch"), who was in charge of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Two other cases--Case 003 against Meas Mut and Sou Met and Case 004 against Im Chaem (a Buddhist monk now)--are ready for trial but are mired in political controversy. The government of Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia as prime minister since 1985, has numerous links to the Khmer Rouge terror that it prefers not to have revisited through trial testimony. Hun Sen has said that he will block future indictments.

Joshua Casteel (1979 - 2012)

I learned this week of the death, back on August 25, of Joshua Casteel. Chances are that you've never heard of Joshua Casteel, but he left his mark on the world in a way that deserves to be pondered, discussed, and perhaps even emulated. If nothing else, the trajectory of his life and the "crystallization of conscience" that he experienced merit thoughtful consideration, especially in an age when it seems that, as Yeats put it, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Casteel grew up in an evangelical Christian home in Iowa, steeped in patriotism and conservative views. At 17, he joined the Army Reserves, then went to the University of Iowa on an ROTC scholarship. On entering active duty, he was assigned to language school where he studied Arabic. In 2004, just weeks after the torture scandal became public knowledge, Casteel was assigned to Abu Ghraib as part of the Army's 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion. He was a translator and an interrogator in one of the world's most notorious prisons.

The "crystallization of conscience"--the moment when Casteel decided to apply for conscientious objector status--came in response to the comments of a Muslim prisoner (and self-proclaimed jihadist) he was interrogating:  "[He said] I wasn’t fulfilling the call to turn the other cheek, to love one’s enemies. When posed with that kind of challenge, I had nothing I could say to him. I absolutely agreed with him. My position as a U.S. Army interrogator contradicted my calling simply as a Christian."

Casteel was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector in May 2005. He joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, published a book entitled Letters from Abu Ghraib, earned an MFA in writing at the University of Iowa, and wrote two plays about his experiences in Iraq. In 2010, be began studies at the University of Chicago's Divinity School. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, which claimed his life on August 25, 2012.

Soldiers of Conscience, a documentary produced in 2007 and broadcast on PBS the following year, featured Casteel's story. An excerpt appears in the clip below.

Rushworth M. Kidder (1944-2012)

Rushworth M. Kidder, long-time reporter and columnist for the Christian Science Monitor and founder of the Institute for Global Ethics (IGE), died on Monday.  He devoted much of his life to ethics education.

My primary connection to his work came through a slender volume he published in 1995 called How Good People Make Tough Choices.  Even though it was not geared toward foreign policy debates, its simple framework for working through ethical dilemmas provided a solid introduction to ethical decisionmaking for my Ethics and International Politics course.  Kidder argued that an ethical dilemma involves a "right vs. right" choice, in contrast to what he called moral temptations that involve choices between right and wrong.  Ethical dilemmas, he believed, tend to fit one of four paradigms:  truth vs. loyalty, individual vs. community, short-term vs. long-term, or justice vs. mercy.  He classified the options for resolving ethical dilemmas using three categories:  rules-based ethics, ends-based ethics, and care-based ethics.  Simple, certainly, but helpful for that very reason.

For a more complete obituary, see the Bangor Daily News article here.

Bongo: The Obituary

The Independent provides an excellent overview of Omar Bongo's life that opens with this trenchant observation: "Omar Bongo was so successful at the art of holding on to power that by the end of his life there was no one left in his country with enough authority to pronounce him dead."

The complete obituary is here.

The Death of Omar Bongo

It was an unusual announcement. This morning, the government of Gabon stated that "the President of the Republic, the Head of State, His Excellency Omar Bongo is not dead." The official statement, like the off-the-cuff comment of Prime Minister Jean Eyeghe Ndong who had declared that Bongo was "alive and well," was wrong. Bongo, 73, died of cardiac arrest in a hospital in Barcelona, Spain.

Bongo's death ended a run of almost forty-two years at the head of the Gabonese government. In fact, he and his mentor, Leon Mba, are the only two men to have ruled Gabon since the West African state gained its independence from France in 1960.

At the time of his death, Bongo was under investigation for corruption in France where Transparency International and Association Sherpa had recently succeeded in convincing an investigating judge to examine whether he and two other West African leaders, Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea and Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo, had acquired their vast wealth by embezzling public funds. Bongo's wealth, which included fifteen luxury properties in Paris and seventy bank accounts in France, appears largely to have been produced by his corrupt handling of Gabon's oil wealth.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that Bongo's demise will lead to greater democracy and development in Gabon. Many expect the current defense minister of Gabon, Bongo's son Ali, to seize power.

Jerry Falwell (1933-2007)

What if Ann Coulter, the mistress of hate-filled invective, carried with her whatever credibility comes from being the minister of a suburban mega-church?

Jerry Falwell, founder of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia and of the Moral Majority, died yesterday in his office at Liberty University. In death as in life, Falwell was a polarizing figure. In fact, I've read comments that can only be described as "fighting words" from pacifists who have felt compelled to respond to the news of Falwell's death.

But why is Falwell's passing being noted here--on an IR blog?

I could point to Falwell's support for the repressive right-wing government in El Salvador during the 1980s or his opposition to sanctions against the South African apartheid regime. I could also point to his noxious comments in the aftermath of 9/11. Instead, I want to focus on his attitude toward women and its impact on U.S. human rights policy.

Let's start with an instructive contrast: Two Southern Baptists--Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Carter--came to prominence in the United States at about the same time. The two men differed on almost everything--including women's rights.

President Carter supported the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. His administration signed the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). He appointed more women and minorities to federal courts than all of the presidents who preceded him combined.

Falwell, on the other hand, was a misogynist.

In 1989, Falwell said,

I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. . . . These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem.

Truly a Coulter-esque comment.

Falwell was a consistent opponent of equal rights for women. Key Republican leaders, including Senator Jesse Helms, later the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, were encouraged by the support they received from Falwell's Moral Majority to steadfastly oppose ratification of CEDAW.

It would be a gross over-simplification to say that Falwell was responsible for the failure--right down to the present day--of the United States to ratify CEDAW, but religiously based opposition to feminism in all its forms (including the very basic form of support for gender equality) is part of what he has left us. James Dobson and Focus on the Family (along with its political arm, the Family Research Council) carry Falwell's misogynistic mantle today. Falwell may no longer have the ear of Republican senators and presidents, but Dobson does and he follow's Falwell's script.

It will be difficult for the United States to reclaim a position of leadership on human rights until CEDAW and the Convention on the Rights of the Child are ratified. And it will be difficult for that to happen until the Christian Right understands that Falwell and his successors have been wrong about women's rights.

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

Molly Ivins, one of the great political writers and wits of our time, died today in Austin at the age of 62.

She responded to Pat Buchanan's somber speech about America's "culture war" at the 1992 Republican National Convention by noting that the speech "probably sounded better in the original German." Of the first President Bush she wrote, "Calling George Bush shallow is like calling a dwarf short." When George W. Bush first ran for governor of Texas, Ivins began calling him "Shrub."

Her progressive politics belied her conservative upbringing as the daughter of an oil company executive living in Houston. She offered some thoughts about the origins of her views in the introduction to her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (The book's title was derived from the line plastered on billboards in Dallas by her employer, the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, in an effort to defuse--and perhaps capitalize on--an uproar generated when Ivins wrote about a congressman, "If his I.Q. slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day.") Ivins wrote:

I'm supposed to explain myself in this introduction--specifically, how come I came out so strange. Having been properly reared by a right-wing family in East Texas, how'd I turn out this peculiar? I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point--race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, "Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty." In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean. Children can be horribly logical.

The first great political movement to come along in my lifetime was the civil rights movement, and I was for it. The second great question was the war in Vietnam, and I was against it. So they told me I was a double-dyed liberal. I said, "O.K." What did I know? Later on, people took to claiming it meant I was for big government, high taxes, and communism. That's when I learned never to let anyone else define my politics.

I suspect there are a couple of other factors accounting for the odd hitch in my getalong. Being female, for starters. Can't say I've ever come to any particularly cosmic conclusions about gender, but when you start out in a culture that defines your role as standing on the sidelines with pom-poms to cheer while the guys get to play the game, it will raise a few questions in your mind. Another problem is my size. It wasn't that I ever rejected the norms of Southern womanhood. I was just ineligible. I was the Too Tall Jones of my time. I grew up a St. Bernard among greyhounds. It's hard to be cute if you're six feet tall.

My copy of Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? was signed by Ivins. She wrote: "Texans-in-exile. Come home! You know we get to laugh more here--we have more to laugh about. Hang in and keep fightin’ for freedom. And keep laughin’ too. Best wishes--Molly Ivins."

Ivins wasn't just funny; more often than not she was on to something important. In the weeks right after 9/11, Dan Caldwell, Russ Burgos, and I gave a series of lectures at Pepperdine on terrorism. I began one of my lectures with an observation that Ivins had made a week or two earlier in her column: "In 1950, the United States got involved in a war and called it a police action. We are now involved in a police action that we’re calling a war. The semantic confusion is having unfortunate effects on everyone." Slowly, more and more experts have come to the same conclusion that Ivins reached immediately after the declaration of a "war on terror."

In the next-to-last column Ivins wrote, dated January 8, 2007, she promised to make every one of her columns thereafter about the war in Iraq "until we find some way to end it." Sadly, the cancer that was first diagnosed in 1999 took Molly Ivins' life before much progress could be made toward ending the war.

Ivins believed that we all need to take an active part in the political life of our community and our nation. That's why in her final columns she urged "Bubba," the good ol' boy in Texas who'd rather drink beer and watch football than get out and vote, to take matters into his own hands concerning the war. Ivins once wrote, "Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." It's a sentiment worth remembering from a woman worth remembering.

Robert F. Drinan, S.J. (1920-2007)

Father Robert Drinan--a tireless defender of human rights, the first Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, and, at the time of his death, a professor of law at Georgetown University--died on Sunday at the age of 86. The Boston Globe provides a complete obituary while Chris Borgen offers a more personal tribute at Opinio Juris.

Drinan was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts in 1970 on the strength of his opposition to the Vietnam War. During his second term in Congress, in 1973, he filed a resolution of impeachment against President Nixon--not because of the Watergate burglary and coverup that eventually forced Nixon's resignation but because of the bombing of Cambodia in violation of congressionally imposed limits on the war in Southeast Asia.

In 1980, after he was forced to relinquish his seat in the House when Pope John Paul II barred priests from serving in elective office, Drinan returned to teaching, public speaking, and writing, with most of his work focused on human rights.

Drinan's 2001 book, The Mobilization of Shame: A World View of Human Rights, concludes with these words:

The human race has been struggling for centuries to stop injustice and to offer reparations to its victims. There is no one pattern or force that prompts nations to be just. Sometimes it is the voice of the victims that accomplishes such a feat, but more often it is the conscience and moral outrage of nonvictims. Traditionally, they more than any others have championed the rights of those who have been victimized.

Solon, the ancient Athenian jurist, summed up this truth in words that have a striking relevance: "Justice will not come until those who are not hurt feel just as indignant as those who are."

Father Drinan was not a victim, but, to use his own words, he nonetheless "championed the rights of those who have been victimized."

Ann Richards (1933-2006)

Years ago, the State of Texas promoted tourism in the state with a slogan that proclaimed, "Texas: It's like a whole other country." On that basis, perhaps I can justify writing a few words here on this IR blog about the passing of Governor Ann Richards.

In 1990, Richards became only the second woman to hold the highest office in the Lone Star State. (She was preceded by Miriam A. "Ma" Ferguson, who was elected governor after husband, James A. Ferguson was impeached. She campaigned on the slogan, "Two governors for the price of one." Critics said, "Bedfellows make for strange politics.") She was a rare breed--a progressive Texas Democrat able to win a statewide election. It is, today, an extinct breed.

If for no other reason (and I would argue that there were many other reasons), Richards was good for Texas--and for humankind--because she brought more women and minorities into positions of power in Texas than anyone before or since. She recognized what it meant to be part of an under-represented group and she struggled heroically to change that.

I'm very proud of the fact that in 1990 I often wore a T-shirt that said, "Another man for Ann."

[Update: This beautiful tribute by Molly Ivins is well worth reading. It captures Richards' wit perfectly.]

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

John Kenneth Galbraith, described in a Boston Globe obituary as "a towering figure in American intellectual life whose astringent wit and elegant iconoclasm graced the academic and political scene for seven decades," has died at the age of 97.

Galbraith was an economist who wrote bestsellers, dabbled in politics, and advised presidents from FDR to Clinton. Under President Kennedy, he served as the United States ambassador to India.

In 1989, Galbraith said (with his customary flair), "In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong." It is excellent advice.

Frederick L. Holborn (1928-2005)

I have just learned that Fred Holborn, who taught for over thirty years at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, died on June 3 at the age of 76. The loss is personal because, more than anyone else at SAIS, Fred Holborn guided me through my first graduate school experience when I went to SAIS as a naive 21-year-old.

Professor Holborn taught courses on U.S. foreign policy. In the spring of 1981, my second semester at SAIS, I took his course entitled, simply, "The Conduct of Foreign Policy." The following semester, I went back for "Congress and the Making of National Policy." Looking back through my notes for these courses, I am reminded that Professor Holborn had an extraordinarily broad knowledge of the American constitutional system, of American history, and of foreign policy. The notes I took in his classes, in fact, kept me well supplied with interesting facts to inject into my own lectures in American government courses when I began teaching. (I am also reminded that he was very open and approachable. On the first page of my notes from both semesters, I have his home phone number written down.)

Professor Holborn also supervised my thesis and, in so doing, introduced me to the normative issues in foreign policy that have been among my primary interests ever since. I recall numerous occasions sitting in his office--Room 318 in the Nitze Building at 1740 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.--talking about Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau and the contrasts in foreign policy between the recently ended Carter Administration and the newly inaugurated Reagan Administration. To have a conversation with Professor Holborn in his office required that he bring his chair around to the front of the desk because the desk invariably had so many papers piled on it that it was impossible for two people sitting down on opposite sides of the desk to see each other over or through the clutter. (Yes, even now I can only aspire to have an office as messy as his was.)

For more on Fred Holborn's remarkable life, see this obituary published in yesterday's Washington Post.

John Paul II, 1920-2005

Pope John Paul II has died at the age of 84. There will be many analyses of his papacy in the coming days, but a few points from an international relations perspective are worth noting here.

As a native of Poland, John Paul brought to the Vatican an uncommon combination of qualities. He was finely attuned to the principles of power politics--realism--but, at the same time, strongly convinced of the significance of human rights. These characteristics merged in what might have been the defining feature of the first half of his papacy, his staunch opposition to communism. In Eastern Europe, his anticommunism provided moral support (although little else) for those who were determined to end Soviet domination. In Latin America, however, it caused him to be suspicious of those trying to overthrow right-wing dictatorships. Like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, John Paul seemed far less concerned about authoritarian regimes than about communist dictatorships.

The Catholic Church under John Paul's leadership made common cause with Muslims and evangelical Protestants against all proposals to control population growth or slow the spread of HIV/AIDS that were not based on sexual abstinence alone. Africa, where the Catholic Church experienced its greatest growth during John Paul's papacy, experienced enormous human suffering during the same period due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. While Catholic teachings on birth control are generally ignored in the United States and Europe, they have generally been accepted, often with disastrous results, by new converts in Africa.

His extensive travels, his efforts to communicate in the local language wherever he went, and his obvious concern for the downtrodden made John Paul II enormously popular among Catholics all over the world. He was not, however, responsible for the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. In fact, it would be closer to the truth (although still hyperbolic) to say that, with the rise of abortion as a wedge issue in American politics, he was responsible for the decline of the Democratic Party in the United States.

George F. Kennan (1904-2005)

America's most influential diplomat of the twentieth century, George F. Kennan, has died at his home in Princeton, N.J. at the age of 101. Kennan is best remembered as the author of the "Long Telegram" and the Mr. X article, an essay in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." These two documents were instrumental in establishing the intellectual foundations of the American policy of containment.

Here's the obituary in the New York Times.

Hans Bethe (1906-2005)

Hans Bethe, one of the twentieth century's greatest theoretical physicists and most articulate peace activists, died today at the age of 98 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. A key figure in the Manhattan Project, Bethe later worked tirelessly to try to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work explaining the process that fuels the Sun and other stars.

Born in Strasbourg in 1906, Bethe studied in Frankfurt and Munich as a young man. In 1932, he joined the faculty at the University of Tubingen. When Hitler's government adopted a civil service law banning Jews from teaching and other government jobs, Bethe, whose mother was Jewish, was dismissed. In 1935, Bethe joined many of Central Europe's greatest scientists by leaving Europe for the safer shores of the United States. He joined the faculty of Cornell University where he would teach for six decades.

When theoretical physicists suggested, in 1938, that it might be possible to develop an atomic bomb, Bethe and many other physicists trained in Central Europe worried that the Nazis might be moving forward on such a project owing to Germany's ascendancy in the field of theoretical physics. J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked by the United States Government to establish a project to develop an atomic bomb and, in 1943, Oppie appointed Bethe to be the head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project was headquartered. Bethe, like many other scientists, overcame his opposition to war and his objections to the development of nuclear weapons because he feared what might happen if Hitler won the race to develop an atomic bomb.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bethe concluded that nuclear weapons had to be controlled. He spent much of his time after World War II trying to convince policy makers that the arms race had to be stopped.

In 1995, Bethe headed up the Atomic Scientists Appeal, which called upon "all scientists in all countries to case and desist from work creating, developing, improving, and manufacturing further nuclear weapons--and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons."

Peter Benenson (1921-2005)

Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, died Friday in Oxford, England at the age of 83.

It is a story of the sort that warms my heart because it is the story of one person fearlessly taking action against great injustices: In 1961, on reading of two students who had been jailed in Portugal for drinking a toast to liberty, Benenson wrote an essay for the Observer (London) suggesting that ordinary people turn their outrage over prisoners of conscience worldwide into action by writing letters of protest to the governments that were imprisoning, torturing, and executing people for their beliefs. What began as a one-year campaign turned into a global movement that evolved into the world's largest and most respected human rights organization.

Not only did Benenson demonstrate by his own actions the power of one person to change the world, he did it with humility. Consider this from the AI tribute to him:

Inordinately modest and self-effacing, the one-time lawyer who launched Amnesty International in 1961 would never claim credit for the sea-change of the last 40 years. He was offered knighthoods by almost every successive British Prime Minister but he never accepted.

Each Prime Minister who wrote to him received a personal response from Benenson--who typed his own letters until late in life--in which he would cite the current human rights violations Amnesty was confronting in the UK. He would suggest, without mincing his words, that if the government wished to take account of his work for human rights, what mattered was to redress those abuses.

Here, from the Observer, is an obituary. The obituary from the New York Times is here. Read, and be inspired to act.