John Shattuck Interview (1997): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Diplomacy and the Shaping of a Human Rights Agenda: Conversation with John Shattuck, Asst Sec'y of State for Democracy, Human Rights, & Labor; by Harry Kreisler, 4/30/97

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

Page 7 of 7

Conclusion

I want to ask you about some of the frustrations of your job. It sounds like one of them is the extent to which there probably isn't sufficient recognition of all of these little steps that are being taken by the government, building structure for the future. Is that correct?

That may be one of the frustrations. I think the larger frustration is that you get to be a fairly lonely voice sometimes. You have to bide your time and wait your moment on issues that aren't ripe for the government to move on. And yet I'm pleased that I've been able to keep on the agenda of the United States the issue of Tibet, the issue of East Timor. These are terrible human rights conflicts that could easily be brushed aside, and often are, and it's frustrating that you can't get them resolved overnight. For several years I had great frustrations over our policy in Bosnia. And for at least a year I had frustrations over our policy in Haiti. But you find that if you're patient and persistent, and if you don't just sort of give up and say, "All right, I'm going to resign in protest because I didn't get everything I wanted today," you can actually achieve an awful lot, both in terms of small or incremental advances, and sometimes in terms of a dramatic change of our whole policy, as we did in both Bosnia and Haiti.

So I guess the role model of you father defending this individual in the McCarthy era is kept in your mind, with these kinds of situations. I want to ask you about the question of political and public consciousness about human rights issues, and I want this answer to be informed by your experience being outside the government and now in. One thing that comes to mind, and I'm going to ask this in a general way and not focus on any particular politicians, but as in the Cold War, I think in the new era we discover that in presidential elections people make promises that take a long time to reach fruition. Partly they come into office and are no longer interested in implementing what they had promised in the campaign. This seems to be very true in human rights, so if I keep this at a very general level, what about that problem? There is often a disconnect between the words of the campaign, which is what democracy is about, and what people come in and do.

Well it's true, and I think the public interest in human rights is often, at best, skin deep. I mean the public certainly will wring its hands over what it sees on CNN, but when it comes to actually doing something about it and taking risks, maybe military, maybe using funds, it's difficult to get the public to support that. I think the public also gets what I'd call a kind of compassion fatigue or human rights fatigue. I mean, we're living in an era where information just gets pumped out at you, whether through the Internet or through CNN or other forms of communication, where you know that these terrible problems are going on all over the world. You start by saying that that's a terrible thing and that we should do something about it, and by the time you've seen the fifth or sixth such problem, you're sort of turned off. People have plenty of problems of their own right here at home. So I think mobilizing a constituency to address these issues is perhaps the single most challenging aspect. And it's true that it's easy to say things in a campaign that indicate that this is going to be high on our national agenda, but there's a cost to doing each of these things, financial or political or sometimes in blood, and getting the public to pay that cost is probably the single biggest challenge we have. However, having said all that, I think the public is not complacent. The American public recognizes that the U.S. has a very key role to play in the world. There's much more support for the United Nations than many conservative members of Congress would lead you to believe, or than many elements of the media would lead you to believe. Basically the public wants a more stable world, and in the end, what these human rights battles are all about is trying to help stabilize the world so that it's possible to travel to all these places without finding that you're caught in some terrible crisis.

One could probably say that the American people want a moral foreign policy. The definition of that may be open for debate, but they don't want an immoral one.

Sure. They certainly don't want to have a sense that they're wasting their money or spending their money on things that are really immoral, that's absolutely right. That's the lesson of a lot of our big public foreign policy debates over the last 30 years. That was certainly the lesson of the Vietnam War struggle, and I think it's been the lesson of some of the criticisms that were leveled at our Central America policies and other policies that we saw in earlier periods. Today I think the public, in its own quiet way -- and it's not noisy on foreign policy right now; thank God we don't have any single foreign policy crisis facing us -- would be very quick to let the Congress and the president know if it felt we were making a major investment in a project that violated human rights. I think the biggest accomplishment, oddly enough, that we've had over the last four years is that I can say in all candor that I do not see any U.S. policy anywhere in the world which is actively supporting the violation of human rights. I could not have said that at any early point during my adult life.

If there are students out there who envision a career like yours, what advice would you give them for preparing for a career in humanitarian law, human rights work, and so on?

Get out there. Don't sit at home. If you want to pursue an international career, there are all kinds of opportunities overseas, before you go to law school. Go into the Peace Corps or serve as a volunteer in one of the humanitarian organizations, or otherwise involve yourself in international work at the grassroots level. Then maybe you'll want to get some training, go to law school, go to a school of foreign affairs. I think the careers in the government are very interesting. Entering the foreign service these days would be very interesting for a human rights advocate, because human rights now is a much more established part of our foreign service. Outside the government, the sky's the limit. I think that we're on the verge of creating a whole variety of new institutions and opportunities that could bring people into this and have them gainfully employed in this field. Certainly that's what we need to do. So it's a very exciting time to be working on human rights.

One final question. When you look at you career, it's a kind of a normative equivalent of a Horatio Alger story in the sense of American Civil Liberties Union, defending Mort Halperin against the Nixon administration, Amnesty International and now in this role. Is there some lesson that you would distill from your own life story that you would like to share with us?

I have a cartoon on my wall at home. It's been there for a long time. It's about 25 years old, very yellowed. And its got this old guy sitting by a campfire and he's obviously very cold, he's all bundled up. He's got his dog beside him. There's a heading underneath this, "Camping out with the old liberal." And the dog is saying to him, "Bide your time and stick by your principles."

On that note, thank you very much Mr. Shattuck for being with us today. And thank YOU very much for being here for this "Conversation with History."

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