Lemkin initially fumed less over the substance of the human rights agenda than over its timing. He had worked since 1944 to get his word embraced in official circles and since 1933 to get the crime banned. Lemkin was upset that the General Assembly had passed its historic universal declaration on December 10, 1948, the day after the genocide convention’s passage. He felt the association of national celebrities like Eleanor Roosevelt with the UDHR had overshadowed the vote on the genocide convention.31
The UDHR was a nonbinding, thirty-article declaration of principles of civil, political, economic, and social justice.32 This aspirational set of principles was only a “date,” Lemkin said, whereas the convention, which required states to behave a certain way, was more like a “marriage.”33 He naively believed that unanimous passage of the convention meant that states intended to live up to their legal commitments. Thus, he feared respect for “his” law would be lessened by association with “her” declaration.
Yet it was when the human rights movement attempted to legalize this initial declaration of principles and turn it into a legal convention modeled on the genocide ban that Lemkin erupted.34 He simply could not believe that diplomats, drafters, and concerned citizens would attempt to make low-level rights abuses the subject of international law, which he was convinced should be reserved for the most extreme crimes, which were most likely to elude national prosecution. Slavery and genocide were appropriate international crimes; abridgement of speech and press, which were patently unenforceable, were not. His more justified and far more urgent ends had to be distinguished from the human rights crowd’s largely prosaic concerns.
In an unpublished op-ed entitled “The U.N. Is Killing Its Own Child,” Lemkin warned against those articles in the proposed human rights covenant that “encroached” upon his convention: “The same provisions apply to mass beatings in a concentration camp and to the spanking of a child by its parents. In brief, the dividing line between the crime of Genocide, which changes the course of civilization on one hand, and uncivilized behavior of individuals on the other hand, disappears.”35 If every abuse were to become a subject of international concern, Lemkin worried, states would recoil against international law and would not respond to the greatest crime of all.
Lemkin also predicted (quite accurately) that some critics of the genocide convention would use the human rights law to kill his law in a different way, arguing that there was no need for a genocide pact because the human rights law was so expansive that it covered the crime of genocide.36 Indeed, some began to claim that genocide simply constituted an egregious form of discrimination. Lemkin was understandably adamant that the destruction of groups not be absorbed under the heading of prejudice. In a 1953 memo he snapped: “Genocide implies destruction, death, annihilation, while discrimination is a regrettable denial of certain opportunities of life. To be unequal is not the same as to be dead.”37
Foreshadowing some of the turf warfare that has plagued nongovernmental organizations since their formation, Lemkin began lobbying for the excision from the human rights law of those provisions that overlapped with his. Two clauses in particular gnawed at him: “Nobody shall be deprived of the right to life” and “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” If these were included in the human rights law, genocide convention critics would claim that genocide had already been “covered.” Lemkin urged dumbfounded U.S. officials to insist that the human rights law omit references to the right to life and the right to be free of inhuman treatment. He received a gracious letter back from Assistant Secretary of State John D. Hickerson, who observed, “Certainly it would be difficult to deny that these two rights are among the most basic of human rights generally recognized throughout the world.”38 Yet Lemkin thought international law should reserve itself for the base and not busy itself with the “basic.”
As he attacked the human rights treaty and its sponsors, Lemkin found himself mouthing the same arguments as notorious human rights abusers.39 In his fury, he ignored all he had in common with his human rights rivals. René Cassin, a French Jewish lawyer who took the lead on the Human Rights Commission in drafting the Universal Declaration and who in 1968 was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts, had lost twenty-nine members of his family, including his sister, in Nazi concentration camps. Cassin’s response to Soviet critics who bristled at outside interference might well have been written by Lemkin. “The right of interference is here; it is here,” Cassin noted. “Why? Because we do not want a repetition of what happened in 1933, where Germany began to massacre its own nationals, and everybody. . .bowed, saying ‘Thou art sovereign and master in thine own house.’”40
Lemkin, Cassin, and Roosevelt also squared off against the same opponents. Senator Bricker teamed with Senator McCarthy to deride all UN instruments as vehicles of world government and socialism that would swallow U.S. sovereignty and aid in a Communist plot to rule (and internationalize) the world. The bedfellows who united in opposition to the genocide ban and the human rights law were not only fierce anti-Communists like Bricker but also devoted Communists from the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc representing their countries at the United Nations.
But instead of seeing or seeking common ground, Lemkin chided human rights advocates for the very utopianism that his opponents ascribed to him. The draft human rights covenant naturally included a demand that signatories respect rights “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” Lemkin found this laughably unrealistic: “History has tried to achieve this task through a combined travail of revolution and evolution, but never before has a philosopher or lawyer dreamed of this unique opportunity of replacing a historical process by fiat of law. In short, it is merely a description of Utopia, but Utopia belongs to fiction and poetry and not to law.”41
Back in the United States, the gatekeepers at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee quashed all prospective hearings on the genocide convention. After another wave of countries signed the convention in 1957, the New York Times again lauded Lemkin, calling him “that exceedingly patient and totally unofficial man.”42
But Lemkin’s patience was thinning and his health worsening. He took each year’s delay personally, and the stress of the extended struggle took its toll. He began to disappear from sight for long stretches, cutting himself off from his few friends. A close friend, Maxwell Cohen, said Lemkin “was very warm to those close to him, but he antagonized so many people with his insistence and his impatience.” Although Lemkin spent weekends and summers with Cohen’s family, they always referred to him as “Dr. Lemkin.” Lemkin could woo people with his Old World gentility, but he always kept them at a distance. According to Cohen, “Women were attracted to him. He was a very charming man with an extraordinary inner dignity.” But Lemkin continued to make no time for them, telling Cohen, “I can’t afford to fall in love.”43
Lemkin’s enemies and disappointments were piling up. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1958, and 1959.44 But journalists had stopped calling. And the “multilateral moment” where the UN and international law held promise had passed. Lemkin lived off small donations from Jewish and Eastern European émigré groups. He had begun a four-volume history of genocide. The first volume, which he had nearly completed, would be entitled “An Introduction into the Study of Genocide”; the second would cover genocide in antiquity; the third would focus on genocide in the Middle Ages; and the fourth would take readers through genocide in modern times. But if Lemkin saw the indispensable service to humanity such a collection would supply, American publishers foresaw only dim sales. The president of the John Day Company informed him that the company had concluded they could not “successfully sell a book about the history of genocide, whether condensed or at length.”45 Charles Pearce of Duell, Sloan and Pearce replied to his inquiry by stating, “It would not be possible for
us to find a large enough audience of buyers for a book of this nature,” and a Simon and Schuster reviewer described it as a “very dubious commercial risk.”46 Lemkin next tried to market a full-length autobiography, claiming confidently in the introduction that “this book will be interesting because it shows how a private individual almost single handedly can succeed in imposing a moral law on the world and how he can stir world conscience to this end.” But for this book, to be called “The Totally Unofficial Man,” after the New York Times description, he received similarly dejecting feedback.
Accused of fighting the whole world, Lemkin used to insist, “I am not fighting the whole world. But only against an infinitely small part of the world, which arrogates to itself the right to speak for the whole world. What you call the whole world is really on my side.” If American critics of the genocide convention actually believed they had the American people on their side, he argued, they would freely admit that they opposed the genocide treaty and permit the measure to come before the full Senate for debate.
On August 28, 1959, after a quarter-century battle to ban genocide, Lemkin collapsed and died of a heart attack in the public relations office of Milton H. Blow on Park Avenue, his blazer leaking papers at the seams. His one-room apartment on West 112th Street in Manhattan was left overflowing with memos prepared for foreign ministers and ambassadors, as well as some 500 books, each read, reread, and emphatically underlined. He had published eleven books, most of them on international law but one volume of art criticism and another on rose cultivation. At the time of his death, he was fifty-nine and penniless. A New York Times editorial two days later observed:
Diplomats of this and other nations who used to feel a certain concern when they saw the slightly stooped figure of Dr. Raphael Lemkin approaching them in the corridors of the United Nations need not be uneasy anymore. They will not have to think up explanations for a failure to ratify the genocide convention for which Dr. Lemkin worked so patiently and so unselfishly for a decade and a half. . . . Death in action was his final argument—a final word to our own State Department, which has feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe upon our sovereignty.47
Lemkin had coined the word “genocide.” He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the world’s most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkin’s funeral.48
“Successors”
After Lemkin’s death, the genocide convention languished unattended in the United States until the mid-1960s. Bruno Bitker, a Milwaukee international lawyer, sparked a second wave of interest when he urged William Proxmire, the wiry senator from Wisconsin, to take up the cause of the genocide ban. Nearly seventy countries had by then ratified the law, and Proxmire could not grasp what could be slowing the U.S. Senate.49
Unlike Lemkin, Proxmire had led a privileged life, graduating from Yale, receiving two master’s degrees from Harvard, and marrying Elsie Rockefeller, a great-granddaughter of oil baron William A. Rockefeller, the brother and partner of John D. Rockefeller. But like Lemkin, Proxmire was a loner who had a habit of breaking with convention. Reared in a staunch Republican family in Illinois, he declared himself a Democrat in the late 1940s and moved to Wisconsin, home of the iconoclastic populist Robert La Follette and a state that columnist Mary McGrory likened to “a portly Teutonic old lady, full of beer and cheese, with a weakness for wild men and underdogs.”50
When he lost the race for Wisconsin governor in 1952, 1954, and 1956, Proxmire turned up at Milwaukee factories the next morning to pass out “We lost, but . . .” cards to groggy workers.51 In 1957, when he ran for the late Joseph McCarthy’s Senate seat, instead of distancing himself from prior races, Proxmire embraced the “three-time loser” label. “Let my opponent have the support of the man who has never proposed to a girl and lost,” Proxmire declared in one radio broadcast. “I’ll take the losers. . . . If all those who have ever lost in business, love, sports or politics will vote for me as one who knows what it is to lose and fight back, I will be glad to give my opponent the support of all those lucky voters who have never lost anything.”52
If Proxmire intended to pick a loser on the legislative front, he could not have done any better then the genocide convention. Ever since Eisenhower had struck his 1953 deal with Senator Bricker agreeing to drop the pact from consideration, nobody in the Senate had cared to reintroduce the measure. On January 11, 1967, Proxmire stood up on the Senate floor to deliver his first genocide speech. He casually announced his intention to begin a campaign that would not cease until the United States had ratified the pact. To a largely uninterested, deserted Senate chamber, he declared: “The Senate’s failure to act has become a national shame. . . . I serve notice today that from now on I intend to speak day after day in this body to remind the Senate of our failure to act and of the necessity for prompt action.”53
Ellen Proxmire
Senator William Proxmire (D.–Wisc.)
Proxmire’s speech-a-day approach to ratification was one of many rituals he observed in the Senate. He made a point (and a show) of never missing a roll call vote during his twenty-two years in the Senate, tallying more than 10,000 consecutively. A renowned skinflint, he became famous nationally for crusading against pork-barrel projects and passing out the monthly Golden Fleece Awards to government agencies for waste in spending. The first award in 1975 went to the National Science Foundation for funding a $84,000 study on “why people fall in love.” Later recipients were “honored” for a $27,000 project to determine why inmates want to escape from prison; a $25,000 grant to learn why people cheat, lie, and act rudely on Virginia tennis courts; and a $500,000 grant to research why monkeys, rats, and humans clench their jaws. The award infuriated many of Proxmire’s colleagues in the Senate, who deemed it a publicity stunt designed to earn Proxmire kudos at their expense.54
Although Proxmire alienated some colleagues by “fleecing” them, a few joined him in fighting for the genocide convention. Claiborne Pell, a fellow Democrat from Rhode Island, was one who endorsed Proxmire’s pursuit.55 Pell’s father, Herbert C. Pell, had served during World War II as U.S. representative to the War Crimes Commission, which the Allies established in 1943 to investigate allegations of Nazi atrocities. The elder Pell had hardly been able to get senior officials in the Roosevelt administration to return his calls. In late 1944 he was informed that the war crimes office would close for budgetary reasons. The Roosevelt team rejected Pell’s offer to pay his secretary and the office rent out of his own pocket, reversing the decision only when Pell publicized the office’s closing. When the younger Pell spoke publicly on behalf of the genocide convention decades later, he recalled those years in which he watched his father come to terms with the outside world’s disregard for Nazi brutality:
I remember the shock and horror that my father suffered—he was a gentle man—at becoming aware of the horror and heinousness of what was going on. . . . I am convinced. . . that there was an unwritten gentleman’s understanding to ignore the Jewish problem in Germany, and that we and the British would not intervene in any particular way. . . . We wrung our hands and did nothing.56
Backed by Pell, Proxmire pressed ahead in an effort to resurrect Lemkin’s law. Proxmire’s daily ritual became as regular and predictable as the bang of the gavel and the morning prayer. Yet it was also as varied as the weather. Each speech had to be an original. The senator put his interns to good use, trusting them, in weekly rotations, to prepare the genocide remarks. The office developed files like Lemkin’s on each of the major genocides of the past millennium, and the interns tapped the files each day for a new theme. Anniversaries helped. The Turkish genocide against the Armenians and the Holocaust were often invoked.
But sadly, Proxmire’s best source of material was the morning paper. In 1968 Nigeria responded to Biafra’s attempted secession by waging war against the Christian Ibo resistance and by cutting off food supplies to the civilian population. “Mr. President, the need of the starving is
obvious. Indeed, it cries to high heaven for action,” Proxmire declared. “And to the degree that the nations of the world allow themselves to be lulled by the claim that the elimination of hundreds of thousands of their fellows is an internal affair, to that degree will our moral courage be bankrupt and our humane concern for others a thin veneer. Our responsibility grows awesomely with the death of each innocent man, woman and child.”57 But the United States stood behind Nigerian unity. Reeling from huge losses in Vietnam as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Johnson administration followed the lead of the State Department’s Africa bureau and its British allies, both of which adamantly opposed Biafran secession. Citing fears of further Soviet incursions in Africa and eyeing potentially vast oil reserves in Iboland, U.S. officials stalled effective famine relief measures for much of the conflict. The United States insisted that food be delivered through Lagos, even though Nigerian commanders were open about their objectives. “Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war,” one said.58 In the end Nigeria crushed the Ibo resistance and killed and starved to death more than 1 million people
Beginning in March 1971, after Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan’s Awami League won an overall majority in the proposed national assembly and made modest appeals for autonomy, Pakistani troops killed between 1 and 2 million Bengalis and raped some 200,000 girls and women. The Nixon administration, which was hostile to India and using Pakistan as an intermediary to China, did not protest. The U.S. consul general in Dacca, Archer Blood, cabled Washington on April 6, 1971, soon after the massacres began, charging:
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