Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

            Allan Brownfeld covers Washington D.C. as a freelance reporter.

One Man’s Passion for Freedom—and Encounters with Extraordinary People

Leonard R. Sussman has led an extraordinary life and his contribution to the advancement of freedom—in particular, freedom of the press—has been notable.

As the executive director of Freedom House for 21 years and now its Senior Scholar of International Communications, Sussman had the opportunity of both leading and serving an organization that has been at the center of the struggle for freedom for more than 60 years.

Founded by Wendell Willkie, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other prominent Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, Freedom House has championed worthy causes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to the new democracies that have emerged around the world since the 1990s. It was prominent in the battle against Communist tyranny and in advancing freedom in societies which lived under dictatorships, whether of the left or right.

In an important memoir, A Passion for Freedom: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (Prometheus Books, 2004), Sussman recalls his relationship with courageous men and women in 59 countries. He pays tribute to these mostly unsung heroes who contributed to freedom and humanistic ideals and in some cases paid the heavy price of imprisonment, torture or death. Among the individuals profiled are Milovan Djilas, a leading Yugoslav opponent of Communism who suffered years of imprisonment; Helen Suzman, a white parliamentarian who fought apartheid in South Africa for three decades; philosopher-activist Sidney Hook; Luis Muñoz Marin, Puerto Rico’s first elected governor; and many other journalists, political leaders, activists and intellectuals.

Sussman’s efforts were informed by his expansive religious faith and vision. Prior to joining Freedom House, he served as executive director of the American Council for Judaism, a group which advanced the Reform Jewish idea of a religion of universal values, free of the nationalism which some Jewish groups had embraced. Those Jewish groups which substituted the State of Israel and the Jewish people for God as the proper object of worship are, in Sussman’s view, distorting the moral and ethical essence of Judaism:

One cannot fulfill even the minimalist interpretation of Judaism, I believe, without a commitment to the obligations of ethical practice and social justice that are inherent in the religion. That obligation goes beyond the family and the fellowship of Jews: it commits Jews to the uplifting of oppressed human beings, whatever their religious beliefs. This commitment impelled Jews in the civil rights movement to march in Alabama for the liberation of blacks. It calls on Jews to understand the travail of Palestinians as well as Israelis. Such a commitment is imperiled by the tribalistic worship of false gods: the equating of the future of Judaism with the success or failure of the state of Israel, as well as emphasis on Jewish survivalism—for its own sake—as the common objective of modern Jews. If one must draw sustenance from tragedy, suggests Rabbi Michael Goldberg, turn to the Exodus rather than the Holocaust. Exodus, he says, is the “master story”: God led the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery in order to fulfill an eternal covenant, a linchpin on God’s redemption of the world—not survival for survival’s sake.

After his years with the Council, Leonard Sussman moved on to Freedom House and expanded his efforts worldwide to promote freedom in areas which had long lacked not only representative government and institutions but very basic human rights as well.

He developed the widely used “map of Freedom,” which showed the numerous not-free countries in black, the (as numerous) partially free countries in gray, and the one-third minority of free countries in white. Among the many prominent Americans with whom Sussman worked on the Freedom House board were Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Margaret Chase Smith and Paul Douglas, philosopher Sidney Hook, and civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin.

Of Hook, Sussman writes:

Sidney’s philosophy of freedom in a free society meshed with Freedom House’s fundamental beliefs. Early in 1949, he was invited to the Sorbonne in Paris to report on the Freedom House demonstration earlier that countered the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, a creation of the Soviet Union held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Sidney declared: “I have more in common with a democrat who differs with me on economic questions, but who firmly believes in civil rights and a peaceful method of resolving our economic differences, than with any professional Socialist who would seize power by a minority coup, keep it by terror, and take orders from a foreign tyrant. Hitler and Stalin (both of whom invoke the term Socialism) have written in letters of fire over the skies of Europe this message: Socialism without political democracy is not Socialism but slavery.

As an undergraduate at New York University, Leonard Sussman majored in philosophy and Sidney Hook, chairman of the department, became his intellectual mainstay and for 50 years afterwards a friend. Hook once said that “a great teacher is a sculptor in the snow,” pointing  out that,

We remember teachers rather than courses—we remember their manner and method, their enthusiasm and intellectual excitement, and their capacity to arouse our delight in, or curiosity about, the subject taught.

One suspects that Sussman, who has taught for many years at New York University, has followed in his mentor’s footsteps.

In recent years, promoting press freedom has been one of Sussman’s major tasks. He laments, we have witnessed

. . . a diverse crew of censor-propagandists. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin set down the Soviet credo in 1902. A newspaper, he said, should “become part of an enormous bellows that would blow every spark of class struggle and popular indignation into a general conflagration.” Italian dictator Benito Mussolini took up the cry in 1912, saying, “Journalism is not a profession, but a mission. Our newspaper is our party, our ideal, our soul and our banner which lead us to victory.” Joseph Goebbels, who ran Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda, declared that “not every item of news should be published; rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.” And so he did. All three censor-propagandists clearly rejected Benjamin Disraeli’s admonition to be credible, that news reporting must be diverse in subject and balanced in presentation, and that it must reflect differing points of view. Or one can take Disraeli literally (as would developing countries and critics of Western journalism): news coverage should include people and events from all points on the compass, not mainly the like-minded and the power centers. Indeed, North, East, West and South produce the acronym NEWS.

Sussman is particularly hard on intellectuals in the West who failed to understand the enormity of the crimes of the Soviet Union:

It must be remembered that the Cold War was two sided: Lenin took power in 1917, destroyed the Russian economy, precipitated a famine that claimed five million lives, and began a massive campaign of terror. Stalin, Lenin’s successor, did even worse. He created a privileged class, the nomenklatura, ran purges whose killing rate was the greatest in history, enslaved the peasants, and further impoverished the vast population—all in the name of high idealism. The other side of the Cold War: widespread U.S. anti-Communist policies informed by a small band of intellectuals and politicians in the West who understood the horrors of Communism and its expansionist potential worldwide and persuaded America to deploy military and public-diplomacy deterrents.

What Sussman calls the “anti-anti-Communism, the popular cry of the liberal left,” was, he writes, “a threat to Freedom House. It was a direct challenge to cultural freedom, and ultimately to democratic societies.” He cites those intellectuals who stood firm against those trends and did their best to identify Communism’s evils, among them Leopold Labedz, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Robert Conquest, Edward Shils, Irving Kristol, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Melvin Lasky.

Leonard Sussman participated in the first election observer team which, in 1979, traveled to Zimbabwe to monitor the fairness of the election in that newly independent country:

This Freedom House election observer team was the first of its kind. Since then, many other groups have engaged in such activity. Jimmy Carter’s center at Emory University, created after he left the White House, has become a regular monitor of elections on several continents. But our first mission set the pattern for our future observer jobs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and for other groups that followed.

Among the chapters in this book devoted to individuals with whom Sussman has worked closely over the years are those devoted to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bayard Rustin, Andre Amalrik, Helen Suzman, Percy Qoboza, Milovan Djalas, Margaret Chase Smith, Lucia Thorne, Isaam Sartawi and the Dalai Lama.

In 1979, Sussman arranged for the Dalai Lama’s first visit to the U.S. He notes that,

In 1959, China exiled from Tibet the fourteenth Dalai Lama, temporal and spiritual leader of six million Tibetan Buddhists. The Chinese government systematically invaded the Jokhang temple, beating and killing thirty monks and dragging their bodies “like dead animals and threw then in the back of the trucks.” More than 87,000 Tibetans were killed in Lhasa alone, according to Chinese sources. The slaughter continued for years, as did China’s efforts to obliterate the culture and religion of the Tibetans.

Anxious to cultivate cordial relations with the Communist regime in Beijing, Sussman notes, U.S. officials refused to meet publicly with the Dalai Lama.

In the case of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, less than a year before his death in 1987, he was interviewed by Sussman. This previously unpublished interview of a man Sussman refers to as “the least publicized hero of the American civil rights movement,” and a longtime colleague of Sussman’s at Freedom House, is worthy of serious attention.

Rustin contrasted the role of Martin Luther King, so widely honored for his role in the civil rights effort, with that of Roy Wilkins, longtime executive secretary of the NAACP and for thirty years a trustee of Freedom House, which has largely been forgotten:

King . . . responded to situations, responded to crises. Roy was a longtime planner and a great diplomat. Roy was an urbane, extremely careful person who knew each step of the way. Roy came to a position out of conviction that he had a role to play. Martin, on the other hand, was thrust into a situation. . . . One incident indicates how Roy’s planning was so integral. I was in the courtroom with Martin one day. He was telling me before the court opened how things were getting bad. People had been marching for more than a year then. It was almost impossible to continue people-walking; something had to happen. . . . While we were sitting there, somebody came in and handed Martin a note. He looked at it, grabbed me by the arm, and began to smile and shake my arm. “What’s happening?” I asked. He said the NAACP had won the case—and that meant the Montgomery bus protest had won. In other words, without the long-range planning that Roy had done we’d never have gotten through. That’s an illustration of the differences between the men.

While not diminishing King’s role in the civil rights struggle, Rustin urged Americans to consider the role played by Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, and other black leaders. Both Rustin and Wilkins opposed tying the civil rights movement to the left-wing anti-Vietnam War groups which King, late in his career, began to embrace. “Roy felt that blacks already had enough against them. They didn’t need to take on what would be a triple-threat jeopardy by becoming left-wingers,” states Rustin. Perhaps someday, the crucial role played by Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and others will be rediscovered.

Before President Reagan departed for the 1986 summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Sussman was one of a group invited to the White House to discuss the question of human rights and their role at the summit. After he left the presidency, Reagan delivered the Churchill Address at the Guildhall in London. He called for a pro-democracy program to assist the former Soviet states and used material from Sussman’s book, Power, the Press and the Technology of Freedom: The Coming Age of ISDN (Freedom House, 1989).

Reagan stated in his address:

In a book coming out this fall, Leonard Sussman, a senior scholar at Freedom House, writes that the speed, variety, and number of new communications tools defy control. At some point, Soviet citizens will be permitted to interact live and on-line with people in other countries. They will share information in a working relationship. . . . When that happens, the Goliath of totalitarian control rapidly will be brought down by the David of the microchip.

While some have spoken of the progressive nature of history, in which things steadily improve, the 20th century, with its twin barbarities of Communism and Nazism, indicate that man’s nature and tendency toward selfishness and brutality remain much the same. Human nature, it seems, is constant.

At the present time, as we proceed into a new century, we see where the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and religious extremism can lead. In all too many places, civilization seems a thin veneer indeed. Those who are committed to advancing humane values and genuine civilization always have a formidable task before them. 

Those men and women who wish to make the world a better place do, however, have examples to follow. They would do well to ponder Leonard Sussman’s words—and follow in his footsteps. He has set a standard for the rest of us.

Whatever Happened to Federalism and the Essential Role of the States?

The Founding Fathers understood that for freedom to endure government power had to be carefully circumscribed and divided. They attempted to do so by adopting a constitution which set forth the respective roles of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches as well as a sharp division between the states and the national government. The Tenth Amendment made clear that powers not specifically granted to the national government were to remain with the states and the people.

These divisions have eroded over the years and power has become increasingly centralized in Washington. Both Republicans and Democrats have presided over what can only be described as a major alteration of our system of government. At the present time, initiatives continue to nationalize what was once a genuinely federal system.

In the case of abortion, if it is murder, as right to life groups proclaim, or is not, as pro-choice groups argue, this has traditionally been a state matter. Yet, both groups have promoted the nationalization of this question, either through court decisions or constitutional amendments.

Similarly, marriage has traditionally been a matter for state control. When it comes to gay marriage, however, a uniform federal role is now being advocated through a constitutional amendment. The authority of state legislatures is to be abandoned and a national standard is to be imposed.

Or consider the current effort to nationalize tort reform laws. In a new Cato Institute report, “Can Tort Reform and Federalism Coexist?” Michael I. Krauss and Robert Levy write that,

A recent spate of lawsuits against manufacturers of guns, fast food, and tobacco has spurred Congress and the Bush administration to consider a deluge of tort reform proposals. . . . Current proposals encroach upon traditional state powers and cannot be harmonized with the principles of federalism. . . . The Commerce Clause, although originally intended to serve as a shield against interference by the states in interstate trade, has been used by Congress as a justification for many far-reaching economic regulations, tort reform being the latest.

The fear that government power would grow and become centralized, and that states rights and individual freedom would be diminished, concerned many of our early leaders. It is timely indeed that a new study of the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun has recently been published. In Calhoun and Popular Rule, (University of Missouri Press), Professor H. Lee Cheek, Jr., of Lee university in Tennessee, presents Calhoun (1782-1850) as an original political thinker who devoted is life to the recovery of a “proper mode of popular rule.”

In his Disquisition On Government, Calhoun wrote prophetically of the inherent tendency of a state to break through the limits of its written constitutions

A written constitution certainly has many and considerable advantages, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the powers of government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance, will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party in possession of the government, they will . . . be in favor of the powers granted by the Constitution and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them. As the major and dominant parties, they will have no need of these restrictions for their protection. . . . The minor or weaker party, on the contrary, would take the opposite direction and regard them as essential to their protection against the dominant party. . . . But where there are no means by which they could compel the major party to observe the restrictions, the only resort left them would be a strict construction of the Constitution. . . . To this the major party would oppose a liberal construction—one which would give the words of the grant the broadest meaning of which they were susceptible.

Calhoun continued:

It would then be construction against construction—the one to contract and the other to enlarge the powers of the government to the utmost. But of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be, against the liberal interpretation of the major, when the one would have all the powers of the government to carry its construction into effect and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction? In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful. The party in favor of the restrictions would be overpowered. . . . The end of the contest would be the subversion of the Constitution . . . the restrictions would ultimately be annulled and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.

Professor Cheek shows that Calhoun was a successor to the political thinking of Jefferson and Madison:

For Jefferson, Madison and Calhoun, only the states could adequately represent the people; no other assemblage, and certainly not the population en masse, could represent the needs and diversity of Americans. The return to state authority signaled a recovery of the connection between the protective qualities of the constitutional system and its most receptive organs, the states. The systematic enterprise devoted to enlarging the general government’s power through the “necessary and proper” clause (art.1 sec. 8) was initially condemned by Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolutions and Madison in the Report, but Madison also challenged, in the Virginia Resolutions and Report, the related expansion of the “general welfare” provision (art. 1 sec. 8). In the Discourse, Calhoun thoroughly challenged the use and eventual abuse of the “general welfare” clause as an unjust and unconstitutional initiative pursued by the forces of centralization within American political life.

Calhoun suggested that

. . . all governments are actuated by a spirit of ambition and avarice . . . be the form of government what it may, Monarchical, Aristocratic or Republican.

Cheek notes that,

The search for a golden mean between an overzealous, domineering state and a weak, ineffectual regime led Calhoun towards a constitutionalism that evolved out of the need to advance moral concerns on a communal level, while offering a notion of restraint against self-indulgent behavior. . . . By “federal,” Calhoun suggested that America represented the middle ground between the potentially hegemonic consolidation of authority in a centralized government and the dissipation of a coherent political order manifested in a purely confederal arrangement. The American polity embodied the best possible situation for the preservation of popular rule because it avoided the extremes of consolidation on the one hand and disunion on the other.

The decline of local and state government and the centralization of power in Washington has been compared with similar trends in ancient Rome. In Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock writes:

The pressure of centralization has tended powerfully to convert every official and every political aspirant in the smaller units into a venal and complaisant agent of the federal bureaucracy. This presents an interesting parallel with the state of things prevailing in the Roman Empire in the last days of the Flavian Dynasty, and afterwards. The rights and practices of local self-government, which were formerly very considerable in the provinces and much more so in the municipalities, were lost by surrender rather than by suppression. The imperial bureaucracy, which up to the second century was comparatively a modest affair, grew rapidly to great size, and local politicians were quick to see the advantage of being on terms with it. They came to Rome with their hats in their hands, as governors, congressional aspirants and such-like now go to Washington. Their eyes and thoughts were constantly fixed on Rome, because recognition and preferment lay that way; and in their incorrigible sycophancy they became, as Plutarch says, like hypochondriacs who dare not eat or take a bath without consulting their physician.

Given the dramatic decline in the teaching of history in our schools, fewer and fewer Americans have an understanding of the political philosophy upon which our system of government is based. The Founding Fathers understood very well that freedom was not man’s natural state. Their entire political philosophy was based on a fear of government power and the need to limit and control that power very strictly. Yet, they would not be surprised to see the many limitations upon individual freedom and the centralization of power which have come into existence.

In a letter to Edward Carrington, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

He noted that,

One of the most profound preferences in human nature is for satisfying one’s needs and desires with the least possible exertion, for appropriating wealth produced by the labor of others, rather than producing it by one’s own labor . . . the stronger and more centralized the government, the safer would be the guarantee of such monopolies; in other words, the stronger the government, the weaker the producer, the less consideration need be given him and the more might be taken away from him.

Speaking before the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1788,
James Madison, the political thinker Calhoun considered responsible “for the form of the government under which we live,” defended the diffused authority prefigured in the Discourse:

The powers granted by the proposed Constitution are the gift of the people, and may be resumed by them when perverted to their oppression, and every power not granted thereby, remains with the people, and at their will. It adds likewise, that no right of any denomination, can be cancelled, abridged, restrained, or modified by the General Government, or any of its officers, except in those instances in which power is given by the Constitution for these purposes. There cannot be a more positive and unequivocal declaration of the principles of the adoption—that everything not granted, is reserved.

Assessing Calhoun’s thought, Dr. Cheek writes:

Calhoun’s own inherited vision of American politics was confirmed by Madison and the South Atlantic republican tradition’s insights in situations of disputed authority, the states possessed the right of self-protection. The Tenth Amendment, with its emphasis upon state authority, was more than a declaratory statement about the role of the states against the encroachment from the general government. In the worldview of Calhoun and those who shared his understanding, the Tenth Amendment was not merely “a rule of interpreting the Constitution.” In fact, the Tenth Amendment was a guide for defining the theoretical core of the republic and an important premise of constitutional theory. . . . At the heart of the matter, Calhoun recognized that the Founders intended for the Tenth Amendment to limit the general government’s sphere of influence while facilitating genuine popular rule. In its refining of the boundaries of governmental authority, Calhoun’s interpretation closely resembled Justice Story’s depiction of the Tenth Amendment as excluding “any interpretation, by which other powers should be assumed beyond those, which are granted.”. . . In actuality, Calhoun’s purpose was the preservation of the original balance of authority and the fortification of the American political system against the obstacles it faced. The vindication of Calhoun’s critique can be witnessed in the effects of the centralization of political power in America and throughout the world during the century and a half since his death, which has in most cases either limited or repealed long-standing modes of deliberation and popular rule. For Calhoun, it was “indispensable” that the government of the United States should be restored to its federal character in theory and practice.

It seems beyond doubt that the system the framers of the Constitution established and the centralized government under which we now live are different in nature. Whichever party has been in power, government has grown and become increasingly centered in Washington. Is it too late to turn back? Let us hope that this is not the case.     Ω

“Professional politicians like to talk about the value of experience in government. Nuts! The only experience you gain in politics is how to be political.” —Ronald Reagan

We would like to thank the following people for their generous contributions (from 5/11/04-7/15/04) towards the publication of this journal: Ariel, Alexis I. Bayard, James L. Blilie, Walter I.C. Brent, James M. Broz, Georgia Buchta, D. J. Cahill, Robert Day, Hans Dolezalek, John B. Gardner, John H. Hearding, Don Herman, Larry Hooper, David Ihle, Donald C. Ingram, Stephen W. Jenks, O. Walter Johnson, Robert R. Johnson, Mary A. Kelley, Edward B. Kiolbasa, Benjamin H. Lane, James A. Lee, Herbert London, Dan R. MacLean, Daniel Maher, Francis P. Markoe, Thomas J. McGreevy, Donald J. Povejsil, Howard J. Romanek, Philip E. Rosine, W. E. Saunders, William A. Shipley, Clifford W. Stone, John West Thatcher, Doug Tice, James W. Williams.