Amerasians are the forgotten people of America's vaunted human rights policy. Amerasians are the unwanted product of illicit liaisons between American servicemen and Asian women, primarily bar girls. It is difficult to estimate accurately the number of neglected Amerasians left behind in Asia. Many thousands were born in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand. Precise figures are hard to get because neither the Asian families nor the governments involved like to advertise what is for them a matter of shame. In one country, Cambodia, it is unlikely that any Amerasians survived the genocidal Khmer Rouge purification campaign. Fortunately, American forces were not in Cambodia long enough for them to produce large numbers of Amerasians.

October 19, 1977, was described by one of South Africa's best-known newspapers, the Rnnd Daily Mail, as "the bleakest day in South Africa's history." On that day the government banned the country's only black newspaper, The World, eighteen organizations (including most groups in the Black Consciousness Movement that had come to be associated with the name of Steve Biko), and seven individuals. Forty-two black leaders were imprisoned without trial, nineteen homes and offices were raided. "What it has done," wrote the editor of the Mail, "is to leave the Black people who reject separate development with no outlet, no organization, no mouthpiece even, through which to express themselves." And so it remains today.

Like Nixon, Kissinger uses the slippery phrase to sell the shoddy. "I believed in the moral significance of my adopted country," he writes, defending his zeal for Nixon's Vietnam policy. Do not all nations, all things human, possess "moral significance"? But Kissinger means to slip by another idea, a moral valuation of American power. "America, alone of the free countries," he continues, "was strong enough to assure global security against the forces of tyranny. Only America had both the power and the decency to inspire other peoples who struggled for identity, for progress and dignity." My!.

A representative comment by Henry Kissinger on the Vietnam experience captures the essence of what he means by moral judgment in The White House Years:

For all the inspiration Henry Kissinger is supposed to have received from the tradition of "power politics" and "political realism," he does not, at least on the surface, employ the notion of morality in a way that is quite in keeping with that tradition. In White House Years, Kissinger displays little of the skepticism and embarrassment about mixing moral judgments and foreign policy decisions that is characteristic of political realists.

In The White House Years, Henry Kissinger is, as ever, faithful to the conservative view of international relations he has espoused since his early study of Metternich. Yet, unlike Metternich, he is writing in a liberal democracy and must justify the survivalist ethic of balance- of-power Realpolitik in terms that give it what he calls at one point a "moral compass." What that consists in is not explicitly enunciated, but presumably it is related to the "idealism...humanity...and the embodiment of men's hopes" that in an eloquent passage he describes as his image of America when he was a boy suffering persecution in Nazi Germany.

The keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Cincinnati World Affairs Council in March, 1972, was Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. The dinner was held in a cavernous banquet hall, with forty or fifty of Cincinnati's leading citizens seated in two tiers on a raised dais at one end. Midway through Laird's address a figure arose from the darkened audience and began working her way forward. Everyone, including Laird, pretended to ignore her steady progress toward the speaker's lectern. Arriving directly in front of the secretary, the woman unfurled a small white sign— "War Is Murder"—and pinned it to the front of the lectern. Someone then got up and quietly escorted her to the sidelines. It was one person's way of protesting the ongoing agony of the Vietnam war.

Because of Barbara Ward's unflinching effort to uphold the highest values of Western civilization she has, in the eyes of many, become a conscience-keeper of the West. Her anxious call over three decades about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer has echoed widely. Although the call has fallen mostly on deaf ears in key policymaking circles, that detracts neither from its nobility nor from its validity.

The strident first-round offensive in the Carter administration's human rights crusade is over. In retrospect the first phase of the human rights movement had a noble purpose, yet failed to capture and hold the high ground of national policy and public support. It failed as national policy because it did not comprehend the fundamental relationship between human rights, prosperity, international trade, and investment. Public support declined because asymmetric, therefore hypocritical, publicity of human rights violations concentrated on minor blemishes on the record of U.S. business abroad while ignoring more terrible disfigurements of human rights.