Copyright by Gregory Krauss 2007 - The University of Texas at Austin

activists were solidly anti-war. As noted in Chapter 3, Lister had supported the
Dominican intervention in 1965, and he had later supported the Vietnam War.
For other reasons, though, Lister’s devotion to human rights was not
surprising. Lister was already a grizzled veteran of his own personal struggle against
the State Department bureaucracy. Although nearing retirement age, perhaps he
relished the chance for one more battle with State Department policymakers. Also,
despite his support for the Vietnam War, Lister was sensitive to the way in which
militaries could be used as a tool of repression. In the late 1960s, without using the
term “human rights,” he had even begun to speak out about U.S. military aid to right-
wing dictatorships in Latin America. Finally, since his days as an FSO in Poland and
Russia, he had cared deeply about the plight of people living under totalitarian
regimes. In a speech in 1998, Lister said that freedom of speech and women’s rights
were the “two key human rights” in his opinion. 52 “He was not a religious man but I
think he had a sense for the ways that governments can treat their fellow citizens in an
inhuman and hideous way,” said Joseph Eldridge, who served as director of WOLA
from 1974 to 1986.
Human rights work furthermore dovetailed nicely with the kind of work Lister
already advocated and excelled at. Lister had written Averell Harriman in 1962 that
he desired to be a “global anti-communist activist.” The human rights issue gave
Lister a new way to take an activist approach against Communism around the world.
Lister had also called for more “effective political dialogue” with Latin Americans.
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