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

moment. The bureau had already been through a period of instability at the end of the
Carter administration. In 1979, Senior Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Mark
Schneider had left the bureau, and in 1980, Derian had taken a leave of absence.
Other staff people were also leaving at the end of the Carter administration due to the
upcoming election and the perception that the administration had lost its human rights
focus. 105 The appointment of Stephen Palmer as Acting Assistant Secretary of State
kept the bureau afloat, but it continued to languish.
The true test of the durability of the bureau was whether it could survive a
change in administration. When Reagan took office in January 1981, morale had
never been worse in the human rights bureau. As noted above, Reagan initially was
against a strong human rights policy; he had nominated Ernest Lefever, an opponent
of drawing human rights into U.S. foreign policy, to head the bureau. Bureau officials
admitted that during the Lefever episode the human rights bureau was the “laughing
stock” of the State Department. 106 Lister later recalled that “there were some, in and
out of government, who assumed that our human rights policy was finished.” 107
Lister joined the human rights bureau in July 1981. 108 He was followed in
December by Reagan’s second nominee, Elliot Abrams, who had written the
memorandum outlining what would be Reagan’s new human rights approach. 109
Abrams, in his early 30s, was a conservative Harvard law school graduate who had
worked on the staffs of Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Pat
Moynihan. 110 He had joined the Reagan campaign in 1980, and in the first months of
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