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

One of Lister’s significant accomplishments was to make communication with
the State Department a regular activity for both U.S. and foreign human rights
activists. Lister’s first step was often to demystify the State Department; his own
slightly awkward presence at human rights events helped to accomplish this. Another
common practice was to invite activists to have lunch with him at the State
Department. In 1974, Lister made his first such lunch invitation to Eldridge, who
remembers entering the State Department with “a little apprehension, fear and
trembling.” Eldridge had lived in Chile at the time of the coup, and he held the State
Department and Kissinger partly responsible. 139 Lister gave Eldridge the State
Department tour, taking him to the 7 th floor, where they walked by Kissinger’s office,
and then stopped with him to look out over the Washington Monument and the
Mall. 140 When they entered the cafeteria, where hundreds of State Department
employees were having lunch, Lister turned to Eldridge and said, “Now look at all
those people, they don’t all look like fascists, do they?” 141
In trying to persuade activists that it was worth lobbying the State Department
or the U.S. government, Lister could be quite direct. In September 1983, he met with
Sergio Bitar, part of the democratic opposition to Pinochet and the former Minister of
Mines under Allende. 142 Dialogue between the U.S. government and the democratic
opposition to Pinochet to that point was almost non-existent. 143 Lister told Bitar that
Chilean democratic opposition leaders were wrong to assume that the U.S.
government could not be convinced to take a harder line against Pinochet. 144 “This is
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