Sarah Paine

The United States still doesn't want to show, but we go along with our allies.

And our allies insist on including human rights provisions.

And we think this is crazy land because we know the Soviets are never going to enforce those things.

But you get the Helsinki agreements, accords that have all sorts of human rights provisions.

Well, lo and behold, unbeknownst to anybody, dissidents across the Eastern Bloc and human rights activists across the West start holding the communists to account for the agreements that they have signed and start contrasting the liberation that communism promises

versus the dictatorship actually delivered.

And this human rights movement took on within the Soviet bloc and abroad.

It took on a life of its own.

So here you have the former director of the CIA and former head of the Department of Defense, Robert Gates, saying the Soviets desperately wanted this big conference.

and it laid the foundations for the end of their empire.

We resisted it for years, only to discover years later that this conference had yielded benefits beyond our wildest imagination.

Go figure.

And here is Jimmy Carter with his human rights initiative.

And it was Gorbachev's English language translator who said that actually Carter's emphasis on precisely the human rights that were denied...

to Soviets really resonated.

And it made people think that they wanted a more democratic, open, liberal society.

So here's Carter giving a graduation address at Notre Dame.

He said, we have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.

What draws us Americans together is a belief in human freedom.

We want the world to know that our nation stands for more than just financial prosperity.