Teddy's Idealism

AP Photo Though Ted Kennedy will mostly be remembered for his work on domestic issues, his contributions to human rights around the globe are unmatched.

Ted Kennedy’s greatest contributions—affecting hundreds of millions of Americans—were on domestic issues such as health, education, labor, and civil rights. But with the exception of his opposition to the war in Iraq, he played a largely overlooked but important role in international affairs, fighting for refugees from Vietnam to Ethiopia to Iraq and crusading against political oppression in nations such as Pakistan, Chile, Northern Ireland, and South Africa.

His first venture came in 1965 when he used an obscure chairmanship, a Judiciary Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, to get involved in Vietnam issues. He started out as a Johnson administration cheerleader, saying the Vietcong was using phony refugees to infiltrate government areas. But the hearings he conducted soon made it clear that Washington did not know and Saigon did not care about the scope of the problem—a case he made in Look magazine after a November 1965 visit to Vietnam.

Kennedy’s best-known position on foreign affairs was his opposition—early and often—to the war in Iraq.

Over the next couple of years, he successfully pressed the administration to do more for the medical care of civilian victims of the war, especially of American artillery and bombing. He went back in 1968 thoroughly prepared, having sent four aides in advance to look at the problems and then show them to him. After that trip he called Saigon’s officials corrupt “colonialists in their own nation,” and said the United States should pull out if South Vietnam’s government did not shape up.

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• Adam Clymer: Teddy's Friends Raised Millions for Memorial While never the most prominent foe of the war, Kennedy became increasingly outspoken in the next few years. In 1971, he accused President Nixon of delaying peace talks to coordinate them with his own reelection campaign. And when Congress convened in 1973, Kennedy led an effort to put the Senate’s Democratic caucus on record against any further spending on the war. He won 36 to 12. After House Democrats followed suit, Nixon was able to use their votes to persuade South Vietnam to return to the negotiating table in Paris and agree to end the war.

A refugee issue also spurred his first speech in the Senate after Robert Kennedy’s death and later a rare agreement with the Nixon administration. In September 1968, he said starvation among in Biafra, a breakaway state from Nigeria, was costing more than 7,000 lives a day while the United States government stood “paralyzed.” The Johnson administration did not react, but the Nixon administration sent a refugee coordinator and then substantial quantities of food.

But the other great famine of the Nixon years got no such attention from the administration. It occurred when Pakistan, which had the firm support of Nixon and Henry Kissinger, sought to suppress an independence movement in East Pakistan or Bangladesh, as the Bengalis called their country. After millions of refugees fled Pakistan’s army into Eastern India and Kennedy visited refugee camps and said he saw “one of the most appalling tides of human misery in modern times.” Though the administration remained resolute in support of Pakistan, even after it stupidly invaded India and was routed, it did send more food aid to the refugee camps.