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In Moynihan's view, the world's minority of liberal parliamentary democracies is under assault from a majority of the U.N.'s 143 members; many are totalitarian and ideologically hostile to the U.S. Moynihan insists that his instructions from President Ford were unmistakable. "To say," as Moynihan puts it: "there are some things you cannot do to us and some things you cannot say about us. And we will just not take that, and we will find ways to discourage it."
But he became displeased with the kind of support he got from Washington. The Arab-sponsored anti-Zionism resolution was countered slowly at first in State Department instructions to American ambassadors abroad. They were told to call on foreign ministries if it was "deemed to be useful." That, snorts one U.S. official at the U.N., was "the weakest possible instruction. It means if you run into someone at tennis."
Amnesty Loss. Moynihan phoned the State Department to step up the pressure abroad. The weekend before the final vote, Kissinger belatedly ordered ambassadors to visit the foreign ministers of five key Third World governments, but after the vote, Western European delegates complained that Moynihan's "threatening" tactics had made face-saving compromise impossible. One European ambassador reported that three African delegates claimed they could not even abstain in the vote for fear of appearing to knuckle under to an American ambassador who had called the Organization of African Unity's chairman, President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, a "racist murderer." Moynihan feels that without a strong stand the vote might have been worse. Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog agrees.
Another battle between Moynihan and the State Department developed over what he had hoped would be a "major" U.S. initiative: a resolution calling for worldwide amnesty for all political prisoners jailed for nonviolent acts. It was Moynihan's idea; he sold it to Kissinger over lunch.
Probably doomed from the start, the resolution was not helped by either Moynihan's or the State Department's handling of it. Moynihan failed to lobby for European support sufficiently in advance. One European ambassador first learned of the resolution when he heard Moynihan telling Barbara Walters about it on the NBC Today show.