ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

Q: During the Vietnam War, there was quite a bit of tension between Trudeau and
Lyndon Johnson. Did you get any sense of that during your time there?
PERINA: By the time I got to Ottawa the Vietnam War was basically over. It was no
longer as controversial as in years past. So no, I did not get any sense of that. But of
course Trudeau was a strong leader, intelligent and unafraid to speak out when he felt like
it, so I have no doubt he made some in Washington nervous.
Q: Well, then you left Ottawa in late ‘76 or so?
PERINA: Exactly, we left in the winter of 1976 with two young daughters in tow. I got a
job here in Washington. Everyone was telling me that that was the smart thing to do
early-on in a career, to learn how the bureaucracy works. It was a little frustrating
because I had joined the Foreign Service to see the world but had not seen much of it yet.
But I received what was considered a very good assignment in EUR/RPM, or the regional
political-military office of the European Bureau. It was essentially the NATO desk in the
State Department. It was a desk for NATO but also for what was then the CSCE, later to
become OSCE, which I became very involved in.
Q: Can you elaborate?
PERINA: Well, the CSCE was the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a
process created by the Helsinki Final Act which was signed in 1975 by 33 European
countries plus the U.S. and Canada. The document had a lot of human rights-related
provisions, the famous Basket III, and Congress became very interested in their
implementation. A joint legislative-executive Helsinki Commission was in fact created
on the Hill, and Congress asked for semiannual reports from the President on how
Helsinki Final Act provisions were being implemented. My job turned out to be drafting
those reports. A friend of mine, Jon Greenwald, drafted the first one, and I drafted the
subsequent four. These were actually quite lengthy reports. They ranged from 70 to 100
pages and were basically a tabulation of events in the Eastern bloc related to CSCE
implementation, things like treatment of dissidents, human rights violations, freedom of
the press, freedom of movement and so on.
There was a lot of interest in these reports, and they were attacked by the Eastern bloc
countries as soon as they were published, so it was important to be accurate. It was
actually a heady experience for a second-tour junior officer to be drafting these long
documents that were then released in the name of the President. One interesting tidbit
was that the first report I drafted was under Jimmy Carter, who was inaugurated just as I
returned to Washington. We had to send the report to the NSC for clearance, and,
amazingly, when it came back there were these pencil notations in the margins that we
were told came from the President himself. Jimmy Carter had personally read the 70 or so
page report. No one could believe it, and I am sure it was a fluke only because he was
new to the job. He did not read subsequent reports because his staffers were more
experienced and did not pass stuff like this to him. But it was consistent with what we
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