By David Kurlander
President Biden last Sunday officially recognized the Armenian Genocide, in which Ottoman Turks systematically killed 1.5 million ethnic Armenians from 1915 to 1923. For a century, presidents have awkwardly avoided defining the atrocities, wary of causing a rift with Turkey, whose leaders deny that the genocide took place. In the New York Times piece on Biden’s decision, correspondent Lara Jakes noted that President Reagan came the closest to calling the mass murders a genocide, offering a “glancing reference” during an April 1981 Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. Reagan wrote: “Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it—and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples—the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.” While a hopeful step, Reagan’s initial acknowledgment devolved in the succeeding years into a morally fraught debate over formal recognition—and a reminder of the long road to Biden’s choice.
President Reagan’s Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation came at a moment of particular attention to genocide. In 1978, President Carter had appointed legendary Night author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to chair the U.S. Presidential Holocaust Memorial Council. In 1980, Congress voted unanimously to establish a Holocaust museum in Washington. The climate was not lost on Ken Khachigian, a veteran Armenian American speechwriter who drafted the fateful lines in Reagan’s proclamation.
Eight days after Reagan’s proclamation, as part of a larger series of ceremonies dubbed “The Days of Remembrance,” Wiesel tied the Armenian cause explicitly to the Holocaust during a speech at the Capitol Rotunda: “Before the planning of the final solution, Hitler asked, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ He was right. No one remembered them, as no one remembered the Jews. Rejected by everyone, they felt expelled from history.”
The push for recognition, however, was complicated by rising tensions between Armenia and Turkey. In September 1981, four Armenian radicals seized the Turkish consulate in Paris, holding more than 50 hostages and unsuccessfully demanding the release of all Armenian political prisoners. The radicals dubbed the consulate takeover “Operation Van,” after the city where Armenians most aggressively took up arms against the Ottomans at the height of the genocide. The consulate takeover followed the assassinations by affiliated Armenian liberation groups of at least 21 Turkish diplomats and a series of bombings at embassies and airports. Most of the Armenian demands included both calls for Turkish lands acquired during the killings to be returned to Armenian control and for Turkey to formally acknowledge the genocide.
The uptick in violence precipitated an article in the August 1982 State Department Bulletin. The piece, entitled “Armenian Terrorism: A Profile,” by Department analyst Andrew Corsun, was primarily a dispassionate look at the effectiveness of the radicals at spreading their message of historical pain. “By resorting to terrorism,” Corsun wrote, “Armenian extremists were able to accomplish in 7 years what legitimate Armenian organizations have been trying to do for almost 70 years: internationalize the Armenian cause.” The article, however, included a massively impactful endnote: “Because the historical record of the 1915 events in Asia Minor is ambiguous, the Department of State does not endorse allegations that the Turkish Government committed a genocide against the Armenian people.”
Letters poured in from concerned Armenian Americans demanding to know where the State Department stood, particularly in light of Reagan’s seemingly contradictory proclamation. “Regardless of immediate political interests, the Department of State must affirm the facts of the Armenian Genocide and in so doing defend the principle of the inviolability of history,” wrote the Armenian Assembly of America.
Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill joined a growing chorus of legislators who wrote letters to amplify concerns from the Armenian community and their allies. “This sort of revisionism is an outrage when engaged in by historians: it is absolutely inexcusable when it comes from the Department of State of the greatest democracy in the world,” O’Neill wrote. Senator William Proxmire followed up on the floor, urging Senators to revisit the 1915 declarations of Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, a witness who called the Ottoman’s killing “a campaign of race extermination” in a 1915 cable to Secretary of State Robert Lansing and later wrote a book, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, laying out the genocide in devastating detail. The State Department eventually issued a clarification that Corsun’s note was “not intended as statement of policy of the United States.”
Even with the backpedal, however, the State Department still came out against congressional resolutions to recognize the genocide in both 1984 and 1985. Their argument, parroted by Reagan in a statement delivered to the Turkish press, was that the acknowledgment might empower Armenian radicals and “inadvertently encourage or reward terrorist actions on Turks.” Other factors, however, were also at play. During the 1984 resolution debate, the Turkish government dropped out of a $700 million jet deal with Seattle-based Boeing, opting instead for the European consortium Airbus Industrie. Turkish Ambassador Sukru Elekdag also hired the legendary Washington lobbying group Gray & Co. to help foment opposition.
During that same first resolution debate in 1984, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane mocked up potential responses to the Armenian American community. He ultimately opted to send a caring—but very general—open letter to California Governor George Deukmejian—the highest-ranking person of Armenian heritage in American politics— rather than to issue any sort of official statement. “Neither the President’s letter nor my covering letter…will fully satisfy Governor Deukmejian,” McFarlane admitted in a memo laying out his plan to Secretary of State James Baker in June 1984.
Deukmejian responded by forwarding a column to Vice President George H.W. Bush. The article was by George J. Mason, the founder of America’s largest Armenian American newspaper (the California Courier), a managing director at Bear Stearns, and a proud Republican. “As strongly as I support the Republicans, however, I can’t sit through another of these funerals—hear about the horrible sufferings perpetrated by the Turks, then overlook the fact that our government refuses to acknowledge such an outrageous event,” Mason wrote. “In the long run the loss of their political support may be more costly to the country than the temporary irritation of the Turks,” Mason further warned. Bush forwarded the response to Baker and McFarlane with a note: “I hope we can clear this matter up. The President, in my view, should not be positioned in retreat from where he was on this issue.”
As the second resolution failed in 1985, Reagan’s tight-rope act with Armenia collided with another faux pas about genocide recognition. In April, Reagan announced plans to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. The ceremony was to take place at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where a significant number of fallen Nazi soldiers were buried. In a surreal Roosevelt Room press conference shortly before the trip, Wiesel pleaded with Reagan not to attend the ceremony: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place…your place is with the victims of the S.S.” Reagan, eager to protect his relationship with Germany, went ahead with the visit, albeit with a shorter wreath-laying than initially planned.
The confluence of the Bitburg controversy with the further stonewalling of Armenian recognition led the Wall Street Journal to craft a headline reading, “Reagan Opposition to Armenian Bill Starts a Second Genocide Controversy.” The linkage of the two scandals demonstrated a sad truth: Despite the power of his initial proclamation, Reagan had failed to recognize the genocide, and—despite a subsequent passionate push for recognition by Senator Bob Dole in 1989—had revealed the fundamental unreadiness of the State Department to take a position amid Turkish denialism and Armenian extremism.
The issue has stalled, even with remarkable and consistent Armenian American activism, for 35 years. Now, the diplomatic community waits to see how Turkey will react—and to see what other human rights declarations may shift global alliances in the coming months.
Most of the sources for this article came from two digitized files from the Reagan Presidential Library—one focused on the immediate reaction to the State Department Bulletin endnote, and the other on the larger Reagan Administration responses to criticism from the Armenian American community.
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