Ernest Lefever, 89; founded conservative think tank on policy and ethics
WASHINGTON - Ernest W. Lefever, who founded a conservative public policy organization in Washington and was an embattled nominee for a State Department human rights job under President Reagan, died Wednesday at a Church of the Brethren nursing home in New Oxford, Pa. He was 89 and had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.
Dr. Lefever, a Chevy Chase, Md., resident, was an international affairs specialist with the National Council of Churches, a staff consultant on foreign affairs to Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Democrat of Minnesota, and a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution before starting the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1976. The center studies the link between Judeo-Christian morality and national and foreign policy.
In 1981, Reagan nominated Dr. Lefever for the State Department position of assistant secretary of human rights. After months of accusations over conflicts of interest involving his think tank and insurmountable controversy about his views of the human rights job, Dr. Lefever withdrew his bid after rejection by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
What drew the most media attention during his nomination was his distinction between “authoritarian’’ regimes that supported US policy - right-wing juntas, for example - and “totalitarian’’ regimes run by communists who saw the United States as a foe.
Authoritarian states, he said, could be accorded “quiet diplomacy’’ to effect change, but such efforts with totalitarian countries were diplomatically untenable.
“Our friends deserve quiet support and public encouragement in their quest for a more humane society,’’ Dr. Lefever wrote at the time. “We must earn this respect by being a steadfast ally, rather than an erratic and capricious partner given to moral posturing.
“We should be concerned more with results than with rhetoric,’’ he added, “more with doing good than with feeling good. Getting one innocent man out of prison is worth more than a dozen noisy and ineffectual TV demonstrations.’’
Many critics said Dr. Lefever’s distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes was arbitrary. Among his opponents were his two younger brothers, Donald and John.
Donald Lefever, a department manager for a Minneapolis farm cooperative, told the Foreign Relations Committee that both types of autocratic societies repressed human rights and that his brother was not the man for the job.
There were also allegations that Dr. Lefever’s think tank had a quid pro quo arrangement with Nestlé, the Swiss food company that controversially marketed its baby-food formula to developing countries. Nestlé had given Ethics and Public Policy Center $25,000 as the think tank sponsored a study of the medical needs of developing countries. The study was never written up, but the author, a reporter at Fortune magazine, wrote an article heavily favoring the company’s perspective. The center reprinted the article.
Ernest Warren Lefever was born Nov. 12, 1919, into what he called a “pious, religious, pacifist family’’ in York, Pa. He became an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren, a Christian denomination that grew out of Germany in 18th century and, like Quakers and Mennonites, emphasizes Christian pacifism.
He was 1942 graduate of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and a 1945 graduate of Yale Divinity School. In 1956, he received a doctorate in Christian ethics at Yale.
In 1951, he married Margaret Briggs.
Dr. Lefever disavowed his early belief in pacifism after traveling to Europe after World War II. In his 1998 book, “The Irony of Virtue,’’ he wrote about seeing “scattered rib bones in the red clay’’ at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. In subsequent lectures, he showed audiences a bone he had taken from the camp, a tangible reminder of mankind’s potential for evil.
From his visit to Bergen-Belsen forward, he called himself a “humane realist.’’
