On human rights as foreign policy:

I come out of the environment of the Deep South, where I had seen the millstone of racial discrimination weighting down my people, both the black people and the white people; and I had seen the enormous progress that we were able to make after we removed the legal restraints of a two-class society, with the whites superior and blacks inferior. So I was very convinced before I became president that basic human rights, equality of opportunity, the end of abuse by governments of their people, was a basic principle on which the United States should be an acknowledged champion. ...

I announced that human rights would be a cornerstone or foundation of our entire foreign policy. So I officially designated every U.S. ambassador on earth to be my personal human rights representative, and to have the embassy be a haven for people who suffered from abuse by their own government. And every time a foreign leader met with me, they knew that human rights in their country would be on the agenda. And I think that this was one of the seminal changes that was brought to U.S. policy. And although in the first few weeks of his term my successor Ronald Reagan disavowed this policy and sent an emissary down to Argentina and to Chile and to Brazil -- to the military dictators -- and said, "The human rights policy of Carter is over," it was just a few months before he saw that the American people supported this human rights policy and that it was good for his administration. So after that he became a strong protector of human rights as well. ...

I didn't single out the Soviet Union for my human rights policy: I applied it in a much more difficult way to the regimes in South America, most of which were military dictatorships and very abusive. But the Soviet leaders did assume that my human rights policy was targeted against them, to embarrass them. I don't have any regrets about having done so. There's no doubt that this was a cause of disharmony between me and Brezhnev, between my Secretary of State and Gromyko and so forth. But it resulted almost immediately in a dramatic increase, for instance, in Jewish migration from the Soviet Union. The first year I was in office, only about 800 people came out of the Soviet Union, Jews. By the second year, 1979, 51,000 came out of the Soviet Union. And every one of the human rights heroes -- I'll use the word -- who have come out of the Soviet Union have said it was a turning point in their lives. And not only in the Soviet Union, but also in places like Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland [they] saw this human rights policy of mine as being a great boost to the present democracy and freedom that they enjoy. I don't want to exaggerate its effect, but I think it was a very sound policy, and it's basically been followed since then, and I think there's a much more intense awareness of human rights principles now than there would have been otherwise.

On U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations:

One of the greatest concerns that I had when I became president was the vast array of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union and a few other countries, and also the great proliferation of conventional weapons, non-nuclear weapons, particularly as a tremendous burden on the economies of developing or very poor countries. So I did a few things: I issued a directive, which is still in effect now, prohibiting the sale of any sophisticated weaponry to any country in this hemisphere, and that involves F-16s or F-15s or advanced aircraft. It's still in effect. The other thing I did was to try to put forward to the Soviet Union a much more dramatic reduction in the total quantity and effectiveness of the nuclear weapons in our arsenals, and to bring about a comprehensive test ban to eliminate the explosion of any nuclear devices, either underground or in the air. And as is well known, in March of the first year I was in office, I sent my Secretary of State, Cy Vance, to Moscow with what I thought was a very good proposal for dramatic cuts -- but as an alternative, just to continue an evolutionary step-by-step move from the Vladivostok agreement that my predecessor Gerald Ford had negotiated. The response in Moscow was not very favorable. ...

In retrospect, I can see that President Brezhnev was quite proud of the limited agreement that he had concluded in Vladivostok; and to have a new American president come in and say, "That is not good enough -- let's do much more, and do it quite rapidly," took him by surprise. ...

On the SALT II negotiations:

In 1979, we had a very productive summit between me and Brezhnev to negotiate the terms of the SALT II nuclear weapons agreement. He and I got along quite well. It was a harmonious meeting. I assuaged his concerns about my recent normalizing of diplomatic relations with China. That had been the cause of great consternation in Moscow, because they could envision, in their somewhat paranoid state, that the U.S. and China were secretly ganging up against the Soviet Union. This was not the case. I think I alleviated his concerns with my discussions with him. In addition to that, we put reasonable limits on the size of our nuclear arsenals, agreeing to dismantle or destroy certain weapons. ...

I [first] met Brezhnev ... in Vienna. He was ill. It was his [turn] to come to Washington, but he was constrained by his doctors not to fly at any great altitude because of his ear problem, so he could only fly short distances. So I agreed, very generously and easily, to go to Vienna instead. He had to be supported by someone as he walked around; he was obviously unbalanced in his walking -- he had an inner-ear problem. But he was very alert mentally, and he was very harmonious with me. We had long talks, privately, just the two of us with interpreters, about all kinds of issues. I mentioned our normalized relations with China; we had a good talk about human rights policy. He was proud of the number of Jews who were being permitted to leave the Soviet Union. We had reached agreement on the SALT II treaty; we had laid plans for future, more dramatic reductions, and so forth.

One of the surprising things that Brezhnev said when we were in our talks was when I proposed that we make these changes in nuclear weaponry; he said: "God will never forgive us if we don't succeed." And, you know, coming from the leader of an atheistic communist country, this surprised everyone. I think the most surprised person at the table was Gromyko, who looked up at the sky like this and [moved] his hands in a peculiar way, as though this was a shocking thing for Brezhnev to say. But I would repeat that Brezhnev and I were quite compatible. And I don't know how strong he was at home. Chernenko was with him and the military leaders were with him and Gromyko was with him. I felt that all of them were much more cautious or conservative than was Brezhnev. That was in June; and in December, right after Christmas, was when they invaded Afghanistan, that's when the good progress that we were making was fairly well made impossible for a while.

On the Iranian revolution:

When the shah was in Washington for a state visit in November of 1977, his secret police, Savak, had fired into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators and killed, I believe, several hundred of them. When the shah came to visit me, I took him aside into a small office that I had adjacent to the Oval Office, and I told him that I thought that he was making a serious mistake in violating the human rights of his own people through his secret police and in taking strong military action against peaceful demonstrators. I advised him strongly not to do this any further. He replied to me with some degree of scorn, and said that not only the United States but all the European countries were making a serious mistake in permitting demonstrations of our people against our government, that this was obviously a communist plot to overthrow democracy and freedom in the Western world, and we were ignorant as leaders in not stamping out this kind of demonstration at its earliest stage. And he said that in the nation of Iran there were just a tiny handful of people who opposed his regime, and these were all communists, inspired and controlled from outside, that there was no indigenous threat to his popularity. ...

It was a blow to the United States when the shah was deposed. He had been a close associate, an ally with, I think, if I'm not mistaken, seven presidents who preceded me. And we never dreamed that the shah was likely to be overthrown by his own people. But when he became embattled by attacks from his own people at home, and particularly from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was issuing broadcasts and tape recordings from France, we gave the shah every possible legitimate support. When he was finally overthrown and had to leave the country, we tried to find him a haven where he could reside, and he eventually wound up in Panama, without any one of us knowing that he had terminal cancer, which was revealed later on. During the interim period, after the shah was forced out of Iran into exile, during the first 10 or 11 months of 1979, we had a working relationship with his revolutionary replacement. We helped them find accommodations in Washington for their diplomatic staff and so forth, and they were paying bills to American contractors that had been incurred under the shah, and so forth. It was only in November, the first week in November, when the student militants took over the American Embassy, that the situation deteriorated. ...

I was taken aback by surprise when the militants overran our embassy and captured our hostages and then refused to release them. First of all, this is contrary to the basic Islamic faith. The Koran says you must protect foreign emissaries when they're in your country, so in a religious sense, this was a violation of the Islamic law. And I had been given full assurance before I let the shah come to New York for treatment, that American interests would be protected in Iran. The president and prime minister -- Bazargan and Yazdi were their names -- gave me this assurance. After the militants took the American Embassy and captured our hostages, the president and prime minister of Iran resigned in protest against this violation of their commitment. So I was obviously surprised when this occurred. ...

The first thing I did after the hostages were taken was to send the Ayatollah Khomeini a secret message: "If you put any of our hostages on trial, I will [interfere in] all commerce between Iran and the outside world. If you injure or kill a hostage, I will respond militarily." And after that, the Ayatollah never made any statements about injuring or killing a hostage or putting any on trial, so I felt that the hostages' lives were being protected. We tried many times, through all kinds of emissaries -- Germany, France, Syria, the PLO, Muhammad Ali -- to get the hostages released, unsuccessfully. And I think certainly, toward the end of my term, when we could have had the hostages released, that the Ayatollah deliberately delayed their release until five minutes after I was no longer president. The morning of the inauguration of President Reagan, when I went out of office, the hostages had been sitting in an airplane at the end of the runway into Iran for several hours, waiting to take off, and they waited until I was no longer president.

On the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:

I had no forewarning in Christmas week of 1979 that the Soviets were going to invade Afghanistan. ... And I could see that the Soviet movement into Afghanistan was not an end in itself. The intelligence that I had from various sources, including within the Soviet Union, was that the Soviets' long-term goal was to penetrate into access to warm-water oceans from Afghanistan, either through Iran or through Pakistan. I saw this as a direct threat to global stability and to the security of my own nation. I had several alternatives, one of which was military action, which I thought was out of the question half way around the world, with the powerful Soviet military adjacent to Afghanistan. So I exhausted almost all the other means that I had to put restraints on the Soviet Union. One of them was to issue a public statement that if the Soviets did invade either Pakistan or Iran out of Afghanistan, that I would consider this a personal threat to the security of the United States of America, and I would take whatever action I desired or considered appropriate to respond -- and I let it be known that this would not exclude a nuclear reaction. This was a very serious and sobering statement that I made, and I relayed this in more private terms to Brezhnev, and encouraged him to restrain the Soviet forces and urged him to withdraw them from Afghanistan. ...

I sent Brezhnev an inquiry. At first: "What are your intentions in invading Afghanistan? When will you withdraw?" That was my first question. He sent me word back that he had been invited into Afghanistan, to maintain stability there, by Afghan leaders. The fact is that as his forces went into Afghanistan, he carried in a puppet leader that he implanted in Kabul to administer the government that was to be controlled by the Soviet Union. I knew that his response was not honest. Then they continued to pour in airplane after airplane loaded with troops, and then to cross the border on land as well. This took several days. That's when I decided to issue my statement, that I've already described, that I considered any further advance by the Soviet Union beyond Afghanistan to be a direct threat to my country. ...

This was a major setback, and obviously the Soviets had not tried to extend their hegemony beyond their borders since they had gone into Hungary and Czechoslovakia a generation earlier, so it was quite a change in their basic policy. ... We had been making good progress, I think, in alleviating the tension of the Cold War. I had explained my reasons for normalizing relations with China; we had concluded a very productive negotiation in Vienna for the SALT II treaty; we were having a very good response from the Soviet Union in permitting Jews to emigrate from their country because of our human rights policy; and I really felt that we were on the track to an alleviation of tension. And then Brezhnev made what I considered to be a very serious mistake.