US president Jimmy Carter insisted in his inaugural address that “we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere.” What is more, he pledged that US commitment to human rights “must be absolute” (quoted on p. 2). Translating lofty campaign proposals into policy was a different matter, of course, and political observers and scholars have debated ever since about the nature, scope, effectiveness, and legacy of Carter's human rights policy. William Michael Schmidli comes down on the side of those who argue that although this commitment was certainly not absolute and, indeed, weakened markedly during the second half of the Carter presidency, it nevertheless brought about significant and lasting change in the larger process of institutionalizing human rights in US foreign policy.Schmidli's account is not limited to the traditional confines of diplomatic history. In order to show how the new approach to human rights came about, he canvasses the rise of the human rights movement in the United States and how it dovetailed with the work of sympathetic allies in the US Congress, who over the years and with varying success had fought to restrict military assistance to authoritarian client states. Carter's incorporation of human rights language into his electoral campaign was certainly more than a reflection of his moral convictions. It was also and not least a “savvy recognition of the national mood in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era” (p. 89). Nonetheless, for human rights advocates, the incoming Carter administration provided unprecedented access to the higher echelons of government.Carter's choice of Patricia Derian as his lead human rights official, moreover, signaled a break with the past. A veteran civil rights activist, Derian was not wedded to diplomatic niceties. She did not shy away from publicly shaming foreign heads of state for abusing their citizens. Human rights idealism, however, had to contend with countervailing forces. The latter, spearheaded by organized business interests and their political allies on Capitol Hill, soon regained momentum amid renewed Cold War tensions and increasing concerns over a weakening economy.From the outset, Derian faced stiff bureaucratic resistance from within the State Department and elsewhere. As a means to maintain flexibility in its relations with authoritarian client states, moreover, the Carter government chose to apply a case-by-case approach when dealing with applications for security assistance and loans rather than implement a general clampdown on a given regime. This was an operational mode that accentuated bureaucratic infighting and thus compromised the efficacy of its human rights policies.Schmidli chose to focus on Argentina as the country that for Derian came to be the “defining test case” (p. 85). No doubt, for Argentina's military government (1976–1983), the incoming Carter administration constituted a real and unwelcome change. In the past, the military had felt encouraged by US governments to apply ruthless force against leftist subversion. And since they saw themselves as at the helm of a third world war to save Western civilization, they reacted with outrage when pilloried on human rights grounds by a Western government.Washington's leverage over Argentina, however, was tenuous. Bent on completing their campaign of terror, the Argentine military seemed willing to sacrifice close relations with the United States. And notwithstanding the military government's professed crusade against international communism, they took advantage of Carter's grain embargo on the Soviet Union by expanding Argentine sales. They thereby strengthened the hand of those factions within the Carter administration that insisted on the need to normalize relations with Argentina.Nevertheless, Schmidli confirms, Derian's strenuous efforts to clamp down on the Argentine junta by tightening existing controls over US security assistance and by torpedoing multilateral loans met with some success. More specifically, the blocking of large-scale Export-Import Bank credits in the notorious Allis-Chalmers deal paved the way for the junta's acceptance of a high-profile visit by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). As the military junta started to clean up its act for the IACHR's upcoming visit in September 1979, human rights violations declined dramatically (p. 192). The IACHR's visit thus constituted a “historic victory” for Carter's human rights policies (p. 155).Readers familiar with previous studies by political scientist Kathryn Sikkink and others will recognize that the overall picture emanating from this book is not entirely new. However, Schmidli's thorough and nuanced use of the documentary evidence, which includes recently declassified official papers and personal interviews, not only adds revealing new details but also makes a strong case for the importance of a range of midlevel actors like F. Allen “Tex” Harris at the Buenos Aires embassy who, by the sheer tenacity of their convictions, affected the course of events. By skillfully interweaving such personal close-ups at the micro levels of the policymaking process, Schmidli produced an engaging as well as highly readable account of the rise and inner workings of human rights policies during the Carter administration.