Upon signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the United States committed itself to advancing the cause of human rights on the international stage. Considering these obligations, each U.S. president during the Cold War made foreign policy decisions that often ran afoul of many of these same considerations. Why were such decisions made? Did the fight against global communism and the Soviet Union lead U.S. decision-makers to ignore other pressing human rights concerns, including mass violence and genocide? Were security considerations and the pursuit of allies in the third-world given greater importance in the eyes of policymakers? This course explores these questions and many more by examining the human rights record of each U.S. president from 1946 to 1991 and studying the defining events that shaped each president's human rights record.