My NPEC project required me to review Ambassador Goldberg and Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s testimony to the Senate from when that august body was deliberating whether to ratify the Outer Space Treaty. Ambassador Goldberg was a U.S. Supreme Court justice before President Johnson asked him to become ambassador to the UN, where he negotiated the Outer Space Treaty for the United States.
One nugget that was unrelated to my task, but that caught my attention nonetheless, was former Justice Goldberg’s testimony about someone’s request for a treaty provision to control so-called “propaganda,” what is often characterized nowadays as “misinformation.”
Ambassador Goldberg used the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment defensively to stop an “anti-propaganda” provision:
Mr GOLDBERG. Just let me put this. Let me put this specifically. We had a provision offered that said that no communications satellite should issue any type of propaganda which was deemed inimical to the interests of any other country.
Now, we could not agree with that under our Constitution. We have the first amendment, people have the right to express themselves.
Congress has authorized—and that I had to deal with what Congress has authorized—I was not writing on a clean slate, we have a Communications Satellite Act. I was not agreeing and could not as a negotiator agree on a provision like that, and I had to say we must lay that aside and we must consider what to do about that, and that was one of the reasons we set aside this particular subject for further exploration. I could not by this treaty set aside an act of Congress or indeed set aside the Constitution of the United States.
It’s heartening to see a former Supreme Court justice applying the U.S. Constitution to communications in outer space.