President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  All the other central figures in the Camp David triumph paid a heavy price. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 devastated Begin’s political career, after he had made such difficult concessions for peace, sending him into self-imposed retirement and almost total seclusion, and bringing an even harder-line successor, Yitzhak Shamir. Four Israeli prime ministers tried to negotiate with the Palestinians by offering various degrees of withdrawal, and none succeeded. Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981, while reviewing a military parade when a group of uniformed men broke ranks and shot him to death under a fatwa issued by an Egyptian cleric later convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. And Carter lost reelection in a landslide, in the process garnering only 40 percent of the Jewish vote, the lowest percentage of any Democratic candidate in modern times. Yet none of the three statesmen who courageously risked so much to change history at Camp David would say their work was of no value; the problem was that so much was left undone after so much effort.

  Until his death in 2015, the tough-minded Meir Rosenne telephoned Carter—no matter where either of them happened to be—every year on the March 26 anniversary of the treaty to thank him for the many years of peace between two former enemies.61 True, it is commonly understood in both countries as a “cold peace”—mainly the absence of war—with little human or commercial traffic from either side but with security guarantees maintained by both. In recent years, with the common threat of Hamas and Iranian-backed terrorism, Egypt and Israel share intelligence and quietly coordinate military actions, although there is little commerical activity, tourism, or public political interaction.

  But the peace is a testimony to Carter’s willingness to defy conventional wisdom; to take enormous risks for his presidency; and to his negotiating skill and prowess in combining a broad vision with a detailed knowledge of the history, the parties, the personalities, and the legal nuances, all necessary to unlock the promise of peace between two bitter enemies. Jimmy Carter’s achievement at Camp David will be indelibly linked with the history of the Middle East and the security of Israel. How many other presidents who have served four or even eight years have come close to matching this singular triumph?

  PART VI

  PEACE IN THE REST OF THE WORLD

  21

  THE PANAMA CANAL AND LATIN AMERICA

  Through most of the twentieth century, the Panama Canal had an almost mystical hold over Americans. This miracle of U.S. engineering demonstrated the nation’s conquest of nature and its dominance of our own hemisphere, by linking the two oceans that protected it from the ills of the Old World of Europe and threats from Asia. But to the Latin half of our hemisphere, the canal was a painful symbol of “Yanqui imperialism” that threatened their own independence and made them into second-class peoples, whose rights were dispensed at the will of Washington, D.C. Against all the political odds of American national pride, Jimmy Carter changed that for the better. He was not the first president to try, but he was the first to succeed, and once again he paid a political price for doing “the right thing.”

  The canal signaled America’s rise as a world power and was a great legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, the dashing young president who embodied its boldness. By linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, it provided a direct new route for international trade and military transport, cutting almost eight thousand miles off the sea journey between California and New York, and significantly shortening the journey from Europe to the West Coast of the Americas. Shipping through the canal transformed international trade overnight. The canal significantly reduced the costs and time of transportation and positioned the United States as a major player in the international trade, military, and political arenas.

  For the Panamanians, the treaty they signed with the United States was both an opportunity and a humiliation. In 1903, only months after declaring independence from neighboring Colombia (with American support, delivered after Colombia rejected a canal treaty), Panama literally signed away its rights, bisecting the new country and granting the United States exclusive and permanent control of a fifty-mile strip across the isthmus. While the treaty did not grant America formal sovereignty, Panama had no access to the new Panama Canal Zone and no right to operate the canal when it opened in 1917; it was built and run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Panamanians entered as day laborers.

  The Panamanians were unhappy with the arrangement from the start, but lived with it. In 1936, they persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to modify a treaty provision giving the United States the unilateral right to intervene in Panama’s internal affairs to protect the canal. In 1964 students rioted against American control and demanded talks on a new treaty, but President Johnson backed away from the domestic political blowback. President Nixon resumed negotiations, but they were mainly for show, and under President Ford, Henry Kissinger made progress with Panama, negotiating a set of principles. But that initiative withered under the sharp attacks from the Republican right, led by Ford’s 1976 primary election challenger, Ronald Reagan. On the stump he scored repeatedly with conservative crowds by holding up a Panama hat and declaring in an aggrieved baritone, “You see this hat? It’s mine. I bought it, I paid for it, and I’m gonna keep it. And that’s why we oughta keep the Panama Canal.” As Ford’s campaign manager James Baker ruefully recalled, “Man, the room would erupt.”1

  * * *

  When I began working on policy with Carter for his campaign, we both knew the canal was a hot political issue, particularly with his Southern political base that never questioned it was anything but part of the United States. Carter mirrored their certainty and turned Ford’s good-faith negotiations against him, accusing his opponent of being prepared to cave on eventual sovereignty, while outflanking him from the right. In the presidential debate Carter declared he was ready to negotiate with Panama on physical improvements, tolls, and other practical matters, but “I would not relinquish practical control of the Panama Canal Zone any time in the foreseeable future,” repeating that mantra throughout his campaign.2 So, it came as a surprise to me after he won the election that Carter vaulted one of the most contentious, emotional foreign-policy issues of the era to the top of his priority list. It turned out to be a politically bruising two-year quest to negotiate a new treaty transferring the canal to Panama and struggling for ratification by the constitutional requirement of two-thirds of the Senate. In fact there were several sound reasons for Carter’s decision.

  In December 1976, Panama persuaded more than half a dozen presidents of other Latin American countries to sign a letter to President-elect Carter emphasizing the need for a new Panama Canal Treaty to improve inter-American relations. Carter was impressed that the Latin countries would put Panama’s most pressing issue before their own, a diplomatic rarity anywhere.

  Another factor was the threat of violence in the Canal Zone. Before the election there had been a series of nonlethal bombings, which the CIA suggested might be provocations by the Panamanian National Guard. The agency also reported that Panamanians were being trained to commit acts of terrorism.3

  During the transition Carter also read a report by the Commission on United States–Latin American Relations chaired by Sol Linowitz, former CEO of Xerox. It made two major recommendations to improve relations with Latin America: first to transfer control of the canal to Panama in a new treaty, and then to stress the importance of human rights and democracy in the Americas. The commission’s staff director was Robert Pastor, and after the election, he was summoned by Brzezinski to brief Carter about Latin America and the canal for ten minutes. For a young graduate student just finishing his Harvard Ph.D., this was the chance of a lifetime, and Pastor stayed up most of the night preparing.4 Carter repeated his campaign mantra of negotiating a new treaty without giving away “effective control” and mentioned sharing sovereignty with Panama. But Pastor knew that Panama had never formally relinquished sovereignty and underscored that without a new treaty early in the new adm
inistration, violence was inevitable.

  Support for this came from no less than Henry Kissinger, who briefed Carter on a range of foreign-policy issues and added that Mexico was even talking about sending troops to Panama’s defense if a conflict arose.5 President Ford put the Panama Canal negotiations ahead of even the Middle East and the Soviet Union in his postelection meeting with Carter.6 An additional factor was the Cold War. The Soviets already had a foothold in the Western Hemisphere in Cuba and were trying to penetrate other Latin American countries.

  The way Carter reacted speaks volumes about how he approached his presidency. If there was a problem, he wanted to tackle it without considering the political consequences or balancing it against other priorities. As he reflected years later: “I have to say I could have put it off to a second term, that’s what Johnson had done; that’s what Nixon had done: that’s what Ford had done, and got away with it. But I didn’t think it was right to continue with it.”7 Even when Rosalynn advised him to wait until a second term, he replied, “Suppose there is no second term?”8 It was not that he was ignorant of the politics of decisions like Panama, but his overriding, guiding principle of presidential governance was to do things that needed to be done, in the certain belief that if he did the “right thing,” he would ultimately be rewarded by the American people with another term.9 But as he later admitted, he underestimated the difficulty of applying this principle to the task in Panama.10 His insistence on immediately tackling the tough challenges, regardless of political costs and competing priorites, was at once his strength and weakness.

  “FAIRNESS, AND NOT FORCE”

  Carter, like Pastor and Linowitz, saw a Panama Canal Treaty as the key to opening a new chapter in U.S.–Latin American relations, and crucial to winning friends abroad during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He also felt correctly that the original treaty was unfair to Panama and had been foisted upon it. Vance, the incoming secretary of state, also read the Linowitz commission report and, in Pastor’s words, felt that “Panama’s patience machine had run out of gas.”11 Shortly before Carter’s inauguration, I accompanied him to a foreign-policy briefing for members of Congress at the Smithsonian “Castle” building on the National Mall. He indicated he wanted to resume negotiations with Panama promptly and hoped for a treaty by June; it was clear he had the bit in his teeth and, in his tenacious style, would not let go.12 This was accelerated by Brzezinski’s decision to hire Pastor as his director for Latin America and instruct him to prepare a memorandum. Drawing heavily on the State Department’s expertise, it was highly skeptical that a new treaty could easily be negotiated, let alone ratified by a hostile Senate.

  Just before the November election, forty-eight senators had sponsored a resolution declaring that they would never support “giving away the Canal.” With Carter in office, Pastor learned that Senator Strom Thurmond, the archconservative South Carolina Republican, was circulating another resolution against even starting negotiations with Panama, and had already obtained the signatures of thirty-four senators. At the request of the White House, the Senate Democratic Whip, California’s Alan Cranston, made sure it never came to the floor.13

  With the battle lines drawn, Vance asked Sol Linowitz to become the lead negotiator and serve for six months; Linowitz insisted that Ellsworth Bunker resume the position he had held as Ford’s occasional negotiator and serve with him in bipartisan fashion. He also called me for assurance that Carter was seriously ready to take the intense political heat. I told him that not only was Carter devoted to improving relations with Panama and Latin America, but that he spoke Spanish and read a passage in the Bible in Spanish each night with his wife.14

  Bunker and Linowitz were the proverbial odd couple: Bunker the tall, elegant, Brahmin model of a diplomat; Linowitz, a shrewd and avuncular Jewish American businessman-turned-diplomat, with an Old World dash of schmaltz. They worked together effectively, but it was Linowitz who discovered the diplomatic keys to success.

  When negotiations began in the month following Carter’s inauguration, Linowitz never thought an agreement was likely, and certainly not within his six-month assignment. The biggest hurdle would be persuading the Panamanians to extend the most hated aspect of the 1903 treaty, which they had continued to reject during talks with three American administrations over more than a decade: ceding in perpetuity the right to the United States to intervene in Panama if Washington believed the canal’s security or neutrality were threatened. Linowitz knew from his congressional consultations that this right of intervention was essential for Senate ratification of any treaty giving Panama operational control of the canal. Session after session, the Panamanian negotiators repeated their negative mantra. Then Linowitz had what he described to me as a “brainstorm.” It was clear that the United States would stop operating the canal in the future but would never give up the authority to act if it was threatened. So, he thought, Why not two treaties?

  The first treaty would deal with security, maintaining the canal’s permanent neutrality, and giving both Panama and the United States the right to defend it. As Linowitz pointed out, without an agreement on security, any agreement on when and how to turn over control to Panama would be irrelevant. The second treaty would end U.S. operational control on December 31, 1999, and deal with transitional and economic details. But the overriding issue during the tense negotiations with Panama and the bitter Senate and House debates that followed was this: Under what circumstances and where could the United States intervene to protect the canal’s neutrality and continued operation? Panama needed a check on the possibility of the American military unilaterally meddling in Panamanian politics under cover of quelling any local unrest that might threaten the canal.15 Carter sympathized but knew he could never gain congressional approval without a firm guarantee that U.S. ships would have access and the right to defend the canal against external threats.16

  As was his habit, Carter closely followed the negotiations, writing notes in the margins of Linowitz’s reports of progress. During those intense months of negotiation, Linowitz developed keen insight into Carter’s method of governing. The president had what Linowitz called “an insatiable curiosity about facts; he wanted to know everything about everything, and it was quite clear that he never had enough. If you told him one fact, he’d get another.” He would ask Linowitz about such things as the size of some area in the Zone or the shipping volume in the previous year. Linowitz confessed that he often had to lie that he did not know, because if he gave him the answer, Carter would follow up by asking him to break down the amount of traffic in each direction. So he would plead ignorance. And yet Linowitz said that Carter did not micromanage the negotiations themselves. The president instructed him to “find the best deal you can come up with”; “use your judgment”; and then “let me know when you think you’ve got the best deal you can make.”17

  As the negotiations evolved, the Panamanians reluctantly agreed that under the neutrality treaty, the U.S. could defend the canal militarily but only against external threats, while Panama would protect the canal from dangers arising within its own country.18 They also agreed that American troops would be stationed in the Canal Zone until the year 2000, but that the U.S. Army would cede operational control to a new Panama Canal Commission, with four American and three Panamanian directors, and that a Panamanian would take charge in 2000.

  Linowitz called me on July 119 to give me the exciting news that he had made progress beyond his hopes, and that only the financial arrangements remained to be settled. He told me for the first time that Panama had agreed to his idea of two treaties, with the first according the United States the right in perpetuity to preserve the neutrality of the canal—what he called “an invitation to unilateral intervention … a great concession by Panama.” The second would deal with the economic arrangements, but he warned that they would not approve the treaties without additional U.S government funds, which Carter had to decide. He asked me to arrange a meeting with the president, which I
did, but not before giving Sol, in our common vernacular, a hearty Mazel Tov.

  But his optimism was premature. Toward the end of the month Linowitz called me to say he could conclude a treaty within three weeks, but only if the president sent a personal letter to the mercurial, populist Panamanian dictator, Omar Torrijos, rejecting Panama’s absurd demand for a $1 billion lump sum and then $300 million a year, without regard to the canal tolls Panama would collect.20 I called the president, and it was done thorough a July 29 letter, rejecting the payoff and supporting the agreement Linowitz had reached.21

  But Panama began backing away from its concessions and reasserting its opposition to an American right to protect the canal “in perpetuity” even after Panama assumed operational control. Now a linguistic distinction without a difference cut the Gordian knot. As Linowitz repeated the need for a perpetual right of protection, his Panamanian translator used the Spanish word permanente. Linowitz said yes, and the Panamanians confirmed that it would be “not perpetual” but permanente. That quickly wrapped up the security treaty, or so they thought.

  When Linowitz and Bunker arrived back in Panama on August 9, the Panamanians sent their final revisions, and the mood had changed. Linowitz said: “It’s the most sickening, disheartening thing. They had backed off everything they had committed to in the past two months.” He was in a box. His six-month commission ended the next day, his air force plane was ready to take the negotiators back to Washington with what he assumed would be an agreed treaty, and instead Panama had suddenly reneged.22