President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  Linowitz called President Carter immediately and told him to have someone start preparing a press statement explaining the failure. When Ham called, Linowitz told him to be sure the statement detailed how far the U.S. side had gone to achieve an agreement, “so the world will know that we acted fairly and reasonably.” The next morning, as Linowitz and Bunker arrived for the final session, the Panamanians started by joking he had been “sucking lemons again,” a favorite Torrijos line to taunt Linowitz about his gaunt, high-boned face, with its sunken cheeks. But Linowitz was in no mood for jocularity, and snapped back that the United States could not accept any of Panama’s changes. Suddenly, on a dime, they agreed to knock out all their modifications—that is what can happen in dictatorships. Linowitz immediately called the president to inform him of the amazing turn of events. Carter’s first words were: “Call President Ford and let him know that you want to see him to get him to sign on to the treaty.” Linowitz found this very smart, because it gave him the opportunity to get Ford on his side before opponents could get to him.23

  When they flew back in the afternoon, the president had his presidential helicopter, Marine One, bring them directly to the White House, where, with the cameras rolling, they told the American people and the world that Carter accepted the two treaties with great enthusiasm, marking a new point in relations with Panama and all Latin America. Linowitz marveled that Carter made his declaration even before he had been briefed on the details or seen the treaty drafts. They looked at each other in disbelief, and Linowitz saw Bunker raise his eyebrows, as if to say that Carter had better mean what he said.24

  But Carter had already committed himself irrevocably. Two days before, he had telephoned or wired all one hundred senators to tell them that the treaties were imminent. Afterward, he sent each senator a handwritten note.25 Moreover, he had endorsements from Ford and Kissinger in his pocket. Senate Majority Leader Byrd warned him that the treaty was headed for a defeat unless he talked with each senator individually, and Carter actually talked or met privately with every senator, except the leaders of the opposition.26 Bunker and Linowitz, wise in the ways of Washington, had also kept in touch with the leaders of both Senate and House foreign relations committees as the negotiations proceeded.

  The two treaties were signed in Washington on September 7, 1977, at the Pan American Union Building in Washington. Along with former president Ford and Lady Bird Johnson, whom Carter also had as his White House guests the night before, Kissinger and his predecessor as secretary of state under Nixon, William Rogers, were at the ceremony, too. In his remarks Carter framed the treaty in the broad terms of his foreign policy: “fairness, and not force, should lie at the heart of our dealings with the nations of the world.” And he pointedly let the Latin dignitaries who attended know that the 1903 treaty had been signed “in a world different from ours today [and which] has become an obstacle to better relations with Latin America,” and that the new treaties “can open a new era of understanding and comprehension, friendship, and mutual respect throughtout not only this hemisphere but throughout the world.”27

  THE BATTLE ON CAPITOL HILL

  As difficult and contentious as the negotiations were, they barely compared to the battles in the Senate and the House leading up to ratification of the treaties and passage of enabling legislation to finance the deal. It mattered little to diehard conservatives that even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Jones, warned that rejection was likely to touch off violence and guerrilla war in Panama—probably threatening the canal even more than a change to local control. In many ways the Panama Canal debate helped foster the New Right within the Republican Party, as Adam Clymer describes in his book Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch. As negotiations commenced in February, and even before there was a treaty to examine, the issue became fodder for Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy among the Republican Party right, with continuous assaults, including his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

  The Senate opponents met regularly in the office of Nevada’s Paul Laxalt to trade information on the vote count and get their marching orders from leaders of the conservative insurgents. Paul Weyrich, who coined the term “moral majority” and started the Heritage Foundation, and Richard Viguerie, a brilliant direct-mail fund-raiser with a long list of conservative clients, would become household names from the crucible of their Panama Canal fight.28 However, one powerful Hollywood symbol of conservative American values lay beyond their reach: John Wayne had a second home in Panama, was friendly with Torrijos, and endorsed the treaty. This helped dilute accusations that the Panamanian was a Communist.

  Because of the heavy quotient of partisan politics, Ham Jordan was brought to the front lines. He ran a war room to coordinate our campaign for ratification, and furthermore turned out to be our best primary contact with Torrijos, forming what Brzezinski called a very useful “buddy-buddy relationship,”29 perhaps because of their shared background as soldiers. We would need an open line to deal with him on the inevitable changes that the Senate would demand as a price for ratification, and Torrijos was not just a standard-issue Latin caudillo. He had hopes of developing Panama into a modern country and attracted the interest and support of European writers and intellectuals, most notably the novelist Graham Greene.

  Initially there was not even a bare majority in the Senate, let alone the two-thirds necessary to approve any treaty. So our initial lobbying effort was directed at persuading senators to remain neutral and open-minded. Congressional liasion head Frank Moore, Mondale, and Carter divided up the one hundred senators and simply asked them not to commit publicly against the treaty until the administration had the opportunity to defend it before the public and explain how it would protect U.S. interests. This was critical to eventual success, because the temptation of many was to blast the treaty at the first opportunity, on the assumption that it would be political suicide not to do so.

  In all our cabinet and senior staff meetings Carter instructed us to underscore that the treaty “opened a new chapter in hemispheric relations, as a gesture of equality”30—a very different concept from the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger, who had engineered a 1973 CIA-led military coup that killed Chile’s popularly elected leftist president, Salvador Allende, and replaced his government with a military junta that murdered its political opposition. But this new era opened Carter to conservative criticism. Sophisticated arguments for ratification paled before our opponents’ blunt attack—“Don’t Give Away Our Canal”—and polls showed 78 percent of Americans opposed.31

  The Carter political effort purred to perfection through Ham’s war room and slowly began to build support. The president talked with every one of the one hundred senators, and kept a private notebook in his study with every possible bit of information on where each stood and which of their supporters at home might be able to persuade them.32 They worked in coordination with the congressional leaders. Majority Leader Byrd appointed as Senate floor manager Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat and a calm, analytical former Rhodes scholar, who partnered with Idaho’s silver-tongued Democrat Frank Church to beat back arguments that Torrijos’s brother had ties to the drug trade. The allegations came from the hard right, led by Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Nevada’s Paul Laxalt, who was close to Reagan.

  * * *

  During treaty debates, it is not unusual for senators to obtain formal clarifications and understandings from the administration. But what happened with the Panama Canal Treaty was virtually unprecedented. For the first time in half a century, key senators forced the two countries to renegotiate and amend the treaty to clarify an essential question: What were the limits to American intervention in Panama? On that issue the fate of the treaties would hinge, and it would require words to dance on the head of a pin.33

  At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s first hearing, senators raised what seemed to be discrepancies arising from statements by Panama’s chief negotiator, Romulo Escobar. He had been tryin
g to show the Panamanian public that he was succeeding in limiting the right of the U.S. military to intervene, and the priority of American ships to use the canal.34 Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote the committee that Panama and the United States would have the right to defend the canal against any threat to the regime of neutrality established in the treaty, but not to intervene in the internal affairs of Panama. That was still not enough.

  Torrijos and Carter met in the White House on October 14, 1977, which led to a Joint Statement of Understanding that same day. The language showed extreme sensitivity on both sides to assuage Panamanian fears of open-ended U.S. intervention. It indicated that both Panama and the United States would assure that the canal remained open and secure for all nations. It then said: “The correct interpretation of this principle is that each country shall defend against any threat to the regime of neutrality [and] shall have the right to act against any aggression or threat directed against the Canal or against the peaceful transit of vessels through the Canal.” Again, to satisfy Panama, and by extension to help create a new order in Latin American relations, the statement emphasized: “This does not mean, nor shall it be interpreted as a right of intervention by the United States in the internal affairs of Panama. Any United States action will be directed at insuring that the Canal will remain open, secure, and accessible, and it shall never be directed against the territorial integrity or political independence of Panama.”35

  But even this was not enough to push the treaty over the top. Carter felt it would improve both prospects for ratification as well as the conditions of Panama’s citizens if he could nudge Torrijos toward expanding democracy and human rights. He correctly viewed Torrijos as a “military dictator” but also saw him as a leader who “genuinely cares for the poor—a sincere populist.”36 His views had some impact on Torrijos, who wrote Senator Byrd early in December 37 that Panama’s new Congress would have greatly expanded powers,38 and that it had repealed laws that allowed summary administrative trials for political opponents with long prison sentences and promised also to roll back a decree limiting press freedom. Byrd was pleased and inserted the letter in the Congressional Record. How much further Torrijos would have gone cannot be known, since he died in an airplane crash before his promises could be tested.

  One of the most effective ways to sway senators was to fly them to Panama for meetings with Torrijos, who made an almost uniformly positive impression on his visitors, despite his authoritarian nature. Almost half the senators made the trip, organized by Moore and his congressional lobbying team.39 All the while the president tried to keep Torrijos calm as senators demanded one change after another; Carter even sent him a handwritten note in Spanish.40 But no visit was more important than the one early in January 1978, by Republican Minority Leader Howard Baker and two colleagues. Baker told Torrijos that the treaties could not pass without changes—and at the same time offered him the prospect that they would pass with them. Torrijos assured Baker he would be flexible and accepted the formalization of his joint understanding with Carter by agreeing to include it in an amended treaty.41

  Of all the members of Congress with whom I dealt in the Carter White House, none exceeded in stature and in my respect and admiration Howard Baker. He had a homespun Tennessee quality about him, with an arresting smile and a sharp mind. He was short in stature but tall in political courage. During the Watergate hearings, he memorably became the first Republican to ask about Nixon: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Baker’s father had been a congressman, and his father-in-law, Everett Dirksen, an earlier Republican Senate leader, provided politically difficult and crucial support for President Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act. Baker would do the same for the Panama Canal Treaty, almost certainly closing the way for him to secure a Republican presidential nomination. The treaties simply could not have passed without the bipartisan support that he delivered, with the help of his credibility among Republicans.

  Slowly the ice began to crack. On January 13 Byrd, who had remained officially neutral to facilitate our lobbying, came out in favor of ratification with the modification of the Carter-Torrijos exchange.42 At the January 24 congressional leadership breakfast, Baker said the exchange between the leaders needed to be a formal amendment explicitly permitting U.S. intervention to maintain the neutrality of the canal.43 It would be added as an additional article so that Panama, which had already held a plebiscite, would not have to hold a second one.

  When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted out the treaties 14–1 on January 30, an essential step to get the treaties to the full Senate, we were still well shy of the 67 votes needed for ratification. New York Senator Pat Moynihan confided to me that by the end of February, only 10 senators genuinely disliked the treaty—but a total of 30 feared that they would lose their seats by supporting it.44 There were some other profiles in courage. The stately, white-haired Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, with the chiseled profile of an ideal senator and a deep Southern drawl, had announced for the treaties as early as the previous September, and wrote a newsletter to his conservative constituents telling them not only why he was supporting the treaty, but that the opponents were simply afraid.

  CARTER APPLIES FORCE

  As Carter pulled out all the stops, support increased in fits and starts. Carter told Vance to spend full time on the Hill, and he also asked David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as Mondale, Defense Secretary Brown, Energy Secretary Schlesinger, and Interior Secretary Andrus to devote as much time as possible to persuading senators.45 He asked Kissinger to help, and in a demonstration of bipartisanship sadly lacking today, enlisted former president Ford to call several undecided Republican senators. Carter even called the leadership of the Mormon Church to convert Nevada senator Howard Cannon to the plus side.46 In March, Carter called me with an update, and then asked if I knew “people who could help, like civil rights leaders, Jewish leaders, and others.”47 I contacted several prominent Jews with whom I had dealt on the anti-Arab-boycott bill, Soviet Jewry, and the Middle East peace talks, as well as civil rights figures.

  The president even had Rosalynn call the spouses of wavering senators. But calling in favors was not enough. Senators needed to know that a politically risky vote for the canal treaties would have at least a modicum of support back home. Senators were asked for the names of their key constituents, who were invited to White House briefings with their senators, the negotiators, the national security team, and always a general with his stars glittering. Moore and his congressional liaison team organized these briefings state by state, so we had a Georgia day, an Arkansas day, and so forth. Carter would arrive as cleanup hitter and ask each one to go back home and argue for the treaties.48

  As important as the merits of the matter might be, senators tried to use the close vote to extract something for their states. It is here that presidents have the advantage through patronage and the government’s spending. As Jesse Helms moaned: “I don’t want to be crass, but our side can’t appoint judges. Our side can’t promise a senator he won’t have an opponent in the primary.” The press jumped on the story of buying votes with federal largesse on everything from routes for Amtrak to new weather stations. There were things we could and would not do. Senator Abourezk wanted us to switch to his side and drop our support for natural-gas deregulation. I got involved with the Agriculture Department when Spark Matsunaga, a Hawaii Democrat, wanted changes in sugar legislation to help his state, and for us to support a farm bill backed by the president’s Georgia friend, Senator Herman Talmadge, which we had opposed for budget reasons. We saw the light of day on both, and got their votes. The Wall Street Journal editorial page accused us of playing a government version of the popular television program of the time, Let’s Make a Deal.49

  Frankly I reveled in the criticism, and wished we had done more of this on other legislation, although some demands took on almost comical dimensions. Florida Democrat
Richard Stone, for example, wanted to insert a reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine.50 No president in modern times disliked this kind of horse-trading more than Jimmy Carter, yet here he realized that a defeat of his first major foreign-policy venture would be so serious, and the consequences of a loss so grave for America’s prestige, that he had to swallow his distaste.

  * * *

  Carter hated almost all aspects of the politics of his job, especially the stroking of legislators for key votes: “We made a tremendous effort to woo the Congress. Many nights when I was tired and would like to have relaxed, we had a supper for maybe a hundred members of the House, and I would spend two hours in the East Room. describing either domestic or foreign and defense policy. In a way I enjoyed these things, but after you do it time after time after time, it gets tiresome. We had them over in groups ad nauseam. I mean it was horrible [emphasis added]. Night after night going through the same basic questions when I was convinced the House members knew they ought to support the Panama Canal legislation. But it was politically damaging for them to do it, and they were tortured. Well, these kinds of efforts that I made, some pleasant, some unpleasant, I think eventually paid dividends, and that was part of being a political leader. But it was more tedious work than being a great communicator. I don’t claim to be a great communicator.”51

  The two most difficult senators were the California Republican S. I. Hayakawa and Arizona Democrat Dennis DeConcini, for vastly different reasons. Hayakawa was a brilliant though somewhat flaky professor of linguistics at San Francisco State College who in 1968 had come to fame when, as acting president, he used the police to break up a black student demonstration. A conservative free spirit, during his Senate campaign he famously quipped, in opposing Panamanian control, that the United States “stole it fair and square.”