Out of the blue Hayakawa contacted Mondale to say that he might be willing to support the treaty if he could talk regularly with the president and give him foreign-policy advice. Mondale asked him how often, and Hayakawa replied, maybe every two weeks. Carter was alerted, and even now it is hard not to laugh at the president’s instant response when Mondale put him on the phone line: “Oh, Senator, I wouldn’t want to set it every two weeks. I might want to see you even more often!” He also discussed Hayakawa’s best-selling book, Language in Action, and praised its brilliance, although he never got beyond skimming the introduction, if that. But stroking this massive ego was what mattered; after securing his vote, Carter never had to meet with Hayakawa after all.52
DeConcini presented real problems and became Jimmy Carter’s least favorite senator—and that is saying something. Thin and wiry, with a painful smile signaling perpetual worry about reelection, he was serving his first term representing an intensely conservative state. There was nothing subtle about Dennis DeConcini. Arizona was a major copper producer and the government stockpiled copper for its strategic reserve. He insisted that the government prop up the declining price of the metal by buying more, which it did for an additional $250 million. But even this was not enough, or the most serious problem. Senators were introducing amendments galore, some designed to be so unpalatable to Panama that they would kill the treaty, others to show they had toughened it up. DeConcini, insisting on making explicit what had been implicit about the use of American force, added insult to injury by going to the Senate floor and declaring that his amendment was essential to deal not only with foreign attacks but internal upheavals that might also affect the operation of the canal, and to do so “in Panama,” not just the Canal Zone.
The joint Carter-Torrijos statement was intentionally ambiguous on the nature of the threat that could occasion U.S. intervention, but in proscribing it “in the internal affairs of Panama,” both saw clear limits to U.S. action. As Linowitz bemoaned to me, DeConcini “rubbed their noses in it.”53 The president tried in vain to persuade DeConcini to delete the words “in Panama,” but he refused.54 Carter felt he had no choice because DeConcini was bringing along two more senators with him.55 Not surprisingly this touched the rawest of nerves in Panama: For them the whole point of the treaty was ending the right of the United States to intervene. Carter wanted to consign to history once and for all the arrogant U.S. attitude that made Panama and many other Latin American countries feel that in Washington’s eyes they were banana republics. With DeConcini’s amendment, Torrijos finally had enough. He was going to renounce the treaty.
The president called Torrijos, who warned him that there would be riots. Carter urged him to make no public statements until he sent Ham to Panama. Ham saved the day by reassuring him, with the backing of both Byrd and Baker, that the impact of the DeConcini amendment would be limited in two ways: It would be added only to the Senate resolution, not the treaty itself, and would be overridden in the second treaty on the operation of the canal by stipulating precisely the opposite of what DeConcini was proposing. Even that did not quiet the senator, who was being threatened by a recall movement in Arizona, and tried to insert even tougher language. Byrd then brought together Sarbanes, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher, and William Rogers, who was representing Panama as its lawyer.
After hours of bargaining they rewrote the second treaty, indicating that any U.S. action “should be only for assuring that the Canal remains open, secure and accessible, and shall not have as its purpose or be interpreted as a right of intervention in the internal affairs of the Republic of Panama or interference with its political independence or sovereign integrity.” This was the exact language in the Carter-Torrijos statement, but omitted DeConcini’s phrase “use of military force in Panama.” That satisfied Torrijos, but not DeConcini.
Byrd dramatically pulled him aside on the Senate floor and made it clear that DeConcini’s status in the Senate depended upon him acting responsibly: “It has to be like this, Dennis, I will not accept any changes.” Byrd showed his experience as majority leader: He threw the freshman senator a bone and allowed him to announce the compromise language as his amendment, even though he had played no part in drafting it.56 Still, no one wanted to cast the decisive sixty-seventh vote, so Byrd and Baker agreed to vote last. But we were still short. Russell Long shouted, “Vote, vote, vote!” But Byrd and Baker were still waiting for Abourezk. He was pressured into a phone booth just off the Senate floor by two fellow liberal Democrats, Ted Kennedy and John Culver, who appealed to him to take a broader view and then literally put the heat on him: They threatened to light a newspaper under the phone booth if he did not come to the Senate floor to support the treaty.57
As the roll call proceeded in alphabetical order, the tension was so great it could be cut with a knife; Abourezk voted yes. The Senate unanimously adopted what was known as the “DeConcini amendment” and then approved the second treaty several weeks later, after an equally difficult struggle, by the same one-vote margin provided by Baker and Byrd. The debate had lasted two and one-half months, longer than for any treaty except the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, which suffered a historic defeat in the Senate. The White House knew that if the Panama treaty had been defeated, the Panamanian national guard was poised to attack. The president confided to the Democratic leadership breakfast on April 18 that if the treaties were not approved, “we would have had 20,000 Panamanians storming the canal.”58
Still the legislative battle was not over. The House had to enact implementing legislation on the financial costs, and as they began hearings there were rumors, soon substantiated, that Torrijos was supplying arms to Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinistas in their fight to unseat the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. This fed allegations that Torrijos was a closet Communist, whose word could not be trusted. The administration asked him to stop because it was unnerving Congress, but Torrijos refused. He hoped to provide the coup de grâce to the Somoza dynasty. The vote in the House was close, 224–202, and came only after several crippling amendments had been defeated by three-vote margins. The bill went back to the Senate, where it finally passed two years after the treaties were signed.
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But was all this worth the expenditure of huge amounts of political capital? It diverted energy and attention from other priorities. Seven senators lost their seats in the midterm elections, and another eleven were defeated in 1980.59 All were treaty supporters, and this was a factor in the erosion of support from Carter’s conservative Southern base. Byrd recognized at a congressional breakfast that a defeat “would be a big boost to the New Right.”60 What he did not say was that even their passage would become a victory for them, as well. The treaties became a rallying cry for the new conservative movement that Reagan captured. And Panama’s ties to the Sandinistas became ammunition for the small but vociferous neoconservative movement of Democrats that moved sharply right, some into the Republican Party, and made Commentary magazine their house organ, with Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Georgetown University professor, as their intellectual leader.61 Her essay after the final passage of the Panama Canal Treaties, “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” argued that Nicaragua was a prime example of undermining pro-American, anti-Communist dictators in favor of leftist movements like the Sandinistas. This helped propel her onto the platform where, as Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, she continued to defend repressive “authoritarian” regimes such as those in Argentina and Chile, as preferable to “totalitarian” Communist governments.62
Such rhetoric was useful in cementing the Republicans’ conservative base, but the treaties have stood the test of time, and Reagan never tried to amend them in any way. The Panamanians operated the canal with efficiency and transparency and constructed an expansion to accommodate larger container ships that opened in 2016. Carter correctly saw the treaties as a vehicle to open a new day in U.S.–Latin American relations, ridding Washington of its label by many in the reg
ion as a colonialist power, and helping the nations of Latin America shed their dictatorships. He personally ushered it in when he invited every Latin American head of state except for Fidel Castro to attend the elaborate signing ceremony for the treaties—not in the White House but at the Pan American Union Building of the Organization of American States. Organized by our talented U.S. ambassador to the OAS, former senator Gale McGee, the signing was attended by eighteen heads of state, one vice president, and three foreign ministers.63
In order to bring them to Washington to witness the signing of a treaty with a third country, the administration had to promise each leader that he would meet personally with the president, a rare occasion for most. During those meetings, which extended over a week, Carter’s new Latin American policy was set in motion, as he discussed the concerns of each country and how the United States could help them.64
HUMAN RIGHTS AND A NEW ERA IN RELATIONS WITH LATIN AMERICA
But leveraging the Panama treaties into a broader policy based on mutual respect was not a task that could be accomplished through a series of private meetings mainly with dictators, or even by the treaties alone. The most obvious barrier to a new relationship was that the president’s policy in Latin America was based upon human rights in a region of autocrats, and, ironically, another was a collision with his liberal Democratic allies in Congress, who pressed principles of human rights beyond the delicate balance the president needed to maintain with American security interests.
Jimmy Carter did not make human rights a key foreign-policy goal at the start of his presidential campaign. When we first fleshed out his positions on national and international issues in the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, neither he nor I raised the issue. When he announced his candidacy at the end of 1974, his speech was almost entirely devoted to domestic issues, with an anti-Watergate, reformist twist. There was little on foreign and national security policy, and what there was was focused on efficiency in military spending, the dangers of nuclear proliferation, mutual arms reduction, an obligatory sentence on preserving Israel’s integrity (for whose inclusion I fought) and that was it—nothing on human rights. But as the campaign unfurled, we sought to differentiate Carter from the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger policy of realpolitik, which was not based on morality, but on asserting America’s national interests and staying out of the domestic affairs of other countries.
Carter’s policy began to evolve during the campaign, and it could only have been expected that human rights would become entangled in politics. Like so many American ideals, it rested partly on a political pillar, and I take some credit for helping to cement it there. Carter first pressed the issue in a campaign speech to the Foreign Policy Association in June 1976, just after the Democratic Party platform carried a ringing declaration of human rights. Then in a September campaign speech to B’nai B’rith that I helped draft, he made human rights a central theme for the first time. Patrick Anderson, our chief campaign speechwriter, attributed it to my background as a “devout Jew.”65 But my motives were somewhat less high-minded.
As a principal drafter of the platform, I had made sure that we focused on human rights because it was one of the few foreign-policy issues that united the party’s factions—the hard-line anti-Communists led by Scoop Jackson, who wanted it applied to the Soviet Union, and the liberal Democratic followers of George McGovern, who had lost the presidency in the catastrophic 1972 election, and targeted right-wing military regimes. The issue also drew support from the centrist New Yorker Pat Moynihan, who had served in both the Kennedy and Nixon administrations, and Sam Brown, the activist opponent of the Vietnam War.66 The policy finally came into full voice in Carter’s inaugural address: “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.”67 As president, he applied human rights to both the Soviets and the right-wing autocrats in Latin America.
But Carter did not create a human rights policy on a clean slate. Even before he took office, the new liberal Democratic congressional majority placed human rights on the foreign-policy agenda through initiatives aimed at repressive regimes in Latin America. In 1974 Congress directed the executive branch for the first time to take a country’s human rights into account in extending U.S. foreign aid. The next year Congress banned military sales, credits, and training to the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile. In 1976 Congress required the State Department to publish an annual human rights review of countries receiving U.S. assistance. The first annual report (it is still issued today) appeared during the first year of the Carter administration.
The president took human rights to a much higher level, and embedded it in his foreign policy. In his first year in office he appointed Patricia “Patt” Derian, a trailblazing civil rights champion from Mississippi, as the first assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, and the State Department established the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. During his first year the president was also instructed by Congress to end all military assistance to Argentina if its human rights record did not improve; he supported the goal but opposed the congressional mandate, because it limited his flexibility in dealing with the brutal generals running the country.
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Until Carter entered the White House, Latin American regimes could obtain the blessing of U.S. administrations by arguing that their repressive policies were necessary to deal with violent, pro-Communist rebels who threatened to provide an opening for the Soviet Union in our own hemisphere. And there were facts to back up their concerns. Inspired by the Castro revolution in Cuba, radical left-wing guerrilla groups had spread throughout the continent. In the spring of 1976, Kissinger met with leaders of Argentina and Chile to warn them of impending change if Carter won the election, and to finish what they were doing quickly.
Change arrived the following year in Carter’s human rights speech to the UN General Assembly on March 17 of his first year in office, which made clear that being anti-Communist did not exempt dictators from criticism for their repressive regimes.
To underline his push for human rights, and begin a new era in Western Hemisphere relations, the president also sent his wife on one of the most unorthodox missions in the history of American diplomacy, a grueling seven-country tour of the region carrying the message that the United States no longer would do business as usual with military dictatorships. The first lady’s most significant accomplishments were made in Ecuador and Peru, which in turn set in motion the democratization of Latin America. Peru’s military government pledged to establish a democracy, and in 1980 the generals handed power to a democratically elected government whose inauguration Rosalynn Carter attended.68
But given the conflicting demands of working with unsavory regimes, it would be devilishly difficult to fashion a clear and uniform human rights policy. There were conflicts within the State Department between Terrence Todman, the assistant secretary for Latin America, and the hard-charging Derian over how far to push the military juntas.
Similar conflicts arose between the White House and human rights champions in Congress on the best balance between security and liberty and the right approach to the harsh realities of the world, with liberals trying to limit presidential negotiating discretion. Following a speech on April 30, 1977, by Secretary of State Vance on human rights, a directive was issued the next month by the National Security Council, establishing the Interagency Group on Human Rights and Foreign Assistance. It met regularly under the chairmanship of Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and by February 1978 general guidelines had been developed and put into Presidential Directive 30 on such key questions as: When do we use a carrot and when a stick? Which of the numerous countries with severe human rights problems should be targeted? What would provide the greatest leverage to improve their human rights record? The list included our key Middle East oil suppliers with major human rig
hts deficits; the pro-American Latin dictatorships; and the Marcos kleptocracy in the Philippines, our former colony and close Pacific ally.69
The tension persists to this day: When Donald Trump attempted to form an antiterrorism coalition of moderate Arab autocracies on his first trip abroad as president in 2017, he decisively shifted the emphasis of U.S. policy by making it clear that their human rights record—or lack of it—would not stand in the way. This was a throwback to the Nixon-Kissinger era, but neither did Carter press those countries on human rights issues, because of their economic and strategic importance adopting a country-by- country approach.70
To be clear: Carter did not invent the concept of human rights. If any one person put human rights on the public agenda of the postwar world it was Eleanor Roosevelt. The late president’s widow guided the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the United Nations, and there it remains as an international ideal. (Ironically, Franklin Roosevelt is still widely quoted as giving a pass to the brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza on the ground that “He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.”) But Carter was the first American president to apply human rights to U.S. foreign policy as a novel organizing principle, and he had no road map to follow. The result was many inconsistencies in its application; many occasions when Carter’s rhetoric did not match his actions; and many instances when he had to restrain members of Congress who wanted to be more absolutist than pragmatic. In areas of strategic significance he had to walk gingerly, which is why the Shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines largely got a pass. Carter’s human rights policy opened him up to sharp criticism as a naive moralist by conservatives and the neoconservative Democrats adhering to a strongly anti-Communist foreign policy. But Carter was not dewy eyed, and he recognized that a successful foreign policy had to be a blend of ideals and practicalities, a marriage of the best of American values of promoting democracy and human rights with realpolitik. And yet he left with positive if mixed results, and a legacy on human rights that succeeding presidents could not totally ignore without criticism, even when they shifted the ever-changing balance between providing security and promoting freedom.
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