When President Jimmy Carter traveled to Panama in June 1978 to finalize hotly disputed treaties turning over the Panama Canal, he declared that “we stand on the threshold of a new era.”
More than 46 years later, that era may be over, if President-elect Donald J. Trump has his way.
Mr. Carter always considered the twin treaties to be signature achievements that would figure prominently in his obituary. Indeed, for all the fireworks they generated at the time, the canal treaties have been broadly accepted ever since as a settled matter and the bedrock of the U.S. relationship with Latin America.
Yet paradoxically, just days before Mr. Carter’s death at age 100 on Sunday, Mr. Trump seemingly out of the blue propelled the nearly half-century-old issue back onto the national agenda, complaining about shipping fees and Chinese influence. If Panama does not make changes, he said, “we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America, in full, quickly and without question.”
Mr. Trump did not say how he would force such an outcome, and some analysts were skeptical that it amounted to more than a blustery bargaining position. But the timing of his threat focused new attention on an old issue, recalling an episode in Mr. Carter’s presidency that many Americans today may not remember or know much about.
“Through a bizarre accident of timing, we now have one president fantasizing about taking back the canal at just the time the world recognizes the canal transfer as an important part of a late president’s legacy,” said James Fallows, who was Mr. Carter’s speechwriter at the time and accompanied the president on that 1978 trip to Panama.
The story of Mr. Carter’s successful efforts to turn the canal over to Panama was one of the defining moments of his tenure and amounts to a case study in how much Washington has changed since then. Despite ferocious opposition on the political right led by a former California governor named Ronald Reagan, Mr. Carter managed what seems impossible to imagine today — a relentless drive that actually changed minds and built bipartisan support to do something with little political payoff and plenty of political risk.
By most accounts, the turnover of the canal improved U.S. relations in Latin America and stabilized the situation for U.S. shipping to avoid what many feared would be upheaval and even violence. The turnover was seen by opponents as a blow to American pride and national interests since, after all, the United States had built the canal. But even Mr. Reagan came to accept the treaties and never tried to upend them once he became president.
The issue was inherited by Mr. Carter, who by his own acknowledgment knew little about it when he first ran for president in 1976. The original Panama Canal treaty was signed in 1903. In one of the great engineering feats of modern history, the United States built the canal between 1904 and 1914, and operated it thereafter.
But over time, it became an issue of national pride for Panama, and mass riots in 1964 killed four American soldiers and 20 Panamanians. Panama’s government cut off diplomatic relations with the United States until President Lyndon B. Johnson agreed to negotiate a new treaty ceding sovereignty.
That effort broke down in 1968 when Brig. Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera seized power in Panama in a military coup. President Richard M. Nixon eventually reopened negotiations in 1970 and President Gerald R. Ford continued them when he took over.
But Mr. Reagan, challenging Mr. Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, made control of the canal a powerful attack line. “We bought it, we paid for it, we built it and we intend to keep it,” Mr. Reagan memorably declared.
Mr. Ford won the nomination but lost the general election to Mr. Carter. During the transition, Mr. Ford told his successor that the canal was a more pressing issue than Middle East peace or arms talks with the Soviet Union. To educate himself, Mr. Carter read “The Path Between the Seas,” David McCullough’s award-winning account of the building of the canal.
The new president came to see it as an issue of justice. “It’s obvious that we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he wrote in his diary. In his memoir, he called tension over the canal a “diplomatic cancer.”
But it was also a matter of security. Military officials told Mr. Carter at the time that it would require up to 100,000 American troops to defend the canal against an uprising.
To overcome concerns about losing control, Mr. Carter negotiated two treaties with Panama. In addition to the main agreement outlining joint operation of the canal until its turnover by 2000, the second treaty stipulated that the canal would be neutral, with U.S. shipping guaranteed access, and that the United States would be permitted to use armed force to keep it open.
Mr. Carter invited leaders from across Latin America to a celebratory signing ceremony on Sept. 7, 1977, meant to highlight American respect for its neighbors. General Torrijos was so overcome by emotion that he broke down and sobbed in a private room with Mr. Carter before the ceremony.
But ratification in the Senate “seemed impossible,” as Mr. Carter recalled in his memoir, “Keeping Faith.” A Gallup poll showed that only 39 percent of Americans supported the treaties while 46 percent opposed them.
Mr. Carter was undaunted. A stubborn man who saw political expediency as a cardinal sin, he made ratification his top priority, working night and day to convince the public and the Senate. He teamed up with Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, the Republican leader, while lobbying conservatives like Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona and enlisting the aid of prominent Republicans like Mr. Ford and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.
He got help from influential conservative voices like William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, and even the iconic cowboy actor John Wayne, a strong Reagan ally. Mr. Wayne, whose first wife was Panamanian, even wrote a letter to his friend Mr. Reagan chastising him for “misinforming people.”
Mr. Carter was so personally invested that he kept a notebook on his desk with a section for each senator to record the latest information on their position. “It’s hard to concentrate on anything except Panama,” he told his diary.
His efforts shifted public sentiments, with polls now showing more support than opposition. But just two days before the first vote, he nearly despaired. “This has been one of the worst days, knowing that we were lost, then gaining a little hope,” he recorded in the diary.
On March 16, 1978, after 22 days of debate, the Senate voted on the second treaty first, on the assumption that it would be easier to support the agreement guaranteeing American rights to defend the canal. Mr. Carter listened in his private office, checking each senator’s vote on a tally sheet. “I had never been more tense in my life,” he wrote in his memoir. The treaty was approved 68 to 32, winning one vote more than necessary.
It was a major victory, but Mr. Carter still needed to push through the other, more disputed treaty. A key vote belonged to Senator S.I. Hayakawa, Republican of California.
A colorful character, Mr. Hayakawa gave Mr. Carter a copy of a book on semantics that he had written. Mr. Carter, ever the dutiful student, read it that night, then called the senator the next day and demonstrated enough knowledge to prove that he really had.
That still was not enough, so finally, playing to senatorial vanity, Mr. Baker arranged to call Mr. Carter with Mr. Hayakawa listening to ask if the president needed to meet occasionally with the California senator to get his advice on foreign affairs. “I gulped, thought for a few seconds, and replied, ‘Yes, I really do!’ hoping God would forgive me,” Mr. Carter later wrote.
Jonathan Alter, author of “His Very Best,” a 2020 biography of Mr. Carter, wrote that Mr. Hayakawa wanted Mr. Carter to commit to meeting every two weeks. “Sam, I couldn’t possibly limit our visits to every two weeks,” Mr. Carter replied cleverly. “I might want to hear your advice more often!” Mr. Hayakawa signed onto the treaty and, as Mr. Alter wrote, “that was the last time S.I. Hayakawa ever spoke to Jimmy Carter.”
The Senate approved the other treaty by the same 68 to 32 vote on April 18, 1978. Mr. Fallows, who just returned from a trip to the Panama Canal last month, called it “one of Jimmy Carter’s most important, if least remembered, diplomatic and legislative achievements.”
It came at a cost. Seven senators who voted for the treaties lost re-election just months later. But Mr. Reagan came to believe the treaties were worth keeping and thus ensured their survival, at least until now.
“Once he became president, he never revisited the issue and actually benefited policy-wise from Carter’s political courage in returning the canal to Panama,” said William Inboden, author of “The Peacemaker,” about Mr. Reagan’s foreign policy. “I think it is one of Carter’s most consequential Latin America foreign policy legacies.”
Still, Mr. Inboden, director of the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, said that “while Trump’s musing about the U.S. retaking the canal is crass and unrealistic, it still highlights a serious concern about China’s growing influence in the region.”
But Mr. Alter said that Mr. Carter’s move had secured American interests. “That basic calculus has not changed,” he said on Thursday. “After all these years of Panama successfully running the canal, there’s no question that Trump breaking the treaties would lead to extensive violence, even war, there and a critical artery of global commerce would be at least temporarily shut.”
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