The Communist Who Convinced Jimmy Carter to Give Away the Panama Canal

The late Jimmy Carter didn’t come up spontaneously with the idea of giving away the Panama Canal, which America spent blood and gold on and which is an essential part of its national security. Instead, he had Robert A. Pastor, a communist, whispering in his ear.

A globalist who desired to merge incrementally the U.S., Mexico, and Canada into a “North American Union” (NAU) along the model of the European Union, Pastor’s intellectual development was rooted in Marxism. Pastor played an instrumental role in the Carter administration’s decision to relinquish control of the Panama Canal.

In what appears to have been his first job after being a teaching assistant graduate student while getting his Ph.D. at Harvard University’s Department of Government, Robert A. Pastor signed on to be the Executive Director of the Linowitz Commission. The Linowitz Commission was formally named the “Rockefeller Foundation’s Commission on U.S.- Latin American Relations,” but took its unofficial name from its chairman, Sol Linowitz. Linowitz had previously served as director of the socialist National Planning Association and was a paid, registered foreign agent of the Communist regime of Salvadore Allende in Chile.

One of the Linowitz Commission’s primary recommendations was that the United States should give the Panama Canal to Panama. In a 1995 interview he gave for a publication in a law journal,^1/ Linowitz explained that it was wrong for the U.S. to have sovereignty over the Panama Canal. Discussing the 1903 treaty that gave the U.S. sovereignty over the Panama Canal, Linowitz commented, “That treaty was a source of shame to the Panamanians because it conveyed sovereignty over a large stretch of their territory to an occupying party.”

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After completing this assignment as Executive Director of the Linowitz Commission, Pastor signed on with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Interestingly, the curriculum vitae that Pastor prepared for American University, where he taught before his death in 2014, mentioned his involvement with the Linowitz Commission but neglected to mention his association with IPS.

According to political scientist S. Steven Powell’s definitive study of the IPS,^2/ the group was founded in 1963 with funding coming from the Rubin Foundation. Russian émigré Samuel Rubin was a registered member of the Communist Party who made his fortune in the cosmetic business of Faberge, Inc., which he founded in 1936 and sold for approximately $25 million in 1963.

Cora Rubin Weiss, Samuel’s daughter, continued funding IPS through the Rubin Foundation, while her husband, Peter Weiss, served as IPS chairman of the board of trustees.^3/ Author David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org identified the IPS as “America’s oldest leftwing think tank,” which “has long supported Communist and Anti-American causes around the world,” with a place for KGB agents from the Soviet embassy in Washington “to convene and strategize.” By its own admission, the Institute for Policy Studies is “an avowedly radical organization,^4/ created to influence public policy in a leftist direction.

At IPS, Pastor participated in the Ad Hoc Working Group on Latin America, which produced a 1977 report entitled “The Southern Connection: Recommendations for a New Approach to Inter-American Relations.”^5/ This paper found that the official presumption of U.S. superiority in Latin America was “morally reprehensible.” The IPS paper argued that human rights problems in Latin America were a direct result of our “virulent anticommunism” and “national development based on free play of market forces.”

The IPS solution argued for the U.S. to abandon our anti-communist allies in Latin America in favor of supporting “ideological pluralism,” a code word designed to normalize the revolutionary socialist forces then fighting for power in Latin America. The IPS political agenda promoted an anti-American “Third Worldism” and the “self-flagellation” characteristic of Carter’s foreign policy—an agenda with far-reaching consequences that were revealed when the Sandinistas fashioned their revolutionary society” in Nicaragua, “along the lines of Castro’s Cuba.”^6/ Pastor left the Linowitz Commission to become the director of the Office of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs in the National Security Council in the Carter White House. There, Pastor served as President Carter’s “point man”,^7/ advocating for the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty (with Omar Torrijos, the dictatorial Panamanian head of state) that transferred the Panama Canal to Panama.

Pastor also played a role in convincing the Senate to vote for the Carter-Torrijos Treaty on April 18, 1978, despite staunch objections from conservative politicians, including Ronald Reagan, who objected on national security grounds.^8/ At the request of President Jimmy Carter, Linowitz had helped negotiate the Carter-Torrijos Treaty, touring and speaking throughout the U.S. to conservative groups opposing the Panama Canal giveaway.

In December 1993, when President Clinton nominated Pastor to be the U.S. ambassador to Panama, Pastor’s role in the Panama Canal giveaway came back to haunt him. Pastor’s nomination had been approved by a 16-3 vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his confirmation looked virtually certain.

The nomination failed, however, and the administration withdrew it in February 1995 after Senator Jesse Helms swore to prevent a Senate vote on Pastor’s nomination. Helms, who had vehemently opposed the turn-over of the Panama Canal, placed much of the blame squarely on Pastor, declaring when he opposed Pastor’s nomination that Pastor “presided over one of the most disastrous and humiliating periods in the history of US involvement in Latin America.”^9/

Jeane Kirkpatrick, UN ambassador under Ronald Reagan, commented presciently on the connections between the Linowitz Commission, the IPS, revolutionary socialism, and utopian globalism:

The ease with which the Linowitz recommendations were incorporated into the IPS analysis and report demonstrated how strong had become the affinity between the views of the foreign policy establishment and the New Left, how readily the categories of the new liberalism could be translated into those of revolutionary socialism, and how short a step it was from utopian globalism and the expectation of change to anti-American perspectives and revolutionary activism.^10/

During Carter’s presidency, Pastor played a major intellectual role in shaping the administration’s dominant ideology that U.S. capitalism was the culprit, not the solution—leading to public policy tilted toward viewing the United States as responsible for pervasive Latin American poverty. The only solution that Pastor and the other leftists making this argument could see was to promote Marxist revolutions throughout Latin America, helped by their willingness to weaken the U.S. by abandoning U.S. assets they viewed as imperialistic.