Sol M. Linowitz, 91; Envoy in Transfer of Panama Canal

Sol M. Linowitz, who played a key role in negotiating the treaties that gave Panama sovereignty over the Panama Canal, died Friday. He was 91.

A lawyer and businessman as well as diplomat, Linowitz died at his home in Washington, according to an announcement from the Academy for Educational Development. Linowitz served as chairman of the nonprofit group since 1990.

Linowitz made a name for himself in key management posts at Xerox Corp. at the time the company’s profits and product were just taking off. He served as chairman of the executive committee, legal counsel and finally as chairman of the board.

In 1966, he put his 35,000 shares of Xerox stock in a trust and had his first diplomatic assignment answering President Johnson’s call to be U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and U.S. representative on the Inter-American Committee of the Alliance for Progress.

But it was during the Carter administration a decade later that he made his major contributions in government service.

Just before Carter’s election, Linowitz headed a commission on U.S.-Latin American relations. The report from that commission noted that one of the major hurdles in hemispheric relations was the issue of the Panama Canal Treaty.

The treaty dated to the early 1900s and gave the United States sovereignty over a large area of Panamanian territory, including the canal. Panamanians viewed it as a source of shame.

“President Carter was familiar with the commission’s findings and agreed with our conclusions,” Linowitz said in an interview with the DC Bar Report in 1995. “Shortly after his inauguration, he told me he wanted Ellsworth Bunker [another longtime U.S. diplomat] and me to negotiate a treaty that was ‘generous, fair and appropriate.’ ”

Linowitz said that dealing with the Panamanians, while difficult, was nothing compared to the political opposition at home. Those on the far right saw the treaty as a dire threat to the nation’s security. Linowitz said that his life and the lives of his family were threatened.

He also recalled that Ronald Reagan was in the forefront of the responsible opposition to the accord. Reagan’s position was that, since the United States built it and paid for it, the U.S. should keep the canal.

In the law journal interview, Linowitz recalled meeting with Reagan on several occasions and patiently answering his point-by-point questions, which were written out on a legal pad. Linowitz walked away from the first meeting thinking he had changed Reagan’s mind, but the next day the presidential hopeful was on national television and again attacked the treaties. Linowitz finally determined that, even though he was affable in their discussions, Reagan was not going to give up such a potent issue so close to a presidential election.

The new treaties were ratified by the House and Senate in 1979. The Canal Zone was transferred to Panama that year. The canal itself changed hands Dec. 31, 1999.

“In retrospect I’d have to say that assignment was probably the most difficult and exciting challenge of my life. It is also the accomplishment of which I’m most proud,” Linowitz said.

Later in the Carter administration, Linowitz served as the president’s special Middle East envoy. In that role, he served as mediator for the first talks on Palestinian autonomy. Those talks came out of the Camp David accords that led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

In an interview with the New York Times in 1991, Linowitz recalled that, in their talks with the Egyptians, the Israelis had agreed to turn over “25 very important areas” to Palestinian authority. “This would have given the Palestinians very substantial control over their lives and moved to eliminate the presence of Israeli military in the area,” Linowitz said.

But the Palestinians rejected the proposal as not being enough.

Sol Myron Linowitz was born in Trenton, N.J., on Dec. 7, 1913. His father was a fruit importer whose business took a sharp downturn during the Depression. Linowitz worked his way through Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., graduating in 1935. He attended Cornell Law School, where he was the editor of the Cornell Law Quarterly, earning his law degree in 1938.

He practiced law for several years with a leading law firm in Rochester, N.Y., before going to Washington during the war years as assistant general counsel of the Office of Price Administration. Linowitz later served as a legal officer in the Navy at the end of the war. He was discharged in 1946.

He returned to Rochester and for the next 20 years was a partner in a leading law firm. In the 1950s, he began giving legal advice to Rochester businessman Joseph Wilson, the president of the Haloid Co., a firm producing photographic supplies. Toward the end of the 1950s, the firm produced the first copying machine for commercial use. In 1961, the firm’s name officially became Xerox Corp. During Linowitz’s tenure with the company, gross revenues rose from $33 million in 1959 to nearly $500 million in 1966.

At the end of the Carter administration, Linowitz joined the board of the Academy for Educational Development, a nonprofit human and social development organization. He also resumed his post with Coudert Bros., a leading international law firm where he was partner and senior counsel.

He retired from law in 1994. That year, Linowitz offered a critique of his longtime profession in the book “The Betrayed Profession,” saying: “We inherited a noble profession and we’ve made it into a business. We’ve lost the ability to differentiate between what you can do and what you ought to do.”

He also wrote “The Making of a Public Man: A Memoir.”

In 1998, President Clinton awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that “receiving advice from Sol Linowitz on international diplomacy is like getting trumpet lessons from the angel Gabriel.”

Linowitz is survived by his wife, the former Toni Zimmerman, whom he married in 1939; four daughters; eight grandchildren, and three brothers.