Inter-American Dialogue

Sol Linowitz Dies; Carter-Era Envoy Helped Found Xerox

By Joe Holley
March 19, 2005

Sol Linowitz, 91, a businessman who became chairman of the board of a small Rochester-based company that grew to become Xerox, a diplomat who was co-negotiator of the Panama Canal treaties and a lawyer who in later years became a forceful critic of what he saw as his profession's ethical lapses, died yesterday at his home in Washington. The cause of death was pneumonia, after a long illness.

When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, Mr. Linowitz chaired a committee on U.S.-Latin American relations that identified the conflict over the Panama Canal as the most serious problem confronting the United States. Carter agreed with the panel's conclusions and asked Mr. Linowitz and Ellsworth Bunker to negotiate a treaty that was "generous, fair and appropriate."

"In retrospect, I'd have to say that assignment was probably the most difficult and exciting challenge of my life," Mr. Linowitz once recalled. "It is also the accomplishment of which I am most proud."

He also served as the president's personal representative to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1979 to 1981.

"Our country has lost a great citizen and diplomat," Carter said in a statement released yesterday afternoon. "Sol Linowitz had a much distinguished career before joining me in addressing two areas of critical foreign policy important to the United States: the Panama Canal treaties and peace in the Middle East. Because of his vision, intellect, decency and hard work, remarkable success was achieved."

Mr. Linowitz was the quintessential "public man." He not only served presidents as a diplomat but also sat on countless boards and commissions, usually policy-oriented private organizations.

He was, for example, co-founder, with David Rockefeller, of the International Executive Service Corps, which sent mostly retired businessmen on six-month tours of duty to help local companies in developing nations. He was founder and co-chairman of Inter-American Dialogue and chairman of a 1978 presidential commission on world hunger. In a 1966 New York Times Magazine profile of Mr. Linowitz, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis recalled meeting him after President Lyndon B. Johnson named him a trustee of the Kennedy Center. "One doesn't, obviously, pour out one's soul at meetings," she recalled. "What's so special about Sol Linowitz, in these days when everyone is so busy, is that he really does pour himself out. He's quickly brilliant -- and he gets on with people. He's kind."

Sol Myron Linowitz was the eldest of four sons born to Joseph and Rose Oglenskye Linowitz, immigrants from a region of Poland under Russian rule. He was born in Trenton, N.J., in a multicultural neighborhood of Jews, Protestants and Catholics, as well as one African American family. His father was a fruit importer.

Mr. Linowitz graduated first in his class from Trenton Central High School, recalled his brother Robert Linowes, a prominent Washington area zoning and land-use lawyer. (As adults, Mr. Linowitz's three brothers changed their spelling of the family name.) Despite the Depression, he was able to go to Hamilton College in Upstate New York thanks to scholarships and part-time jobs that included waiting tables, selling newspapers and tutoring. One of only two Jews in his Hamilton class, he sold Christmas cards to supplement his income. He graduated in 1935 as salutatorian of his class at Hamilton and delivered a commencement oration in Latin.

Mr. Linowitz's career choice was determined at college. On Sunday afternoons, he often read to Elihu Root, who had served as secretary of state under President Theodore Roosevelt. Root was a Hamilton alumnus who spent time on campus during the last years of his life.

"One afternoon he stopped me and asked, 'What are you going to do after you graduate?' " Mr. Linowitz recalled in an interview with the Bar Report, a publication of the D.C. Bar.

"I said, 'I don't know. I can't decide between being a lawyer and being a rabbi.' "

Mr. Root had a word of advice: "Be a lawyer. A lawyer needs twice as much religion as a minister or a rabbi."

Mr. Linowitz enrolled at Cornell Law School in 1935 "burning with a desire to do good," he explained.

He was editor-in-chief of the Cornell Law Quarterly and graduated first in his class in 1938.

He considered a career on Wall Street but decided instead to go with a small family firm in Rochester, Sutherland & Sutherland, run by a father and his two sons.

"What I learned at Sutherland & Sutherland is that the law is a human profession," he recalled. "If you are going to get satisfaction and personal fulfillment as a lawyer, you've got to do things that are helpful to people. You can't do things impersonally."

A knee injury incurred playing soccer at Hamilton kept him out of the military at the onset of World War II, so Mr. Linowitz wrangled a job in Washington at the Office of Price Administration, where he was in charge of appellate cases in the rent-control program and worked with a young lawyer named Richard Nixon. In 1944, he received a naval commission -- as did Nixon -- and served until 1946, when he went back to Rochester. He practiced law in Rochester for the next 20 years.

After the war, Mr. Linowitz went back to Rochester, where he met a young businessman named Joseph C. Wilson who had just succeeded his father as president of the Haloid Co., a $17 million-a-year photographic supplies producer that was overshadowed by Rochester giant Eastman-Kodak. Wilson wanted to expand his automatic photocopying business, and his research director had encountered an obscure process called electrophotography, invented by an equally obscure engineer and patent lawyer named Charles Carlson. It was being developed by Battelle Memorial Institute, an industrial research organization in Columbus, Ohio.

Wilson asked Mr. Linowitz to help him draw up an option form for the process and then to accompany him to Columbus. Wilson did not want to take the work to the company's regular attorney because he was afraid word would get back to Eastman-Kodak. He made it clear to Mr. Linowitz that it was a "one-shot" project, that he wanted Mr. Linowitz to draw up an agreement by which Haloid would acquire a short-term license, with renewal options, for certain uses of electrophotography.

He recalled the initial Columbus trip in his memoir, "The Making of a Public Man" (1985): "With some fanfare, our hosts at Battelle brought out a metal roller coated with some dark substance, a rag of cat's fur, a transparent plastic child's ruler with dark lines scratched in it, and a bright light. They rubbed the roller with the cat's fur. Then they shined the light through the ruler onto the roller, and some feeble off-white lines appeared on the dark surface."

He later recalled that "it was the most unimpressive demonstration I've ever witnessed."

"Sol was not a technical genius," Linowes recalled, "and I don't think he quite mastered what xerography was all about. But he could acquire the patents the company needed, and Joe Wilson had complete trust and faith in him."

In 1959, the company produced the first copy machine made available for the commercial market.

From such humble beginnings, Wilson's company, with Linowitz as general counsel and then chairman of the board, became Xerox. By 1966, "our little company had become one of the 12 largest in the United States in terms of the market value of its stock," Mr. Linowitz wrote.

According to David Owen, whose book "Copies in Seconds" (2004) traces the history of the Xerox machine, the effect on human communication of xerographic copiers is comparable to that of Gutenberg's printing press. "It has given ordinary people a simple means of reproducing and sharing printed information, and, by doing so, it has reduced the ability of the strong to keep secrets from the weak. (Without photocopying, there could have been no Pentagon Papers, for example.)"

In October 1966, Mr. Linowitz left Xerox to accept President Johnson's joint appointment as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and U.S. representative on the Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress.

He returned to private practice during the Nixon administration, remaining in Washington as a senior partner in the international law firm of Coudert Brothers LLP from 1969 to 1983. (He was senior counsel until 1994). He was still active in numerous civic and national causes, including the National Urban Coalition, the Federal City Council and the Commission on United States-Latin American Relations.

Earlier, there had been talk among New York Democrats about drafting him to run for governor against Nelson Rockefeller. Others questioned whether he was mean enough.

In the 1966 New York Times profile, Martin Mayer put it this way: "As an advocate, Linowitz specialized in the politesse of the courts of appeals; as a counselor, he was engaged in the impersonalities of long-range planning. As a liberal Democrat functioning in a highly conservative business community, he developed the habit of saying mostly what his interlocutors would like him to say, and inserting, with minimum discomfort, the needle of disagreement."

Those diplomatic skills were invaluable once he plunged into the Panama Canal negotiations.

"He felt very strongly about it," Linowes recalled. "He had a very deep feeling for Latin Americans in general and the way they had been treated and the way they had been dealt with by our government. He also worked very well with Ellsworth Bunker."

The president wanted a treaty acceptable to the Panamanians, a treaty that fully protected U.S. interests and one that the Senate could ratify. Mr. Linowitz soon discovered that the most difficult part of the assignment was getting the domestic political support needed for Senate ratification.

"The far right was absolutely sure that the nation's security was being damaged, and I bore the brunt of their attacks," he recalled in the Bar Report interview. "My life was threatened, and my family was threatened."

He drew a distinction between legitimate opposition, personified by Ronald Reagan, among others, and what he called "the far-right crazies." He made speeches across the country seeking to allay concerns about giving up control of the canal. The treaties were ratified in 1979 by the narrowest of margins.

Mr. Linowitz continued to take government assignments from the Carter White House.

On Nov. 6, 1979, he became Carter's personal representative for the Middle East peace negotiations. Those 14 months, he wrote, "were, as the President had promised, the most interesting and exciting -- and uncertain -- of my life. They might also, I think, have been the most productive, if the incoming Reagan administration had built in early 1981 on the foundations we had laid for them."

Mr. Linowitz's second book, "The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering in the 20th Century" (1994), reflected his concern that attorneys had inherited a noble profession and transformed it into a "huckstering business operation."

He called for more ethics courses in law school, as well as more attention to the philosophical, social and literary underpinnings of the Western legal system.

In a 1995 speech, he urged lawyers "to demonstrate that their concern as lawyers is with the human and the humane, that they are truly committed to the principle of equality of access to the law, that lawyers accept the obligation to serve all of the people in our society. Then -- and only then -- will lawyers find that we have won and deserve the appreciation and respect of those we seek to serve -- then and only then will we once again be able to say with dignity and honor: 'I am truly proud to be a lawyer.' "

In 1998, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. "Receiving advice from Sol Linowitz on international diplomacy is like getting trumpet lessons from the angel Gabriel," President Bill Clinton said at the award ceremony, quoting Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty, a mutual friend and former special envoy to the Americas. "If every world leader had half the vision Sol Linowitz does," Clinton added, "we'd have about a tenth as many problems as we've got in this whole world today."

In addition to his brother of Chevy Chase, survivors include his wife of 65 years, Evelyn (Toni) Zimmerman Linowitz of Washington; four daughters, Anne Mazursky of Ottawa, June Linowitz of Bethesda, Jan Wadden of Wynnewood, Pa., and Ronni Jolles of Great Falls; two brothers, David F. Linowes of Chevy Chase and Harry Linowes of Bethesda; and eight grandchildren.