ABSTRACT
Not since the heady days of John F. Kennedy and the Alliance for Progress has Washington lavished so much attention on Latin America. The president and his wife, the vice president, the secretary of state and his deputy, the secretary of the treasury, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations all visited the region during the Carter administration's first 18 months, traveling to a total of 17 different countries, many of them more than once. Terence A. Todman, Carter's original assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, managed to tour all the countries of the hemisphere before he became ambassador to Spain last July. The Panama Canal issue absorbed more high-level official energies than any other single foreign policy question during Carter's first year-and-a-half in office.
