Panama Canal treaty

I've just walked out of an oven into an icebox. The oven is New York City which made me think I was in London at the end of June 1976. The icebox, comparatively speaking, is my study and I know I'm in New York City in 1977. While I change my sopping clothes and climb into my right mind, I can't help thinking how comical it is that I'm settling down to tell you what's on the minds of Americans over the blasting holiday weekend, when all that's on my mind is a few minutes of comfort on which to ponder the fate of my car.

I had to come into New York last weekend and we happened to hit one of those brutal periods, a couple of days anyway, when ferocious thunderstorms rove around the countryside like bandits and swoop down on unsuspecting farmers and, as the natives call us, summer folks and disrupt any plans you may have for a quiet life. 

I waited to leave the cottage at end of Long Island till the first rainstorm was over, since it was hurling stair rods and my windscreen wipers were about as useful as bucket bailing out the Titanic. Well, the first storm stopped and, just as I was ready to take off, a great streak of lightning blinded down on us and another storm came on with thunderclaps and great rolling reverberations, worse than anything MGM thought up for Clark Gable and Lana Turner in, was it 'China Seas'? 

We had staying with us a French lady who lives in England and, at the first crash, she retired to her bedroom and drew all the shades and brooded by herself. ... few and mild were the thunderstorms we had in England; my mother used to retreat under the dining-room table clutching the silver. Well, this went on for about three hours and the sky alternated between the Day of Judgement and a Jamaica watercolour by Winslow Homer. I drove north on a one-mile road to a divided, or dual, highway but the car was carving waves as high as a speedboat. My lights could not pierce anything ahead and I pulled over and cowered while the thunderbolts and the lightning crashed around the telegraph poles and me. 

Well, in the end, I got to New York and was mighty relieved to put my car into a garage. When I came to pick it up again, a couple of days later, the big, black man said, 'Brother, you got trouble!' There were no brakes, no pedal anyway and he promised to fix it in two days. I went back again two days later and the black man was there again welcoming me with a large grin. I knew then something was up. He stood ready to chant his line like a member of a Greek chorus, 'Brother,' he intoned, 'you got worse troubles yet.' Well, it seems that when they brought the car down from an upper storage room, the brakes had gone and when it was driven out of the car lift, it simply sailed into a wall. They hadn't told me this the first time and the fan had buried itself in the radiator. And that's where it stands today, also coated with salt water from the rivers by the bay. It will, I'm assured, be fixed or, as such people say when faced with insuperable and as far as you're concerned expensive crises, 'No problem!' 

So now I'm back home. I have perused the papers, it is 93 degrees out there in Fun City and I'm ready to pretend that every American from clammy Maine to blazing Arizona is bent over his hamburger or his Coke or his enchilada and is deeply worried over the Securities and Exchange Commission's report on the finances of New York City or is ready to take up arms to protect and defend the Panama Canal. 

Some money-minded or, as we prefer to say, financially-oriented types, may wonder whatever happened to the bankrupt Big Apple or as old investors in the city bonds call it, the 'Bad' Apple. Well, little Mayor Beame, that engaging Disney midget, is running for re-election in a couple of months and naturally he's anxious to make the best possible impression on the voters. 

So you can imagine what awful, what tasteless timing it is on the part of the Securities and Exchange Commission to publish this week a long report on the recent conduct of New York City's finances. The SEC, the commission, was set up by Congress in 1934, five years after the Crash in an attempt to eliminate the 1920s shenanigans in the sale of stock and other securities. The commission's first duty is to protect the public against fraud in the sale of securities. 

Well the commission has spent 19 months in our bank books and for an official report this one is written in verbose but pretty brutal English. The mayor is the main culprit. It said he had deceived the public about the city's solvency precisely when the city was selling securities to innocents in record numbers. There was a record number both of securities and innocents. Then the commission took a stinging swipe at the big banks, the city controller and the underwriters, and the main charge against them is that they've been busy getting rid of their own city bonds while selling them with cosy reassurances to investors. Well, this report will obviously concern New Yorkers and the congressmen who voted for federal aid to bail out the foundering city. 

But something that does interest most Americans, I think, is the fate of the Panama Canal and the treaty which the president will submit next session to Congress and which most cool onlookers believe is going to have a rough time getting past. I doubt that one American in a thousand knows how the Panama Canal has been administered all these years since, as one California senator put it, 'We stole it fair and square!' 

The idea of a canal linking both oceans is almost as old as Christopher Columbus but it wasn't seriously taken up till the nineteenth Century when the Americans got interested and Britain got interested in seeing that the Americans didn't control preferential ocean routes. The United States stepped in in the 1840s and made a treaty with Colombia guaranteeing the neutrality of the Isthmus of Panama in exchange for a promise of free transit for American ships through any canal that might be built. 

Well, as we all know in 1881 I think, a Frenchman, de Lesseps – later recognisable in the movies as Tyrone Power – started the construction and it didn’t work. And an American company failed with a canal across Nicaragua. The great obstacle is the incidence of yellow fever among the workers and then came the Spanish-American war which acutely emphasised the need of a canal for American national defence and the American government took it on. 

After several scrapped treaties and a Panamanian revolution, the United States in 1903 signed the treaty with the new republic of Panama which guaranteed the independence of Panama, paid the republic $10 million, an annuity of a quarter of a million for nine years and got in return the right to use, occupy and control a zone ten miles wide, or however much would be needed to work the canal. It was open to commerce in 1914. The initial cost was $400 million and many more millions have been poured in since then. The treaty gave the United State the right, nay, the obligation to put down disorders to protect the canal. 

Now for the past 70-odd years, America and Panama have been bickering about American rights which the Panamanians have maintained were granted only for the construction and the working of the canal. Well, finally a new treaty has been worked out. The canal will be maintained and protected by the United States as always, but she will turn it and her revenues over to Panama in the year 2000. Now beneath the dry ground of this history is buried a very powerful, emotional charge; two charges. The Panamanians feel they are a colonial relic beholden to the giant of the North. Many Americans, on the other hand, feel that the canal is a symbol if not of American power, of America's role as a watchdog of trouble affecting her interests in Latin America. 

The administration has been at pains to point out that Americans will, at all times, defend the canal even beyond the year 2000. The administration tries, in private, to point out that so long as the canal seems like an imperial symbol, it could goad and bait the restless countries to the south into arms. The administration points out that the day of imperial symbols is over and that nothing but goodwill will flow from yielding the name and the appearance of sovereignty now. 

But 'Panama' is a passionate word to Americans. It's a symbol, however dated, as powerful as Gibraltar is to Britons. Ronald Reagan, the former Governor of California has been quick to mobilise the general protest and in his pithy and telling way he's declared that if the new treaty is signed, the world will think America is checking out of her responsibilities, that our allies will wonder about our will and our capacity to defend ourselves, that the formal American retreat will leave a power vacuum in the Caribbean which Fidel Castro and his patron, the Soviet Union, will seek to exploit. 

It seems that the United States is faced with a dilemma. Something will be lost and something gained whether the treaty is signed or rejected. For the average voter, and especially for the proud patriot, it is not enough to point out that the canal will not even take the American aircraft carriers of today, that supplies in any new war would go by air, that the canal is considered as a fortress, an anachronism. 

Before the year's out I suspect you're going to hear some gaudy rhetoric in the Senate of the United States. It will come down, I think, to a battle, perhaps a stand-off, between the men who say the canal is obsolete and the men who say that yielding final control of it will leave the United States, in Richard Nixon's words, 'A helpless giant.' 

Facts alone will not decide the great debate. It will come down to a contest between the senators who see in the treaty an act of magnanimity and good business or an act of surrender.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.