Panama blunder by Reagan

It was a heartening thing to get in the mail one morning a letter from a listener saying 'thank you'. Not for something I'd talked about, but for something I hadn't talked about. 'Thank you', it said, 'for not talking about those awful American primary elections.’

Well, I discovered some years ago, later I'm afraid than I should have done, that few topics are more boring than another country's politics. The United States is an exception perhaps in that its politics are, from time to time, spiced with more melodrama than those of any other countries, except possibly those of Central America. Even they've been fairly quiet lately. 

There was a time in the 1930s when the Central American republics appeared to be having a revolution and a new president about once a month, which led the late Will Rogers to say, 'In the United States, every boy can get to be president. In Central America, every boy has got to be president.' 

Well, I don't think anyone would deny that a commentator has a duty to take in not only the melodramatic spasms of American politics and, alas, the all too frequent explosions of tragedy. In this century alone, there have been 14 Presidents. Two of them, McKinley and Kennedy, were assassinated and three, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, had very close shaves. And, as we all know, we've had, also, the first president in history who was forced to resign from office. 

But American politics do not simply oscillate between high drama and routine tedium. The routine, especially, of electing a president is different enough from that of most other democracies or pretended democracies to be worth following not only in its comic aspects, of which there are plenty, but as a continuous demonstration of how a continental and very mixed population, a bubbling, maddening, fascinating stew of 215 million people contrive, however blousily, to try and make democracy work. In, I think, all the other continental nations that have tried it, it hasn't worked and I sometimes think, especially after a trip around the country and seeing the huge differences of the regions, I sometimes think it's a wonder not that they ever had a civil war, but that they've had only one. 

Well, as you'll guess, I'm inching up on the presidential election because my pleasure in the grateful lady's letter was quickly snuffed out by another letter in the same mail charging me with irresponsibility in not keeping you up on the candidates. To this charge I offer two defences. One is that the intelligentsia who insists on knowing about the progress of the race from New Hampshire, to Massachusetts, to Florida, to the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and so on, must surely read the papers designed for the intelligentsia. 

My second defence is that in March I named the nine, I believe, candidates for the nomination of the Democratic Party and predicted that, by the summer, at least six of them would have lapsed back into obscurity or despair so that your memory exercises would have been a waste of time. And look! It's only May and the Democrats have only one man left in the race, Mr Jimmy Carter, the low-key, toothy, peanut farmer from Georgia. To hedge a big bet on his certain nomination by the Democrats in New York in July, you could say that there is another man waiting and watching from the grandstand who feels – who hopes – that, at the last minute, Mr Carter will not get the judges' approval and he, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, will be hauled out of the stands and pushed past the tape. 

Now according to Mr Humphrey's friends and advisers – he still has lots of advisers, even if he hasn't got a campaign manager or a campaign or any money with which to wage a campaign – there are aficionados of American politics who believe that when it comes down to the conventions, it will be Gerald Ford against Hubert Humphrey and, if this now sounds naive or simply dogmatic, let me say that one of those naive prophets is Senator Barry Goldwater who, being a conservative Republican way over on the right, ought to be cheering the sudden, dramatic victories of Ronald Reagan. 

Nobody knows better than Goldwater what it's like to carry the banner of the right and to see it hailed in the south and the west, a region that has hardened in its conservatism so visibly as to become a new entity in American politics. It runs from Florida through Louisiana and Texas and Arizona and Nevada to California, and is now known as the Sun Belt. Well, you may recall that in 1964, Goldwater carried the Republican convention at San Francisco in an orgy of revulsion against all Republican liberals and, in the same place, Nelson Rockefeller, the leader of the liberals, was booed from the rostrum and consigned to oblivion. He is, by the way, now the Vice President of the United States. 

It seemed back then that the country had taken a big swing to the right and there were all those angry and confident voices out of Florida and Texas and Arizona and California to tell us so. The Sun Belt certainly runs up a lot of delegates, but not so many votes in the nation, as a whole, and Senator Goldwater, who can still recall – and now with a chuckle, where once he used to wince – he can still recall the feeling the morning after the election that his part of the country, the Sun Belt, was by no means the whole of America, that America – after it has heard from its more defiant patriots, from its brave right wing – America tends to move towards the centre and the man, or men, who stand there. In short, Senator Goldwater was given the second worst drumming in a presidential election. 

Now he's a generous man. He's just about the last politician I can think of who would express an old grudge in the form of a prediction. He probably agrees with much of what Mr Reagan has to say, on domestic matters certainly. But Mr Reagan, the other day, started to wave the flag over what he calls the 'sovereign territory of Panama' and practically offered to go to war if anyone, the Panamanians, for instance, tried to push the Americans out of their ownership of the canal.

Well, first, Panama is not sovereign American territory. United States citizens are resident aliens or as the Bible says, 'strangers within the gates'. The Sovereign State of Panama, in 1904, sold a strip of land five miles on each side of the access of the canal to the United States. And – here's where the patriotic rub comes in – the treaty gave the United States perpetual sovereignty over this tiny zone, known as the Canal Zone. The treaty also guaranteed the independence of Panama. The rent, you could call it, of the zone began as a thumping $10 million with annual payments of a quarter million to be paid on and on after nine years. In 1955, the United States signed another treaty which increased the annual rent to be paid out to $1.9 millions on account of inflation and there was a clause in that treaty granting United States' citizens equal pay with Panamanians. 

Twelve years later the Panamanians were up in arms, literally, about the American ownership and the controlling treaties and, ever since, they've been trying to get the Americans out. In 1973, the United Nations Security Council was ready to pass a resolution calling on the US and Panama to negotiate a new treaty and give Panama sovereignty over all its territory, including the Canal Zone. And a year later – that's two years ago – the Americans and the Panamanians agreed to set a date for a final transfer of the canal to Panama, in the meantime providing for joint operation and shared revenues. And that's where the balky matter stands. Or stood until this week when Mr Reagan rattled his sword and swore to do or die for America's Panama. 

Now, all this Mr Reagan could have boned up from an almanac in ten minutes, but when it comes to foreign affairs he does seem to be living up to the remark of an American senator who once said, 'his knowledge of American foreign policy is profound up to the 12-mile limit. After that, it's a blank.' 

Well, Senator Goldwater took up Panama when he appeared on the Sunday midday television programme 'Meet The Press' which certainly has more viewers than all of the Sun Belt has votes. He said, 'I have to support President Ford's position of renegotiating the Canal Treaty and I think Reagan would too if he knew more.' And Vice President Rockefeller who, as I hinted earlier, has understandable reasons for enjoying the sight of a Republican on the right coming a cropper, he said Reagan is a man who doesn't do his homework on key issues of national security. He says we had the same sovereign rights over Panama that we had over Louisiana which is a factual misrepresentation. 

Incidentally, the Vice President thought President Ford lost Texas last Tuesday so spectacularly because he refused, last winter, to veto a bill which permitted only a very modest increase in the price of petrol. The president's action is one that probably gathered him many more votes from outside Texas than it ever lost him in the oil state itself. Mr Rockefeller mentioned that when he was in Texas, a couple of months ago, the Republican chairman of Texas said, 'If the president didn't veto the bill, he'd lose every delegate to the convention', which is what appears to have happened. 

It's worth a mention, anyway, when people are waxing hysterical over Reagan's massive triumph in the state that lives by oil revenues. I've quoted Senator Goldwater to the exclusion of scores of pundits who are writing themselves into a daze over the tragic collapse of Gerald Ford and the coming presidency of Ronald Reagan, because Goldwater has immense, even decisive, influence on the conservatives in the Republican Party. 

Nixon was really doomed the day that Goldwater – not any liberal, not any moderate, not any close friend – went to the White House and told him he had to go. What Goldwater fears, of course, is a split and bitter Republican convention which could then write not a winning ticket, but an entry permit for Jimmy Carter to live in the White House. But, again, Goldwater sucks his teeth and discounts Carter and reads over again Hubert Humphrey's speech renouncing his candidacy. 

'I listened to that statement of refusal', Goldwater said, 'and if it wasn't filled with hand-graved invitations, I've never seen one.'

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.

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