Panama treaty agreed

Well, after a flare-up of hot weather which was enough to bring out the Japanese cherry blossom and the tourists in Washington, the spring retired again to the south and the rest of us, up north, were left with a cold spring, torrential rains and an inclination to stay indoors and goggle over the surprising spurt of things that the Carter administration has done or, some people say, has had done to it.

Certainly the news out of Washington was not typical of a normal spring when Congress tends to behave like a trade union that's thinking about a new contract. That's to say, they look over the president’s proposals for new legislation, they X-ray them for hidden intentions – what does he really have in mind? – and tread water before plunging into a vote or a fight. In other words, spring is the time when Congress has had about three months to digest all the president's proposals to bring in the millennium and has to make up its mind whether what is on the way is the millennium or hell on wheels. 

On the main and very treacherous issue, the issue of the Panama Canal, the Senate, which had been playing its hand very close to its chest, was suddenly called on to declare. The initiative came from the Panamanians themselves. The Senate was debating the second, the final, draft of the treaty between Panama and the United States on how much control America would have over the canal if there was a military threat to it. 

It's quite understandable for the rest of the world to yawn over this problem in a time when one bomb could dispose of all the ships and men who might be sent to defend it. But then the Panamanians heard that a senator from Arizona had proposed a clause which gave the United States the right to rush in with arms and men in any emergency that threatened to close the canal. Now the Panamanians had been given to understand that the United States was going to relinquish its traditional controls step by step and that by the year 2000, they would own it. 

News of the Arizona amendment triggered a tidal wave down there of anti-Americanism and 'Yankee go homeism'. The president of Panama – whom the administration had been teaching us to admire in spite of the awkward fact that he's a dictator not deeply devoted to Mr Carter's views on human rights – the president of Panama found the proposed treaty unacceptable. 

Now at this point you'd expect the initiative to pass over to Mr Carter. He is, after all, the president, is he not? And he has the power to conclude treaties with foreign nations? That is so. But only, the constitution says, only with the advice and consent of the Senate. 

Well, at this point, the president’s man in the Senate, the Democratic leader Senator Byrd of West Virginia, let the White House know that neither he nor his colleagues were offering advice nor promising consent. Senator Byrd is what most of Mr Carter's young advisers are not – he's an old and adroit politician or what, in other countries, is called an experienced parliamentarian. The big difference, however, is that in a parliamentary system, the party in power advises the prime minister, maybe argues with him, but, in the end, the decision rests with you, prime minister. But in any big battle in Congress, the president can huff and puff and deplore and foresee Armageddon or whatever, but he has to stay out of the showdown. 'The battle', as Lincoln said, 'belongs to the general in the field.' And that general was Senator Byrd. 

He told the White House firmly, with minimum politeness, to stay out of it. He had counted heads and what he saw was the probability of a victory for the Arizona amendment and therefore the collapse of the treaty and 13 years of negotiations in ruins. If not a defeat for the White House, he warned, then at best a stalemate, an actual tie vote. The constitution requires the Senate to pass treaties by a two-thirds majority. That means that at least 67 senators must say 'Aye!' 

Well, the final vote came last Tuesday and Senator Byrd's guess was a good deal more accurate than the White House's assurances. In fact, Senator Byrd was right on the button. When the vote was called, Senator Byrd passed. When the vote tallied at 66 for the treaty and 32 against it, Senator Byrd asked for recognition and cast the decisive 67th vote. And that was it. 

Mr Carter, by the way, was following the vote in his office, along with a couple of his Georgia cronies or, as they're more formally known, presidential aides, and his chief security adviser. Once the roll call was done, Mr Carter picked up the phone and called Senator Byrd and, in a rare outburst of euphoria, he said, 'You're a great man senator, it was a beautiful vote.' 

Now, why, if things were so close in prospect should Senator Byrd beg the president and his kitchen Cabinet to stay out of it? Well, because there was an alarming number – maybe a majority – of senators who wanted to vote for the Arizona amendment which gave the United States the right to intervene in the military defence of the canal. Senator Byrd had no intention of letting the treaty go to the vote on that issue in those words. He got very busy negotiating a reservation which would declare that the United States would never intervene in Panama's internal affairs. And that was the final reservation that was adopted and it was on that that the last vote came. 

As a practical matter, what I think this means is that in any threat to the canal it would be up to Panama and not to the United States to decide whether she needed help from outside. This may look like the most delicate method of splitting a hair but passions can turn on such an operation and I, for one, shouldn't be surprised in the 1980 presidential election, the defeated hawks raised a hullabaloo crying 'sell out' and 'betrayal' and worse in their campaign against the re-election of Mr Carter or the election of some other man that, by then, the Democrats may come to prefer. 

If that sounds like hair-splitting, think of the passions that have seared the debates in the United Nations over that old resolution which was drafted to ensure that Israel should give up her conquests in the 1967 war. This whole enormous hassle has turned on one word. The United Nations resolution said that Israel should withdraw from lands occupied during the 1967 war and, to the great majority, this meant that Israel should withdraw from 'the' lands, that's 'all' the lands so occupied. But the Israelis have taken it in the spirit of a careful lawyer. It didn't say 'the lands.' It said 'lands' which, to them, means 'some lands'. 

Well, I suppose for the time being Mr Carter's other troubles will be blurred by what the international edition of the Herald Tribune headlines as, 'Political Triumph for Carter'. The New York Times put it another way. 'The Senate', it said, 'voted to turn over the Panama Canal to Panama in the year 2000, thereby saving Carter from a grave political defeat.' Here, the difference between a political triumph and a grave, political defeat was one vote, the vote of Senator Byrd. Hair's-breadth salvation from a grave, political defeat would, I think, be a more accurate way of putting it. 

Well, among the other things that we barely had time to notice during the thunder over the Panama Canal, was an interesting ruling of the Supreme Court which struck down a provision almost 200 years old of the Tennessee Constitution which forbade clergymen from political office on, I suppose, the grounds that in a nation which not only has no established religion, but which expressly forbids an establishment of religion, a parson who was also a congressman would find it impossible to determine the priority between the church and the state. There were two dissenters on these grounds but the majority of the court felt that even in running for political office, a parson deserves the equal protection of the laws.

This could lead to some boiling trouble if we ever again had such a fiery demagogue in a turnaround collar as the late Father Coughlin who had a vast radio audience in the 1930s for his peculiar and powerful brand of authoritarianism with more than a touch of anti-Semitism. 

And then we heard, or might have if anybody had been listening, that Mexico has decided it doesn't want 26 American jet fighter planes it had requested. Once again Mr Carter must be grateful for the other fellow's initiative. He was caught in a contradiction. He proclaims he wants to reduce the sale of arms to foreigners. 

On the other hand, he doesn't want to do anything to offend Mexico at a time when he's trying to get Mexico to help in stifling the export of hard drugs and to arrest the dreadful flow of illegal immigrants. The best guess is that there are about seven million Mexicans illegally in the United States, or about 80 per cent of the American unemployment figure. However, Mexico says it doesn't want the planes for the simplest of reasons. It can't afford them. 

Then Mr Brezhnev spoke out on the neutron bomb issue – well, not exactly spoke out, he came through with what the administration can only hear as a Bronx cheer. The point, the White House has claimed, the point of holding back on the neutron bomb was to be nice to the Soviets in the hope that they would be nice to us. 

In other words, in exchange for not making a weapon which would pulverise any Soviet tank advance through Western Europe, Mr Carter hoped the Russians would say, 'OK, we'll cut back or dismantle some of our fine weapons.' So... well, so Mr Brezhnev says, 'obviously', and I quote, 'obviously Russia is not going to do any such thing'. Well it is, or it will soon, seem to be a shattering sentence. It could mean to the Russians that the United States is not willing 'yet' to guarantee the effective protection of Western Europe for fear of being beastly to the Soviet Union. Plainly, I imagine, Mr Carter is going to have to think again about the neutron bomb. 

However, let us take courage. There is another switch of policy. The United States has accepted the invitation of North Korea to send a ping-pong team there for the first time. And this, as we all know with China, is a gesture toward détente. It is, however, a move that must be deeply baffling to the 40,000 Americans stationed in South Korea for its defence against the North.

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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