Word: canallers
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...team had to cope with allies as well as adversaries. At certain critical points, President Carter disrupted negotiations by sounding off in public. In a speech last month, for example, he casually remarked that the U.S. might retain "partial sovereignty" over the canal even after 2000. Panamanians, who thought that issue had been settled, exploded in outrage until they were reassured by Bunker and Linowitz. "Well," noted a participant, "there isn't much we can do about loose language...
...fate of the treaty in the U.S. is less certain. Commitment to a U.S.-controlled canal is deeply embedded in popular sentiment and skillfully exploited by such conservative Republican Senators as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Helms flaunts a recent poll of 1,011 adult Americans by the Opinion Research Corporation, showing 78% for keeping the canal, only 14% willing to cede it to Panama. Yet the survey does not specify the conditions under which the U.S. might relinquish the canal...
...minimum of 34 will be needed to block the treaty). Proponents are encouraged by the defection of Barry Goldwater and S.I. Hayakawa. Since Barry switched, he says that Ronald Reagan has not spoken to him. Explains Goldwater, resignedly: "I would have said that we should fight for the canal if necessary. But the Viet Nam years have taught me that we wouldn't. So we might as well hand it over." During his California senatorial campaign, Hayakawa quipped: "We stole it fair and square." He now insists that he was only being waggish. He thinks the agreement is fair...
...lobbyists and educators will have to field a number of thorny questions about the canal and its future...
Trying to hang on to the canal in the face of growing opposition might be more of a threat to U.S. security than gradually ceding control. "This thing is terribly explosive," says a high Administration source. "If the treaty is rejected, we'll confront a bloody mess in Panama, and elsewhere." It is generally conceded that the waterway is basically indefensible. Determined guerrillas could close it down for an indefinite period by lobbing a few hand grenades into lock machinery. Says a top British military expert: "The whole history of the years of decolonization since 1945 has shown that however...