Word: panama
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Confronted a few days ago with opposition to the new Panama Canal Treaty, Carter explained his position in terms of cold logic, as usual-but almost instinctively, he also reached out for the butter dish. When Ambassador Sol Linowitz called Carter from Panama City to report that an agreement would be reached within hours, one of Carter's first requests was that Linowitz phone the news to Jerry Ford up in Vail. At least three times Carter personally talked to Ford on the phone, then sent Linowitz, General George Brown, and former Ford Aide Brent Scowcroft...
With a long-sought agreement on the future of the Panama Canal finally in hand, President Carter last week mounted a hard-sell campaign aimed at whipping the treaty through the Senate as quickly as possible. Administration emissaries fanned out to brief influential politicians, and Carter himself got on the phone to promote the pact. Yet winning approval by two-thirds of the Senate-where cries of "Giveaway!" are sure to echo and the filibuster remains a real threat-could prove a difficult, divisive and time-consuming task. Winning that approval before the end of the year is likely...
...only to the Senate but also to a public that may need a good deal of persuading. An Opinion Research Corporation poll of 1,100 Americans conducted before the new agreement was initialed showed that 78% wanted to keep the canal, whereas only 14% favored ceding it to Panama. Of course, those figures could change drastically now that a treaty is in sight...
...basic agreement negotiated by Bunker and Linowitz would give Panama control of the canal by the end of the century. A second agreement gives the U.S. the right to defend the canal's "neutrality" beyond the year 2000. Both must be okayed by the Senate. Not clear, though, is whether a majority of the House will have to approve the first treaty, since it involves disposal of U.S. property. Moving to assert the authority of the lower house, New York's conservative Democratic Congressman John Murphy, chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, summoned Bunker...
...North Carolina's Jesse Helms, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond and Utah's Orrin Hatch, flew to the Canal Zone aboard an Air Force plane to listen to the complaints of Americans living there. No sooner did they leave, having ingested what one American businessman in Panama called "an overdose of fuel for their case," than Mississippi's Senator James Eastland arrived for more of the same. At week's end, some 2,000 American Zonians, mainly employees of the Panama Canal Company and members of their families, staged an anti-treaty rally in Balboa...