Word: waterways
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though U.S. conservatives have made the canal something of a political issue, public support for American control has waned somewhat in the U.S. because the waterway is not so important as it used to be. Some 10% of all American exports and imports pass through the waterway; if the canal was shut down, American commerce would be hurt but not disrupted in a major way. Increasingly, traffic is diverted from the canal, whose locks are too small to accommodate the growing fleet of supertankers. Since 1973, the Panama Canal has been losing money, and its deficit in the past fiscal...
...soon as he took office, Jimmy Carter put the canal at the top of the agenda of the National Security Council, although in the presidential campaign he had pledged "never to give up complete control or practical control" of the waterway. Vance subsequently held a wellpublicized, two-hour meeting with then Panamanian Foreign Minister Aquilino Boyd. To give the talks a boost, Sol Linowitz, 53, the skilled former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States, was added to the American negotiating team. The aim was to make him head of the effort, but he insisted on deferring to Veteran...
...major remaining issue: while the U.S. is willing to turn over some of its 14 military bases to Panama and operate the others jointly with the Panamanian army, it insists on keeping some kind of residual force to protect the waterway in case of armed attack or sabotage. Panama, on the other hand, wants to entrust such a peace-keeping mission to the U.N.-a proposition that the U.S. views with skepticism...
...Greene sees what he calls a "charisma of desperation." It communicates an impatience with the inert diplomacy over the Canal issue, but also a desire to leave a mark on history. If he doesn't do so on the dotted line on the document that restores sovereignty over the waterway to Panama, Greene hints he plans to leave it in blood...
Once they were the undisputed mistresses of the world's greatest commercial waterway. They still evoke memories of a long-departed era that Mark Twain -whose very nom de plume is derived from navigation terminology of the day -described in Life on the Mississippi. Today the great paddle-wheeling river steamboat is a species almost as endangered as the whooping crane-and likewise protected by the Government. The last wooden-decked steamboat, the 50-year-old Delta Queen, plies the 1,500 miles of river from Cincinnati to New Orleans under a special congressional exemption from the federal safety...