Storm over The Canal

As Carter & Co. mount a hard sell, opposition also mounts

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 to prove an impossible one.

Carter must sell the treaty not 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.

The President focused his first selling efforts on two influential Republicans. Twice last week he spoke on the phone to Gerald Ford. First Carter called the former President at his vacation retreat in Vail, Colo. The next afternoon Ford called Carter at Camp David; the President thanked him "for this example of bipartisan support." In between conversations, Ford had been briefed for 90 minutes by Sol Linowitz (who had negotiated the terms, along with Ellsworth Bunker), and by Gen. George S. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the White House, Carter had former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger over for lunch and stressed that the agreement was part of "an absolute continuum of what you and [former President Ford] started." Kissinger, whose foreign policy was a major target during last year's presidential campaign, must have been amused by Carter's talk of a continuum; his response went unrecorded. In any event, after further briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he went on record with his support.

By the end of the week, some critics were complaining about the publicity blitz. Said Robert Michel, No. 2 House Republican: "We have been asked to wait for phone calls that never come and detailed briefings that never materialize. Meanwhile, the President and his top negotiators are saturating the air waves with praise for the agreement."

The 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 and Linowitz to a hurriedly convened hearing. His committee, Murphy said, was not about to watch the canal "go down the drain" without some say in it all.

In that same spirit, the Senate's most critical Republicans, including 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 Stadium, but Strongman Omar Torrijos Herrera had robbed them of much of their thunder at a meeting of Panama's toothless legislature earlier in the day. Torrijos praised Carter and exhorted voters to turn out in the national plebiscite on the canal agreements.

Clearly, however, Torrijos' friendly mood would change instantly if the treaty were rejected--or substantially delayed--by Congress. Linowitz, stopping off in Denver after visiting Ford to attend an American Legion Convention, claimed to have won a convert or two among the anti-treaty legionnaires. This week he stalks still bigger game: former California Governor Ronald Reagan, who earlier had denounced Carter's campaign for support as a "medicine show." To the dismay of the critics, Reagan agreed to withhold criticism until he had been briefed by Linowitz and Bunker. It seemed unlikely, however, that Reagan would join such conservative Republicans as Senators S.I. Hayakawa and Barry Goldwater in an endorsement.

Nobody could be sure just how the votes would fall in the Senate. "Anybody who says he has an accurate head count now is crazy," said Carter Aide Hamilton Jordan, who is coordinating White House ratification efforts. "There are guys on record as being against the treaty who I think will eventually support it." As for Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd's suggestion that the vote be delayed until next year, Jordan said simply: "We certainly don't want an early vote if we're going to lose."

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