Engineer Memoirs
Q:
This is the Harold Brown you worked for later?
A:
Yes. He had been the deputy director at Livermore. And Gerry Johnson who had been
the associate director for testing and Plowshare at Livermore became the assistant to
the Secretary of Defense for Atomic Energy, the chairman of the Military Liaison
Committee. They were interested in these peaceful uses--Johnson, in particular.
The other thing that happened was that President [Roberto] Chiari of Panama wrote a
letter to President [John F.] Kennedy asking about renegotiating the 1904 treaty. The
White House referred that to the State Department, where it was placed in the hands
of a lady named Kay Bracken, one of the top people in the Bureau of American
Republics, with responsibility for Central America. She had the job of coming up with
an answer to this letter.
The view of the State Department, then, was that any effort to renegotiate this treaty
would be nothing but trouble. Of course, later it proved quite difficult for other
Presidents, and President [Jimmy] Carter had quite a time getting it ratified. The State
Department really didn't want to get this started.
They were groping around for some way to deal with this political problem. They came
up with the following: if they proposed the sea-level canal as something that had to be
looked at, this would postpone everything.
Q:
Construction in politics?
A:
They wrote to Chiari to the effect that, we know there are difficulties, but the United
States really cannot consider a new arrangement with Panama until we decide whether
or not we should build a sea-level canal. Incidentally, I'm rusty on this, but there was
some provision relevant to a sea-level canal resulting from the 1935 revision of the
treaty agreed to by President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt.
There was a provision that gave the United States some rights with respect to building
a sea-level canal. So we could write to Chiari that, until we resolved whether we were
going to build a sea-level canal or not, we couldn't really get down to cases on any new
arrangements.
There was another angle to this whole thing. The State Department thought that the
Army Corps of Engineers had a lot of friends up in Congress and that they would get
the Army Corps of Engineers engaged in this sea-level canal project. Then, if, in fact,
the new arrangement with Panama was an integral part of building a sea-level canal,
they would get the Corps of Engineers to help them put this whole thing across in
Congress.
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