Ernest Graves
There were areas of several tens of thousands of square miles that were going to have
to be evacuated at least temporarily. We estimated that there were 30,000 Indians living
in this area. A solution was never devised for this. Of course, the bottom line was that
the relations with Panama evolved. At the political level, you had a shift.
There were the riots in '64 when [Lyndon B.] Johnson first became President. Johnson,
who was very anxious to be every bit as effective as his predecessor in the foreign
affairs area, felt he had to do something. We got full support from Johnson for a policy
that said that we were willing to change our treaty relationship with Panama because
we were going to build a sea-level canal. This was all part of a package.
We came up with the notion, and they pursued this, of negotiating three new treaties
with Panama. There would be a new treaty covering the present canal. There would be
a new treaty covering our military rights--the stationing of our troops down there. And
there would be a third new treaty which would cover the sea-level canal.
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Tom Mann supported this. After
a period of year or so, he was replaced in that position by the person who had been our
ambassador to Panama. He took a totally different view of this.
Whereas Mann had felt that we should hold out the sea-level canal and the possibility
of building it in other countries to keep Panama in line, the man who had been the
ambassador to Panama and who succeeded Mann held the view that we owed it to
Panama to redress all their grievances as the result of the unfair relationship that we had
with them, extending back to the original treaty. He felt that it wasn't right for us to
frighten them with the possibility that we'd pick up our marbles and build a canal
someplace else.
The whole tenor of the thing changed. The whole concept that we were going to build
a sea-level canal also got shunted aside, based on the point that the canal was Panama's
biggest industry. If you built a sea-level canal there would be an unmanageable boom
during the construction, followed by a catastrophic depression when the construction
ended and there was nothing left to do but watch the ships sail by.
These political things that I've just described tended to eliminate the top-level interest
in the sea-level canal as a mechanism for solving the political problem. It was seen as
more of a trouble than an aid.
When that was coupled with the technical difficulties, the whole idea went away. One
other technical difficulty that deserves to be mentioned is that we learned much more
about the transmission of disturbances in the ground from nuclear explosions.
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