Engineer Memoirs
my good friends. I see him quite a bit, although not as often as I'd like because now
he's up in New York.
We had this negotiation. The head negotiator for the United States was the same
Robert Anderson that headed the study commission. His deputy was John Erwin, who
has held various senior jobs in the State Department, including Deputy Secretary of
State.
Jack Erwin was negotiating with the Panamanian team. I was the Defense
representative, but I did not sit in on negotiations. Erwin would meet with us almost
every day, go over various points, and ask us to come back to him with solutions.
An Air Force lawyer, Bernie Ramundo, from the Office of the Secretary of Defense,
worked on base rights issues. His contribution was all the rights we should retain for
our military that are stationed in Panama.
My contribution was all the things that we should do as far as this new canal. A number
of State Department people were involved.
We drafted treaties, and we spent a lot of time getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS]
to address these treaty issues. I remember the Chief of Naval Operations really cared
about only one thing, and that was whether we'd be allowed to continue flying the
American flag. We could never get him to focus on some of the more complex issues,
such as the right of passage through the canal.
The Montreux Convention governs the use of the Suez Canal by various types of ships,
including ships of war. The Montreux Convention was not then the exact regime that
controlled the Panama Canal. The treaty provided that the United States would have
priority on use of the canal. Of course, during World War II, we didn't pay any
attention to any of this stuff. We used the canal exclusively, and nobody else came near
it.
But if you were going into a regime where you were going to share control with
Panama, then you had to be more concerned about the use of the canal by our Navy and
allied navies, and possibly by hostile navies, as well.
This was one of the things we were working on: what would be said in this treaty about
who could use the canal and when and so forth? There were some people in the Navy
who were concerned about that. But the main thing I remember is that we spent
inordinate amounts of time talking about whose flag would fly. The issue for the
Panamanians was it was going to be their flag. That was a big waste of time, in my
opinion.
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