"A Man, A Plan"

...But the New Right had only just begun to fi ght, organizing to oppose pro-treaty senators...

...According to the broadcasts, Carter and his allies were conspiring to give away “the American canal in Panama” to Sovietfriendly, Cuba-coddling tyrants...

...One of the most vocal extortionists, Manuel Noriega, an aide to Torrijos, briefed visiting U.S...

...This is a valuable book about an issue that has been largely ignored by historians, but which contributed immensely to conservative political success...

...In New Jersey former Reagan aide Jeffrey Bell knocked off the old guard GOP senator Clifford Case in a primary, while in New Hampshire an unknown airline pilot and antitreaty organizer, Gordon Humphrey, beat the incumbent senator Thomas McIntyre almost exclusively over the Panama Canal...

...and cowboy icon John Wayne lined up for the treaties (Wayne and Torrijos were fi shing buddies...

...Even candidate Jimmy Carter took Ford to task for his plan to “give up complete control . . . in the Panama Canal Zone...

...Truth Squads” toured the country to gin up opposition to the “giveaway” of the Panama Canal...

...BY CRAIG SHIRLEY Thirty years ago oil was at historic highs, gold prices peaked, and America’s name was mud—plus ?a change, plus c’est la m?me chose...

...Instead of selling kitchen knives to insomniacs, the American Conservative Union sold information and righteous indignation in 30minute doses to nine million-plus television viewers...

...And yet, despite a two-year media barrage, massive fundraising campaign, and the palpable opposition of the American people, treaty proponents scraped together the necessary votes for ratifi cation...

...Then, the major league fi ght over the Panama Canal treaties pitted a liberal American establishment resigned to declining American greatness against an upstart New Right struggling to fi nd its political and philosophical footing while battling the complacent elements of what was left of the Grand Old Party...

...To be sure, readers should be wary of the lessons Clymer draws from this episode: Although he strives to be fair-minded, his bias occasionally peeks through as he blames the “divisiveness” of modern politics on the tactics and rhetoric conservatives first used to great effect in the treaty fi ght...

...he thundered in speech after speech—and the issue catapulted him to within a whisker of wresting the Republican nomination from the sitting president, Gerald Ford...

...Conservative organizations, including the American Conservative Union led by Rep...

...But the legacy of that fi ght is this: Being too far out of touch with the concerns of average Americans can cost elected representatives their seats—as a number of Democrats and liberal Republicans learned firsthand...

...And Clymer’s wealth of interviews and insider knowledge— including, I should disclose, my own research material on the subject— makes Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch indispensable to any student of modern political history...

...Ordinary Americans believed that kowtowing to the Panamanian military dictator, Omar Torrijos, would only further weaken America’s position in the world...

...Panama’s leaders frequently implied that the situation would either resolve itself peacefully (in Panama’s favor) or violently...

...We paid for it...

...In 1976, two years before the treaties went to the Senate for ratifi cation, the struggling GOP candidate Reagan struck a nerve with his opposition to the treaties in the primaries...

...The two Canal treaties— the fi rst to guarantee the neutrality of the canal through American force of arms, the second to cede control of the canal to Panama over time—represented a perfect political storm for the right, argues the longtime New York Times reporter Adam Clymer in Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch...

...Philip Crane, and individuals such as Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, joined forces to lean on soft treaty votes...

...One of the signal innovations to come out of the treaty fi ght was the infomercial...

...All across the country the New Right ran largely against Democratic luminaries rather than for their Republican rivals, and although these campaigns often came down to a lot more than the treaty, Panama was an undercurrent in almost every close race in the 1978 and ’80 cycles—where the GOP picked up 15 seats...

...And as he illustrates here, the status of a small strip of land in Central America helped to propel Ronald Reagan into the White House with a Republican Senate and, as a result, transformed our country...

...Clymer explains that Carter’s reversal came after Henry Kissinger and Sol Linowitz, Carter’s point man on Latin America, advised him that further delays in the treaty would cause irreparable harm to U.S.-Latin American relations, with Mexico even willing to dispatch troops to Panama’s aid in the event of confl ict...

...When Theodore Roosevelt committed himself to doing what Europe’s greatest empires had failed to accomplish— building a canal across the isthmus of Panama—he was signaling to the world that America’s time had come...

...We built it...

...But the Right was not unifi ed in its opposition...

...Indeed, the issue was still so toxic 20 years later that neither Bill Clinton nor his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, attended the formal handover of the Canal...

...And in circles on the New Right, this unconditional surrender of American power and prestige could not be allowed...

...Even William F. Buckley Jr...

...senators on the “vulnerability” of the canal to a coordinated sabotage campaign...

...Still, Clymer’s bias is minimal, and he is “old school” in the sense that, while his politics may be of some particular persuasion, it almost never infected his prodigious and impressive writing for the Times...

...In fi tting paradox, conservatives won by losingCraig Shirley, president of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, is the author, most recently, of Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America...

...As Clymer notes, hyperbole was not new to American politics, but delivering it in such a palatable and accessible way certainly was...

...After Carter took offi ce, the treaty fi ght began in earnest as Carter, with the aid of establishment fi xtures such as Kissinger and Ford, twisted senators’ arms to reach the 67-vote threshold for ratification...

...When Ronald Reagan signed an anti-treaty fundraising letter that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Republican National Committee, RNC chairman William Brock refused to back the truth squads financially...

...When Jimmy Carter (and all four of his immediate predecessors) agreed to cede that feat of American engineering and will to (in Ronald Reagan’s words) “a tinhorn dictator,” it seemed to many that Carter was signaling that America’s time had gone...

...Clymer makes the convincing case that the Panama Canal Treaties fi ght represents a watershed moment for the conservative movement, where it sharpened its tactics and vaulted itself into power...

...It’s ours and we’re gonna keep it...