by Julie Greene
A housewife from Nebraska, it turns out, helps to illustrate some of these themes. During the winter of 1978, Helen Greene, a fifty-four-year-old mother living in a small town who had long been active in the Democratic Party, received a summons from Washington, D.C. Her newly elected senator, the Democrat Edward Zorinsky, had emerged as a critical undecided vote in the ratification battle. President Carter, seeking every possible means of convincing Zorinsky to support the treaties, had offered to present his case personally to around two hundred Nebraskans. Carter believed Zorinsky was willing to support the treaties but feared political fallout from his conservative constituents back home. Thus, in a creative effort to win Zorinsky’s support, Carter planned to reach out to some of those constituents, educate them about the canal, and thereby convince Zorinsky to vote in favor of the treaties.14
If Jimmy Carter had known anything about Helen Greene, he likely would have imagined her as the perfect person to win over. She identified herself as a progressive Democrat. She followed political developments closely and was an intelligent and educated woman. Over the years she had combined her work as a mother and housewife with ardent support for Democratic causes, walking the sidewalks of her small town to distribute campaign literature and sending her children out for the same purpose if she was too busy cooking dinner. She had worn a variety of political hats, serving as public relations chairman of Nebraska Citizens for Kennedy during the 1960presidential campaign, winning appointment in 1964to the new Nebraska Commission on the Status of Women, and working for two years as public safety coordinator in the administration of Governor Frank Morrison. As president of the Democratic Women’s Second Congressional District Caucus in the mid- 1970s, Helen Greene was one of the people Senator Zorinsky suggested should receive an invitation to the White House.
Greene was curious to hear what the president would say, she remembered years later, as she packed a light bag for her trip to Washington, D.C. She had bought a new wool coat in Nebraska City for the occasion, and it came in handy when a howling blizzard hit the state just as she headed to the airport. The weather was so bad Greene’s husband had to drive her to the airport in their pickup truck. The plane was filled with Nebraskans heading to meet the president, to the surprise of stewardesses serving them snacks and coffee, and discussion about their journey filled the airplane.
As the two hundred Nebraskans arrived at the White House, First Lady Rosalynn Carter greeted each of them individually. They received a personal briefing by President Carter, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Together these men explained the reasons for transferring the canal to Panama, the history of the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty signed in 1903, the security issues at stake, and the larger consequences of attempting to hold on to the canal indefinitely. They stressed that the United States would retain the right to defend the canal even after Panama assumed complete control in 2000, and that the canal had grown gradually less important economically to the United States. Afterward the men and women from Nebraska enjoyed cake decorated with the president’s seal and served on china Jacqueline Kennedy had purchased.
Helen Greene was an experienced and well-informed citizen, and now she had attentively received a fine education on the politics and history of the canal. She returned home and dutifully gave a few talks on what she had learned to local schools and Democratic clubs. None of it, however, changed her mind. She continued to have reservations, she wished the United States would not relinquish control, and she felt nervous about the future of the canal once it fell to the Panamanians to maintain. Senator Edward Zorinsky agreed. Despite constant and aggressive courting by President Carter, Zorinsky voted against ratification of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties. Luckily for Carter and for the people of Panama, enough senators voted in favor to ratify the treaties. Zorinsky’s vote had not been needed after all.
Latin Americans warmly welcomed the treaties. Torrijos declared the agreement to be a “triumph” because it “decolonizes and does so rapidly.” Bolivia designated a “day of national rejoicing” to celebrate the treaties. Costa Rican president Daniel Oduber noted that the “U.S. is showing the Third World that in this hemisphere the relations between the most powerful nation and the small countries are conducted in an atmosphere of equality and mutual respect.” In the United States, however, anger and bitterness greeted the “loss” of the canal. The remarkable pride and sense of ownership Americans had historically placed in the canal made it difficult for them to say good-bye. Twelve thousand U.S. citizens living in the Canal Zone—the so-called Zonians—found the changes particularly painful to accept. On September 30, 1979, Panama acquired jurisdiction over the Canal Zone, even though the United States would continue to manage the canal itself until the end of 1999. The New York Times described an “unmistakably funereal mood” in Balboa as Zonians prepared to see their way of life disappear. Some families had lived in the Zone since the construction era. One Zonian commented sadly, “The past is dead. Teddy Roosevelt is in the ground.” The journalist Alan Riding seemed as emotional as any Zonian, comparing the United States’ loss of the Zone to “a nation going down to defeat.”15
The Torrijos-Carter Treaties did not mean that the United States would remove itself from Panamanian affairs. They provided for the presence of U.S. troops and military bases until the final transfer of power occurred on December 31, 1999, and fourteen bases across the isthmus provided a home to thousands of U.S. military personnel. Over the decades Panama had become a major staging ground for U.S. military intervention in Latin America, with the establishment of such institutions as the Inter-American Air Forces Academy and the School of the Americas (which between them trained nearly eighty thousand Latin American military personnel and police between World War II and 1989). When Manuel Noriega rose to power in 1983, he made Panama into an efficient supporter of U.S. military goals in Central America, for example, allowing the use of his country for covert training and assisting the CIA in establishing a training camp for the Nicaraguan contras. Noriega even supplied men who were demolition specialists to Oliver North in 1985to help blow up a munitions dump in Managua, Nicaragua.16
Despite the strong alliance between Noriega’s government and the United States, disagreements between the two increased during the 1980s. By 1989protests against Noriega had risen within Panama as well because of his authoritarian military rule. Demonstrators in Panama protesting his dictatorship regularly confronted violence at the hands of the Panamanian national guard. President George H.W. Bush increasingly found himself unable to control Noriega, and this seemed particularly problematic at a time when the Torrijos-Carter Treaties were moving the two nations toward joint administration of the canal. Perhaps looking also to demonstrate the potency of his administration, Bush became convinced that Noriega had to be removed from power and that Panama’s national guard (known as the Panama Defense Forces, or PDF) had to be eliminated. The U.S. military determined that its goal would be “the disarming and dismantling of the Panama Defense Force.” The United States would not only install a new president of Panama but create a new police force under its control. Under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties the PDF was slated to defend the canal after the transfer on December 31, 1999, and the withdrawal of the United States. In a public message immediately after the invasion, President Bush declared his goals: to safeguard the lives of Americans, defend democracy in Panama, combat drug trafficking, and protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty. Ensuring continued U.S. control over Panama and its military as the date of transferring full sovereignty over the canal approached may well have been a central motivation for the invasion, although few documents have been released by the United States to date. Among Panamanians, however—including the many who suffered under Noriega’s rule—there is little doubt that this was a primary goal of the U.S. invasion of their country.17
The e
vents that triggered the invasion were evocative of the Cocoa Grove riots seven decades earlier. When a Marine intelligence vehicle ran through a roadblock and headed toward Noriega’s office, Panamanian national guardsmen fired upon it, and the gunfire killed one marine. In the aftermath of this incident a U.S. soldier and his wife who had observed the killing were taken into custody by the guardsmen, whereupon the soldier received a beating and the wife was threatened with sexual assault. Arguing that Panamanian guardsmen were placing American families’ lives at risk, Bush immediately ordered the invasion, along the way seeking to allay worries that he was a spineless president. The United States launched Operation Just Cause in the middle of the night on December 20, 1989, minutes after having sworn into office a new president on a U.S. military base in Panama. The invasion constituted the largest military operation conducted by the United States since the Vietnam War. The United States used overwhelming force to eliminate Panama’s small national guard, only three thousand men strong. Eighteen thousand Panamanians had to move into shelters as a result of the invasion, five thousand were detained in prison camps by U.S. soldiers, and the property damage reached higher than $ 1billion. As fires spread through Panama City and plumes of smoke rose high, a Panamanian woman interviewed by the New York Times declared, “This is horrible. Never in the history of our country has this been seen.” According to the Pentagon, more than five hundred Panamanians lost their lives, most of them residents of El Chorrillo, a working-class neighborhood. Human rights observers, however, have estimated that mortalities reached much higher than the Pentagon’s figure. Latin American governments, including Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru, vigorously condemned the invasion as a violation of Panamanian sovereignty.18
The economic, political, and emotional costs of the invasion to Panamanians were difficult to measure. In the short run the invasion clearly changed the power relationship between the United States and Panama to the benefit of the former. Yet over time nationalism within Panama and concerns over sovereignty—both heightened tremendously by Operation Just Cause—generated enormous opposition across the country to any continued U.S. military presence after the transfer of the canal. In persistent rounds of negotiation the United States, under President Bill Clinton, tried to maintain a presence, but Panamanians refused to accede to its demands. Thus on December 31, 1999, not only did the Panama Canal become the responsibility of the Republic of Panama, but all U.S. military bases shut down permanently, and most remaining troops were shipped out to Puerto Rico. As the sun set on December 30, U.S. soldiers took down their nation’s flag for the last time. The United States had planned to lower the flag during the ceremony transferring the canal the following day, but at the last moment officials decided to change course. They worried, they said, that lowering the flag during the official ceremony would inflame anti-Americanism in Panama; many U.S. and Panamanian citizens believed the real worry involved the passions of conservatives in the United States who opposed the transfer. Former Panamanian foreign minister Jorge Ritter stated, “Somehow, I think it would have been nobler to lower the flag at Friday’s ceremony. It would have been better for the two countries to end the relationship with a gesture of nobility and patriotism.”19
Nonetheless, it was a day of national jubilation in Panama as President Mireya Moscoso joined thousands of Panamanian citizens in front of the old commission headquarters to mark the moment in which the canal became Panama’s possession. President Moscoso shouted, “The canal is ours!” as Panamanian citizens cheered. Then Moscoso raised the flag of Panama and announced, “I tell the men, women and children of my country that there will be no more fences, no more signs blocking our entrance. This territory is ours again.” One Panamanian in the crowd witnessing the transfer, a seventeen-year-old student, captured the feelings of many as he waved a Panamanian flag and announced, “This is the culmination of a pending account. This is the achievement of complete sovereignty.”20
On the stage among the dignitaries during the ceremony that day was a man, Cecil Haynes, who had worked on the canal as an “office boy” for seventy-one years and whose father had arrived from Barbados in 1904to help build the canal. Haynes was born in 1913as the final touches were being put on the huge construction effort. In 1928he had begun working for the canal commission. Eighty-six years old now, Haynes explained, “My father and others instilled in me that I should respect their efforts in the construction of the canal. It was built mostly with the blood, sweat, and tears of blacks.” Although he would be standing among the VIPs during the transfer ceremony, Haynes declared, he was doing so as a living representative of the true VIPs, what he called the “Very Invisible People,” those like his father and thousands of other West Indians who built the canal. “I am representing the forgotten workers. They say I’m famous. Famous for what? Did I go to the moon? No. This is for the men who built the canal, who did something international, with loss of life.” Haynes described decades of living and working in the Zone among the Americans: “We had to work for them and keep them in the station they were accustomed to. We lived in the zone, too, but we were there to help them on the job and off the job. We were not equals.” Thus Haynes had his own reasons for celebrating as the Panamanian flag was raised and the canal was officially transferred to Panama: “I am glad we Panamanians now have the canal, and we will run it as well or better than the Americans did.”21
“The American Century ended today,” a journalist wrote, and perhaps for that very reason no ambitious U.S. politician cared to be present at the event. President Clinton stayed away, as did every significant member of his administration; the ranking U.S. official attending the ceremony was the secretary of the Army. One U.S. citizen who bothered to attend was Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus. He flew in to lobby for the reestablishment of U.S. military bases in Panama, offering that in return the United States might help clean up some of the estimated 110, 000pieces of unexploded munitions it had left littering Panama’s landscape. He demanded also that Panama cancel its port management contract with a Hong Kong–based company, arguing that its role would allow China to threaten the canal’s security. This had been a common refrain in the United States in the weeks leading up to the official transfer (“Asia Moves In On the Big Ditch,” one newspaper headline proclaimed). Another presidential campaign was under way in the United States, and the “loss” of the Panama Canal was very much on the minds of conservative activists. One of the rising Republican stars was the son of the president who had invaded Panama in 1989. Just days after the canal was transferred to Panama, the presidential candidate George W. Bush declared during a debate that he would “liberate the Panama Canal if I have to” in order to protect U.S. interests. If the American Century was over, no one had yet told candidate Bush.22
A FEW YEARS after the canal’s transfer, when I was in the early stages of researching this book, an alumni association invited me to serve as lecturer on a cruise through the Panama Canal. I jumped at the opportunity to embark upon this “sweet gig,” as a friend of mine put it. Along the way I learned some unexpected lessons about the canal and its place in American historical memory. My mother, Helen Greene—yes, the same Nebraska woman who had visited the White House in 1978—agreed to go with me.
Preparing my lecture as the ship made its way through the Pacific Ocean, heading toward the canal, I wondered if the audience would care to hear anything other than stories about Theodore Roosevelt, engineering challenges, conquest over nature, and the battle against the mosquito. Finally, I decided my talk should reflect the most interesting aspects of my research, and so I focused not on Roosevelt but on the international workforce that built the canal, particularly the West Indians. I covered topics like segregation, the silver and gold system, and the disadvantages West Indians faced—the housing without screens, the long hours of work standing in water. Audience members seemed engaged by my lecture—indeed, they appeared hungry to learn about the complexities of the construc
tion project even if it meant disrupting their own Rooseveltian notions of the era. The questions audience members asked confirmed that they were more than ready to embrace the history of the canal in all its tragedy and unromantic difficulty. Two specific reactions from audience members, however, suggested to me the dual legacies of the canal construction.
The first came just after my lecture ended. I had answered many questions from the audience and decided somewhat impulsively to introduce my mother to the group. I told the crowd briefly about her 1978visit to meet with President Carter, and then she stood up and waved to everyone. The audience seemed enchanted to have someone there who had played a part, however small, in the canal’s historic transfer back to Panama. And Mom, flushed with the attention, was enjoying the moment. Someone shouted out a question to her: “What did you think about giving the canal back to Panama? Did you approve?” Nearly eighty years old now, Helen Greene still possessed the articulate charm of a young woman. She stood up straight and addressed the crowd: “No, I didn’t approve. I didn’t think it was right back then, and I still don’t now. It was our canal and we should have kept it.” The crowd responded to Helen’s answer with terrific applause—one could imagine how Ronald Reagan felt when he unexpectedly tapped into a similar current of popular sentiment. I interjected some comments about what it meant to Panamanians to gain possession of the canal, how it symbolized independence, honor, and national identity to them, but my audience by now was energetically discussing all the reasons why returning it had been a betrayal of America’s responsibilities in the world. I was an alien in someone else’s conversation. Audience members eagerly shared with one another their sense of disappointment and frustration, and as they talked, one could discern palpable anger floating through that cruise ship auditorium. Americans no longer owned the canal, and a period of idealism and innocence in U.S. foreign policy had prematurely and unnecessarily ended.23