President-elect Donald Trump surprised many earlier this month when at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, he declined to assure the public that he would not use military coercion against Panama. Trump suggested he would consider using military force to gain or regain control of the Panama Canal.
He claimed that the U.S. is charged higher rates for its ships to sail the canal than those of other countries, and that Panama is in violation of a deal with the U.S. He said, “China is basically taking it over.” He threatened to try to take it back saying that returning it to U.S. control is vital to national security of the U.S.
While it is not clear what deal Trump was referring to, under the terms of a Carter administration treaty that transitioned control of the canal from the U. S.to Panama by 1999, the United States would hold the right to defend the canal from any change to its neutrality.
The attention to Panama and the Panama Canal does not surprise Carter Wrenn, a former protégée of the late Senator Jesse Helms. Wrenn devotes much of his new book, “The Trail of the Serpent: Stories from the Smoke-Filled Rooms of Politics,” to Helms’s use of the Panama Canal issue to fight his Republican rivals in the 1976 and 1980 presidential primary elections.
In 1976 Helms supported former California Governor Ronald Regan, who was against any change in U.S. control of the Canal. His opponent was the then current President Gerald Ford, who favored the agreement to transfer the Canal to the Panamanian government. Regan did so poorly in the early primaries that he considered dropping out. But in March he won the North Carolina primary and found an issue that helped him in future contests.
When pollster Arthur Finkelstein “stared at his last poll in the North Carolina, his eyes locked on one number: ninety-two percent of the voters opposed giving away the Panama Canal. He sat for a moment looked up at Tom Ellis: ‘Hit Ford for the Panama Canal giveaway—don’t say a word about anything else for the last five days.’”
“Four years later, after the Democrats gave up the Panama Canal, they lost the Senate but a week before our primary no one had heard the words ‘Panama Canal giveaway’ in a campaign; none of us knew it then but Arthur (the pollster) had found the issue that wreaked havoc on Gerald Ford—fear drove that river and Grim-faced men and women saw the Panama Canal giveaway as the heart of weakness.”
Wrenn’s book is full of stories about Helms and Ellis and their transformation from conservative Democrats to effective Republicans.
Wrenn is a great storyteller and he has great stories to tell.
I asked Wrenn about the title of his book “The Trail of the Serpent.” Here is his response: ”There is a poem by Irish poet Thomas Moore – it includes a line, ‘Some flow’rets of Eden ye still inherit, but the trail of the Serpent is over them all.’ That’s where the line came from. It’s at the front of the book, before the table of contents. And I mentioned it once more on the last page of the last chapter. Basically, I wrote about ‘the trail of the serpent’ — the devil — and ‘the flowers of Eden’ across 50 years of politics.”
D.G. Martin, a lawyer, retired as UNC system vice president for public affairs in 1997. He hosted PBC-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch,” for more than 20 years.
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