(2 of 4)
His first accomplishment was convincing the U.S. Senate—and Ohio's powerful Republican Mark Hanna—that the Panama route was superior to the Nicaraguan. His chief argument: Nicaragua was prey to volcanic eruptions. On the morning of a crucial Senate vote, Bunau-Varilla sent every Senator a Nicaraguan five-peso stamp picturing an erupting volcano that could have been Mount Momo-tombo, near the proposed canal line. The Senate switched to Panama on June 19, 1902. Soon afterward, Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay began to press Colombia to agree to a treaty. Their offer: $10 million in gold, plus an annual rent of $250,000. Colombia would retain sovereignty over a six-mile-wide Canal zone, but the U.S. would have the right to enforce its own regulations there. The U.S. Senate approved the treaty, but Bogota rejected it on Aug. 12,1903.
T.R. bristled. "I do not think that the Bogota lot of jack rabbits should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future highways of civilization," Roosevelt wrote Hay. Earlier that summer the New York lawyer for the French company, William Cromwell, left a meeting in Washington with the President to issue a press release stating that the province of Panama might secede from Colombia, in which case the U.S. would recognize Panama as an independent nation and conclude a treaty with the new state. This scheme seemed to violate an 1846 U.S. agreement to guarantee the sovereignty of Colombia in the isthmus. Violation or not, the plot was shortly put into effect.
As Historian David McCullough recounts in his current bestseller, The Path Between the Seas, a Panamanian secessionist who would soon become the first president of Panama, Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero, met with Bunau-Varilla in room 1162 of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on Sept. 24, 1903. Bunau-Varilla later called that room "the cradle of the Panama republic." The frail, bespectacled Amador wanted assurance that the U.S. would support a Panamanian revolution. Bunau-Varilla left for Washington to put the question to Roosevelt. The Frenchman received "no assurances," Roosevelt said later, but the President added: "He is a very able fellow, and it was his business to find out what he thought our Government would do. He would have been a very dull man had he been unable to make such a guess."
Back in New York, Bunau-Varilla went to Macy's to purchase colored silk for a red, white and blue Panamanian flag (which his wife sewed), and he advised Amador that the U.S. would support the revolution—provided that its leaders would appoint Bunau-Varilla envoy to Washington to draft the canal treaty. Reluctantly and a bit skeptically, Amador agreed. He sailed for Panama with Bunau-Varilla's promise of $100,000 to bribe Colombian troops; he hid his new flag under his clothing, wrapped around his torso. After arriving in Panama, Amador sent a coded cable: "Fate news bad powerful tiger. Urge vapor Colon." It meant that Colombian troops were arriving in five days, and the revolutionary plotters requested a U.S. steamer at Colon. Bunau-Varilla hurried to Washington and soon afterward the U.S.S. Nashville arrived at Colon—triggering the Panamanian revolution, which remained peaceful due to the presence of U.S. troops.