Unholy Fury Read online

  On the other side of Australian politics, however, it was a very different story. Before his 1953 visit to Australia, the State Department in Washington warned the vice president of ‘elements within the Labor party [which] consider the Menzies government too acquiescent to American leadership on international issues’. Nixon’s summary of Labor leader Evatt was blunt: he was a ‘difficult man’, one that the United States needed to ‘cultivate’.14 His public broadcast, however, reserved special praise for Australia’s trade unions and their ‘cleaning out [of] the Communists’, the visit coming at a time when Australia itself remained divided over the threat of internal subversion. Two years earlier, Menzies had launched an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to ban the Communist Party in Australia. Nixon later commented that the talks held with officials of the labour movement were among the most important of his brief stay.15 No matter how much this Asian trip was meant to allow him the opportunity to broaden his outlook beyond the red-baiting for which he was so well known, time and again he returned to his cherished theme: dealing with the enemy at the gates.16

  But with memories of those ‘nerve-racking years’ of the Pacific war still so fresh, journalists in Australia wove the presence of the American ‘second in command’ into a ready-made narrative about wartime cooperation and shared interests in uncertain times.17 Nixon’s stay was seen as ‘eloquent testimony to America’s undiminished interest in, and friendship for, her continental neighbour in the South-West Pacific’. It was reassuring for Australians to ‘find President Eisenhower’s deputy expressing his opinion that “this great country of yours is as indispensible to our security as we are to your security”’.18 This was precisely the language that Australian leaders wanted to hear: the words of mutual reassurance, rhetoric which satisfied a deep and longstanding Australian desire for great power protection in a region seen as threatening and unstable. As one editorial stated, the vice president might have had an exacting programme, but he would certainly ‘have time to realise that the alliance means far more to Australians than a formal treaty’.19 Or, as another scribe mused, Nixon’s ‘impressions of Australia, however fleeting, are likely to become President Eisenhower’s impressions of Australia. On that basis his coming could have limitless consequences for this country’.20

  That might have been nothing more than the throwaway line of an excited journalist, but in the succeeding decades, Richard Nixon was to have a major influence on Australia, its political leaders and the nation’s place in the world. And for one politician listening to the vice president’s luncheon address in Canberra during that visit, those consequences were to prove profound indeed.

  A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE COLD WAR IN ASIA

  In October 1953 Gough Whitlam was not even one year into his first term in the federal parliament. Elected to the western Sydney seat of Werriwa at a by-election in November the previous year, he had only recently made his first speech to the House of Representatives on international affairs. A veteran of World War II, in which he served with the Royal Australian Air Force, Whitlam spoke a very different language to Nixon about the coming of the Cold War to Asia. He had little time for the rhetoric of fear and dread, and did not see Asian communism as an insidious kind of red lava, seeping into Australia from the north. He understood that the region around his country was changing—and quickly. The retreat of the European empires and the rise of new nations were to be welcomed: ‘The best way to deal with any red menace, as we so glibly term it, is to give [the emerging nations] self-government.’ The new Asian states, he went on, were ‘entitled to self-government within the world community of nations, the United Nations, of which Australia is one’.21 Whitlam was laying out the foundations of his own world-view, one which combined hard-headed realism—he argued consistently that the Soviet Union and China were part of the irreversible facts of great power politics—with liberal internationalism, which looked above all to foster international understanding and cooperation among nations.22

  Whitlam’s first speech on these questions—one month before Nixon’s arrival in Australia—responded to a statement by the minister for external affairs, Richard Casey. Casey was reporting on the outcomes from the first ANZUS council meeting, a forum of Australian and American officials established when the treaty had been signed. The debate, Whitlam recalled, was ‘characterised by unanimity on ANZUS’.23 But the member for Werriwa took the opportunity to reflect on the workings of the pact, defending the exclusion from it both of Britain and other European powers who had interests in the Pacific. In a phrase that betrayed a certain ambivalence about the treaty itself, Whitlam added that ‘if it had to come about’, the arrangement was ‘wisely limited’ to the three signatory countries: the United States, Australia and New Zealand. He also delivered a mild rebuke to the Americans, though one firmly couched within a certain appreciation for their world role: ‘Traditionally’, he intoned, ‘the United States of America has sympathy for peoples who are seeking self-government’. He regretted, however, that ‘at the present time it does not seem always to show such sympathy in every part of the world’. The new member of the Australian parliament was taking aim at aspects of the United States’ Cold War policy in Asia, one which in his view too often saw not the assertion of political and cultural independence, but the threat of monolithic communism. And in a direct reference to Articles IV and V of the treaty—those that provided for consultation in the event of an armed attack on one or the other in the Pacific area—Whitlam sounded the alarm. It is ‘quite plain’, he said, ‘that there is cause for us to review some features of the Anzus [sic] pact. We should consider the implications of it’:

  The terms of Article V of the treaty are very wide. They contain the words An armed attack on the armed forces, public vessels or aircraft of any of the parties in the Pacific. Are we to be embroiled on behalf of the Americans if there is an armed attack on any United States armed forces in an area where they are conducting some unilateral campaign, and is the United States of America to be embroiled on our behalf if there is any attack on our forces in, for instance, Malaya? I merely put it, without expressing any concluded opinion, that in the light of the events of last year, this matter must give us serious pause.24

  These were prescient questions, and it was a brave politician to speak such language in the febrile environment of the Cold War, particularly in a parliament where those who dared question American intentions were quickly denounced as disloyal. Although Whitlam was expressing a traditional Labor fear of being automatically caught up in a war to support its great and powerful allies, his remarks came in the wake of the cease-fire in Korea and as momentum was gathering to end the French intervention in Indochina. In essence, he was pointing out the dangers for Australia in aligning itself too closely to US policy; highlighting the risk of becoming involved in another war in the very region so vital to Australia’s postwar security interests; and asking whether the much-vaunted spirit of reciprocity in the treaty had any real meaning.

  Two decades later, in July 1973, Whitlam and Nixon would meet in Washington DC as the leaders of their respective countries: the Republican president in his second term, the Labor Party leader as Australia’s twenty-first prime minister. But at that meeting they faced a very different global outlook. The rigid bipolarity of the Cold War was coming under strain. In its place was emerging a new multipolar world, with separate if overlapping centres of power. Russia and China had split and were publicly brawling, while the European Community had become a separate centre of economic power. Japan was emerging as the second greatest economy in the world and therefore a potential global power in its own right. The OPEC countries were a force to be reckoned with, while Asian, African and Caribbean nations were pressing their own claims in the United Nations and elsewhere. Although the United States and the Soviet Union retained the capacity to annihilate each other with their arsenal of nuclear weapons, the once stark ideological fault lines of the Cold War had at least been substantially qualified.

 
Even so, the events of twenty years before, when Nixon had been in Australia, remained something of a point of reference for both men. During their meeting in the Oval Office, Nixon noted: ‘Whatever our problems may be today, it is a better world today that it was back in 1953’. Whitlam too said that he remembered listening to Nixon’s Canberra address: ‘I knew then’, he added, ‘that a glittering future lay before you’.25

  Never mind that Nixon’s political star was fading rapidly at this time in the wake of damaging revelations over the Watergate scandal: Whitlam’s sweet talk could not mask the mutual suspicion or allay the deep antagonism which had developed between them. By July 1973, those differences, and in particular explosive disagreements over the prosecution of the war in Vietnam, would ultimately plunge the American–Australian alliance into its greatest ever crisis. Their meeting in Washington that July followed a period of stress in the relationship unknown previously or since. And yet earlier that decade these two protagonists had developed the same sense of strategic foresight to end Communist China’s isolation. Now, in the hands of these two powerful, enigmatic and ultimately flawed leaders, an alliance that had endured the heights of the Cold War was veering dangerously off course and seemed headed for destruction. Far from seeing Australia as being ‘on the right side’, Nixon now saw the country as a virtual deserter from the west, even placing it second on his so-called ‘shit list’ of least favourite countries.

  But the clash between Gough Whitlam and Richard Nixon over the end of the Vietnam war and the shape of a new Asia was by no means ordained by fate. Nor were the icy winds that blew through the Australian-American relationship in the early 1970s simply due to the ideological differences between a Republican president and a Labor prime minister, though differing ideas about politics and international affairs were certainly a factor. Indeed, in more than one respect, these two leaders had a great deal in common. Both saw the opportunities this more fluid world created, and both had the boldness to seize the moment and so recast their nation’s foreign policies, not least in welcoming détente with the Soviet Union and reaching an accommodation with Communist China. Both Whitlam and Nixon knew that their nation’s destiny lay in Asia. Both, too, were leaders prepared to stare down their parties and overturn the conventional wisdom. And although Whitlam had not tasted serious political defeat, he too, like Nixon had wandered through the bleak woods of the political wilderness for long enough. But these leaders differed profoundly on the way in which the new strategic context was to be managed and shaped. What emerged were two very different approaches to managing the end of the Cold War in East Asia. In contrast to Richard Nixon’s commitment to power politics, Gough Whitlam saw the world from a progressive point of view.

  TROUBLE IN THE ALLIANCE

  This book tells the story of that rift. It portrays a bitter clash between the two men and their respective visions of the world, exposing for the first time the depth of frustration and mistrust on both sides of the Pacific. The war in Vietnam was by no means the only sticking point between Australia and the United States in this era. Across a broad range of issues, all of which were central to how both nations saw their role in the world and their future in Asia, it became apparent that the harmony of aims and interests that characterised the alliance during the Cold War had come to an abrupt and acrimonious end. This divergence was at its sharpest and most intense from the time Gough Whitlam became prime minister in late 1972 until his visit to Washington the following year, but the controversy stirred up by these early tensions continued to trouble the alliance until the middle of the decade. It is worth recalling that of all the international ‘crises’ that occupied his time as CIA director in this period—flashpoints in the Middle East, coups in Cyprus and Portugal, and a nuclear explosion in India—William Colby felt compelled to add to his list of potential troubles ‘a left-wing and possibly antagonistic government in Australia’.26 Indeed, as this book will show, there is evidence to suggest that Nixon and senior administration officials in Washington, in the light of what they saw as unreasonable truculence and intransigence on the part of a junior ally, and fearful that the continued presence of US intelligence facilities on Australian soil was under grave threat, gave more than a passing thought to abandoning ANZUS altogether. Until now, Australians have not known the true force of this American frustration and fury.

  The dramatic deterioration in relations was most apparent in the realm of foreign affairs, where Whitlam wanted Australia to exercise more freedom of movement both inside and outside the alliance. This included support for new forms of regional forums that did not include the United States, and zones of peace and neutrality in South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean that aimed to reduce superpower rivalry in Australia’s backyard. But the friction in the alliance also had consequences in the economic sphere, where the new Labor government’s narrative of ‘buying back the farm’ imposed more stringent conditions on American investment in the country and pressured American multinational companies to appoint local, rather than American, chief executives. And in keeping with his desire to identify with the ‘new nationalism’, Whitlam also demanded more Australian content on television and asked that American-owned cinema chains show more home-grown product in Australia.27

  Tempers on both sides frayed. The cooperative spirit of the Cold War alliance was quickly replaced by a flurry of insults and barbs flowing freely back and forth across the Pacific. Some of Whitlam’s senior ministers, their throats inflamed by the president’s decision to bomb North Vietnam in December 1972, accused the White House of being run by ‘maniacs’ and ‘thugs’; Nixon labelled the Australian leader a ‘peacenik’ while Henry Kissinger dismissed Whitlam, with barely concealed contempt, as hardly a ‘heavyweight’. The spat even spilled onto the waterfront, where for a period of nearly two weeks over the Christmas-New Year period of 1972–73, Australian maritime unions refused to unload visiting American ships—a move duly reciprocated by their counterparts in the United States. Elsewhere, an American businessman—the managing director of Chrysler, no less—was sent home in disgrace for criticising Labor’s new policies. The tensions even made an appearance at the annual Logies television awards in early 1973, when American actor Glenn Ford, visiting the country as a guest of honour for the ceremony, refused to shake hands with the minister for the media, the Labor stalwart Doug McLelland. On stage, Ford was overheard telling him: ‘I don’t like what your government is saying about my country and the way it is trying to put American actors out of work.’28 Never before had such an atmosphere of pervasive acrimony cast so long a shadow over the relationship.

  The timing was critical. A new, beamingly confident government in Canberra faced an administration in Washington bleeding from war weariness and political scandal. In late 1972 Gough Whitlam was enjoying his first heady moments of real power. Prime minister at last, he had won office on the back of a promise to ‘take Australia forward to her rightful, proud, secure and independent place in the future of our region’.29 The new leader wanted to reshape Australian foreign policy and refashion the relationship with the United States. For him, the world emerging from the ashes of Vietnam offered an exciting opportunity to recast the national image and lift Australia’s reputation abroad. Whitlam wanted to transcend the Cold War mentality with its fears and phobias and make Australia more truly a part of its own region. What his country needed, he was to tell one American audience, was an ‘ideological holiday’.30 He wanted a ‘new maturity’ in the alliance and a ‘new internationalism’ in world affairs. There was to be ‘real and deep’ change to how Australia would perceive and interpret its national interests and international obligations, its alliances and friendships.31 But this was no will o’ the wisp dalliance with the levers of policy. It was neither a language designed to make Australians simply feel good about themselves, nor a brash, raw nationalism chafing against its great ally. As Opposition leader, Whitlam had patiently constructed a coherent, alternative vision of Australian foreign affairs; as pr
ime minister, he was single-minded in his determination to lock it into place.