Unholy Fury (12 page)

 

For this American observer at least, paying lip service to the history of the alliance carried no weight. It was a dramatic illustration of the level of distrust towards the party that represented the alternative Australian government. In the eyes of Ed Clark, at least, the alliance had no future under a Labor administration. The American reluctance to understand Calwell's position on the war in anything other than Manichean terms merely confirmed their ongoing suspicion of Labor as a party that simply could not be trusted to protect and preserve relations—a suspicion which Whitlam had to meet head on when he became leader in February 1967.
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‘OVER DOING IT'

Johnson's visit to Australia—coming at the very peak of Australian–American cooperation in the containment of Asian communism—offers a powerful means of understanding alliance dynamics at the time. In his analysis of American–Australian relations during the Cold War, David McLean makes the salient point that ‘the impulse behind Johnson's welcome in 1966 was similar to that underlying the reception of President Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet in 1908: in both cases the fervour of the response expressed goodwill and gratitude towards a culturally related great power to which Australians looked for protection against a threatening region, in particular against what were feared to be the expansionist ambitions of Japan in one case, China in the other'.
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The presidential visit of 1966 was by no means the first time that Australians wildly embraced the phenomenon of the visiting American. But, just as in 1908, and again following the so called ‘friendly-invasion' of nearly a million American servicemen in World War II, real gains—in terms of greater Australian influence or access to the centre of US policy making—were thin on the ground. In 1909, Roosevelt was uninterested in Prime Minister Alfred Deakin's proposal for the extension of the American Monroe Doctrine to the South Pacific.
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During World War II, the Australian reception of American troops did not result
in Australia gaining more access to the innermost allied councils of the war, or to a more sympathetic American ear to treatment of Australian proposals for a defence pact or security arrangement with Washington. Indeed on both occasions, the hysteria that greeted the visitor from across the Pacific was followed in subsequent years by a measure of ambivalence, if not downright disappointment.

In the case of 1966, the euphoria was perhaps even more shortlived—for both Australia and the United States. Holt himself confided to a senior British diplomat shortly after the visit that, while he ‘admired President Johnson very much', he ‘found it difficult to get on the same wavelength with him'—not only during the president's Australian sojourn but also at the subsequent Manila Conference. Apparently, Holt continued, he ‘felt personally far closer to Harold Wilson “although Johnson probably means more to me and my country”'.
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It was a revealing comment: Holt appeared to be telling his British friends precisely what they wanted to hear—that whilst American power could not be lightly dismissed, the personal chemistry between prime minister and president simply did not match the equivalent relationship that an Australian leader enjoyed with his British counterpart. In truth, British officials had probably worried a little too much about the fate of Australian loyalties in the aftermath of the Johnson visit. Certainly Holt, as historian Jeppe Kristensen has shown, was ‘in no way inclined to dance on the grave of British Australia'. During a visit to Britain in September 1967, he conceded that the United States was going to loom larger on the Australian horizon, but this was not to imply that the last rites were to be delivered to the British connection. The prime minister told an audience in London that Australia was ‘in essence still a British country … The Australian situation geographically, politically and in terms of trade, draws us into the Pacific Ocean of affairs … But this is not to kiss goodbye to Britain'.
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Holt's language may have lacked the conviction and certainty of old, but it nevertheless showed that, amidst a time of turbulence and change in the Australian outlook, the gravitational pull of the American superpower had by no means entirely wrenched clean the political elite from the comfort of their familiar British world.

The White House too, demonstrated a sensitivity to the perception that the relationship with Australia was sustained by little else than pleasantries and platitudes: in preparation for Holt's visit to Washington in June the following year, William Bundy, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, pointed to the ‘danger that this visit, particularly with its formalities, will be construed in some quarters as overdoing it from a personal standpoint'. Bundy recommended that the president prioritise the discussion of ‘major serious Asian topics' rather than the ‘personal cordialities', including the need for public presidential statements to put ‘Vietnam in the context of an Asia that may be turning the corner'.
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Even the Americans, then, were conceding that the alliance required an injection of substance over show.

More significantly, however, the 1966 visit did not result in closer consultation and coordination of policy between the two countries, either in Vietnam or elsewhere. Though Holt gained great domestic political kudos from Johnson's visit to Australia in October 1966, it did not translate into a greater level of access to the US policymaking process. Indeed, as subsequent governments were to find, all the major American decisions relating to the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and its efforts to reach terms with the enemy were carried out without any prior discussions with the Australians. It was to provoke in Canberra yet another round of introspection as to the meaning of the alliance.

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

In that cauldron of swirling uncertainty in Australian foreign affairs, Gough Whitlam stood poised to assume the Labor leadership. He would inherit a party badly scarred by nearly two decades on the Opposition benches, constantly depicted by their political enemies as untrustworthy on matters of foreign policy and defence. The conservative parties under Menzies and then Harold Holt had made the alliance their own. It seemed unshakeable. Whitlam would have to move quickly to shore up internal support as he set about the task of making Labor electable again. But the circumstances were to start shifting Labor's way. In little more than a year after taking over
the leadership, Whitlam could confidently pronounce on national television that events in Vietnam were proving the prescience of Labor's position on the war. ‘On point after point', he exclaimed, the United States, ‘has now done or urged what the Australian Labor Party has been urging throughout the year'. It would not be the first time Whitlam claimed to be setting the US agenda. But he used the same interview to sketch out a new kind of relationship with the United States, telling journalist Mike Willesee, that the:

 

American alliance does not depend on any particular party being in power in America, the Democrats or Republicans. It does not depend on any particular person being candidate of either of those parties. American policy would be longer in range, one would hope, than any term of office of any one President. Australian policy should be too. It would be quite wrong, as the Government has now found, to say that policy or the alliance should depend on one man.
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The plea for longer-term thinking could not entirely conceal that he and his party were still somewhat smarting from the domestic political benefits Harold Holt had extracted from his rapport with Lyndon Johnson. Emboldened by a weakened presidency in the United States and leadership churn in Australia, Whitlam was out to loosen, if not dismantle, the conservative stranglehold on the US alliance.

Across the Pacific, Richard Nixon too was readying himself once more for national leadership and about to launch himself into another presidential campaign. And much like Whitlam, Nixon was eager to grasp the opportunities offered by the new international circumstances. Speaking in July 1967, he pointed out that ‘never before in human history have more changes taken place in the world in one generation'. Gone were the giant leaders of the postwar period: Churchill, Adenauer, Stalin, Khrushchev, Nehru and Sukarno. Gone too were some of the great ideas that had ‘stirred men to revolution after World War Two'. Communism and Marxism had ‘lost their pulling power'. Nixon embraced a ‘world of new ideas', and he saw that non-communist Asia, except for Vietnam, was experiencing the ‘most hopeful change'.
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Had they sat down together in the middle
of that year to discuss the shifting plates of global geopolitics and the cracks beginning to appear along the ideological fault lines of the Cold War, Gough Whitlam and Richard Nixon would probably have found much on which they agreed.

 

4

In the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson's visit to Australia, the American ambassador in Canberra had only one gripe. A framed photo that LBJ had autographed especially for the deputy Labor Opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, had been ‘unfortunately … badly damaged by broken glass'. Ed Clark was not pleased. The tone of his message back to Washington was hurried, if not a little tetchy. He asked that a replacement of both ‘the blue leather frame with the presidential seal and the inscribed color photo of the president' be dispatched forthwith, adding that the task be ‘completed with urgency'.

The need for such haste was even clearly spelt out: Whitlam was ‘one of the more moderate Laborites and probably will replace [Arthur] Calwell as Labor Party leader following elections' due later that year.
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It speaks volumes that Clark thought Whitlam's affections could be won over with gilt-edged trimmings and a presidential autograph. But it showed the extent to which the US embassy in Canberra was banking on him as Labor's future—the safe pair of hands who could keep the party's left wing in check and therefore safeguard US interests in Australia, especially its intelligence installation at North West Cape. And after all, during the November election Whitlam had deviated from the party and his then leader's
policy line by arguing that only conscripts would be brought home from Vietnam after the election. It is little wonder the Americans reached out to him as a voice of reason within a party they viewed as deeply suspect on matters of national security and defence.

What this curious ambassadorial missive also revealed was that at last the Americans had got Whitlam's name right. Since he had come on to the diplomatic radar as an up and coming Labor figure in the early 1960s, various US reports struggled to record his surname properly. Some had him as ‘Wicklam', others ‘Wicklow' (an Irish touch) while his first name tied American tongues in even more knots: one US secretary of state was told that ‘Gough' rhymed with ‘tough'. Even allowing for a southern drawl it was a bit of a stretch. LBJ was finally given the right elocutionary advice: it was simply pronounced ‘Goff'. Yet in the mid 1970s, when he was prime minister, the Australian leader could still be introduced to a Washington audience as ‘Mr Ego Whitlam', an almost comical rendering of his full name, Edward Gough Whitlam. A Freudian slip perhaps, but Whitlam's presence in Australian politics was clearly not one the Americans could ever ignore.

That Whitlam stood apart from many of his party colleagues in the 1960s was attributable not only to his expertise in foreign affairs and his clear leadership ambitions, but also to his growing frustration at the stasis within the ALP. In short, he was seen as someone the Americans could deal with. Whitlam's disagreement with Calwell over conscription during the 1966 election campaign was only the most glaring—and publicly damaging—display of the tension that had been simmering since Whitlam rose to the deputy leadership at the beginning of the decade. Long thought of as the party's coming man and something of a boy wonder, Whitlam saw Calwell's rigid attachment to the Labor platform as a recipe for irrelevance and continuing electoral decline.
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His oft-quoted remark to the 1967 Labor conference that ‘certainly the impotent are pure' was a damning indictment of the party's tendency to prioritise principle over pragmatism. Though a moderniser in foreign affairs—he had advocated the recognition of China since entering parliament—he was certainly no kneejerk anti-American. Like Calwell, Whitlam was
all too painfully aware of the electoral agony caused by Labor's lack of clarity and unity on foreign policy since the 1950s. He would have heartily endorsed Calwell's sharp and colourful quip to Tom Uren, a lion of the Labor left, that ‘Whatever you say Tom, I'm not going to let you bastards destroy the American alliance'.
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Whitlam's world-view at this time thus reflected orthodox Labor policy, which maintained a strong commitment to ANZUS and close regional cooperation with the United States, projected a profound faith in the United Nations, displayed sympathy for colonial independence movements in Asia and Africa, and looked to pragmatic compromise and realism as the best means of dealing with the Soviet Union and Communist China. And while Whitlam rejected the strategies of containment, forward defence and ideological confrontation, he still recognised the realities of power politics.
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As Whitlam rose through the party ranks, first as deputy and then leader, he stood firmly behind Labor policy as agreed at successive conferences in the 1950s, which stated that ‘ANZUS is essential and must continue'. Indeed, many in the party shared the government's fears about Chinese intentions in the region, as well as the unpredictability of Indonesian nationalism. As Whitlam remarked in his Roy Milne lecture of 1963: ‘A country as isolated and as small as Australia must for the time being seek security in collective arrangements. The ANZUS treaty is the most important such arrangement to which we belong'. Virtually quoting from Articles IV and V of the treaty itself, he added that it provided the ‘only clear and certain commitment between Australia and America in the event of an armed attack on their homelands or their island territories and armed forces in the Pacific'.
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Both the caution and scepticism of his 1953 remarks had been shelved.
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Whitlam could not have been more emphatic and definitive in his support for the treaty and its provisions.