Unholy Fury (20 page)

Nevertheless, Whitlam was frank and fearless in his assessment of the impact of Vietnam on domestic politics in the United States. When Zhou said that the United States ‘wants to control everybody', Whitlam at first leapt to the defence of Australia's major ally. He said that he wanted to put a ‘qualifying argument on behalf of America'. But in the next breath he could not resist expressing his contempt for the ‘destructive style of John Foster Dulles', the US secretary of state
who had refused to shake Zhou's hand at Geneva in 1954. Although Whitlam was relieved that the United States had overcome the rigidity of the Cold War, there was still a lesson to be learnt from the folly of Vietnam. ‘The American people have broken President Lyndon Baines Johnson', he intoned, ‘and if Richard Milhous Nixon does not continue to withdraw his forces from Vietnam they will destroy him similarly'. The conversation was taking place in full view of the press, so Whitlam's words were quickly beamed back to Australia and, no doubt to Washington DC. And it was that commentary on politics in the United States that would cause the most sensation back in Australia. When Whitlam and Zhou discussed the level of popular dissent in the United States against the war, the Labor leader pointed out that ‘throughout the North East' of the United States, ‘the part I know best, there is no support among opinion makers for what has gone on. The American people will force the American president to change the policy'.
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And he was saying this in Beijing, the very heart of Asian communism. The prophecies carried an intent: he was not only warning Nixon about his potential political demise, but also playing up the influence of protest and dissent on the administration's policy. Whitlam later expressed surprise that Zhou hadn't criticised the US intelligence facilities in Australia, but in a separate meeting the Chinese foreign minister did express unease over Australian troops stationed in Singapore and Malaysia.
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The timing of the Labor delegation's visit proved even more fortuitous when it was revealed that Henry Kissinger had arrived in Beijing only a matter of days after the Whitlam visit. Only when he arrived in Japan did Whitlam learn of Nixon's announcement on 15 July that he was to visit China in February 1972. What some in his own party had feared as a potential disaster now appeared to be a stroke of diplomatic genius. In a press statement Whitlam welcomed it as a ‘good day for China and America … a good day for Australia and Japan … a great day for all to wish to see the peaceful development of our region'.
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In reality, then, it was the Americans who had gifted Whitlam his China coup.

Whitlam, however, looking towards the coming election, was going to extract the most from his audacious trip. Dining with
Australian diplomatic officials in Tokyo—and joined by the American ambassador—immediately after his visit to China, he told guests that he was ‘glad to be a pathfinder for Nixon: it makes things easier for him at home and for people all over the world'. Though the comment was typical of Whitlam's breathless bravado, the Labor leader was nevertheless equally quick to credit the US president's bold policy shift, believing it could presage a real breakthrough in Vietnam. As Whitlam put it: ‘Nixon as a Republican can go further in making a settlement' than ‘a liberal Democrat President who would be suspected of yielding to Communism'. Commenting on McMahon's troubles, he believed the government ‘went too far out on a limb regarding his Peking visit because of their need to appease … the reactionary DLP and win their second preference votes in the next election'.
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On that score, as historian Roderic Pitty has demonstrated, Whitlam was correct.

Whitlam's journey to Beijing was all the more dramatic because the Australian government in Canberra had been caught hopelessly flatfooted by the American shift. Prime Minister William McMahon was caught dangerously off guard by the stunning change in America's China policy engineered by Nixon and Kissinger. The prime minister was enraged at not being given advance notice of Nixon's announcement by the White House. And the seeming success of Whitlam's visit and the talks he had held with Zhou Enlai only compounded McMahon's political difficulties. He had initially ridiculed the talks, saying to a group of Young Liberals in Melbourne on 12 July that it was time to ‘expose the shams and absurdities of Whitlam's excursion into instant coffee diplomacy' and that ‘in no time at all Zhou Enlai had Mr Whitlam on a hook and he played him as a fisherman plays a trout'.
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It was a speech he later claimed to have cleared with American officials.
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In the end, however, it was McMahon who was hoist by his own failure to read the signs coming out of the United States and, to some extent, his own diplomatic corps. The blunt reality for the Australian prime minister was that there had been no special cultivation or consultation, real or intended, of allies where Nixon's China policy was concerned. McMahon's over-reliance on the Americans had been brutally
exposed. Virtually overnight the US metamorphosis had taken from the alliance relationship its very raison d'être: the fear of Red China. What the prime minister had once hailed as a ‘political asset to the Liberal party' was now a symbol of its paralysis in power.
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The diplomatic and domestic difficulties these developments created for the government in Canberra were acute. McMahon lashed out at Whitlam's ‘impertinence to the leader of the United States', behaviour that was ‘not likely to be forgotten by the American administration'. He even pressured the
Sydney Morning Herald
into changing its editorial line on the Whitlam visit, from one of cautious support to outright condemnation. Speaking of Whitlam's ‘offensive' comments on US domestic politics, the
Herald
fumed: ‘If Mr Whitlam thinks that this wholesale selling out of friends to gain a despot's smile is diplomacy, then Heaven protect this country if ever he directs its foreign policy'.
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But if McMahon made headway with the editorial writers, he cut a lonely figure in the Nixon White House. His frustration with the United States culminated in a bitter letter of complaint to the president, in which he bemoaned the lack of ‘foreknowledge' of at least the broad trends of American policies. McMahon added that Australia had been ‘placed in a quandary' by this dramatic step, ‘the more so because we have attempted under all circumstances to co-ordinate our policies and support you in what you are doing'.
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It did not seem to occur to the Australians that they were by no means the only ones excluded from the innermost councils of the administration on this question. Nixon's secretary of state, William Rogers, senior Republicans on Capitol Hill, and even the prime minister of America's closest ally in Asia, Japanese leader Eisaku Sato, were not informed before the policy change. US officials reported that McMahon was in a ‘nervous state' and the editor of the
Canberra Times
, John Allan, told the US embassy that the prime minister was ‘almost psychotic' about being humiliated not only by the American president but also by Whitlam. Allan himself had been on the receiving end of a telephone call from ‘an obviously upset and tense' McMahon, who took him to task for an editorial that highlighted his ‘prime ministerial clangers'. It coincided with what senior policy
makers in the Australian government had also been telling their US interlocutors, that McMahon was ‘on edge and almost frenzied in trying to stay on top of his job'. One unnamed public servant in Canberra had even described him as being ‘in hot pursuit of events without ever catching up with them'.
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Where the Labor leader, according to US diplomats, had shown at the very least that he was ‘active', McMahon's government remained ‘inert and petrified in outdated politics'.
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American officials in Canberra were initially repeating some of McMahon's lines of attack on Whitlam in their reports back to Washington. Hugh Appling, the embassy's deputy chief of mission, told the secretary of state that Whitlam was ‘cleverly used for propaganda by Chou en Lai and was maladroit in expressing fear and antagonism towards Japan'. Appling labelled Whitlam's comments on American domestic politics ‘meddlesome' and concluded that ‘he seemed willing to win relations with Peking at any price or at least at [the] price of breaking relations with Taipei'. Of course, the assessment was written before news of Kissinger's own visit had broken in Australia. But at the very least, the report conceded, Whitlam's supporters were ‘extol[ling] him breaking through into a new era free of doctrinaire antagonisms of the past'.
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Five days after McMahon's letter of complaint arrived on Nixon's desk, Australia's ambassador in Washington, Sir James Plimsoll, was summoned to see Kissinger at the White House in an attempt to smooth over the difficulties. After listening to Kissinger's explanation of the reasons for the extreme secrecy surrounding the US move, Plimsoll poured out the perception problem: ‘the Australian government could not appear to be unaware of what the US was doing or seem to be just following the US lead. It needed to put across to the public the concept that it was having consultations with the US on major policy issues such as China'. Plimsoll continued: in coping with the accusations flowing from Whitlam's visit, the Australian prime minister ‘might have expressed himself differently had he known in advance of US moves'. Yet even the polished language of a career diplomat could not entirely conceal the disappointment. Kissinger agreed to Plimsoll's request that Nixon's
reply ‘include a note of personal warmth' to McMahon, and, further, that options to establish a secret channel of communication between prime minister and president be explored—as Kissinger said, ‘to get the prime minister's views before we acted'. In a bizarre twist, the national security adviser then suggested ‘that if the Australian government could survive for 14 months, the Australian elections would be concurrent with those in the US'. Plimsoll thought it a ‘good idea'.
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Just what Kissinger implied from this possible synchronising of respective electoral timetables is unclear: but it is highly doubtful he was being serious. It was probably nothing more than a whimsical hypothetical, a tempting sweetener to divert attention from the discomfort caused by Nixon's China shift.

These discussions and half-measures were not enough to placate the Australian prime minister. At a speech in Sydney to the American National Club in late July, McMahon could contain his outrage no longer. In remarks apparently laced with ‘unmistakable sarcasm' concerning the Nixon announcement, McMahon not only referred to the ‘sweet letter' he had received from the president explaining the need for secrecy about the move, but speculated that ‘I wouldn't be surprised if Chou-En Lai didn't get the best of President Nixon which in turn will adversely affect Nixon's election chances in 1972'. Such a public assessment of American domestic politics was all the more remarkable given that McMahon had excoriated Whitlam for daring to suggest to the Chinese premier that Nixon's Vietnam policies, like those of LBJ, might well be his electoral undoing. Having listened to the speech, a startled guest told the American consul general that the prime minister had clearly drunk too much: he ‘must be full'.
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The clear implication was that his comments were so shocking to the public conventions of the alliance that the only conclusion to be reached was that this was the ‘drink' talking, not the prime minister's true self.

At home, however, Whitlam was more eager to put the visit in the context of a new-found Australian habit of self-reliance. The Americans expected that he would come back with ‘all guns blazing'.
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In a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra upon his return, Whitlam claimed that his visit had made Australia appear
‘less flat-footed, less ignorant, less obscurantist, less imitative in the light of the United States initiative than she might otherwise have done'.
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The message was clear. Only Labor could renew and revitalise Australia's foreign policy. Only Labor could strike the right balance between the alliance and Australia's relations with Asia. Whitlam, too, was effusive in his praise of the president's announcement. ‘President Nixon', he said, ‘has given the West a second chance'. And ‘in a small way' he added, ‘our visit helped Australia to share in that opportunity'. It was a step down from the boasting of being a ‘pathbreaker' for Nixon, but Whitlam took it upon himself to be an explanatory force in Australia for the reversal in US China policy. Nixon was offering the chance to right the wrongs of the past two decades of confrontation with China, an opportunity to bury the architects of US Cold War foreign policy. And Australia, he argued, had to stand shoulder to shoulder with the American president. Whitlam was putting a stake in the ground:

 

President Nixon cannot afford to let his visit fail, but clearly the whole region has as deep a vested interest in his success as he himself. The nations in the region, especially Australia, would endanger its success should they strive to put obstacles in its path such as insisting that Taiwan is an independent nation. There is no basis in law, morality, history or humanity for such a claim. To make it now is an act of sabotage against the United States and the hopes of the world.

 

It was an emphatic call to support Nixon and America. During this same speech Whitlam told journalists of his belief that the US president would have ‘accepted' his analysis about the political imperatives of the Vietnam situation in American domestic politics.
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A brave statement, it was a strange kind of peace offering to the White House. In parliament, however, in the heat of political debate, the Labor leader continued to be scathing about the legacy of the Cold War for Australian foreign affairs and its misplaced faith in great powers. ‘The fact is', he thundered in the month following his Beijing visit, ‘we would never have been in Vietnam but for the Sino-phobia which is felt in Australia and her great and powerful associates'.
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And it was not a rhetorical slip. Whitlam was determined to show that his China move had dismantled once and for all the edifice of Menzies' ‘great and powerful friends'. On the scale of diplomatic intimacy, an ‘associate' was certainly on a lower level than ‘friend'.