Unholy Fury (33 page)

There was nothing in Green's background or education that had prepared him for his long service in East Asia. Throughout his formative years he had no exposure to Asian languages or cultures. A self-professed ‘little New Englander', he often spent his summer
holidays as a child travelling with his parents in Europe. Indeed he once declared that his ‘whole orientation was towards Europe'.
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Educated at the prestigious Groton school and then Yale, his first career break came in October 1939 when the US ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, needed a private secretary. Green got the job—it was a protocol, not policy position—on account of the fact that Grew too had been to Yale, and that Green played bridge and golf. A lifelong fascination with the country began. As he watched the storm clouds gather in North-East Asia, Green later confessed he had been ‘spoiling' to go to war with Japan. He had travelled through Japanese-occupied Korea, Manchuria and northern China, seeing first hand the ‘ruthlessness of Japanese military rule'. The experience also forced him to think about the prevailing mood in his own country. Writing to his mother around this time, Green deplored the isolationist strain in the US debate. Americans had become:

 

over humoured by the good fortune to which we have fallen heir. Where the youth of other lands are aggressive, we are retracting, and our doom, like that of the Greek and Roman civilisations, is sealed when we produce, in our declining years, men not willing to fight for what they have.
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Green left Japan in May 1941 and joined the war effort, serving for the duration in the US Navy as an intelligence officer and, after learning Japanese, as an interpreter.

Entering the Foreign Service proper after the war, Green's first posting was as third secretary to Wellington, New Zealand, where, despite an appreciation for America's assistance in the Pacific war, he noted the strong pull of local sentiment back towards Britain, or what the locals called the ‘mother-country', especially in the form of bulk exports of primary products to a ‘hard-pressed England'.
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But Japan appeared to have a kind of gravitational pull on Green's interests: the country was to become a self-professed ‘thread' throughout his career. In 1948 US Secretary of State George Marshall sent George Kennan, then head of Policy Planning in State, on a special mission to Japan, along with Green as his sole travelling companion and adviser. The visit resulted in the acceleration of the
US government's shift in emphasis from occupation to economic recovery. The idea, Green said, was to ‘normalise things as far and as fast as one could to stave off growing, nationalist resentment against the occupation'. Green described listening to Kennan's briefings as like seeing a ‘human eye … piercing into the depths of eternity'.
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Kennan had also taken issue with the policy of routinely ‘purging' those sections of the Japanese business or political elite who had been in any way responsible for the war effort, arguing that each case should be dealt with individually.

Out of that experience came a central lesson that was to guide much of Green's own approach to the rise of Asian nationalism: there was a need for the United States to help its regional allies to stand on their own two feet and take care of themselves. Later, he was intimately involved in preparing the recommendations for a mutual security treaty with Japan and in the negotiations relating to the ongoing presence of American military bases there. Here, too, Green saw how the prickliness of domestic politics could wreak their own havoc on close alliance relationships. A ‘vociferous' left in Japan had ‘whipped the people up on the military base issue'. In the late 1950s he accompanied Frank Nash, assistant secretary of defence, on the far eastern leg of a presidential mission to examine the issue of relations between US military bases and their host communities.

Despite these sensitivities to local issues, Green nevertheless was still captive to the prevailing Cold War orthodoxies. Had Indonesia gone communist, he believed, ‘all Southeast Asia might have come under Communist domination'. With American forces in Vietnam, he argued that had Suharto not prevailed and the communists taken Indonesia, US troops ‘would have been caught in a kind of huge nutcracker': squeezed between communist insurgencies in north and South-East Asia.
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In Green's view, however, Indonesia became something of a model: showing that Asians could solve their own problems. Or, as he put it directly to Nixon some years later, Indonesia showed how ‘traditionalism and emotional nationalism' could give way to ‘modernisation and productive relationships with other countries'.
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Green emerged from that posting convinced that a much lighter US footprint in Asia was
required, along with an acceptance that the United States could not control every situation.

As ambassador in Jakarta, Green had made a favourable impression on Nixon, and the two had discussed regional affairs at length during Nixon's visit there in 1967, as the former vice-president geared up for another tilt at the White House. Once elected, the new president appointed Green as assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, and immediately dispatched him to all corners of the region to take soundings from key allies. He was given a wide brief: in effect to try to give content to Nixon's ideas—first expressed in
Foreign Affairs
in October 1967—about what a post-Vietnam US Asia policy might look like. Green's report following that mission observed that ‘our ability to help will depend to an important extent upon what countries of the area are doing to help themselves and their neighbours'. But there was no regional clamour for the US to leave, Green noting that ‘virtually all East Asian leaders stressed that premature or excessive withdrawal of US strength could prove disastrous'.
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Yet in a climate of worsening news from Vietnam and growing public disillusionment in America, Green's message found its mark. As he wrote:

 

Americans feel that they are carrying a disproportionate share of the burden for military security … in areas which, while important to the US, are nevertheless distant. They are asking more and more frequently what other countries are doing to help themselves and to help each other. This mood is intensified by concern over our deepening problems at home.
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In the Foreign Affairs Department some saw Green's appointment as the new American ambassador in early 1973 as something of a ‘trophy'. ‘We got Marshall Green' was the boast of one official: more used, no doubt, to the usual roll call of presidential associates and bag handlers who normally secured the Australian post. Others saw it as an ‘early pay off from Australia's changed attitude towards the US'.
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A more accurate rationale for the appointment, however, might be found in the comments of Richard Sneider, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia, to Australia's head of mission in Tokyo: that Washington ‘now felt they had to have someone in Canberra
who could take a tougher attitude from time to time'.
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In reality, Marshall Green was coming to sort the Australians out.

Another explanation for Green's appointment may be even more convincing. Green and Kissinger had not always seen eye to eye, with Green's opposition to the idea of a US ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 not exactly helping his cause in the tight, inner sanctum of the Oval Office. Originally thought to be the next logical appointment as ambassador in Japan, Green was instead sent to handle the Australian ‘problem'. The tension between these two policy makers clearly lingered. In an oral history interview in 1995 Green remarked that Kissinger had no ‘depth of knowledge about East Asia—none' and that ‘his failure to draw upon the expertise of people who had spent their lives working on East Asia was a great mistake on his part'. He recalled that being ‘cut out of things' by the White House and the National Security Council was particularly problematic: ‘Kissinger knew that you didn't have the complete picture, and therefore he tended to discredit your views accordingly'. Lest that be seen as wounded bureaucratic pride, Whitlam too believed that ‘Kissinger resented Green's professional expertise and verbal brilliance', contending that the appointment was to remove the diplomat as another source of advice to Nixon. Although Green made all the right public noises when he arrived in Australia about having specifically chosen the Canberra post for himself, within two months he was in Kissinger's office in the White House requesting—even pleading—that he be reassigned back to Washington.
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There can be little doubt, however, that Green was perfectly cast for the role of ministering to a sickly alliance. Given his long experience in Asia, Green had an ear ‘acutely attuned to the assertive voice of newly found nationalism' in the region,
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and he had already shown some sensitivity to the Australian predicament. In late 1972 he told William Rogers that there was a silver lining to Whitlam's consistent emphasis on ‘independence'. Green felt that the new sense of vigour in Australia could be used to advantage in utilising Australia's leadership to strengthen regional cohesion and self-help, as prescribed in the Nixon doctrine.
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Before his departure for Canberra, he told Australian journalists that the era of the Cold
War had passed, and with it the need for both countries to ‘march together, against the forces of darkness'.
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And in talks with the German ambassador to the United States, Green pointed out that the new Australian Labor government was merely ‘introducing views and attitudes typical of a political party which had been out of political office a long time'. And he was equally quick to point out that ‘overidentification with another country can itself be a problem, as the US/Canadian relationship illustrated'. Summing up, he said it ‘could well be a “watershed year” in our relations with Australia'.
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VISITING RITES: ‘FLEABITE FURORE' OR ‘NATIONALISTIC OBSESSION'?

But there was to be a significant delay between Green's appointment and his actual arrival in Australia, which was not to be until early June. In between, trouble continued to brew. Nixon's refusal to receive Whitlam at the White House only hardened. The Australian prime minister was due to visit Mexico in late July on his way to a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Canada in early August, and therefore hoped to visit Washington in between. He had already received an invitation to address the National Press Club in the US capital, but was holding off until the White House confirmed that he would meet with Nixon. Kissinger had restated the policy privately to senior national security staff at the end of January, and over the succeeding months US officials refused to be drawn in public as to whether the Australian leader would be welcomed. However much Whitlam flippantly dismissed the endless round of press speculation about an invitation—he downplayed it as ‘hoohah' and ‘tedious'—he could not but be embarrassed by this policy of the closed door. After all, only a couple of years before, he had told an American diplomat that no Australian leader of any standing would want to visit Washington without seeing the president.
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Even his political opponents in Australia pleaded with Marshall Green, and indeed with officials in Washington DC, to ensure that the prime minister would not be snubbed. As Green remarked at the time, the visit became something of a ‘nationalistic obsession' for many Australians, a sign of where they stood in the alliance. But the
president would not budge. It was a standoff, or, as British diplomats remarked, the matter became something of a ‘cliff-hanger'.
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Whitlam knew that something had to be done. Clearly lacking faith in Plimsoll, the prime minister dispatched his private secretary, Peter Wilenski, to meet with Kissinger in an attempt to break through the Americans' intransigence. Wilenski—whom Whitlam liked to refer to as ‘My Dr Kissinger'—had come to the job on Whitlam's staff after distinguished service in academia and the public service. He boasted degrees from the ANU, Oxford and Harvard, had served as an Australian diplomat in Saigon and Canada, and worked in Treasury.

He met with Kissinger at the White House in early May. It would prove to be one of the most significant encounters during this crisis in the alliance: not simply because Wilenski gained Kissinger's confidence, as well as a loose assurance about a meeting with Nixon, but because it was the first opportunity for a trusted Whitlam confidante to try to explain the new thrust of Australian foreign policy.

Kissinger opened with a joke. He was ‘delighted' to see Wilenski, and, referring to the events of late 1971 when he was unable to see Whitlam, admitted he was ‘terrified that I would have to stand up a member of the Australian Labor party, as happened once before'. The flippancy aside, Wilenski got down to business. Whitlam had sent him to ‘get across the conceptual framework of our foreign policy and the restraints in formulating it'. It was to be done with the ‘minimum of intermediaries', an approach surely designed to appeal to Kissinger and Nixon's own
modus operandi
. He then proceeded to outline the new environment in which Whitlam was reshaping the nation's foreign policy—the country was no longer ‘dominated by fear of Communist hordes and the gravitational theory', it had ‘gone away from the fear of the Asian menace', and during its recent years of opposition, Labor had sketched out a new agenda ‘freed from [such] constraints'. Australia did not want its troops stationed in the region, although Wilenski was keen to reassure that such a drawdown would not be immediate, and while the nation still wanted to maintain a regional stance, and would not reduce the percentage of GNP it spent on defence, it saw the American alliance as ‘the background for
these things'. If ever there was a moment when an Australian cut to the core of where the alliance sat in the new order, this was it. But it was nevertheless consistent with what Whitlam, and many in the foreign affairs bureaucracy, had been saying for some time: that the alliance was not the ‘be all and end all' of Australia's global outlook.