Unholy Fury (14 page)

Here was an appeal to the memory of the dead president: not to Kennedy as staunch Cold War warrior, lofty new frontiersman and a leader haunted by the ghosts of Munich, but Kennedy as the cautious, measured, careful deliberator—weighing both sides of an argument or situation. Yet Whitlam, too, combined these two visions of America. On the one hand, he was the pragmatic politician who could defend American resistance to Communist China in South-East Asia; on the other, the intellectual who eschewed the temptation to reduce complex issues to simplistic slogans and rousing trumpet calls. He had no time for an idea of the world that was almost systematically reduced to moral absolutes. As the situation in Vietnam began to deteriorate, it became easier for Whitlam to strengthen the calls for international cooperation whilst maintaining that a withdrawal from South-East Asia would allow America to return to her rightful role in international affairs. It was this idealised America—the responsible leader of the free world—to which he appealed. That in turn had consequences for how America's closest allies ought to behave. Thus over Vietnam he continued to counsel ‘restraint and de-escalation as a preliminary to negotiations with a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops and the implementation of free elections by the United Nations'. As he lamented in September 1966: ‘so far the Australian government has acted entirely in the opposite direction. It has urged greater escalation'.
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REBUILDING LABOR'S CREDIBILITY

Mired in the internal troubles of Opposition, however, there was little Whitlam could do with no ability to get his hands on the levers of policy. What he could do was try to moderate his party's position on the Vietnam war and make it less of an electoral liability. This he started after he became leader of the Labor Party in early 1967. Circumstances were beginning to change, and Whitlam sensed the opportunity to shift the political debate in Labor's favour. In a Senate
election advertisement later that year, the new leader stated that ‘Vietnam is no longer as black and white as it may have appeared last year'.
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But he still needed to patiently rebuild his party's standing on national security in the eyes of the people.

An early opportunity to begin that reconstruction of Labor's credibility came when he visited Washington in the middle of June that year: it was his first real test of walking the fine line between opposing the war and maintaining support for the alliance. The Johnson White House welcomed the opportunity to host a different kind of Labor leader. With memories of Calwell still too fresh—he was ‘violently opposed to our policy in Vietnam'—Walt Rostow advised Johnson that Whitlam ‘takes a more realistic view of the situation in South East Asia', noting however that he faced serious internal obstacles ‘in his attempt to reorient the direction of the Party's foreign policy'. Whitlam ‘needs the advantage of face-to-face contact with the American point of view expressed at the highest levels to reinforce his moderate viewpoint in dealing with his colleagues'. The CIA assessed that although Whitlam ‘rejects approaches based on obsolete socialist dogma … he carries a strong support for the UN to somewhat of an extreme'. The portrait even went so far as to highlight that the visiting Australian was ‘an exceptionally tall man who looks younger than his 50 years and who makes a good public impression in person and on television'.
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Impressions were paramount. As an Opposition leader of a fragile party that had gone like lambs to the electoral slaughter in November the previous year on account of a chaotic foreign policy, what Whitlam needed to do most of all was to win Johnson's confidence. As the alternative Australian prime minister, it was a rare moment to share the spotlight with the American commander in chief and show the public back home that Labor could be taken seriously on the world stage. And with headlines back home like ‘LBJ warms to Whitlam' and ‘LBJ lavishes praise on Australia', he seemed to have achieved that objective.
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Whitlam met Johnson in the Oval Office late on the morning of 14 June 1967. The two leaders chatted privately there before continuing the conversation in the White House Rose Garden outside. According to the brief,
almost cursory American record of the occasion, Johnson recalled his visit to Australia and ‘expressed his particularly warm feeling of friendship for the Australians … [and] his period of service in Australia during World War II'. He even presented Whitlam with a specially struck medal of his Asian trip the year before, thus adding to the Labor leader's mementoes of the occasion.
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As to the subject of their private discussions, Whitlam was determined not to put a foot wrong and took refuge in confidentiality: all he would confirm to the waiting press was that Johnson had asked him about his height and whether he had a weight problem. Just quite how Whitlam engaged with this sort of presidential banter is sadly not recorded.

But the theatrics did not stop there. After the discussion in the Oval Office, Whitlam was then invited by the president to join him at a ceremony on the south lawn of the White House attended by over one thousand teenagers from rural areas of the United States. It was ‘Rural Electric Youth Week' and Johnson, having championed the issue of electrification for country America during his many years in the Senate, took charge. To the waiting crowd he hailed Whitlam as the ‘young and brilliant leader' of the Australian Labor Party. So his audience was not confused, however, he added: ‘At the moment, the Labor Party is the opposition party. It is like the Republican Party in this country, although they don't have the same views on questions. It is the other party'. The words were spare: the speed with which he moved to reaffirm the pecking order was not. Johnson noted with delight that Harold Holt was to visit him at the LBJ ranch in Texas the following weekend. It is a wonder the Australian press did not make more of the optics: Holt getting the ranch, Whitlam being roped into a rural youth conference.

Johnson then called on Whitlam to deliver some impromptu remarks of his own. It was the perfect opportunity for the Labor leader to skirt the thornier issues: he could refer to the president as ‘the leader of the greatest country in the world' and salute ‘the inspiration of a man who derives so much of his own strength from the land'.
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During the proceedings, the new Labor leader was seated on a platform next to Johnson and also beside two American beauty queens: ‘Miss Rural Electrification 1967' and the ‘National Grange
Princess'. The evangelical leader Billy Graham, waiting to see Johnson next, was also wheeled in for the moment. And a ‘romping beagle' apparently entertained the youthful throng during the speeches. It is not known what Whitlam thought of this combination of evangelicalism, electrifying beauty and canine antics. But it would be fair to say that he would not easily forget his first visit to Washington as an Australian political leader.

At home, however, Whitlam was beginning to ramp up the pressure on Holt's support for American policy, especially its bombing of North Vietnam. Speaking in the parliament in early November 1967, Whitlam dismissed the effect of these raids as ‘marginal', questioned whether the government understood the division within the US Congress and public over the utility and morality of the bombing, and argued that it had to be stopped in order for peace negotiations to start. He also condemned the government's enthusiasm as an act of grotesque irresponsibility on the part of an ally. By supporting the bombings, Australia was aiding and abetting ‘a continuing source of weakness in America's international stance'. Agreeing with Senator Robert Kennedy's call for a bombing halt as a step towards a negotiated peace, he argued that a continuation of the war ‘threatens an American return to isolationism'. And he asked pointedly whether the criticism of US policy meted out by other allies, like Canada, would render those relationships less strong or less permanent. Whitlam was in full flight, now depicting Holt and Treasurer William McMahon as the real enemies of the alliance:

 

People like the Prime Minister and the Treasurer do the United States no credit and give the United States no credit. The Americans are the most powerful, generous and outspoken people in the world … no country has more to lose than we from a return to isolationism: military, economic, diplomatic or psychological isolationism, in the United States. No country has more to fear from a growth of instability in this, the most turbulent and deprived region of the world. A continuation of the war in Vietnam threatens both …

    
The government places all its hopes on American military might. A better, surer hope lies in the field where America is truly invincible, in the use of her matchless skills and resources in reducing hunger and poverty in the underdeveloped world.
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No speech better reflected the rhetorical weapons in the Whitlam armoury—in taking the fight to the government on the alliance, he managed at the same time to appear as a champion of American credibility and prestige in the region and the world. The Labor leader evoked a different America from his political opponents, but it was America nonetheless. And yet, perhaps no piece of oratorical flight better demonstrated Whitlam's naivety that Australia could truly alter the course of America's approach to Vietnam, or indeed in South-East Asia. Whether or not Whitlam really believed that Australia had the potential to influence US policy, it certainly helped to shield his alliance flank in a political culture still harnessed to Cold War foundations.

‘THE END OF A CHAPTER'

Over the next year, circumstances for the president, the war and the alliance were to change dramatically. Just eight days before Christmas in 1967, Harold Holt disappeared whilst swimming off the coast of Portsea in Victoria. Even in US eyes, Johnson's ‘pilgrimage' to Australia for Holt's funeral seemed to mark ‘the end of a chapter in American–Australian relations'.
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The occasion provided another opportunity for the president to meet both with the Australian Cabinet and with the Labor leader. By this time the Americans were clearly warming to Whitlam's efforts in modernising the party. Whitlam ‘claims to be impressed', the president was advised, ‘by your vision in looking beyond the purely military aspects of Vietnam toward long-range programs of pacification and economic improvement'. That might have been a case of Whitlam seeing in US policy only what he wanted to see, but the Americans were clear eyed about Labor's ‘ultimata' on Vietnam policy. They saw Whitlam as trying to make the party's position on the war more acceptable to the public by stressing the need for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and the use of napalm as well as recognition of the Viet
Cong as a legitimate political movement. His support for a greater sense of Australian self-reliance within the alliance, recognition of China and concern over excessive US private capital investment were all flagged.
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Whitlam also saw the potential political space Labor might occupy in the wake of Holt's disappearance. He told US embassy officials in Canberra privately that ‘no matter who became Prime Minister, and particularly if Senator Gorton did, the ALP would stand to gain' since the new leader would ‘take the government further to the right and would permit the ALP to move out of left field and into a more moderate middle ground'. The Labor leader was expecting Gorton to adopt an even more hawkish Vietnam policy than Holt.
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Yet Gorton was a very different kind of leader to his predecessor. Behind the ‘crumpled nose which makes him look like an ex-prize fighter', US observers discerned a nervous new prime minister groping towards a more robust language of national self-confidence.
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But Gorton's attempt at assertive nationalism aggravated a White House increasingly desperate to maintain a united allied front at a time when the situation in Vietnam continued to spiral out of control. Almost upon coming to office Gorton had stated that Australia could not increase its commitment of manpower to the conflict, which then numbered around 8000. The president's closest advisers struggled to take Gorton seriously, labelling him ‘not a profound thinker … a conclusion jumper' and a leader who ‘lacks experience in foreign affairs'.
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While they respected his refusal to ‘have either himself or Australia taken for granted', they underlined the inherent limits to this brash style. Amidst so many regional uncertainties, not only in Vietnam but also in the projected British military pull-out from South-East Asia, US officials pointed to a ‘growing realisation that, whatever its will, Australia cannot realistically adopt a meaningful independent stance'.
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American distrust of the new Australian prime minister was also sparked by Gorton's alarmed reaction to Johnson's critical speech at the end of March 1968, which announced a unilateral limitation on the bombing of North Vietnam. In the wake of the Tet Offensive, in which the Vietcong had been able to strike seemingly at will at
US and allied targets in the south of the country, the somewhat rosy American ideas of progress in Vietnam took a fatal blow. The growth of the protest movement and the steady erosion of public support for the war ate into the president's own credibility. Worn down by the stress of Vietnam and the challenges from within his own party—especially from Robert Kennedy—Johnson also said in his nationwide address that he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic party's nomination for president. In the same speech he announced a substantial reduction in hostilities towards North Vietnam, including an immediate bombing halt. This move towards de-escalation caught the Australian government of John Gorton by complete surprise.

Only days before, External Affairs Minister Paul Hasluck had strongly defended the US bombing policy in the parliament. Furious at the lack of consultation about the policy change, Gorton had privately remarked that this was ‘no way to treat an ally'.
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In the press, journalist Alan Ramsey likened the American decision to ‘little short of stabbing in the back'.
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The prime minister confided to one reporter his fear that the United States was on the cusp of returning to pre–World War II isolationism. Yet Gorton saw even more portents of doom ahead—one assessment by the State Department argued that the Australian leader viewed Johnson's retirement from politics as ‘possibly foreshadowing a US retreat from Southeast Asia, which would leave Australia in an agonising position'.
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It was not far from the mark. As Australian Minister for Air Peter Howson confided to his diary in the days following Johnson's broadcast: ‘To my mind it's the first step of the Americans moving out of South East Asia and … within a few years, there'll be no white faces on the Asian mainland … from now on, and to a much greater extent, we shall be isolated and on our own'.
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It was a compelling illustration of the thick fog enveloping the conservative Cold War world-view. Neither the politics of Vietnam nor the domestic affairs of the United States could be interpreted on their own terms. Everything was viewed through the prism of how it might affect America's regional presence.