Unholy Fury (16 page)

Far from enhancing the American role in Asia, this policy has had exactly the contrary result. The United States has been weakened economically, diplomatically, militarily and morally by the war in Vietnam … For the first time since Pearl Harbour, isolationism has become an important factor in American political debate and all the candidates for the presidency have, to some degree, been obliged to make gestures towards an isolationist stance. This has never happened in any other presidential election throughout the 1950s or any part of this decade.

 

He again cast himself in the role of defender of American honour, leadership and prestige. The message was that Australia's foreign policy could not exist in a state of suspended animation: ‘Our role in Asia', he added, ‘cannot be determined solely by the role the next American president may choose for his country. We cannot be content to leave everything to American initiatives'. Instead, in a line that showed to some extent his anticipation of the Nixon doctrine, Whitlam reaffirmed that Australia's task was to encourage the building up of the ‘defences, societies and economies of our neighbours'.
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Not long after his parliamentary assault on Gorton, Whitlam gave his American sympathies a fuller airing during a speech on American Independence Day. In a clear sign that his confidence was growing, he used the occasion not only to deliver a history lesson but also to offer a reflection about the nature of American society, particularly as it reeled in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Looking to move beyond the ‘sloganeering terms' of the Australian debate over the alliance, he called for a change in national psychology: ‘thirty years ago faith in the immutability of the British connection was held to be the test of loyalty. We should not now permit ourselves to attach the same emotional and uncritical content to Saigon as thirty years ago we did to Singapore'. These were brave words for a Labor leader, raising as they did the clear prospect of American defeat in Vietnam, not to mention the
explicit connection he was implying between blind dependence on a great power and ultimate military failure. As he again challenged the assumptions on which the government based its foreign policy, namely keeping the Americans militarily in South-East Asia, he suggested that the alliance ‘should be constantly reassessed in terms of its value both for Australia and America', words which harked back to his first speech on international affairs in the parliament. Whitlam wanted an alliance that was a two-way street:

 

Any alliance is a two-way affair. We should not assume, as we have tended to assume, that all the benefits are conferred by America and received by Australia. Nor should we too lightly assume that Australia is too insignificant a power to make a meaningful contribution in our own region in our right.

 

Setting out an early agenda for greater self-reliance within the alliance and a more activist international agenda for the country, he pointed to the risks of Australia allowing its defences to become geared exclusively to US defence and industrial capacity; the dangers of increasing American control of the nation's basic export industries; and the need for Australia to help the United States to ‘adopt a less hysterically hostile attitude towards China'—the last being hailed as the ‘best antidote for the equally hysterical hostility of China towards the US'. But in his peroration, as he gestured towards the cultural and social torment raging across the United States, Whitlam looked again to a particular strand of the American political tradition as symbolic of its enduring appeal: ‘The important thing about America is not that she produces or harbours the assassins of a John or Robert Kennedy; it is that she produces a John or a Robert Kennedy. The important thing about America is not that she produces a Joseph McCarthy but that she can produce a Eugene McCarthy', the anti-war senator whose strong showing in early Democrat primaries that year had been instrumental in forcing LBJ not to seek a second term.
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By paying homage to the recent heroes of the Democratic party's pantheon, Whitlam not only further fireproofed his alliance credentials, he was also saying that, despite its present trauma, the country remained a source of inspiration. In a major speech on
Australian foreign policy that attempted to look over the horizon and ‘beyond Vietnam', he again took issue with those he believed were equating the strategic relationship with the nefarious influence of American popular culture and violence:

 

It is absurd to blame ANZUS for the television wasteland. While the United States may be one of the most violent communities of the world, it still remains the most generous and idealistic nation in the world. Our proper role is not to shut ourselves off from American influence but to use and expand our own influence with America to assist in playing a fruitful, meaningful and peaceful role in our region.
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‘YOU MAY HAVE ONE OR TWO PROBLEMS WITH MR NIXON'

Suspicions of Gorton and doubts about his capabilities filtered into the new Nixon administration. Indeed, in his last months in office, Lyndon Johnson had predicted there might be trouble. Shortly after Nixon's victory in November 1968, Johnson had burst into a lunch with Australian journalists in Washington to admit he was ‘furious' with Gorton's criticisms of the administration's Vietnam policies. According to one guest, it was clear that LBJ had ‘not taken to Gorton one little bit'. What had so infuriated Johnson was hearing Gorton's statement in reaction to the president's announcement in September of a halt on all bombing of North Vietnam as a prelude to peace negotiations. Gorton's speech in response was perfunctory, if not dismissive of the chances for peace: indeed he barely acknowledged that Hanoi had agreed to participate in negotiations. In the parliament, he said: ‘We should not have too sanguine expectations of too early a settlement'.
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Although there were good reasons for Gorton's doubts, Johnson saw the prime minister's downbeat tone as a ‘deliberate act' in retaliation for the lack of consultation earlier in the year, before his speech of 31 March. The journalists were clearly shocked by the candour, but they were more keen to gauge Johnson's appraisal of the president-elect. Johnson's reply was brief, but decidedly ominous: ‘You may have one or two problems with Mr Nixon'.
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Whitlam seized the moment, believing it offered another chance to put the government's use of the alliance to the sword. Sensing the time was right to bury the idea that Labor wanted to desert ANZUS—a line that remained a constant refrain in the speeches of his political opponents—Whitlam launched a savage and sustained attack on the prime minister in the House of Representatives. He believed that Gorton's willingness to virtually brush aside the switch in US policy amounted to nothing less than the crumbling of ‘Liberal polemics and Liberal propaganda about the war and Australia's role'. The ‘“tough minded realists”, the “hard-headed hawks”', he thundered, ‘have been shown to be mere dreamers living in a world of self-constructed fantasy'. Strategies and tactics that the government had denounced and derided barely a year ago were now the official US policy. The Liberals had been ‘overtaken in the drift of events' but remained fixated on encouraging Washington to ‘prolong and escalate the conflict'. Where once the Australian government had classified a bombing halt, the participation of the National Liberation Front in peace talks and the conversion of the war into holding operations as ‘totally unacceptable to the United States', circumstances had changed—and dramatically. ‘Bit by bit'—Whitlam clearly relished turning the screw on his political enemies—‘these “totally unacceptable” propositions, this “treason”, this “scuttle”, this “sell-out”, this “saintliness”, have become the policy, the aims, the objectives of the United States of America'. Gorton and his ministers, however, were solely interested in keeping their ally ‘bogged down in an interminable conflict at immense cost to the United States in blood, treasure, national unity and national purpose'. And at the crescendo of his speech, Whitlam moved to inflict the deepest possible political wound: ‘Heaven save the United States from such allies'.
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Revenge was in the air.

A more subtle, but no less pungent, lecture on alliance management was delivered to the Gorton government by Philip Quigg, the editor of the prestigious American quarterly
Foreign Affairs
. Visiting Canberra in December 1968, Quigg went out of his way to encourage an ongoing Australian commitment to Malaysia and Singapore. But he also suggested that Australian leaders and
diplomats not underestimate their ability to influence American policy. ‘What would really be perilous', he was quoted as saying:

 

would be to assume a posture that could be interpreted by Americans as one of indifference to anything except the United States commitment in ANZUS. You just cannot afford a feeling of taking the United States for granted. The best way to avoid doing this … is to talk toe-to-toe and not hesitate to disagree with us.

 

Quigg was telling the Australians, in essence, to widen their regional lens and toughen up a little. In short, if the Gorton government was not prepared to stick its neck out in South-East Asia, it could not expect broad pledges of American support. The risk, he added, was a ‘long-term danger of erosion of the ANZUS treaty'.
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The new Nixon administration remained somewhat puzzled at how to accommodate a less obliging ally. In the figure of John Gorton—who had said publicly that he had no wish to ‘follow America blindly'—they continued to bristle at a style unseen in previous Australian leaders.
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William Crook, American ambassador in Canberra, believed that Gorton had a ‘bone and marrow suspicion that we are trying to push him around'. He was, quite simply, a ‘very difficult man' who needed to be ‘told the facts of life'.
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Even the British sensed that the president–prime minister relationship had to be ‘rebuilt anew'.
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Though he ‘wound up rather jaundiced' by his experiences with Johnson, Gorton was being told by senior Australian officials that Nixon was a ‘man with whom he can have a proper relationship without fear that he is being dominated or annexed'. Those same officials, however, were not entirely well informed about Nixon. Keith Waller told Governor-General Lord Casey that he had ‘simply no idea of the line the new president will take' towards Australia.
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But the anticipation of a new era for the alliance met the blunt reality of a new president not given to notions of special treatment. Although prime ministerial visits to Washington may have been invested on the Australian side with what one observer called ‘a touch of the sacred and the mystical' in this era, Nixon and Kissinger took
office determined to cull the sacred cows of ‘special relationships'.
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As one observer in Canberra cheekily observed, ‘if there is one thing Australia should know about the election of a President it is that Australia's interests are as far from any politician's mind as the weather in Kurdistan'.
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Gorton did, however, win some early kudos with the new administration on account of his announcement, not long after Nixon's inauguration, that Australia would maintain its forces, including ground troops, in Malaysia and Singapore after the British pull-out in 1971. Nixon's secretary of state, William Rogers, noted that the decision ‘put an end to a year-long, meandering public foreign policy debate on “forward defence” versus “fortress Australia”'.
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The former had won. The
Bulletin
magazine reported that there were ‘shouts of joy' in Washington at the news, and Rogers was especially relieved, since Gorton now seemed no longer likely ‘to seek a specific US guarantee of the safety of his ground forces before committing them'.
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And extracting that guarantee had reportedly been the ‘only one thing on his mind' before coming to Washington to see Nixon.
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But as Gorton confided to Rogers, he was repeatedly questioned whether ANZUS applies to ‘this and that' but now recognised that he ‘could not be always trying to spell out the meaning of the treaty in the absence of concrete situations. To do so … might well result in narrowing the application of the treaty unnecessarily rather than clarifying it'. The ‘best he could look for was something general in nature'.
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It was a somewhat sullen resignation to the realities. But it meant the Americans could retreat to the safety of their tried and true 1963 formula: that in the event of any military contingency in Malaysia or Singapore requiring their support, the US ‘would of course stand ready to consult fully and promptly on what support we might give'.
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Kissinger knew, though, that Gorton was still likely to ‘test the firmness of US Asian commitments' and while he didn't seek ‘legal precision', he was after a ‘real and personal feeling that we intend to stick by Australia'.
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And those warming words were always much easier to put in the presidential speeches. One State Department briefing paper even surmised that Gorton was so ‘blunt', so ‘down to earth', so desirous of a ‘man-to-man approach',
so ‘impatient of formalities and diplomatic nuances' that literally any kind of assurance from the US on ANZUS might hit the spot. ‘He is the sort of man who, if he hits it off with the President, might even be content with an oral exchange and a handshake over a scotch and soda'.
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Never before—and probably not since—have the critical articles of the ANZUS treaty been reduced to the boozy protocols of the saloon bar. Gorton, too, had made it clear that ‘it would be very embarrassing to the government of Australia to be taken unaware by changes in US policy in areas of common concern, such as Vietnam and China'.
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He could not have known then just how prescient those words would prove to be.