Unholy Fury (18 page)

 

If the history of our relations with Labor regimes is a reliable guide, with careful diplomatic effort we can expect to win from Whitlam's government a considerable degree of cooperation in most matters, since most Australians of whatever political stripe recognise the importance to Australia of the American alliance.
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And yet the last time a White House had dealt with a Labor government had been during World War II and in the immediate postwar years. The real message, of course, was that Americans expected a Labor government to simply fall into line.

 

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The question of America's obligations under the ANZUS treaty would haunt conservative leaders in Australia all the way to the 1972 election. Although Prime Minister William McMahon tried to make sense of the tectonic shifts in world politics around this time, he remained rusted on to the old orthodoxies. Much like his predecessor Gorton, McMahon was a leader torn between conflicting forces: by the comforting habits of the past and the unsettling demands of a more fluid international situation. Groomed in Cold War politics, where an unwavering commitment to the alliance was the first principle of Australia's national security, he struggled to adapt to a different environment in which the great power ally was battling to preserve its self-confidence and starting to redefine its national interests, especially in Asia. Under pressure to embody a more distinctively Australian view of world affairs, McMahon was at pains to stress he would not relegate Australia to the status of ‘echo or satellite' of the United States.
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But these sporadic outbursts of ‘independence' could not fully hide his deep-seated trepidation towards the prospect of a world without the umbrella of American protection. In the words of Donald Horne, the conservative leaders of this generation were ‘running in a maze. A world had withered'.
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Well before he came to office in 1969, Richard Nixon was challenging many of the assumptions that had sustained McMahon's view of the Australia–US alliance. As president, Nixon was speaking a different language—and charting an alternative course—for the United States in Asia and across the globe. Leading a country badly wounded by Vietnam—physically, psychologically and economically—Nixon was determined to end the war and take American foreign policy in new directions.

China was to become the great symbol of this new era in American foreign policy. In his first term in the White House, Nixon overturned a generation of red baiting and announced his intention to visit Beijing in 1972 to hold discussions with Chairman Mao. The once arch Cold War warrior was now arguing for the People's Republic of China to be brought back into the international fold. Alongside the move towards détente and arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union, it was clear that the United States would no longer rigidly abide by the policies of confrontation and containment. The country was no longer willing to ‘pay any price' or ‘bear any burden … to assure the survival and the success of liberty', as John F Kennedy had promised in his inaugural address. The changes were sudden and dramatic, catching close allies in the region—not to mention many on Nixon's own side of politics in Washington—by surprise. But America's Asian allies would have no choice but to learn to live with the consequences of the adjustments in US policy.

For Labor's Gough Whitlam, however, the overturning of America's stance was something of a political gift, and a vindication of his own longstanding advocacy for recognition of Communist China. These were days of high drama in Australian and world politics. Whitlam was taking hold of the red arrows that had been used in the 1966 election campaign—luminous arrows launched from China and typically lunging down towards Australia's coastline—and snapping them in half. Just seventy-two hours after Whitlam led a Labor delegation to China for talks in July 1971, Henry Kissinger arrived in Beijing to lay the groundwork for Nixon's visit the following year. Whitlam, denounced as a Manchurian candidate for deigning to go to China as Opposition leader, could now claim with every
justification that he was more in tune with American thinking than was the McMahon government.

The moment turned Australian political culture on its head. For Labor's leader, the Nixon initiative offered an opportunity to bury once and for all some of the ideas that Whitlam argued had for too long distorted the west's conduct of international relations since the end of World War II. Whitlam's rhetoric in praise of Nixon's intentions soared, and he predicted that the US president's arrival in the Chinese capital would be ‘one of the commandingly crucial events in modern world diplomacy'. He even ranked it alongside the Entente Cordiale, the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles and the German–Soviet non-aggression pact as ‘events which have crucially changed relations between great states, and consequently between all states'.
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For Gough Whitlam, the world was on the cusp of a seismic change in twentieth-century diplomacy.

At this time, and on this question, it appeared that Gough Whitlam and Richard Nixon were virtually as one, both hurtling along the diplomatic trail to China. Indeed Whitlam self-consciously identified himself with Nixon's China policy as a means of breaking through the ‘artificial tensions' of the Cold War.
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At times, even, he could appear to position himself as a trailblazer for Nixon. And he took special care to both celebrate and commemorate the Nixonian China moment. Nevertheless there were key differences. For Whitlam, the opening to China was a time of liberation from what he perceived to be the ideological straightjacket of the previous two decades, and a symbol of a dramatic new departure in Australian foreign relations and the nation's relationship with Asia. The move also gave Whitlam another opportunity to distance himself from the unpopular war in Vietnam. Nixon, too, embraced the transformative nature of his China initiative, but for him the Cold War raged on, and the US president did not have the same freedom as Whitlam to denounce the war. While this moment saw the career trajectories of both leaders more or less coincide, it would prove to be a false dawn. Their agreement on the need to bring China in from the cold was to prove an evocative contrast to the rancorous disagreement that would come to colour their relationship just eighteen months later.

It was against this background that Gough Whitlam also sought to transform the alliance dynamic in Australian politics. The decision by the Nixon administration in June 1969 to start withdrawing troops and ‘Vietnamise' the war had convinced Labor that events were now proving the party's original critique of the war correct. Growing public dissatisfaction with Vietnam—visible in the swelling numbers joining the anti-war moratorium marches across the country—along with a perception that the government had deceived the electorate in explaining the reasons for going to war, gave the new leader an ideal platform from which to begin the task of resetting the alliance coordinates in domestic political debate. Whitlam's challenge, however, entailed much more than the crafting of an alternative rhetoric for the Australian-American relationship. He had to overturn a generation of doubt about Labor's capacity to handle foreign affairs and defence. Such shibboleths had to be put to the sword. Accordingly, he sought to turn the tables on his conservative opponents by making their dependence on the US alliance a subject of ridicule. In the parliament and in the public domain he sought to capitalise on their palpable unease with changing US priorities in the region, and especially their approach to China.

With a fresh mind and a powerful personality, Whitlam was well suited to take advantage of these new circumstances. Unlike his political opponents, he was not disheartened by the retreat of British and US power from South-East Asia. This was neither a moment to whine nor a time to reminisce about the ‘captains and kings' of Europe and North America shielding the nation from its traditional Asian anxieties. On the contrary, he saw that the changed regional and global environment offered opportunities for Australia. As early as 1966 he had made the case that ‘Our allies want us to be more independent in our approach to our neighbours, so that we can supplement and interpret their efforts'.
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In his own way he was anticipating American expectations of their Asian allies under the Nixon doctrine. When prime minister, Whitlam would often credit Nixon's moves—especially on China and détente with the Soviet Union—for providing the very conditions that allowed Labor to come to office—in particular their encouragement of greater
self-reliance in Asia and an increased focus on social and economic development across the region. Indeed, so convinced of this view was he that six months out from the ‘It's Time' election of December 1972, Whitlam could confidently pronounce that ANZUS had to ‘change from a purely military alliance or die'.
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The government's cries of protest and outrage that Labor would tear the heart out of the alliance had finally fallen flat, failing to resonate in an electorate grown weary of the old slogans. As Whitlam remarked of the treaty, ‘what we want to do is put heart in it':

 

there is no future in military arrangements in our region which just appear—rightly or wrongly—to our neighbours to be an inward-looking, backward-looking huddling together of three of the white powers of the Pacific.
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At the same time, however, Whitlam had to tread carefully. It was not the season for open slather on America's problems. Ongoing racial tensions in the United States regularly made the front pages of Australian newspapers, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy had, in the words of the State Department, ‘increased the feeling that Australia's great protector may be becoming a tormented giant, beset with domestic as well as foreign difficulties'.
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Whitlam was still operating in a political culture where memories of Labor's previous troubles on these issues could be easily stirred. Judged solely by the number of times he or his shadow ministers were asked about the extent of ‘anti-Americanism' in Labor's ranks, some remained to be convinced that the party had the alliance's best interests in mind.

The deteriorating situation in Vietnam had also seen a pronounced shift in the internal politics of the Labor Party, with the left in the ascendant. Although the dilemma of criticising the war while expressing continued support for the alliance was no longer as thorny and treacherous as it had been during the period of Calwell's leadership, Whitlam nevertheless remained acutely aware of the sensitivities. Where his predecessor appealed for the Americans not to be humiliated in Asia, Whitlam argued that Liberal Party policy towards Vietnam and China had delayed the return of America to its
rightful place as leader of the free world.
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He believed that ‘one of the great tasks for Australian statesmanship' in the 1970s would be to channel the Australian–American alliance into ‘more fruitful and constructive directions'.
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In doing so he maintained at all times that Australia was aligned to the west, that the US alliance was fundamental to Australian security and that, despite its travails in Vietnam, the United States remained the ‘most generous and idealistic nation in the world'.
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Whitlam's starting point was not that the American alliance itself had ‘reduced Australia to a status of diplomatic and defence dependence'. Rather it was the ‘government's interpretation of the alliance'.
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Ironically, it was the length of time spent in Opposition that allowed Labor's leader to make new political capital: out of office the party bore no responsibility for the failed policies of the past. The government's foreign policy, he said, was ‘in ruins because its very foundations were false. It is time to clear away the rubble. We need a fresh start'.
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Whitlam's visit to China in mid 1971 epitomised in the most emphatic way possible this new beginning.

The strategy seemed to promise electoral salvation for Labor, but it remained risky. Whitlam had to concede some ground to the chorus of alliance critics on his left, but at the same time he had to find soothing words of reassurance for the US officials increasingly knocking at his door. He needed to assuage any concerns that their interests, particularly the presence and status of US intelligence installations on Australian soil, might be under threat from a future Labor government: American diplomats remained distinctly wary of this new breeze in Australian politics. Already frustrated by John Gorton's unpredictability and now William McMahon's irascibility, they wondered what kind of future the alliance would have under a Labor government. Even though convinced that Whitlam was a moderate with whom they could deal, US leaders and officials became more and more alarmed by the growing truculence and ideological predisposition of senior Labor figures around him. In effect, the seeds of distrust sown in the minds of American officials in this period go some way to explaining just why Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger reacted so sharply to the early moves by the Whitlam government in December 1972.

Thus began the slow burn in Australian–American relations.

‘CORRUPTED BY OUR HANG-UPS'

The dramatic nature of the visits to Beijing by Whitlam and Nixon in the early 1970s can only be understood against the backdrop of how China was framed within the Cold War alliance. Writing from the Chinese capital in early July 1971, Whitlam told readers of the
Sunday Australian
that he ‘really started on this journey to China in 1954 … when I was the first Australian parliamentarian to call for the recognition of China and her admission to the United Nations'. For a generation, he noted, the great question of China had been ‘corrupted by our hang-ups about Chinese communism'.
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Where one stood on China, wrote Stephen FitzGerald, had become a ‘touchstone of loyalty' in Australian politics.
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