Unholy Fury (21 page)

Whitlam clearly relished the process of maximising his opponent's political pain. In response, he continued to draw fire from some well-worn Cold War rhetorical imagery. McMahon labelled his opponent as the ‘man who went to China to play party politics with wheat and finished up being a total advocate for the policy of a foreign power—the greatest communist power in Asia',
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while Malcolm Fraser denounced his ‘secret agreements' with Chinese leaders and labelled the Labor leader as ‘a disgrace to Australia'.
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The Liberal member for Bradfield, Harry Turner, not wishing to be outdone by his party's leaders, contended that Whitlam's ‘visit was conceived in sin … born in iniquity by the betrayal of all our national interests in Peking and nurtured in folly because he made Australia contemptible in the eyes of the world, like a performing monkey in Peking'.
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The outrage could not entirely mask, however, the ongoing embarrassment at being left high and dry by the administration in Washington.

But the conservative hangover from Nixon's move was clearly felt for some time afterwards. In late August 1971 a gathering of senior government ministers in Melbourne only confirmed the lingering difficulty in coming to terms with the new American policy. Addressing the topic ‘China: The Looming Presence'—the title of the seminar itself betrayed the resilience of the old fears—Nigel Bowen, Leslie Bury, Andrew Peacock and Malcolm Fraser all in one way or another made the United States, or Whitlam's Labor, the target. According to one report, Bowen presented a ‘turgid exposition' on Chinese law. Bury stated that Australian foreign policy should not be ‘dragged by the chariot wheels of American foreign policy' and Fraser attacked Whitlam as the ‘Chinese candidate'. This ‘Liberal Party group of stalwart conservatives', noted Hugh Appling at the American embassy in Canberra, ‘long accustomed to comfortable reliance on the US–Australian treaty relationship, found the subject of China confusing, hard to get a handle on, and, psychologically, barely digestible'.
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McMahon, however, still wanted to preserve at least the semblance of common cause with the United States: he wanted the alliance of old as well as the rhetoric and ritual that went with it. Seeking to calm the Australian leader's rattled nerves, Nixon had dangled the carrot of some kind of American assistance which might ‘ease [the] burden' of the ‘domestic problems in Australia' caused by his announcement.
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McMahon took it literally, and duly provided to the president a list of detailed suggestions, all of them centrally concerned with re-establishing the public image of an alliance in good, working order. First, he asked Nixon to consider visiting Australia on his way to Beijing the following year: itself a bold request and one he must have surely known was a virtual impossibility. If that was not convenient, he wanted a special ANZUS meeting—involving only heads of government—to be convened in Washington just prior to Nixon's departure for China. And if all else failed, he sought an urgent visit to Washington himself.
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The Americans quickly dismissed the first two options and arranged for McMahon to visit Washington in November, an event that came to be remembered above all else for the revealing dress that his wife, Sonia, wore to the official White House dinner. During his meeting with the secretary of state, McMahon said that the best thing the president could do to help was to ‘declare that [the] ANZUS treaty is as important now as [the] day it was signed'.
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In other words, having been rebuffed on all his other suggestions, he retreated to the need for yet another security guarantee.

Nixon didn't quite go that far—though during his toast to the visiting Australian he did stress that the treaty was ‘one of the fundamental pillars of our policy of peace in the Pacific' and that it went ‘far beyond simply that piece of paper'. He was happy ‘to reiterate that support and that commitment'. The language was strong but essentially theoretical and lacked what McMahon most wanted—a touch of the definitive. And so if the president wouldn't say the magic words, McMahon would do it for him. In his reply to Nixon, he hinted at a more independent role for Australia in South-East Asia, but went on to add that it rested on a ‘basis of security … the guarantee and the assurance from you and from your
administration that the ANZUS treaty is as sacred today and as valid today as when it was first signed a few years ago by Mr Dulles and our own foreign minister, Sir Percy Spender'.
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Here was McMahon's very own siren song to the past.

But the ‘red carpet treatment', according to American official reports, had done the trick. McMahon on his return to Australia duly thanked the president not only for talks which ‘took place at a formative stage of decision making', but also the ‘robust reaffirmation of the ANZUS treaty' and for making ‘Blair House available to us'.
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As a further sop to Australian protests over the lack of consultation, the Nixon administration had agreed to the establishment of a secret ‘hot-line' between the White House in Washington and the prime minister's residence in Canberra, but it was apparently used only five times in its thirteen-month life—and mainly to convey birthday wishes.
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Over the next eighteen months, as Australia prepared once more to head to the polls, Whitlam continued to draw on the lessons of both his, and Nixon's, visits to China. In effect, he took on the role of regional foreign policy seer. Australia, the United States and Japan could not put themselves ‘completely at the disposition' of Taiwanese leader Jiang Jieshi. He could not be allowed to ‘defer the world's hope for a new era'. Australia, too, could now follow Canada's model of how to be a more constructive ally for the United States. Speaking to the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Whitlam said that the nation ‘should at long last realise what it really means to be a good ally and a good friend. We should encourage by every means the positive and constructive aspects of American policy, and warn against its negative and destructive aspects'. It was a repeat of Calwell's position in May 1965, but now carried greater weight given Whitlam's own visit to Beijing. Australia's collaboration with the United States in Vietnam, he added, stood in poor contrast to Canada's opening of the door to China. And as a result, Canada ‘stood higher with the American people'.
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By the time of Nixon's visit to China in February 1972, Whitlam was even more ebullient. He wanted to prepare the Japanese and
Australian people for a ‘great upsurge of pro-China sentiment on the part of the American people' as a result of Nixon's visit:

 

Just as there was an over-reaction against the so-called ‘loss of China' in 1949, so there may be an over-reaction after 22 years of irrational and exaggerated hostility. This will be enforced by the sheer physical impact of the memorable scenes that undoubtedly await the President and which will be received directly on television from Shanghai. At a time when the United States is feeling rather chastened, even lonely, in the aftermath of Vietnam, it will come as a refreshing change to the people to find, at least superficially, that there is one place where the United States president appears unequivocally welcome. It might be a highly organised ‘enthusiasm' but its impact on the American people will not be the less for that.
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There was, of course, political self-interest involved in these triumphant predictions for the Nixon visit. The more Whitlam built up the historical significance of the American president's move, the more Whitlam's own ground-breaking visit could bask in the reflected glow of history. But he was also, again, making a statement about the extremes of American foreign policy, relishing the distance its leadership had come since the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Whitlam was now identifying China as the source of American redemption, a site of forgiveness for its mistakes of the Cold War, a regional haven for an American leader under pressure and on the defensive. Whitlam's tone was grandiose, but it also carried a touch of the patronising. In a speech to the Australian-American Association on Thanksgiving Day in 1971, he again repeated the line that ‘China will be one of the few countries in the world where an American president can visit without a demonstration against him'.
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So enamoured was Labor's leader of Nixon's China initiative that in July 1972 Whitlam even went to the trouble of delivering a live radio broadcast marking the one year anniversary of the US president's announcement of his visit to Beijing. This time, however, there was
much less hyperbole. While the shockwaves of Nixon's reversal of policy were still being felt in regional capitals and in Canberra, luck had played its part. ‘It was, I believe, fortunate for Australia—though I acknowledge it was quite fortuitous a coincidence—that I had just completed my own visit to China'. Stressing again the optics of the occasion—that Australia appeared ‘less an echo of the US Administration as a result', he was sure that had Nixon not gone to China, the visit of the Labor delegation would still be denounced by McMahon. The American shift had shown ‘how alert and imaginative we Australians have to be about the speed at which events are changing our neighbourhood'.
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Whitlam sensed that the times were moving with him, that he, and not his opponents, were the agents of change in Australian politics. In the wake of Whitlam's passing in 2014, the
New York Times
seemed to share in at least some of the Labor leader's mythmaking on his visit to Beijing. Its obituary for the former Australian prime minister noted that he ‘was also known for eclipsing President Richard M Nixon's 1972 visit to China by turning up there first'.
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Nixon would surely be rolling in his grave to hear that assessment.

In the aftermath of these changes to American policy in the region, and in the wake of alarmist Australian reactions to them, the White House felt it was necessary to take a closer look at the alliance. Establishing the context for the change in relations, all the major US departments and intelligence agencies produced a National Security Study Memorandum in August 1971: the most comprehensive look at the strategic relationship for over a decade. The document could not help but initially cast a wistful eye back to Australia's unwavering support for US policy in Asia throughout the Cold War. They reminded themselves of how this had been evident in its membership of SEATO and ANZUS, military contributions in Korea and Vietnam, non-recognition of China and aid to Cambodia. But policy makers in Washington warned that there would be ‘more critical scrutiny of our policies than in the past':

 

For two decades Australia and New Zealand have looked to ANZUS as a protective shield against a resurgent Japan or
the challenge of revolutionary Communism. Today they are reassessing the basic premises of their security in the light of fundamental changes in the Asian structure of power, above all, the declining US profile in Asia … All of this may prompt a reconsideration of alternatives to exclusive reliance upon the US guarantee as a source of security and has already provoked efforts to begin establishing a larger measure of diplomatic manoeuvrability.
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In such an environment it only reiterated the fact that ‘Australia and New Zealand, while they have nowhere else to turn, wonder whether ANZUS means what it used to, and are inclined to make less sacrifices for it, whether engaging in forward defense or accommodating secret US military installations on their soil'. Into that heady mix was thrown the uncertainty of domestic politics. In both countries, long-serving conservative governments were ‘now credibly challenged by mildly socialistic Opposition Labor parties which are more concerned with social welfare than with the maintenance of “forward defence”'.
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And the Americans showed little faith in McMahon's capacity to stem ‘the trend towards a more assertive and independent posture towards the US'.
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‘THE WAR OF THE GREAT LIE'

Nixon's opening to China had also derived from a desire to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split as a means of moderating Chinese influence in South-East Asia and therefore minimising potential fallout from the gradual American disengagement from Vietnam. Nixon was under no illusions that the war could be won. And so he continued to wind down the American military operation in Vietnam, even as little progress was made in the peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Indeed after successive withdrawals of American soldiers at the rate of close to 100 000 per year, by 1971 the numbers of US ground troops in South Vietnam had been reduced by half. The Australian government had little option but to follow suit. By August of that year Prime Minister McMahon could announce that the 6000 Australian combat troops would be
‘home in Australia by Christmas'.
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Once again the dynamics of the alliance in Australian domestic politics took a sharp turn in Labor's favour. In short, Whitlam was becoming even more emboldened and confident that he was now on the right side of history and Australian public opinion.

Labor could not but believe that its original assessment of the war had been correct, and thus Whitlam moved quickly to seize the moral high ground and with it the electoral advantage. The mass popular protests against the war, already fuelled by media reporting of atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, grew ever more vocal and powerful. Under sustained internal pressure to ramp up the assault on the government, Whitlam's criticisms of the war developed a sharper edge. It had to—for Whitlam's own political survival. Facing a serious challenge to his leadership from Jim Cairns, his parliamentary colleague and the leader of the anti-war moratorium movement, Whitlam had no option but to concede more ground to the left of his party. Once a sceptic of the power of the people to shape foreign policy, he even began to address anti-Vietnam protest rallies. In press conferences, too, he openly questioned the secrecy surrounding American intelligence facilities, stressing that a future Labor government would insist on a written guarantee that America would treat any attack on such facilities as an attack on her own mainland: ‘To put it bluntly we would want to be sure that America would risk a nuclear attack on her own cities as a quid pro quo for any attack on us'.
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Visiting Washington in July 1970, he told American Secretary of State William Rogers that the war had been a ‘mistake' and that Australia had been ‘conned' into Vietnam by the Johnson administration. His party was not ‘anti-American'. Rather it ‘applaud[ed] America's traditional generosity and her historical championing of the aspirations for freedom and betterment of people everywhere'. He hoped the Nixon administration could ‘re-establish' the image and posture of the US as a ‘liberator of the downtrodden'.
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