Unholy Fury (22 page)

If Whitlam was not afraid to mix tough talk with dulcet descriptions of America as a worldwide champion of social justice, others in his party were ready to speak bluntly in front of American officials. During a visit to Washington in May 1971, Bill Morrison, a former
Australian diplomat who had served in Moscow, London, Washington, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, held talks with senior officials in the State Department. Morrison had been elected to parliament in 1969 and was deputy chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Americans treated him as Labor's shadow foreign minister and were clearly flabbergasted by the loaded, conspiratorial language he used during one particular meeting. Morrison said that Labor favoured a ‘lowering' of the US presence in Asia since it had been ‘counter-productive', even going so far as to say that the Nixon doctrine virtually released the United States from the ANZUS treaty. He then lamented the ‘blatant support' the American embassy had lent the Liberal–Country Party coalition at the 1963 and 1966 elections, a move that had resulted in the growth of widespread ‘anti-American feeling' in the Labor Party.

He did not stop there. Once in office, Morrison said, a ‘delicate question … would be the US bases in Australia: the ALP resents the secrecy that surrounds them … the present government in Australia had brainwashed the Australian people into thinking that any action against the US is treason against Australia'. Many of his colleagues felt that the bases made Australia a nuclear target in the event of a nuclear war. As he summed it up: US–Australia relations ‘will be affected' when Labor wins office.
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The fears only intensified when, in early 1972, Morrison delivered an intemperate speech to the Australian-American Association in Sydney in which he lamented that Australia had ‘many losses to show on the ANZUS account', especially the intelligence facilities. It is little wonder that encounters such as this tended to feed an underlying suspicion about what a Labor win might mean for the alliance. No matter how often Whitlam tried to strike a restrained tone in private, it was the cantankerous rodomontades such as that delivered by Bill Morrison that made the Americans sit up and take notice. As the senior US policy maker responsible for Asia, Marshall Green noted at the time, he ‘represents a viewpoint which could attract adherents if we are not always careful to deal openly and fairly with our Australian friends. To know is to be on guard'.
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The leaking of the Pentagon Papers in June and July 1971 poured even more fuel onto the flames of the anti-war movement. Given
to the
New York Times
and other US newspapers, the documents gave a warts and all portrait of how the United States had got itself mired in Vietnam, covering its political and military involvement in the country from 1945–67. The decision-making processes revealed that there had been no great enthusiasm for the Vietnam experience amongst US policy makers. Rather, as time went on the continuation of the war had become more and more entwined with the defence of American ‘credibility'. Too few in the administration had asked whether the ideas of liberty and freedom were in fact going to tap deep roots in the political culture of South Vietnam. Moreover the study, which had been ordered by then US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, displayed the extent to which the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had deceived and manipulated their allies in the process. The effect of their publication was lethal. In Australia the press focused in particular on the question of whether Menzies had deceived the electorate in setting out the original reasons for the commitment—whether, in fact, the government had been in receipt of a request from South Vietnam for assistance in May 1965, or whether the decision was motivated solely by alliance considerations. Menzies emerged from retirement to refute the allegations, but the effect of the whole affair was a further erosion in McMahon's authority.
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A new dose of toxicity had been injected into the Vietnam debate.

Whitlam upped the ante. Responding to the Pentagon Papers and the government's explanation for withdrawing Australian troops, he now denounced Vietnam as the ‘war of the great lie' and lamented the ‘immense damage' that had been done not only to the fabric of American life but also to its global standing. The conflict had brought on a ‘massive reappraisal of the role of the United States in the region and the world'.
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The effect of these developments was to create the space in which Labor could now move to articulate a meaning of the alliance less reliant on military cooperation. At its Launceston conference in June 1971, Labor had endorsed Whitlam's recommendations that the ANZUS treaty no longer be mentioned in the party platform as being of ‘crucial importance' to Australia. Rather it was now to be enshrined that Labor ‘seeks close and continuing
cooperation with the people of the United States and New Zealand to make the ANZUS treaty an instrument for justice and peace, and political, social and economic advancement in the Pacific area'.
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It was a risky move: and the government duly briefed the media and electorate at large that Labor was ‘disregarding the essential defence elements of ANZUS and thus weakening the alliance'. While US diplomats thought such a charge ‘self-serving' on the government's part, they nevertheless believed it to be ‘not without foundation'.
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Whitlam's public comments clearly continued to unnerve, and the officers at the US embassy in Canberra appeared, at times, simply unable to differentiate between Labor's criticism of the war and its desires for the restoration of America's more hopeful global role.

But Whitlam continued to develop his US contacts at the highest levels, visiting the US almost every year from 1967 until his election. In preparation for a visit to the US in early 1972 he had, with the support of Prime Minister McMahon, sought a meeting with President Nixon. Given that Whitlam had met Johnson three times when he was Opposition leader, he had every reason to believe the entrée to the Oval Office would be made, and even confessed to one US diplomat in Canberra before his departure that ‘no major political leader would wish to visit the US without seeing the President if only to protect his image at home'.
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In the end, however, Whitlam was rebuffed. Nixon would not see him. The State Department had suggested that to do so would incur hostile reactions from other Opposition leaders of close allies in Asia, also eager to have a word in the president's ear before his visit to Beijing in February.
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Whitlam was passed on to Kissinger, but even that fell through after the national security adviser kept Whitlam waiting for no less than 36 hours—and until 10 p.m. on a Friday night—before cancelling a meeting, citing the pressure of other business. Speculation swirled in the Australian press that Whitlam had been ‘snubbed', not only because of his comments about the president and Vietnam during his conversation with Zhou Enlai six months before, but because of his different policies on Asia: he intended to recognise China immediately on coming to office, and to withdraw Australian troops from the defence of Malaysia and Singapore. One report also
suggested that the White House was wary of opposition politicians ‘running to Washington' before election time. But the optics for Washington were also not the best: especially once it was revealed that Nixon had met with the West German opposition leader on the same day Whitlam was in Washington. The morning newspapers had also carried pictures of Kissinger escorting socialite Christina Ford to a black tie function at a plush Washington hotel the night before. Washington seemingly had no time for Whitlam any more. Back in Canberra, the embassy went into damage control, virtually pleading with the White House to telephone Whitlam to ensure he didn't feel ‘slighted'. The phone call never came.
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Whitlam, however, had done enough to neutralise the alliance as an issue at the 1972 elections. During his visit to Washington he met again with Secretary of State Rogers for a wide-ranging discussion on the affairs of the moment. In that meeting, Whitlam put his front foot forward in emphasising that ‘Australians were coming to the realisation that they must fend for themselves', a comment that should have been music to the ears of an administration looking for greater self-reliance among its allies. Again, however, Whitlam was forced to hold forth on the nature and extent of anti-Americanism in Australia. This time he looked to bury it once and for all, saying emphatically that ‘there had never been any real anti-Americanism in Australia … in large measure Australian criticism of the US was simply a play-back of American self-criticism'. His evidence was Australian students' complaints about US policy in Latin America, which were ‘obviously an adopted attitude, not home-grown'. Rogers confessed that while his own country did not like criticism, ‘it did not seriously disturb us so long as it was made in the right spirit'. He was genuinely puzzled by those ‘who were accustomed to say they liked us' but ‘criticised us so loudly'.
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Rogers could not have known then just how much those comments would resonate just over a year later.

Whitlam had long since learnt that a carefully crafted private conversation with a secretary of state was one thing, the script to be used in a public address quite another. Speaking to an audience in New York, he tried to place the drama of the recent past in a longer
historical context: ‘The log jam of the dullest era has been broken'. It was a classic, cheeky Whitlamesque play on words: a deliberate riposte to the policies of former US diplomat John Foster Dulles, architect of the ANZUS treaty and the non-recognition of China. ‘The policies to which successive Australian and American administrations have devoted themselves for 20 years are at an end'. And in a clear sign of his intention to move quickly once in power, he stressed that ‘there may be different paces at which the United States and Australia move on these things'.
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Whitlam could have given no clearer indication of his intention for the alliance to enter a new and different phase of its history, and that it would likely prove to be an uncomfortable development for some.

All that, however, was still nearly a year away. As he continued along his path to the prime ministership, Whitlam assured the American ambassador, Walter Rice, that Labor would not ask for the withdrawal of US intelligence facilities, even emphasising that he was ‘not under significant pressure to go beyond seeking more information about the installations'. It was the past that continued to rankle, especially Whitlam's belief that former US Ambassador Bill Battle had been ‘playing partisan politics' with the North West Cape facility in 1962. As Rice recalled, Whitlam spoke ‘acidly' about ‘“Kennedy's men” whom he described as young, arrogant and inclined to meddle in the affairs of other countries'.
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There were no eulogies for JFK's ‘new frontier'. But Whitlam had done enough. In the months leading up to the election, Rice released a statement denying that a Labor government would undermine the US alliance.
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This was significant. Never before had the US embassy made a similar statement about the Labor Party in the run up to an election. Not only did that undercut much of the government's attack on the Opposition, it showed that Whitlam had finally been able to exorcise the ghost of Labor's supposed disloyalty to the American alliance.

Or so it seemed. There remained anxieties on both sides of the Pacific. Just two weeks out from the December 1972 election, Australia's ambassador to the United States, James Plimsoll, made a special call on William Rogers. He asked specifically that the contents of the discussion not be ‘played back' to his government
in any way as it would be ‘very embarrassing to him personally'. In one sense, Plimsoll was only doing his job—trying to calm any rattled nerves in Washington about the impending election of the first Labor government in twenty-three years. But he was also trying to position himself as the one who had steadied Whitlam's hand on the alliance tiller. Plimsoll relayed the contents of a discussion he had had with the Labor leader two months previously, in which he had ‘forthrightly' told Whitlam to ‘not raise questions or criticism about American defense facilities in Australia such as Woomera and Pine Gap, that these were installations of great importance to the United States and they figured prominently in the US-Australian relationship'. Further, he had conveyed to Whitlam the view that his ideas ‘about changing the image of ANZUS were fuzzy and not very helpful: ANZUS was the key to Australia's defences and should not be downgraded in any sense'.
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But this ambassadorial strut had completely misread the substance of Whitlam's efforts to redefine the alliance in the light of new circumstances. Plimsoll's ingratiating briefing not only showed the trepidation drifting through the corridors of Australian diplomacy at the prospect of their new political master, it also served to perpetuate the view in Washington that, when all was said and done, Australian leaders would come to the American party.

But what kind of America did Australians see in this era? Whitlam's coming to power would also coincide with a period in which the American image in Australia, and indeed much of the western world, was increasingly under serious question. The significance of American influence on women's liberation, gay rights and the anti-war movement around this time is undoubted, even if, as Donald Horne noted, ‘fashions of protest came almost exclusively from the United States'.
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But just as the idea of America represented a beacon of progressive thought for those chafing at the status quo, so too could its image take something of a battering from the combined forces of an unpopular war and social and racial unrest. The chief of London's
Daily Telegraph
, Stephen Barber, came to the conclusion towards the end of 1970 that the combination of the Vietnam war, racial conflict and the breakdown in law and order had crushed America's
confidence in itself and its role in the world. William Shirer, the American journalist who had chronicled first hand the rise of Hitler, went much further, predicting that the United States might become the first nation to turn fascist democratically.
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The claims might have been far fetched, but they nevertheless represented a real fear that the United States was losing its way. Just months before Whitlam's election as prime minister, Keith Waller, then secretary of foreign affairs, set out his own concerns about growing doubts in Australia toward not only the alliance but America and its president. In a private note to Plimsoll in Washington, he sensed: