Unholy Fury (24 page)

That assessment would have shocked most Australian policy makers, but any puzzlement about just how the
Post
had arrived
at its conclusion was almost certainly outdone by the even more grim prognosis emanating from the
New York Times'
esteemed correspondent Cyrus Sulzberger. In a piece previewing Australia's planned exit from the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), Sulzberger alleged that the new Whitlam government was ‘likewise getting out of ANZUS, a little known pact with New Zealand and the United States'. The analysis was far fetched, but it does beg the question of who was whispering in the
Times'
ear about Australian intentions. Sulzberger, though, was clearly overegging the pudding, and struggling to fit Australia into his global pattern. As he concluded, the ‘Cold War ice has thawed and now breaks into crazily shifting kaleidoscopic patterns. Nobody knows in what direction the floes are headed'.
¹⁰

Whitlam did foreshadow Australia's withdrawal from the SEATO, a forum he had long dismissed as ‘moribund'. Formed in 1954, it was a predominantly western alliance that would supposedly hold the line against further communist advances in the region. But the Chinese had dubbed it a ‘paper tiger' and its regional representation was patchy—one of the major powers of the region, Indonesia, was not even included. And three other members—France, Britain and Pakistan—were from outside the region. America's involvement alone gave it substance, and though actions were taken in SEATO's name, the treaty did little more than give the appearance of a collective resistance to communism.

Although the Americans shared some of these misgivings, SEATO nevertheless guaranteed the US commitment to Thailand and was also a means of diplomatic restraint on communism at a time when the US was recalibrating its regional engagement. Officials in Washington virtually demanded that the Australians temper their criticism. And they spoke in a language that they knew their junior partner would understand. Only a fortnight after Whitlam's coming to power, Secretary of State Rogers informed Sir James Plimsoll, the Australian ambassador in Washington, that less than full support for SEATO ‘could signal a deterioration of our commitment to our alliances and could even affect ANZUS unfavourably'.
¹¹
It was the Americans, then, who fired the first shot across the bows, and
it certainly hit its target. Reports in the Australian press suggested Whitlam recalled Plimsoll to Canberra: for briefings on ‘delicate aspects of relations between the two countries', but it was more likely a simple matter of Whitlam wishing to make him aware of the policies of the new government.
¹²
Either way, though, Whitlam certainly wanted to know just how much pressure the US was applying to Australia to stay in SEATO.

The Nixon White House, too, was no less forthcoming in admitting its desire to be remembered ‘as the administration that set a new direction in foreign policy',
¹³
and as Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston have shown, ‘Nixon realism' entailed a certain relaxation of old animosities and a refusal to differentiate between ideological friends and foes at the negotiating table. The administration was ‘willing to talk to anyone: no state or social system was beyond the pale … allies and adversaries were now valued for their utility, not their ideology or domestic political system'.
¹⁴
Australia, Britain and Sweden, however, would all test that hypothesis. And, unlike Whitlam's Australia, the White House did not see détente as fixed in stone. Rather détente ebbed and flowed, and was usually punctuated by periods of increased tension. From where Nixon and Kissinger were sitting, détente entailed a fragile balancing act, a state of play that required constant attention and tendering in order that it might be achieved.

‘HE WILL NOT GO OUT OF VIETNAM WHIMPERING'

That the advent of a new Labor government in Australia could so focus the minds of American policy makers underlines not only the patterns of Australian alliance behaviour to which they had become accustomed, but also the extent to which, during this period, Australia's seeming drift from the American embrace was interpreted as virtual desertion from the western alliance. From the vantage point in Washington, Australia appeared to be breaking ranks.

And that at the worst possible time—not only for the delicate peace negotiations in Vietnam but also for an administration starting to feel the searing heat of political crisis arising from the investigations into a burglary at the offices of the Democratic National Committee
at the Watergate complex in Washington DC in June 1972. Although initial reports in the US press treated it as a relatively minor item, in the following months a series of damaging revelations to journalists at the
Washington Post
, delivered by an FBI agent calling himself ‘Deep Throat', painted an increasingly ominous picture of White House involvement. In mid September 1972, E Howard Hunt and G Gordon Liddy—two of the so called ‘plumbers' whose job it was to fix leaks of confidential information in the Nixon administration—along with the five Watergate burglars, were indicted by a federal grand jury. And on 10 October, less than a month from the presidential election, the FBI established that the break-in was connected to a massive operation of spying and sabotage connected to Nixon's re-election campaign.
¹⁵
As historian Robert Dallek notes, Nixon remained confident the investigations would not hurt him at the polls, and at that stage nothing led directly to the Oval Office.
¹⁶
But Nixon was also a politician instinctively prone to seeing a phalanx of enemies out to bring him down. In the week leading up to the election, Kissinger found his leader at Camp David ‘deep in the bog of the resentments that had produced the darkest and perhaps most malevolent frame of mind of his presidency'.
¹⁷

Nixon went on to win the 1972 election with 61 per cent of the popular vote—winning every state except Massachusetts. To that time, only Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had enjoyed greater margins of victory. But instead of celebrating the magnitude of his achievement, Nixon demanded the immediate resignation of his entire White House staff, except Kissinger and a few other senior advisers. He wanted to clear the decks for his second term. Other developments, too, needled the presidential psyche. Towards the end of the year Nixon had been named
Time's
‘Man of the Year' alongside Kissinger, but the joint award only further irritated the president, who was increasingly sensitive to his adviser's growing prominence in the press. An interview with an Italian journalist in which Kissinger appeared to take sole credit for the China breakthrough—he spoke of Americans' high regard for the ‘cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding alone on his horse'—further angered Nixon. The president ordered his chief of staff, HR ‘Bob' Haldemann,
to remind Kissinger that the key policy discussions in the Oval Office, Lincoln Room and Executive Office building had all been recorded, and would duly show that ‘Henry doesn't make the decisions'. As Nixon put it, he alone was the author of the ‘China story'.
¹⁸

As if a White House in turmoil, a clear and present sense of scandal and a trail of wounded egos was not enough, what proved galling to American eyes and ears too was the challenge that the Australian government, through its rapid policy shifts, seemed to be issuing to American credibility. Especially as it was in the midst of delicate diplomacy with the North and South Vietnamese over ending the Vietnam war. Nixon the presidential candidate might have talked of ‘Asia after Vietnam', but once in the White House he was not prepared to simply walk away from the fight and see America's reputation sullied in the eyes of its allies. He might have spoken of a different role for the United States around the world, but once in office he was adamant that the nation's prestige had to be maintained, especially in the face of enemies. For Nixon, the preservation of America's status as a superpower was critical. As he put it during a meeting with British Prime Minister Ted Heath in early 1973, ‘I could have flushed Vietnam four years ago and blamed it on Johnson and Kennedy. But it [is] essential that the United States should be seen to be a dependable ally'.
¹⁹

That desire to achieve an ‘honourable' end to the Vietnam war had been a hallmark of the Nixon presidency. Indeed his pitch for re-election had rested substantially upon his record of pulling the United States out of the war. Even as he came to office in 1969 he had staked out his ground for the next presidential campaign, declaring that ‘Vietnam will not be an issue in 1972'.
²⁰
The scale and speed of troop withdrawals alone—US soldiers returned home from Vietnam at the rate of 100 000 to 150 000 a year—symbolised his intent. When he commenced his first term there were over half a million American soldiers in Vietnam—yet by the time Nixon won again on the first Tuesday of November in 1972, there were only 23 000 US troops left in the country.
²¹

The White House was consumed by the process of ending the war. As one British diplomat observed at the time, ‘everything,
other than Vietnam, has, for the time being, been brushed up under the rug'. That meant a certain difficulty for close allies, including Britain and Australia, in acquiring any kind of accurate picture of American thinking on the Vietnam negotiations. Access was a scarce commodity. It is ‘well-nigh impossible', complained a senior British official in Washington, ‘to get into the stable, let alone to get the horse to speak'.
²²

As US troop withdrawals were taking place, the president and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, pursued a diplomatic track that aimed to secure a ‘just peace', as Nixon put it in early 1970. It was critical that the exit from Vietnam demonstrate, as much as possible, ongoing American strength rather than weakness. Successive American troop withdrawals were intended to demonstrate US goodwill and bring the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (the Vietcong) to the negotiating table in an effort to reach a reasonable settlement. The decreasing number of American troops was also in line with the policy of ‘Vietnamisation': in which US officials increasingly argued aloud that the South Vietnamese were now capable of providing for their own defence. When, however, the North Vietnamese remained intransigent, the Nixon administration could only respond with the calculated use of force in an effort to keep up the credibility of its negotiating hand with the communists. Thus the interventions in Cambodia in May 1970 and Southern Laos in February were designed to undermine communist assumptions about a ‘safe haven' in those countries. Similarly the resumption of strategic bombing against North Vietnam in April 1972 and the mining of Haiphong harbour the following month were ‘forceful reminders to the North Vietnamese of the price to be paid for delaying tactics at the negotiating table and of the determination' of the Nixon White House to show that it had the will to use the military force at its disposal.
²³
Still, these were only limited measures; measures which in their own way revealed that the United States was well and truly on the back foot in South-East Asia.

From the moment they came to office, Nixon and Kissinger saw the threat of air power as perhaps the only US card left in
exerting maximum pressure on the North Vietnamese in the peace negotiations. It was, as Kissinger put it, ‘one of our few bargaining weapons'.
²⁴
Writing of the US predicament in Vietnam, historian Jeremy Suri emphasises that ‘American leaders struggled to preserve the nation's “credibility” as they accepted a major setback—perhaps the most damaging US military experience in the twentieth century. They emphasised the importance of displaying continued resolve to defeat threatening enemies, and continued commitment to loyal friends'. Credibility was essentially about ‘appearing tough, and even brutal when necessary'. An emerging part of what Nixon and Kissinger called their ‘game plan' towards the North Vietnamese was visibly illustrated in March and April of 1969, when the president told his national security adviser that he wanted to ‘crack them pretty hard' with sustained air strikes. Nixon wanted to show the North Vietnamese, and through them Moscow and Beijing, ‘that there's still a lot of snap left in the old boys'. The use of air power was the chief mechanism for reducing US casualties and sending a tough message to the rest of the world.
²⁵
Nixon wanted it known that, unlike previous administrations, he had the will to use American military might—unleashing military action, as he put it, that was ‘strong, threatening and effective'.
²⁶

The decision to resume the bombings in December 1972 came at a time when public and congressional patience with the peace process was running out. Only six weeks earlier, after all, Kissinger had famously announced after the latest round of talks with the North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris that ‘peace is at hand'. But as had occurred on so many previous occasions, further stalemate and another deadlock ensued. Nixon had always been of the view that Hanoi would never settle without the additional use of US military power. Moreover, he did not want to reach a peace settlement before the November election for fear of being seen to cave in to the North. He believed, instead, that a renewed mandate, a delay in the negotiations and the opportunity to use that delay as a justification for further air strikes would enable him to leverage extra concessions from Hanoi. But that meant a peace settlement had to be reached at some point between his election win and his inauguration. Yet it
was not only the North Vietnamese who were seen as recalcitrant. The administration was also experiencing ongoing frustrations with its South Vietnamese ally: President Thieu dreaded the severing of the American umbilical cord to his country, and would not sign onto an agreement which, inter alia, left North Vietnamese troops in the South and failed to delegitimise the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam. Indeed, as Robert Dallek has confirmed, the White House became increasingly annoyed as ‘Thieu's defiance fuelled Hanoi's intransigence'.
²⁷