Unholy Fury (30 page)

The longer Whitlam delayed, the louder the condemnation grew. In the eyes of an excitable press gallery, the greater the prime ministerial prevarication the more ominous became the portents for his government. The
Australian
, which had advocated a vote for Labor at the 1972 election, was less worried about the ‘idiotic exercise' of the unions than the ‘connotations' for Labor's governing style. Whitlam was deemed ‘incapable of influencing the fringe leftists' in the unions and his colleagues around the Cabinet table. ‘Who is running the country?' asked the
Sun Herald
, while the
Age
discerned the ‘most disturbing aspect of the farce is the apparent willingness of the prime minister to sit back and tolerate this joke at Australia's expense'. Almost all major newspapers around the country agreed that he needed to ‘act like a national leader, not a timorous party politician'. There was no point in ‘biting America's hand'.
³²
Up to that moment, assessed one editorial:

 

Mr Whitlam has looked impressive enough, presiding over the daily announcement of decisions based on previously agreed party policy. Now for the first time he faces a brand new crisis which is not covered in previous party policy pronouncements, and in which his duty as national leader is not only clear, but clearly contradicts the most expedient course attractive to a national leader.
³³

 

The comments captured Whitlam's dilemma: it was simply not in the script for a major industrial, political and diplomatic stoush to emerge in the first month of the new government. It was hard to avoid the conclusion of the
Bulletin's
Canberra correspondent, Peter Samuel, that Whitlam ‘found he was virtually impotent' with a ‘key component of the nation's foreign policy taken right out of his hands by the communist unions on the one hand and his leftist ministers on the other'.
³⁴

Amongst senior diplomats, the efforts at damage control continued. Sir James Plimsoll tried to put on a brave face, telling the American ambassador that the Australian government and people ‘sometimes treated [the] US badly because they felt that we were not foreigners but part of the family and subject to the same rough treatment' that characterised domestic political debate in Australia.
³⁵
Much like Kissinger had done before with Roy Fernandez, Rogers quickly brought this kind of sentiment crashing down to earth. ‘When the going is tough', he told Plimsoll, ‘we look to friends to give us support'. Referring to the likely cancellation of the ANZUS council meeting for that year, Rogers added that ‘in fact, there might be even a question in some minds as to the desirability of continuing ANZUS' altogether.
³⁶
Although much of this might now be viewed as nothing more than bureaucratic bluster, nevertheless it showed the depth of annoyance and frustration in Washington. Temperature levels were rising. To be sure, the administration in Washington was not preparing to abandon ANZUS, but they were slowly adjusting to the fact that they could no longer take the views and interests of Australia for granted.

In the end, the intervention of Bob Hawke was critical in having the bans lifted. Although he had been on holiday when the strikes began, Hawke had received a flurry of telegrams pressing the ACTU to not only endorse the action but to also broaden it to the entire trade union movement. One telegram put it bluntly enough: ‘
PROUD TO BE AUSTRALIAN NOW PUT SATANIC NIXON IN HELL WHERE HE BELONGS
', while the celebrated pianist Roger Woodward wrote that it was ‘
WONDERFUL TO READ WHAT IS HAPPENING IN AUSTRALIA
' and joined his ‘
BROTHERS IN THE UNIONS IN PROTESTING AGAINST THE
CRIMINAL BOMBING ORDERED BY PRESIDENT NIXON
'. Hawke, however, stood with longstanding ACTU policy by disapproving of the industrial action. In a telegram to Eliot V Elliot on 8 January, Hawke said that he understood and was sympathetic to the union action and had himself described the Nixon policy on Australian television the night before as the ‘substitution of barbarity for diplomacy'. But where his ‘strongest personal feelings' clashed with his responsibility to the policy and constitution of the ACTU it was the latter that prevailed. Hawke stressed it was ‘imperative' to have the ban lifted so that the ‘Australian government can have [the] best possible chance to continue to press internationally its emphatic repudiation of American bombing and stalling of peace negotiations and to urge early achievement of peaceful settlement' at the Paris peace talks that week.
³⁷
Effectively then, he convinced the unions to lift the bans for the duration of the peace talks while leaving open the option of their returning to the picket line if the bombings resumed.
³⁸
Elliot agreed to end the ‘blockade' and pledged that each member of his union would contribute a minimum of $5 per pay for the next month as a contribution towards the restoration of hospitals in North Vietnam.
³⁹

Hawke's timing was crucial. Indeed it was during Whitlam's first meeting with the US ambassador on 8 January that Hawke called to advise the prime minister that the shipping bans would be suspended the following day. That development seemed to allow Whitlam maximum room for manoeuvre in his meeting with the American diplomat, Walter Rice, who described Whitlam as ‘particularly friendly' and at his ‘eloquent best' during their first encounter. The Australian leader now came to condemn, but also to convince: to condemn his ministers and the strikes but to convince Rice that neither imperilled the relationship. There had ‘been no more consistent supporter of ANZUS than himself', Whitlam said. The prime minister singled out Uren's comment as ‘grotesquely offensive', but was quick to point out that these were ‘habits of speech carried over from years of opposition' and a ‘style of many years standing'. The strikes however were given no such rationale—Whitlam dismissed them as ‘almost ludicrous' and the threats to extend the boycott to all American interests as ‘so much crap'. The strikes had been ‘no help to him',
but he deplored the ‘talk of trade war' in which some had suggested that the US would ‘do a Cuba' on Australia. He pointed out that his predecessor as prime minister, William McMahon, had been similarly powerless ‘to do anything' in 1971 when the French ambassador in Canberra had complained about union boycotts during French nuclear tests in the Pacific.

It was time to douse the fiery rhetoric on both sides. Whitlam, though, was certainly not going to go down on bended knee to this American emissary. He warned that if there was a suspension of peace talks and a resumption of the bombing he ‘could not be so discreet or reticent again' and would have no option but to speak out publicly and refer the matter to the United Nations. He knew of no government in the world ‘that supports carpet bombing' of another country, and admitted that had the bombing not been halted when it had, he would have been forced to describe it as ‘atrocious and barbarous'. And for good measure he added that, although his support for the maintenance of US intelligence facilities on Australian soil continued, ‘if there were any attempt to screw us or bounce us, inevitably these defence arrangements would become a matter of contention here'.
⁴⁰
That last remark set US diplomatic hares running. Up to that moment, Whitlam had given all the private reassurances possible to assuage any doubts over his support for the maintenance of US intelligence facilities. Indeed so satisfied had the American embassy been with these assurances that a team of intelligence officers in Washington, readied to fly out to Canberra in early January to brief the new prime minister on the facilities, had been told to stay at home.

In his press conference less than twenty-four hours later, however, Whitlam struck a different, even more defiant tone. There was precious little of the sweet reason he had doled out to the American ambassador. In public, he was going to bucket neither the unions nor his colleagues. Emphasising the importance of keeping things in ‘proportion', he felt compelled to point out that there had only been ‘two ships involved—two ships' and whilst he confirmed that only he as foreign minister would be speaking on international affairs from then on, he wanted the press gallery to understand that some
of the statements which had been made were ‘made pursuant to arrangements concluded days or a couple of weeks before, while the bombing was proceeding'. These were weasel words, and they were also inaccurate.
⁴¹
Whitlam was virtually excusing the comments of Cairns, Cameron and Uren. Retreating to the tabernacle of his party ‘program', he confirmed that the government had been elected with a ‘mandate to do all it can to stop the continuation of this war'.
⁴²
In the face of such seeming indifference to the controversy that had raged over the preceding fortnight, one newspaper believed the prime minister ‘had paid small compliment to the intelligence of his audience' by trying to keep a sense of proportion. ‘Mr Whitlam's response to this blackguarding of an ally' was akin to saying they were ‘perfectly all right'.
⁴³

‘DETERMINED TO BULL AHEAD'

On 27 January 1973, the day that the cease-fire took effect in Vietnam, Whitlam was delivering a speech at the Australian Institute of Political Science Summer School in Canberra. It gave him the perfect platform to set out the government's approach to the alliance in terms of Labor's policy and the events of the previous six weeks. He began by welcoming the end of American intervention in Vietnam, saying that it removed the only ‘really serious difference' between his government and that in Washington.

The end of the war, too, nourished his hope that the United States could be restored to its role as the ‘world's most generous and idealistic nation'. They were words he had uttered often. Again he looked to disconnect Vietnam from ANZUS, emphatically denying that any American or Australian politician had ever said that ‘Australia's attitude to the war in Vietnam or any phase in the war in Vietnam was a condition of the continuation of ANZUS'. The common interests ‘remain constant beyond changes of administration'.

And yet, he went on: ‘For all its enduring importance, adherence to ANZUS does not constitute a foreign policy'. In so far as it represented a ‘security guarantee in the ultimate peril, reliance upon it as the sole objective of our foreign policy would in fact place our foreign policy in suspension—until the peril emerged'.
⁴⁴
There was, too, a history lesson for the Americans. ‘The United States herself now accepts' he confidently proposed, ‘that its cold war commitment to global containment of communism represented a gross overextension of her real power'. But Vietnam had changed all that, and utterly. As Whitlam remarked, one needed only to ‘compare the circumspection of President Nixon's second inaugural with the sweeping rhetoric of John Kennedy's inaugural with its vision of an unlimited universal acceptance of burdens by the United States'. The problem for Whitlam, however, was that this perceptive analysis of the blow that the conflict in Vietnam had dealt to American nationalism was largely lost in the atmosphere of crisis enveloping the relationship. A senior adviser in the White House told Kissinger that the speech showed Whitlam persisting ‘in his public debate with us over Vietnam' and ‘determined to bull ahead with his rather doctrinaire notions on reshaping Asian security arrangements'.
⁴⁵

Here then, was an indication of the next area of serious divergence in the alliance: Whitlam's vision for change in Asian security arrangements. Agreeing with his defence advisers that Australia faced no direct or external threat for the next ten to fifteen years, Whitlam moved to bury once and for all the idea of ‘forward defence'—the idea that Australia looks for a ‘frontier where we fight nameless Asian enemies as far to the north of our own shores as possible—in other people's backyards'. In this speech, he expressed his support for an approach with ‘less emphasis on military pacts', including a new idea of ‘regional community' without ‘ideological overtones' and ‘conceived as an initiative to help free the region of great power rivalries'.
⁴⁶
He expressed his support for the idea of a zone of peace and neutrality in South-East Asia: essentially a means of trying to rid the region of great power rivalry, and said that he would push for a restructuring of other Asian regional bodies. He did not see North Vietnam as posing a post-settlement threat to the region, and he would encourage other countries to adopt the same view. The White House, however, was contemptuous of these ‘half-formed ideas', adding that New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk had told them after meeting with Whitlam in January that the Australian leader was ‘concerned with ideological appearances to the neglect
of serious pragmatic consequences, and was prone to take black and white approaches'.
⁴⁷

‘WHEN ALLIES TURN ON YOU'

Kirk was an unlikely channel in American thinking about how to handle Whitlam. Officials in the National Security Council seemed to quickly forget about the New Zealander's own letter of protest against the Christmas bombings barely a month before. Indeed they believed that he could be used as a ‘restraining influence' on Australia's renegade prime minister. But the White House's means of doing so amounted in this case to little more than the gentlest of slaps on the diplomatic wrist, and spoke volumes about the petty lengths to which they would go in order to punish Whitlam. When both Australian and New Zealand prime ministers sent the customary letters of condolence to Nixon following the death of Lyndon Johnson, Kissinger agreed that only Kirk would receive a reply, in the belief that such treatment would encourage him ‘in his much more pragmatic approach to Asian security problems (by comparison with that of … Whitlam)'. Indeed it was noted that Kirk had ‘showed his ability and willingness to work in this direction during his recent meetings with Whitlam in Wellington'.
⁴⁸
Similarly when Whitlam and Governor-General Paul Hasluck wrote separate letters of congratulations to Nixon after his inauguration, Hasluck was given a warm reply, while it was proposed that Whitlam receive the ‘tersest reply or none at all': the NSC believing such a curt response would ‘indicate that our dissatisfaction is with Whitlam as a whole, and thereby hopefully keep the pressure on Whitlam but avoid antagonising Australians generally'. In the end a perfunctory three-line reply was sent: