Unholy Fury (31 page)

 

Dear Mr Prime Minister

 

 

I appreciated receiving your kind message of congratulations on the occasion of my inauguration as President of the United States.

 

 

Sincerely, Richard Nixon.
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The skeletal correspondence showed, however, just how little the White House had learnt from the recent impasse. Whitlam was never going to change course as a result of clipped correspondence. Nor was he going to take offence at the White House decision not to send a special representative of the president to the annual Coral Sea Ball.
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What was to hurt the Australian prime minister more, however, was the Nixon—Kissinger agreement to ‘freeze' him for a while, and the growing rumours in the press and elsewhere that he may not be invited to the White House if he happened to be in the United States later in the year. Kissinger even went out of his way at a meeting of the Special Actions Group—a National Security Council committee called to discuss serious crises—that ‘the President wants the State Department to know that our relations with Australia have not improved … Whitlam is not being invited, and if he comes anyway you can be sure he will not be received'.
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The antagonism was fast becoming deep-rooted.

Nixon was keen, too, to air his feelings about Whitlam during his meetings with visiting heads of state in the month following the bombings. Here an allies' response to his decision to resume the raids on North Vietnam became the ultimate test: not only of their loyalty to the US connection but also as a marker of where they stood in the western alliance. Even British diplomats, preparing their own prime minister for his visit to Washington in early February, put the ‘French, Canadians and Australians' in the category of ‘backsliders on western defence'.
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Both US and British officials believed Whitlam was turning his back on Australian responsibilities in South-East Asia, most particularly the Five Power Defence Arrangement, through which Australia, Britain and New Zealand had committed to immediate consultation in the event of an armed attack on Malaysia and Singapore. The arrangement stood as a warning to Indonesia in the wake of the Confrontation dispute. Since coming to office Whitlam had made clear his intentions that Australian ground forces would be removed from Singapore by early 1975, with the air units to be withdrawn from Malaysia the following year: a move that only exacerbated fears in Washington of a security vacuum in the region given the continuing British withdrawal of its military presence
from east of Suez. As Kissinger stressed, it was not the numbers of troops there that was important; it was more that such a move might be perceived as a ‘symbolic retreat of Western Power'.
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Or, as Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew told William Rogers, the proposed Whitlam action would ‘leave the impression throughout South East Asia that “the West is on the way out”'.
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The analysis was overblown, but it was only calculated to fuel deeper suspicions of Whitlam's intentions. Australia was seen to be walking out on the Cold War alliance system.

When British Prime Minister Edward Heath met Nixon at the White House in February 1973 the president was quick to thank his guest for his support during the December bombings: ‘we are very much aware', Nixon said, that ‘when we were under tremendous pressure, the British stuck with us'. ‘What you did', he added, ‘did not go unnoticed, and what others did, did not go unnoticed either. It is hard to understand when allies turn on you'.
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But the two of them could at least find solace in Whitlam's decision, following pressure from both Britain and the United States, to maintain an Australian defence commitment in Malaysia and Singapore until 1976. Their exchange, though, showed the extent to which the new Australian leader was giving both leaders fresh headaches. For Heath, that was primarily concerned with matters of civic culture: Whitlam's insistence on removing residual colonial links with Britain by pressing for changes to the
Royal Styles and Titles Act;
appeals to the Privy Council; and instituting a new national anthem.
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For Nixon, as the British record of their conversation shows, the problem was not constitutional, but ideological:

 

President Nixon said that he found the Australians, whether under a Labour [sic] or Conservative government, very hard to understand. They should surely realise how great an interest they had in stemming the advance of Chinese communism and retaining the United States' presence in South East Asia. But the new Australian government seemed to be taking up exactly the opposite attitude—not that the United States were going to accommodate them.

 

The American president simply could not grasp that the once trusted ally had changed. He wanted the Australia of the 1950s and 1960s back. When he asked Heath to find ‘any rational basis', Heath too shot from the hip: Whitlam was ‘simply “wet”—if there were nasty things around, he just didn't want to know about them!'
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For Nixon it could be summed up more succinctly: he wondered whether Whitlam was an ‘isolationist'.
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Nixon, along with many in the national security community in Washington, was unable to comprehend Australia on its own terms. That may be understandable, even excusable, given the issues that were on Nixon's plate in January 1973, but he continued to view the country through a Cold War prism, and to locate its criticism of his bombing in North Vietnam as part of a worldwide leftist conspiracy. As he told the former Japanese prime minister, Eisaku Sato, around the same time:

 

We must realise that elements of the left in all nations are the same in attitude toward a system of alliances around the world … They oppose because they seek changes which even they have not analysed adequately. They are the same wherever they are. Not just the communists, but some socialists—the left in general—think that the way to peace is to disarm, disband alliances. A nice dream, if there weren't other nations with other ideas.

 

Although Nixon himself had welcomed a more fluid global system, he had maintained that the United States would always honour its treaty obligations. A constant theme of his private conversations in this period was the call by Asian allies for the US to stay the course in South-East Asia. And he was sure that had he opted out of the war upon his election to office, ‘peace elements in Japan, France, Australia, who were so quick to criticise when we were trying to bring [the North Vietnamese] back to the conference table … would have welcomed such a move on my part in 1969'. Only ‘far sighted leaders', he added, ‘have seen that how the US stood by a small ally would show how the US could be relied upon by a great ally'.
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In the months ahead the American concern about Whitlam's moves in Asia would only mount. The National Security Council
received well-informed reports that the Australian leader, during his discussions with the Indonesian president in February 1973, tried to convince Suharto to pressure Thailand for an early removal of US bases there. Whitlam had told his own advisers at the beginning of the year that he ‘did not like United States involvement in Thailand', believing it would only provoke North Vietnam to again destabilise the region. But the Americans also knew that he had been rebuffed by Suharto, not only on this question but also on Whitlam's ideas for a new regional grouping.
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Other Whitlam moves were also troubling to American diplomats. The Department of State pleaded with the Australian government to slow its momentum towards officially recognising North Korea.
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It showed just how much Australian divergence unsettled its alliance partner.

‘PATIENCE AND FIRMNESS'

How then to account for Whitlam's long silence in the wake of the ministerial brickbats and the industrial action, events which helped to plunge the alliance into its most serious ever crisis? On the one hand, his position, explained clearly and calmly to the American ambassador, was entirely defensible. For the prime minister to publicly rebuke the unions or the ministers might have only further inflamed an already febrile atmosphere in Washington and on the waterfronts in both countries. Indeed so tired had Australian diplomats become of being told by their American counterparts how ‘astounded, appalled and astonished' they were at measures taken by the new Labor government, that one deputy secretary in Foreign Affairs pleaded directly with the Americans to be ‘less adjectival'. It was all well and good to acknowledge that Whitlam's fusillade of activities had created the impression of unpredictability for the United States, but it was hoped the Americans could be ‘less dramatic' in their responses.
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On the other hand, Whitlam must surely have recognised the danger of letting the perception grow that he was unable to control the left wing of his party. He could combine Whitlamesque charm and eloquence for the American ambassador, yet he seemed loath to lay down the law to the more raucous elements on his own side
of politics. The best he could manage, according to Tom Uren, was a mild rebuke over breakfast before the first Cabinet meeting in January. ‘Christ', the prime minister said to Uren, ‘you're making it hard for me. I wrote a letter to Nixon. I can't disclose what it was I said in the letter, but I was firm'.
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Whitlam stayed aloof from the tempest for too long. Two conclusions may be reached: the first is that the uproar in the wake of his letter to Nixon was unexpected. It was a distraction from the implementation of the Labor ‘program'. Whitlam clearly thought he could ride out the storm, that the wounds from ministerial outbursts were merely skin deep and that the futility of the waterfront strikes would become more apparent as time dragged on. What can equally be said, however, is that once it was clear the crisis was upon him, he was not cowed. True, there was annoyance that Nixon did not respond to his letter, but when Whitlam finally agreed to see Walter Rice he did not retreat from the positions he had staked out on the Vietnam war over many years. As one lone editorial made the point: ‘For years past Australia has been crossed off the diplomatic map as completely reliable and completely predictable. Now it has reappeared as an independent-minded critic with views of its own and no inhibitions about expressing them'.
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Sooner or later the Americans were going to have to face facts about the new Australia: they certainly faced them in December 1972 and January 1973.

For President Nixon, however, Australia's dependability as an ally had been seriously eroded. By the end of January, with the signing of the Vietnam peace accords, he had in his own mind been entirely vindicated on the question of the bombings. ‘Hanoi would know by now', he told Britain's Ted Heath, ‘that the United States Government did not bluff in these matters; if they threatened, they carried out their threats. “Walk slowly; talk slowly and carry a big stick”. That was how to do it'.
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Any ally who had not kept faith was shown the door, literally, and viewed as nothing more than reckless, gormless leftists out to dismantle the western alliance. But there was to be no melancholy retreat for the United States into its shell. As Nixon told his joint chiefs of staff:

 

Other countries have to have the support of the peaceniks to survive. During the recent bombing, the only ones to stand with us were the British, the Germans and the Turks. All the others took a cheap shot … Trudeau, Tanaka … The bombings in World War II killed millions but that was a “good war”. This is a “bad war”, so the bombing was “evil”. There is a real double standard, and isolationism is rampant.

 

He added further that there was a ‘tendency in the rimland of Asia and elsewhere to tell the US to go home'. But despite the ‘setback in South East Asia', and pressure from Congress, ‘the situation is not hopeless'.
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In this period, perhaps more than ever before, Vietnam became the ‘touchstone by which friends of the United States were judged in Washington', even as the US was retreating from Vietnam a defeated nation.
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And for Australia the verdict was harsh.

Part of the explanation for the American reaction lies in a lack of understanding about Australian politics in this era, and about Australian political processes in general. Prior to the 1972 election, the US embassy in Canberra had sent many detailed reports outlining the Whitlam agenda, but those analyses clearly had not filtered though to all levels of the administration. Even in March 1973 the American secretary of state was still briefing Nixon about how the Labor Party caucus, not the prime minister, selects the ministers in a Labor government. And he was doing so in an effort to explain how Whitlam was ‘seeking to get things under control after a bad start'. The ‘big showdown in the party', however, was still to come, when at the forthcoming Labor conference (scheduled for July) ‘the leftists will try to throw overboard all military alliances and eject our highly classified US defense and space installations from Australia'.
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For the State Department at least, no amount of reassurance from Whitlam on US intelligence facilities could overcome their entrenched suspicion of Labor's left wing.

And yet the CIA had a very different view. In its first detailed report on the new government in Canberra it noted that ‘much of what has been done could have been anticipated' and that the stream of announcements from Whitlam ‘grew directly out of the Labor
Party's longstanding policies and election platform'. The new prime minister was certainly serving notice on allies that ‘a new team with different ideas is now in charge'. The agency assessed that ‘Australia's basic alliance with the US does not appear in jeopardy' and that the ‘continuation of US defense and scientific activities in Australia will present no fundamental problem'. They praised Whitlam's work behind the scenes in settling the strikes, believing it showed ‘he could count on the support and cooperation of the national trade union machinery'. It was the ‘lack of a common front' during the strikes that remained a sticking point, perhaps showing that the ‘maintenance of party discipline will be a major problem'. Even Whitlam's ‘blunt forewarning' about taking the United States to the UN in the event of a further breakdown in the Paris negotiations was no cause for hysteria: it simply said ‘much about the Australian Government the US must deal with in the future—a government that accepts the alliance with the US as basic, but is determined to move toward what it sees as more equality in that alliance'.
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