Unholy Fury (32 page)

Here, in essence, was the clearest indication that Whitlam's approach was cutting through. But it certainly didn't convince a White House resolved to keep Whitlam out in the cold. And that, more than any other sparsely worded piece of presidential correspondence, or a vacant VIP chair at a Coral Sea Ball, had real potential to do Whitlam serious domestic damage. The longer Nixon kept the door to the Oval Office closed, the more quickly Whitlam's credibility as an international player would ebb. The more it appeared he wasn't taken seriously in Washington, the more his political opponents in Australia could depict him as a reckless destroyer of the nation's most important security relationship. The longer the frosty reception from the United States continued, the deeper the doubts would grow over the entire Whitlam foreign policy agenda.

American patience, too, had clearly defined limits. At the time, one assistant secretary of state with a long experience in Asian affairs mused privately that ‘if we were too patient we might encourage the Australians in irresponsible policies; on the other hand firmness might strengthen the hand of the government's more moderate supporters'. But getting the balance right between ‘patience and firmness would
require considerable diplomatic skill'.
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That task would fall to a new American ambassador, soon to be appointed by the White House. For all his seething contempt for Australia's international behaviour, Richard Nixon's decision on that appointment would prove a masterstroke that would ultimately help to save an alliance in freefall.

 

8

Just how seriously the White House viewed the deterioration in the alliance was seen at the end of February 1973 when it announced that one of its most senior diplomats and East Asia specialists, Marshall Green, would be the new ambassador to Australia. This was the first time in twenty years that the United States had appointed a career foreign service officer to the position. It had become almost a custom for the post to be filled by presidential friends or generous campaign donors. Following the announcement, Gough Whitlam boldly told the
New York Times
that ‘the US has shown that at last it takes us seriously': virtually claiming Green as the sweet tasting fruit of all his alliance labours. As that newspaper's esteemed foreign correspondent, Cyrus Sulzberger, remarked, it was ‘one of the wisest foreign appointments President Nixon has made since 1968': mainly because Australia had felt neglected for too long. ‘There had been a belief', Sulzberger continued, ‘even under more conservative regimes, that Canberra was a dumping ground for second-class US political envoys because it was regarded as a second class partner'.
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Green however was under no illusions as to the job he faced. On the day he left for Australia in early June, the
US News and World Report
observed that ‘Mr Green's task is enormous'.
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The president did not have the time for any kind of lengthy discussion with Green before taking up his new post. But the two did exchange words at a White House luncheon in the days preceding Green's departure from Washington. ‘Normally, I wouldn't send you to a place like Australia', Green remembered Nixon telling him, ‘but right now it is critically important'. Then followed a string of presidential ‘expletives' about Whitlam, culminating in the peroration, ‘Marshall, I can't stand that [****]'. It was, Green later said, ‘a strange kind of parting instruction to get from your President'.
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That Nixon had no space in his schedule to see Green might easily be seen as yet another fit of presidential pique towards Australia and its leader. And, clearly, Nixon remained enraged by Australia's response to the events of December 1972. But it also showed yet again the extent to which the president's diary was dominated by the escalating scandal of Watergate. One historian assesses that in the period from February to July 1973, Nixon spent close to three-quarters of his time discussing the crisis and how best the White House could manage the fallout.
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Day by day, however, the lethal drip of revelations in the press about Nixon's knowledge of the burglary, his involvement in the cover-up, the payment of hush money and the possible granting of clemency to the burglars, steadily eroded both his public credibility and his own morale. As current and former Nixon aides and advisers began testifying in front of various commissions and inquiries, a once fortress-like White House, obsessed with secrecy, watched in horror as its operational and political entrails spilled onto the front pages of the nation's newspapers and television. Never before had the American public been given so dramatic an insight into the inner workings of an administration. Nixon was under siege yet again, though every time he tried to regain the initiative, he seemed to sink only further into the mire. As he recorded in his diary in February, ‘we are really caught here without really knowing how to handle it'.
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The distraction of Watergate was all the more galling to a president whose gaze was still on the ambitious foreign policy agenda he had mapped out for his second term. With the ink still fresh on the Vietnam peace accords, and still sporting a 60-33 public approval rating, Nixon harboured the idea that he would eventually ride out
the Watergate storm and put the tempest behind him for good. This was to be the ‘Year of Europe', in which Nixon was to reach out to America's European allies, reassuring them that, despite his opening to China, they were still of crucial importance to the United States. It was to be a time to refocus on the Middle East peace process and to welcome Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to the White House for a major summit on further steps in détente and, specifically, arms limitation.

The president also had his record to defend. In an address to the nation from the Oval Office at the end of March, Nixon stood firm on all the controversial decisions he had taken in Vietnam: the attacks on communist bases in Cambodia, the mining of Haiphong, air-strikes on North Vietnam and, as he put it, the ‘hardest decision I have made as President', the bombings of Christmas 1972. In a defiant speech, Nixon proclaimed that he had delivered on his commitment to achieve ‘peace with honour' in Vietnam, and was now resolved to throw himself into the new domestic challenge: meeting the scourge of inflation that had arisen as a consequence of the decade long conflict in South-East Asia. At the close of his speech, he spoke of the courage and faith of American prisoners of war just returned from Vietnam, and, channelling Winston Churchill, remarked that ‘if we meet the great challenges of peace that lie ahead with this kind of faith, then one day it will be written: This was America's finest hour'.
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The rhetoric soared, but the hammering in the press over Watergate continued, each new detail ‘falling like a sickening blow to Nixon's confidence'.
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Not even the firing, at the end of April 1973, of his two closest and most trusted aides—HR ‘Bob' Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, for their role in the scandal and its cover-up—could stem the tide of crisis engulfing the White House. The situation was only made worse when it was revealed that taxpayer funds had been used to pay for improvements to Nixon's San Clemente home on the Pacific coast, and when it was shown that he had failed to lodge tax returns over a number of years. As historian Stephen Ambrose remarked, ‘nothing short of war would push Watergate out of the spotlight'.
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Even the summit with Brezhnev—envisaged by Nixon as one of the highlights of his presidency—was interpreted by many
in the Washington press as a distraction from the inquiries into the burglary. No matter how hard the president tried to keep his gaze on the world beyond, it inevitably came back to his own words and actions in the months following the arrest of the burglars. The question of what was on the White House tapes that Nixon used to secretly record conversations and telephone calls, and the extent to which they implicated him in any wrongdoing, began to obsess the president. Kissinger's memoirs record that in early 1973 he had found it ‘difficult to get Nixon to focus on foreign policy to a degree that should have disquieted me' and over the coming months, it was virtually impossible ‘to get him to address memoranda. They came back without the plethora of marginal comments to indicate they had been carefully read'.
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Even as the North Vietnamese began to violate the cease-fire agreements, Kissinger could not sufficiently marshal the attention of his boss to engage in the kind of retaliation that Nixon had promised America's South Vietnamese ally. He would not agree to resume the bombing.

The irony for Australian diplomacy in this period was that at the very moment the bolts of a tightly controlled White House were loosening, as the tight veil of secrecy was being lifted on a paranoid administration, its doors remained well and truly locked for Australia. Of course, Australia's new direction would have been the furthest thing from Nixon's mind amidst this daily, and deadly, inundation of revelation and recrimination. And the policy that Nixon and Kissinger had settled on at Camp David in late December the previous year—to ‘freeze' Whitlam—remained very much in place. It was Marshall Green who found a way to keep the diplomatic channels open to the Australians, especially with Ambassador James Plimsoll. Securing the agreement of Secretary of State William Rogers, but without telling either Nixon or Kissinger, Green continued to see Plimsoll, visiting him by night at his official residence before he left to take up the post in Canberra. For nearly five months, then, the only substantive communication in the American–Australia alliance occurred under the cover of darkness in the inner suburbs of Washington DC.

Nixon's ongoing wrath towards Australia showed just how much the controversy stirred up by the Australian criticisms of his
Vietnam policies continued to ‘redden the coals of resentment'.
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In its most concrete form, that anger expressed itself in his stubborn refusal to issue a formal invitation to Whitlam to visit the White House. The lack of willingness to put out a welcome mat for Australia was all the more telling given that Nixon had readily agreed to host Brezhnev, and, as time went on, other world leaders, such as Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

But Whitlam's exclusion from the inner sanctum of American power—however much that sanctum was losing its sheen amidst the scandal of Watergate—became a pressing issue in Australian politics in the first half of 1973. For the first time in the history of the alliance, a prime minister was being made to look as if he had to beg to be let in to see the president. It did not matter how badly Nixon's reputation was being tarnished by the poisonous atmosphere in Washington DC, Whitlam's exclusion began to damage him politically at home, and raise serious doubts about his capacity to manage the foreign affairs portfolio. The prime minister's language, in one breath suave and soothing and in the next gratuitously cynical and sarcastic, did not help matters. The efforts to repair the damage to the relationship and secure Whitlam an audience in the Oval Office seemed to fall primarily onto the shoulders of the new American ambassador, Marshall Green. And this highly experienced diplomat came to Canberra with a sound appreciation for the nationalistic currents then flowing through the Asia–Pacific.

‘WE GOT MARSHALL GREEN'

One of America's most gifted Asia experts and policy makers in the postwar period, Marshall Green prided himself on his quick wit and gift for comic repartee. His diplomatic memoirs even bore the subtitle ‘Recollections and Humour' and featured countless episodes where his jokes, as a State Department colleague once recalled, were able to ‘relieve awkward tension, induce a more friendly mood between opposing negotiators or cut through windy rhetoric'.
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If his expertise fitted him out perfectly for the new role in Australia, so did his capacity to break the ice. In Washington he was known as the ‘man of steel with the gentle smile'.
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There can be no question that Green found a kind of boyish joy in reaching for the nearest pun. But it might also have been a way of releasing the pressure. After all, his was a diplomatic career spent almost entirely at the coalface of America's Asia policy from the beginning of World War II to the late 1970s. This was a period of extraordinary transformation in the region, in which the assertion of newfound nationalism jostled with chronic poverty and rapid economic development. Green was uniquely placed to observe the way in which these two forces, national self-assertion and modernisation, were shaping a new dynamic in East Asia.

Being present at so many regional flashpoints meant that Green acquired something of a reputation as an Asian ‘trouble shooter'.
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During the Taiwan Straits conflict in 1958 he served as crisis manager for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; serving as deputy head of mission in Korea in 1960–61 he observed the students' uprising and the downfall of President Syngman Rhee, followed by a military coup d'état which overthrew a democratically elected government and installed President Park Chung-Hee. As consul general in Hong Kong in 1961–63—when that mission was the US administration's ‘eyes and ears' on China—Green witnessed the tragic aftermath of the Great Leap Forward when thousands of Chinese refugees swarmed into Hong Kong. In the early 1960s he was recalled to Washington to lead a review of US China policy, where he recommended the easing of trade and travel restrictions. Then, in Indonesia from 1965 to 1969, his first posting as ambassador, Green watched as the firebrand nationalist Sukarno and some of his pro-communist followers were replaced by General Suharto, who made it clear that foreign investment would be welcomed and a more cooperative stance with regional partners adopted. Green then served as assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs from 1969 to 1973, a period which saw the return of Okinawa to Japan, Nixon's trip to Beijing, the bombing of North Vietnam and the Paris Peace Accords.