Unholy Fury (36 page)

But the president's man in Canberra had given a classic Nixonian rendition of the new circumstances facing the United States, and how the turning away from certain Cold War orthodoxies necessarily involved toning down the grandiloquent speeches and missions of the past. There could be no more lofty rhetoric about a
pax Americana
. Green even pointedly rejected the American national myth as expressed in John F Kennedy's inaugural address, confessing that it was ‘hard to conceive of a more sweeping declaration of commitment to the world spoken by a President just elected by the narrowest of margins'. While Americans would:

 

still wish to carry out the burden of this message … we have come to see a serious flaw in an approach that suggests the
business of America is world leadership. Leadership is to be shared. Burdens and responsibilities are to be shared … it is far beyond the means and capabilities of any one country to shoulder all these responsibilities; and it is far beyond the wisdom of any one country to supply by itself the answers and solutions to world problems.
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It was a message about American humility, and Green too felt the brunt of growing misgivings about his country's general wellbeing. The perception that the United States was in a moral crisis continued to fuel deeper doubts about its capacity to maintain global pre-eminence. At a press conference following this speech, an Australian reporter asked Green: ‘After events like My Lai [in which American soldiers had massacred a village of defenceless civilians in South Vietnam] and the My Lai cover-up, Watergate, and the Watergate cover up … American observers like James Michener have asked the question “Is America burning”?' The ambassador could only concede that the United States had been ‘through a difficult experience', and confessed that ‘we made a mistake in ever assuming that we could be responsible for everybody's affairs, even though the motive was highly worthy'. But Green's response also highlighted the high expectations applied to the United States. Its problems ‘tended to be far more advertised, ventilated before the world, because of our particular position, and therefore command a great deal more attention'.
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In effect, Green was showing just how difficult it was for Americans to let go of their national myth—the idea that the United States had a universal mission to redeem the world.

As for the alliance, Green showed his sensitivity to the new Australian mood—he was in a country which ‘now seeks as never before to define its unique identity and personality'. America, he said, ‘had no quarrel with this'. There was no need for the two countries to ‘march in long step to preserve their community of interests'. There was room for individuality and flexibility: ‘We must never take one another for granted', a theme that was to recur again and again in Green's public and private remarks during his posting to Australia.
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BUILDING BACKFIRES

In Washington the following month, just days before Whitlam was to see the president, Green would tell Kissinger that the delay in extending the invitation might have stirred up domestic politics in Australia for a time, but the turbulence had been worthwhile: it had ‘made Whitlam sweat a bit'.
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Here was a telling insight into how US officials viewed the relationship between the presidential schedule and recalcitrant allies: the latter were to be made to wait until the commander-in-chief was well and truly ready to bestow the honour of an Oval Office meeting. The inescapable conclusion was that this was punishment, White House style, for stepping out of line. Whilst this pointed to the underlying pettiness of the United States in dealing with allies who departed from the script, there was little in Whitlam's behaviour in this period that might have changed the equation. With Nixon's focus being entirely on the elemental matter of his political survival, the Australian prime minister did not help matters by making gratuitous public comments about the presidency, comments that he must have known would be relayed to Washington. Whitlam was virtually mocking Nixon at a time when the US leader was at one of his lowest ebbs. It brought to the fore yet again questions about Whitlam's judgement. The tragedy was that his occasionally caustic tongue undid much of the good work that both he and Wilenski had done in explaining the rationale behind Australia's new international stance and its progress towards greater self-reliance.

And so it had come to this. Whitlam would be visiting a president badly wounded by the Watergate scandal, and one in no mood to spend any more time than necessary with an ally he believed had more or less vacated the arena. As Green subsequently recalled, Nixon was of the view that Australia, once a ‘great, staunch ally', had suddenly ‘opted out' of the Vietnam war when Labor came to power in December 1972.
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As the visit approached, however, some in Washington did grow a little more concerned about the treatment envisaged for the Australian prime minister. The informal nature of the meeting and the fact that it conflicted with an official visit—replete with lavish
ceremonials—by Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka, led some in the State Department to fear that the Australian press, ‘anti-US elements in the Australian government' and even Whitlam himself ‘may draw invidious comparisons between this visit, and [the] red-carpet treatment extended to PM McMahon during his last Washington visit'. McMahon in any case had already drawn that comparison. Again, however, this was a fundamental misreading of Whitlam, who had expressly said he did not want a ‘coronation' in Washington. To try to arrest this view of the US cold shoulder from gaining purchase in Canberra, Green was duly instructed to ‘build backfires' with the press and Labor parliamentarians.
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Yet these were instructions from the State Department, not the National Security Council or the White House.

Nothing, it seems, could adequately prepare Washington for the coming of Gough Whitlam. In the State Department, memories were short. One of its most senior officials told the secretary, William Rogers, that Whitlam's trip would be the ‘first ever visit to Washington by an Australian Labor Prime Minister', a statement which completely passed over wartime Prime Minister John Curtin's discussions with Franklin Roosevelt at the White House in 1944. Those talks, however, seemed to have come from another age. The Australian leader might have taken at least a little comfort from one confidential American briefing prepared on the cusp of his arrival, which argued that his visit would be ‘the most critical of any recent Washington visit by an Australian head of government'.
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But Whitlam was clearly a political species unsighted in the US capital for nearly thirty years. Indeed, from a reading of the material prepared by various American national security agencies in advance of his visit, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Australian prime minister was about to arrive in Washington caged in a zoological crate specially marked ‘Caution: Handle with Care'.

 

9

The day before he met Gough Whitlam, Richard Nixon went swimming. Under strict orders from his doctor to relax, he spent the day in seclusion at Camp David, the president's mountaintop retreat in Maryland. None of his principal aides or senior advisers were there: only his wife Pat and lifelong friend Charles Rebozo.
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Barely ten days earlier, Nixon had discharged himself from the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington after suffering a bout of viral pneumonia. The strain of the Watergate investigations had finally taken its toll on his health, and Nixon had spent just over a week holed up in bed as the controversy continued to swirl around him. His chest pain reminded him of his college days, when he had ‘cracked a rib playing football at Whittier'.
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Still, he was resolute that no inquiry would gain access to his presidential records, and that he himself would not testify before any committee. Many in the press suspected his admission to hospital was due to alcoholism and the need to ‘dry out', a view fuelled by reports of Nixon's growing tendency to make incoherent, rambling late night phone calls.
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Although the president continued to work in hospital, it was only the bare minimum. Unusually for Nixon, he did no reading. As he confessed to Henry Kissinger, ‘I just haven't got interest in it', and
while ‘laying around' was anathema to him, he conceded that ‘it may be a blessing in a way just to get the mind turned off for a week'. Kissinger did his level best to raise the presidential spirits, telling Nixon that key foreign ambassadors were emphatically rejecting any link between Watergate and the United States' reputation around the world, which was a ‘good thing because this is the best foreign policy that America has ever conducted'. It was self-serving mutual back slapping, but Kissinger, ever ambitious, continued to have his eyes on an appointment as secretary of state. ‘You have been under this unbelievable tortuous [sic] pressure for the last few months', he told Nixon. ‘And ever since you have come into office you have taken the position [that] you don't take vacations so you've always been on. Now this isn't a vacation but it forces you to rest and I really think we can get so much momentum in August and September … when these hearings resume, it will be in a totally different climate'. Nixon appreciated the lift: ‘Well, the hell with them', he replied. ‘The hearings do go on and we'll go on doing our job, let the country take the choice'.
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It was, of course, wishful thinking. By the middle of July the existence of the White House taping system had been confirmed, and thus began a long struggle for access to the tapes. But both Nixon and Kissinger were adamant in the middle of 1973 that foreign policy could be used as a means of salvaging an administration teetering on the brink. Announcements that Nixon had made on domestic policy—fighting inflation, the creation of a new department focused on energy and natural resources—had barely made a ripple in the Watergate flood.
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But on his handling of international affairs, Nixon was still attracting solid public approval ratings, and he had great hopes that the summit with Leonid Brezhnev in June would be a ‘watershed in history', a stunning counter to those believing his political end was near. Even though virtually a ‘lame-duck' president, Nixon was still talking about sticking it out until the end of his second term. As historian Robert Dallek has suggested, the president ‘solaced himself with thoughts that world peace might depend on his continued presence in the White House'.
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A great deal of public relations energy went into the task of convincing the American
public and the Congress that Nixon was indispensible to America's world standing. ‘No one in this great office at this time in the world's history can slow down', he told his staff when returning to work from hospital. Hitting out at his critics, he warned: ‘Any suggestion that this president is going to slow down … or is ever going to leave this office until … he finished the job he was elected to do … is just plain poppycock'. Rather than ‘wallow in Watergate', he was going to ‘make the great decisions … that are going to determine whether we are going to have peace in this world for years to come'.
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Nixon would not easily let go of the big picture.

Gough Whitlam, although not at this time facing the kind of crisis that had besieged Nixon, had nevertheless seen the capacity for foreign policy—if not handled well—to cause problems on the home front. But by early July 1973, invitation to the White House snug in hand, the prime minister was beginning to feel some measure of confidence about his efforts to redefine the alliance and Australia's place in the world. Although he continued to take flack from Opposition leader Billy Snedden, who lamented ‘the serious decline in close ties with the United States', others in the Opposition were starting to speak in decidedly Whitlamesque tones about the relationship with Washington. Andrew Peacock, the shadow minister for manufacturing, had returned from his visit to the United States around this time speaking the language of the ‘new nationalism'. The ‘days of sycophancy and me-tooism have finished', he wrote in the
Age
, and he gave qualified support to the proposal for a zone of peace in the Indian Ocean, ‘even though the Americans are not too keen on it'.
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At the Labor Party conference in July, Whitlam had even more of a spring in his step, proudly listing his achievements in the field of foreign affairs. Indeed this was one forum in which his tough stance with Nixon on the Christmas bombings—and his refusal to come out publicly to muzzle his loquacious ministers—had decidedly helped. It gave him the necessary cover to de-fang, to some extent, the left of his party. ‘We want to move away from the narrow view that ANZUS is the only significant factor in our relations with the United States', he told delegates, ‘and the equally narrow view that
our relations with the United States are the only significant factor in Australia's foreign relations'. ANZUS ‘is important', he went on, ‘but it is only one aspect of the very wide range of interests and, indeed, obligations linking us with the United States'. This kept faith with his past pronouncements about the alliance, but now carried with it the actions and rhetoric of the previous six months in government. He was, in effect, trying to normalise the relationship: he told of his resentment at how the conservatives had ‘defined ANZUS … almost as if it were a personal treaty with the President of the United States'. But his audience, however much they might have warmed to such rhetoric, would not have missed the prime minister's closing retort to the leftist hardliners in his midst: ‘The negative obsession some people in the Labor Party have about the American alliance is as counterproductive as the preoccupation with forcing every issue into its framework'.
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Whitlam was not going to allow any room for misinterpretation, and he certainly wasn't rushing headlong into the arms of the left. Indeed a signature achievement at the conference was his ability to defend once again the presence of American intelligence facilities on Australian soil.