Unholy Fury (41 page)

A string of public comments by Whitlam, Cairns and other Labor Party figures that were either critical of Nixon or Ambassador Marshall Green, or which seemed to cast some doubt over the future of the installations, only raised the hackles in Washington even further.

So just three months after Whitlam's visit to Washington the war of words between Canberra and Washington began anew. In the Middle East crisis of November 1973, when it seemed that the Soviet Union might intervene in the Arab–Israeli war which had just broken out, the United States had put all its military bases around the globe on full alert. Whitlam speculated aloud that the alarm had been raised purely for ‘American domestic consumption', as a means of distracting the press and public from the continuing fallout over the Watergate affair. He went further by stating that ‘the war would never have broken out … but for supplies from outside—by the Soviet Union and the United States; and they both recovered their sanity in time to save us all'. Once again, just as he had done in December 1972, Whitlam was putting the Americans on a level pegging with a communist adversary, this time the USSR.
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Then, on a visit to Hanoi in December, Cairns told a dinner held in his honour that he regretted Australia's ‘association with the United States' war of destruction upon your country'. Moreover he claimed that the North Vietnamese had ‘won' the Paris negotiations and the US had been ‘defeated'.
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These Australian ‘gaffes', as one policy officer in Washington termed them, were ‘not quickly forgotten' in the US corridors of power. Every time Whitlam or a senior minister spoke,
it seemed, the National Security Council feared a ‘new monstrosity'.
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Whitlam had told Marshall Green privately that Cairns's comments in Hanoi were ‘bloody silly', but pleaded for some understanding given Cairns's long opposition to the war. Yet during a visit to Thailand in early February 1974 the prime minister himself again condemned the American bombing of North Vietnam as ‘militarily ineffective' and ‘morally … monstrous'.
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Behind it all the Americans saw Whitlam's ‘flirtation with neutrality' and the belief that Australia was drifting further and further into isolationism. Washington's Cold War world-view held firm: the more Australia endeavoured to transcend it, the more Americans kept reviving it.

Crucially, senior American diplomats were clearly still coming to terms with Whitlam's ‘new nationalism' and its consequences for the alliance. Where the Australian leader saw ‘creative maturity', others saw a reckless indifference to the basic facts of power politics. Marshall Green told Australia's high commissioner to India, Bruce Grant, that he remained somewhat unnerved by the broad scope of Whitlam's foreign policy, particularly in its tendency to look beyond South-East Asia. Clinging to the idea of Australia as a US ‘strategic anchor' in the South Pacific, Green maintained that Australia should be ‘taking up the slack' in South-East Asia as the Americans withdrew. It showed that, in this respect at least, the principles of the Nixon doctrine remained very much in place. And although Green agreed with the description of Australia as a ‘robust middle power', he ‘wished that Australia would give more recognition to the fact that America was a super power'.
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Thus for all Green's welcoming of the ‘maturation process', the wounds of the immediate past had not quite healed: Australians, it seemed, still had to be reminded of the global pecking order. Speaking privately with Whitlam at the Lodge just before Christmas 1973, the US ambassador sought to account for why the relationship had been under pressure over the past year, suggesting that it was largely down to the fact that ‘some Australians seemed to feel that plucking feathers from the American eagle somehow showed Australia had achieved robustness and independence'.
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Little wonder Green had been telling the State Department at around the same time that Whitlam's foreign policy
was profoundly ‘disturbing from [a] US standpoint', the envoy even suggesting that Whitlam appeared to be ‘serving as PRC [Chinese] stalking horse with ASEAN members'—the only relief being that many Asian leaders were ‘unimpressed and wary' of the Australian leader's regional vision.
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It was as if the Americans had found their very own antipodean Manchurian candidate.

American approaches to Whitlam therefore underwent something of a change in the period following his visit to Washington. Since the 1960s, the Labor leader's primary appeal to US officials had been his moderation: his avowed determination to keep Labor's left wing, especially its hostility to the presence of US intelligence facilities in the country, in check. Now he was cast not only as ‘physically imposing, keen-witted [and] energetic' but also ‘impetuous' and ‘not a profound thinker'.
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Whitlam was still someone with whom the Americans could deal, but they grew increasingly nervous about his ability to control a fractious party that itself was starting to feel serious political pressure, not least in putting a brake on fiscal profligacy, the loans affair and various ministerial scandals. Notwithstanding the impression Whitlam had made in the American capital in July, he was now in danger of losing his reputation as someone the Americans could trust. Despite sporadic but genuine praise for certain aspects of US policy; despite going out of his way to signal his desire for close relations; and despite the control he had of his party, Whitlam had been unable to entirely shake free the American image of him as an ‘enemy of the President'. ‘With Whitlam', one senior US official remarked in early 1974, ‘one can never afford to breathe easily', mainly because of his ‘self-acknowledged temptation to make the ill-considered quip'. There was, however, a willingness to give him one last chance. After a lunch in Canberra with Kenneth Rush—the deputy secretary of state—and Marshall Green, Whitlam supposedly ‘offered a full scale truce' and, according to Rush's report of the discussion, was ‘prepared to fall into line if we do likewise'. Whitlam was ‘going to great lengths … to make his peace' with the United States.
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But it was wishful thinking.

Whitlam was by no means running up the white flag. Indeed the Australian prime minister had every reason himself to question
whether the new definition of the alliance—and the new direction of Australian foreign policy—had really sunk into the mind of US officialdom. After the brief triumph of his Washington visit, he felt that Australia was again being taken for granted. This time, Marshall Green was squarely in Whitlam's sights. In January 1974,Whitlam told the Australian ambassador-designate to Washington, Patrick Shaw, that since coming to the post Green ‘had not acted wisely in that he had expected a too easy compliance by the Australian Government with the various wishes of the United States government'. Green had to learn that ‘Australia “was not a push over”'.
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The remark showed Whitlam's frustration: he was in no mood to slip back into the old nostrums of the Cold War alliance. It seemed to draw new battle lines and announce, if not welcome, further confrontation. Another gauntlet was being thrown down, one which did not augur well for the course of Australian–American relations over the short term.

‘THOROUGHLY OBNOXIOUS': LABOR AND THE US FACILITIES

Whitlam was becoming emboldened too, by the ever more beleaguered state of the US presidency. During the Middle East crisis of late 1973, Kissinger, newly appointed secretary of state but also retaining his position as national security adviser, had effectively taken charge. Nixon was essentially passive, suffering even more from a persecution mentality and holed up for long periods at his private residence in San Clemente. Forced to hand over the White House tapes, bleeding from the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, and jealous of Kissinger being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (along with the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho, who refused the award) for his part in bringing the Vietnam war to a close, Nixon was more politically crippled than ever.
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Whitlam, like many others, sensed it. In talks with the foreign minister of Singapore, he remarked that now ‘there was no political damage to an Australian politician in appearing to be offside … with the Nixon administration in the United States'. Although he realised that ‘he should not have said' that the Middle East alert was raised for domestic political purposes, the game had changed. ‘In the past there would have been a tremendous
furore made of this in parliament', he noted, ‘but on this occasion there had hardly been a ripple because now even the Opposition realised that there was no mileage in appearing to side with Nixon'.
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For Whitlam, who had cut his teeth in an era when his party was almost permanently on the back foot on matters of national security, that change in the political climate must have been nothing short of remarkable. Clearly, he relished it.

In the press, however, there had been much more than a ripple when news of the Middle East alert had filtered through. The failure of the US government to inform Canberra that the alert had been transmitted through the North West Cape station was perceived as nothing less than a slight on the alliance—an alliance that was, after all, supposed to have entered a new era in which the great power showed greater respect and consideration for the wishes of its junior ally. Responding to a question in parliament Whitlam pointed out that ‘the ANZUS treaty and the United States Naval Communications Station Agreement would both indicate that Australia should have been consulted'.
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He believed it was an example of how a foreign base on Australian soil could be used to initiate a third world war without Australia either agreeing or knowing about it.
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Some newspapers, however, were much more emotional, if not hysterical, and resuscitated older fears about great powers paying lip service to Australian national interests. It was the day ‘When our hot line ran cold' blared a Melbourne
Age
editorial: ‘neither NATO powers nor Australia are satisfied with being left in the dark'. The forthcoming visit to Washington by Defence Minister Lance Barnard presented a perfect opportunity to protest this ‘off-hand treatment of an allied government': there was now a case for increased Australian control over US installations on its territory. The
Australian
asked, with barely a hint of incredulity, ‘if Moscow knew, why not us?' and concluded that ‘there can be no doubt that most Australians … feel that their government should be informed before parts of our territory become potential targets in a nuclear war'.
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Since the 1960s, Labor's most constant criticism of the US bases had been that they derogated from Australian sovereignty. This was especially the case for the North West Cape base, through which
the Americans, without any reference to Australia, could also pass instructions to their Polaris missile-armed submarines in the Indian Ocean. In March 1973, Whitlam had called the base for this reason ‘thoroughly obnoxious', and Labor had indicated before the 1972 election that it would seek to revise the agreement relating to control and access to the base.
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The occurrence of the Middle East Alert provided a lightening rod to those in Labor's ranks who retained serious reservations about the presence of the installations. Although a major US study into the alliance at this time asserted that the location of the installations in remote areas of the country meant that ‘there is little visible evidence of the American defense presence', the alert had brought these facilities well and truly back to centre stage in Australian politics.
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Alarmed by the possible consequences, Deputy Prime Minister Lance Barnard was sent to Washington to seek joint control over the use of the base, that is, an effective veto over any messages relayed from or through it. But even before he left Canberra, Marshall Green had made it clear that no such option was possible. There was simply no practical way that the Australian government could examine all the communications going through North West Cape: a process that would involve the decoding of messages and their referral to Canberra for political or bureaucratic approval.
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The Americans would not have it. As the journalist Paul Kelly noted at the time, Barnard's visit to the United States appeared to be a ‘deeply serious mission—on which he is ordained to fail'.
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In Washington, a hint of the likely reception awaiting Barnard came in a private telephone conversation between Secretary of Defence James Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger in the early evening of 8 January, the day before Barnard's crucial talks. Schlesinger was calling to advise the secretary of state that he intended to pull out of a dinner being hosted that evening for his Australian counterpart by Ambassador Plimsoll. Plimsoll had earlier conveyed to Kissinger that he wanted to ‘straighten out the relationship' in the wake of recent tensions, but Schlesinger was still smarting over the comments of that ‘god damn Prime Minister' Whitlam on the Middle East alert. ‘He is a …', muttered Schlesinger, seemingly looking for the right expletive.
But Kissinger jumped in, emphatically finishing the sentence for him: ‘He is a bastard'.
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Barnard arrived in the United States trumpeting the Whitlam government's ‘new nationalism'. In New York he affirmed that Australia would no longer behave as a ‘junior partner or a client state' in any alliances, and addressing his hosts directly he emphasised that ‘you [Americans] must expect that we shall wish our relations with you to be consistent with our status as an independent nation'.
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But in private he could not have been more forthcoming in his discussions with Schlesinger. Although Barnard trotted out the cautionary words about Australian sovereignty and self-reliance, he said that his proposed joint statement on North West Cape ‘will enable us to get away from the situation whereby people in Australia can criticise the US installations'. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, tried to placate recent Australian frustrations over the Middle East Alert, saying that ‘we will see to it that it never happens again', but in the process pointed out that he did not consider the raising to DEFCON3—in which the readiness of US armed forces for combat is increased above normal levels—as a genuine alert: American forces in South-East Asia had been on the same alert level since 1965. Barnard was grateful for the assurances and did not want ‘any possible debate in Australia about these bases. They make a significant contribution to US and Australian security and to world peace. I want to get them accepted by the public … Mr Whitlam and I are prepared to accept responsibility for these bases'.
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