Unholy Fury (8 page)

Kennedy delivered an even blunter message to the Australian external affairs minister, Garfield Barwick, when he came to Washington later the same month with the hope of breaking the impasse on the language of the treaty. Kennedy told Barwick he ‘wanted to make sure the record was straight'. Speaking of the domestic reality in his own country, the president remarked that ‘people have forgotten ANZUS and are not at the moment prepared for a situation which would
involve the United States'. He reiterated the need for cool heads: ‘Our policy toward Indonesia had been deliberately ambivalent—not to face Sukarno with a white trio'.
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These were neither the words nor the sentiments that Australian leaders wanted to hear. The idea that the American public had ‘forgotten' about the treaty punctured much of the rhetoric about an alliance forged in the Pacific war, and showed with dramatic clarity that the idea of common cause with an old wartime ally cut no ice in US domestic politics. The American reluctance to be part of a white tribe ganging up on an emerging power also showed the limits of Australia's alliance policy: it failed to understand the connection between the administration's domestic and foreign policies. As historian David Webster has explained in a study of the administration's approach to the Indonesian question, Kennedy ‘backed civil rights for African Americans in part to avoid condemnation by Asian and African governments. That approach would have been undermined by a conflict pitting Europeans against third world countries along racial lines'.
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As a result of this meeting, the United States did agree to come to Australia's aid under the terms of ANZUS if Indonesians attacked Australian armed forces. But they placed so many conditions on their consent that, in the given circumstances, the agreement was almost emptied of meaning. In a formal memorandum handed to Barwick, the United States laid down the law as they saw it: they required first of all that Australia should consult with them before sending troops to Borneo. Furthermore the promise of aid would apply only to a conventional military attack on Australian forces and not to a guerrilla or subversive war. And lastly in the event of the Australians invoking the agreement, US assistance would be limited to air, naval and logistical support. As the Defence Committee in Canberra subsequently noted, the ‘agreed note is cautiously worded as regards the obligations of the United States'. The understatement hid the hurt, but the government in Canberra had little choice but to accept that this was how it had to be. In a sign, however, that the Australians remained deeply wounded over the stark import of the US caveats, the committee resolved that ‘opportunity might be taken to try and clarify the US attitude in a non-Malaysian situation'.
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Australians, in other words, were going to keep pressing for more US guarantees.

These episodes, and Washington's reluctance to promise military assistance in the event of Australia becoming involved in armed conflict with Indonesian forces, raised doubts about the meaning of the ANZUS alliance, and about Australia's ability to rely on America for support or even consultation about issues which touched its vital interests in the region. In 1964 the best Menzies could say about any ANZUS guarantee was that it was a ‘contract based on the utmost goodwill, the utmost good faith and unqualified friendship. Each of us will stand by it'.
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So totemic did these words become in the domestic political lexicon that John Gorton would still be quoting them five years later as the considered Australian position. It was sweet rhetoric, but it could not mask the enduring uncertainty that pervaded the Australian diplomatic mind. ‘Goodwill' was to prove a remarkably shallow commodity on which to base Australia's faith in the alliance. As Arthur Tange, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, conceded to his minister, Paul Hasluck, in early 1965: ‘we have been put on notice by a former President that the US understanding of its obligations was such as to exclude help from them to Australia in certain circumstances'.
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As a consequence, Hasluck believed the best policy was to simply keep quiet: the ‘more we try to spell out the meaning of Article IV and V the narrower that meaning will become'.
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But it was advice rarely, if ever, followed by his colleagues.

The United States, too, had made it clear that any assistance in the case of Indonesia would depend on Australia's other activities in South-East Asia. The commitment of troops to Vietnam in April 1965—the first time Australia had fought a war in which Britain was not involved—meant that the revolution in Australia's strategic orientation was complete. It gave the ANZUS treaty new meaning.
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At the time, Menzies described the US action in Vietnam as the ‘greatest act of moral courage since Britain stood alone in the Second World War'.
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Speaking to the American–Australian Association in New York not long after his country had joined the struggle in South-East Asia, Menzies trumpeted that ‘what is going on in South Vietnam is one of the greatest demonstrations by [the United States]
of the loftiness of its responsibilities that I have ever seen'.
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Indeed Australia and New Zealand were the only powers who contributed freely to the US cause in Vietnam. The United States' European partners in SEATO stayed on the sidelines, and although South Korea and Thailand committed larger military forces than Australia, it is also true that these Asian countries received substantial financial assistance from the United States. As a consequence, Canberra came to be seen as part of the ‘inner circle of allies', with one White House aide remarking ‘when you consider that the Australian GDP is one thirtieth the size of ours and that their military force is one fiftieth the size of America's, you can appreciate their generosity'.
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NIXON RETURNS

Just four months after Menzies announced Australia's Vietnam commitment, Richard Nixon arrived on his second visit to Australia, this time as a private citizen. In his self-described ‘wilderness years' following both the loss to Kennedy in 1960 and a failed attempt to become governor of California in 1962, Nixon bided his time and began to build a case for another run at the presidency. He knew that credibility on foreign affairs would again be paramount in the presidential election of 1968. Nixon's frequent travel around the world in these years—in five years from 1963 until 1968 he made six extensive trips to Europe, two to the Middle East, four to Asia and one to Africa—was not merely for the purpose of maintaining contacts and fine-tuning his grasp of international affairs: it was also to showcase his credentials as a world statesman.
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As Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose has noted, these tours may have been billed as private and non-political, but ‘he called press conferences at every stop'.
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Nixon's stopover in Australia came after he had visited Taiwan, where after meeting with Jiang Jieshi he warned Beijing that any intervention in Vietnam would provoke an attack on the mainland from Nationalist China. And in Tokyo, he criticised anti-war demonstrators for helping to undermine the reputation of the United States in the eyes of its regional allies. He then spent three days in South Vietnam, where he called for an expanded bombing campaign.

The target for these lectures was, of course, primarily Americans back home. Earlier in the year Nixon told one audience in San Francisco that the United States was already losing in Vietnam. And he continued to make the case that President Johnson's willingness to negotiate with the enemy was a ‘sign of weakness that has actually prolonged the war', a reward for North Vietnamese aggression.
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Nixon further argued that a policy of gradual escalation was not enough. He was not suggesting a resort to nuclear weapons, but he was pushing strongly for the ready employment of America's considerable sea and air power. Stakes were high. ‘If America gives up on Vietnam', Nixon said on many occasions during 1965, ‘Asia will give up on America'.
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His time in Australia was again brief: just forty-eight hours. But Nixon delivered two speeches and appeared on a
Four Corners
television special about Vietnam. That particular broadcast was the first sustained look the wider Australian public had at Richard Milhous Nixon since his loss to Kennedy in 1960. In a wide-ranging interview that covered his views on the war, his chances for the Republican nomination in 1968, the image of the United States in Asia and his philosophical approach to governing, Nixon clearly struck a chord. He spoke of his father's work ethic, the loss of two brothers to tuberculosis, and the need for government to extend a helping hand for those genuinely in need. The executive producer of the programme, Robert Moore, wrote to Nixon following the interview to say that the ABC had received ‘many flattering comments about it'.
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During the interview, Nixon had steadfastly refused to be drawn on the question of whether he would again run for president, but he did espouse a robust view of US world leadership. Declaring his ‘strong internationalist convictions', he expressed the belief that ‘the United States must assume the role of responsibility in Asia, in Europe and in the newly developing countries … As a matter of fact', he added, taking direct aim at isolationists within his own Republican ranks, ‘I would expand the United States in its world commitments rather than withdraw them'. With an eye to the campaign in 1968, he did not want to be seen as casting doubt on America's capacity for global leadership.

In his answers to other questions Nixon was adamant that aerial bombardment of North Vietnam—with no targets off limits—would be required to exert maximum pressure on the ‘aggressors'. Asked to respond to recent remarks by Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew that the Americans lacked depth and wisdom in world affairs, that they were ‘new chums' in Asia who wanted to simply remake the world in their own image, Nixon conceded that the United States had to do a better job of conveying its mission in the region and its purpose in Vietnam. It was not ‘selfish interest' that had propelled America into the conflict, he responded, but the desire to make South Vietnam ‘an example to the Communist aggressors so that they won't try it again some place else':

 

I think that we need to do a better job of information, all over South East Asia, maybe even a better job here in Australia for that matter, because here while there is strong support as there is in the United States for the present policy, there are too many people who support the policy without knowing why. And there are too many people against it for the wrong reasons, because their assumptions are wrong.
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Nixon seemed to be hinting at the inadequacy of blind loyalty, but he had also in the same interview expressed his frustration at partisan debate that ‘actually hurts the war effort'. He longed for an informed community pulling together at a time of international crisis.

But Nixon certainly did enough on that visit to reinforce the central core assumptions about US policy in the region. In short, he voiced yet more classic, Cold War clarion calls. In his set piece speeches in Sydney and Canberra, Nixon mixed a plea for patience with the familiar strains of the domino theory and lessons of history. He said that the war was being fought to prevent the Pacific from becoming a ‘Red Sea' and that ‘if Vietnam was lost the cork would be out of the bottle', with a number of neighbouring countries to ‘go down the drain'. Reaching for the lessons of Munich once more, he told the National Press Club that ‘In the event of aggression being rewarded in Vietnam, history tells us that the aggressor will try it again some place else … maybe in Thailand, maybe in Malaysia or
any other part of South East Asia'. The risk of losing ‘this little war in Vietnam now' was the probability of having to fight a ‘bigger war later to save the Philippines and the Pacific'. Nixon was less keen in these speeches to cast aspersions on President Johnson's war leadership—he said Johnson ‘was the most able politician to occupy the White House this century', so as not to detract from his call for resolve and his efforts to maintain a statesmanlike position when abroad. America and Australia, he said, ‘must build a wall to protect Asia from Communist China'.
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During this second visit to Australia, Menzies had gone out of his way to ensure Nixon was well looked after. ‘Welcome again to Australia!' wrote the prime minister in an excited letter handed to Nixon on his arrival.
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Not only did the two meet privately, but Menzies also hosted a dinner with senior Cabinet colleagues and diplomats, allowed Nixon the use of a government plane to shuttle between cities and put the prime ministerial residence in Sydney, Kirribilli House, at his disposal. As Nixon himself remarked in a thank-you letter to the Australian leader, these were ‘demonstrations of hospitality and friendship far beyond the demands of protocol'. In addition, Menzies gave Nixon a personally inscribed copy of a collection of his speeches,
Speech is of Time
, which the former vice president found to be ‘an inspirational companion on the long journey back to the United States'. Carrying on from their first meeting in 1953, it was clear Nixon genuinely relished their conversations, even to the point of trying to commit himself to Menzies' ‘reading schedule'. They had discussed the ‘broad philosophical doctrine which underlies our approach to foreign policy problems', Nixon lamenting if ‘only the factors of time and distance made it possible to meet more often'. Indeed the two seemed to have come to some sort of agreement during a conversation in Menzies' library that the Australian leader would write a book about ‘the exciting mystery of how so many of the world's great leaders have had their most productive years after suffering shattering defeats'.
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