Unholy Fury (10 page)

Australia was not altogether a new experience for Lyndon Johnson. As a young naval lieutenant in World War II, he had spent some time in both countries as part of his war service in the Pacific theatre, a record that he increasingly drew on as his political career took
shape in the aftermath of the conflict. As Robert A Caro has shown, Johnson was prone to exaggerating the extent and the effect of his time in uniform, a charade he was still performing with journalists at the White House the week before he left on his Asian tour in October 1966. Caro's description of Johnson's time in Australia provides a short but revealing portrait of an emerging political style. On a flight from Darwin to Melbourne, the plane in which he was travelling suffered navigational failure and was forced to land in the desert. Once on the ground, Lieutenant Commander Johnson got ‘busy' meeting the local Australian farmers. Johnson was ‘shaking hands all round', telling his comrades that ‘these are real folks—the best damn folks in the world except maybe the folks in … Texas'. As one of Johnson's companions noted: ‘Pretty soon he knows their first names … and there's no question he swung that county for Johnson before we left. He was in his element'.
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It is hardly surprising, then, that once he arrived in Australia as president twenty-four years later, Johnson was eager to reminisce about this previous visit, and his public speeches were peppered with vignettes of his wartime experience: it had been a ‘mission of war', whereas he was now on a ‘mission of hope'; he could ‘feel … as I did in 1942, the confidence that comes from the steadfast support of a united people in Australia'; he was in the country, he said on another occasion, to ‘retrace some of the tracks that I made a quarter of a century ago'. Leaving Australia from Townsville in Northern Queensland, he confessed it had been a ‘sentimental journey'.
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Tempting though it might be to dismiss this kind of rhetoric as sentimental schmaltz, it nevertheless gave Johnson an immediate emotional connection to the Australian collective memory of the Pacific war—a time when in the face of the Japanese southward advance and the inability of Britain's Royal Navy to provide for Australia's defence, the nation's prime minister had made a dramatic appeal to America for military assistance. The rhetorical bridge between the ‘struggle for freedom' in World War II and the confrontation with communism in the Cold War was never a difficult one for Johnson to traverse. Indeed, it was this language that continued to sustain the emotional bonds of the alliance.

In Australia the fervor of the welcome for the president seemingly knew no bounds. The ‘generally enthusiastic reaction' that greeted LBJ, the ‘miles of ticker tape and bands … and carpets of flowers and marching girls' had all the hallmarks of a genuine spectacle, and there can be little doubt that Australian crowds, for the most part, were willing participants.
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‘For 65 hours', journalist Alan Ramsey observed, Johnson ‘hypnotised Australia with his magnetic personality and wide smile, his Texan drawl and folksy rhetoric'.
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The
Age
hailed it as ‘the most spectacular reception ever given by Australia to one man'.
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The
Canberra Times'
description of the president's reception in Sydney somewhat sarcastically gave something of the flavour, noting that: ‘Rising like the ocean waves were joyous shouts of “All the way with LBJ” … while in their hearts the surging masses felt love for their great leaders and derision for the cardboard dragon of Chinese imperialism. Through the night loyal printers had labored to produce “one million hoorays” printed on strips of coloured paper eight inches long, 100,000 lapel badges and 1,000 cardboard banners 15 inches by 20 inches, all carrying portraits of President Lyndon—friend, saviour, big brother and father of friendship between the American and Australian peoples'. And in a sign that some journalists themselves were perhaps taken aback by the extent of the welcome, one pointed out that ‘some loyal cadres had even produced posters proclaiming “the 51st State welcomes LBJ”'.
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Although protests over the presidential presence did occur, these were not allowed to impinge on Australia's moment in the international sun. Anti-war demonstrators were warned by a nervous press and officialdom not to stain the national reputation and sully Australia's image in the eyes of the world. In Brisbane, the
Courier-Mail
branded the visit as a ‘test of good manners' even suggesting that the local police allow a demonstration by an anti-war group ‘before the presidential arrival' which ‘should satisfy both the demonstrators, who will get the protests off their chests, and the waiting crowd, who will have the opportunity of watching a preliminary to the big event'. Putting aside the bizarre reduction of the visit to the rules and regulations of a major sporting event, the plaintive tone of such reporting showed that nothing less than national prestige was at
stake.
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In general, the press tended to portray the protests as aberrant, isolated incidents, or, in the words of one report ‘unrepresentative of Australian feeling'.
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Others stressed that now was simply not the time to pick a fight with the US commander in chief—political discord could wait for the Australian general election in November: ‘as the guest of Australia, the president will not be able to argue with minority groups', the Melbourne
Age
observed. ‘We can do that between ourselves before the year is out'.
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For the British high commissioner in Canberra, Charles Johnston, it was the very novelty of the whole experience for Australians, as much as the lure of the limelight of international opinion, that captured the essence of the Johnson effect: ‘The President's double function as Head of State and of Government, and the consequent mixture of majesty and campaigning folksiness, was something quite new to Australians and had an overwhelming impact'. In the main, he reported, ‘they were flattered that so much attention should be paid to them by the most powerful man in the world'. The post-Dallas security procedures and overall sense of grandeur were particularly striking features for Australian crowds:

 

the security arrangements were a prominent part of the proceedings. They were carried out with a certain ruthless ‘colonialism' which characterised the whole visit. With a good deal of courtesy the Americans made it absolutely clear who was the boss. When their security people arrived in advance at a place which the President was going to visit, they practically took it over, and everyone from the State governor down had to keep out of the way, and no questions asked. Perhaps the most extraordinary impression was created by the bubble-top car.When the President stopped it and emerged from it to talk to people on the route, he resembled a diver coming up for air. Below him, inside the bowl of thick plate glass, the portly form of Ambassador Ed Clark could be faintly discerned like a monster of the deep. At other times, when the car was moving, the President's voice coming out of it over the bull horn produced a sort of science fiction effect—like a Dalek.

 

The whole episode, Johnston observed with obvious relish, ‘was new and exciting and slightly macabre'.
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AMERICAN DOUBT, AUSTRALIAN CONVICTION

No matter how spontaneous the welcome from the Australian public, or how much effort the White House and Secret Service put into managing the visit, there were points of contention. Although many of the private discussions between the president and Australian politicians constituted a ‘blunt reiteration of the public rhetoric',
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there was evidence of underlying American frustration at the relatively small numbers of Australian and other allied troops committed. Indeed the visit became something of a microcosm for the respective attitudes each country brought to the conflict. The Americans, eager to soak up the adulation of a supportive ally, nevertheless hoped that Australia, along with other key regional allies, would substantially increase its military commitment to Vietnam. The Australians, on the other hand, were quite happy to bask in the reflected glow of the presidential presence, while remaining adamant that they had reached their capacity on troop numbers. The misunderstanding derived from a combination of unrealistic hopes on the American side, along with a calculating Australian attitude to how it could use the alliance to serve its own national interests in the region.

Much of this stemmed from a flawed assessment within the White House of just what Canberra's early enthusiasm for the conflict might mean. The Johnson administration's gratitude for Menzies' initial contribution to Vietnam brought with it a set of expectations about Australia's ability to increase its commitments in the future. Accordingly, Australia was even included in some of the initial planning for US escalation. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs William Bundy told Johnson in July 1965: ‘we have already told the Australians what we have in mind and indicated that we may be suggesting similar mobilisation acceleration measures in their own military posture'.
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But throughout this period, Washington was to underestimate the limitations on the Australian government that prevented an increased contribution. Principal among these factors were Australia's ongoing fears of Indonesian ambitions and its
continuing commitment to the defence of Malaysia in the aftermath of the Confrontation episode. Thus when the Australian Cabinet decided in March 1966 to increase Australia's forces from 1400 to 4000, the new prime minister, Harold Holt, told the president that this was the upper limit of Australia's capacity, given its pre-existing commitments in the region.
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The hard lesson that Washington learnt in this period was that the Australian government's fiery rhetoric about the threat of communism and the need for great power protection was never translated into a higher defence expenditure. Australians, in the memorable words of historian Peter King, were prepared to ‘fight in Southeast Asia to the last American'.
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Moreover there were significant divergences between respective understandings of the situation on the ground in Vietnam. As American doubts about the progress of the war increased throughout 1966—with a growing number of senior American officials, including William Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, almost at the point of despair—Australian leaders seemed only to gain in confidence.
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That confidence derived less from developments at the frontline than it did from an assessment of how the alliance could best serve Australian national interests given the impending British departure from the region. In March 1966, Cabinet decided that the nation's primary consideration in being in Vietnam was the ‘continued commitment of the United States to the defence of South East Asia'. Any prospect of British withdrawal, it noted, ‘must tend to embarrass and undermine present United States policy'.
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Accordingly Australian statements and policies at this time all pushed in one direction: pressing the Americans to continue the fight in Vietnam.

On this point it is instructive to note the Australian prime minister's confidence in May 1966 regarding the situation in Vietnam. Speaking to a senior Cabinet colleague, Peter Howson, about the benefits his government would reap from a minimal military commitment, Holt surmised: ‘The USA are there to stay … We will win there and get protection in the South Pacific for a very small insurance premium'.
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Later the following month, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk found Holt ‘one thousand per cent in support of
what we are trying to achieve in South East Asia'. Taking the matter further Holt had explained that ‘the general feeling in Australia is that Australia is more directly threatened by the situation in Vietnam than is the US, and that there is a widespread feeling the US is fighting Australia's battle there, rather than the other way around'.
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It was an accurate summation of the Australian attitude: the deeper American engagement to Vietnam became, the less need there was for Canberra to devote more spending on defence. This again points to a central lesson for the politics of the alliance in this period, and one that is all too easily forgotten: namely how few concessions Australia had to make in order to maintain the overwhelming American presence in South-East Asia—the central pillar of its Cold War policy.

Although Holt's visit to Washington in July 1966 is remembered primarily for his appropriation of the ‘all the way with LBJ' slogan, perhaps the more remarkable rhetorical moment was Holt's response to an American journalist following his speech at the National Press Club. Holt was told that ‘we are not used to having our policies so enthusiastically supported', and was then asked ‘Isn't there anything wrong with American foreign policy?' Holt's response was revealing: ‘well, frankly, not in our eyes'.
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As Glen Barclay has argued, Holt was ‘temperamentally the Australian politician most sympathetic to American concerns', but he ‘did not seem to recognise [the] serious circumstances that were rendering the Americans desperate'.
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From December 1965 until the end of 1966 American forces in Vietnam increased from 184 000 to 385 000.
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Australian leaders, however, were ever wary of becoming trapped in a cycle of automatic commitment, where Canberra would be expected to systematically match US troop increases.
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Indeed in a speech upon his return from Washington, Holt extolled Australia's worth to the United States as a ‘country of influence' in the Asia–Pacific area, but he added in the next breath that ‘there is no escalation … in contemplation' in relation to the number of Australian boots on the ground.
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