Unholy Fury (13 page)

On Vietnam, Whitlam epitomised Labor's early support for American decisions and ambitions. The party's leaders were ever keen to rebut any criticism of Labor being either weak on the alliance or isolationist. Thus when President Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964—in which it was alleged
North Vietnamese torpedo boats had wantonly attacked American destroyers in international waters—to justify retaliation against North Vietnam, Whitlam gave steadfast support to this dramatic episode of American escalation: ‘It is many, many years since it has been so easy to come to a conclusion on any incident in South East Asia' he said, and it was ‘difficult to think that any United States President, or any other head of state, would have reacted differently'.
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The US version of events, as one Labor insider recalled, was almost universally accepted. To have suggested then that Johnson's actions arose from a mistake or misunderstanding, wrote Graham Freudenberg some years later, would have ‘been a kind of heresy' in Australian politics.
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Nevertheless, even after Australian troops were committed to Vietnam in April 1965, Whitlam, although he shared his leader's sentiments about the miscalculation and flawed assumptions driving US intervention, still maintained that ‘We badly need the American alliance' and that ‘America's motives in South East Asia are beyond dispute'.
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With one eye on shoring up support from the party's right faction, Whitlam was not going to risk being seen as a dead weight on the US alliance.

This trust in the American relationship and the US leadership of the west was shown by the way in which Whitlam gave expression to his own alliance faith. His commitment to the relationship rested on two pillars, each of which represented the essence of his approach to politics: the first was legal and constitutional, the second ‘a matter of spirit and attitude'. If the former related to ‘our mutual treaty obligations', the latter related to ‘the kind of influence we should try to exert on the US to play a role in our region'.
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This understanding of the alliance emphasised Australian activism and agency in shaping America's regional role—a role that Whitlam stressed should not be seen in exclusively military terms. It became a dominant theme in his speeches and statements as he moved to convince not only the electorate of Labor's credibility on defence and foreign policy, but party colleagues that his vision of America was not solely related to its use of hard military power. This position was buttressed by Whitlam's understanding of American society and history. ‘No country', he said in a speech on American Independence Day in 1968, ‘is better placed
than Australia to influence, encourage and help America fulfil her truly creative and, in the best sense of the word, her revolutionary role in the world'.
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As the decade wore on, however, and as the situation on the ground in Vietnam worsened and public disaffection with the war intensified, it became much easier for Whitlam to critique not only the war, but also the government's interpretation of the alliance. Whitlam became increasingly sceptical of American optimism about the progress in Vietnam. After a visit to Australian troops there in 1966, he likened US General William Westmoreland's demand for more soldiers to guarantee victory to the infamous actions of the British general of World War I, Douglas Haig, who sent thousands to their deaths on the battlefields of northern France. He also followed closely the growing political division in Washington and the popular clamour for withdrawal on the American home front. Thus when he became Labor leader in 1967, the times were more propitious for a forceful attack on the war and the government's arguments used to sustain the Australian commitment. Whitlam put John Gorton, who had succeeded Harold Holt as leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister, squarely in the firing line for failing to influence American policy in South-East Asia towards more fruitful endeavours, and he attacked the government for its betrayal of the ‘true' America.

This task was made easier for Whitlam by the emergence of a different dynamic in the alliance at the level of prime minister and president. Gorton struggled to achieve the same kind of intimacy with Johnson that Holt seemed to have enjoyed, though it was not for lack of effort on the part of the American president. More to the point, Gorton remained somewhat fixated on the security guarantee offered under ANZUS. And that uneasiness only intensified as the new American president Richard Nixon, in the wake of growing uncertainties about the war in Vietnam, articulated a very different kind of US military footprint in Asia. If American officials were getting their first look at Gough Whitlam in this period, the Australian government of John Gorton was gaining its first impressions of Richard Nixon.

‘MORE CONTEMPORARY … MORE ARTICULATE'

As Gorton struggled to maintain his party's ascendancy in foreign policy, Whitlam moved quickly to seize the political initiative, all the while sending out the requisite messages of assurance that he remained a true believer in the American alliance. He did so from a strong foundation of long-term support for the United States and its self-professed ideals.

In his early speeches as deputy Labor leader, Whitlam had identified himself with the optimistic strand of John F Kennedy's ‘new frontier'. The new Democrat president's rhetoric and program was for him, as for many others at that time, evocative of the great altruism that shaped American life and its global outlook. Three days after Kennedy's inauguration, Whitlam stood in front of a summer school audience at the University of Western Australia, welcoming the ‘more contemporary' and ‘more articulate' policy likely to emanate from the White House: especially in its stance at the United Nations. It offered an escape route, Whitlam said, from the ‘blind alleys' into which Australia had followed Washington under President Eisenhower. He lamented that Menzies had so readily followed the American lead in not recognising China and that it had ‘acquiesced in American policy on the invasion of North Korea and the retention of Quemoy and Matsu', the islands in the Taiwan Straits over which China and the United States had skirmished on two occasions in the 1950s. Whitlam seemed to be suggesting that Kennedy was about to eschew the more ‘bellicose' tone of the Republican Party and soften American's Cold War policy of containment.

Whitlam drew a different set of lessons from history, looking not to Munich but to the period preceding the onset of World War I. Immediately following the Cuban missile crisis of October 1963, he pointed out in parliament that American historian Barbara Tuchman's
August 1914
(also published as
The Guns of August)
had been required reading for Kennedy's Cabinet during the tense thirteen days in which the Cold War came close to exploding into a nuclear confrontation. Tuchman's book, which was published in 1962 and won the Pulitzer Prize, was a close study of the catastrophic misjudgements that characterised the months prior to the outbreak of World War I.
‘There was no doubt', Whitlam mused, that ‘President Kennedy and all Americans in a position to determine these matters were aware of the fatal momentum which can come from mobilisation, and which did come in August 1914'. He even went so far as to claim that ‘had there been United Nations machinery at that time we would have been spared the First World War'.
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Whitlam would later remark that the ‘Munich-generated fear of appeasement' had been used to distort the conduct of international affairs in the postwar period, particularly in the 1956 Suez crisis and in Australia's policy in the Vietnam war.
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Along with Calwell, then, he remained impervious to the seductive power of the very myth that dominated the west's understanding of geopolitics in the Cold War.

Whitlam believed that the prevalence of these myths had delayed Australia's ability to understand and embrace the uniqueness of its own geopolitical situation—and the benefit that might bring to the American alliance. In doing so, he readily conceded the enormous task awaiting Australians in reorienting themselves from ‘the familiar European world to the unfamiliar Afro-Asian world'. But he believed that Australia's ‘history and geography' made it the ‘best bridge between the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans'. Whilst continued reliance on ‘proven Western allies' was paramount, he added that ‘we do not do justice to ourselves or assist them if we render them uncritical support'.
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Those lines, along with his observation in 1963 that a country like Australia needed security arrangements such as ANZUS ‘for the time being' came to the attention of American diplomats in Canberra, who seemed to parse every statement of Labor Party leaders, almost as if hunting for any sign of wavering on the part of the Opposition.

The scrutiny of Whitlam's speeches also showed an American embassy starting to sit up and take notice of Whitlam as Labor's brightest prime ministerial prospect in a generation. But there was just enough of a hint of the conditional in his words to prompt speculation about his view of the longevity of the alliance. Confronted about his comments by a senior US official in Canberra, Doyle Martin, Whitlam held firm. Martin suggested the phrase ‘for the time being' conveyed the impression that Whitlam believed that the
nation's defensive arrangements with the United States were only ‘temporary'. Knowing all too well Whitlam's sensitivity on the question of loyalty, Martin reminded him of the Liberal Party's ability to ‘raise doubt about the fidelity of the Australian Labor Party to ANZUS and other alliances': such statements might ‘lend credence to this doubt'. Under this line of questioning, Whitlam came to the point, clarifying that he was not thinking of ‘five or ten years, but of a much longer period, probably 30 to 40 years'. While there was a need to retain the current American alliance, especially given that China would be a ‘have rather than a have-not nation' by the end of the century, ‘more thinking should be done over the longer range about methods for cooperation, particularly with China and Indonesia'. Australians, he said, had to ‘think more in regional terms'. Asked whether his nation's European heritage, predominantly white population and relative wealth were a barrier to Australia becoming an ‘Asian nation rather than a nation on the edge of Asia', Whitlam was ‘unwilling to concede that these attributes made close regional relationships impossible'.
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The Americans got a closer look at Whitlam when in 1964, along with Malcolm Fraser, he was the recipient of a Smith-Mundt grant from the US government. Effectively, such an award was given only to those believed to be future leaders, and it allowed them a three month stint in the country to immerse themselves in American political culture and discuss the issues of the hour with the wider national security community in Washington. During his stay Whitlam met, among others, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Marshall Green, then deputy assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. For Labor's deputy leader, it was a key opportunity to gauge thinking in Washington on the growing US commitment to South Vietnam, their attitudes toward Communist China and how to respond to growing Indonesian assertiveness. Both Rusk and Green rattled off a series of Cold War bullet points that left Whitlam in no doubt as to the American policy line. In the words of Rusk, they ‘were not going to pull out of South East Asia' and wanted to send a clear message to Hanoi and Beijing. In both meetings Whitlam seemed to imply that the United States lacked a comprehensive policy approach
to South-East Asia. To Rusk he called it ‘compartmentalisation'; to Green he was a little more straightforward: the US, Whitlam said, ‘seemed to be handling the problems in South East Asia as bits and pieces … how [could] the jigsaw puzzle be fitted together?'
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And he wanted to know why the US would not support sending matters such as South Vietnam to the United Nations. On the same visit he held discussions at the United Nations in New York with the American ambassador and former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.
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Nevertheless Whitlam's rather direct questions to Rusk and Green were not those of a brash Australian going out of his way to needlessly rock the alliance boat. It was precisely because his views were seen as the epitome of Labor respectability that such opportunities came his way. Like Calwell, Whitlam had no wish to see America humiliated in Vietnam. He did not want the US to ‘leave or abandon interest in the area' as it was the ‘only effective counterweight to Chinese influence there'.
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As Ashley Lavelle has demonstrated, the ‘strong undertones of anti-communism in such statements reflected Labor's bipartisanship with the Government on the security threat posed in southeast Asia by China and the nationalist Sukarno government in Indonesia'.
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Although Whitlam disagreed with the American line that in trading with China ‘we are trading with the enemy', he repeated his conviction in the parliament that he ‘was certain that America will not withdraw' from the region. ‘We need our allies', he concluded in one speech, ‘as much as ever'.
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What Whitlam did seek to do was to sharpen the differences between Labor and the government over the interpretation of the alliance. Australia faced a fundamental choice: it could be a ‘base' from which the United States could play the role of regional policeman, or it could act as a ‘bridge' between the United States and the countries of Asia. He was taking aim at what he believed was an uncritical conservative approach to the management of the alliance. With the echo of Harold Holt's ‘All the way with LBJ' still reverberating in Australian politics, Whitlam took refuge in the rhetorical legacy of Johnson's immediate predecessor: ‘The late President Kennedy warned the United States “not to see only a
distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than exchange of threats”. In such views we should go all the way with JFK'.
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