Unholy Fury (2 page)

Not all, however, were entirely enthusiastic about Nixon's presence in Australia. Local officials in Canberra were sorely disappointed that their distinguished guest seemed oblivious to a memorial then under construction on Russell Hill: a soaring column surmounted by an emblematic eagle to mark Australian gratitude for America's
defence of the country in World War II. A surprised and somewhat embarrassed Nixon hastily inserted a line into his radio broadcast to give ‘heartfelt thanks' to the Australian people, saying how ‘moved' he had been by this tribute to America's ‘fighting men'.
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The memorial still towers over the Defence Department complex in Canberra today.

A FRIENDSHIP OF MUTUAL RESPECT

American diplomats spoke glowingly of Nixon's ‘substantive and courageous talk' to politicians in Canberra, but the rhetoric did not soothe every ear. Menzies told the British high commissioner, Sir Stephen Holmes, that while the speech was ‘admirably phrased and produced', he had been aghast to learn from journalists travelling with the vice president that it was Nixon's eleventh performance of the same act. Clearly the prime minister, himself a silken orator, believed that the visiting vice president should have crafted a speech uniquely for his Australian audience. But Menzies also confided to Holmes that Nixon ‘did not have a clue' about what being in government meant. Such a verdict on Nixon's lack of experience in high office was, however, overwhelmed by Menzies' ongoing doubts about America's rapid rise to global pre-eminence, and what that meant for the role and responsibility of the British Commonwealth. In their private conversation, the prime minister told Nixon he was ‘worried that the United States had assumed responsibility with unprecedented power', a clear indication of his ongoing unease about American credentials for world leadership. Nevertheless he added that ‘Though he was British to [the] bootheels, we must work together in the Pacific'.
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No doubt, too, Menzies was frustrated by Nixon's handling of delicate questions put to him during the meeting with ministers, when the vice president deftly dodged the thorny topics of why American tariffs were hurting Australian farmers, and why Washington was refusing to share atomic secrets with the British government. News of Nixon's arrival in the country had jostled for space with headlines detailing the detonation of Britain's first atomic weapon at Woomera in the South Australian desert.

On the other hand, this Australian prime minister would not be quickly forgotten by Richard Nixon. In his private, handwritten
notes from the visit, Nixon wrote warmly of Menzies being ‘big, blue-eyed and grey haired', ‘good at cutting people to size', and ‘nice to the common people'.
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Later, in his memoirs, Nixon added that Menzies had made an ‘indelible impression' on him during this 1953 visit. He was convinced that, had he been born in Britain, Menzies ‘would have been a great British prime minister in the tradition of Winston Churchill'.
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An appraisal of Menzies in his subsequent book
Leaders
was even more glowing, Nixon describing his friend being ‘as big as all Australia in body as well as spirit and outlook'. But along with Menzies' knack for repartee and his talent in the art of conversation—on that skill Nixon ranked him highest amongst all the world leaders he had met—there was praise for his oratorical prowess, staunch anti-communism, even his contempt for the press and big business.

A deeper current, however, flowed through their respective political lives. ‘Like so many other great leaders', Nixon wrote, ‘Menzies was toughened by his years in the wilderness. When he took power again, he was much more confident of his abilities and sure of his goals'.
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That theme, of rejection and isolation followed by electoral redemption, was the narrative that bound these two leaders together. It was a shared experience, a tale in which two prominent political figures, both deemed finished after previous stints in leadership roles, return in triumph to dominate the stage in their respective countries. It was an experience often discussed at their meetings over that decade and into the next. No Australian leader with whom Nixon would subsequently deal—be it John Gorton, Billy McMahon or Gough Whitlam—could ever have hoped to attain the cherished place occupied by Menzies in Nixon's pantheon of world leadership. Indeed, it would be fair to say that in Richard Nixon's eyes, Robert Menzies was the epitome of the Australian statesman.

So began a friendship of mutual respect between the two men that was to last until the late 1970s. After this first meeting in Canberra, Nixon and Menzies were to meet regularly during the Australian leader's trips to the United States and the two would often correspond, send each other their respective books, and swap notes on the political issues of the day. Speaking to the House of
Representatives in August 1959, Menzies spoke of the ‘several long talks' he had with the vice president on his latest trip to Washington, praising his ‘bold approach to international problems'. Menzies was referring specifically to Nixon's visit to Latin America in 1958—where his motorcade was viciously attacked by angry rioters in Venezuela—and to the famous kitchen debate between Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, in which the two had squared off in an impromptu debate over the respective merits of capitalism and communism. The vice president's approach, Menzies said, was one that ‘commends itself to the Australian mind. It is quite clear that [Nixon] is a great believer in going to the seat of the trouble and meeting other people freely and frankly … this seems to me to be essential in the near future of the world'.
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Although these were plaudits typical of a leader in an alliance with a great power, the compliment was returned. Nixon wrote in praise of
TIME
magazine's cover story on Menzies in April 1960, saying he had been most pleased by the article's ‘frank recognition that the conservative economic policies which your government has so courageously and effectively applied have been primarily responsible for Australia's remarkable progress since World War II'.
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And in early February 1969, only a matter of weeks after Nixon's inauguration as president, Menzies was the guest of honour at a specially convened White House dinner, along with Secretary of State William Rogers, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and former Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. As Menzies recounted to his daughter, ‘the new president and all the others put questions to me and were anxious to get my views'. Writing subsequently to Nixon in appreciation, the former Australian leader expressed confidence to his long-time friend that ‘the team you have around you will be highly successful and … you will play a notable part in the administration of your great country'.
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The Nixon—Menzies relationship was much more than a link born of mutual appreciation and admiration: they were the essence of an Australian and American Cold War conservative political culture in which the way to handle the challenges of domestic politics, the region and the world tended to merge.

On the other side of Australian politics, however, it was a very different story. Before his 1953 visit to Australia, the State Department in Washington warned the vice president of ‘elements within the Labor party [which] consider the Menzies government too acquiescent to American leadership on international issues'. Nixon's summary of Labor leader Evatt was blunt: he was a ‘difficult man', one that the United States needed to ‘cultivate'.
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His public broadcast, however, reserved special praise for Australia's trade unions and their ‘cleaning out [of] the Communists', the visit coming at a time when Australia itself remained divided over the threat of internal subversion. Two years earlier, Menzies had launched an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to ban the Communist Party in Australia. Nixon later commented that the talks held with officials of the labour movement were among the most important of his brief stay.
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No matter how much this Asian trip was meant to allow him the opportunity to broaden his outlook beyond the red-baiting for which he was so well known, time and again he returned to his cherished theme: dealing with the enemy at the gates.
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But with memories of those ‘nerve-racking years' of the Pacific war still so fresh, journalists in Australia wove the presence of the American ‘second in command' into a ready-made narrative about wartime cooperation and shared interests in uncertain times.
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Nixon's stay was seen as ‘eloquent testimony to America's undiminished interest in, and friendship for, her continental neighbour in the South-West Pacific'. It was reassuring for Australians to ‘find President Eisenhower's deputy expressing his opinion that “this great country of yours is as indispensible to our security as we are to your security”'.
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This was precisely the language that Australian leaders wanted to hear: the words of mutual reassurance, rhetoric which satisfied a deep and longstanding Australian desire for great power protection in a region seen as threatening and unstable. As one editorial stated, the vice president might have had an exacting programme, but he would certainly ‘have time to realise that the alliance means far more to Australians than a formal treaty'.
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Or, as another scribe mused, Nixon's ‘impressions of Australia, however fleeting, are likely to become President Eisenhower's impressions of
Australia. On that basis his coming could have limitless consequences for this country'.
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That might have been nothing more than the throwaway line of an excited journalist, but in the succeeding decades, Richard Nixon was to have a major influence on Australia, its political leaders and the nation's place in the world. And for one politician listening to the vice president's luncheon address in Canberra during that visit, those consequences were to prove profound indeed.

A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE COLD WAR IN ASIA

In October 1953 Gough Whitlam was not even one year into his first term in the federal parliament. Elected to the western Sydney seat of Werriwa at a by-election in November the previous year, he had only recently made his first speech to the House of Representatives on international affairs. A veteran of World War II, in which he served with the Royal Australian Air Force, Whitlam spoke a very different language to Nixon about the coming of the Cold War to Asia. He had little time for the rhetoric of fear and dread, and did not see Asian communism as an insidious kind of red lava, seeping into Australia from the north. He understood that the region around his country was changing—and quickly. The retreat of the European empires and the rise of new nations were to be welcomed: ‘The best way to deal with any red menace, as we so glibly term it, is to give [the emerging nations] self-government.' The new Asian states, he went on, were ‘entitled to self-government within the world community of nations, the United Nations, of which Australia is one'.
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Whitlam was laying out the foundations of his own world-view, one which combined hard-headed realism—he argued consistently that the Soviet Union and China were part of the irreversible facts of great power politics—with liberal internationalism, which looked above all to foster international understanding and cooperation among nations.
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Whitlam's first speech on these questions—one month before Nixon's arrival in Australia—responded to a statement by the minister for external affairs, Richard Casey. Casey was reporting on the outcomes from the first ANZUS council meeting, a forum of Australian
and American officials established when the treaty had been signed. The debate, Whitlam recalled, was ‘characterised by unanimity on ANZUS'.
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But the member for Werriwa took the opportunity to reflect on the workings of the pact, defending the exclusion from it both of Britain and other European powers who had interests in the Pacific. In a phrase that betrayed a certain ambivalence about the treaty itself, Whitlam added that ‘if it had to come about', the arrangement was ‘wisely limited' to the three signatory countries: the United States, Australia and New Zealand. He also delivered a mild rebuke to the Americans, though one firmly couched within a certain appreciation for their world role: ‘Traditionally', he intoned, ‘the United States of America has sympathy for peoples who are seeking self-government'. He regretted, however, that ‘at the present time it does not seem always to show such sympathy in every part of the world'. The new member of the Australian parliament was taking aim at aspects of the United States' Cold War policy in Asia, one which in his view too often saw not the assertion of political and cultural independence, but the threat of monolithic communism. And in a direct reference to Articles IV and V of the treaty—those that provided for consultation in the event of an armed attack on one or the other in the Pacific area—Whitlam sounded the alarm. It is ‘quite plain', he said, ‘that there is cause for us to review some features of the Anzus [sic] pact. We should consider the implications of it':

 

The terms of Article V of the treaty are very wide. They contain the words
An armed attack on the armed forces, public vessels or aircraft of any of the parties in the Pacific
. Are we to be embroiled on behalf of the Americans if there is an armed attack on any United States armed forces in an area where they are conducting some unilateral campaign, and is the United States of America to be embroiled on our behalf if there is any attack on our forces in, for instance, Malaya? I merely put it, without expressing any concluded opinion, that in the light of the events of last year, this matter must give us serious pause.
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