Unholy Fury (23 page)

 

a growing anti-Americanism among the general public. This is an inchoate thing but it is a marked change from the atmosphere of the 1960s and in my view permeates all age groups. It is not by any means universal but the proposition that the United States is Australia's best friend does not any longer command general support. There is a general sense of bewilderment, stimulated by the United States news media, about where America is going. Are they really as bad as they sound? Is Nixon a wise man or an extremely unscrupulous one? Was the China visit a good thing or has he kow-towed to Chairman Mao? … Has the government allowed itself to become too subservient to the Americans who are taking over the country commercially in any case?

 

Waller thought that most people didn't come up with answers to such questions, but he was adamant that ‘they are being asked with much more persistence than would have been the case ten years ago'.
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He was clearly witnessing something of a sea change in Australia's attitude to the alliance, a relationship that seemed to have been cast adrift from its old Cold War moorings. What had been the bedrock of Australian security in the previous decade now lacked the overwhelming public consensus so crucial in ensuring Australia's status as a valued partner. At the very least, Waller was making a connection between the American image, refracted through a media prone to focusing on the conflicts and crises besetting America, and a diminishing confidence in the alliance at home. Uncomfortable questions about the United States' policies and leadership
were rupturing once widely accepted conventions about that country's purpose and direction.

Clearly some US observers in Australia themselves sensed something of a similar drift in local attitudes towards their country. From the late 1960s, US assessments of just what a future Labor government would mean for the alliance had vacillated between panic over the reach and extent of leftist influences on the leadership, and platitudinous assurances of the moderate forces within the party who could be relied on to support ANZUS. They were prone to depicting a Labor Party rife with ‘crypto communism', with future ministers Jim Cairns, Lionel Murphy, Clyde Cameron and Frank Crean regularly singled out as not only ‘vocal in their anti-Americanism', but also a security risk in terms of their access to classified US intelligence information. Indeed they saw Cairns as one of the ‘extremists' who advocated the ‘termination of ANZUS'. The American ambassador pointed out in early 1972 that while Cairns, then shadow minister for trade and industry, had said he would not burn the US consulate general in Melbourne in the moratorium marches, he would burn President Nixon in effigy. It was hardly surprising then that amidst this kind of volatility, the US embassy in Canberra would go to the trouble of sending a report back to Washington carrying an almost beaming, yet equally incredulous headline: ‘Kind Words from the ALP': in this case Deputy Labor leader Lance Barnard's ‘enthusiastic approval of President Nixon' in private remarks to the ambassador at a diplomatic function. Barnard praised Nixon as a ‘courageous leader with a great record of great achievement as President'.
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And then there was Whitlam, who, whilst he might have ‘surrendered to the left' on occasion, was ‘essentially a friend of ours and will wish to help us to [the] extent his party's policies can be warped and interpreted in our favour'.
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Thus the Americans too remained as much trapped within the miasma of the Cold War mindset as some conservative politicians in Australia. They recognised the fundamental changes in the national outlook but struggled to understand why that might mean a different interpretation of the Alliance on the other side of Australian politics. They had every expectation that moderates such as Whitlam and Barnard would keep party renegades in check.

But aside from Nixon and Kissinger's rebuff to Whitlam when he was in Washington, there was never any sense that the doors were to be completely shut on a new Labor government in Canberra. As one policy brief had warned before, ‘a complete cold-shoulder' to Whitlam ‘could be counter-productive'.
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But that was now a dated and dusty brief. His election as prime minister was always going to put the acid test on these implied statements of support.

 

6

The most explosive period in the history of American–Australian relations came about from the collision of two seemingly unstoppable forces: the egos and ambitions of two leaders who, while both tasting electoral success, reacted in very different ways to their moment of political triumph.

The first was an American president who, although just re-elected for a second term in 1972, remained a prisoner of his own paranoia. Although the lethal drip of the Watergate revelations was only just beginning as voting day approached, Nixon's instincts told him that the scandal would not forever disappear off the front pages. And in the aftermath of a resounding win at the polls, an already highly secretive White House turned inwards even more, becoming an almost impenetrable citadel. Outside, the press and public could only watch as the administration fortified its barricades against enemies real and imagined, both at home and abroad. Desperate to be free of the burden of Vietnam so that he might continue with his grand foreign policy agenda in the Middle East and Europe, Nixon and those around him became utterly consumed by the task of reaching a negotiated settlement—a ‘peace with honour'. In the period between his re-election in November 1972 and his inauguration in January
the following year, everything was to be subordinated to the task of extracting the United States from the war and securing peace with the Vietcong.

The second was an Australian prime minister newly installed in the Lodge, emboldened by his own election win to swiftly rebrand his nation's foreign policy and redefine its key alliance relationship. Gough Whitlam had waited nearly twenty years for this moment, and he hit the ground running. Holding at last the levers of power, he felt there was no time to waste. Having so patiently set out his agenda over the preceding years, he now moved with alacrity to lock it into place. His views on the world, which had done so much to shape his political persona in Opposition and cast him as an emerging statesman, now carried the weight and authority of prime ministerial office. That, of course, brought with it a new sense of responsibility, not only for himself, but also for his new Cabinet. In those first heady days of political power, the new leader implemented a range of policies that caught the United States off-guard. And he saw little need, initially, to restrain some of the more vocal Labor ministers who, savouring their first taste of electoral success in a generation, poured scorn on the American president and his war in Vietnam. If those first weeks of the Whitlam government were to showcase the thrill and excitement of Labor's first taste of political power in a generation, they were also to reveal hints of the ill-discipline and recklessness that would ultimately lead to its destruction a little under three years later.

Nixon's decision to bomb the major cities of North Vietnam, Hanoi and Haiphong, in late December 1972, was the fuse that lit the powder. Often referred to as the ‘Christmas bombings', the offensive constituted the president's attempt to not only break the will of the North Vietnamese at a time when its leaders were deemed unresponsive to renewed American pressure for peace, but also to show its South Vietnamese ally that the United States would respond strongly to any future violation of a peace agreement. Over an eleven-day period beginning on 18 December—there was a twenty-four-hour reprieve for Christmas Day—the United States Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps flew a total of 3420 sorties over
North Vietnam: with an estimated 120 raids each day flown by the much-feared B-52 bombers, or ‘stratofortresses'. As National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger proudly exclaimed to the president, one hundred B-52s was akin to ‘a 4000-plane raid in World War Two … it's going to break every window in Hanoi'.
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Australia, once again, was not consulted prior to the beginning of this bombing campaign.

Although civilian areas were not intentionally targeted, the collateral damage from this offensive—code-named ‘Operation Linebacker II'—was immense: an estimated 2000 civilians were killed in the attacks. But what surprised most observers was the timing: and not simply because the bombings took place over the festive season. They followed a period in which optimism had been rising for a peace settlement—Kissinger himself in late October 1972 had famously claimed that ‘peace is at hand'. The president too had spoken of a ‘breakthrough' in the negotiations.
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So his decision to resort to a massive bombing campaign came as something of a shock. It seemed to fly in the face of the widespread view that the war was in the process of winding down. The action drew protest and indignation from across the globe. The
Washington Post
characterised the attacks as ‘the most savage and senseless act of war ever visited, over a scant ten days, by one sovereign people over another'.
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But while the condemnation of the bombings from Congress, and American and world media, even from close allies in Europe, was severe and sustained, nothing had prepared the White House for the criticism that came from one of its closest and most trusted allies: Australia. Gough Whitlam, having gradually solidified his opposition to the Vietnam war from the time he became Labor leader, was now set to make an immediate adversary out of the American president. The formal letter he sent to Nixon criticising the bombings—his first piece of substantial correspondence with the White House as prime minister—so enraged Nixon that it plunged the relationship into a virtual six-month freeze. As speechwriter Graham Freudenberg recalled, this crisis brought on the ‘the first and greatest test' for the freshly installed Whitlam ministry and was ‘the new Labor government's introduction to American–Australian relations … its baptism in dealing with Nixon and Kissinger'.
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For some American leaders and officials, the fears about a left-wing government in Australia that had been growing in intensity since the mid 1960s, seemed to crystallise in this moment. At stake was the fate of crucial American intelligence installations on Australian soil. The stinging criticism of Vietnam policy was one matter; the prospect of Labor's left wing ramping up pressure to expel these facilities from Australia altogether was quite another. The equation of a left-wing government with visceral anti-Americanism also proved the durability of the Cold War prism through which Australia was being viewed. No matter how many times Whitlam had reassured American diplomats in the years before his election, he could not entirely break free from the deep underlying suspicion in Washington of his intentions. And so for all the talk of a White House welcoming a new era of multipolarity, when the chips were down Nixon and Kissinger resorted to what some observers have called a ‘maniacal' and ‘rigidly' bipolar view of the world. As historian Barbara Keys has pointed out, ‘local conditions around the globe … were viewed, and often misconstrued, within the framework of superpower relations'.
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It is also true, then, that in the period following Whitlam's election Australia's status in Washington slipped, and slipped badly. Where a call on the president was once a formality, and where access to the Oval Office and the inner sanctum of American power was almost an annual ritual, it now appeared as if the Australians were to be shut well and truly outside the gates. A relationship that had come to assume an almost mystical air for Australian politicians was now to bear the full brunt of Nixonian fury.

THE NEW TEAM

The first Labor government in twenty-three years was always going to draw attention, and raise eyebrows, from a US press not normally disposed to reporting much news from Australia. All the major newspapers in the United States ran editorials and assessments of the Whitlam victory. And with the advent of change came the usual mixture of anticipation and apprehension. Much of the commentary tended to emphasise the new ideological breeze running through the antipodes more generally, with New Zealand Labour's Norman
Kirk also coming to power that December. Whitlam had ‘stirred up' Australia, coming into office like a ‘whirlwind' and promising to ‘turn Australian foreign policy around'. Several newspapers noted the ‘dazzling administrative speed' with which he moved to enact the new policies.
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Viewed from Washington, Whitlam's early changes to Australian foreign policy were indeed swift and dramatic. Immediately after being elected he withdrew Australia's remaining military advisers to Saigon, signalled his intention to cut off all military aid to South Vietnam, proceeded to establish full diplomatic relations with China and East Germany, and instructed the Australian delegation at the United Nations to vote in favour of a resolution proposing the neutrality of the Indian Ocean. These were all measures that the United States government either opposed or found embarrassing. As Marshall Green, then assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, remarked: ‘on the question of style', Whitlam had been a ‘whirling dervish', which essentially meant ‘moving on matters of vital interest to the US without the prior consultation that we have come to expect from Australia'.
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Whitlam was an Australian prime minister the likes of which American diplomats of Green's generation had never seen.

Some appraisals, however, were more sombre and speculative. In the
Washington Evening Star
, editorial writers discerned that the ‘comrade in arms' spirit which had characterised the alliance relationship during the Cold War was very much in decline, sensing ‘some evidences of anti-Americanism down-under'. At the
Chicago Tribune
, Australia's new direction was interpreted as a direct result of great power negligence—since the United States had ‘deserted' Australia on so many key issues in the last decade, the ‘job of patching up relations will now be much harder'.
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The
Washington Post
, taking a leaf from the Nixon doctrine, asserted that Whitlam's election showed a new model for America's allies: security was no longer to be defined exclusively in terms of US patronage: ‘that an alliance starts to become obsolete is matter not for dismay but pride, it means that the members are adjusting to change'.
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