Unholy Fury (4 page)

Nevertheless as a young Congressman Nixon had won national notoriety and fame for his pursuit of the former State Department official Alger Hiss, whom he had accused of being a Soviet agent. Ultimately, Hiss was shown to be a liar and perjurer, but Nixon's reputation as an anti-communist crusader was confirmed. As the billboards announced his subsequent Senate campaign against the Democrat Helen Douglas in 1950, Nixon was ‘On guard for America'. By 1952 he was the vice presidential candidate to World War II hero Dwight D Eisenhower and, in the words of historian Robert Dallek, became the Republican Party's ‘poster boy for anti-communism at home and abroad'.
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While the vice presidency had long been dismissed by some as an executive position of little consequence, Nixon used it to prepare himself for a tilt at the Oval Office, travelling widely and educating himself on the major challenges facing the United States across the world. He believed
his strengths in foreign affairs would be an advantage over the less experienced John F Kennedy in the 1960 presidential elections, but his narrow loss at that poll and an unsuccessful run for governor of California in 1962 saw him retreat to life as a private citizen. He needed time to think, reflect and craft his return to the political arena. For Richard Nixon, the call of politics and public service never entirely abated.

By the time he reached the White House in 1969, president at last, Nixon had undergone something of a transformation: once the arch Cold War warrior, he now talked a less grandiose language about America's global role. It was time, he said, during a major foreign policy address at the Bohemian Grove in San Francisco, to realise that the communist world was no longer ‘monolithic' and for Americans to ‘recognize that … American style democracy is not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia'.
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The
pax Americana
could not last, and Nixon enunciated a less activist version of the American mission: ‘the role of the United States as a world policeman', he wrote on the cusp of his second run for the presidency, ‘is likely to be limited in the future'.
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In July 1969 he gave this sentiment more content with the enunciation of what came to be known as the Nixon doctrine, announced on the tiny Pacific island of Guam, where Nixon had gone to watch the splashdown of the Apollo 11 mooncraft. The president's brief, ‘off the cuff' remarks to journalists about the future of American policy in Asia sent shockwaves throughout the region. With the war in Vietnam sapping national morale, he signalled that America's regional allies would in future have to provide more for their own self-defence: in effect, to stand more on their own two feet. Two years later, Nixon dropped an even bigger bombshell. He sent Asian allies, not to mention many conservatives back home, into a state of near apoplexy by presiding over a dramatic metamorphosis in US China policy, travelling to Beijing and shaking hands with Chairman Mao. The visit ended decades of separation and mutual mistrust between the two countries. Along with the negotiations to end the Vietnam war, Asia consumed Nixon's attention. As the president himself told America's top diplomats in the region: ‘If I was in the foreign service,
I would choose Asia to serve in … in Asia you have more opportunity to shape the outcome of events than anywhere else on this globe'.
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Nixon was all too aware, however, of just how much the war in Vietnam had distorted America's outlook on the world and obscured the changes that were starting to grind against the tectonic plates of world power. In a speech to media executives in Kansas city, Missouri, in July 1971—at the very moment Kissinger was in Beijing to pave the way for the opening to China—Nixon set out in the clearest possible terms this new world his country was encountering. The idealism and power with which America had rebuilt a shattered postwar Europe was now being tempered by a new reality. ‘When we see the world in which we are about to move', he said, ‘the United States no longer is in the position of complete pre-eminence or predominance. That is not a bad thing'. These were brave words for an American president to use. Nixon, who had staked so much of his career on an uncompromising American world stance, was now effectively conceding that America's reach and influence abroad had climaxed. In effect, the doctrine he outlined on Guam, along with détente and the push for arms control agreements with the Soviets, all to a greater or lesser extent illustrated the limits of American power. ‘What we see as we look ahead 5 years, 10 years, perhaps it is 15, but in any event, it is within our time, we see five great economic super powers: the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Mainland China, and, of course, Japan'.
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It would be a ‘safer world and a better world', he added before visiting China in February 1972, if these countries were ‘each balancing the other, an even balance'. Looking at the world through the prism of Metternich and Bismarck—the great European heroes of
realpolitik
—he remarked that ‘it is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises'.
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Despite these rivals, Nixon was confident that America would continue to be the ‘strongest' and ‘richest' nation in the world, but his speech can be seen as part of a wider narrative in the 1970s: the pervasive and persistent idea that the west was on the ‘slide'. A host of economic, environmental and demographic challenges contributed to a widespread sense of ‘crisis' in this era.
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For Nixon, like many
others, the lessons of history provided little comfort in facing up to the looming challenge. Towards the end of his remarks in Kansas, the president told of his affection for walking the streets of Washington DC at night and taking in the great monuments of the American capital. Although he confessed an affection for the Lincoln memorial, ‘particularly at night with the light shining on the statue of Lincoln', his favourite building was instead the National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution were housed. It was ‘impressive', Nixon went on, ‘because it has the appearance of the ages … these great marble columns give you the feeling of the past and of also what the nation stands for'. For Nixon, these walks brought back memories of nocturnal visits to the Acropolis in Athens and the Forum in Rome, and prompted a sobering reflection:

 

I think of what happened to Greece and Rome and, as you see, what is left—only the pillars. What has happened, of course, is that great civilisations of the past, as they have become wealthy, as they have lost their will to live, to improve, they then become subject to the decadence which eventually destroys a civilisation. The United States is now reaching that period.

 

Nixon was not only warning his country of the task ahead, but also channelling the work of historian Arnold Toynbee, whose theories on the rise and fall of great civilisations had informed his
Study of History
, a multi-volume history of the world in which Toynbee had warned of the tendency to ‘rest on one's oars' or idolise a lost past. What Nixon was really trying to say, of course, was that the American century was nearing its end.

The great irony is that it was not only American self-belief that was collapsing in this era—in the wake of defeat in Vietnam at the hands of insurgent peasant guerrillas—but Nixon's own career, which in 1973 was heading slowly and painfully towards oblivion. The Vietnam war had cost Americans dearly, not only in the casualty toll—60 000 dead—but in an economy dangerously weakened by the long struggle in South East Asia. The ongoing difficulties in securing an end to the conflict and, even more, the mounting pressures of the
Watergate scandal, had produced an extreme and visceral reaction from the president to any criticism, but especially to barbs from once close and trusted allies.

The Nixon White House was under siege in the first half of 1973, and Australia was not the only close American ally to feel the blasts of Nixonian anger. Britain, France and Sweden were all very much on the outer. The president's national security adviser, the mercurial Henry Kissinger, recalled that at the time he felt as if the country was on ‘the edge of a precipice'. Others spoke of a ‘stockade mentality' gripping the White House, making an already poisonous atmosphere in Washington all the more toxic.
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It was not meant to be like this: 1973 was to have been the year in which Nixon could bring the Vietnam war to a close, host Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev for a major summit in Washington, and pursue broader American policy objectives in Europe and the Middle East. Nixon and Kissinger had always relished the opportunity that this more fluid world presented for strategic creativity. They believed that previous administrations had fallen victim to the staleness of treating every foreign policy crisis through the prism of the struggle with Soviet Russia. In the tradition of
realpolitik
, they saw the world as a network of states, systems and statesmen that was there to be controlled, manipulated and mastered.
⁵⁰
It seemed that in many respects the old ideological Cold War was at an end and was being replaced by the manoeuvring of great powers for a favourable balance of power. And in an interconnected world, once-cherished ideas of ‘special relationships' were given short shrift; in a worldview based on clinical calculation, there was little room for sentiment. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger, however, was prepared to tolerate criticism—especially from allies. Quite the contrary. ‘All over the world', Nixon thundered in late 1970:

 

it's too much the fashion to kick us around. We are not sensitive but our reactions must be coldly proper. We cannot fail to show our displeasure. We can't put up with ‘Give Americans hell but pray they don't go away'. There must be times when we should and must react, not because we want to hurt them but to show we can't be kicked around.
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For Australian leaders on both sides of politics, those words would come to have an increasing resonance during the Nixon presidency. Although Nixon and Kissinger might have professed to leave behind their Manichean world-view, dividing the world into friends and enemies, they never hesitated to put relations with ‘unhelpful' allies on ice. As Kissinger confided to the Shah of Iran in late July 1973—and he had Australia directly in mind here—‘what we want to do is to get our allies into a frame of mind where they feel that they have more to lose than we do when they criticize us or take us to task'.
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As the crisis brought on by the Watergate affair saw the Nixon administration increasingly distracted, the president saw a world arrayed against him. And in his rage over Australia's criticism of his Vietnam policies and other moves in Asia, Nixon threatened to rip apart the very fabric of the alliance, pulling out the top secret American defence installations in Australia, reducing the number of joint military exercises and ending all intelligence sharing. Such a move threatened to empty the ANZUS treaty of any meaning or significance, leaving the relationship little more than a brittle chrysalis.

CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES

How had it come to this? That a treaty which had been the unquestioned first principle of Australian foreign policy since 1951 could come so close to being cast aside presents an important historical problem for Australians. In the decades following World War II, Australian governments had worked tirelessly to keep the Americans and the British engaged militarily in South East Asia. Fighting alongside their major allies in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam was seen as the best means of keeping the communist threat in Asia at bay. And the alliance enjoyed broad popular and political support. ‘The general and deep belief among Australians that Australia's alliance with the United States is essential to its security', noted the
Bulletin
, ‘demands that the alliance should be given a touch of the sacred and the mystical'.
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But by the end of the 1960s Australians faced a future that was almost as challenging as the one they had faced at the end of World War II. All their assumptions about the world and their ability to
depend on Britain and America for their security were proving to be unsound. In that decade the Australian political system was compelled to absorb the impact of Britain's decision to seek membership of the European Economic Community and the announcement of its intention to withdraw a military presence from east of Suez. Then, with the enunciation of Nixon's Guam doctrine in 1969, Australia witnessed the collapse of its Cold War policy. Its former strategic objective, namely that its great and powerful friends would keep South East Asia safe for the west, had failed.

The departure of the ‘great and powerful friends' from Asia was a moment of profound crisis for Australian politicians and policy makers. As one journalist remarked, ‘one thing we must do is stop talking as if our great and powerful friends are immutable parts of the scenery where we live, with permanent, unchangeable attitudes and commitments'.
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Similarly W McMahon Ball, a former Australian diplomat, warned around this time of the transience of American goodwill, especially if the parameters of US policy shifted quickly. In a warning that clearly went unheeded at the time, Ball emphasised that if the administration of President Lyndon Johnson was ‘replaced by one that changes the Vietnam policy, and perhaps withdraws the American military presence from the Asian mainland, and has widespread popular support for these changes, any goodwill we may have won … may become irrelevant'.
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In a survey on Australia appearing around the same time, the
Economist
took a more direct approach: ‘the desire of most Australians to keep America actively involved in Asia is strong … but who stays in the posse when the marshal decides to get out of town?'
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True, Australia had developed relationships with Japan, Indonesia and other Asian nations during the Cold War, and it had made piecemeal adjustments to its White Australia policy, but it had done so under the umbrella of great power protection. Mostly, it had sought to keep Asia and Asians at arm's length. These external shocks contributed to a period of unprecedented national soul-searching.
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As historian Stuart Ward has shown, the changes also had important consequences for how the country articulated where its defence priorities should lie in a post-imperial world. In the words of the
Australian
in late 1969: ‘we have
no defence philosophy because we seem uncertain of what we are supposed to be defending'.
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A new era of disarray and disorientation descended upon the political class.