Unholy Fury (40 page)

Some bitterness certainly did remain in Washington. Kissinger was angered by Bernard Gwertzman's article in the
New York Times
, which claimed that Whitlam had had to ‘virtually … invite himself to the White House' and that the administration only agreed to host him after being urged to do so by the State Department. The very suggestion was enough to get under Kissinger's skin. Over the telephone to Gwertzman the day after Whitlam's meeting with Nixon, Kissinger dismissed this ‘folklore' and said he wanted to ‘set the record straight'. The visit ‘was not something imposed on the White House either by Whitlam announcing he was coming, much less by the State Department insisting on it … The future of this administration doesn't depend on whether the State Department arranges the Whitlam visit'. Then, having explained in detail the process by which he and Wilenski had arranged the timing of Whitlam's meeting with Nixon, he even told Gwertzman—with a burst of laughter—that he ‘would be glad to play my tape for you'.
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Putting aside the joke about the White House taping system, which in any case had been turned off mid-July, it speaks volumes for Kissinger's pettiness that he would make a call to argue such a trivial point with a senior journalist. But it is a potent symbol of a White House besieged, fighting for every small scrap of credit on the foreign policy front, no matter how minor. And there was to be the usual payback for the State Department: true to his agreement with Nixon in late December that all cables regarding Australia would be exclusively controlled and cleared from the White House, Kissinger approved amendments to State's diplomatic cable that summarised the visit. The problem? Officials in Foggy Bottom had been too positive about the visit's outcomes. According to the National Security Council's Jack Froebe, the draft overdid the accomplishments. Froebe took particular exception to the characterisation of Whitlam's time in Washington as ‘exceedingly successful' and sought to ‘tone down the tendency towards euphoria' in the draft. The visit was instead rendered ‘quite successful', with special note made of the reassurances
Whitlam had given on SEATO, US installations in Australia and ‘other areas of basic concern to the US'.
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Marshall Green, who had also sat in on the Nixon-Whitlam exchange, was later to report that, after the president escorted the Australian prime minister to his car following their meeting, Nixon had turned to him and said ‘Well, Marshall, he's quite a guy'.
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It was the closest Nixon got to paying Whitlam a compliment. Whitlam, for his part, told British journalist David Frost that it was ‘very absorbing to see how the President's mind worked', especially the ‘way he would muse on the present situation and the situation say in twenty years' time of the ‘big countries in the world, what they would be doing with their resources, and on the moods of their respective people' in the interim. ‘Only a man with his history' could have come to grips with the ‘big problems of the post-war years'. Whitlam felt Nixon was not oppressed by Watergate, but this was all he would say of his time in the ‘space capsule'—his reference to the Oval Office—‘we were taking a world view'.
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Kissinger, however, was clearly still to be convinced of Whitlam's credentials to statesmanship. Only days after the meeting, he confided to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew his view that Whitlam was ‘not a heavyweight'.
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And when New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk visited the White House in September that year, Kissinger went out of his way to brief the president on how the occasion might be used to again show where Whitlam sat in the antipodean pecking order: ‘we should pitch the Kirk visit a notch or two higher than that of Whitlam', he wrote. This ‘differential treatment would be useful in encouraging Kirk to continue his less critical, more constructive and more pragmatic approach to his country's Asian policies by contrast with Prime Minister Whitlam'.
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The State Department spelt it out even more clearly:

 

Although both Laborites, the similarity between Kirk and his Australian counterpart, PM Gough Whitlam, largely ends there. Whitlam tends to arrogance, enjoys the pomp of office, is incautious in his public statements, inclined to change for change's sake, and is determined to carve out for himself a
recognised leadership role in Asian and third world diplomatic leadership circles. Kirk is very different. Truly a ‘little man's' leader, he has a strong distaste for the niceties of protocol and seldom confuses form for substance. He is cautious, generally pragmatic and disinclined to flamboyance or bandstand oratory.
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In an ironic twist, the US diplomatic community was even willing to forgive Kirk's strong protest over the Christmas bombings. A more assertive, and even occasionally prickly, New Zealand nationalism was depicted as perfectly harmonious with the Nixon doctrine, an analytical generosity rarely afforded Whitlam in this period. Kirk was to be given a small working dinner hosted by the president, ‘an effective means', Kissinger argued, ‘of giving a slightly higher profile to the visit' without running the risk of needlessly offending Whitlam. Nixon was on the same wavelength, taking special care in his meeting with Kirk to single out Australians who ‘demagogue the issues', and even reassuring him that American fighter pilots in the Pacific in World War II had always preferred to take their leave in Auckland rather than Sydney.
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The president would stop at nothing in order to mark Australia down.

These were certainly rebukes to the Australian government, even more so since they came directly from the White House. But collectively they amounted to little more than the very mildest of diplomatic slaps. Henry Kissinger could play the game of semantic fiddles with State Department cables, and even authorise the rolling out of an extra metre of red carpet for a visiting New Zealander, but the puny and almost perverse nature of the measures demonstrated the very lack of serious weaponry left in the American diplomatic armoury at this time. No matter how much Kissinger wished the clock could be turned back to a simpler time, to a ‘conventional' US relationship with Australia based on ‘emotional bonds', the fact remained that Whitlam's time in Washington, though brief, had forced even Kissinger to accept that the once faithful and staunch ally had changed. Kissinger's determination after the visit to play down its significance, to score political points over the State Department, or mollycoddle other world leaders only showed once more the lengths
to which he would go in order to reassert both his and his nation's dominance over supposedly recalcitrant allies. Perhaps this was one way of showing a White House still in control, despite the political fires ablaze around it.

To be sure, Whitlam had given some ground in the face of ongoing American disaffection with his government's policies. He had sought neither pomp nor ceremony in Washington but, in private, there were moments where his behaviour bordered on the deferential to both the national security adviser and the president. But he was by no means the first, nor indeed the last, to reveal his American affections amidst the aura of the Oval Office. Whitlam backed down on pulling out of SEATO and even publicly affirmed the significance of that treaty for the relationship between the United States and Thailand. And he had proved himself steadfast, for the time being at least, in defending the presence of American intelligence facilities on Australian soil.

But he had also spoken of the ‘substantive and straightforward' discussions he had enjoyed with the president and other senior US political figures, and he could claim with every justification that the relationship now rested on ‘firmer foundations than it did in the past'. In short, in the face of Nixon and Kissinger's childish spite, Whitlam had kept faith with his policy prescriptions to bring the relationship to a ‘new maturity'. Speaking in parliament on his return from the visit, which had also included stops in Mexico and Canada, he seemed to relish the declaration that ‘Washington is not the sole capital in that vast hemisphere' and that ‘the American administration now fully accepts that Australia is not a small and relatively insignificant country as it was once called there', but a ‘middle power of growing influence in the South East Asian and South Pacific Regions'.
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Whitlam now spoke more of the American ‘connection' than he did of the American ‘alliance'.
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It was a looser term: much less binding than ‘alliance', and more suited to Whitlam's desire to lift the relationship out of its Cold War permafrost. In 1971 he had said that the relationship had to ‘change from a purely military alliance or die'. Now, as prime minister, he was giving that ambition a policy face. The policies were not always successful—some were clearly
rubbery and barely thought through—but they had nevertheless forced senior US officials to come to the view that Australia could no longer be brushed aside. Moreover these were policies that derived from a more self-reliant Australian posture. But this was early days, of course. As one Australian newspaper remarked, ‘independence' was not simply something that you could ‘take out of the box and dust off at election time, but rather a continuing development of our own national life and interests'.
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And that meant the likelihood of ongoing friction and tension between the two countries. The flow of political events in Australia over the next two years would do little to dissuade some hardliners in Washington that Labor's Australia still presented serious problems for the United States.

 

10

However much Gough Whitlam believed that his visit to Washington had rejuvenated the alliance and ushered in a new era of understanding between the two countries, it did not take long for the old pattern of suspicion and recrimination to re-emerge. Over the following two and half years, as Richard Nixon ultimately resigned the presidency and Whitlam began his own descent into the dark valley of political oblivion, the idea of an Australian–American connection being sustained by ‘creative maturity' was to prove something of a mirage. On the one hand, ongoing American outrage at yet more rhetorical barbs flung from Australian mouths showed that powerful egos could still be quickly bruised and sensitivities easily pricked. On the other, Whitlam and some of his senior ministers did continue to test American tolerance with gratuitous and ill-timed observations on American foreign policy. At crucial moments, their critique of US action in Vietnam and elsewhere gained a sharper edge. Across a broad range of issues, but particularly where the future of American intelligence facilities on Australian soil was concerned, White House patience with its ally in the Pacific was pushed to breaking point—so much so that some elements in the Nixon administration gave serious consideration to ending the alliance altogether. For the first time
since the signing of the ANZUS treaty in 1951, Australia's formal, strategic relationship with America perched precariously on the edge of an abyss. This chapter reveals not only how close the government in Canberra came to losing the alliance, but also how some kind of covert CIA activity in Australian domestic politics was at the very least contemplated by senior policy makers in Washington.

That it had come to this suggests a certain red line had been crossed. And that line related to the question of whether the US intelligence facilities at Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape would come under threat from what the United States assessed to be Australia's ‘continuing turn to the left' under Whitlam.
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Most alarming for US observers was the election of Jim Cairns—one of the strongest Australian critics of Nixon and the war in Vietnam—to the position of deputy prime minister following the federal election of May 1974. It sent ‘shock waves' through the American intelligence network.
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Cairns had long been on the American radar—indeed since 1967 he had been on the ‘Visa Lookout List'—a mechanism for screening potential visitors to the United States. Upon his election to the Labor ministry in 1972, the US embassy in Canberra somewhat predictably lamented his ‘very simplistic and inaccurate view of most world questions'. Although they noted he was ‘probably not a Communist' the portrait did add that ‘he is certainly close to many Communist political views, both domestically … as well as on most foreign questions'. Noting his position as chair of the Melbourne based Congress for International Disarmament, a front organisation of the Communist Party of Australia, they also highlighted Cairns's friendly disposition to US officials and pointed out that he had frequently visited the country after waiver action by the US attorney general. In a bemused tone, Cairns was depicted as ‘quite capable of having lunch with an American official and then leading a demonstration against the Embassy or the Consulate General in Melbourne the same afternoon, with no evident embarrassment at the inconsistency'.
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Some in Washington feared that Cairns and his colleagues on the Labor left would not only compromise American intelligence material shared with Australia, but agitate to have the installations
themselves removed. Indeed at the end of September 1974, Marshall Green concluded that Cairns was the most likely to take over the prime ministership if Whitlam was forced to step aside. Once in the Lodge, Green surmised, Cairns would ‘veer towards extension of government controls over various forms of national life and towards a foreign policy based on neutrality and the removal of American bases from Australian soil'.
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With the agreement establishing Pine Gap due for renewal in December 1975, the rise of Jim Cairns meant that US anxieties over the future of the facilities intensified. Indeed, all of the United States' concerns over the alliance were now seen through this prism.