Unholy Fury (47 page)

So although Whitlam succeeded in making the Americans more aware of the needs and interests of its junior partner, and although he instituted a greater sense of self-reliance within the alliance, it remains doubtful just how much this filtered through the American political system. This remains a point of lasting significance in dealing with the history of the alliance in the age of Gough Whitlam and Richard Nixon. As James Plimsoll observed at the height of the crisis in early 1973: ‘one of the problems with the United States Administration is
that knowledge of the Australian political system and the workings of the Australian Labor party is limited. The White House has little feel or knowledge of Australia'. Those in the State Department who were informed, he added, were ‘often out of date or expect us to behave in the same way as the British'.
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Plimsoll was not at all wide of the mark. In an era when a Labor government spoke of a ‘new nationalism', where an Australian prime minister classified Britain and America as ‘foreign' countries, many in Washington were still imagining the Australia of yesteryear: in this case, the dutiful Pacific ally of World War II. The divergence in American and Australian approaches to the region and to the world did not, therefore, derive solely from political differences and personality clashes: for the Americans, it was very much the shock of encountering a new Australia.

This was most vividly illustrated during a conversation in the State Department in June 1974, at a meeting in which senior US officials had been contemplating just how much of a threat Jim Cairns's rise to the deputy prime ministership posed to its intelligence links with Australia. Robert Ingersoll, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, clearly wrestled with the sea change in Australia and in its politics. Indeed, he appeared to be simply dumbfounded by the transformation, and as he summed up the issue of how to deal with Cairns, his frustrations poured out:

 

You know, for me, who knows the Australia of World War II, having lived there for two years, to me these political movements are almost incomprehensible. It is a different Australia, completely, from the two years I spent there.
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Just how Ingersoll held the view that the country could remain virtually fixed in time, unchanged from the early 1940s, is beside the point. It showed the enduring hold of the memory of the war—a period when Australia had actively looked to America for assistance in facing the common foe. For some in Washington at least, the expectations of Australia as an ally were still very much perceived in those terms. With this kind of world-view informing senior policy makers, it is little wonder that Nixon and Kissinger saw Whitlam's policy departures as a dangerous breach in the western alliance.

Some Australians, too, clearly felt that Whitlam was betraying an alliance forged in the furnace of global conflict. World War II was still very much within public memory at this time and retained its capacity to arouse feelings of intense loyalty to the US relationship. Where the Vietnam war soured perceptions of the alliance for a younger generation challenging the establishment and the status quo, the idea of the two nations as brothers in arms in the Pacific, staring down rampant Japanese militarism, retained a powerful hold. This was especially the case for older Australians, and particularly returned servicemen and women. William Harrop, deputy chief of mission to Marshall Green during these years, remembered many locals coming up to him and offering their own assessment of Whitlam's approach to the alliance: ‘You understand that we don't agree with this radical nonsense. You Americans are our friends. We remember how you saved us during World War II. We remember the Battle of the Coral Sea. We are your allies, and don't you worry'.
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And yet even in the late 1960s that kind of sentiment had been judged by the American embassy to be withering on the vine—inadequate to sustain a relationship that had to adjust not only to a rapidly changing, more self-confident Australia, but also to a prevailing sense of anxiety that the United States, failing badly in Vietnam, was pulling out of Asia and leaving its old wartime partner to fend for itself.

These sepia-coloured memories of Australia, and the lack of American understanding of Australian politics should come as no real surprise: from the end of World War II the United States was a global superpower, locked in an ideological, military, diplomatic and economic struggle with the Soviet Union. Although a valued and trusted ally in the Pacific, and one of the very few to commit troops to Vietnam, Australia remained somewhat on the periphery of the American global radar. For some, this was a bitter pill to swallow. During the age of Nixon—an even more brutal reality—as Plimsoll's successor Patrick Shaw noted towards the end of 1974, was that Australia struggled to feature in any significant way, if indeed at all, in Henry Kissinger's grand strategy. This should not have come as a shock to Australian officials who followed US politics and policy
closely, but the tone was so often that of the jilted suitor. As Shaw lamented in a reflective despatch back to his minister:

 

In Dr Kissinger's theoretical writings not much attention is given to smaller countries either as individuals or as members of regional groups. He sees all world problems as subordinate to his grand design of a relationship resting firstly on the USA and the USSR and then with other great powers.

 

As Shaw explained, Kissinger's interest in withdrawing US forces from Vietnam derived not only from compelling domestic factors but also from achieving détente with Soviet Russia: the ‘tilt' towards Pakistan in 1971 was an element in reaching out to Communist China. But ‘Dr Kissinger has not focussed on the capacity of a country like Australia, either in a world or in a regional framework, to contribute to the processes of disarmament, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to the solution of global problems'. Whitlam, of course, would have responded that this was not Kissinger's job: that the new activism in Australian foreign policy was designed to carve out a new role for the nation in world affairs. But it was enough of a reminder that no amount of diplomatic energy or hyperactivity could seriously alter the power equation between the two countries. Then, there was the raw truth: ‘We have to remind ourselves', Shaw added, that ‘ANZUS has not directly cost the United States anything in blood or money. Furthermore, the United States has to fit Australia into some order of priorities and that order changes'.
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Or, as one British official noted at the pointy end of this alliance crisis, it was ‘hard for Australians to realise that there are many more important matters than American/Australian relations on the President's plate'.
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In essence, that captured the story of the alliance since the signing of the treaty in September 1951: Australia always had to work hard to be noticed—and appreciated—by its great power protector.

But by the end of the Whitlam era, too, it was clear that Australia's image of the United States had itself undergone substantial modification. One senior American diplomat in Canberra remarked that the cumulative effect of a decade of civil strife in the United States had had its repercussions on Australia's American gaze. He saw
an ‘Australia which had changed markedly from the “all the way with LBJ” days … Close identification with things American has lost some of its lustre in recent years. Vietnam, the Watergate affair, the Kennedy and King murders, student unrest and racial problems have blurred the traditional and more hopeful vision of American life'.
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It is not suggested here that the damage America's reputation suffered in this period alone explains the strains in the alliance that revealed themselves when Whitlam came to power. The fact that the ideal of America had lost some of its millenarian glow owing to domestic and international setbacks is nevertheless indicative of a change of mood—one which no doubt allowed Whitlam greater freedom of movement as he set about dislodging the alliance from being the ‘be all and end all' of Australia's foreign policy. In short, by the time Whitlam came to office, there was every reason to expect change in how the alliance was to be conceived and managed.

THE LIMITS OF POWER

But the White House could not have it all its own way. Even though Australia, along with Sweden, France and Britain, among others, had their feet put to the fire by Nixon and Kissinger, the administration was not always able to impose its will. In the case of Britain, a recent study by historians R Gerald Hughes and Thomas Robb has shown that its much-vaunted ‘special relationship' with the United States survived despite intense US frustration with the policy direction of Conservative British Prime Minister Ted Heath. Like Whitlam, Heath had little emotional investment in the American relationship, and when he came to power in 1970 showed—much to the annoyance of Kissinger—an unwillingness to reverse the trend towards British military withdrawal from South-East Asia. Later, furious at Britain's more European-oriented foreign policy, Kissinger told the president that he had ordered Anglo-American intelligence communications to cease. ‘No more special relations', was Nixon's assenting reply. That short-term suspension of cooperation on the most sensitive matters had some success in altering Heath's course, but it was the only win for a White House which, for the remainder of the Nixon and Ford administrations, tried to make the British pay for straying
too far from American prescriptions. Subsequent US pressure failed to prevent Harold Wilson, in his second term in Downing Street (1974–76), from cutting British defence spending, and Kissinger's threats to cancel all intelligence sharing and nuclear cooperation proved to be nothing more than bluster. Indeed the US warnings were issued so often that British officials began to ignore them. As Hughes and Robb argue, ‘America's ability to coerce Britain was considerably weakened when the latter ceased to act as if the “Special Relationship” was the most important dimension of British international policy'. Such were the ‘limits that the war in Vietnam had revealed, and that détente had proclaimed'.
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The parallels with Australian attitudes are striking. Once Whitlam had stripped from the alliance the aura of mystique attributed to it by many of his conservative predecessors—he wanted a ‘more mature and less adulatory' relationship—the Americans simply had to adjust. And there was only so much the White House could do to punish its more boisterous alliance partner. Whether it was the arguments back and forth about who should represent the United States at the annual Battle of the Coral Sea celebrations—or indeed if anyone should go at all—or whether it was the tone or content of a presidential reply, or the delay in inviting Whitlam to Washington or the absence of any trimmings and trappings when he got there—these were reprimands which, while causing a certain level of domestic political discomfort for Whitlam, were at least bearable. Even when considering the relocation of the US intelligence installations—facilities that were, in the words of one senior State Department official, ‘damned near irreplaceable'—the financial and strategic costs of doing so were ultimately prohibitive. In short, for all the angst, consternation and contempt that Whitlam provoked in some quarters of American officialdom, their willingness to make Australia suffer was quite limited. A weakened White House, battered daily by Watergate, gradually found that it was unable to play the role of enforcer. It had to accept that it could not bend Australia's new arc to its will.

EXORCISING THE GHOSTS

Despite the early switch to Cold War rhetoric, Malcolm Fraser essentially kept faith with the Labor line of advocating a greater degree of self-determination within the alliance, declaring, in his first major address on international affairs as prime minister, that ‘the interests of the United States and the interests of Australia are not necessarily identical'.
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Some in the American press could pluck for cosy headlines such as ‘Waltzing Close again' following Fraser's first visit to Washington in July 1976, but American officials had to concede, at last, that an era had passed. In the White House, Brent Scowcroft drafted advice for President Ford which stated that:

 

Fraser has no intention of returning Australia to the client patron relationship that earlier Liberal-Country Party governments maintained. The more independent attitude of the Whitlam government was popular in Australia, and Fraser will continue it. We thus should not appear to take Australia for granted or to be patronizing.
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That in itself was a reductive caricature of Australia's handling of the alliance during the Cold War. Nevertheless it was certainly accurate in predicting that Labor's opponents would not wind back the clock once gaining office. Speaking in Washington DC, Fraser himself dismissed the notion that ‘concurrence and common action means subordination to the larger nation'.
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The Whitlam period thus set the tone for the relationship with the United States down to the mid 1990s. During this era, although Australian leaders expressed their commitment to the alliance as the primary security arrangement for the nation, both Labor and the conservative parties gave the bulk of their creative energies to the task of comprehensive engagement with Asia.

There were other casualties from the change in alliance atmospherics. Some of the personal and political relationships that had sustained the links across the Pacific in the wake of World War II now faced their day of reckoning. In 1977 even Nixon's closest Australian friend, Sir Robert Menzies, came out of retirement to express his ‘disappointment' that the former president, during his
blockbuster television interviews with British journalist David Frost, had chosen to make public the details of a letter he had sent him during the Watergate crisis. Nixon had said it was a ‘very nice note', but Menzies told the Australian press that he took ‘great exception' to the revelation: a ‘personal letter should remain personal forever'.
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In August 1973, Menzies had indeed conveyed his heartfelt sympathy to Nixon following his second nationwide address on the crisis, a speech in which the president continued to deny knowledge of the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up. ‘I have been thinking of you a great deal lately', Menzies had written, ‘particularly since you became the object of what I believe to be an unscrupulous press and television campaign'. Menzies praised the speech as one that had done ‘proper honour, not only to yourself as an individual whom we greatly admire, but also to the great office that you occupy'. The president's accusers were ‘serving up hearsay which would, therefore, not have been of receivability in an ordinary court'. ‘Why', Menzies asked, ‘should you flatter them by pursuing them into their irrelevant by-paths?' And finally, there was empathy for his political soul-mate. The former Australian prime minister was ‘writing as one who has himself had a great deal of experience of the cut and thrust of political campaigning', and thus felt ‘bound to say that I have never known the level of attack to sink so low as it has in your case'.
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It is little wonder that Nixon chose the Frost interviews to air in general terms the support that Menzies had offered him at a time when so many were abandoning the White House. But it is equally unsurprising that Menzies did not hesitate—with all that was now in the public domain about Nixon's behaviour during the scandal—to virtually disown his friend. As for his view of Whitlam, he was a ‘fine looking man', Nixon told Frost, with whom he had ‘agreed to disagree'. The former president spent more time confessing the ‘big bang' he got out of the ‘daring' dress Sonia McMahon had worn to the White House in 1971.
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