Unholy Fury (48 page)

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger devoted a single line to Whitlam in their respective, voluminous memoirs.

But the experience of the Whitlam years would not be entirely forgotten in Washington's corridors of power. The litmus test
would come when another Labor government came to office in 1983, this time under the leadership of former Australian trade union leader Bob Hawke. In the month before his election, the CIA published an intelligence assessment on the implications of a Labor victory. Crucially, the agency determined the ‘concern that a Labor government under Hawke would be a repeat of the 1972–75 Gough Whitlam government' to be ‘unfounded'. But there were still ‘nettlesome problems' ahead if Hawke followed party policy, especially on the question of asking the United States to break precedent and inform Canberra of the presence of nuclear weapons on US aircraft operating through Australia. There was also the goal, particularly cherished by Labor's left wing, to obtain veto power over any first-strike order sent by the United States through the North West Cape naval communications facility. In that same report, the CIA included a special section on ‘the Whitlam years and US concerns', where it reminded its political masters of the fears among the American intelligence community in the 1970s that ‘Labor's foreign policy might serve some Soviet interests'. It was a ludicrous assessment. The country during those years was depicted as being ‘without direction', and ‘Whitlam … faltering at the helm'. Nevertheless despite this residue of alarmist paranoia, the judgement was reached that the greater sense of ‘Australian nationalism' in those years ‘caused no irreparable harm to the US-Australian alliance'.
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That early confidence was duly returned when the US embassy in Canberra could report it was ‘off to a good start' following early meetings with Hawke and Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Hayden. And it was Hayden who was the focal point of concern—before the election he had spoken of his intention to renegotiate the agreement whereby American B-52 bombers were allowed to stage through Darwin and conduct training flights in northern Australia. But as US Ambassador Bill Nesen reported back to Washington after their first meeting, ‘Hayden appeared deliberately to be trying to alleviate any concerns that we might have had that the new Labor government would move rapidly and rashly towards confrontation of any of the issues where they do not totally agree with us'.
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Hawke and Hayden, both witnesses to the rapid deterioration under Whitlam, were eager
to distance themselves from the ‘tag of anti-Americanism': just one of the elements, Hawke later wrote in his memoirs, that had ‘kept the party from government' in the 1950s and 1960s.
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In contrast to Fraser, whose first visit abroad as prime minister was to Tokyo and Beijing, Hawke reverted to the more traditional practice of making Washington his first stop. Once there, he told his hosts that there was ‘no country that the US will be able to rely on more as a constructive ally than Australia'. Later, he would tell the Australian-American Association that the two countries would be ‘together forever', a phrase no doubt designed to exorcise the ghosts of the Whitlam era once and for all.
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It also showed, of course, the lengths to which Hawke would go in proclaiming Labor's fealty to the alliance; a point clarified when, despite his pre-election calls for a review of the ANZUS treaty, it was subsequently confirmed that the report had resulted in a ‘firm and unequivocal' reaffirmation of the alliance as ‘fundamental' to Australian security.
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President Reagan, for his part, was strongly urged by his advisers to reassure Hawke of the ‘equality of US-Australian ties in the ANZUS framework', and warned that the new Labor government, given its opposition to ‘right wing dictators', would not support US policy in Central America.
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Hawke and Hayden would subsequently criticise the Reagan administration's use of military force in Grenada and later its support for the ‘Contra' rebels in Nicaragua.

Not long after Hawke's successful first visit to the White House, however, the Reagan administration started to receive more worrying reports about Bill Hayden's comments during a visit to South East Asia. Despite that first upbeat meeting, Hayden had never been a favourite with the Americans: one portrait describing him as a ‘still difficult enigma', ‘a lone wolf with a rather austere personality' and one who ‘consciously maneuvers to distance himself from US policy and/or appearance of following US line'. And some in the American embassy still expected him to challenge Hawke for the prime ministership.
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At a press conference in Bangkok, Hayden had made the unremarkable comment that Australia's relations with countries in the region would become more important for the future stability and security of Australia than the ANZUS alliance. Moreover, he
warned of the danger of Australian over-reliance on the United States relationship: ‘We have tended to rely almost exclusively on great power alliances and friendships', he said, but ‘events in recent years have started to tear the scales of innocence away from our eyes'.
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That kind of rhetoric brought back memories of a decidedly Whitlamesque hue for some American officials, and when Hayden himself called on Reagan's national security adviser, William Clark, in July 1983, he was introduced as a ‘different kettle of fish' to Hawke. Hayden had been in the American capital for the ANZUS council meetings where, Clark was advised, he had been on his best behaviour. But he had caused consternation in his press conference, where he stated that the ANZUS treaty was limited in geographic scope and that a military response from all was not ‘automatically triggered' by an attack on one.
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He was, after all, only stating the facts. There were reports in the press at the time, however, that in return for continued Australian agreement to host US intelligence installations, the United States had given a detailed commitment to defend Australia from any attack.
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Clarification of that point will have to wait for the declassification of the relevant records, but it remains the case that the Americans were occasionally jittery with another Labor government in office.

For some in Washington, it did not matter that Hawke and Hayden had control of the left of their party. Nor did it seem to matter that both continually reaffirmed the central significance of the treaty and the alliance. There were still enough Australian leaders on the other side of politics to stir the pot. Former Western Australian premier Charles Court, for example, told American Ambassador Bill Nesen that the Labor left was ‘making considerably more progress in expanding its influence in the unions and among the youth in Australia under the Labor Party leadership than Hawke himself realises'. Alarmed by Court's Chinese whispers, the ambassador felt there was a ‘long range danger here that we must continue to pay attention to and not be lulled by Hawke's personable reasonableness into the conclusion that all American interests are well served by this particular Labor government'.
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It was a judgement bordering on the hysterical, and only showed that it did not take much to revive the old
American nightmares of the early 1970s. And when in 1985 Hawke had to retract a promise he had made to the Reagan administration that American aircraft would be allowed to refuel in Australia as part of their monitoring of MX missile testing in the Pacific, the leader of the Opposition, Andrew Peacock, charged that Hawke had caved in to Labor party factionalism at the expense of the American relationship. National Party leader Ian Sinclair, in a desperate attempt to remind Labor of its past, alleged that the prime minister ‘wore the mantle of Gough Whitlam' in his attitude towards ANZUS.
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But as historian Greg Pemberton has shown, it was clear by 1990 that the Hawke government had virtually outdone previous conservative governments in proclaiming its support for Washington.
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LEGACY

The aim of this book has been to show that the rift between Gough Whitlam's government and Richard Nixon's White House was not simply the result of suspicion engendered by a Republican president towards a new, left of centre Australian prime minister. But it is certainly the case that Labor, in US eyes, carried a great deal of baggage with it when it finally came to power in 1972. Indeed it had been virtually ingrained in the DNA of Washington's foreign policy establishment that Labor posed serious difficulties for the alliance—that, in effect, it was spoiling to expel the US intelligence facilities from Australian soil. On top of that, Nixon and Kissinger, engaged in delicate diplomacy to extract the United States from a disastrous war in Vietnam, did not take kindly to being placed on the same level as their communist enemy, much less by a Labor leader who was rushing headlong to officially recognise communist governments both in Asia and in Europe. As one American official in Canberra recalled, Whitlam was ‘just itching to get at it'.
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Failing to understand Whitlam's ‘new nationalism', a panicked American political elite—schooled in the doctrines and dogma of the Cold War—saw not a model ‘Nixon doctrine' country trying to stand on its own two feet, but an ally embracing the isolationist left and vacating the arena.

More particularly, this period of strife in the alliance amounted to a breakdown in a mutual view of the world. Although the two
countries had disagreed over fundamental policies in the 1950s and 1960s, especially where Indonesia was concerned, nevertheless the tensions had been contained within a tight rhetorical and ideological bond borne out of World War II and sanctified by the global struggle against what both saw as a monolithic Communist enemy. Only under the greatest provocation, such as Nixon's metamorphosis on China policy, did the strains in the alliance seep into the public domain. But from the early 1970s, as the world situation changed so rapidly, the two countries came to have increasingly different conceptions of the Cold War struggle. As the guiding framework of that conflict came under pressure, Australia was one of a number of allies to chart a new path in the region and the world. Out of that experience came a new definition of the alliance, one that was broadly followed by successive governments on both sides of Australian politics. For all the abuse and insults, Whitlam ushered in the maturation process that the Australian-American alliance simply had to have. And the alliance ultimately proved strong enough to withstand it.

This is not to elevate Whitlam as a Labor hero, poking President Nixon in the eye and beating the drum of Australian nationalism all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. At no stage did this Labor leader ever advocate walking out on ANZUS—in fact, he strove constantly to make the alliance work better for Australian interests. In the face of enormous pressure from his political enemies, from public and editorial opinion and from within his own bureaucracy, Whitlam nevertheless held his line. He understood that the alliance had to change to suit the new world of the 1970s and he was genuine in his desire to see the United States emerge from the morass of Vietnam and return to its role as the ‘most generous, idealistic nation'. There were times, however, when he seemed to make this transition more tumultuous than it otherwise might have been. There is justification in the American frustration at Whitlam's ill-considered quips, his lack of judgement in failing to take action more quickly, and more forcefully, to put some of the cranks and crackpots in their place. On top of the dramatic changes in Australian foreign policy, the hurling of insults and abuse only added to the perception—however misguided—of an ally seemingly relishing America's humiliation
in the jungles of Vietnam. Whitlam had to give some latitude to a labour movement that felt justified by its longstanding opposition to the war, but there were times when he gave too much.

This study provides another perspective on what an alliance with the United States meant in the 1970s. Up to the time of Whitlam's election, it was the Australian governments of Menzies and his successors that kept asking for the ultimate guarantee from presidents in Washington, who were seemingly indefatigable in trying to divine in the words of Article IV of the ANZUS treaty the iron-clad commitment of the United States to Australia's national security. But from 1972 it was the US government that began to dangle the treaty as a threat, a warning that the guarantee may become infirm. Yet all the while the Nixon White House assumed they were talking to the same kind of Australian leaders that had sat opposite them in the 1950s and 1960s. This then is a vivid and verifiable illustration of the dramatic change that Whitlam brought to the alliance relationship. His style, outlook and policy agenda were a shock to the official American understanding of how the alliance ought to work, and how Australia ought to behave as an ally. That jolt underscored a deeper truth for the alliance from the time of its inception in 1951 to the Whitlam era: the very term ‘ANZUS' had evolved from a simple treaty obligation to a template for the relationship as a whole. But it was a common currency freighted with unfulfilled expectations on both sides. Whitlam began his parliamentary career questioning the terms of the treaty itself; by the time he left office he had redefined it to take account of a broader Australian perspective on the region and the world, and had laid the foundations for a greater sense of self-reliance within the alliance. For US policy makers, the situation was profoundly ironic. Throughout the 1960s, successive administrations in Washington had watered down the security provisions in ANZUS to such an extent that when they served notice about the treaty's very viability in reaction to the Whitlam government policies of the early 1970s, the menace in the rhetoric carried much less force.

But future historians who examine the relationship into the twenty-first century will have to account for why both sides of Australian politics have now returned to the unqualified rhetoric
of the Cold War. Whether it be John Howard's classification of the nation as a ‘100% ally' of the United States, or Julia Gillard's solemn declaration of Australia as an ‘ally for all the years to come', there is a new intensity to the public rhetoric of the alliance in the ‘Asian century'. Yet cheerleading can never substitute for analysis, and unqualified support rarely means Australia's distinctive interests are being protected or preserved. The circumstances are constantly invoked as ‘new' and ‘unprecedented', and yet the interpretative frameworks used to explain them hark back to simpler times. No two periods in human history are the same, and historians should be cautious in ascribing ‘lessons' from the past for those whose job it is to navigate the kaleidoscopic present. Still, just as in the 1970s, it is certain that Australia and the United States will once more face the dilemmas of divergence. Then, and only then, can the true nature of the alliance be really tested.