Unholy Fury (7 page)

The United States had some sympathy for Calwell's precarious position at the helm of Labor's warring factions, and they were aware of the strong gusts of isolationism and neutrality sweeping through some wings of the party. They knew of his US sympathies—his pride in boasting an American grandfather and his knowledge of the civil war—and recognised his regular public affirmations of support for the alliance.
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Increasingly, however, they had little time for those elements they believed were pulling him further and further to the left: forces with which Calwell himself felt less and less comfortable. Some US reporting even seemed to take a kind of perverse pleasure in Labor's vacillation on foreign policy, Bill Battle delighting that its problems over whether to support the presence of a US intelligence facility on Australian soil would ‘place the Menzies government in an excellent position to make much needed political ground'.
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Labor's political opponents did much more than make political ground on this issue, however.

In 1962 Menzies approved the installation at North West Cape in Western Australia of a very low frequency (VLF) naval radio communications station, which was able to transmit orders to US Polaris-armed submarines in the Indian Ocean. Although he did not need parliamentary approval, the prime minister initiated a debate on the issue to once again highlight Labor's discomfort in the glare of public opinion. The issue threw the party into something of a tailspin. Although Whitlam believed intelligence installations were a ‘grim and awful necessity' of maintaining a close alliance with the
United States, some left-wing members of the party referred to the facility as a US ‘base' for nuclear submarines and implied that in the event of hostilities it could involve Australia in a global nuclear war.
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The move revived old fears that control of the nation's foreign policy would be lost to a great power that neglected to take into account Australia's own interests. Calwell wanted to secure joint control of the installation as well as the right to be consulted prior to the transmission of messages that might affect the nation's political relationship with other countries. For Labor it was a question of Australian sovereignty, respectability and self-worth. In his 1963 Roy Milne lecture, Whitlam gave a more pungent expression of this view:

 

Australian soil should not be used by other powers unless Australia has an effective voice in the policies of the powers on her soil. It is irresponsible of a government to abdicate its right to decide how an ally can use its territory. It washes its hands of its responsibility to its own citizens and to other nations.
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Calwell even proposed that a future Labor government would renegotiate the terms of the agreement to ensure joint control and operation of the station, with the facilities also being made available to Australian forces. But when he met with President Kennedy in the Oval Office he did not push the issue.
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In effect, the damage had been done. The
Sydney Morning Herald
led the charge, dismissing Labor's list of conditions as ‘theoretical objections which do not match the realities of defence in the nuclear age'.
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But it was the means by which Labor arrived at this policy that became the albatross around its political neck. Calwell had referred the decision on whether Labor should support the VLF station to the thirty-six-member non-elected party executive. That might have been a victory for internal party consultation, but when he and deputy leader Gough Whitlam were photographed awaiting the decision under a lamp post outside the Kingston Hotel in Canberra, it only seemed to confirm a party in disarray, beholden to ‘faceless men' pulling the strings behind closed doors. As speechwriter Graham Freudenberg recalled, Menzies' use of that phrase became ‘one of the most damaging slogans in Australian political history'.
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Although it continues to haunt Labor to this day, at the time it was unleashed the slogan symbolised a party seen to be lacking a full commitment to the US alliance. In a Cold War climate, that kind of epithet meant political death. A Gallup poll taken at the time showed that Australians—including two-thirds of Labor voters—were overwhelmingly in favour of the United States constructing such a facility. The main comments from respondents, which included the refrains of ‘Australia is not strong enough alone' and ‘America is our main hope for defence; they saved us before',
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indicated the ongoing resonance of memories of World War II. And therein lay another reason Labor's woes continued: their positions cut across deep-seated public expectations that had been crystallised during the Pacific war. Labor was seen to be driving a stake right through the very heart of that powerful public memory about US help at a time of national crisis. As the
Bulletin
remarked after Labor's loss at the 1963 elections, Calwell had expected the ‘people of this country to have swallowed the absurdities of a nuclear free zone which would leave this country virtually defenceless'.
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ALLIANCE EXPECTATIONS—AND OBLIGATIONS

The tendency, however, to argue that the Menzies government simply followed the US lead in the Cold War, that it was a puppet of US domination or that it was unable to express a distinctively Australian view of regional affairs will not stand up to scrutiny. Menzies' anti-communist rhetoric could be astutely employed for the purposes of domestic politics, but he was not reluctant to take a different line to the United States when it came to matters directly touching Australia's regional affairs. Indeed, nowhere was this more dramatically illustrated than on China. After the victory of the Chinese communists in 1949, there was every indication that Australia was set to follow Britain's lead and officially recognise the regime, but because the United States placed so much store on isolating China, Australia deferred to Washington. Unlike the United States, however, which forbade any trade with the communist regime, Menzies pursued a profitable trading relationship with Beijing in non-strategic goods, especially wheat. Australia also refused to open
an embassy in Taiwan and indeed urged restraint on the United States in the first Taiwan Straits crisis in 1954–55, when Chinese communist forces attacked the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, then held by Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi.
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But perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the limits to the rhetoric of shared values and common interests was made over the question of Indonesia and President Sukarno's increasingly assertive nationalism. Australians would no doubt have welcomed the US National Security Council's 1961 assessment that their country was ‘one of the ultimate bastions of the free world in the Far East',
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but in the same period the United States and Australia disagreed over Indonesian claims to the Dutch-held territory of West New Guinea and Jakarta's policy of ‘Confrontation' towards the new Malaysian Federation.

Although Indonesia had gained its independence from the Dutch in 1949 with Australian support and goodwill, there was an outstanding problem, which over the next decade cast a long, dark shadow over the relationship and its otherwise auspicious beginning. The future of West New Guinea had been left unresolved in the peace settlement. Whilst Indonesia claimed sovereignty, the Dutch, encouraged by the Menzies government, wanted to retain the area as their last foothold in the region. In Canberra, policy makers feared that if the claim of Indonesia to West New Guinea was conceded, it would only be a matter of time before Sukarno would attempt to annex the trust territory of Australian New Guinea. Menzies fervently hoped that the United States and Britain would support him in blocking Indonesian ambitions. But neither of Australia's great power allies wanted to do anything that would alienate Indonesian nationalists and so strengthen the position of the Indonesian communists—then the third largest Communist Party outside Moscow and Beijing. The acquisition of West New Guinea became, for Sukarno, a powerful national cause: it would be the final act in ridding the region of the Dutch empire, and the final step in the completion of their great Indonesian state. Throughout much of the 1950s, despite bellicose rhetoric from Percy Spender that Australia would be prepared to go to war to prevent an Indonesian takeover, Australia had to accept the
US advice, soften its approach and hope that either Sukarno would give up the cause, the Dutch decide to withdraw or some other solution might appear. When, however, Sukarno rattled the sabre even further in 1958, confiscating the remaining Dutch assets in their territory and dispatching Indonesian guerrillas to the province, Australian fears again reached fever-pitch.
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Although the United States had remained largely neutral on the fate of West New Guinea for much of the 1950s, the Kennedy administration, which took office in January 1961, decided, against the backdrop of the intensifying Cold War in South-East Asia, that it could not let the sore continue to fester. They recognised that Sukarno's hold on government was a fine balancing act and feared that if he did not get his way over West New Guinea, then the Indonesian Communist Party might seize the leadership of the national cause and possibly overthrow him. One of Kennedy's key advisers, Bob Komer, explained with brutal clarity the difference between US and Australian geopolitical perspectives on this question. Where Australians viewed Indonesia's territorial aggrandisement as a threat to their own security, Komer remarked that it was worth sacrificing ‘a few thousand square miles of Cannibal land' to keep Indonesia out of the communist camp. Perhaps more tellingly, he asked, ‘how long will their [Australia's] resentment last?'
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Washington pressed the Dutch to give up the territory and convinced the Indonesians to eventually hold a nominal plebiscite to confirm that the people of West New Guinea approved. But Australians only learnt of the resolution of the affair when all the deals had been done.
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The ANZUS treaty had in this instance counted for very little.

Another urgent problem, however, again brought the divergence between US and Australian approaches to the region to the fore. Almost exactly at the time that Indonesia took possession of West New Guinea, Sukarno commenced a policy of Confrontation towards the new Malaysian Federation, believing it to be a western imperialist plot to encircle Indonesia. The arrangement, however, had been carefully worked out by the British, and provided for the decolonisation of the British lands in West Borneo—Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo—by incorporating them with Singapore into a
Malaysian Federation. Under pressure from the British to send troops in response to Indonesia's militant stand, the Australians were initially loath to commit to a conflict that might well make a long-term enemy out of its nearest neighbour. Accordingly they approached Washington to ask whether Australia could rely on the protection of the ANZUS treaty if its territory or forces came under attack from the Indonesians.
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But by the end of 1963 the United States already had 10 000 troops in South Vietnam. Kennedy's White House had no desire to become involved in another guerrilla war in a region that was already giving them much trouble.

The Australian government then set out on a course which, in the end, was to prove far from reassuring. When US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, W Averell Harriman, visited Australia in June 1963 and was asked about possible US assistance in the event of armed conflict with Indonesia, his tone was evasive. Speaking to Australian ministers, he said he ‘did not think that the US would let Australia down … [but] he could make no commitments. There was a grey area between the two countries. Australia's other activities in SouthEast Asia would also influence the US'.
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This ‘grey area' continued to cast a cloud over Australian deliberations, and as a consequence they embarked on a sustained diplomatic campaign to elicit a stronger guarantee from the White House. Both Menzies and Harold Holt tried to extract firmer pledges from their great ally, but none were forthcoming. In July 1963, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Menzies told Kennedy that he would be ‘hesitant to undertake commitments north of Indonesia unless he could be sure that the US would back them if they got in trouble'. He wanted there to be ‘no possibility of misunderstanding between the US and Australia' on the nature of US commitments under the treaty.
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Howard Beale, Australia's ambassador in Washington, went much further than his prime minister, recording in his memoirs that when Kennedy asked him for his interpretation of America's ANZUS obligations, he replied that ‘every Australian believes … that if we get involved in some military clash in our part of the world which we can't handle ourselves, then the United States is committed under the treaty and also morally and honourably to come to our aid'.
There were no shades of grey in Beale's formulation. But when the US president relayed this to a subsequent meeting of the National Security Council, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, was incredulous. ‘My God', he exclaimed, ‘does that mean if some drunken digger in a slouch hat gets his ear shot off by an Indonesian sniper we've got to send down the Seventh Fleet?'
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But the Americans remained unmoved. They too, found themselves in something of a dilemma over ANZUS: not wishing to give the Australians a blank cheque, but equally mindful of the need to keep encouraging them to support the British military effort. For some advisers in Washington, then, the treaty was useful as much for the capacity it gave them to influence Australian policy towards positions more harmonious with US interests as it was to contain the scope of US commitments.

Australian ministers and officials, meanwhile, kept pushing. Indeed they were relentless in their pursuit of the form of words that they hoped would provide the sort of security they clearly struggled to find within the language of the ANZUS treaty itself. When Treasurer Harold Holt and Howard Beale met with Kennedy in early October, they tried to force the US commander in chief into recognising that should Australian troops move into North Borneo and come under fire from Indonesia guerrilla units, the US would be automatically engaged under the terms of ANZUS. But Kennedy's reply sent shockwaves all the way back to Canberra: ‘this', he said with some emphasis, was ‘not what the United States thinks'. While the ‘Australians felt that if they got themselves involved we would also be obliged to be involved … this was not the US view'. Indeed he had to try to gently steer the Australians away from inflaming the situation.
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