Unholy Fury (9 page)

Nixon and Menzies' relationship captured in essence the broader context of the US–Australia relationship since its formal inception with the signing of the ANZUS treaty in 1951. Menzies,
at first doubtful of US claims to global pre-eminence and initially unconvinced by Nixon's leadership qualities, nevertheless by the middle of the following decade had come to look upon the alliance as one of his greatest foreign policy achievements. His friendship with Nixon was clearly a meeting of minds. And it was this interpretation of the relationship that Gough Whitlam would come to overturn: at both the official and personal level. Resentful at the way in which the link with the United States seemed to be defined principally by the relationships between respective prime ministers and presidents, he would seek to wrench ANZUS clean from these Cold War moorings, and to make the US alliance just one of a number of important links that Australia had around the globe.

But Whitlam's opportunity to do so was still some years away. By January 1966, Menzies had retired from politics, and it would be for a new conservative prime minister, Harold Holt, to develop a rapport with US President Lyndon Johnson. Their connection would give a fresh impetus to the rhetoric of common endeavour and mutual interest in Asia, and it would take the US–Australian alliance, for a brief moment at least, to heights it had never before seen.

 

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In late October 1966, the US ambassador in Canberra, Ed Clark, told the White House that ‘the air in Australia is still charged' following Lyndon Johnson's visit earlier in the month. It was the first time that a serving American president had set foot in the country, and Clark was convinced that the president's presence would ‘have a tremendous lasting effect on Australia's thinking, on its economy, the policy in terms of Asia and elsewhere, and of course in US-Australian relations'.
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Johnson spent nearly four days in Australia as part of a presidential swing through the region en route to the Manila Security Conference, a meeting called to demonstrate the unity of US allies in Asia amidst the Vietnam war.

The Australian–American alliance had never known euphoria like this. Johnson strode the national stage like a colossus, and Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt basked in the presidential afterglow. For the Labor Party, however, the visit brought to the fore in the most acute way its ongoing struggle in navigating the turbulent political and strategic waters of the Cold War and the American alliance. It was during this period, as Whitlam recalled, that ‘all of us were entangled in Labor's central dilemma: how to oppose American intervention without opposing America; how to denounce the war
without denouncing the US'.
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In the month following Johnson's tour of Australia, Labor would suffer its eighth straight election loss, and one of its biggest on record. The party had hit rock bottom.

But for many on both sides of the Pacific, at the time Johnson's visit to Australia symbolised not only the high point of the alliance relationship, but the dawn of a new era in American–Australian cooperation in Asia. According to the Melbourne
Age
, the president's ability to tap such ‘a fantastically rich vein of affection in the Australian people' meant that ‘the warmth of this tribute so far overstepped the bounds of formal politeness that it also became a mass approval of his policies'. On the morning of Johnson's arrival in Australia, the
Sydney Morning Herald
discerned the ‘first faint outline of a “special relationship” between Australia and the United States in the Pacific which may come to parallel the former special relationship between the United States and Britain in Europe'.
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Little wonder, then, that in early 1967 the American embassy in Canberra viewed Australia's rock-solid support for US policy in Vietnam as evidence of ‘a bi-national US-Australian foreign policy in Asia' and a ‘reaffirmed and nearly total commitment to the alliance'.
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Such confidence was not altogether misplaced. Johnson's visit coincided with strong Australian popular support for the war in Vietnam. Polling taken in August 1966 showed that 64 per cent of the electorate strongly approved of Prime Minister Harold Holt's support for American policy, while an even larger majority backed a call up for the military training of 20-year-olds. On his first visit to Washington as prime minister in June 1966, Holt had famously adapted the Democratic Party's election campaign slogan from two years previously, declaring that Australia was ‘all the way with LBJ'—this when the administration was attracting widespread condemnation for its bombings of North Vietnam, which were moving closer and closer to the major population centres of Hanoi and Haiphong. Holt's comment was mocked by some in Australia as the epitome of his government's uncritical support for the United States. But such unqualified support from a close ally provided much succour to a White House keen to avoid the appearance of international isolation. Indeed when Walt Rostow, special assistant to the president, suggested
that Australia be included on the president's itinerary for the Manila conference trip, he pointed out that there were ‘no difficult issues outstanding in our relations with Australia' and was confident that ‘the whole atmosphere of the visit will be excellent'.
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Judging from the amount of warm rhetoric—and tickertape—which flowed during the visit, Rostow's prediction appeared to be largely correct. The historian Peter Edwards has contended that the euphoria of the occasion turned Holt's ‘All the way' line into a ‘political asset', as the governing Liberal Party cruised to its biggest victory on record at the November federal elections.
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Australian public and political enthusiasm for the visit, however, is often depicted as a symptom of American cultural dominance and a fawning, obsequious government in Canberra unwilling to pursue an independent Australian foreign policy. Such a view of the American–Australian alliance seems forever frozen inside the frame of photographer David Moore's shot of Holt, on the tarmac at Canberra airport, welcoming Johnson to Australia. The prime minister, head bowed in seeming deference to the American president, had unwittingly provided the visual representation of submissive deference.

Australian historians have largely followed suit, with the dominant interpretation being that Johnson was rewarding Australia for its loyalty at a time when criticism of the president both in Washington and abroad was making his task of selling the war all the more problematic.
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Thus historians Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett have described the visit as the ‘apotheosis of Australia's love-affair with America'. For them, American cultural imperialism had ‘so conquered Australia by the mid-1960s that a visiting President was virtually a de facto leader'.
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Donald Horne saw it as a presidential payback for services rendered, replete with all the pomp and ceremony of a visiting monarch: ‘here was the faithful ally being rewarded by an imperial visit, offering the spectacles of the triumphal motorcade, the imperial limousine, the imperial lectern, the imperial secret service guard, the impromptu stops, the hand shakings'.
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In a variation on the imperial theme, Glen Barclay suggested that the whole experience was ‘reminiscent of the chairman of the board checking up on his branch managers', and indeed Johnson himself
was reputed to have told Holt that he liked to ‘come out and look my prime ministers over'.
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Although the prevailing view amongst Australian historians is that this inaugural visit by an American president and commander-in-chief confirmed that the alliance between the two countries was that of an imperial power and a colony, a closer look at reactions to the visit reveals a more complex picture. Some American officials were annoyed by Australia's reluctance to increase its troop numbers in Vietnam. In addition, the visit brought to the fore the acute difficulties faced by Australia's Labor Opposition and its leader, Arthur Calwell, caught between maintaining support for the American alliance while opposing the Vietnam war. The public and private confrontations between Calwell and Johnson during this time have much to tell not only about the politics of the alliance in Australia, but also about how the Johnson administration dealt with its international critics.

‘FRIEND, SAVIOUR AND BIG BROTHER'

Johnson's Asian tour also included stops in Hawaii, New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea. According to Joseph A Califano, one of Johnson's senior domestic aides, the president was ‘enthusiastically received everywhere, and came away convinced that Asia was the future'.
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Even before his departure from the White House on this Asian tour, there can be little doubt that the Australian leg was viewed as a much-needed tonic for an increasingly beleaguered president and nervous officials concerned with the lack of progress on the ground in Vietnam. During much of the first half of 1966 Johnson kept an unusually low profile, spending close to three months on his ranch in Texas and speaking only occasionally to the press. With his popularity falling, the president was being labelled the most aloof chief executive since Calvin Coolidge: Johnson was a war leader increasingly unable to communicate to the nation its mission in Vietnam.
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His emergence from this relative isolation in the summer and autumn of 1966 included a speaking tour of the mid west, where his emphasis was on enemy atrocities in Vietnam and the need to provide American troops in the field with the support they
deserved.
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Maintaining the message of multinational backing for the war amongst Washington's regional allies was deemed a crucial part of trying to wrest back some sort of momentum in South-East Asia and restore public faith at home.

The story of Johnson's visit to Australia is also necessarily related to how the United States envisaged a changing Asia, even as it was struggling to maintain control of the situation in Vietnam. In a major speech on America's Asian policy delivered from the White House in July 1966, Johnson attempted to lay down the foundations for what Washington's post-Vietnam regional approach might look like. Although much of the address set out a rationale for why the United States was resolved to stay the course in Vietnam, the president also talked about the ‘building of political and economic strength among the nations of free Asia'. In essence, he wanted to see more Asian countries standing on their own two feet. The ‘untold story of 1966', he claimed, ‘is the story of what free Asians have done for themselves and with the help of others'.
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The speech even hinted at bringing China out of international isolation, and although it might be tempting to see in these remarks the harbinger of the Nixon doctrine and the subsequent opening to China, Johnson's idea of a ‘new Asia' remained firmly anchored within the imperatives of the situation on the ground in Vietnam. As Nancy Bernkopf Tucker has shown, the somewhat optimistic notions of ‘reshaping' Asia, held by some high level officials in the Johnson White House, were not realised and thus ‘no new era dawned' in US Asia policy during this period.
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Other priorities, namely the Johnson administration's need to shore up regional support for the Vietnam war and maintain credibility in the eyes of its allies, formed the primary policy objectives of the president's journey. On the cusp of the mid-term elections, the Manila conference was an opportunity for Johnson to lead a meeting of the seven nations fighting in Vietnam and to use publicity from his visits to those nations in an effort to shore up support for his policies on the home front.
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But there was a related, no less important dimension to the strategic setting in which the visit took place. Johnson's Asian tour came hard on the heels of rising concern amongst policy makers in Washington about the impending British military withdrawal
from ‘East of Suez'. The prospect of Britain's dwindling presence in South-East Asia had been foreseen as early as 1960, but gathered pace throughout the decade as successive British governments were faced with the reality that they could no longer sustain their political and military influence in the region. The fear in Washington was of a potential security vacuum in the region that the United States, already well and truly feeling the pinch in Vietnam, would have to fill. This in turn had consequences for the extra American pressure that would be brought to bear on the Australian government to increase its Vietnam commitments, and to commit to a longer-term security role in South-East Asia—especially in Malaysia and Singapore—as Britain withdrew.

Australian leaders were adamant that they alone could not simply step in where Britain was leaving off.
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Postwar decolonisation was therefore impacting on the minds of policy makers in the United States, Australia and Britain in different ways. For the British it served only to confirm the need to shed excessive and costly global obligations. But as historian Jeremy Fielding demonstrates, the British search for economies through cuts in regional commitments coincided with decisions in Washington that saw the Johnson administration significantly increasing its presence and effort in South-East Asia. Moreover officials in Washington continued to cling to the belief that the ‘British global presence was a prerequisite for their continued commitment in Vietnam'.
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Australian politicians and policy makers, however, far from welcoming an assertion of new Asian nationalism, remained desperate to maintain the presence of the United States and Britain in the region to the north. And while the implications of British withdrawal remained unclear, the need to press for American commitment to South-East Asia only intensified. As Holt told the Australian parliament in March 1966: ‘Australia has a vital interest in the participation of the United States as a great power in the area of Asia and the Pacific'.
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