UNHOLY FURY: WHITLAM AND NIXON AT WAR

As the Nixon White House went increasingly on the defensive in early 1973, reeling from the lethal drip of the Watergate revelations, the first Austraian Labor prime minister in twenty-three years looked to redefine ANZUS and Australia’s global stance. In his new book, Unholy Fury the US Alliance and the Whitlam-Nixon Crisis, James Curran draws on new evidence from once top-secret American and Australian records, and show a the bitter clash between these two leaders and their competing visions of the world. James Curran is Associate Professor in the Sydney University Department of History and the US Studies Centre and the author. To explore some of the themes in his new study, James Curran addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 11 May 2015

UNHOLY FURY: WHITLAM AND NIXON AT WAR

JAMES CURRAN

On the surface, it might seem inevitable that Gough Whitlam and Richard Nixon would clash, and clash spectacularly.

After all, Whitlam was the very kind of effete social democrat that Nixon had come to despise and mistrust. Another leftist at a time when Nixon felt some left of centre governments around the globe were abandoning him over Vietnam and over the concept of western defence generally.

If Whitlam was gregarious, Nixon was insular, a self-declared introvert in an extrovert’s profession. If the Australian had shown a willingness to accept China and the Soviet Union as facts of international life since he entered parliament in 1953, Nixon by that time was already the poster boy of the Republican right. A staunch Cold Warrior. A red-baiter par excellence. If Whitlam looked askance at the Munich myth of appeasement, Nixon gave it the fullest rhetorical flourish.

And yet, the real surprise is that these two figures had so much in common. Both had known only too well the loneliness of the political wilderness, and both had used their time in those bleak woods to think deeply about the world. Possessed of powerful egos, both were eager to reshape the foreign policy of their respective countries; both keen to welcome the new opportunities brought on by the advent of a more multipolar world; both, of course, hurtling along the diplomatic trail to China at almost precisely the same time. And both, in late 1972, coming off highly significant election victories.

That the antagonism between the two ran so deep, that it became so bitter and that it had near catastrophic consequences for the Australia-US alliance was not simply due to their strong disagreement over the end of the Vietnam war and the controversial Christmas bombings of North Vietnam in December 1972.  Nor was it due to the fact that just as Whitlam was enjoying his first golden moments in the electoral sun, Nixon was beginning to stare down the barrel of political oblivion as a result of the lethal drip of revelations relating to the Watergate scandal. Nor even was it due to the inflamed throats of Labor ministers – hurling abuse at the president and his advisers – or the speed with which Whitlam moved to alter Communist countries or change Australia’s voting patterns at the United Nations once he came to office.

All these factors played a part, but the frisson and the fury had a deeper source.

There were tectonic plates moving beneath the surface of these political events. The virtual end of the Cold War in East Asia had clearly meant different things to the foreign policy establishments in Canberra and Washington.

For Washington, it meant a careful, calibrated reframing of their regional stance. Détente was a fragile balancing act, a state of affairs that needed careful management, even tendering. The enemy was still at the gates. American power had to be preserved, its credibility maintained.

For Canberra, under a new Labor government, the breakdown of the rigid bipolarity of the Cold war gave Whitlam the freedom to experiment with new ideas about regional architecture, zones of peace and neutrality, and updating Australia’s traditional relationships with Britain and the United States. For him détente was a thrilling release from the straitjacket of the Cold War. Australia, he told the National Press Club in Washington in July 1973, needed an “ideological holiday”. These were ideas and approaches that certainly unnerved an elite in the US that had come to expect predictable behaviour from its junior ally.

Whitlam with a fresh mind and powerful personality had seen the need to shatter some of the Cold War shibboleths. He had seen Labor marooned on the wrong side of the loyalty divide in Australian politics for too long.

So from the time he became Deputy Opposition leader, Whitlam sought to nullify the conservative charge that Labor could not be trusted on national security or managing the alliance. That meant cultivating trust amongst American foreign policy politicians and policy makers, but it also meant making a clear and powerful case for why the Alliance had to change to meet the demands of a new era.

If the Alliance had become holy writ in Australian politics, Labor was seemingly barred from accessing the tabernacle. And for many on both sides of the Pacific, some of Whitlam’s actions were depicted as akin to stealing the holy water from the church. In 1964 he had even told one American diplomat in Canberra that Australia needed security arrangements such as the US alliance “for the time being”. It would necessarily recede in importance as China’s stature and presence grew and as Australia began to think in more “regional terms”.

And as Whitlam famously put it a few years later, the alliance had ‘to change from a purely military alliance or die’. It could not be “huddling together of three white powers in the Pacific”. He did not see Asian Communism as a coiled spring waiting to pounce on a vulnerable Australia. And as such the alliance was not to be the be all and end all of Australian foreign policy. He did not pine for ceremony, he sought no coronation on the South Lawn of the White House. He was frustrated by the conservative appropriation of the Alliance’s rites and rituals, chafed at the reduction of the alliance to the rapport between president and prime minister.

This was a big shock for Washington, but as the war in Vietnam soured, so the circumstances shifted Whitlam’s way. He believed, much like Calwell, that the conflict was preventing the return of the United States to her rightful place as leader of the free world. Throughout this period the constant refrains of Whitlam’s speeches balanced his denunciation of Vietnam as the “war of the great lie”, “disastrous” and a “failure” with his more upbeat that America was the “most generous, idealistic’”nation the world had ever seen. He wanted to help the American people “liquidate the war they have come to hate”. He spoke about clearing away the “rubble” of the past and ushering in a “fresh start”. “One of the great tasks for Australian statesmanship in the 1970s, he said, would be to channel the Australian-American alliance into ‘more fruitful and constructive directions’.

The Alliance was indeed changing, and it is important to note that this was occurring even before Whitlam was elected Prime Minister. In the late 1960s, particularly as a result of the tensions between John Gorton and Lyndon Johnson over troop withdrawals from Vietnam, American diplomats were starting to send back reports to Washington pointing to the need for a fundamental rethink on how the US viewed its Alliance partner. They also became aware of the limits of memory. The mellifluous rhetoric that celebrated brothers in arms in the Pacific war and the battles over the Coral Sea struggled to resonate in a changing Australia. That kind of sentiment no longer cut any ice with Australians. It alone could not sustain the Alliance. A “new nationalism” was taking root in the country and Gorton was its first champion.

It is little wonder that during his first month in power, Whitlam was described by the top Asia specialist in the State Department as a “whirling dervish”.  But after the controversy of the Christmas bombings Australia was frozen out of the Nixon White House. In the first half of 1973, as the entrails of the US administration were spilling out onto the front pages of American newspapers, Whitlam was well and truly shut out of the gates. It was a remarkable period. The New York Times called it a foolish display of public petulance towards a friend and ally. Remember: Nixon during this same period was hosting a state visit by the General Secretary of the Communist party. And when he sent Marshall Green off to become America’s new Ambassador to Australia – Green recalled a string of presidential expletives about Whitlam, culminating in the peroration, “Marshall, I can’t stand that …..”. Kissinger told Peter Wilenski, the PM’s private secretary, that “there is a very bad feeling here towards your prime minister, particularly because the president has a warm spot towards Australia”.

Australia, in fact, became a thorn in America’s Asian side during the life of this Labor government. Whitlam wanted to abandon SEATO, withdraw Australia’s commitment to the Five Power defence arrangements, and he was proposing new forms of regional architecture – which whilst hazy certainly didn’t seem to have US membership – and giving his support to proposals for zones of peace and neutrality in South East Asia and the Indian Ocean. It is worth recalling that of all the crises which occupied his time as CIA director in this period – flashpoints in the Middle East, coups in Cyprus and Portugal, and a nuclear explosion in India – William Colby felt compelled to add to his list of troubles “a left wing and possibly antagonistic government in Australia”. As Kissinger put it just prior to Whitlam’s meeting with the president July 1973, “we see his Asian policies cutting across our own”. Whitlam needed to “be kept in line”, his view of regional affairs ‘broadened’.

And as I lay out in great detail in the book, concern in Washington about Whitlam reached such feverish levels – particularly after elevation of Jim Cairns to the deputy prime ministership following the 1974 election – that President Nixon gave serious thought to cutting off intelligence sharing, drastically reducing military cooperation and relocating American security installations out of the country.  Had he done so, of course, the alliance would have been left as little more than a brittle chrysalis.  But for a moment there, Australia’s Alliance with the US was perched precariously on the edge of an abyss.

Up until 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.  And they did so with no success.

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 an affront 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 – not to mention self-respect – within and without the alliance.

For American policymakers, the situation was profoundly ironic. Throughout the 1960s, particularly in crises over Indonesia, successive administrations in Washington had watered down the security provisions in ANZUS to such an extent that when they served notice to the Whitlam government about the treaty’s very viability, the menace in the threats carried much less force.  These Americans simply did not know how to deal with the Whitlam winds of change.

The Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments all had their moments of disagreement with the Americans.  But, it should be remembered there was no great punishment meted out by Washington for doing so.

But I would argue that today we’ve largely forgotten what it’s like to disagree with the United States. If the alliance evolved into a kind of liturgy during the Cold War, today, as Bob Carr has recently stated, it dominates Australia’s international personality.  How do we account for this? One can appreciate and indeed extol the benefits and advantages that spring from the alliance without losing a sense of Australian autonomy.

It is surely significant that the world-views of the present generation of political leaders in Australia were largely shaped, if not during the height of the Cold War, then in a period where the East-West divide was still the major factor in international relations. The post-Cold War period too was dominated by debate over the “unipolar” moment and US leadership of a “new world order”. In other words, this is a generation not used to an America on the back foot, or at least an America less keen to play the role of world policeman.

One sometimes get the sense that some recent Australian prime ministers are trying to force the alliance back into its Cold War mould. Thus former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s statement in her speech to a joint session of the US Congress in March 2011, that Australia is an “ally for all the years to come”, while spoken with the utmost sincerity, carried more than a faint whiff of uncritical obeisance. And it was not too dissimilar from John Howard’s statement in his memoirs that the Americans in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York needed a “100 per cent Ally”. The great irony of alliance rhetoric in the post 9/11 era is that it repeats the moral absolutes of the Cold War.

Of course, a case can certainly be made to support the view that China’s rise means Australia is more important now to the United States than it was during the Cold War. Both the US and Australia now have their key national interests heavily bound up in this part of the world. And both are wrestling with the central question of our times – how do we deal with the rise of China? Right now that is driving a new sense of convergence in the alliance. But we cannot be sure if that will be the case in future years. No one in the current debate has the gift for seeing around corners.

Clearly, the training facility in Darwin is one manifestation of this convergence. But there are some signs of public unease with what this means. Can Australia, in practical terms, extract itself from any military contingency where that base, or the troops stationed there, come into play? Seventy-one per cent of Australians polled by the Australia-China Relations Institute late last year believed Australia should remain neutral in any dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, and that therefore ANZUS should not drag us into a conflict on the side of Japan. There may well be an emerging divide between public and elite opinion on the alliance.

The great risk for Australia is that sentimentalism and solemn incantations of shared values – no matter how much we all identify with and embody those values – get in the way of clear thinking about the alliance and downplay the possibilities of divergence. Of course the United States values Australia as an ally, but history shows that when it comes to its own national interests, the US, quite understandably, has been decidedly unsentimental itself.

 So while the US remains a superpower – even if a somewhat chastened and less confident one – and while the alliance remains the first principle of Australian foreign policy, that history of occasional divergence remains relevant.

It is not that policymakers or indeed political leaders need be captives to this history, but an awareness of it, and sensitivity to how and why differences of outlook and opinion arose in the past, can surely help in mapping a way ahead.  Not only can a sense of this history help mediate some of the more muscular views of the alliance, and cool the passions of the more boisterous Alliance cheerleaders, it can also assist in injecting a healthy dose of realism into the relationship.

Henry Kissinger might have called Whitlam a bastard; he might have struggled to remember Billy McMahon’s name; might have rolled out an extra metre of red carpet for NZ PM Norman Kirk just to try to spite Whitlam; might even have intervened to downgrade American representation at a Coral Sea Ball. But, in his latest work published just last year, he is surely correct that in an age dominated by 24/7 news, social media, and information overload, political leaders still need a sense of history and some kind of vision of the future. But that’s much more difficult to acquire now, he argues, and even more difficult to sustain “in the face of all the pressures that descend on leaders. We should deepen the current cognitive exercise to a level that is more compatible with conceptual thinking and less geared to the immediate emotion”.

Let me emphasise, though: what I’m saying here is not about beating the drum of Australian nationalism all the way down Pennsylvania Ave and poking the President of the United States in the eye, or kicking him or her in the shins, simply because it feels good. But it is about respect. Dare I say it, it is important for Australia and Australians to know this history. And it goes to the very heart of what kind of ally Washington needs in times of crisis and doubt.

Alliance razzamatazz can never substitute for analysis, and unqualified support rarely means Australia’s distinctive interests are being protected or preserved.  Today’s circumstances are constantly invoked as “new” and “unprecedented”, and yet the interpretative frameworks used to explain them hark back to simpler times. 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.