Unholy Fury (11 page)

Once in Australia, Johnson found a way to convey his attitude on the level of allied commitments. On 21 October, when he addressed the Australian Cabinet in Canberra, Johnson again expressed his disappointment with Britain and Washington's SEATO partners for
staying out of Vietnam. Although he stressed that he ‘had not come to Australia to ask for a man or a dollar', those around the Cabinet table would not have missed his subsequent statement that ‘if the United States were to pull out of Vietnam tomorrow, other countries of South East Asia would quickly fall. And the aggressor would get to Australia long before he got to San Francisco'.
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It was a line he repeated in his public speeches during the visit. ‘It is time', he told one audience, ‘for you to stop, look, and listen, and decide how much your liberty and your freedom mean to you and what you are willing to pay for it'.
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And there is evidence to support the suggestion that Johnson and his advisers were growing increasingly frustrated with the unwillingness of Australia and New Zealand to contribute more troops to the war effort. Privately, the Americans were putting a great deal of pressure on Holt to add a third battalion to the two that were already in Vietnam, though the Australian leader maintained that the policy would remain the same until ‘the people have had a chance to vote on it' at the election scheduled for November.
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At the official reception for the president in Melbourne, the governor of Victoria was shocked to hear Johnson ‘declaiming violently against New Zealand for the smallness of its contribution in Vietnam', the president reportedly telling guests: ‘Here are 100 American boys being killed every week—100 mothers every week—and yet New Zealand only sends 200 odd men there. Such a country does not deserve to be free'.
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Australia did not entirely escape a certain measure of American opprobrium. A staunch opponent of the war in Washington, Democrat Senator J William Fulbright, already had Australia's troop numbers in his sights and sought to maximise Canberra's embarrassment on this point. Earlier in the year he had remarked that the Australians ‘believe that the United States will carry the whole load, and that our men will do the dying and that we will pay the bill. Otherwise, I am unable to understand why they do not send more than a token force'.
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For Australian leaders, however, there can be no doubt that Johnson's tour carried enormous symbolic appeal.
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As Howson noted in his diary after listening to Johnson's official speech at Parliament House in Canberra, the president's words had ‘cemented
the US-Australian alliance and confirmed a common policy in South East Asia. There can now be no doubt that Australia has an umbrella or shield' in the region. ‘Three years ago', he added, ‘this was not really a certainty'.
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Australian ministers publicly acknowledged that the US relationship was at the core of their Vietnam involvement, and that the presence of the president provided the heavyweight personal assurance that successive leaders struggled to find in the language of the ANZUS treaty itself—a moment, at least, where the legacy of difference and disagreement with Washington over West New Guinea and Confrontation could be easily forgotten, momentarily carried away on a sea of sentimental affection for the visiting president. And Holt was true to his word: after a commanding win at the polls in November, the Americans had their answer on an extra military commitment, with the announcement of an increase in Australian troops for the conflict. It brought the total number of Australian soldiers in Vietnam at that time to 6300, a number that would eventually peak in 1967 at around 8000.

‘CAUGHT IN A CLEFT STICK': LABOR AND LBJ'S VISIT

This was the context in which Whitlam and the Labor Party had to face up to the Vietnam war. In his leader's speech opposing the Menzies government's decision to commit an Australian battalion to Vietnam in May 1965, leader Arthur Calwell had combined opposition to the war with a commitment to maintaining the alliance. Indeed, the Labor Party's underlying position on the war was that it prevented the United States from assuming again its rightful place as leader of the free world. Calwell framed his opposition not only on the grounds of an American misreading of the situation in Vietnam, but also on the issue of US global prestige and the responsibility of an ally like Australia: the role of a ‘true friend', he said, was to ensure that ‘America must not be humiliated'. The speech made the case that the government's policy was deeply flawed and that it rested on three false assumptions. First it had an erroneous view of the war in South Vietnam. As the CIA had told the White House, it was essentially a civil war and not part of a Chinese design to gain control of South-East Asia. As Calwell put it, this was a simple-minded way of seeing
‘the very map of Asia itself becoming a conspiracy of geography against Australia'. Second, he stated that the Vietnamese communists were not clients of the Soviets or Chinese; rather they were leading a nationalist movement that was trying to respond to the legitimate social and economic grievances of the Vietnamese people. Finally he took aim at the Menzies government's encouragement of the United States entering the war. It would weaken the Americans' ability to meet real threats should Beijing or Moscow take advantage of the US preoccupation with South Vietnam. It would mean that in future the United States might be less willing to sacrifice its treasure and troops in the defence of its allies. Rather than counsel caution, Australia, in Calwell's view, was compounding the folly by championing ‘no pause for reflection'.
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The Americans assessed that Calwell, since his loss at the 1963 election, had ‘become more and more dependent on left-wing elements in the Labor Party', citing his support both for a nuclear-free zone in the Southern Hemisphere and for the involvement of communist China in disarmament negotiations. Seeing Calwell's leadership as driven largely by ideological loyalties and sectional interests, US diplomats doubted his ability to maintain party support for the alliance. They were all too aware that many in Labor's left were opposed to the presence of US intelligence facilities on Australian soil. By the time of Johnson's visit Calwell was depicted as ‘ageing and ineffectual', an ailing leader out of step with his party and the majority of the Australian population, and prone to railing against ‘international imperialism'.
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Calwell had promised to bring home all conscripts from Vietnam immediately if he was elected prime minister, with the remaining ‘regular' soldiers to be withdrawn after consultation with the United States. And he signalled early that he wanted to make the 1966 federal election a referendum on conscription. Whitlam, who unlike his leader had not been involved in the World War I conscription crisis, broke ranks with his leader by stating in the days just before the election that a Labor government might ‘send regulars' to Vietnam. The party's lack of a coherent policy on withdrawal was clear for all to see.
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In sum, American policy makers saw a bleak future for the alliance were Labor to win federal
office in November 1966. Walt Rostow called it Labor's ‘continued death wish'.
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But this American view largely missed the delicate political path that Calwell had to tread. Following the announcement of Johnson's visit, the Labor leader was particularly sensitive to being publicly defined as anti-American or being seen as discourteous to a visiting head of state. According to the British high commissioner, the visit caught the Labor Party in something of a ‘cleft stick'.
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It meant there was little support within the party when one of its senators called for demonstrations against Johnson's Vietnam policy and labelled the president's visit a ‘cheap political gimmick' to win votes for the Holt government.
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At the same time, Labor did ‘not want by over-enthusiasm to seem to be simply jumping on to Mr Holt's bandwagon'. As British diplomats in Canberra read the situation, Calwell wanted conscription, not the alliance, to be the electoral battleground:

 

Since the visit [Labor's] line of criticism over Vietnam seems to be concentrating more on the conscription aspect of it, which has the merit of being a traditional rallying cry in the party since World War One—particularly dear to Mr Calwell's heart—and of being at the same time free from Anti-American connotations. In private leading members of the ALP are bitterly critical of the fact that a foreign Head of State should, just before an election, have spoken widely and effectively to the Australian people about the major issue on which the election will be fought.
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In public Calwell stuck to this position, but the visit did not pass entirely free of controversy. During his speech of welcome to Johnson at a parliamentary reception in Canberra, he gave full voice to his American sympathies. Describing the president as the embodiment of ‘the nation that gave to the world its greatest revolution', he finished by reciting from memory Lincoln's Gettysburg address. In between such sweeteners, however, he reminded the president of the domestic opposition to the war back in Washington, even naming Senators Robert Kennedy, J William Fulbright, Wayne Morse ‘and other' Democrats who were ‘not prepared to go all the way with
LBJ'.
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The comments touched a raw nerve. Alan Reid, then the most senior journalist in the Canberra press gallery, condemned Calwell for letting down ‘the sliprail of convention that politicians do not dabble in detail in the politics either of the country they are visiting or of the countries whence a visitor has come'.
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Johnson replied in kind, using the most potent of weapons in the rhetorical armoury of the alliance at that time: ‘there is not a boy that wears the uniform yonder in Vietnam today', he roared, now visibly seething, ‘that has not always known that when freedom is at stake and when honorable men are in battle shoulder to shoulder that Australia will go all the way—not one third of the way, not part of the way, not three-quarters of the way but all the way, until liberty and freedom have been won'.
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In a political environment where Labor was bleeding electoral support on account of its stance on the war, Johnson's blistering retort was perhaps the cruellest political cut of all.

But Calwell's parliamentary welcome was only a mild public broadside compared with the pointed question he posed to the president the following day in a private meeting at the Canberra Rex Hotel. Joined by Labor's defence and foreign policy leadership group—including Whitlam—the encounter was conducted in an atmosphere of barely concealed hostility. The brevity and scope of the suggested talking points prepared by the White House for Johnson said it all—American officials advised that the president should raise only Calwell's historical interest in the American civil war. But the Labor leader allowed little time for pleasantries or reflections on the American past. Instead, he asked Johnson for his opinion concerning the failure of the British and Canadian governments to play a more active role in Vietnam. Stressing that his party maintained close links with the Labour parties in those countries, he ‘asked the President how he evaluated the opposition of those two parties to a military commitment'. Johnson tried to avoid the question, but concluded that ‘it must be recognised that either a treaty relationship had validity or it did not. The US government had supported Britain in its attempts to maintain the value of the pound but one had to balance this kind of concern for important problems of one country against support
for problems of another in an alliance'. It was the very bait that Allen Fraser, chairman of Labor's Foreign Affairs Committee, could not resist: ‘Then if I understand you correctly, Mr President, you are saying that if Australia were to withdraw her troops from Vietnam, we could not expect full support in the future from the United States under ANZUS?'

Although Fraser's question might be reasonably perceived as yet another example of Australian anxiety about the extent to which the ANZUS treaty provided Australia with a security guarantee, any nuance was lost on the visiting president. It was a conversation killer, Johnson repeating that it was up to each country to decide for itself where its paramount interests lay. As the president and his advisers got up to leave, Fraser shot back: ‘Thanks for the lecture, Mr President'.
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This frosty exchange on the top floor of the Canberra Rex revealed two very different views of how an alliance ought to work. For Johnson, the idea of reciprocity was bound up with what was expected of an alliance partner when the chips were down. His repeated entreaties to Prime Minister Harold Wilson for some measure of British support in Vietnam had, however, failed to bear fruit, and indeed it had become more of an imperative in American eyes for the British to continue their role East of Suez.
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For its part, the Australian Labor Party wanted the best of both worlds. It wanted the right to express a stronger sense of independence within the alliance, but left the impression that it too sought the continued extension of American protection. Such a stance did not endear itself to American officials. The most scathing assessment of this position came in the days immediately before the federal election later that same year, when American Ambassador Ed Clark considered the shape of the country in the unlikely event Labor should prevail:

 

it is the fashion in the ALP to say that the American alliance was forged under a Labor government and would be undisturbed by a Labor victory. Looking objectively at the personalities that are influential in the Party today and the policies they espouse, however, we are forced to the conclusion that the basic fabric of the alliance would be severely strained and the question might
shortly arise as to whether from our point of view that alliance had much further meaning or utility.
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