Unholy Fury (28 page)

For the Australians, however, this was to be no laughing matter. Though it may have been gratifying to know that Australia was not the only one on the wrong end of an American tongue-lashing, it would have done very little in any case to appease wounded egos. The anger, bitterness, exasperation and barely concealed fury that enveloped the Australian-American alliance at this time represents something of a point of departure in the history of the relationship. For Whitlam, the test probably came too early. At the very moment he was transitioning to power, he faced what appeared to be yet another dramatic escalation of the war. The Labor Party and the prime minister's closest supporters virtually demanded a strong response. He had laid the groundwork for a new approach to the alliance, and he had to stay the course; given the position he had staked out on Vietnam before the election, Whitlam had little choice. For the Americans, it would take some time to adjust to the new Australian mood. There was to be no more salving the wounded pride of Australian prime ministers with promises of secret telephone links between the Lodge and the Oval Office, and no special invitation to the president's private retreat, be it San
Clemente, Key Biscayne or Camp David. Pleasantries and privileges were no longer on the table.

Both leaders, though in their own way at the height of their political power, could not adequately understand the dilemmas the other faced. Instead, Nixon's rage at Whitlam, and Whitlam's frustration at the course of American foreign policy since Kennedy, only seemed to raise temperatures rather than advance understanding. The mechanisms that had been used in the past to resolve disagreements appeared hopelessly inadequate: the two leaders were simply looking past each other. Both were impatient to further reshape their country's place on the world stage: Nixon desperate to be free of Vietnam; Whitlam eager to reset Australia's international stance. The result was an entrenched suspicion that would take some time to shift. And it was only going to get worse as ministers in Whitlam's new government, and officials in some parts of the trade union movement, saw fit to hand down an even harsher and more controversial verdict on Nixon's attempt to end the war in Vietnam.

 

7

Richard Nixon was not expecting to have to deal with Australia at the beginning of 1973. After all, three years earlier he had issued a directive to his senior staff setting out his foreign policy priorities. That document failed to even mention Australia and indeed relegated it, along with a number of other countries, to a category where he did not want materials submitted to him ‘unless they require Presidential decision and can only be handled at the Presidential level'.
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But by the time Gough Whitlam came to power in December 1972 and made his intentions clear, Australia had not only grabbed Nixon's attention: it fuelled his rage as well.

Writing in his memoirs, Whitlam recalled that Nixon's ‘anger' over his letter protesting the resumption of the bombings ‘turned to fury' when in late December 1972 and early January 1973 several of his most senior Cabinet ministers ‘intruded with mounting stridency' about US policy in Vietnam.
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The presidential bitterness only intensified when maritime unions placed a ban on all American shipping in Australian ports. Indeed the combination of freewheeling ministerial tongues and the muscular threats of militant trade unionists created something of a perfect storm in the relationship. The Americans believed that the prime minister was actively sponsoring both the
slander and the strikes. Marshall Green depicted a particularly hostile atmosphere in Washington towards Australia during the first half of 1973, in which Nixon ‘elevated Australia to number two place on his personal shit list'. Green remembered the pecking order: ‘Sweden occupied number one place, but Australia stayed number two for quite a while … you certainly couldn't mention Whitlam's name around the White House without an explosion'.
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The irony, of course, was that the ferocity of the comments by senior Labor ministers only served to make Whitlam's statement of alarm seem all the more moderate. But within the space of ten days Jim Cairns, Clyde Cameron and Tom Uren managed to inflame the situation. Of course, it was unlikely that the tensions within the Labor Party over the bombing could be contained solely by the delivery of Whitlam's formal protest to Nixon. Having opposed the Vietnam war since the first Australian troops were committed to the conflict in 1965, some Labor spokesmen were never about to feign respect for the niceties of diplomatic protocol, even if they had just received their ministerial commissions from the governor-general.

Thus on 28 December, the day Whitlam had met with Waller and Plimsoll at Kirribilli House, Cairns, now minister for trade, blamed the continuation of the war on a ‘few deceitful and self-righteous men in the White House who have never been elected by anyone at any time'. What Whitlam had disclosed in a private conversation Cairns unleashed in public. He described the bombings as ‘the most brutal, indiscriminate slaughter of defenceless men, women and children in living memory'.
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His comments coincided with the formal announcement by the Seamen's Union of a black ban on all American ships coming to Australia. That action was accompanied by a trade union ultimatum to Nixon to end the Vietnam war within a week or face a possible ban on all US financial interests in the country.

On the following day Clyde Cameron, then minister for employment, lent his support to the unions carrying out the strikes and said that it might even be necessary for ‘all nations to … isolate the United States community commercially and diplomatically until Congress moves in to control the maniacs who seem to be
determining US policy in Vietnam'. Then, on 8 January, Tom Uren, minister for urban affairs, spoke at a ‘Rally for Peace in Vietnam' in Sydney. He condemned Nixon's ‘hypocrisy', ‘arrogance', ‘false pretentions' and ‘double dealing', charging that the president was waging a ‘diplomacy of terror' in Vietnam and that his policy represented a ‘mentality of thuggery' and ‘mass murder'.
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In between these rhetorical broadsides, Labor Senator Arthur Gietzelt—US diplomats were well aware of his close links with the Australian Communist Party—injected an element of high farce into the debate by suggesting on New Year's eve that the Australian government seize all land owned by American companies in Australia, eject the US intelligence facilities from Australian soil, move to have the US expelled from the United Nations and refuse entry to all American citizens not publicly associated with the peace movement.
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Putting aside the extremism of Gietzelt, the Australian censure was one of the more strident of any of America's allies.
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Almost overnight Australia had gone from being one of the United States' most loyal lieutenants to one of its chief critics. The result was a White House that became more and more determined to make Australia suffer, engaging in a series of punitive paybacks, which, while causing some domestic discomfort and a certain embarrassment for the Whitlam government, also showed that the administration in Washington was struggling to come to terms with what had happened to one of its most reliable partnerships. Nixon made no secret of his contempt for left-wing governments around the world, particularly when it came to dealing with their critique of his policies in Vietnam. ‘Except for the British, Greeks and Turks', he told NATO Chief Andrew Goodpaster in mid February 1973, ‘our allies ha[ve] been very critical of us during the recent bombing, pandering to their leftist constituencies'. And he added that save for British Prime Minister Edward Heath and possibly French President Georges Pompidou, there were to be ‘no more toasts, no more state visits' during the remainder of his term in office.
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For a period of nearly five months Nixon refused to invite Whitlam to the White House, and in a series of further meetings with other world leaders in this period, he was to express his contempt for Australian politicians of both parties.

As Nixon dug in his heels, Whitlam only grew more determined to make his views known and his presence felt. He was adamant that he would not be pushed around by the great power. The new prime minister had been stung by the American response to his protest and could not believe that the White House refused to officially acknowledge the receipt of his letter. But if this was the first major test for his new foreign policy, it provided the first indication of how he would control the more outspoken left wing of his party—the very people with whom he had battled so consistently since coming to the leadership in 1967. It was to provide, too, a devastating example of how one arm of the broader labour movement—in the form of a particularly vociferous and strident group of maritime unions—could momentarily derail his broader foreign policy agenda. In private, Whitlam's critique of the American actions and its mission in Vietnam virtually mirrored those of his Cabinet colleagues. But he was now prime minister, and the first week of 1973 was to prove a particularly exacting time for his fledgling leadership of the country.

In this fog of mistrust and misunderstanding, the alliance entered a new and deeply unstable phase. US officials, troubled as much by the trajectory of Whitlam's vision for Asia as they were over the outbursts of Australian government ministers and maritime workers, repeated their warnings and threats over the future of the ANZUS treaty. All their doubts over the outlook and orientation of the new Labor government seemed to have been confirmed. From Washington, they saw a prime ministerial letter of protest quickly followed by ministerial abuse and strike action led by Australian trade unions, some of them communist-backed. No matter how much and how often Whitlam and his advisers tried to soften the harder edges for their American listeners, the damage had been done. And in the ensuing months, a great deal of Australian diplomatic energy was consumed with the task of mending a rickety alliance fence.

Nevertheless, the momentum towards a new understanding of the alliance was building. In every way this period represented the passing of an era for the American–Australian relationship. That it was framed by the death of two US presidents only seemed to add a touch of poignancy to the moment. On 26 December 1972, Harry
Truman, the leader who more than any other put the United States onto a Cold War footing, passed away in Kansas City, Missouri. It was during his presidency that the Americans had finally agreed to a Pacific Pact with Australia and New Zealand. And just under a month later, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the president who had escalated the US involvement in Vietnam, died in Stonewall, Texas. In the parliament, Whitlam paid tribute to him as ‘one of the great reforming presidents in the history of the republic', singling out his vision of the ‘Great Society', a ‘succession of social and domestic reforms unparalleled in our generation'.
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The
Courier-Mail
noted in its obituary of the former president that ‘Australia was one of the most important things in LBJ's life … What he liked about Australia was the size of the land, the roughness of the people, the outspokenness of Holt'. There was doubtless a touch of classic tabloid hyperbole to this assessment. But the point was that, by early 1973, the Holt–Johnson rapport seemed a distant memory.

‘WHAT THE HELL!': THE MARITIME BANS

The first union protest against the US government in the wake of the bombings predated the dispatch of Whitlam's protest letter to Nixon. On 19 December the secretary of the Melbourne Waterside Workers Federation announced that, if the war continued, he would institute a ban on all American ships entering Victorian ports. Just over a week later, on 28 December, the Seamen's Union in Melbourne voted to enforce the ban in protest ‘against the latest barbaric acts of US imperialists against the heroic people of North Vietnam'.
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In Sydney on the same day, Elliot V Eliot, the 70-year-old general secretary of the Seamen's Union, sent a telegram to President Nixon advising him of an Australia-wide ban on all US ships.

Eliot, described as a ‘striking figure with a bushy mane of neatly groomed hair and a clipped military moustache', had held the leadership of his union since 1941. He was no stranger to using union power to try to force foreign policy change. At the end of World War II, he had been instrumental in banning all Dutch ships from docking in Australian ports in support of Indonesian aspirations for independence. Then, during the Korean war, his union had refused
to handle any ships carrying arms to Korea as a protest against what he labelled American aggression. And in 1967 his workers agreed not to man ships commissioned by the Australian government to take munitions and supplies to the Australian task force in Vietnam. On that occasion the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) had voted fifteen to one against the Seamen's Union action, but Eliot stood his ground, and the ships had to be manned by officers of the Royal Australian Navy.
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ACTU support was similarly unforthcoming on this occasion, and for that reason the numbers actually enforcing the ban remained limited to those unions whose workforce was centred on the waterfront.
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That is not to say, however, that the number of threats publicly aired by members of other unions across the country in any way diminished. If anything the action by the Seamen's union ushered in something of an open season on US commercial interests in the country. Nothing, it seems, was off limits: calls from various state branches were made for everything from cutting off water supplies to all US-owned industries and halting work on US space projects at Woomera and Alice Springs, to threatening the delivery of food and stationery, even beer and spirits, to the US embassy in Canberra. Americans in Australia could be forgiven for thinking that they were under siege.
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For a time the Australian unions involved stood in solidarity with their labour brethren in the Italian port of Genoa, but that ban was called off once Nixon ordered a halt to the bombings—and a return to peace negotiations—on 30 December.