Interdependence and Foreign Policy by Malcolm McKinnon

Author:Malcolm McKinnon [McKinnon, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Australia & New Zealand
ISBN: 9781775580959
Google: cb4YAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2013-10-01T02:51:02+00:00

1966–68

An American commentator noted on the eve of President Johnson’s brief visit to New Zealand in October 1966 that the ‘National Party considers New Zealand involvement in Vietnam a plus in the coming campaign …. [there] is no systematic opinion polling in New Zealand, degree of popular support for American involvement not known, but generally believed to be majority … even Labour Party supports humanitarian efforts’.48 Big welcoming crowds turned out to greet Johnson in Wellington. At the end of 1966, despite more controversy, in particular over renewed bombing of North Vietnam, some of this mood survived. Holyoake, according to one journalist,

quite clearly had no doubts from the beginning of the campaign (whatever doubts he may have entertained earlier) that his Vietnam policy was a winning policy. His first meeting in Christchurch must have reinforced him in this view—if indeed the remarkably fervent welcome to President Johnson from professedly phlegmatic Wellingtonians had not already done so. At every occasion, from every platform, Mr Holyoake spoke about Vietnam. If there had been some doubt that it would be an issue at all, he removed that doubt, too.49

National’s 1966 victory confirmed this analysis. So did another ‘poll’. When Roger Horrocks surveyed 250 essays on Vietnam by teenagers he found that over 80 per cent of them supported New Zealand’s Vietnam policy, instancing most often the argument, ‘the Communists are coming to get us, so we’ve got to stop them’. Sixty per cent also argued that by participating in the war New Zealand ensured it would be protected if it were directly threatened.50

Some commentators questioned whether Vietnam was an issue in the election at all, but most thought it had played a role, and one beneficial to the government.51 And the government had achieved this not by breaking with the independent foreign policy and taking the country into a major military commitment in Vietnam, but by working within the framework of the policy. It paid heed to New Zealanders’ insularity as well as to their wish to be protected: ‘Setting aside almost instinctive responses to appeals from Britain, we did not, I think, feel ourselves necessarily involved during this period in the affairs of the world at large. It is not always surprising that some vestiges of this attitude remain. Perhaps they explain in part the reactions of some people to the war in Vietnam.’52

A conservative American commentator, William F. Buckley, who visited New Zealand early in 1967, commented on the population as a whole:

During the [1966] election the Left tried very hard to encourage the voters to punish the Government for sending 150 soldiers to Vietnam but the people, churlishly, refused to do so. Not so much because they approved New Zealand’s presence in Vietnam, as because they do not really care about foreign policy. Their exquisite islands are so far removed from strife that they cultivate their isolation. To the dismay of the Left, which is involved in mankind and very much wants the Americans out of Vietnam.53

But the strife came closer.

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