Unholy Fury by James Curran

Author:James Curran [Curran, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522861754
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2016-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

‘WHEN ALLIES TURN ON YOU’

Kirk was an unlikely channel in American thinking about how to handle Whitlam. Officials in the National Security Council seemed to quickly forget about the New Zealander’s own letter of protest against the Christmas bombings barely a month before. Indeed they believed that he could be used as a ‘restraining influence’ on Australia’s renegade prime minister. But the White House’s means of doing so amounted in this case to little more than the gentlest of slaps on the diplomatic wrist, and spoke volumes about the petty lengths to which they would go in order to punish Whitlam. When both Australian and New Zealand prime ministers sent the customary letters of condolence to Nixon following the death of Lyndon Johnson, Kissinger agreed that only Kirk would receive a reply, in the belief that such treatment would encourage him ‘in his much more pragmatic approach to Asian security problems (by comparison with that of … Whitlam)’. Indeed it was noted that Kirk had ‘showed his ability and willingness to work in this direction during his recent meetings with Whitlam in Wellington’.48 Similarly when Whitlam and Governor-General Paul Hasluck wrote separate letters of congratulations to Nixon after his inauguration, Hasluck was given a warm reply, while it was proposed that Whitlam receive the ‘tersest reply or none at all’: the NSC believing such a curt response would ‘indicate that our dissatisfaction is with Whitlam as a whole, and thereby hopefully keep the pressure on Whitlam but avoid antagonising Australians generally’. In the end a perfunctory three-line reply was sent:

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