Arthur Tange, page 25
Visits to Vietnam
During his time in India Tange made two visits to Vietnam, in August 1967 and September 1969, in order to make an independent assessment of the war, of Australia’s contribution and of the adequacy of Australian political and military reporting. In 1967 he offered a coolly objective appraisal of the conflict to which Australia was deeply committed, to which India was equally deeply opposed, and which was provoking deep divisions in Australian politics and society. On the military performance, he thought that Australia’s defence machinery and armed services had taken far too long to despatch and equip a tiny force. ‘It would be alarming to think,’ he reported to Plimsoll, ‘that this is the best we can do—and our quickest reaction—in the event of a more direct threat to Australian security.’ Privately, he said of Vietnam, as of other manifestations of Australian military performance, ‘the Australian public deserves better’.364
By contrast, Tange was particularly impressed by the ability of the American generals to express themselves and to discuss broad political and strategic issues as well as more narrowly operational questions. They were, he said, ‘educated men as well as fighting men’, an impression that strongly influenced his approach in the 1970s towards the education of Australia’s officer cadets. But while Tange admired the ability of the American generals to think in broad strategic terms and to articulate their views persuasively, he also saw it as a major challenge to Australian policy-makers. Australians, he said, should not be easily persuaded by American enthusiasm. Were they winning? He told Plimsoll that:
frankly, I don’t know where the truth lies. We simply have to remain sceptical. And perhaps this contains some lessons for the way Australia assesses Vietnam, determines our policy there, and runs our Mission there. I would counsel the creation of an analytical and self-critical approach (not a negative one) because the American effort combined with American enthusiasm in justifying what they are doing may swamp our better judgment. We must do everything we can to form independent conclusions … 365
These views were of little or no immediate significance in Australia’s conduct of the war, but pointed to a longstanding theme in his attitude to the American alliance and a central concern in his subsequent administration of Australia’s defence machinery.
By 1969 the United States was beginning to withdraw some of its forces from Vietnam but was still assuring its allies of its continued interest in South-East Asia. Britain, by contrast, was accelerating the withdrawal of its military from the whole region ‘east of Suez’. Tange, as noted earlier, had been involved in the negotiations in 1950 when the British had objected strongly to their exclusion from the security treaty that linked Australia and New Zealand with the United States. Tange now commented in his diary:
It is interesting now to reflect, twenty years later, that ANZUS stands as a worthwhile contract between the US and Australia to share [the] defence burden in the Pacific/South East Asian region. And Britain, with all its concern of 20 years ago … has no special influence in India. She is withdrawing from Asia. What remains are China, South-East Asia, Australia—and ANZUS.366
The Vietnam visits thus brought out the two strands of Tange’s attitude to the American alliance that would be highly influential in the 1970s. On the one hand Australia’s security was enormously strengthened by the ANZUS relationship. But this did not mean that Australian policy-makers should uncritically accept every assessment or piece of advice that emanated from Washington. Australians had to make their own independent assessments and manage the alliance relationship on the basis of that judgment
The head of mission
In New Delhi Tange’s personality and style, especially his unforgiving insistence on the highest professional standards, were only magnified by being confined within the scope of a moderately sized diplomatic mission.367 At first he was constantly arriving at his office with a list of ideas, wanting papers prepared on each of several topics and having to be reminded that a staff of four diplomats (one at each of the levels of counsellor, first secretary, second secretary and third secretary) simply could not cope with them all. Having issued orders to the gardeners at the residence in the morning, he was horrified to return at midday to find them enjoying their customary post-lunch rest. He set about driving virtually every aspect of the mission’s activities, from strategic policy assessments to the colours of furniture in the staff housing. (On this last topic, some of his staff thought that his ideas owed something to a desire to emulate the Sydney offices of his old friend Nugget Coombs, now Governor of the Reserve Bank. Orange cushions might have worked there, they thought, but fitted less well into the cool blues and greens appropriate for New Delhi.) He closely supervised the design of a new chancery building, opened during his time, and made adjustments to the High Commissioner’s residence, to the chagrin of Walter Crocker who had been responsible for the previous design. By the end of his term, the High Commission was regarded as having one of the best gardens in New Delhi, a reflection of the active and informed interest of both Arthur and Marjorie.
Having made some adjustments to his new environment, he settled into driving his new machine as hard as possible. Of his staff, several came to admire his professionalism and energy. They accepted his critiques of their drafts as ruthless but beneficial. Many noted his emphasis on ensuring that reports always pointed to the implications for Australian policy. They were not reporting on Indian affairs as a matter of academic interest, he repeatedly reminded them, but in order to help Australian ministers to do their job. They also respected his political sense. His insistence that the mission closely monitor developments in the Lok Sabha meant that the Australians were among the first to predict that the Congress Party was about to suffer its historic split. His toughness on people, they later testified, was his way of testing the quality of their work. Those who stood their ground and argued their case with adequate evidence would be respected; those who folded under his initial criticisms would not recover ground. His probity was beyond question and touches like using his own stamps for private correspondence earned respect.
Tim McDonald, instructed even before his arrival in New Delhi as second secretary to organise Tange’s first visit to Nepal, was terrified at the prospect, but discovered an unsuspected side to his notoriously severe chief. On the road he found Tange was charming and friendly. Back in New Delhi, Tim and his wife Gillian were invited to spend Sunday evenings with Arthur and Marjorie, which proved relaxed and enjoyable. But on Monday morning the personal rapport would be ‘put back in the cupboard’ and Tange’s office persona—demanding, dominating, driving—would again be the only side evident.
The High Commission staff included vehement critics of Tange’s style, and even staunch admirers of Tange’s professionalism and insistence on excellence conceded that there were times when he went too far. His assertion of his own prerogatives, the importance of his time, and the priority to be given to his demands became wearing. The office telephone system included buzzers for internal communication; no-one. the mission’s staff found, could communicate his personality through a buzzer more unmistakably than Tange. His meticulous attention to protocol and procedures at diplomatic dinner parties could become stifling. (His generosity was not questioned. Tange noted on one occasion that a leading Indian politician stumbled out of a High Commission function asserting that he had only ever drunk two things: mother’s milk and Scotch whisky.368) One of his subordinates, who knew that Tange had criticised his Australian accent as unsuitable for a diplomatic representative, thought him highly class-conscious, but the same officer admitted that Tange’s confidential assessments of character and personality were remarkably perceptive.369
Tange’s attitude towards the service attachés was particularly noticeable and, in the light of his later career, noteworthy. On the Defence Committee Tange had been critical of the attitude of the services towards these positions. Too often, he believed with good cause, they were allocated to officers who were thought to deserve a pre-retirement reward or to have the social skills appropriate for diplomatic cocktail parties. Tange believed they should be treated as important parts of the system providing information and advice to Canberra on defence policy. The service attachés in New Delhi were heavily criticised for what he regarded as naive, inept and inadequate contributions to policy discussions.
India also offered a corrective to the idea that Tange was incorrigibly old-fashioned in his attitude to women. Tim McDonald’s wife Gillian—a diplomatic cadet, the first woman cadet for some years, who had been obliged to resign on marrying her fellow cadet—travelled often with the Tanges and saw no prejudice on Arthurs part. Moreover, she noted that Tange displayed a healthy respect, without any gender-based condescension, for the numerous outstanding Indian women in government and academia, one of whom he sponsored to visit Australia under the department’s Special Visitors Program.370
Ministerial and other visitors from Australia, often an occupational hazard for heads of diplomatic missions, were treated with appropriate care. As noted in Chapter 6, Tange knew that John McEwen could be an uncomfortable visitor, who particularly resented ambassadors who, without consultation, organised dinners or cocktail parties in his honour. Tange was therefore solicitous when McEwen visited India, especially on the second such occasion in 1968. McEwen accepted his invitation to stay at the residence, where the Tanges took particular care to give him both the support and the freedom that he required. The letter of thanks that McEwen wrote afterwards expressed more than conventional gratitude and Tange was proud and relieved to have earned it.371 Visits by the Caseys on their annual pilgrimage to the House of Lords in London generated less tension, but the staff at the mission knew that nothing was to take priority over their comfort and care as long as the visit lasted. Some thought this a snobbish affectation on Tange’s part but few knew of the almost filial rapport they had developed as minister and departmental secretary.
Filial rapport was not always predominant when Chris and Jenny Tange visited their parents at the High Commission. When Arthur went to New-Delhi, Jenny was starting a three-year course in kindergarten teaching in Sydney. As she liked to put it, she did not leave home, it left her. In her third year she told her father that she wanted to withdraw from the course and pursue her love of pottery. Arthur sternly replied that, while she could take up pottery, she must finish her course first. She did, and remained grateful for advice that allowed her to pursue the career that had attracted her since attending the kindergarten in Washington in 1953, while maintaining pottery as a hobby. Chris’s tertiary education was less successful. When visiting New Delhi he had to tell his father that his results were such that he had been excluded from his Arts-Law course at the Australian National University. Arthur was far from pleased but he helped Chris to make the contacts that allowed him to start a career in business. By the end of the decade he was part of the Australian expatriate business community in Hong Kong. In both New Delhi and Canberra, External Affairs colleagues saw enough of Arthur’s reactions to generate critical stories. Some said that he was too hard on both children, others that he came down heavily on Chris while favouring Jenny. This alleged harshness towards his own children contributed substantially to Tange’s reputation in Canberra as a bully. Nevertheless, it did not reflect the feelings of the supposed victims, who felt that their father had been stern but fair, giving helpful support and sound advice even when critical of signs of failure or weakness.
As Secretary, Tange had had to send instructions to ambassadors and to handle their complaints about the failings of the department in Canberra. Now he was one of the ambassadors, conscious of being overseen by his immediate predecessor in New Delhi, a notably successful High Commissioner. Those close to him noted a wry smile around Tange’s lips as he observed Plimsoll encountering some difficulty when he came to New Delhi for the official talks or to chair a regional heads of mission conference. As the years passed, Tange became increasingly abrasive in finding fault with administrative instructions from Canberra. By 1969 he was sending a stream of long memoranda and letters to Plimsoll and the senior officer in charge of administration, Keith Brennan, recounting in great detail the sins of omission and commission that he detected in the department’s management. At one point Tange averred that he—famous, when Secretary, for his insistence on strict observance of security requirements—had directly contravened a security instruction that he thought was unworkable. He noted that he would be in Canberra on leave and consultations in August 1969, and suggested combatively that he would welcome any discussion that Plimsoll cared to have.372
At stake was more than an element of rivalry between two men whose careers had followed similar paths. Tange was well informed of the deteriorating position of the department. To the surprise of the many admirers of his abilities as an ambassador, Plimsoll was proving remarkably unsuccessful as the permanent head. He was, moreover, facing enormous difficulties as Hasluck continued to bewilder and frustrate the officials in External Affairs, issuing critiques on administrative minutiae while refusing to give clear leads on policy. As Keith Shann wrote to Tange just a year after Plimsoll’s arrival:
Your Department, old Arthur, is a mess. Jim does not permit others to see the minister [who] is, to say the least, not interested in having a decent Department. Most of the younger officers feel completely adrift and unimportant, and I suspect we may soon lose a lot of very good people.373
Shann noted that, in the six weeks since completing an exceptionally important and eventful term in Jakarta, he had seen neither the Prime Minister (Harold Holt), his minister (Hasluck), nor the secretary (Plimsoll). From a distance Tange grieved over the declining fortunes of the department he had done so much to develop and sent detailed recommendations on the steps that he believed his successor ought to take.
Career bargaining—offers rejected and accepted
As the years passed, Tange wondered whether his appointment to India would prove to be the start of a virtually permanent exile until August 1974, when he would turn 60, the earliest age at which he could claim his superannuation benefits. Despite his anxieties on this score, he played a tough poker game with his future career as the stake, insisting that the government find him a post appropriate for a former Secretary of External Affairs while scorning offers that he considered unworthy.
The first hand of career poker was played in March 1968, as Tange approached the completion of three years in New Delhi. On Hasluck’s instructions, Plimsoll invited Tange’s reactions to a number of ‘major posts’ that were likely to become vacant, including Paris, Bonn, Moscow and the Mission to the United Nations in New York. Tokyo, Plimsoll noted, was not likely to be an option. The embassy in Paris might soon see a major increase in economic work as the government was considering another attempt to join the OECD, but there was a possibility of a non-career appointment there.374
Tange replied first with a tart handwritten note to Plimsoll, asserting that some of the posts named were, in his view, far from ‘major’, and that ‘I would prefer to move out of EA or a genuine retirement from the Service to a disguised one’. He hoped that, when he accompanied Mrs Gandhi on her official visit to Australia later in the year, he might discuss the options with the Public Service Board and perhaps the Prime Minister.375 Two weeks later he sent a longer letter to Hasluck. thanking him for raising the matter because he wanted the government to consider ‘how it wishes to use my services in the next six years’, before he turned 60. He doubted that his or Marjorie’s health would stand more than two further years in New Delhi, so the government would have to find him another post ‘at home or abroad’ for the remaining four years. Tange told Hasluck bluntly that, in his view, the only overseas positions comparable with that of Secretary of External Affairs were those of Ambassador in Washington and High Commissioner in London. He had ‘hoped to see the day’ when he would be offered one or other of these, adding pointedly that ‘one of my subordinates’ had been appointed to Washington. The posting of Waller, after Menzies had vetoed Tange for the post, still rankled.
Tange ruled out, as insufficiently important, Bonn, Moscow and New York (unless, in the latter case, Australia had been elected to the Security Council). Paris, he conceded, was an important post, but he doubted that he could bring his spoken French to the necessary standard. He said that he would prefer to stay in India for another two years, rather than moving immediately to either Paris or New York.376
During Mrs Gandhi’s Australian visit in June, Tange discussed his future with Hasluck but not, it appears, with the new Prime Minister, John Gorton. Hasluck’s only response was to say that he thought Tange was doing a good job in India, that he had wanted to be sure that Tange did not want Paris, and that he did not expect still to be the minister in two years’ time.377 (Although no hint was yet public, the discussions were already in train that would lead to Hasluck’s appointment as Governor-General early in 1969.) There the matter rested for the remainder of the year.
As Tange and Hasluck played their respective cards in this game of career poker, there was a silent player whose presence was only tacitly acknowledged. At the end of his appointment as Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, where Tange had seen him as both First Division colleague and departmental rival, Allen Brown had accepted the position of Deputy High Commissioner in London. Tange could not therefore argue, as he clearly believed, that this post was too lowly for a First Division officer to accept. He could only contend, with much less credibility, that it was beneath the level appropriate for a former Secretary of External Affairs. Privately, he felt that Brown had sold the pass for First Division officers by accepting the deputy’s post. From London, Brown was cross-posted as Ambassador in Tokyo. This set a precedent that Tange was prepared to accept.
