The drama began on the night of 14 June 1984 when the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, unexpectedly went to Government House to seek an early election. Legend had it that he was drunk. That is doubtful, but if he was not drunk at the start of the evening he certainly was by its end. His condition was not helped by being served two hefty whiskies while waiting in the study of the Governor-General who was in the delicate position of giving a dinner for newspaper editors and some members of the Opposition and could not get away immediately. Muldoon was, however, quite clear about what he was doing. His caucus was increasingly restive about the wage and price freeze he had imposed and he had earlier told the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, that he might have to go to the country in March or April. He held on but with his slender majority in Parliament threatened he asked his department in May for advice on the shortest possible interval between a dissolution and the consequent General Election.
In May the Labour Party Executive had released its international affairs policy. In power it would legislate to make New Zealand and its territorial waters nuclear-free and would prohibit visits by warships either nuclear-armed or -powered. It would actively seek the establishment of a South Pacific Nuclear Weapons-free Zone and end the dumping of nuclear wastes and testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.
On ANZUS it promised to renegotiate ‘the terms of our association with Australia and the United States for the purpose of ensuring the economic, social and political stability of the South East Asian and Pacific regions’. In such an updated agreement the other parties would have to accept New Zealand’s unconditional anti-nuclear stance, as well as an ‘absolutely equal partnership’ and unanimous agreement on all decisions taken by the partners, and for good measure ‘an absolute guarantee of the complete integrity of New Zealand’s sovereignty’.
The policy’s tone had a party activist feel to it, revealing both a considerable unfamiliarity with the working of international agreements, including ANZUS, and also a lack of confidence in the country’s ability to look after its own interests. The British Foreign Office noted that it contained no indication of alignment with the West while the American embassy, in a less clear-sighted moment, thought that the shift to a more independent foreign policy that this signalled would be more rhetorical than substantive.
When the policy was released Rowling said he was doubtful the ANZUS treaty could be rewritten; instead it should be abandoned and replaced by an agreement concentrating, not on military matters, but on economic cooperation in the Asia/Pacific region. He repeated in print his themes of the year before: ‘Our friends have got to recognise us as partners, not acolytes’ and if they did not it would be them and not New Zealand who would be frustrating any agreement for progress and peace.1
The conference of the Federation of Labour, heavily influenced by the hard Left, contributed to the momentum that month, passing remits calling for a nuclear-free Pacific, withdrawal from ANZUS and a general condemnation of US actions in the Caribbean and Central America. Throughout the proceedings the fraternal delegate from the Soviet Union had a seat of honour on the platform with the Executive while the American and Australian delegates had to be content with places in the hall. There was no controversy or even discussion over the ANZUS remits which were simply pushed through; the only lively moment came when a remit against pornographic displays in the workplace was opposed by the Auckland Engineers’ Union, on the grounds that all men were voyeurs and women exhibitionists.
Two weeks later a Bill to enact Labour’s anti-nuclear policy was introduced into Parliament by a Labour frontbencher, Richard Prebble. The government argued that it was in breach of the whole spirit of ANZUS and said, rather desperately, that if passed it would not be forwarded to the Governor-General for assent because it would affect the rights of the Crown.2 In the end the Nuclear Free New Zealand Bill was defeated, but by the narrowest of margins: 40-39. Two National Party members crossed the floor to vote for the Bill, and the government was saved only because two Labour members moved in the opposite direction. Such tidy symmetry was unlikely to last. Muldoon’s mind was made up. Always something of a fatalist, after the vote on 12 June he decided to fight it out at once rather than be nibbled to death trying to stay in power.
After that, the ‘Beyond ANZUS’ conference arranged for 16 to 18 June in the Wellington Town Hall instead found itself part of the election campaign. Upwards of a thousand attended with almost forty speakers from the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements. There was a seminar on the role of the ‘political police’ in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and another on the ‘problems endured by Asian nations under US influence, and the part played by New Zealand and Australia in supporting American objectives in Asia’. To underline the need for an independent foreign policy Tim Shadbolt, the Mayor of Waitemata, spoke on ‘national assertiveness’.
The snap election caught everyone by surprise. The National Party had not even completed its selection of candidates, the party organisation was in some disarray, and after nine years in office National found it hard to find something new to say. Muldoon was exhausted and disheartened and (as Lange was to do) had left his party behind him. The party officials took their revenge with full-page campaign advertisements that said with unexpected frankness, ‘Who Needs This Man?’, and then dropped him from their message completely.3
Labour was in much better shape. It had selected its candidates and was lifted by the long electoral swell that energises party workers and signals to them that the time has come. Its foreign policy was clear but the outlines of its economic policy were still being hard fought. The right-wing, free-market reformers, led by Roger Douglas, were confident of prevailing over the advocates of more familiar Labour policies. Over his nine years in office Muldoon had stolen many of the Left’s traditional policies on state investment (the showy projects known as ‘Think Big’), price and wage controls and government subsidies, and their failure had winded the Left as well as Muldoon. The centre of the caucus was moving over to reform but the snap election meant that instead of further debates a quick manifesto would have to be put out. Geoffrey Palmer, Lange’s deputy, and Margaret Wilson cobbled something together, with contributions from both sides. What emerged was a compromise which took refuge in generalities, saying it was impossible to be specific without more information. In Wilson’s words: ‘What was adopted did not tell the full truth, but it told no lies.’4 It certainly gave few hints of the tide of economic change that was to come.
The question of whether there was a deal or non-aggression pact between those who wanted an anti-nuclear foreign policy and those who wanted radical economic reform has been much debated. Those close to the issue have given differing views. Sir Geoffrey Palmer doubts there was any conscious trade-off; Moore knows of no evidence of any bargain and Prebble agrees: many on the Left had no interest in economic policy – ‘they could not balance their cheque books’ – but were actively opposed to American foreign policy. ‘The fact that the Left was preoccupied by the issue was of benefit to us but there was never a grand or even a small bargain.’5
Others saw a trade-off at least in practice. Roger Douglas, the Minister of Finance, thought so but warned against overplaying it. Simon Walker, in charge of the party’s publicity, said at the outset that ‘Lange wants to win his economic battles in the Cabinet and he won’t be able to do this if he’s fighting battles on the foreign policy front’.6
This was confirmed by weighty testimony from those even closer. In Lange’s first meeting with Hawke as Prime Minister his explanation of the anti-nuclear policy was unconvincing. When questioned by Hawke he agreed that he was himself unconvinced. He explained that when he came to power a deal had been made with the Left to accept their position on nuclear weapons and ship visits in return for him and Douglas having a free hand on economic policy. He said the deal was not done in writing but was something he regarded as binding.7 He seemed to the Australians to be resigned rather than keen about it. Bill Hayden, Hawke’s Foreign Minister, recalled later: ‘For some of us who dealt with him privately it was clear that, initially anyway, he held the tiller on the set course with a slack and unenthusiastic hand.’8
When he was in Wellington for the ANZUS Council with US Secretary of State George Shultz, David Laux from the National Security Council was told at a lunch in the Beehive that Lange did not really care about the nuclear issue – what mattered most was his economic reforms which meant that he might have to give way on the nuclear policy.9 The American embassy also believed there was a deal whereby Lange had accepted some extreme planks on foreign affairs in exchange for a more radical economic charter. ‘In the early days of the Labour Ministry, he will concentrate his fire on economic issues, seeking to avoid confrontation with the Left of his party on some of these sticky international issues.’10
Some years later, Helen Clark, generally regarded as leading the anti-nuclear lobby, was said to have confirmed this. When asked by a Wisconsin Congressman why she had accepted Douglas’s policies when she disliked them, she said bluntly that there had been a trade-off by which they gained the anti-nuclear ship policy in return for going along with economic reform.11 Margaret Wilson thinks this was clearly understood, though never in a formal way. Both factions concentrated on their own concerns and, whether or not it was consciously considered by the reformers, opposing the anti-nuclear policy would have brought all the formidable fire of the Left on to the government’s economic policy.
Nothing of this appeared in the election campaign. Lange had been cautious about the Nuclear Free New Zealand Bill (he wanted to leave out nuclear propulsion), and it was agreed that he would keep a low profile in the debate on it. ‘Lange in Opposition was very careful of the nuclear issue’ was Richard Prebble’s judgement. He seemed ambivalent and gave no sign that this was a personal priority. He did not want to campaign on it during the election and the campaign committee agreed. Geoffrey Palmer told the Australian High Commissioner that the Labour Party had very deliberately chosen not to make it an election issue and his colleague Prebble concurred: ‘We wanted to campaign on the economy and ran the line that the nuclear Bill was just an excuse for an election as Muldoon could not balance the books.’ So Prebble was later ‘a little surprised when Lange made himself an anti-nuclear hero’.12
One enlivening aspect of the campaign was an unexpected intervention by the United States. Washington had become increasingly apprehensive about the way in which ANZUS, in the guise of ship visits, had become an election issue. Lange had earlier told Paul Wolfowitz, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, that isolationist feeling in the Labour Party, which he did not share, ran deep and was impenetrable to argument. It certainly ran deep: opposition to war and its weapons, as Mike Moore was later to point out, was part of Labour’s DNA going back to the First World War. After a visit to Wellington in April, during which he talked to Lange and senior Labour Members of Parliament, the American Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), Admiral Crowe, was half-persuaded that it was not going to be possible to work with them in managing the practical operations of the alliance.
The US began to see the uncomfortable outlines of its dilemma: to speak out would look like bullying a small country, but to stay silent would be to risk any understanding of its position going by default. Inaction might set off wider tremors. New Zealand had been an active participant in world affairs and had an influence far beyond its size – ‘whatever New Zealand decided to do in the future would have a long carry’. Wolfowitz and his colleagues saw it as a symbol of wider significance: isolationism in New Zealand could encourage it in Europe and elsewhere and lead to ‘unravelling’ in Australia.
And it was not just a small country; it was a close ally, with all the emotional and other ties that implied. To those in Washington who argued that New Zealand was no different from other small countries like Uruguay, Wolfowitz had a blunt retort: ‘If New Zealand was Uruguay we certainly would not be sitting on all this butter’ – American dairy surplus which the Administration felt unable to sell overseas because of the damage this would do to New Zealand’s butter market. So it was decided that the importance of what was at stake for the alliance overrode the usual rules and required a statement of Washington’s own view on ANZUS and ship visits.13
This was to invite controversy and the outcome suggested that it was unwise. The Administration spent much time considering the advisability and drafting the message which was cleared at the top by the Vice President, George H. W. Bush. But it concluded that the need to counter some of the claims being made in New Zealand justified the risk of becoming involved in someone else’s election. In particular it was felt necessary to stress that the United States attached ‘critical importance’ to port visits which were seen as part of Australia’s and New Zealand’s contribution to ANZUS, and to correct claims (by Rowling among others) that New Zealand had excluded nuclear ships in 1972-75 without calling the ANZUS relationship into question.14
The ambassador, Monroe Browne, was given discretion as to whether and how to use this material but Washington’s concern, and the fact that the statement was based on a major speech by Wolfowitz, left him in practice with little option.15 He put out a press statement stressing the importance of joint exercises and ship visits in maintaining the credibility of the alliance. He was also anxious to emphasise, ‘as we approach problems in any one area, we must be careful to see them in the perspective of the entire relationship’, making it clear that any change in the security ties would affect the wider association.
The Wolfowitz speech, given at the Australian Studies Center at Pennsylvania State University, was carefully considered, drafted and redrafted. It was wholeheartedly welcomed in Australia as conveying the strongest US commitment to ANZUS since the treaty was signed, but it was much less persuasive to New Zealanders. The Americans had failed to understand how statements which seemed to be plain matters of fact in Washington became amplified and reverberated in the heated atmosphere of a small nation. Lange dismissed it as a venture into the country’s internal debate which was ‘absolutely improper’ and the British High Commission thought its release had significant repercussions. It came just before the first television debate and so ANZUS was the first question put to the leaders. After watching this, the Acting British High Commissioner concluded that Lange could no longer manage ‘the review of ANZUS in such a way as to permit ship visits to continue’.
The campaign in general posed few problems for Lange whose easy appeal fully justified his party’s choice of him as leader. His opening speech concentrated on the themes of bringing the country together and the need for better management of the economy. There were no difficulties as he toured the country; speaking in sweeping generalities came easily to him and the crowds enjoyed the entertainment as well as the confidence of his speeches. His colleagues provided a little coaching for television. Moore played Muldoon in preparing him for the debates. When he snarled, ‘You’re just a fat man who has talked his way to the top’, Lange was temporarily at a loss. But the preparation worked. Muldoon the veteran came across as dispirited while Lange effortlessly talked his way to the top with the convincing promise of a fresh start.
The election result was a triumph for Labour and a rejection of the Muldoon policies.16 It was also a clear victory for anti-nuclear views. Three of the four parties who fought the election opposed nuclear weapons in New Zealand; together they gained 64 per cent of the vote. The Social Credit Party advocated armed neutrality, though apparently without totting up the cost. The New Zealand Party, a one-off party which gathered in disaffected National voters, seemed to lean rather to an unarmed neutrality, on the grounds that since no one was likely to attack the country, defence spending was a waste of money. Labour, which won a comfortable majority, was explicitly anti-nuclear, but even so it was doubtful whether many of the voters knew precisely what to expect. After the 1936 Presidential election a wise commentator remarked: ‘The people have spoken and Mr Roosevelt will tell us what they have said.’ Now New Zealand had spoken and, with varying degrees of apprehension, both the Right and the Left waited for Mr Lange to tell them what they had chosen.
The immediate result was a constitutional crisis. Helped by some hints from Roger Douglas (who was Labour’s finance spokesman), there had been an accelerating run on the New Zealand dollar in the course of the election campaign and it was clear that Labour in government would have to devalue. Because of the formalities involved in certifying the returns, however, the new government could not take office for twelve days after the vote. The well-established convention was that if any major decision had to be made the outgoing ministry would act on the advice of the incoming one. Muldoon, who was no respecter of conventions and had almost a phobia about devaluations, refused to act, and his officials had to close the foreign exchange markets. For the next two days the Prime Minister resisted all pressure to devalue until persuaded by his deputy, Jim McLay, that if he did not, the Governor-General might have to dismiss the dying government. He then telephoned the ambassador in Washington to ask how to get on the lecture circuit in the United States.17
Wellington in the midst of this turmoil was not the most suitable place for an international meeting but the snap election had coincided with long-scheduled arrangements for the ANZUS Council’s annual meeting. Both Australian and American officials had expected the gathering to be postponed, perhaps until December. Officials in Canberra were ‘astounded’ that the meeting was being held in the interregnum between two administrations, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Armitage at the Pentagon could see only difficulties if it went ahead. Norrish had suggested after the election date was announced that the meeting might be shifted to Canberra, but his then Minister rejected this as suggesting that his government expected to lose the election.
Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps from sheer stubbornness, Muldoon dug in his toes and insisted in going ahead with what Lange described as a meeting of the American Secretary of State and the Australian Foreign Minister with a backbench MP (Warren Cooper, the outgoing Foreign Minister). Lange was invited by Muldoon to attend but wisely declined; two governments could hardly represent New Zealand at the Council table, especially when they differed so markedly on the subject at issue. So despite the unreal atmosphere the talks went ahead. What with this, the crisis over devaluation and the excitement of the ‘Beyond ANZUS’ conference, Wolfowitz watching the television news one evening was moved to ask, ‘Is it always like this here?’18
On his way to Wellington, the American Secretary of State, who had been attending an ASEAN meeting in Indonesia, stopped for a night in Canberra to talk to Hawke. They were old friends with considerable respect for one another and Shultz among other things wanted to get Hawke’s view on what course his fellow Labour Party colleague was likely to take in New Zealand. As soon as his aircraft landed he drove to The Lodge where they talked in private and then over dinner with others present.19 Hawke made it clear that giving in to New Zealand would put him in an untenable position with his own party. Neither of them, though, wanted to prejudge events or take a strong line. At the end of the discussion Shultz had an understanding with Hawke on how to handle the issue – to hold firm but give Lange some time. Afterwards they put in a convivial telephone call to the East Mangere Town Hall to congratulate Lange on his thumping victory – a call that Hawke later complained Lange had viewed as an attempt to heavy him over his nuclear policy.20
A howling southerly storm greeted the American delegation on their arrival in New Zealand and the American aircrew’s unfamili-arity with the difficult landing conditions at Wellington meant they made the final stage of the journey in a Royal New Zealand Air Force plane. The caution was justified: Mrs Shultz was almost blown over as she emerged from the plane and David Laux’s glasses came off and went bowling away across the tarmac. But waiting for them inside was a warm welcome from Lange who, acting on a happy impulse, had flown down from Auckland to greet the party. Shultz was impressed by this ‘very unusual and much appreciated gesture’, and perhaps even more by the Prime Minister-elect’s statement to the waiting press that he ‘wanted to tell Mr Shultz that ANZUS was fundamental to our economic and defence way of life’.21
That evening the senior officials from the three delegations met to consider what sort of communiqué might issue from this strange meeting. In the way of international meetings one had already been drafted and circulated. Norrish now suggested that a new draft should be considered, one that better reflected the changed situation. The New Zealanders had prepared one and the Australians too had ideas for an ‘anodyne’ communiqué. The Americans, however, had decided in advance to treat the meeting as business-as-usual. They realised that the communiqué sentence on the importance of port visits would seem provocative to the incoming government but argued that constitutionally they were dealing with the existing Muldoon Government and should hold to the communiqué previously agreed. Underneath this constitutional propriety was the issue of French nuclear testing at an underground site in French Polynesia. In any new draft Australia and New Zealand would want language condemning these tests which the United States was reluctant to accept. The original communiqué survived the tussle, and was stillborn.
The next morning the American delegation met in Shultz’s room at the James Cook Hotel. Its eight members covered all the main players, from State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council, and because of this the decisions taken that morning set the tone for Washington’s subsequent management of the dispute. In the course of the discussion some argued that, if what they feared came to pass, Lange needed to know that the cost would be serious, including sanctions on trade. Shultz halted this by saying that when he was first issued with a rifle in the Marines he was told: ‘Never point this at someone unless you are willing to pull the trigger.’ He said flatly that he was not going to mingle defence and trade – they should be kept separate.22 Not everyone in the room agreed, but he used his subsequent press conference to lay this down as a marker.
Years later he said that it was his fixed intention from the start not to make an enemy of New Zealand – ‘we were too close for that’ – and so he was resolved to ensure that any retaliation was confined to the security field where the dispute arose. There was periodic pressure from some of his angry colleagues and from the Congress but ‘I won that battle’. He was helped in this by his strong relationship with President Reagan. He had private meetings bi-weekly with him, the only Cabinet member who did, and at one of these he discussed the matter with the President who totally supported his approach.23 Indeed, a week after the Wellington meeting, the President confirmed at a televised press conference that he did not see the problems with port access affecting trade with New Zealand. This did not stop other voices being raised from time to time but the Administration’s stance on sanctions never shifted from the position laid down by Shultz at the delegation meeting in Wellington.
When the Council meeting was over both Shultz and Hayden spoke to the press, and in doing so made clear the basic lines of each country’s attitude to the gathering controversy. Asked about whether port access was essential to the treaty, Shultz was blunt: ‘What kind of alliance is this if the military forces of the countries involved are not able to be in contact with each other?’ He contrasted this with the situation after the Vietnam War when people worried that the US was losing interest in the Pacific and fretted that its military presence was not more visible.
He firmly dismissed any trade implications: ‘The ANZUS alliance is a security and military alliance and that’s what we are discussing here.’ This led him equally firmly to brush aside Labour’s aspirations to broaden the scope of the agreement: ‘ANZUS is not an economic agreement in any sense and that is the extent of it.’
Bill Hayden, the Australian Foreign Minister, said that Australia was making clear its concerns about port access and the future of ANZUS but was putting no pressure on the New Zealand Government which had just won an election in which the issue was extensively debated. However, he also took the opportunity to give a hint to the incoming administration. He rejected the frequently repeated claim that the Labor leadership in Australia had walked away from its earlier policy on the treaty. Before the election it had promised a review of the treaty and had duly carried this out when it came to power. ‘What happened was that with the experience that we had in Government, there was a consolidation of our commitment to ANZUS.’24
Another meeting that afternoon turned out to be much more important in shaping the future course of the dispute. Before they left for Honolulu, Shultz and Wolfowitz called on Lange in the Leader of the Opposition’s office (once the wartime office of Peter Fraser) in Parliament Buildings. Lange had only Norrish with him and there was perhaps no reason to foresee that a quiet talk among four people would later lead to such sharp recriminations. That may be why no written record has turned up on either side and each had to fall back on their differing recollections of what had been said.25
Unsurprisingly, the difference turned on what that ambiguous figure, David Lange, was thought to have promised. The Americans believed that Lange had said that if he was given six months he would bring about some change in his party’s stand on ship visits. When he was leaving at the end of his term, in October 1985, the embittered ambassador, Monroe Browne, said in a television interview that Lange had asked for time to establish with his people the importance of ANZUS in the relationship and that port visits were important to the US. ‘It was our impression that he seriously meant to implement ANZUS as we had understood it and so, yes, we did agree that time might be of importance to him.’26
Lange indignantly denied this, calling the ambassador’s account ‘a sad swan-song of self-justification’. More convincingly, Norrish did not agree with it either. In his recollection, Lange did not promise that he would fix the problem. He did say ‘Give me six months’ during which he would be going round the various regional conferences and party gatherings. It might have been inferred from this that he would be making the case for ship visits but he did not say so. Norrish thought, though, that the tenor of the conversation would not have given the Americans any apprehensions about the future of ANZUS.27
Closer examination suggests that the misapprehension, though serious, was neither as wide nor as clear-cut as the ambassador and others in Washington came to believe. It seems unlikely that Lange would have promised to change Labour’s policy within six months – he had after all just been elected on a platform that was quite explicit about this. Wolfowitz said that Lange spoke about public opinion in New Zealand: a strong majority was pro-American but also had anti-nuclear sentiments, while a minority was simply anti-American. He talked about the existing Labour Party policy ‘to which he said he remained committed until it is changed’ and referred vaguely to the ‘Norwegian formula’ as perhaps opening the way for ship visits. There was no discussion of renegotiating ANZUS or reviewing the prominence of defence and security issues in the treaty, as was included in Labour’s policy.28
He did say that he needed a breathing space of six months to work on his party and Shultz was happy to agree that the US would not ask for a ship visit in that time. In Lange’s own account, Shultz pointed out that there were going to be difficulties but he was not prepared to make a snap decision; New Zealand and the US would have to sit down and talk through their differences.29 John Hughes, the State Department spokesman, later said that there was ‘certainly no commitment’ but the American side came away with the feeling that Lange would try to work things out.
These points seem unexceptionable enough to have caused such distrust but they came wrapped in the exuberant Lange rhetoric which may have left impressions not supported by his words. Everyone who ever worked with Lange was familiar with his manner when uneasy. The reassurances and the jokes tumbled out, the sub-clauses billowed like spinnakers and the hearer was submerged in a rush of friendliness and charm. His long-standing friend Richard Prebble called him ‘a chronic body language liar’ who would lead people to believe he was agreeing when he was not. He tells the story of a fellow Minister who came away from an interview convinced that he had the Prime Minister’s backing, only to find when he wrote out the words that Lange had not said anything of the sort. ‘It was partly that Lange hated conflict. He just would not confront people if it would cause conflict.’30 When dealing with a troublesome issue his precise meaning was usually chosen with the care of a lawyer, but the surge of comforting words and the non-verbal body language could give a very different impression.
In public Shultz took an optimistic view of the meeting, telling the American press on the plane going home that Lange was bright and energetic and ‘it was an excellent meeting on a personal and substantive level and in any way you want to characterize it’. He thought it a good harbinger for the future and laid the basis for a good across-the-board, cooperative relationship. In private the tough-minded former Marine was far from being carried away. Despite Wolfowitz’s later view that there was probably ‘excessive hope’ that Lange was another Hawke who understood the benefits of staying with the alliance, Shultz was quite clear that for all the friendly words there was no suggestion of a breakthrough. There was still a big problem ahead but he felt that an encouraging start had been made, and he told Hayden after the meeting that he felt a little more relaxed.31 In the end, Lange’s summary of the result for his deputy Geoffrey Palmer – ‘US expecting the NZ Government to find a way through, and that we would try’ – was probably as accurate as any.32
In any case there was little time for any undue optimism. Within three days of taking office the new Prime Minister was on television vividly reaffirming his party’s election policy. He was, as he sometimes said himself, always liable to be carried away by these occasions and he was still on a high after the excitement of the election, the devaluation crisis and taking office: ‘I tell you, there’s something about a crisis which is exhilarating … that sort of testing that people who are physical do.’ He confirmed that the government would renegotiate the treaty unless its anti-nuclear policy could be honoured. There would be no ‘buckling’ or (in the interviewer’s words) ‘no welshing on a commitment’ as the Australian Government had done. He accepted that there was a disagreement with Shultz but the treaty was more than a code-word for nuclear ships: ‘This government is not going to walk away from ANZUS.’ At the close he said a visit by a US warship would be unlikely before the next election: ‘and I don’t think that will mean the end of ANZUS either’.33
Washington was alarmed ‘by the manner in which Prime Minister Lange is painting himself into a corner’. These comments were far from the tone of his conversation with Shultz. Talking off-the-cuff on television did not make for measured pronouncements but the State Department saw a hardening pattern which did not augur well for ‘a future quiet dialogue’ on the issues. The ambassador was asked to see the Prime Minister to emphasise that the relationship was better served by private discussion than by publicly asserting the non-negotiability of New Zealand’s position – or ‘are we operating on erroneous assumptions?’
Armed with this directive, Monroe Browne went to the Beehive the same day. Lange said he hoped the US realised that anti-nuclear feelings in New Zealand went much wider than the radical fringe of the Labour Party and were held by good, solid church people as in the US. But he stressed that he was serious in wanting to work through the problem with the US – a solution had to be found, for the nuclear issue was linked to broader ones, including nuclear disarmament, relations with Australia, and the effect of New Zealand’s actions on Western security arrangements in other parts of the world: ‘My people will have to consider all this.’ At the end he promised to try to keep the matter out of public discussion and hoped the Americans would do the same.34
The occasion was smoothed over diplomatically with Lange agreeing to another meeting with Shultz in New York when the UN General Assembly met in September. But the first hints of disillusion had entered the relationship between the two and the Administration began to display a certain wariness. The Australians in Washington were told that whereas a month ago nobody on the National Security Council had heard of New Zealand, it was now on the agenda of every morning meeting.35 The American embassy in Wellington reported that the Prime Minister’s economic moves had proved popular but ‘after two weeks in office he has been somewhat erratic in foreign affairs matters’. In what would become a recurrent theme, it noted that Lange had difficulty reining himself in and then put its finger on the nub of Washington’s worry: ‘Though claiming in private conversations with the embassy that he desires to change the Labour Party’s policy, he has publicly strongly supported the party’s anti-nuclear policy, thereby making it extremely difficult for him eventually to reverse himself.’36
This dualism, the contrast between what Lange declared in public and said in private, dogged the dispute throughout. Though his advisers made the point to him several times, the Prime Minister did not seem able or willing to accept that anything he said, even on the spur of the moment, to an audience in New Zealand would be scrutinised minutely in Washington. He seemed to regard his speeches as the business only of New Zealanders and was irritated by American interest in his press conferences: ‘They pored over the transcripts with the intensity of scholars on the Dead Sea Scrolls, in order to get the mind-set of this guy Lange.’37 It left him open to the suspicion of double-dealing which for the Americans gradually hardened into certainty.
His hope was to establish in the minds of New Zealanders and Americans a distinction between the ANZUS alliance and what he argued was the purely operational question of ship visits. Acceptance of nuclear weapons, it was argued, was neither a historical nor an essential part of the treaty, and his government was determined to uphold New Zealand’s membership of the treaty. His view, repeated many times to the Americans, was that a departure from ANZUS would be politically very damaging for him, but that New Zealanders did not want nuclear weapons as part of it.38 The polls consistently bore him out: around three-quarters of those polled firmly supported ANZUS and were equally firmly opposed to nuclear weapons in New Zealand harbours.
What might in the diplomatic jargon of the day have been called Lange’s ‘two-track strategy’ led his harsher critics in Washington and elsewhere to regard him as a liar. Those who were more familiar with his ways might have seen it as a clear if dangerous example of his tendency to fend off trouble by adopting the views of whoever he was talking to at the time. But the double-dealing may in Lange’s mind have been simply the difference between his private views and the public support to which he felt committed by his deal with the Left. On one occasion, when talking over the problem with his advisers, he broke off, fell silent for a moment and then abruptly said, ‘Take what you want, said God, and pay for it.’ In quoting the Spanish proverb he was clearly following a train of thought, but whether he was musing on the dangers of alienating the Left or the Americans was never clear to his hearers. What happened, though, was that as he strongly and regularly reaffirmed the unbending nature of his government’s anti-nuclear policy he gradually became locked into his public position.