Gough Whitlam phoned Sir John Kerr mid-morning on 11 November 1975 to inform the Governor-General he wanted an appointment to recommend a half-Senate election as the next step in his campaign to break the Coalition’s blocking of the budget. It was a brief discussion. Kerr had to prepare for the Remembrance Day ceremony at the War Memorial at 11 a.m. Kerr asked Whitlam a critical question: would supply be available for the Senate campaign? Whitlam replied that it would not be available.
The Prime Minister, fixated on his plans, was blind to what this meant. In the days before the dismissal, the Labor Party succumbed to a folly—it became convinced that calling a half-Senate election, due before mid-1976, was its best resort. In truth, it was a doomed project. The idea was championed by Labor and ACTU president, Bob Hawke, the Labor federal executive was keen, Labor’s parliamentary party was enthusiastic and newspaper editorials backed the proposal. From the onset of the crisis on 16 October it had been an option for Whitlam that he had declined to take—but now he was pressing the trigger.
When the caucus met that morning there was spontaneous applause after Whitlam told his colleagues he would call a half-Senate election. As the party meeting broke and Labor MPs streamed into the lobbies and across King’s Hall where journalists were patrolling, the mood soon became euphoric. The polls were with Labor; the sense of a breaking point in the deadlock was high; public opinion would now be unleashed against the Opposition. Much Labor sentiment was that Malcolm Fraser would soon buckle. The government lobbies roared with hope.
Yet Labor was running on emotion not reason. And the worst offender was Whitlam. There had been an iron law within the government since mid-October—this was Whitlam’s crisis to manage. Only Gough would be dealing with Kerr because, it was assumed, only Gough could manage the Governor-General. Yet Whitlam committed blunder after blunder with his dogmatism and arrogance in dealing with Kerr.
The idea that the Governor-General would grant Whitlam his half-Senate election was more than high risk. It was a request Kerr was most unlikely to grant. This was because supply would expire before the end of November, funds for government services would dry up and there was only a remote chance a half-Senate election could resolve the crisis. One of the first items on a Governor-General’s check list when approving any election is to confirm with the Prime Minister that supply is available. That is the Prime Minister’s responsibility. Normally, it is routine. But not this time; supply was not available. It was improbable that Kerr, sensitive to his responsibilities at this time, would grant this election. Indeed, he gave it little attention since Kerr had a bigger issue on his mind by 11 November—dismissal.
If Kerr had granted the half-Senate election it would have been a crippling blow for the Fraser-led Opposition. It would have terminated its strategy of securing a general election at that time through the intervention of the Governor-General. On 10 November, interviewed by the ABC and asked if the Opposition was prepared to accept ‘anything short of an early House of Representatives election’, Fraser replied: ‘No, we are not.’ It is quite possible such a decision by Kerr would have put irresistible pressure on Fraser to retreat and pass supply. Fraser told his biographer, Philip Ayres, that the Opposition had ‘never addressed this question’. But his ‘guess’ was that the Opposition would have ‘let supply through’ in that situation.1
But Kerr couldn’t operate on guesswork or speculation about what might have happened. The fact he faced was that a half-Senate election in its own right was unlikely to resolve the crisis. He had no confidence in the government’s financing plan proposed as an alternative to supply. Kerr had decided—if the Senate had not cracked—the only solution to the crisis was a House of Representatives election.
In truth, Whitlam’s decision to call a half-Senate election on 11 November was evidence of the weakness of his position. He had failed to break Fraser. For twenty-six days Whitlam had applied maximum pressure on Fraser and his senators to force a retreat, with a singular lack of success. As Kerr said later: ‘Mr Whitlam had left his half-Senate election too late.’2 It was only a viable option if supply did not run out before polling day. In addition, there was almost no prospect the result of the half-Senate election would give Labor the numbers to pass the budget. The euphoria in the Labor lobbies was the elixir of delusion.
In his memoirs, Kerr said the decision he faced was ‘either to let him [Whitlam] have that election without supply, with consequent financial chaos, or to act, so as to ensure full elections for both Houses with full supply produced’.3 In Kerr’s 11 November statement on the dismissal he said of advice for a half-Senate election: ‘If such advice were given to me I should feel constrained to reject it because a half-Senate election held whilst supply continues to be denied does not guarantee a prompt or sufficiently clear prospect of the deadlock being resolved in accordance with proper principles.’4
From the onset of the crisis Whitlam’s priority was the ‘tough it out’ tactic (though he disliked the phrase), the stance he had foreshadowed at Goulburn on 12 September 1975. In that speech Whitlam had pointed out there was no obligation on a Prime Minister faced with a denial of supply to immediately advise an election, a proposition most lawyers, including Kerr, endorsed. In short, Whitlam had time before supply expired to remain in office and try to break the nerve of the Opposition.
His associated tactic was a half-Senate election, due before mid- 1976. Responding to the Senate’s denial of supply by calling the half-Senate election was a live option, but one on which Whitlam ran hot and cold. Claims by some observers that from the time the budget was blocked Whitlam was committed to a half-Senate election are wrong. Sometimes he sent that signal and sometimes he said he would not seek an election of any sort. Whitlam’s changes of mind on this option are documented in Kerr’s letters. Whitlam had also earlier suggested presenting budget bills to Kerr for royal assent that had only passed the House of Representatives. Whitlam and Labor failed to grasp that the half-Senate election was a rapidly diminishing option as the crisis advanced. If it was viable, it had to be exercised soon after the budget was blocked to maximise the chance of a result before supply expired. Once that was no longer possible, the option had little currency.
There was nothing new or unusual about this defect surrounding the half-Senate election. It had been discussed by Kerr and Whitlam much earlier. Indeed, in his letter to Charteris of 30 September, Kerr recounted a conversation with Whitlam the previous day about a possible crisis. Whitlam said if the budget was blocked he would seek a half-Senate election. (That would involve five senators from each state plus a sixth senator from New South Wales and Queensland, where casual vacancies had to be filled. In addition, it would involve the election of two senators from each of the territories—the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.) Kerr reported Whitlam’s tactic was ‘to say that if the Senate rejects the Bills the Senate should be the House to face the people’, and because a half-Senate election was due before mid-1976 that is what he would recommend.
Kerr said: ‘I asked the Prime Minister what he would do for supply whilst awaiting the half-Senate election.’ Whitlam conceded that if the Senate had forced a crisis by blocking the appropriation bills and if the Opposition remained solid then ‘the Commonwealth would be unable to meet its obligations’. Kerr pressed the issue. He asked whether Whitlam thought Fraser ‘would grant him temporary supply until after such a half-Senate election’. Whitlam replied that while this might be ‘possible’ he was ‘very doubtful’. This was hardly reassuring for the half-Senate election option.5 In short, Kerr and Whitlam had discussed the core problem with the half-Senate election option on 29 September—forty-three days before the Prime Minister proposed it on 11 November.
The Governor-General’s letter to Charteris depicts a Prime Minister still canvassing various options. He wrote: ‘We realised that there would be a profound constitutional crisis when the money started to run out in early November and from then on until any such election in early December, but he [Whitlam] says he will certainly not recommend a double dissolution of the House of Representatives and the Senate.’ Kerr said Whitlam’s view was that he ‘would argue to me that he is entitled to retain his commission for as long as he holds the confidence of the House of Representatives’.6
Whitlam put a fanciful proposition to Kerr in this conversation. According to Kerr he said ‘if he can get through until a half Senate election is over’ he would re-present the appropriation bills and, if they were rejected again, would advise a double dissolution in early 1976. This seemed to contradict his earlier remarks. The whole idea seemed absurd—a half-Senate election followed by a double dissolution election without supply for most of the time. It was a bizarre suggestion and hardly mentioned by Whitlam again. Anxious about his plans to visit London, Kerr ended the letter to Charteris by saying if there was a constitutional crisis involving ‘a half-Senate election at a time when even temporary supply is not available I shall be forced, of course, to stay at home to deal with it’.7
The day the budget was blocked, Whitlam told parliament: ‘It is the Senate which is on trial. It is the Senate which will have to submit to the judgment of the people.’8 But he did not seek a Senate election—the government’s poor electoral standing at the outset of the crisis hardly made this an attractive option.
After the crisis was triggered, Kerr wrote to the Palace on 17 October summarising Whitlam’s position after their discussion the previous evening: the Prime Minister would defy the Senate and ‘tough it out’, though ‘he may, in the end, recommend a half-Senate election’. But Whitlam had told Kerr ‘he would not be out to Yarralumla on the crisis for some time’.9 Kerr took some space to explain the significance of a possible half-Senate election option for Whitlam. The senators elected in any half-Senate election would not take their seats until 1 July 1976—except for six of them. The four senators elected from the territories and the two senators elected to fill single casual vacancies in New South Wales and Queensland would take their seats immediately. That is, an interim Senate would operate from the time of the election result until mid-1976, and Whitlam felt there was a prospect—though it was an outside prospect—that he might get sufficient Senate numbers at that time to thwart Fraser. It was this fear that had led the Federal Council of the Liberal Party to appeal earlier to the four non-Labor state premiers to advise their state governors not to issue writs in their states for such a Senate poll, an outrageous breach of election convention. It was a naked bid by the conservative parties to sabotage any half-Senate election.
In this letter, Kerr noted in passing the speculation that if the state governors were so advised by their non-Labor premiers then Whitlam might, in response, ask the Queen and Governor-General to intervene and direct the governors to issue the writs. He offered no comment on this speculation. However, on 20 October, Kerr wrote to Charteris that Whitlam’s position had hardened in the previous forty-eight hours: ‘He had now decided that he will advise no election of any kind whatsoever.’ Whitlam had embarked on what became known as his ‘smash the Senate’ crusade, another term he disliked, though it was accurate.10 ‘He told me that he is determined to break the alleged power of the Senate to force an election,’ Kerr wrote. The Governor-General told the Palace that Whitlam said to him: ‘I can and will break Mr Fraser, if my party stands behind me and it will.’ Kerr asked him: what about Fraser’s party? And Whitlam answered: ‘It will break.’11 Once the Senate backed down and passed the budget, Whitlam calculated the Senate would never again use supply bills to force an election.
During an interview on 20 October, Whitlam said: ‘I’ve never been so certain in anything in my life as I am, that the Senate’s money power will be broken as a result of this crisis. No future Australian government will ever be threatened by the Senate again, with a rejection of its budget, or a refusal of supply. Never again.’ Whitlam, in effect, was bent upon securing a constitutional change by political force.12
For Whitlam, the half-Senate election option was on the backburner for most of the crisis. Whitlam believed public opinion was decisively with him. On 22 October, Kerr told the Palace the government believed there was a ‘big backlash’ against Fraser and ‘some kind of retreat’ by the Opposition was likely.13 On 30 October he reported polls showing that 70 per cent of people in capital cities wanted the budget to pass. But Kerr also said ‘some people’ believed the Prime Minister would soon seek the half-Senate election. The Governor-General told the Palace: ‘Even if he seeks a half-Senate election there is no guarantee that supply will be granted even to get the country through the period of the campaign. Such an election would, if it were held, probably take place on 6th or 13th December.’14
Kerr was far ahead of Whitlam. He anticipated days ahead that Whitlam might eventually seek the half-Senate election. Kerr knew the critical problem of supply had not been solved.
On 27 October, Charteris, sensing the mood in Australia and the opinion polls, wrote: ‘The impression here is that the political battle is swinging in the Prime Minister’s favour.’15 Meanwhile compromises were being tested as the Governor-General reported to Charteris in a revealing letter of 6 November.
There had been a significant tactical reassessment by the Opposition. Fraser had visited Kerr to relay the compromise offer from the Opposition parties—they would pass the budget if Whitlam agreed to hold a general election at the same time as the half-Senate election before mid-1976. That meant a general election as late as May or even early June 1976.
When Kerr raised the compromise with Whitlam he refused to have anything to do with it. Whitlam was in ‘crash through or crash’ mode—he wanted total victory. However, Kerr told Charteris that if the compromise was rebuffed, Fraser had said ‘the Senate would go on deferring Supply indefinitely’. The Governor-General wrote: ‘I judge that he meant it.’16
Whitlam had misread the situation. His ‘tough it out’ tactic had still not broken Fraser despite the polls. Fraser’s compromise was designed to ensure the Opposition Leader looked reasonable. For Fraser, it was not a pathway to retreat. Having chopped and changed on the half-Senate election, Kerr reported in this 6 November letter that Whitlam was still in ‘two minds on the issue’. Meanwhile Kerr was making up his mind—he was heading towards a dismissal.
For Whitlam, momentum was vital. He needed to keep Fraser under pressure. The opinion polls and newspaper editorials calling for a resolution of the deadlock were helping. Whitlam drew hope from worried Coalition senators who feared Fraser had gone too far and was being too stubborn. The Prime Minister settled, finally, on the half-Senate election option. His aim was to intensify the political heat on Fraser.
On the morning of 11 November, a series of critical meetings lay ahead for Whitlam and Fraser. At 9 a.m. there was a meeting between the government and Opposition to investigate the final chance for a compromise. Whitlam, along with cabinet ministers Frank Crean and Fred Daly met Fraser, deputy Liberal leader Phillip Lynch and Country Party leader Doug Anthony. Whitlam was convinced he had the upper hand. He threatened Fraser with the half-Senate election. He believed the choice Fraser faced was either retreat to pass the budget or endure a five-week Senate campaign during which the Coalition side would almost certainly succumb under pressure. But Fraser showed no loss of nerve, just the reverse. Fraser repeated his own compromise offer made previously to Whitlam—the Opposition would pass the budget if Whitlam agreed to a general election by June 1976, seven months away. Whitlam wasn’t interested; he saw this as evidence of Fraser’s weakness.
Fraser asked Whitlam if he would be seeking supply to cover the half-Senate election period. Whitlam said he would not be doing so. This meant Whitlam recognised that supply would run out during the campaign. Fraser felt sure Kerr would not grant a Senate election without supply guaranteed. Fraser warned Whitlam not to take the Governor-General for granted—but Whitlam took no notice. Anthony said later Whitlam seemed ‘fanatical’ at this meeting. A worried Daly told Whitlam he felt a half-Senate election would achieve little. Crean was concerned, saying of the Coalition leaders ‘they’re pretty cocky’.17
Fraser went to his office at 9.45 a.m. and dictated a note to Tony Eggleton, federal director of the Liberal Party. It said Whitlam had told the meeting that ‘if he did not get a majority in that half-Senate election, he would still refuse to recommend a House of Representatives election’.18
Ironically, Whitlam’s mind had been so fixated on the half-Senate election option that the Prime Minister, at this moment, sacrificed the last chance to save himself. Whitlam should have accepted the Fraser compromise. This was a good deal for Labor.19 Consider what Whitlam would gain: he could declare victory in the crisis; the budget would be passed immediately; there would be no general election; Labor would stay in office as the nation went on summer holidays; Whitlam could spend Christmas at Kirribilli planning his agenda for the opening several months of 1976.
Only one concession was required: that Whitlam advise an election by June 1976. The constitutional reality was that a half-Senate election had to be held before mid-1976 anyway. Given this reality, Whitlam, most probably, would have held a double dissolution election in autumn 1976. By any rational judgement, Fraser would have been seen to have backed down. But Whitlam didn’t think like this. He had entered another realm. He had other goals—he was obsessed about breaking the Senate’s power forever; he was focused on destroying Fraser as a leader just as he had destroyed Fraser’s predecessor, Billy Snedden; and he was fixated about being able to say the Senate had played no role in determining the timing of the next House of Representatives election. Whitlam had succumbed to his own propaganda—if Australian democracy was the issue then nothing short of total victory would suffice. The Prime Minister believed he was on the brink of the greatest parliamentary and constitutional victory for the Labor Party since Federation. Why take a partial victory when total victory was at hand? But total victory depended upon Kerr.
Whitlam left the meeting with Fraser keen to make his appointment to advise the Governor-General and start the Senate campaign. The Governor-General had ample warning of Whitlam’s intentions. The Prime Minister’s Department had sent Government House a draft letter from Whitlam to Kerr requesting the Senate election—ahead of formal advice.20 Sending a draft letter was standard procedure.
There is no question: Kerr had prior notice but had not given formal approval. He had not the slightest intention of giving Whitlam the half-Senate election, and he was keeping that decision secret: if he alerted Whitlam to this fact the Prime Minister would know Kerr also intended to move against him. Indeed, the two decisions would come together. Kerr was committed to a campaign of deceit.
When Whitlam got Kerr on the phone he found it was not possible to see the Governor-General until 1 p.m.—but the problem was that Whitlam wanted to tell the morning caucus meeting about his decision. ‘I think I should give you the advice first,’ he said. But in the circumstances, he asked Kerr if he would agree to Whitlam telling his party room first. Kerr agreed.21
While Kerr and Whitlam had discussed a half-Senate election at various times in recent weeks, the Governor-General had not given his approval to this proposal. In their talks, while Kerr had not disagreed, he had not agreed. Kerr’s deliberate deception of Whitlam now extended to another level—allowing him to inform the party meeting of an election the Governor-General would not grant him. It was one component in a larger web of deception. Whitlam’s lunchtime visit to Government House was perfect for Kerr—the Prime Minister was walking into a trap.
Kerr said later that if Whitlam had not come to Government House on 11 November, he ‘should, on the worst view of it, have to send for him’.22 Kerr was correct in thinking that a half-Senate election without supply was an unacceptable decision for a Governor-General at that time. Nor could Kerr not have granted the election conditional on the provision of supply. This would have constituted a decisive political intervention by Kerr against Fraser. It is the job of the Prime Minister to obtain supply—not the job of the Governor-General to grant a Senate election on the condition that Fraser back down and terminate the crisis.
In the final analysis, Whitlam could not guarantee supply. This was the nub of the crisis and Whitlam’s half-Senate proposal would not resolve it. The Whitlam–Kerr conflict over the Senate election was just part of the larger Whitlam-Kerr conflict over how the crisis should be resolved. It highlighted Whitlam’s tactical ineptitude, Kerr’s unjustified deception of his Prime Minister and the singular breakdown in personal communications between the two men.
There was, however, a postscript to the half-Senate election issue. It triggered a series of allegations against the British government and its officials by Jenny Hocking. She asserts there is documentary evidence of a campaign by the British government, through officials at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), to undermine the Whitlam Government and actually thwart Whitlam’s half-Senate election option. These claims were subsequently taken up by the Australian Republic Movement head Peter FitzSimons who repeated Hocking’s allegation: ‘The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the British High Commission are in discussion about the possibility of interfering in domestic Australian politics … in the lead up to November 1975.’23
They arose from a chain of events that saw serious British concern arising from divisions in Australia over the half-Senate election. The Opposition parties had embraced the tactic of having the non-Labor premiers advise their state governors not to issue the writs for such an election. The question then became: what might Whitlam do? New South Wales governor Sir Roden Cutler raised with the British that Whitlam, in this dilemma, might advise the Governor-General to ask the Queen to instruct state governors to override advice from their premiers and issue the writs.
This scenario was remote in the extreme. The British High Commission, however, had reported to the FCO the risks inherent in such a situation. It would directly involve the Queen in Australian politics and the looming crisis. The possibility existed of a diabolical constitutional and political conflict. Whitlam could advise the Queen of Australia only in relation to Commonwealth matters. But in relation to state matters, there was a separate channel—the states spoke to the British government who then advised the Queen of the United Kingdom. These were outdated and unjustified constitutional arrangements which were subsequently abolished.
The British High Commission in its 17 October report to London said: ‘We think it very improbable that Mr Whitlam would embark on such a course.’ That is, they felt it unlikely Whitlam would approach the Queen through the Governor-General to compel the state governors to defy their premiers. This was almost certainly correct, though such advice from the premiers to sabotage the half-Senate election was a profound violation of democratic convention.24
The British ventured further that it was unlikely Sir John Kerr would act on such advice anyway because it would put the Queen in an unacceptable position—her role as Queen of Australia, acting on the advice of federal ministers, and her role as Queen of the United Kingdom, acting on the advice of British ministers in relation to the Australian states, would be in direct conflict. In short, the entire context of British concern was cautionary—to ensure the Queen would not be involved.
At this time the permanent undersecretary at the FCO, Sir Michael Palliser, was visiting Australia. On 17 October, Palliser lunched with Cutler. Palliser’s report to the British High Commissioner Sir Morrice James said Cutler raised this danger. Cutler said he was ‘reasonably confident’ Kerr would not involve the Queen in this way. Cutler told Palliser he felt the Governor-General knew ‘that neither the Queen nor HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] wanted to get involved in this Australian dispute’. James reported, in turn, to the FCO.25
A senior FCO official, Leonard Bevan, from the Southwest Pacific Department, wrote back a relieved message to James on 28 October saying, of the half-Senate election issue, that this confirmed the view that ‘Sir John Kerr could be relied upon to resist any precipitant action that might involve either HM The Queen or HMG in what is essentially an Australian domestic dispute’.26 The meaning could not be clearer—the senior British officials and the British High Commission were working to ensure their government was not involved. The documents, sighted by the authors, permit no other interpretation.
This was further confirmed in a separate 28 October memo from Bevan in London to British diplomat Brian Barder in Canberra. Bevan said: ‘In view of the long-standing self-government of the Australian states in electoral matters it would be improper for UK ministers to intervene or to advise Her Majesty to do so.’27 The manner in which the FCO and the British High Commission investigated this issue—in order to prevent any involvement by the Queen and the British government—was entirely legitimate.
The Australian government was alert to the problem. On 6 October, Don Emerton, acting first assistant secretary in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, advised Whitlam that in this situation ‘the British government would be likely to ask not to be involved in what they might claim to be a domestic matter’.28
Hocking, however, alleged that the FCO ‘had entered into the manifestly improper domain of British intervention in Australian politics’. Hocking said the FCO sought ‘to deceive the prime minister, to liaise in secret with the conservative states and, ultimately, to intervene in Australian politics to prevent the government holding a half Senate election to resolve a stalemate in the Senate over the passage of supply bills’.29
These claims are untenable and are not substantiated by the documents. The British government had no interest in undermining the Whitlam Government or thwarting a half-Senate election. Its only concern was to avoid the remote possibility of the Queen being involved in a domestic Australian conflict about the Senate election that hinged upon the most unlikely event that Whitlam might seek to involve the Queen in overruling state governors. That was improbable but efficient bureaucrats cover improbabilities. This further confirms that the approach of the British government as well as the Palace during the Australian crisis was strict non-intervention.
Hocking alleges that British officials were working against the Whitlam Government. She claims the FCO files ‘reveal a deep suspicion of the new government that quickly led to secrecy, deception and to routine breaches of the highest levels of confidentiality by both the British Prime Minister’s office and the Palace throughout the terms of the Whitlam government’.30 Once again, the evidence does not justify her allegation that the British government, led by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was trying to undermine the Whitlam Government and prevent a half-Senate election.
The British, in short, were focused on a different potential crisis to the one that eventuated on 11 November. When they said Kerr ‘could be relied upon’, they were referring not to the dismissal but to preventing the Queen being involved in a conflict over Senate election writs, a rather substantial difference. The ultimate point to make about the British is what they did—nothing.
Interviewed on this issue, constitutional law expert, Anne Twomey, said:
I have seen no evidence at all in the Palace letters or in the files of the British government that it wanted the dismissal of the Whitlam government or that it was seeking to thwart a half-Senate election. The British government in 1975 was a Labour government. It had no ideological interest in seeking the dismissal of a Labor government in Australia. The only concern expressed by British officials at the time was that the Queen could be drawn into a political controversy … so the UK government did not involve itself, and left the issue to be resolved in Australia.31
British High Commissioner Morrice James was a penetrating critic of the dismissal, contrary to unfounded suggestions he wanted to see the back of Whitlam. In our previous book we revealed his nine-page secret report to London on 20 November 1975. James wrote:
By moving when he [Kerr] did, he laid himself open to the charge that he jumped the gun … Perhaps a straightforward demand by the Governor-General that Mr Whitlam should take some more positive step, or else face dismissal, might have broken up the log jam. Certainly Sir John Kerr’s action seems to have been based on a series of assumptions, any one of which might legitimately have been regarded as unwarranted.32
The timing and manner of the dismissal also disturbed the British Labour government. It was criticised by Harold Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines in his memoirs.33 Bernard Donoughue, who ran the policy unit at Number 10, remembered the reaction in an interview with Troy Bramston. ‘I recall the shock at his dismissal,’ Donoughue said. ‘Wilson was always very interested in Australia, he got on well with Whitlam and was a great Commonwealth man.’34
The notion that the British government along with both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Buckingham Palace were working against Whitlam and thwarting his plans may have an emotional and conspiratorial appeal but it does not reflect the reality of what happened.