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4.7.8
By Tom Heenan, Lecturer, National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University; It is a perverse tribute to the journalist Wilfred Burchett that, 25 years after his death, major Australian media continue to devote space to denigrating him. Robert Manne, Australia’s “Number One public intellectual”, took 10 pages of the June issue of his magazine The Monthly to condemn Burchett. In the same month, Mark Aarons wrote in similar vein for The Australian, and Philip Adams hosted both authors on his Radio National program Late Night Live. For three decades, as a former columnist and then editor of Quadrant magazine, and now as Chairman of the Board of The Monthly, Robert Manne has been the central figure in the assaults on Burchett’s reputation. His recent rearguard action, conceding much ground but firing loud salvos as he retreats, opens an illuminating window on Australian political and intellectual history. It illustrates Manne’s tendency to consider selectively other scholars’ research and his penchant for redefining the terms of an argument to suit his current agenda. Robert Manne first took up cudgels against Burchett in 1985, in an article published in Quadrant, which awarded him a prize for it. There he accused Burchett of a multitude of sins: working as a KGB agent; a Korean War torturer and brainwasher of POWs; black-marketeer; black-mailer; black-guard; womaniser; alcoholic; Soviet agent of influence; and fabricator of germ warfare propaganda stories, whose treacherous activities, had they been properly investigated, would have got him hanged for treason. Twenty-three years later, Manne has modified his view. He now concludes that Burchett was a journalist of “very considerable talent” with “a genuine instinct for human equality”, who had ventured to Berlin under Nazi rule in a “noble” effort “to help Jews escape to Australia”. Manne thus omits his earlier grotesque comparison of Burchett to the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. On Hiroshima, 63 years after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Manne now acknowledges for the first time that Burchett’s exclusive report from the target city weeks after its destruction was a scoop “of world-historical importance”. He also concedes (again for the first time) that Burchett “backed the right horse” on the war in Vietnam, “where opposition to American behaviour turned out to be right”. In his most astonishing reversal, Manne now concedes that Burchett “probably” never did work for the KGB. On many matters, therefore, it seems Manne was totally wrong. His retractions have vindicated the views of his long-time targets, including some of us. (See Ben Kiernan’s essay, “The Making of a Myth: Wilfred Burchett and the KGB,” in his 1986 anthology, Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983, and Gavan McCormack, “The New Right and Human Rights: Cultural Freedom and the ‘Burchett Affair’”, Meanjin 3/1986.) Attempting to explain “the recent rise in Wilfred Burchett’s reputation”, Manne cites the family’s determination, anti-American sentiment since the invasion of Iraq, and the flaws of the Australian Left, but he omits a key factor: the falsity of charges long levelled by Burchett’s critics like himself.
AN APOLOGIAby Wilfred Burchett (Nation Review, August 1972) Apparently because I have been involved in two obscene acts, one committed with Dr. Kissinger in the West Wing of the White House, another with Senator Edward Kennedy and former Chief Justice Earl Warren at a New York Hotel, I have become involved in the American presidential elections. This is the only conclusion to be drawn from studying the US Congressional Record (the Americas equivalent of Hansard) of December 17, 1971 and July 20, 1972, and the immediate follow-up of the recorded Remarks concerning myself. As The Review and Mr. Gordon Barton are mentioned by implication as associated with my over-all guilt, Review readers are entitled to be informed as to the facts. On July 20, 1972 a congressman opened up his Remarks for the Congressional Record as follows: “Mr. Speaker, on July 17, I presented an item from Mr. Edward Hunter’s Tactics (1) dealing with Wilfred Burchett, journalist for the international Communist conspiracy. Today I would like to enter more on this subject of Burchett that deals with the effect that this individual has had directly on the contemporary foreign policy of the United States. An article from Tactics follows: [(1) Edward Hunter’s chief claim to fame is that he launched the term “brain-washing” on the western world in the early days of McCarthyism. Tactics is presumably a magazine published by him with the approval of the John Birch Society] DESECRATION OF THE WHITE HOUSE. KISSINGER AND BURCHETT CONFER. “Wilfred Burchett, deprived of a passport by his native Australia because of his aid to the enemy during the Korean war, who seduced captive Americans into treason in the North Korean p.o.w. camps, has just been secretly welcomed into White House offices for consultation. This constitutes unparalleled desecration of the White House... No agent of the President – indeed no President – has the right to desecrate, the White House and the executive offices in this manner. If this is the sort of price we have to pay for President Nixon to be received in Peking, it is much, much too dishonorable. Surely American veterans of the Korean war would have been foremost among those protesting, if this obscene (My underlining, W.B.) act had not been perpetrated in secrecy...” It seems that the horror at this, and other obscenities listed hereunder, was sufficient to project the congressman into the presidential race to try to prevent any future such desecrations and obscenities. For it was none other than John G. Schmitz, a Republican member from California, shining light of the John Birch Society (which once listed President Eisenhower as a Communist) and designated on August 4 by the America Party to replace Govenor George Wallace of Alabama as the presidential candidate of the ultra-rightist racists. Had this been an isolated coincidence, I would have let the matter rest. But there was something familiar in the Schmitz text, of which I have quoted only two of the sixty-one paragraphs. On checking my files I discovered that sixty of the paragraphs were an exact verbatim copy from a still longer set of Remarks about myself inserted into the Congressional Record on December 17, 1971, by the Honorable John M. Ashbrook, Republican from Ohio. Very shortly after his literary effort for the Record, Ashbrook announced his candidature as a right-wing opponent of Richard Milhouse Nixon for the Republican nomination. He got 5 percent of the vote in the first of the primaries – in New Hampshire in March. Reading through the Schmitz plagiarised version of Ashbrook, I felt that I understood at last the significance of another obscene act in which I had Participated in Hanchow (Red China) – the ardour with which President Nixon wrung my hand after Chou En-lai had introduced us. “Brother!”, he was saying in effect, “At least we have the same rat-bag enemies!” But is attacking Burchett a qualifying test for the near-fascist fringe of Nixon’s rightist opponents? The second Schmitz-Ashbrook accusation of obscene conduct was recorded when an ultra-rightist newsletter “reported Burchett as occupying table 56 at the October 29 (1971) meeting in New York of the Fund For Peace. The State and Justice Departments had secretly waived the law that justifiably deprived him of a visa, while the press looked the other way. Participation in such a program was an obscene act (my underlining) but Sen. Edward Kennedy and former Chief Justice Earl Warren were among the speakers...” (In fact I was in New York as a journalist accredited to the United Nations to cover the China. Debate for The Review and a Paris fortnightly. To have denied me a visa would have been a violation of press freedom and of the role of the United States as host country to the United Nations.) Samples of the crimes that have made association with me an obscenity include the following: “Although he authored some of the most vicious books against the United States, venting his spleen in characteristic communist manner, such papers as the New York Times covered up for him while giving him a prestige as simply an Australian journalist with good contacts among the communists. He sure had, as their bought and paid for operative! “This processed prestige enlarged his image...” and “... suited the purposes of Moscow and Peking on such crucial military maneuvers as inducing the United States to cease its bombings of North Vietnam, on the implied promise that Hanoi then would engage in ‘meaningful’ negotiations to end the war. “Burchett’s primary role since the Korean War has been in that area, to lull the United States and other free nations into actions that diplomatically or militarily push them towards defeat. He is worth whole red army divisions in this role...” Before quoting further from the identical twin Remarks, I feel impelled to reveal other obscenities which the Honorables Schmitz-Ashbrook cannot know about but which should be worth a few thousand votes to Schmitz and the America Party. One was committed in the hotel Royal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia when on March 16, 1967 I had a long conversation with an American senator. We discussed the war in Vietnam, the prospects for peace by negotiations and related subjects. I emphasised that a major mistake by Washington was to interpret every peace move by Hanoi as a sign that North Vietnam was about to “crack” and thus doubling the bomb dosage would bring about complete collapse. The senator whom I found genuinely concerned about the war, asked whether Hanoi felt that the 1968 election year would be decisive for the war. I replied, based on a recent visit to Hanoi: “No! Neither the 1968 elections nor the 1972 elections…” I gave him an autographed copy of my most recent book, at that time, on Vietnam. In other words (Ashbrook-Schmitz-Hunter words) I “brain-washed” the senator! The result, at least as the Honorables Ashbrook-Schmitz must view them, is that the US Senate is jingling in Burchett’s pocket alongside half a dozen seduced, governments. On August 3, 1972 the US Senate, by a vote of 50 to 47 voted to cut off funds to force a total withdrawal from Vietnam within four months, providing US POWs were released within that time. This – perhaps historic – amendment to the Defence Procurement Bill, passed by 92 votes to 5, was sponsored by Senator Edward W. Brooke, Republican of Massachusetts, my Phnom Penh interlocutor, and – a special bonus for Schmitz – racially BLACK! While I am in the confessing mood, I feel I must complete the list of obscene acts by adding (1) I was caught by the cameras with Jane Fonda in my arms at Orly airport in Paris on Sunday, July 23 as she arrived from Hanoi; (2) I had a four-hour tête-à-tête luncheon with Governor Harriman in his suite at the Crillon Hotel at the start of the Paris peace talks; (3) I occupied table 132 at the America Hotel on October 10, 1971 at a campaign-support luncheon for Senator George McGovern. Chairman at the lunch was economist-diplomat Kenneth Galbraith, whom a demented Soviet defector and self-confessed pathological liar, Yuri Krotkov (Karlin) had named, together with myself, the former French and Indian ambassadors to Moscow and many others, as signed-up “K.G.B. agents.” Apparently Britain’s MI5 (secret service) department had also been bought up by the K.G.B. because Krotkov suspected they tried to poison him with lethal headache pills after paying him a hundred pounds to scram, in exchange for a written undertaking by Krotkov never to repeat in public the scandalous balderdash about his success in recruiting diplomats and others through a stable of Bolshoi ballerinas which he boasted were at his disposal for this purpose. “I, Yuri Vasiliyevich Krotkov, also known as George Moore,” reads the document as reproduced by the U.S. Government Printing Office, “voluntarily desire to give the following undertaking to the British authorities who have been concerned with my case… I undertake not to publish or cause to be published or to disseminate to any person outside British government employment any of the information which I have given to the British authorities, either orally or in writing, and relating to the involvement with the K.G.B. (Committee for State Security in the USSR), either in the USSR or elsewhere, of any national of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, the United States of America, Belgium, Holland, India, Pakistan and Mexico...” Scorned in England, Krotkov however found a sympathetic listener – for the MI5 poisoning attempt and all – in J.G. Sourwine, ideological father of McCarthyism in the USA, Chief Counsel for the discredited and near-defunct “Sub-Committee to Investigate The Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws.” It is on Krotkov’s ravings, as extracted by Sourwine that the main part of the Schmitz-Ashbrook Remarks are based, and the various “acts of obscenity” pin-pointed. One of my chief crimes, and that of my associates-in-guilt, has been that of trying to take a war away from the Pentagon. My Korean experiences should have warned me that that is the one absolutely unforgivable offence. “Significantly,” continues the account, “Paul Scott’s column of Nov. 12, 1970 said Kissinger has been deeply involved in secret talks with Hanoi when he set up his own communication link with the North Vietnamese. Two ‘mysterious’ French friends of Burchett were named as go-betweens....” Schmitz-Ashbrook then refer to my passport difficulties as an obstacle to his clandestine operations, and continues as follows: “British libel laws are thorny affairs for the press, much more than in the U.S. The new generation that has been indoctrinated as much as educated is mostly ignorant about the recent past. So Burchett in 1969 took advantage of an accurate article about him by the Australian correspondent, Denis Warner, to sue for libel. “He brazenly used journalism as a cover, denying his communist connections, depending on the passage of years and, the rise of a appeasement climate to deprive the defence of witnesses who could testify to his treason. If he could regain his Australian passport, his use as a red agent would be immensely increased. In addition the whole red network would be enormously benefited. If so obvious a communist operative could win a costly libel suit, an invaluable immunity would be conferred on red agents generally. No newspaper would dare identify any such enemy of the state. Indeed the mere filing of such a suit has such an impact, for it puts the defense to great experience and, inconvenience...” Schmitz and Ashbrook seem unusually well informed about the process of the libel action. They complain that Krotkov’s were suppressed in Australia although: “A copy of the testimony had been promptly sent there and was in the hands of editors. Australian correspondents in Washington were informed. Yet nothing appeared in any Australian publication. “Nothing appeared in England, either. Burchett had sued there, too. But as the first suit was filed in the Supreme Court of Australia, against Warner and the Melbourne Herald, the defense argued that the case first should be tried in Australia, and then in London. Burchett preferred London as a softer push, but the court disagreed with him... Such details are known to few people and says much for contacts between the John Birchers and certain right-wing circles in my native Australia. I had to file a suit in London because of the almost insuperable difficulties in getting my own body into Australia. Schmitz and Ashbrook make a passing reference to this also, referring to the fact that: “Burchett managed a quick trip in early 1970, flying to Noumea, capital of French New Caledonia, where a maverick Australian publisher sent his own plane to bring him in (thanks Gordon Barton, W.B.) presenting the government with a fait accompli. Burchett’s reception was such that he soon left, again without any Australian identity documents.” One would have thought that if one tenth the accusations against me by Schmitz and Ashbrook and their ideological counterparts in Australia could be legally substantiated, the Australian Government would have been dying to get their hands on me! Instead, they bullied international airlines to keep me out. “This is the man Kissinger honored by receiving him in the White House executive offices. No man has the right to thus dishonor our executive offices, irrespective of technicalities. It is an affront to the nation...” The authors note with satisfaction that some of Krotkov’s testimony “was read into the Australian Senate’s Record (by Senator Gair, of the wholly pro-American “Democratic Labour Party”, Australia’s equivalent of the John Birch Society, WB), the Senate being less newsmaking and influential in that land than its House of Representatives…” Could it be that the DLP is in alliance with the John Birchers? Someone keeps them informed. Continuing with the Krotkov “revelations” Scmitz-Ashbrook record that: “One Sydney newspaper used a few paragraphs; every other daily in Australia ignored that important development…” Then comes one really dramatic revelation: “One letter from an Australian contact contained this startling statement: ‘Wilfred Burchett is now interviewed frequently by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the Australian equivalent of the BBC, as the distinguished Australian correspondent. He writes a regular weekly column for a widely read Sunday newspaper – no word of course, about his past and present connections. “This sounded inconceivable at the time. Burchett did send dispatches regularly to The Guardian in New York, and these might have been meant. Surely some paper would have discovered his presence in the U.S. and reported it, as had been done in the Johnson administration…” Indeed, as readers will recall, I sent fortnightly dispatches to Afrique-Asie, from UN headquarters throughout the entire period of the China Debate – also to Melbourne and New York weeklies – having been accredited through normal procedures as I had been in late 1968. For Schmitz and Ashbrook it was inconceivable! How could I have slipped through the fine mesh of the security net? The answer came from Australia: “An informed Australian contact on Nov. 24 (1971) sent a letter that solved the mystery of the red agent’s trip to the United States, in spite of legal barriers. Kissinger wanted it! The letter enclosed an article in the Melbourne Age of that day, written by Bruce Grant: ‘regarded as the leading commentator in this country... what he has to say has wide acceptance. The article is headlined, ‘What did Dr. Kissinger Tell Wilfred Burchett?’...” Schmitz and Ashbrook seem interchangeable, not only as contributors of identical Remarks to the Congressional Record, but as presidential contenders. Schmitz at first intended, as Ashbrook, to outflank Nixon from the right. But he was dumped from the Republican state, even for re-election in California, while Ashbrook was rubbed out as a Republican rival to Nixon for the presidency at the New Hampshire and other primaries. Schmitz thus switched to the racist America Party to become an official candidate for the presidency. Perhaps the pair of them feel slightly mollified regarding the Kissinger-Burchett conspiracy to know that the August number of Le Monde Diplomatique, probably the most prestigious monthly in the world on international affairs, has a lead story by Burchett violently attacking Kissinger for his policy on Vietnam! © The Estate of Wilfred Burchett |
