In the second half of 1950 the focus of my work underwent a big change, precipitated by North Korea’s military invasion of the South. My advisory role was no longer concerned primarily with the economic organs of the United Nations and the new Colombo Plan for aid in Southeast Asia. Spender and Watt now looked to my division to advise on the political and constitutional objectives for the military intervention in defence of South Korea to be laid down in the United Nations and advocated through diplomatic channels. I was drawn into helping to define a security policy for Australia that satisfied several interests—domestic, political, and diplomatic—in relations with the Americans and within the British Commonwealth. They were not easy to reconcile within the framework of the UN approval that was required for the UN campaign. There were sceptics in the non-aligned world about the validity of Western intervention in an Asian country; and when the Communist Chinese entered the war (or when that seemed a possibility to be avoided), disagreement spread over such questions as the admission of Peking [Beijing] to the Chinese seat in the UN Security Council, and whether Peking’s claims on Taiwan against Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] should be resisted militarily. On these matters there were Anglo-American disagreements and hardline opinion in the United States. In Australia, particularly after China entered the war, Spender chose to argue against offering political rewards to aggressors, an attitude having wide support as memories of pre-war fascism in Europe exerted their influence. And Spender’s supreme objective was to earn agreement from the United States to give him a security treaty, an enterprise in which he had no support from Britain.

The work undertaken by myself and others in this tangle of interests is included in Robert O’Neill’s official history^[5] and need not be repeated here. But it may be of interest to record some of the ideas which influenced me in tracing my eventual passage into work on Australia’s military capabilities as a Pacific nation, with its strategic interest centred on its near neighbourhood rather than Europe, the Middle East or North Asia.

In 1950 we went militarily into North Asia with Australian ground forces. This was a high policy decision fathered by Spender who pushed it through, past what I believe to have been somewhat bewildered colleagues, while fortuitously his cautious Prime Minister, R.G. Menzies, was abroad and unable to take part. Once the decision was made, I advocated, unsuccessfully, that we make a larger military contribution. It was not that I saw any reason for Australian sacrifices to protect the Korean people, governed by a corrupt leader; nor did I see much evidence of spontaneous popular sympathy for this remote people. But our membership of the UN Commission for the Unification of Korea, which Evatt had sponsored and where we were represented by the highly regarded James Plimsoll, gave us a moral as well as a practical duty to come to the aid of the South.

Moreover, preservation of the possibility of a new collective security being founded, we hoped, on the United States had to be fostered. But it should not be at the price, as I saw it, of Australia being dragged into a new distant conflict of dubious merit. I hoped the Government would accept advice not to commit itself to a long-term commitment to give military support to whatever government might emerge in Korea after the North Korean Army had been quelled. In particular I was moved by believing then, and also in subsequent years of crisis in the Western Pacific, that the Government of mainland China should not be provoked into war that could spread into Southeast Asia and the approaches to Australia. I took this view when, with a final peace in Korea yet to be settled, the French were overrun by nationalist forces in Indo-China. While the negotiations for an armistice in Korea were not succeeding, we also had to express attitudes, in New York and Washington, on the activities of General Douglas MacArthur in his free interpretation of his political instructions.

Spender took me to London in early 1951 as he carried his energetic and single-minded campaign to a sceptical British audience. I recall the visit as one of the most determined forays of its kind that I have witnessed. Meetings and public addresses were packed into a few days, before he went on to Washington to take a very important opportunity to put his case for a security treaty direct to President Harry Truman. He left me behind in London, entrusted with the task of composing a telegram to Menzies ranging widely (and somewhat indeterminately) over all the issues.

If historians, when making their meticulous interpretations of what they read, knew how some papers originated, it might lighten their days (and their prose). On his journey to Southampton to join the RMS Queen Mary, Spender sat me in the ‘dickey seat’ of his Daimler to record his thoughts and his instructions. His staccato speech seemed, as always, to be in a race with the agility of his mind. We wound through the villages of southern England cloaked in darkness, except when lights, apparently relics of the Second World War, sporadically illuminated the moving vehicle. They proved essential for making crude handwritten notes. At our destination we parted company in his cabin after he gave me his second thoughts (Spender was not a man of few words), interrupted by an altercation with a majestically uniformed purser upon whom Spender vented his displeasure at the inadequacy of the cabin that Cunard had provided to the Foreign Minister of Australia.

In London I pieced together what I thought Spender had told me to say. The telegram to Canberra is now a small piece in the published history of the times^[6] and I doubt that Spender ever saw what he is recorded as saying to his Prime Minster. I had anxieties in those days, but I also had fun.

In the 1950s the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs had no role in decisions on the development of the three arms of the defence force. But when it came to their deployment, membership of the Defence Committee, and advisory sessions with Ministers from time to time, enabled the External Affairs Secretary to express his judgement on where they should not be deployed. It is not possible to say how much influence we had of this kind; for example, in opposing military support to the Dutch in West New Guinea, or in advising the Government to argue the Americans out of defending the off-shore islands in support of Chiang Kai-shek against attacks from the mainland. In the final days of the attempts to settle peace terms for the conflict with China over Korea (and over the issue of repatriation of prisoners of war), we in External Affairs were wary of an American idea of a pledge by the allies in Korea, declared to China, to take punitive action if China broke the negotiated agreements. Widening the war was one of our fears during those years.

These examples of the interconnected interests of External Affairs and Defence illustrate why over some 30 years I held to the view that administrative and inter-Ministerial arrangements were essential to make possible a consensus on security policy. Contrary to the conventional thought that it was only a matter of restraining unwise military initiatives, I came in later years to believe that restraint was needed on the temptation, particularly for Prime Ministers, to inflate Australia’s influence in the world, making commitments that outran the community’s willingness to provide the resources needed by the Defence Force if Australia’s military capability were put to the test.

In mid-1951 R.G. (later Lord) Casey replaced Spender, who had chosen to become Ambassador to the United States. Casey took me on several overseas missions. Those to Southeast Asia reflected his interest in the progress of the British military commanders in Malaya and Singapore in subduing the jungle insurgency. He also wanted to meet and form an impression of the emerging indigenous political leaders. I also accompanied him on a later tour through Cairo and several European capitals, when he led the delegation to the UN General Assembly in Paris. Casey was dismayed by the acrimony of the political debates and by the ferocity of the attacks of Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet delegate, on the Western alliance.

When I returned to Canberra in early 1952 I was again advising on the efforts to break the conflict between voluntary and compulsory repatriation of prisoners of war, in order to reach a settlement with the Chinese for an armistice in Korea. At year’s end I was appointed to the embassy in Washington, with the rank of Minister, under Spender, in order to pursue this and other matters. I was Australia’s liaison officer with senior officers of the US State Department consulting the 16 force contributors in Korea. One of the unrecorded duties that I was given was to exercise restraint on Spender in his free-running presentation of views, often at odds with those of Casey and Watt, on such matters as the Korean negotiations, Indonesia and Dutch New Guinea.

My assignment was cut short when Casey, on a visit to Washington, told me of Watt’s desire for a post in Southeast Asia, and offered me appointment as Secretary of the Department. After 12 months in our new home, I packed up my family again, disrupting the children’s schooling,^[7] and returned to Canberra to take up my new post in January 1954.

While in Washington I saw at first hand the way the Defence Department handled defence relations with the Americans—through a military mission not integrated into the embassy and one senior officer in the embassy. Beyond attending to routine business concerning relations between the armed Services of the two countries, there seemed to be little interest in reporting the defence policies of the United States towards Asia and the vigorous public debates in Congress and elsewhere which had a part in shaping them. Nor was there much evidence of guidance from Melbourne on this subject. Then, and later in Canberra, I wondered whether there was a reluctance to grant Casey leadership in security diplomacy or, more simply, slowness in recognising the implications of the 1951 ANZUS Treaty.

In my new post in Canberra I was propelled by the events of 1954 into helping the Government to respond to the recurring crises in the Western Pacific. The Government sought to attract US involvement for the first time in arresting the spread of communist influence on the Southeast Asian mainland, following the collapse of the French in Indo-China. Support for the legitimacy of the Saigon Government was needed after acceptable terms could not be reached with the communist north for unification of Vietnam in the Geneva Conference. It was a year in which effective cooperation with the Department of Defence on the deteriorating situation to our north had a renewed urgency. Steps were needed to overcome the obstacles to quick and effective cooperation.