My early months working under Fraser were spent chiefly on establishing the new administrative apparatus already described, rather than on policy advising. Fraser for his part was still wrestling with the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, in the atmosphere of public passion and protest that had built up over many months. I had not experienced this. In India, with no television and only meagre radio reports from Australia, my eyes had been on that country’s turmoil, its military tensions and its conflicts with its neighbours. I was told of Fraser’s earlier attempt, when he was Army Minister, to start an orderly withdrawal of ground troops from Vietnam. It had been difficult to calibrate such a withdrawal with unpredictable American withdrawals in a way that avoided appearing simply to do what the Americans did. I learned of Fraser’s belief in using skills within Army units in forms of civil assistance to the community to foster support for the Saigon Government.

Handling our military presence in Vietnam, with its conscripted component, in the face of popular protests, was a major preoccupation for Fraser. But he had also committed himself, in his 10 March 1970 statement, to a programme of extensive changes. In addition, there was another burning problem—the Government’s failure to achieve delivery of the F‑111, the subject of accusations of mounting costs and Labor taunts in Parliament.

Fraser decided that the delivery problem had to be solved. There was a sharp difference with the Air Force over our insistence on bringing defence scientists in to advise him on the feasibility of the Americans solving the metal fatigue problem that had crippled the retractable wing system of the aircraft. The Air Force relied on its powerful engineering branch to monitor the situation. I had no doubt that it also wanted to preserve its exclusive relations with the US Air Force, whose goodwill they might lose if our negotiating tactics impacted on the US Air Force budget.

Believing the long-running controversy in Parliament to be politically intolerable, Fraser led a team to Washington. He made me a member, along with the Secretary of the Air Department (Fred J. Green) and the Chief of Air Staff (Air Marshal Colin Hannah). On the eve of meeting the Americans, Fraser assembled his team for a late Sunday night session in the Australian Embassy chancery to try out various ways of approaching the Americans. Playing devil’s advocate, Fraser shot down most of the arguments that we suggested, based on our agreement to accept supply of an airworthy F-111. Following loss of sleep during the journey to Washington, the occasion overwhelmed both Hannah and Green; one of them went to bed for several days.

Fraser doubted that the Air Department’s conciliatory approach would give us satisfaction. He decided to go over the head of both Air Forces. He presented to Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, a largely political case about the damage to defence relations. He reminded the American that the Labor Opposition, who had attacked the transaction from the beginning, took a different view of our ANZUS association with the Americans. Fraser asked, in effect, that the Americans produce a viable aircraft or give us our money back. As Fraser himself has subsequently recorded,^[19] the venue of the negotiation shifted from the Pentagon to a stadium holding a baseball game that Laird wanted to watch. Perched on uncomfortable benches among shouting spectators, in an atmosphere redolent of hot dogs, the two negotiators went on with their business.

After stressing the need for a viable aircraft in our joint strategic interests, Fraser accepted an offer to lease F-4 Phantom aircraft to bridge the gap until the F-111 problem was solved. Eventually we took delivery of this technologically advanced aircraft at a cost that was, in the context of rapidly rising prices, relatively modest, despite Opposition claims to the contrary.

Before returning to Australia, Fraser and I had a welcome diversion visiting mutual friends at their vacation retreat on the Virginia coast. William Battle, a wartime friend of John Kennedy, had been his Ambassador in Canberra during Fraser’s early days in Parliament and mine in External Affairs.^[20]

Back at home, Fraser decided to satisfy Service grievances over pay and conditions, a subject on which he felt I had been unduly cautious. Slowness of the legal authorities in drafting regulations to adjust pay (for example for the Navy’s technicians) compounded the deficiencies of an earlier decision imposed on the Department and the Services. This had aligned their pay to civilian awards, a system that was incapable of recognising the command responsibilities of non-commissioned officers in the Services. This was creating anomalies and resentments as pay levels followed, after long delays, the wage blow-outs then prevalent in the civilian economy. A report by Justice Kerr defined for the first time a distinct profession of arms and a system of matching pay to responsibilities.

In this and other ways Treasury intrusion into Defence management had reduced the Department’s standing in the eyes of Service personnel. Bland had only recently got the Treasury out of controlling the works programmes of the Services in their various bases and establishments. It took time to wear down Treasury’s parsimony over the housing provided for other ranks.

Fraser called for a prompt study of the feasibility of locating a task force in Western Australia. He was disinclined to accept the Army’s reservations and typically slow responses. I was more sympathetic to the Army’s argument that it would be inefficient, and costly for training, to have to bring the task force together with specialists located on the east coast. I thought that Fraser’s motivation was probably political, with an eye to the Western Australian electorate, which complained of its lack of defence protection. The idea died, but not before distrust of the Army developed.

I had my own frustrations with the Army and with the Army Department. There was an absence of candour or willingness to admit the existence of a problem that Defence could help to solve. Getting the right outcome for the totality of the defence effort required a shared belief in that objective rather than solutions sought by one Service in isolation from the others. I had to live with this insistence by all the Service Departments on their domestic jurisdiction, but it was the Army that was the most reluctant.

The Army was involved in one of Fraser’s setbacks, but it was only one of several actions by the Prime Minister, Gorton, that gave it importance. The Prime Minister took it upon himself to authorise a call-out of the Pacific Islands Regiment, to provide a legal basis should the Administrator (Sir David Hay) later decide it was necessary to use troops to quell an uprising in New Guinea. In so acting, the Prime Minister overrode Fraser’s earlier decision not to recommend the action to the Governor-General. My advice supported Fraser’s view, as I believed there would be damage to the Army’s image and that of Australia if Australian-led soldiers were used against indigenous people in a trust territory before civilian policing had demonstrably failed. The Governor-General (Sir Paul Hasluck, who had been a Territories Minister) asked whether the proposal had Cabinet backing. The matter did not come to a head as, in the event, the Administrator did not call out the Pacific Islands Regiment.

There were other setbacks. Gorton’s reservations led Cabinet to postpone indefinitely the creation of a tri-Service academy recommended by a committee chaired by Sir Leslie Martin. (The title ‘Australian Defence Force Academy’ was only established some years later on my recommendation.)

I was not involved in yet another event involving Fraser and Gorton which developed into a crisis leading to the departure of both men from Ministerial office and which prepared the way for the downfall of the Coalition Government within two years. The situation arose out of Fraser’s determination to exercise his authority over the way in which the Army command was acting in Vietnam, not in respect of its military operations in Phuoc Tuy province but in its dealings with the Saigon Government and others over civic assistance to local communities. His channel for conveying his questions and instructions was the newly appointed Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Admiral Sir Victor Smith. I saw the Secretary as having no more than a watching role in respect of conformity to government policy by the Services in such operations, as I was not a proper channel for instructions where commands were needed.

After a visit to Vietnam to survey the political situation, the prospects of the Saigon Government, and the progress in pacification of the countryside, Fraser had come away dissatisfied with progress. He believed that reporting from Saigon through military and embassy channels was fragmented and inadequate. Taking a close interest in policy issues, he directed the Joint Intelligence Organisation, which served the inter-departmental National Intelligence Committee, to gather more information on the situation. The Director of the Joint Intelligence Organisation, Robert Furlonger, having no intelligence-gathering function, informed the Army of the task he had been given and sought their cooperation.

In February and early March 1971, a crisis of misunderstanding and distrust began, fuelled by unauthorised statements to the media in Saigon suggesting, wrongly, that Defence policy towards the continuation of ‘civic action’ had changed. It was further fuelled by an outrageously inaccurate report in the Sydney Daily Telegraph that the Joint Intelligence Organisation had been instructed to report on what the Army was doing, with the implication of spying on them.

There was substance in Fraser’s indignant belief that the Army was acting on the assumption that, because the total withdrawal of the Army could be foreseen, forms of aid to the civil community (such as new building, medical assistance and so forth) should be reduced to those that could be completed before the withdrawal. As Fraser believed that some Army activity (such as that of the engineers) could continue after the remainder had withdrawn to Australia, he objected strongly to the Army's creating new policies and letting them appear in the media. Whether this was in fact the case, or just a suggestion in Army planning papers, is obscure. Fraser preferred to believe the former. He was, it seems, conducting his own unacknowledged briefing of selected media, making clear his disapproval of Army actions in Vietnam over civic action.

At this point the Prime Minister made another imprudent entry into Fraser’s domain.^[21] Having read (as he later explained publicly) media reports of actions by Fraser deleterious to the Army’s reputation, he spoke, not to his Minister to satisfy his disquiet, but to the Chief of the General Staff (Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly) to obtain his view of events. What was said during the discussion is in contention. A prominent journalist wrote a story saying that Daly had complained of Fraser’s disloyalty to the Army. Gorton left this statement unchallenged by not denying it.

Fraser reacted strongly. While not involved in this deteriorating situation, I had become aware, from discussions with Fraser over some months, of his critical view of the way Gorton conducted his office. When undermined in this way, he called me to his office to tell me of his decision to resign. I considered this to be a political matter and confined myself to advising on some of the formalities that Fraser would have to observe. Having set the process in motion, Fraser told me a day or two later that Gorton had offered some reconciliation. We discussed the steps already taken to give effect to the resignation. Fraser decided that he would go on with it. I took no part in his preparation of his resignation announcement in Parliament (privately I thought the language a little exaggerated). He was gracious and generous in saying farewell to officers of the Department.

Defence lost a strong and purposeful leader, better in these respects than any Coalition Minister for Defence up to the time of my retirement in 1979, and possibly better than any predecessor. His statement on 10 March 1970 of intended reforms, some of which he had inherited, was a remarkable survey of defects needing to be fixed. Whether he would have been strong enough to bring them about, had he remained in office, cannot be known. While always determined to get his own way, his insistence on consulting colleagues when Prime Minister later has been commended by some as desirable practice.^[22] On my observation of him in Defence, I incline to the view that he needed the reassurance of support before acting. One needed reform he did not attempt was abolition of the Service Ministers. On that he would not have had the support of his Prime Minister, Gorton.

He had opinions about most things and was sometimes impetuous in forming them. He expected his advisers to disagree with him and some found his personality hard to endure. He was not always considerate enough to recognise the pressures felt by some. Setting short timetables for production of results by his subordinates maintained his reputation for vigour as a Minister, but it sometimes made for unreasonable demands on those serving him. Sunday night had to be accepted as a normal working time if it happened to suit him.

As to my own relations, Fraser told me in later years that, when considering names for Bland’s successor, he rejected several names because, as he put it, ‘I wanted someone who was willing to disagree with me’. It was not long before I had to oblige him. It was, as I recollect, over an administrative matter—his wanting one of my staff for an assignment when I said I needed him elsewhere. We exchanged one or two testy minutes before he brought the tiff to an end with an admirable solution: ‘Before writing further formal notes I ask you to come over and discuss the matter that apparently disturbs you. It might be best to come at an hour when we can put a whisky in our hands.’

He had much to do with my decision to acquire a trout fishing haven in the mountains, blessed by the absence of a telephone or easy access. But there was never any rancour in our relations. Indeed, we shared a common love of fly-fishing. After becoming Prime Minister, he gave my wife and me the pleasure of having him as our guest at my haven.