Gorton had the portfolio for five months until McMahon dismissed him. Press verdicts on Gorton made much of his inability as a Minister to shake off the imperial style of Prime Ministership. I thought that in his relations with his new department he behaved very much the way Gorton always had—unorthodox, unconventional, not easy to persuade where his sense of loyalty to some group was involved, and prone to leaving his administrators in some uncertainty while he did what he had made up his mind to do. At the same time, one knew that Gorton had intellectual qualities of a kind seldom found among Defence Ministers.

He was confident of his own judgement on policy matters. While he did not tell his Department, as Hasluck had done in External Affairs, to speak on policy matters only when spoken to, he did not encourage policy advice. I had had an altercation with him years earlier when he was Minister Assisting the Minister for External Affairs. When he disputed, in brusque and uncompromising language, my right to vet expenditure proposals made to him by the Director of the Antarctic Division of the Department, I confronted him. The encounter ended in a draw. I am sure his respect for the adventurous Antarctic explorers was greater than his respect for chair-bound staff. Memory of this episode set me wondering how he would respond to the current programme of expanding the Defence Department’s oversight of Service activities. The matter was not put to the test before he left the portfolio. I had no reason to foresee any personal distrust in as much as he had himself as Prime Minister offered me the Washington Embassy posting and later had personally asked me in that phone call to New Delhi to accept the diversion to the Defence Department sought by Fraser.

He showed his independence from his officers in ways unusual for a Minister. When Cabinet in mid-year called for a A$50 million cut in the Defence budget, he personally walked the rounds of the three Service buildings at Russell on a Sunday morning, trying out what cuts they could wear. Meanwhile his Departmental Secretary sat in his office waiting to be handed the scrap of paper recording Gorton’s findings. A Chief of Staff later confided to me that he thought that Gorton had ‘cooked the books’ in his favour.

In a debate over the size of the Army, Gorton overrode the objective of both his Departmental Secretary and the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee to reduce Army manpower, in order to satisfy the requirement for better capabilities in other Services. The opposition he could expect from Army sympathisers might have given his Prime Minister the opportunity to ‘get’ him. Perhaps this was indeed in Gorton’s mind. Gorton’s rejection of a proposal, unanimously supported by the Service Chiefs, to place over the individual Service medical officers a superior medical officer answering to the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee was a bad omen for any new rationalisation efforts.

He showed his independence from previous Coalition attitudes in areas that I personally found encouraging. He had formed his own views on external defence relations while Prime Minister (and they appeared in an address to the Imperial Service Club in Sydney), for which he had not looked to the Department for advice.^[23] He attacked some over-simplified slogans that had long been at the heart of the Coalition’s policies in its conflict with the Labor Party over whether Australia’s strategy needed forward bases and deployments. This was the conflict between ‘forward defence’ and ‘fortress Australia’. Gorton pointed out that the ability to project power abroad did not, of itself, necessitate the stationing of forces overseas. If we did deploy them thus, it should be designed to strengthen the Australian fortress. The real issue was how best to defend Australian soil. It was this simple definition of Australia’s interest that we were later to urge on David Fairbairn and William McMahon and over which they both stumbled and retreated. Moreover, when advocating cooperation with allies, Gorton seemed to be thinking of Asian countries. He did not mention ANZUS once.

With the case for withdrawing from Vietnam growing, and our troops in Singapore the subject of dispute over finance, this trimming of sails was expedient. Looking to the longer-term implications, we in the Defence Department saw some prospect of what in External Affairs I and others had long advocated in our advice, but without success—namely less dependence on the major powers in favour of what we came to call greater ‘self-reliance’. But Gorton’s ideas did not survive after his short-lived term as Defence Minister.

We saw less prospect of obtaining the Minister’s support for our efforts to impose on the Services what we believed to be more rational priorities in respect of manpower and equipment. The Imperial Service Club speech offered the Services all that they said they needed—more spending, better conditions of service and (doubtless with the previous Minister in mind) loyalty from Ministers. There was nothing about facing up to the discipline of priorities.

I could see the Department and its programming system reverting to a role of simply supporting Service bids for funds—the ‘adding machine’ role of earlier times. I saw little prospect that Gorton would support increased authority for the Defence Minister over the Services, or any interest in reforming the existing clumsy apparatus of policy control. Before these gloomy ruminations materialised, Gorton was dismissed from the Cabinet by McMahon for reasons that had nothing to do with defence programming.