New Zealand prime ministers-at the White House: Ken Ross outlines the course of top-level contact between Washington and Wellington in the last 75 years.
New Zealand prime ministers have visited the White House 25 times. The first occasion was when Peter Fraser was there on 26 August 1941. Keith Holyoake went six times, meeting three presidents--Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Norman Kirk's September 1973 meeting with Nixon is the Everest moment of the encounters--the only time a prime minister has contributed his 'new ideas'. Otherwise, our prime ministers have seen their being there in itself as the reason for the visit, and, hopefully, a high point of their prime ministership.**********
'Chet Cooper, head of the US delegation, who had been in the Johnson White House, said, revealingly, that Australia and New Zealand had had priority tickets to the high table in Washington because of their Vietnam support. "And what did you come and tell us? That we were doing the right thing, when what we needed was new ideas.'" (W. David McIntyre, 2009) (1)
'Appointed ex-Senator Robert Hendrickson as ambassador to New Zealand. Adequate--but no more!' (President Eisenhower, 1955). (2)
Ironically Eisenhower's 'adequate--but no more' describes what, since the end of the Second World War, has been the enduring theme of the Washington-Wellington connection. Cooper's rueful observation hits New Zealand's 'best and brightest' hard--too often when prime ministers have gone to the White House they had nothing new to put forward. Norman Kirk stands alone in offering 'new ideas' when visiting the Oval Office.
The diplomatic chemistry that each New Zealand prime minister has had with the United States president has most driven the bilateral relationship. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush marked Wellington's card downwards. George H W. Bush's goodwill expeditiously lightened Reagan's previous heavy-handedness. The present tepid atmosphere between Barack Obama and John Key has seen missed opportunities for Wellington.
Kirk's capable global diplomacy impressed Richard Nixon (and Henry Kissinger). Kirk and Keith Holyoake are the only New Zealand prime ministers since 1945 to have been guests of honour at a presidential black-tie dinner at the White House. Kirk's encounter comes closest to the diplomatic Everest moment that New Zealand prime ministers climb for. Holyoake's two dinner dates were more convivial occasions, yet lacking the rapport in global diplomacy matters which Kirk and Nixon shared.
Kirk's and the other couple of best prime ministerial ascents to the White House since 1945 occurred irrespective of whether Wellington was in or out of good standing as a loyal ally--the status that the Second World War generation of New Zealanders so wanted to go on forever. Holyoake's considerable rapport with Lyndon Baynes Johnson (LBJ) percolated through their relationship despite Holyoake's clear unwillingness to go 'all the way with LBJ'--theirs seems to be the deepest friendship of all the pairings of prime ministers and presidents after 1945. In the final weeks of his presidency Johnson gave Holyoake a state dinner on the prime minister's third visit to the White House. (Holyoake had hosted Johnson two years earlier.) Jim Bolger's walking and talking with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were not diminished by his firm backing of New Zealand's non-nuclear standing.
The pinnacle of the bilateral connection is actually outside the time frame of my forthcoming book. But Peter Fraser's friendship with Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War is well covered in Gerald Hensley's Beyond the Battlefield (2009) and Fred Wood's The New Zealand People at War (1958). They establish that those war years were the setting for the closest relationship which a New Zealand prime minister has had with an American president. Fraser had three bilateral encounters with Roosevelt (distinct from when they met at multilateral meetings). The first was a lunch-time meeting at the White House on 26 August 1941. Fraser returned a year later, spending from 26 August to 4 September in Washington: the first night the Frasers stayed at the White House. The husbands had a stag night, with all of Roosevelt's Cabinet joining them. For the remainder of the visit the Frasers stayed at Blair House, across the road from the White House. Then the Roosevelts had the Frasers stay overnight at their New York home, Hyde Park on the Hudson, on 3 July 1944. Subsequently, no New Zealand prime minister has ever made it to a president's home, or to the presidential 'get away', Camp David.
Since 1945
Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, did not sustain that level of friendship. Fraser had two 30-minute White House appointments with him, in December 1945 and on 14 January 1949. Half-hour conversations have been the most usual allocation a New Zealand prime minister has secured since then--occasionally accompanied by lunch and/or a walk in the Rose Garden.
Sid Holland was at the White House three times, meeting Truman on 8 February 1951 and during Eisenhower's presidency on 18 May 1953 and on one of the days 20 to 25 January 1955.
Walter Nash was twice there, meeting Eisenhower on 28 October 1959 and 1 June 1960.
Keith Holyoake met Kennedy on 3 March 1961 and was to have hosted the president early in 1964--the visit had been advanced in scheduling just days before the president's assassination. (3) Holyoake was at Johnson's White House on 20 July 1964, 28 June 1965 and 10 October 1968. Holyoake became the first prime minister to host a United States' president when Johnson made a 26-hour stop-over in New Zealand on 19-20 October 1966. Holyoake completed his White House calls by meeting Richard Nixon on 16 September 1969, including another official dinner, and again on 10 April 1971. Nixon, who was not known as a great entertainer when president, had a soft spot for New Zealand, reportedly sparked by his wartime encounters with New Zealanders in the Solomon Islands and because Wellington was the first capital he visited as Eisenhower's vice president, a point he highlighted when toasting Kirk two years later.
Kirk's meeting Nixon at the White House on 27 September 1973 involved official discussions, when the prime minister proffered the 'new ideas' that had been so evident six weeks earlier at the Commonwealth leaders' meeting in Ottawa. (4) That evening there was a black-tie dinner in Kirk's honour. (Kissinger, secretary of state for just five days and still the national security advisor, was present at both occasions.) Bruce Kohn, the New Zealand Press Association's Washington-based correspondent, reported
it is apparent that Mr Kirk is held in high regard by the Administration. Officials here see him as pragmatic statesman who, while holding views not always in tandem with those of Washington, is prepared to debate his thinking in official discussions without introducing unduly emotional overtones. (5)
Gauche attempt
Several months earlier, in June, there had been a gauche attempt by the White House to prompt Kirk to visit Washington at the beginning of August when going to Ottawa. The Nixon administration was seemingly
seeking to mitigate the dynamics around Gough Whitlam's declared intent to meet Nixon at that time. Whitlam did get his meeting but his time in Washington was deemed a 'private visit', which ensured that it was without the ceremonial and official functions Kirk received.
Bill Rowling was at the White House on 7 May 1975, but it appears with the most minimal of publicity back home. He was one of three Commonwealth leaders who had separate private meetings that day with President Ford: Whitlam and Harold Wilson were the other two. Each detoured through Washington after being in Jamaica for the Commonwealth leaders' meeting.
Muldoon has the most chequered record. A difficult relationship with Jimmy Carter preceded two encounters with Ronald Reagan that became personal highlights of Muldoon's prime ministership. Ahead of an already announced White House visit for September 1977, Muldoon described the president as 'a peanut farmer'. The response was quick. Muldoon was told to his face by Cyrus Vance, Carter's secretary of state, in a Paris hotel room that his call at the White House was cancelled. Frank Corner's strenuous endeavours secured a re-scheduled visit for November. Carter made Muldoon work hard for his entree--Muldoon spent three weeks in the United States (7-30 November), visiting eight states, including a peanut farm in Georgia, Carter's home state. Muldoon is coy in his own writings of the turbulence ahead of the encounter but Barry Gustafson has a comprehensive account of Muldoon's coming to grief. (6) On 9 November, Muldoon was at the White House for two and half hours, including an official lunch that he subsequently described as awful'. (7) Later in Carter's presidency Muldoon was twice more in Washington, but there was no further invitation to the White House.
Better lunches
Reagan was a different matter and the lunches were better. The first visit, on 24 July 1981, was during the Springbok tour mayhem in New Zealand. The second call was on 24 February 1984 and while the prime minister and the president were in the Oval Office Thea Muldoon had a separate meeting with Nancy Reagan.
David Lange did get to the White House. While leader of the opposition he had a 30-minute meeting with George H.W. Bush, the vice president, on 19 January 1984. Bush had long had good regard where New Zealand was concerned. His visit in May 1982 is the most recent by a US vice president--he was the sixth vice president to have called in. And, in early 1984 Bush had made a vital intervention to ensure New Zealand's butter access to the United States was not reduced. During the ANZUS dust-up he stands out for his quiet role: in Friendly Fire (2013), Hensley does not list the vice president as one of the Americans who were key characters in the drama.
Once president, Bush took a markedly different approach to Reagan. He was ably assisted by two of his top national security advisors, Brent Scowcroft (who had met Kirk and Rowling when they were at the White House) and Bob Gates. Scowcroft and Gates stand out as two of the three shrewdest highest-level presidential minders handling the New Zealand account since 1984. Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff in 1995 and Obama's second defense secretary, is the third.
Soon after he became president, Bush had a familial encounter involving Lange as the latter set the die on his prime ministership. George Herbert Walker Jr, the president's uncle, had endowed one of America's most prestigious annual lectures on international security. Lange's April 1989 Yale speech was that year's lecture. Ahead of Lange, Harold Macmillan, Abba Eban and Willy Brandt had given the lecture; recent lecturers have been Ban Ki-moon, John Major and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Unprecedented call
Jim Bolger's initiative in December 1990, just days after he became prime minister, to phone Bush to discuss a contribution to the 1991 Gulf War was unprecedented--apparently no New Zealand prime minister before or since has dialled the White House. Bush was forthcoming in September 1991 when he and Bolger met in a New York hotel room while attending that year's United Nations General Assembly.
It was another two years before Bolger, always alert to making the most of an opening, got one when the new president,
Bill Clinton, put his shoulder to the APEC initiative, hosting the leaders' first gathering in November 1993. Bolger got to the White House, including for lunch, on 27 March 1995.
Jenny Shipley's high presidential moment was hosting Clinton at the 1999 APEC summit in Auckland and for his two-day stay afterwards, which included Clinton golfing with her husband.
As prime minister, Helen Clark's first contact with Clinton was his congratulatory phone call, during which he pushed firmly that New Zealand stay with the F-16 deal (she did not). Clark's three encounters with Clinton when he was president were away from Washington --at Progressive Governance gatherings in June 2000 and September 2000 and at the 2000 APEC. She twice met George W. Bush at the White House--on 20 March 2002 and 21 March 2007.
John Key's first foreign foray as prime minister was to Peru for the 2008 APEC, which was George W. Bush's final international appearance as president. For Key a first phone call, in May 2009, from Barack Obama was the only one for four and half years. Between phone calls Key encountered Obama at the 2009 APEC leaders' gathering in Singapore and at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April 2010. But it was not until 22 July 2011 that he got his much pursued first visit to the White House. The delay was due to Key having run a diplomatic 'red light' with his public utterance, shortly after their first encounter in Singapore, that he was soon to be at the White House. (8) Key's visit was on the graveyard shift--no other head of government visited the White House that month until a hastily convened crisis meeting between four West African leaders was had in the final days. That Key encounter appeared not to impress the White House. A lack of on-going contact between the pair was evident for several years. The coolness ended when Key stood in for Obama to chair a tricky meeting associated with the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations at the 2013 APEC meeting. Key's reward was his second phone call from Obama. A game of golf in Hawaii in January 2014, when both were holidaying there, appears to be a moment when prime minister and president were not acting in their official capacities. Key's second White House visit occurred on 20 June 2014.
Pinnacle meeting
Kirk's September 1973 meeting with Nixon is the pinnacle of the encounters--the only time a prime minister has discussed his new ideas' with a president. The key to judging Kirk's contribution is an observation that Keith Jackson made in 1970. Until then, Jackson argued, New Zealand foreign policy generally was to acquiesce in the policies of its major partners even where it has important reservations about such policies'. (9) Kirk broke that pattern. But subsequently there has not been a pairing where both leaders were interested in discussing 'new ideas'.
Holyoake is the prime minister who intrigues most--he has the most calls at the White House and develops the closest friendship with a president that any of our prime ministers have had. Yet on the leading topic of interest of the day he was extraordinarily reluctant to stand alongside his good friend LBJ. Holyoake's handling of the Vietnam commitment must have perplexed many. His own Cabinet was solidly pro-military commitment. Within his government he seems to have been the solitary nay-sayer. As a result New Zealand is well described as being 'the most dovish of the hawks' among the troop-contributing states. Nicholas Sarantakes's recent research of the dynamics of the Johnson-- Holyoake relationship is perceptively titled 'Dead Beef and Live Soldiers' (10) and suggests even more forcibly than Roberto Rabel and David McCraw had before him just how determined Holyoake was to limit the New Zealand military contribution. (11)
Holyoake's tactical sense was evident in his getting Ormond Wilson, a prominent Vietnam protestor, to host the Johnsons on his farm, which was nearby the Ohakea air base, from where Air Force One was departing. The media was agog--it was front page news, with headlines such as 'Farm Host of President is Anti-Vietnam'. In his 1982 memoir, Wilson has a laconic account of hosting the Johnsons. (12)
Most recently, in April 2010, we had a serious moment when we had it seems no 'new ideas' to offer at the first Nuclear Security Summit, even failing to capitalise on Kevin Rudd's late absence. We had been invited in the hope that the Kirk Brand was still at work. This was an occasion where Washington was hungry for 'new ideas'. Some of the Clinton national security 'kids', who had with Leon Panetta got President Clinton to quietly protest the 1995 French nuclear testing, (13) were now in the top relevant roles in the Obama White House. It was they who ensured that New Zealand, a non-nuclear state, was at the summit--all of the other 46 governments present had nuclear industries or weaponry.
NOTES
(1.) W. David McIntyre, 'Civil Society Centenaries, 2009-10', NZ International Review, vol 34, no 5 (2009), p.11. Cooper made the comment at a conference in Canberra in February 1970. Bruce Brown (ed), Asia and the Pacific in the 1970s: The Roles of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Canberra, 1971), p.229, where the comment is attributed to 'an American speaker'. Cooper is named in the book as a conference participant.
(2.) Robert H. Ferrell (ed), The Eisenhower Diaries (New York, 1981), p.292. The entry is for 11 January 1955. Hendrickson, a one-term Republican senator from New Jersey had not sought re-election at the 1954 election. He stayed 21 months in Wellington.
(3.) 'President John F. Kennedy planned to visit Australia prior to his death in 1963', Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Nov 2013. The article was based on newly released Australian diplomatic reporting from 1963--initially Kennedy's visit was contemplated for October 1963 but had been re-scheduled for early 1964. Kennedy informed the Australians he would visit New Zealand on the same trip.
(4.) Kirk's 'new ideas' are covered in Ken Ross, 'Norman Kirk's global diplomacy', NZ International Review, vol 39, no 2 (2014).
(5.) Bruce Kohn, 'Mr Kirk Will Receive Red Carpet Treatment on US Visit', Evening Post, 15 Sep 1973.
(6.) Robert Muldoon, My Way (Wellington, 1981), pp.100-5, and Barry Gustafson, His way: a biography of Robert Muldoon (Auckland, 2001), pp. 217-19 and 494 (fn 15).
(7.) Robert Muldoon, Number 38 (Auckland, 1986), p.99. Gustafson, My way, has no mention of Muldoon meeting Reagan.
(8.) Vernon Small, "'Give and take" for free trade deal', Dominion Post, 17 Nov 2009, p.A2. Key's participation in the Nuclear Security Summit in April 2010 was a separate visit. Also Tracy Watkins and Philip Dorling, 'Cable reveals Key desperate for White House visit', Stuff website, 19 Dec 2010.
(9.) W.K. Jackson, 'The decolonisation upheaval', NZ Listener, 13 Mar 1970, p.22.
(10.) Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, 'Dead Beef and Live Soldiers: Lyndon Johnson, Keith Holyoake, and U.S.-New Zealand Relations in the 1960s', Agricultural History, 2004, pp.50-77.
(11.) Roberto Rabel, New Zealand and the Vietnam War: Politics and Diplomacy (Auckland, 2005), and David McCraw, 'Reluctant Ally: New Zealand's Entry into the Vietnam War', New Zealand Journal of History, vol 15, no 1 (1981), pp.49-61.
(12.) Ormond Wilson, An Outsider Looks Back (Wellington, 1982), pp.171-3. Wilson, Oxford educated, had been a Labour MP twice (1935-38 and 1946-49).
(13.) On 18 October 1995 the White House announced that President Chirac's imminent state visit was rescheduled to February 1996. Before Chirac arrived he had announced the early conclusion of the testing.
Ken Ross was an analyst with the External Assessments Bureau, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 1976 until 2012. He has been a research associate at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Canberra. He is writing a book evaluating New Zealand prime ministers' engagement in global diplomacy since 1945.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Ross, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication: | New Zealand International Review |
| Article Type: | Essay |
| Geographic Code: | 8NEWZ |
| Date: | Mar 1, 2015 |
| Words: | 3150 |
| Previous Article: | New Zealand's jihadis: Aaron Zelin discusses the problem New Zealand faces in dealing with Muslim radicalisation and the danger of participation by... |
| Next Article: | When diplomatic breakups occur: Paul Bellamy traces the troubled course of Australian-North Korean relations since 1974, and its impact on New... |
| Topics: | |