REPCRT TO THE NATION
TALK ON GTV9 BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE R. G. MENZIES, QOCO, MVP.
AUGUST, 1959.
I am delighted to have the opportunity of saying something
to you about this last journey of mine around the world. I know
there are people who think that every visit around the world or
anywhere else by a politician is a species of holiday jaunt. I
can assure you that they are not. Mine was in fact the businest
journey I have ever had. I had almost no leisure time but I
found it much more exciting because in the course of my journey
around the world, I had quite close intimate discussions with
about ten heads of government in the various countries in the
world.. And although, of course, it won't be possible to speak
of all of them I do anticipate that before this little programme
is over, I will have the opportunity of saying something to you
about some of them.
JOHN FOSTER DULLES.
I knew John Foster Dulles very well indeed. We were
very closely associated in the negotiations for -the ANZUS treaty;
in the early discussions about the Suez crisis and of course,
later on. In that event, it was my duty, as I felt it, to
disagree with him. Up to that point, we had been in complete
unity. But the great thing about John Foster Dulles not always
understood during his life was that he was a patriot, a man of
the highest ideals and a man of the highest courage. It was
always possible to disagree with him; sometimes one might feel
bound to disagree with him, because we all have our own views.
But it was never possible to doubt that he was a man of great
quality. He was of enormous service to his own country, though
not always recognised for that service. He was of enormous
service to the free world, though a very contentious figure. I
believe that he has made an enduring mark in the modern world,
in circumstances of great difficulty.
QUESTION: And you've met his successor, Mr. Herter?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I did. In the course of my life, as you
know, I have met a great number of people, but I had never met
Mr. Herter before, and therefore I was very interested to do it.
He flew in from Geneva, I think, only that morning, but he was
good enough to give me an interview within half an hour of his
arrival. I found him a man of immense personal attraction. He
has charm-he obviously has a high intellectual background; he
has experience. And I think that, provided he gets the necessary
backing, he is quite likely to prove to be a very, very
distinguished Secretary of State in the United States. I liked
him. I came away happy about his point of view and what he was
doing. I took the liberty as I usually do, with may characteristic
impudence to give him a little moral backing in what he
was doing at Geneva. I think he is a good man and I think we may
be very, very happy about him.
QUESTION: And you had talks with the President.
PRIME MINISTER: Yes, I did. The President was extraordinarily
good to me about it, because he had invited us to have lunch with
him on the day which turned out to be the day of the funeral of
John Foster Dulles and so he gave me a very long interview that
morning. I had not seen him for two years. I ha~ d seen a bit of
him, of course, over the last three or four years before that.
I was delighted to find that he was in such health and
spirits that I could hardly believe it. He has had illnesses;
we have all been given somewhat gloomy reports about it. I
assure you that he sat there as a man in a very vigorous health
and certainly in a very vigorous condition of mind. He left me
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in no doubt as to what his views were on anything that cropped up.
In other words, I found him a revived and vigorous man. And that,
I think, is a very good thing, and a very good thing because the
responsibilities that rest on the President of the United States
are tremendous. He has a duty of leadership, a duty which he owes
not only to the people of the United States, but to a lot of
other people. That I perhaps remember more vividly than
anything else. The point of view in Bonn, the point of view in
Paris was considerably influenced by the view in Washington.
QUESTION: President Eisenhower seems diffident about the idea of
a Summit Confference.
PRIME MINISTER: Well I, of course, have no right to be speaking
for him, you know. But I think that on the whole, his attitude
can be summed up in this way or it could have been:. " I am
always prepared to attend a conference anywhere if it will help
to preserve or to restore the peace. But I am not prepared to have
a Summit Conference unless I see some guarantee of success some
practical thing done by the Soviet Union as an indication that
goodwill is intended and a settlement is desired." That has been
his attitude. As you know, he is a man of very high ideals and
a most earnest seeker after peace. His view in the long run,
particularly in the events of the last two years, did not commend
itself very much to me, because I thought that the problem had
reached a point of urgency.
Anyhow, the President has now taken a very important step.
He has not yet said " I am for a Summit Conference"; nor, let it
be made clear, is he going to see Khrushchev, or is Khrushchev
seeing him, as representatives of the free world on the one side,
and of the Soviet Union on the other. What the President has
made very clear is that he will speak for his own country and
of course, as a very distinguished man, for himself; that he does
not regard himself as negotiating. Well, that I think is a point
of view that is quite understandable. But I have ] Lived long
enough in the world to believe that if the President of the United
States and the President of the Soviet Union not the " President"
but the master of the Soviet Union get together for a few days
of easy informal conversation walking around the garden, or
sitting at the table after dinner, then much could well come of it,
because if the ice is broken then the road to the Summit
Conference of a more elaborate kind will have been opened.
And so I find in the development that has occurred in the
American attitude great room for hope. I have, myselflively
expectations of The President, of course, is a determined
man, but I thought I detected in Washington in -the high quarters
in Washington, a growing feeling that we must get to grips with
these matters by getting into the closest and most; frequent
personal contact with people on the other side i~ f I might use
that expression on the other side of the whole conflict of the
world of ideas, on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
And therefore, not to make too long a story of it, I-was
delighted to find the American President in such good form, so
lively, so eager; and I am sure that we will all have the benefit
of it.
QUESTION: Finally, could you sum up your own attitude towards the
Summit Conference?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, perhaps what I have just been saying about
the position of the American President reflects some light on
my own view. I believe I have always believed that if you are
going to discuss some complex concrete matter, say an international
trade discussion, or something of that kind, there must
be an enormous amount of preliminary work detail. work. Things
have to be put down on paper. Documents have to be abstracted
and put together. All sorts of work must be done. And, until
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a couple of years ago, I thought that this probably was the rule
that applied to a Summit meeting. I confess I have changed my
mind, because in the last two years, we have seen such a
tremendous acceleration of the Soviet propaganda about a peace
offensive as if only the Communists wanted peace, and we didn't.
A terrible thought that the Communists should be able to
represent themselves, and themselves alone, as wanting peace,
when everybody knows that all the wars and rumours of war since
the great war, have been as a result of their actions.
And therefore, I believe, it is time,,-more than time to
have a democratic peace offensive. We are not to be on the
defensive. We are to assume the initiative. And the right way to
assume the initiative is to say, " Very well, we will talk with
you anywhere and at any time." Let's have Summit meetings. Don't
let's have them necessarily surrounded by brass bands and
publicity or even television. Let's have private conversations
designed to arrive at thos preliminary, personal understandings
which may lead to concrete results in a series of discussions
thereafter. Now, that exhibits why I believe in this business,
I do not think we have anything to lose how could we? but I
think we have everything to gain, by making it quiLte clear that
we are for peace and that we are prepared to talk anywhere and at
any time in order to obtain it.
DISCUSSIONS WITH MR. MACMILLAN
QUESTION: You discussed many questions with Mr. Macmillan.
PRIME MINISTER: Yes. We had, of course, problems of the ordinary
kind between the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries,
including Australia. Then, of course, we had, in an overwhelming
degree, the problems associated with a Summit Conference, of
which Mr. Macmillan himself and his ministers were powerful
advocates. We had no formal conference. It was one of those
occasions when you could have informal discussions to a probably
far greater degree than if a number of people were there; and so
I saw a great deal of Mr. Macmillan, who is, of course, a very
old friend of mine and who has the happiest recollections of his
visit to Australia. With him, I had talks about our mutual
relations to the European Common Market, a highly important but
somewhat technical matter. We had discussions about other matters
of common concern. But above all things, we were pursuing our
discussions about the world position and particularly the
European position, because it was in relation to Berlin that the
Geneva conference was occurring.
We had a good deal to say about that, of course, not only
on Be-rlin but on the whole question of world settlemaent-and on
this, Mr. Macmillan has shown, as he showed when he went to Moscow
without much warning, without much preliminary preparation, that
he is all for arriving at peace by conference. We discussed that
a great deal, and in point of fact, I went, o at his invitation to
a Cabinet meeting at No. 10, and there we discussed the same
matter. I was given the courtesy of taking a hand in the talks;
and therefore, when I subsequently went to Europe, I was rather
well informed as to what the state of mind in London, at any rate,
of the Government, was. All these things proved to me to be
extraordinarily interesting. I felt, and I know from subsequent
correspondence with Mr. Macmillan, that he felt that as two old
friends and two people of responsibility his, of course, much
greater than mine we had secured mutual advantage, and, I think,
some comfort, from being able to talk to each other without the
intervention of other people or other circumstances.
QUESTION: We've been inside No. 10 with you. This wasn't your
first visit of course.
PRIME MINISTER: Not my first visit by any means. Oddly enough,-
though I am as you can see, quite a boy I attended a meeting of
Prime Minislers for the first time in 1935. I was not Prime
Minister then, but I deputised for the late Mr. Lyons. Since then,
I have sat in that historic room with, I think, every succeeding
Prime Minister of Great Britain. Of course, the outstanding one
is this marvellous man ( Sir Winston Churchill). It is not saying
anything derogatory about anybody else to say that he IS
No. 10 Downing Street. He is the greatest memory that anybody
could have. I sat there with him early in the war and, of course,
later on after the war when he became Prime Minister once more.
I was delighted this time -I may say, I never go to London without
going down to see him, either at Chartwell or wherever he may be,
and we have talks as old friends. And this time you may be
interested to know that I found him quite remarkable. He is
like you and me; he is ten years older than he was ten years ago.
That is something that happens to all of us; and therefore he was
not the old robustious leader that we became accustomed to. But
his mind is clear. I went to a dinner at the Australian Club
seven hundred men at it in London, and he sat between myself on
the right and the American Ambassador on his left. And all I can
tell you is that he was a great deal livelier than I was. He was
in superb form. He discussed pseudo-political matters with me
in a rather bright and witty fashion; and on the other side, I
could hear him conducting a most learned discussion on racehorses
with Ambassador Whitney. That is something that appeals to us
all versatility and vigor, prolonged so magnificently.. shall1
never forget him.
BERLIN. We have all been saying of recent days that we hope that
the balloon won't go up over Berlin. Personally, I don't think
it will. Berlin's significance, of course, to us of what I will
call the western world, is tremendous. If Berlin passed into the
hands of East Germany, which is today a Soviet satellite country,
then I think that the blow to the pride of Germany would be
enormous; the blow to the whole western alliance in Europe would
be tremendous. I believe that it would give rise to an attitude of
arrogance and aggression from which aything could come. Therefore,
Berlin has been at the centre of the discussions at Geneva, As
you know, Berlin has become not only a city, but a symbol of a
conflict which everybody wants to see resolved, but resolved on
terms of justice to European nations.
Now, of course I had discussions about these things in
Bonn with Chancellor Aaenauer. He is a very remarkable man,
He is about 83, 84+; so full of vigor that he is already talking
about the next election. I think that is magnificent. I knew
him pretty well. In 1956, I had visited Germany specially. I had
some days with him and we became very friendly. He has a nice
sense of humour, and like me, he likes having his own way, if he
can, so we got on pretty well.
He has, of course, done a remarkable job. I know that
people argue now and think that he is becoming old and difficult
and all that kind of thing. The great recovery of Western
Germany since the war is to be credited to Adenauer, more than
to any other single human being. He has been a magnificent
leader, full of courage and, I think, full of understanding of the
European problem. He has got to very good terms with President
De Gaulle. He himself feels that relations between the Germans
and the French have been vastly improved.
He was extraordinarily good to me. He had a little
trouble on his hands, because, you remember, he was going to
become President and then decided to remain Chancellor. And under
those circumstances, I thought I might be lucky to get an hour
with him; but he gave me about five or six and nothing could have
been more interesting than our discussions. He has reservations
about a Summit meeting, largely of the same kind as thoso enter-.
tamned by President Eisenhower. He feels, and I am sure he is
right, that it would not be good to see Europe indefinitely
divided in an economic sense between the Common Market to which
Germany belongs, and to the Little Free Trade Area led by the
United Kingdom and he looked forward to some reconciliation
between these two bodies. But one thing I did notice about him,
and it is worth a great deal of thought on the part of many
people: He is firmly convinced, or he was when I saw him that
the British people, and presumably the British Government, is
inveterately and bitterly hostile to Germany and to himself in
particular. He followed this line so much that first of all I tried
to discover why he should have any distrust of Great Britain;
why he should have this feeling that was so obvious. After an
hour, it appeared that he felt that some appeasement might be in
the air; that something might be done which would prejudice the
re-unification of Germany. I tried to get at that. We elicited
various things, not one of which I thought was crucial. But it
turns out he believes that the British have this hostility which
I have described. Well, I was so struck by this competely
confirmed attitude of mind that I chided him a little and said,
" You know, you are quite wrong. I think you must have been
confining your reading to one or two newspapers of a critical
kind." I rather think he had, but he certainly had this
impression. I took the liberty of saying, " Look, firstly it is
not in the tradition of the British people to maintain hatreds
indefinitely. They never have and they never will. Secondly,
I know something about opinion; certainly about top level opinion
in Great Britain, and I tell you that there is warm admiration
for what West Germany has done since the war the enormous
recovery and a very great admiration for what you, Mr.
Chancellor, have done by providing leadership in that process of
events.*" Well, I hope our discussions did some good. One never
can tell. I certainly felt that I, myself, had been a good deal
illuminated in my mind by discovering what was going on in all
this process of discussion from the German point of view, and so
I left very well informed, I think, on that matter, and I hope
I was able subsequently to convey to Mr. Macmillan some of my
impressions in a helpful way.
GENERAL DE GAULLE.
Well, that last picture you were looking at sho~ wed you the
President himself myself on one side and the Prime Minister of
France on the other, walking out from the Elysee, the President's
palace, into the back garden.
Of course I was tremendously interested, because I had
known him during the war in 1941 when he was not perhaps the
easiest man in the world to negotiate with. He had what we might
describe as a rather dour characteristic about him immensely
tall, rather dour; magnificently determined on the ultimate
liberation of his country; a man who found no reason to suppose
that you ought to have any jesting or lightness when you are in
the middle of a great struggle. In that respect, of course, he
was so unlike the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who
always had time for a jest and struck his blows no less heavily
because of the jest.
So I was tremendously interested to see how De Gaulle
had gone in the intervening years years, do not forget, in which
he was grievously frustrated. Here he was, the whole spirit of
the delivery of France, of the Croix de Lorraine; and after
France had been liberated, after government was restored, he had
to live in his place in the country, seeing a new government
every six months or every nine months not a very happy state of
affairs for him. But now he is back. He is the all-powerful;
he is the President, with width and depth of authority that no
previous President of France has ever had. He ha~ s not just sat
down and glorified himself with all this power., He has behaved
with most tremendous energy. Just let me give you one example.
Two years ago in Lond, having discussions about the
European Common Market everybody said with great truth, that
Germany was the dominating factor and that France, so to speak,
was the weak member, because France's economy was in a battered
condition galloping inflation going one, all sorts of currency
problems, the usual inability to get in the taxes, a lack of
adequate industrial development. And then came De Gaulle. With
his wide prestige and with the most superbly able advice, the
Programmxe has been put into operation in France which has had the
result of making France one of the king pins if you can have
more than one king pin in the European Common Market. In Bonn,
Chancellor Adenauer spoke to me all the time about the resurgence
of France. I heard it in Lond. And for this great credit must
be given to the prestige, the patriotism and the authority of this
very remarkable Frenchman,
THE NETHERLANDS.
QUESTION: There has been speculation that the new government of
the Netherlands might mean a change in policy on West Now Guinea
PRIME MINISTER: There has undoubtedly been a great deal of
speculation, because we did not know what would happen to the
point of view of the Dutch Government after their elections.
Prime Minister Drees, the previous Prime Minister, was a great
believer in what I will call the Dutch policy on West New Guinea.
His party, the Labor Party, was thought not to be quite so keen
on it as he was and there was some speculation as to what would
occur when he went out because he made it clear that hie would
not be resuming. And therefore, I was tremendously interested
to see the new Prime Minister, Mr. De Quay, who used to be a
Professor of Psychology and who was then Queen's Commissioner in
Brabant; and I was interested to find out from him and his
colleagues whether there might be some change in their approach.
The answer was quite clear and unhesitating: " No change. Our
policy on this matter will be precisely the same as the policy of
our predecessors." Later on, when I left The Hague and flew to Zurich, I
saw Mr. Luns, Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, and he
confirmed the proposition that the policy was a continuing policy
and that it need not be thought to be modified in any way. That
means, of course, so far as Australia is concerned, we continue
with our attitude and we continue with the little measures of
administrative contact with the Dutch that we have been
developing quite publicly over the last few years.
INDIA AND NEHRU.
I was very interested, of course, to see Mr. Nehru. We
are very old friends. We are believe it or not the two senior
Prime Ministers in the entire British Commonwealth, and we have
sat almost side by side at conferences at No. 10 Downing Street
for ten years, and therefore I am always pleased to see him and
always pleased to get from him his point of view. His worries
were enormous of course. There was this wretched business in
Kerala about which he had subsequently taken some pretty strong
action. And there had been the alleged rebellions and the most
positively brutal massacres in Tibet, with a lot of reffugees.
That was a great problem.
Very interesting if " interesting" is not too foolish
a word to think about this problem of refugees. Do you know
7.
that we forget that after partition of the subcontinent of India,
there were 18 million refugees who moved from onE) country to the
other. Eighteen million tremendous poverty, tremendous squalor
in many places there were marks of it all over India and
Pakistan. Similarly, up in the north when the Tibet outbreak
occurred9 there were many Tibetans who came acrossi and there
again is one aspect that one might not realise. He pointed out
to me that to settle refugees who were accustomed to living in
a high, cold country like Tibet was very difficult. You could not
put them down into a hot country and expect them to endure. And
therefore, settlement has to be in the more mountainous areas of
India; and it is upon the mountainous areas, along what is called
the McMahon line, that constant discussion has occurred between
the Chinese Communists and Mr. Nehru's government. So this is
not all fun and games, not all milk and honey. There are great
points of difference7and Mr. Nehru was, as always, able to discuss
them with great realism and with great clarity. He was able to
tell me some very interesting things about development in
Communist China and I certainly came away with the impression that
it would be very foolish and this is an impression I had had a
long time for anyone to imagine that Mr. Nehru is an apologist
for the Chinese administration. He merely takes what he believes
to be a realistic view of the matter.
One other thing I will mention, and no more. In both
India and Pakistan, there was enormous pleasure at the prospect
of settling the Indus Waters problem. I think it will be settled.
We are all providing some money towards settling it and if it is
settled then, I believe one of the greatest causes of difference
between India and Pakistan will have disappeared and if that
happens, we will all be delighted.
SINGAPORE. I was looking forward to seeing Dr. Lee ( leader of the new
Singapore Government) and to seeing his ministers, I regard
elections in a country like Singapore as a great triumph for
modern British policy. All these places that were once simple
complete colonies are moving towards their independence, and when,
as in the case of Singapore, a popular election occurs and a
ministry is produced as a result, it deserves not our hostility
or our fear, but our sympathy and understanding. It is the choice
of its country. I had, of course heard all sorts of extravagant
rumours about the Lee administration being a sort. of Communist or
fellow-traveller administration. I don't believe it. I entirely
accept Dr. Lee's repeated statements that he is not either a
Communist or a Communist symapathiser but that on. the contrary he
regards it as a very important duty lo keep his country out of
the Communist orbit. He is a Socialist... yes... but there are many
Socialists in the British countries in the world. We have them
in our own country. I am not a Socialist. I would not, perhaps
have voted for him. I do not know. But he is there and I formed
a very warm opinion of him.
You must not think of people like that as if they were
backward in some fashion. Dear me, Dr. Lee himself is a double
first at Cambridge. He is a man of scholarship. He has a young
and enthusiastic team. Thirty-seven-and-a-half is the average
age of' the Singapore Government.
A big population on a small island a 1lI cn+ 4
increasing by 6o, 000 a year, wifh aat. tLonal 25 000 a year
additional Peoplp cooi-, iiig employment and all thai on an island
in whlich agricultural development is out of the question and the
future depends on industrial development.
It is not the kind of problem that any one of us would be
in a hurry to undertake. The Singapore Government, quite plainly,
has considerable hope, if not expectation do not think
expectation at the moment but considerable hope of joining up
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with the Federation of Malaya, because they feel that under those
circumistances, movement of population and perhaps the use of
resources might be considerably increased. Anyhow, that is their
problem; but I just say for myself and for my own people, that
we want then to succeed; we want them to remain a community within
the British Commonwealth; and therefore they are entitled to our
sympathetic understanding not our patronage; they won't like
that, but to our sympathetic understanding-in everything they do.
QUESTION: To suna up, can you say what are the world danger spots
and what are the hopes for peace?
PRIME MINISTER: I suppose I could answer that question in a
rather abrupt way perhaps, because first of all, Berlin: Will
there be a settlement about Berlin? Will it become necessary to
have either violence or the threat of violence in Berlin? I am
hoping not, but so far very little progress has been made. There
is Berlin. That means Germany and the whole future of Europe.
There is the Middle East. It is out of the news a little
at the tine but we must never forget that the seeds of trouble
are always Zhere great conflicts in the Middle East, sometimes
concealed; and where there are conflicts, the Comunists usually
have some faculty for securing some kind of profit.
Next there is the trouble spot at the moment in Laos,
Now Laos Cambodia and South Vietnam, Thailand all extremely
vulnerable. If the Vietminh of the north of the old French Indo-
China became aggressive, and in particular, if they have the backing
of Commiunist China I do not want to exaggerate the dangers there,
but they are genuinely there and we will all hope that something
will be done through the United Nations or in co-operation with it
to restrain the fervour of some of the actions, the revolutionary
actions, now occurring in Laos.
And then, of course, for months now disappeared out of
sight, there is the problem of Formosa, the Mats-as, Quemaoy, the
off-shor islands of China all those problems which seem to blow
up about once a year with threats, and then subside a little.
But the fact that they subside does not mean that they have
disappeared. It was a very great privilege for Lie, and a great
opportunity for me, in the presence of so many points of difficulty,
to be able to have so many interesting and fruitful discussions
of which I have been able to give you only a hint, wi-th so many
of the world's leading and most responsible men.
I think I ought to say that I am very greateful to you
for listening to me, as presumably you have as patiently as you
have, if in fact you have been patient. Bu thank you very much.
With the compliments of-
HUGH DASH
PRESS SECAETARY TO THE PRIME MINISTER,
CANBERRA, A. C. T.