Insiders and Offsiders

Australian leaders have always kept a watchful eye on the political mood in Washington, especially since Prime Minister John Curtin in the war years declared that Australia would now look to the United States of America, free of links or kinship to the United Kingdom. From Pearl Harbor and the Fall of Singapore to the recent assault on the US Capitol itself, when Donald Trump showed that he was dangerously incapable of admitting electoral defeat, Australian envoys in Washington have always been vital contributors to reading the mood and responding to critical events. These duties invite consideration of the personal qualities and diplomatic skills of the envoy in the hot seat at crucial moments.

Richard Casey was head of Australia’s first diplomatic mission to a foreign country. He served as Minister to the United States in Washington with great distinction between 1940 and early 1942. He was succeeded by Sir Owen Dixon, who took leave from his judicial duties as a member of the High Court of Australia. Dixon’s main task was to ensure that the war in the Pacific, and Australian interests, were not neglected in Washington. Dixon’s biographer, Philip Ayres, has now introduced and edited The Washington Diaries of Owen Dixon, 1942–1944, which provide a first-hand perspective on a momentous period by someone of the highest intelligence and with access to the centres of power.

Philip Ayres points out, in a prefatory note, that the book is intended as a reference work as well as a narrative to be read straight through. He surmises that had Dixon intuited that his private diaries might one day be publicly accessible he may well have burned them. A key proviso on which Dixon had accepted the appointment was that he communicate directly with the man who had appointed him, John Curtin, thus by-passing the mercurial Minister for External Affairs, Herbert Vere Evatt, whom Dixon had sat beside on the High Court and had come to distrust and dislike. Contentious matters of this kind might well have prompted Dixon to torch his private papers, but in the end he left the diaries intact. Now that they have been published, the proviso concerning Evatt, and other potentially compromising facets of Dixon’s time abroad, including the friendships he formed with Washington insiders such as Felix Frankfurter and Dean Acheson, add an element of enthralling tension to the story.

The notion that the author of these diaries might eventually have felt embarrassed by their publication seems somewhat unlikely at a first glance. As a consequence of his judicial background, no doubt, Dixon is generally discreet. His personal observations are never unkind or acerbic, although from time to time he records caustic comments made by others. He sticks to the facts. His diary entries show few signs of elation, impatience or dismay. They reflect a busy round of meetings with notables from many walks of life, including politicians, public servants, jurists, journalists and, inevitably, the President himself, Franklin Roosevelt.

The same judicious tone is used in describing events at the Australian Legation at 3120 Cleveland Ave, NW, a large, elegant house of red brick with a central portico supported by four Doric columns in the southern style. In addition to the First Secretary, Alan Watt, Dixon was assisted by his former associate, Keith Aickin, and the Second Secretary, Peter Heydon. Many entries are devoted to the well-being of his wife Alice, and reveal a constant concern for the health and education of their four children.

Gradually, however, as the reader becomes accustomed to Dixon’s quiet, impersonal tone, the entries are increasingly compelling. As in this entry for July 3, 1942:

With Smart to see Gen. Marshall. He gave me, under a promise not to tell my government, the history of Coral Sea and Midway, and said that at one stage the Australian government nearly destroyed Australia because they publicly said that Japanese forces had congregated in the Marshall Islands, a thing known only through breaking the Japanese cipher, as the Japanese must have been aware. Repeatedly the government had broken necessary secrecy and he, Marshall, was very frightened of them and could not tell them anything with safety.

Various entries cast light upon other strategic concerns. Curtin’s insistence that the Australian 7th Division return to Australia and not be diverted to Burma as Churchill wished, is reflected in Dixon’s account of a meeting at the White House on July 21. “The President said … in reference to controversy between Curtin and Churchill at time of Singapore that he had telegraphed Churchill saying ‘This has got to stop: it is too juvenile for war’.”

There are a good many entries also about the proceedings of the Pacific War Council and Australia’s interest in the Lend-Lease negotiations. It seems, however, that Dixon’s proviso concerning Evatt was a constant worry, obliging the diarist to keep a watchful eye not only upon what was happening in Washington but upon what was happening in Canberra. As in Dixon’s account of a visit from a representative of Australian Associated Press on September 3, 1942:

He reported that the Prime Minister and Treasurer [Ben Chifley] formed one group in Cabinet, Evatt and [John] Beasley another, and [Eddie] Ward and [John] Dedman a third. War effort appeared to him insufficient, and he felt worried about Australia.

Another visitor, a British scientist working on war-related projects, provided equally worrying news: “Tizard came to see me in the morning. Said Evatt was the most hated man here and in London, and he found US and UK representatives unanimous about him.”

In late April 1943, Dixon returned to Australia to familiarise himself with the domestic and military situation, a trip including a brief visit to the war zone in New Guinea. Dixon’s entries for May 12 and 21 are judicious, as usual, but point to a sense of frustration engendered by Evatt’s habit of combining with Lewis Macgregor, Director of the Australian War Supplies Procurement Mission, to bypass the Legation while dealing with American agencies. Hence, the first of Dixon’s entries about this matter: “To see Prime Minister, with whom I spoke plainly about Evatt, Watt, Macgregor and staff, and want of information.”

The diaries are discreetly silent as to the exact nature of the matters complained of and are reticent about the outcome. This is where the sub-textual notes of the editor are important, by providing essential information. It seems that Dixon got everything he wanted from Curtin. The missions at Washington would be responsible to Dixon in the first instance. Dixon would be consulted over changes to his staff (previously a sore point) and henceforth he would be writing, cabling and telephoning to Curtin direct.

A month later, soon after his return to Washington, Dixon speaks of lunching with the President. “He spoke of difficulties of Burma campaign, of Churchill’s suggested alternative, and of his own, of Timor, of New Caledonia … I stated my observations on New Guinea and on Australia and operations.” According to Dixon’s colleague at the Legation, Peter Heydon, the President was most interested in Dixon’s recent trip back home and to the war fronts of New Guinea. Though Evatt had just finished an extended visit to Washington, in the whole of the luncheon between Dixon and Roosevelt, Evatt’s name was not mentioned, nor anything that took place during Evatt’s visit at all.

Having defined his responsibilities more exactly, Dixon resumed his normal, extremely busy, round of engagements, including social occasions and the presentation of broadcasts and discussion papers, often to law societies. He spent a good deal of time in assisting Dean Acheson from the State Department in the organisation of a conference in Atlantic City to fashion policies made pursuant to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agreement, known as the UNRRA. The diaries reveal that on September 4, 1943, Dixon visited the White House to see Churchill: “We were kept waiting, and then he saw me in bed. Spoke of Evatt and his attempt to open way to National Ministry, and asked whether Curtin concerned. I said Curtin understood Evatt and kept control—should meet him. Spoke of Imperial relations: bad in war against Japan. He then got up and I spoke to Mrs Churchill and Mary.”

This unusual meeting at the White House invites a comparison between Dixon’s impersonal tone and the apparently unguarded dash of candour to be found in Dean Acheson’s memoir Morning and Night, a colourful passage containing another bedside scene and an acute appraisal of Churchill’s host, the President of the United States. Acheson says this of FDR:

Every week at the Cabinet meeting, I sat at his left, across the table from Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. Then, too, came summonses to appear and report at the President’s bedside while he breakfasted … But they were not always as well adapted to the purpose as planned. After the tray was taken away, his daughter Anna’s children—known as Sistie and Buzzie—often made a distracting entrance … Conversation became intermittent, disjointed, obscure … He could charm an individual or a nation. But he condescended. Many revelled in apparent admission to an inner circle. I did not, and General Marshall did not, because it gave a false impression of his intimacy with the President. To accord the President the greatest deference and respect should be a gratification to any citizen. It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return. This, of course, was a small part of the man and the impression he made. The essence of that was force. He exuded a relish of power and command. His responses seemed too quick; his reasons too facile for considered judgment; one could not tell what lay beneath them. He remained a formidable man.

The need for tight lips in wartime may well have contributed to the restrained style of Dixon’s entries. It is part of the fascination of reading his diaries, however, that certain figures appear from time to time, treated as innocuous by the diarist, but who are now seen to be of considerable importance, especially when it comes to the keeping of secrets. Dixon was generally dealing with Dean Acheson with respect to Lend-Lease negotiations and the UNRRA. However, at one stage, Dixon enlisted Acheson’s aid in the making of some travel arrangements. Hence, a diary entry on August 31, 1943: “Visited Hiss (Acheson’s offsider) about Casey’s children.” The editor’s sub-textual note identifies the offsider in question as “Alger Hiss, later notorious for being accused of spying for the Soviet Union, a charge most now think substantiated but which he always denied.”

There is no suggestion in this or in other books concerning the State Department that Acheson was involved in any clandestine activities. It is a well-known fact, however, that a few years after the war Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury on the grounds that he had lied about his role in a Soviet spy ring. On the day Hiss was sentenced, Dean Acheson, by then Secretary of State in the Truman administration, made it clear that he did not intend “to turn his back” on his former colleague, a stance that seems to have prompted the first of Senator Joe McCarthy’s lurid accounts of how card-carrying Communists were still nesting cosily in the State Department. The Hiss case became the most controversial spy story of the Cold War, a controversy mirrored to some extent in Australia by the findings of the Petrov Royal Commission a few years later involving members of the Department of External Affairs under Evatt.

Dixon’s proviso concerning his mercurial Minister, Dr Evatt, and Evatt’s unpredictable conduct generally, although seldom mentioned directly in the diaries, remained a troubling issue. Towards the end of Dixon’s term, an international conference attended by the major powers was held at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Georgetown on post-war security and, more specifically, on the structure and powers of the proposed United Nations Organisation. These matters were of considerable interest to Evatt, especially the scope of the proposed veto power, regional arrangements for security and trusteeship in colonial territories. In the meantime, however, when Curtin came to Washington to confer with Roosevelt, the diaries reveal that Dixon took advantage of the Prime Minister’s presence to attend to his own situation. “Morning, talked to Mr Curtin, who agreed to appoint successor as soon as possible and fix matter up before 1st August circa. I repeated sole reason of my return was frustration. But if I was to go it should be at once in the interest of my judicial work. Discussed matters relevant.”

Dixon and his family were back in Sydney by 27 October 1944, the date of the final entry in the book. On that day, it seems, Dixon was taken to lunch at Ushers Hotel by Evatt and his wife. From there, he found his way back to familiar surroundings, and was then “in Court in the afternoon”. Evatt, on the other hand, within six months, was in action at the San Francisco Conference, winning acclaim as a forceful advocate for the small powers as the United Nations was formed.

Curtin’s attempt to curb Evatt’s self-serving autonomy, by appointing the Deputy Prime Minister, Frank Forde, as a joint leader of the Australian delegation, proved to be of no avail. John McEwen, another member of the delegation, and a future prime minister, observed wryly, or perhaps irritably, that “whenever anything had to be said on behalf of Australia the ubiquitous Dr Evatt appeared and stated the case … The personal views of the Minister for External Affairs were consistently put forward as the foreign policy of Australia.” The Secretary-General of the San Francisco Conference was Alger Hiss.

The cursory reference to Hiss in the Dixon diaries is but one of many reminders in the book that, with the benefit of hindsight, diaries of this kind, albeit couched in careful prose, can sometimes encompass more than the diarist knew and foreshadow far more than he might have intended. With or without vivid character sketches, diaries of this kind can also be valuable in an assessment of the diarist’s skills and personality. In this case, of course, the diary entries, brief and discreet, must be read in conjunction with other sources, as the editor intimates, for a fuller picture of the diarist’s outlook and activities.

It is apparent from Dixon’s collection of occasional pieces, Jesting Pilate, that his public presentations, including talks and broadcasts given in America, were always cogent and thoughtful. If called upon to speak plainly, he could be forthright. When he returned to Australia for consultation in 1943, for example, Dixon told the Advisory War Council, according to the minutes of the meeting, that “the Pacific War Council was not an effective body. It provided an opportunity to inspect the mind of the President, but it had no other advantage. It was a civilian body and the President never used it for discussion of strategical questions.”

Dixon informed the Australian War Cabinet, in a report about Roosevelt bearing an uncanny resemblance to Acheson’s bedside prognosis, that it was the practice of the President “to make a general statement to the Council at each meeting, but he always avoided critical issues. Discussion afterwards was in relation to any matters that members themselves wished to raise. No agenda were submitted and no minutes were kept … The advantage of the Council was that it enabled the views of the nations represented to be kept prominently before the President.” The President’s artifice in dealing with critical issues at the Pacific War Council led Dixon to assert that better results could be obtained by presenting a detailed and closely-reasoned statement of Australia’s case before the US Chiefs of Staff.

In his introduction to the diaries, Philip Ayres turns to the memoirs of the First Secretary, Alan Watt, for an account of how Dixon performed as an ambassador. Watt described Dixon as “a man of outstanding character and great ability”, but went on to suggest that Dixon was out of place in Washington. He criticised Dixon for his distrust of “broad generalisations, impressions, intuitions. He wants facts, all the facts, and upon them he will make a very independent judgment.” Watt said also: “He is extremely witty, but his humour induces admiration rather than laughter. Irony makes few friends, least of all in the United States of America.” Watt went on to say:

He is deeply wrapped up in his family, and gentle with them, as he can occasionally be with others. His emotions however have been held in control for so long that they rarely break bounds. This is a perhaps a pity, for his intelligence and wide experience have led him to expect little of human nature and always to anticipate the worst.

It might seem to a fair-minded reader that some, at least, of these observations are substantiated by the tone and content of the diaries. Dixon, as might be expected of an experienced judge, eschewed sentimentality and rhetoric, although he was, unquestionably, very attentive to the needs of his family, especially to the medical issues complicating the life of one of his sons. To others around him, because he kept his opinions to himself, he probably seemed somewhat remote. However, as Philip Ayres points out in his introduction, Watt appears to have felt under-used at the legation and his observations should therefore be viewed with caution. Watt had worked closely with Evatt at the San Francisco Conference and he may have thought also that Dixon was too trusting or had become too sympathetic to the American point of view.

Watt’s colleague at the legation, Peter Heydon, drew an interesting distinction between Dixon’s diplomacy in Washington and that of his predecessor, Richard Casey. In Heydon’s estimation, Dixon was “very averse to publicity and he had a narrower range of contacts than Mr Casey, but they were, I should think, on the whole, deeper and more purposeful”. Heydon added that in his view:

Roosevelt thought rather more highly of Dixon than he did of Casey, though he respected Casey too. And I think partly because of the circumstances at the time, Dixon’s relations with Hopkins, with General Marshall, with Dean Acheson and with Justice Felix Frankfurter were probably closer than Casey ever achieved.

The Dixon diaries, infused with a sense of immediacy and the apprehensions of the era, present a memorable narrative. They constitute a valuable record of Australian diplomacy at the highest level, and show also how it is possible to maintain a close and secure family life undamaged by the demands of an envoy’s role. The basic text is greatly enhanced by the skill with which Philip Ayres has researched and collated the sub-textual notes that add extra layers of meaning to the story.

Many attempts were made to coax the famous essayist Montaigne out of his secluded library. One of them secured his services for a diplomatic venture that may have saved France from ruin. There is something of this perhaps in the story reflected in Dixon’s diaries, the story of a learned legal scholar, drawn from the seclusion of the judicial realm, to perform an important diplomatic role, steadily and conscientiously, in a time of crisis.

The Washington Diaries of Owen Dixon, 1942–1944
edited and annotated by Philip Ayres
The Federation Press, 2021, 392 pages, $120

Nicholas Hasluck’s latest book, Art in Law (Connor Court), includes articles first published in Quadrant