The Australian’s coverage of the Vietnam War shifted as Rupert Murdoch’s political alliances hardened, revealing how editorial direction followed power more than events on the ground.

When Rupert Murdoch began his bold venture of launching a national newspaper in 1964, controversies about the war in Vietnam were becoming more urgent.

In the following decade the quality of The Australian’s coverage and its editorial line depended as much on the twists and turns in Murdoch’s thinking as on developments on the battlefield.

Neither Murdoch nor his first editor Maxwell Newton had spent much time in Asia, nor had much knowledge of Asian politics. They were caught flat-footed when a key event in the American escalation – the Tonkin Gulf incident – occurred.

However, the next year, when Australia committed troops, the national paper, influenced by senior editorial staff – particularly Douglass Brass – was the sole voice among morning papers opposing the Government’s move: ‘The Menzies Government has made a reckless decision on Vietnam … That decision is wrong … It could be that our historians will recall this day with tears’.

Strong public support initially accompanied the sending of troops, and Harold Holt won a smashing victory in 1966, often dubbed the Vietnam election. In the following years, however support waned sharply, so that in 1970 the Vietnam Moratorium produced probably the largest demonstrations in Australia’s history.

However as the public moved left on the war, Murdoch moved right. Murdoch’s thinking on Vietnam was secondary to his principal political alliances. Through the late sixties, he became close to Deputy Prime Minister, John McEwan and Prime Minister John Gorton. In the 1969 election, endorsing the re-election of the Coalition government the paper argued that ‘thoughtful voters’ ‘would support its approach to ‘the over-riding issue of defence’.

Murdoch’s support did not help the Coalition as Whitlam secured a huge seven per cent swing, the second largest swing in post World War II Australian history.

Soon after the 1969 election the My Lai massacre – where American troops killed up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers – made headlines around the world. The Australian covered the horrors powerfully, and then editorialised in favour of withdrawal from the war.

Although public opinion had shifted decisively, the war did not play a prominent part in the 1972 election campaign. The McMahon Government had withdrawn Australian combat troops, although other support for the South Vietnamese government continued, and Labor was keen to keep the focus on its domestic policy agendas.

Murdoch was firmly on board the It’s Time bandwagon. However his boast that he single handedly put Whitlam into government is a fantasy. For example, the swing was strongest in Victoria where Murdoch’s newspaper presence was minimal.

Murdoch’s journey from Whitlam’s strong supporter to his determined opponent between 1972 and 1975 has many steps and contending explanations. Thomas Kiernan’s book Citizen Murdoch has a novel explanation, that dates their initial falling out as much earlier than others, and that involves the Vietnam war.

A journalist turned author, Kiernan has written biographies on such diverse people as Jane Fonda and Yasser Arafat. His book is interesting because although he and Murdoch fell out at the end, for almost a decade from the mid-1970s they were good friends. As a result, Kiernan has many quotes from Murdoch when he was in casual conversation, and it seems as if this is often a more authentic voice than when Murdoch is tailoring his public remarks for political or commercial consumption. It should be added that Kiernan’s unparalleled access to Murdoch is matched by his deep ignorance about Australia.

In late 1972 Murdoch met with President Nixon and was impressed by him. Kiernan says that until then Murdoch had been ‘uncertain about the wisdom of America’s pursuit of the Vietnam war’ but afterward ‘he became a Nixon enthusiast’.

In October 1972, shortly before Nixon’s landslide re-election and Whitlam’s victory, Henry Kissinger pronounced that peace was at hand in Vietnam, prompting euphoria in the US and around the world. But then at Christmas the Nixon Administration began carpet bombing Hanoi and Haiphong harbour, and in 11 days US planes dropped more bombs over North Vietnam than in all of the previous three years.

Such heavy and indiscriminate bombing when peace was supposed to have been achieved produced deep disillusion and protest around the world, not least in the US itself. The Labor Party had long been opposed to the war, and some of the most prominent anti-war ministers publicly denounced the US in strong terms. Whitlam remained publicly silent, but wrote a letter to Nixon, a letter which departed from the traditional Australian stance of subservience and caused great indignation in Washington. There was also a short ban placed by maritime trade unions on US shipping in protest.

According to Kiernan, the US State Department – the competence of the US embassy in Canberra was illustrated by its forecast that McMahon would win the 1972 election – thought that Murdoch ‘had been instrumental’ in Whitlam’s victory and called on him to get Whitlam to end the boycott, but Whitlam refused to intervene. ‘Murdoch felt both betrayed and embarrassed – betrayed by Whitlam’s refusal to do his bidding and embarrassed that the refusal had damaged his standing with the Nixon Administration,’ wrote Thomas Kiernan in his book Citizen Murdoch.

Murdoch was on a fool’s errand. He seems to be oblivious to the depth of anti-war feeling in both the Labor Party and the trade union movement, to have a wildly exaggerated view of Whitlam’s ability to just turn off the protests, and to not appreciate why the bombing brought such disgust. It is hard to believe that he was just making up his mind about the Vietnam war, when it had raged as a political controversy for at least eight years.

By the time of the communist victory in 1975, Murdoch was mobilising against the Whitlam Government, and domestic political controversies dominated its coverage, castigating the Government and ‘the Left’, for example, over their lack of concerted planning for the exodus accompanying the end of the war.

A testimony to the paper’s reduced intellectual capacity was its failure even to attempt to come to grips with the roots of defeat in a war that lasted over a decade, where at its peak in 1968 America had more than half a million troops, and had dropped more bombs than it did in World War II.

Murdoch was a late convert to Cold War views but an extremely zealous one. American foreign policy thinking was for some time shaped by the Vietnam syndrome, the reluctance to commit combat troops in case they were stuck in a never-ending quagmire. Not Murdoch. After 1975 he was unwaveringly hawkish voice whenever there was a call for Western military action.

This article draws on: Thomas Kiernan - Citizen Murdoch (NY, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1986) Denis Cryle - Murdoch’s Flagship. The First Twenty-five Years of the Australian (Melbourne, MUP, 2008) George Munster - A Paper Prince (Melbourne, Viking, 1985) Jenny Hocking - Gough Whitlam. His Time The Biography Vol II (Melbourne, Miegunyah Press, 2012)