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Australian Studies Centre
Institute of Commonweath Studies
University of London
WORKING PAPER NO 30
CASEY AND THE AMERICANS:
AUSTRALIAN WAR PROPAGANDA IN THE
UNITED STATES, 1940-41
by
Carl Bridge
Australian Studies Centre
Copyright Carl Bridge
June 1988
Series Editor: Carl Bridge
ISBN: 0 902499 80 7
CASEY AND THE AMERICANS: AUSTRALIAN WAR PROPAGANDA
IN THE UNITED STATES, 1940-41
"There's no such thing as British propaganda in America. That's a fact. I
know what is being done here. The British Ambassador and I make a few
addresses...Propaganda as I understand it is furtive and underground. There
is none of that".
R.G. Casey. Sydney Morning Herald interview, 7 February 1941
F.D. Roosevelt: "Propaganda, I suppose?"
J. Wheeler-Bennett: "We call it information, Mr. President." (1)
Recently it has been suggested that R.G. Casey, when Australia's first
minister in Washington, 1940 to 1942, acted as a "secret agent" for Britain.
Michael Birgan alleges that "the Menzies government allowed the British to use
the new legation as a conduit for covert political activities including
massive funding of the pro-war faction in congress and of susceptible
journalists. The British could not do this because propaganda activities by
belligerents had been declared illegal by congress." Nevertheless, in these
dark pre-Pearl Harbor years when Congress was isolationist and the Roosevelt
administration wary of committing the country to war in advance of public
opinion - especially before Roosevelt's re-election in November 1940 - it was
apparently worth running the risk of breaking the law in a desperate effort to
convert the American public to the Allies' cause. Birgan says "the British
believed that Australia was sufficiently small to carry out illegal political
activities without attracting the attention of the American authorities or
criticism from anti-British sections of the American press."(2)
The evidence cited is tenuous. C.E. Gauss, the American Minister in Canberra,
claimed in his despatches to have uncovered the details of an Australian plot
for "extensive and expensive plans for propaganda in the U.S." Birgan
explains that Gauss sent the State Department a list (still closed to
scholars) of individuals carrying out covert operations from the legation,
"possibly American recipients of British propaganda funds." Casey was playing
a dangerous game. for if the isolationists got wind of it opinion might harden
even further against the war.(3)
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Raymond Esthus, in his study of Australian-American relations in this period,
based solely on American sources, cites an incident in January 1941 which
seems to support Birgan's argument. The State Department, tipped off by
Gausss, told the Australian Legation when it opened its new Australian News
and Information Bureau in New York to be careful that it limited its
activities to providing sober information and not engage in elaborate and
costly propaganda exercises. Casey heeded the warning.(4)
These are very serious charges. What is the truth about Casey's activities?
There is sufficient evidence to show that the Gauss-Birgan interpretation is
hopelessly distorted, though there are some grains of truth. Certainly there
was no sinister plot, and no vast British propaganda fund at Casey's disposal.
He did not conduct a systematic campaign of wholesale bribery of American
politicans and journalists. Nor was Casey seriously running the risk of
alienating the American authorities; indeed key members of the State
Department and the President's circle and even Roosevelt himself positively
encouraged the British and Australian propaganda efforts. Casey's undoubted
success in this direction is explained by his willingness to be guided by the
newly-invented public opinion polls, by his employment of an American public
relations expert to arrange broadcasts and speeches at the right places and
times, by his own natural flair for publicity and speech-making, and by his
unique position as not only a British subject but the representative of a
young Pacific democracy with much in common with the United States. Most of
all, however, it was, as Churchill predicted in 1940, the march of wartime
"events", not the "eddies of... opinion", which brought the United States into
the war. (5) It was Casey's genius to help keep these events focussed in the
American public mind. Let us consider who Casey was and what Casey did.(6)
I
Richard Gardiner Casey, aged 49 was the scion of one of Melbourne's richest
families, with extensive mining, pastoral and financial interests. Son of a
dominating and successful father, the young Casey had been consciously and
firmly prepared for public life, having been required to keep a diary of his
doings which his father inspected and sytematically criticised right up to the
father's death in 1919. Casey attended Melbourne Grammar School, then
Melbourne University, finally taking a second class honours degree in the
mechanical sciences tripos at Cambridge. During the first world war Casey
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served as a staff officer on Gallipoli and in France and it was said, with
only a little exaggeration, that his father secured his son's preferment by
donating a touring car for the General Staff's use.
After trips post-war to the United States and around his father's interests in
Australia, Casey was appointed Australian Prime Minister S.M. Bruce's "eyes
and ears" in Whitehall as Australian Liaison Officer in the British Cabinet
secretariat, 1924-30. In 1931 he entered federal politics and within two
years was Assistant Treasurer and in 1935 Treasurer in the United Australia
Party government. When Prime Minister J.A. Lyons died in 1939 Casey contested
the leadership with his great rival R.G. Menzies, but destroyed his chances by
advocating publicly Bruce's return to the leadership. Menzies, the victor,
lost little time in appointing Casey to the American post in order to keep his
rival at a safe distance.(7)
By temperament, Casey was a public servant and an engineer, a lieutenant
rather than a leader. Menzies, a scholarship boy, pulled himself to the top
by his own bootstraps, whereas Casey did so by means of patrons - Generals
Birdwood, Bridges and Monash, Prime Ministers Bruce and Lyons. During his
first election campaign he admitted to his agent weakness when he agreed that
he had no stomach to "roll in the gutter with the bastards".(8) Born with a
silver spoon Casey could afford this fastidiousness; Menzies had no such
advantage and no such compunction.
II
When Casey was appointed to the United States he explained to the American
press that his main task was "the promotion of Australian-American friendship
and understanding", to explain Australian and Australia's actions to the
American government and people.(9) The New York Times commented: "The likeable
Mr Casey should not be suspected of propaganda if he talks of these things."(10
But Casey soon learnt that he would need to do a great deal of talking to
convince the Americans to join in the war against Germany. Galiup polls
indicated that 96.3 per cent of the electorate were against participation in
the war; furthermore, Roosevelt told Casey that Australia's distance from the
United States meant that he could not guarantee any American military aid
should Australia be invaded. (11) It was to be a massive task trying to turn
these opinions around.
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Already, before Casey left for Washington, the Australian and British
governments had been thinking hard about how he should approach his task. In
December 1939 Lord Lothian, British Ambassador to the United States, had
welcomed the prospect of an appointment as a very useful adjunct to his own
operations. "There are many things that an Australian ... Minister can say or
do ... which a British Minister cannot", Lothian wrote.(12)
Something of what these things were was spelled out in a proposal prepared for
the Australian government by Dr lan Clunies-Ross, an eminent Australian
veterinary scientist who was in London as chairman of the International Wool
Secretariat, but who was also one of the founders of the Australian Institute
of International Affairs.(13) Clunies-Ross argued that Casey would be in a
unique position to interpret the British Commonwealth's war aims to Americans.
Century-and-a-half-old prejudices meant that to the American "any expression
of opinion by an Englishman is regarded as propaganda and suspect"; indeed
"the American too often senses a feeling of superiority and a lack of
understanding and sympathy in his relations with Englishmen." Shared fears of
Japan in the Pacific, a comparable heritage as a young democracy with a
frontier tradition, and a similar more open and egalitarian social ethos, all
meant that the American naturally liked the Australian as more like himself.
An Australian could be for Britain "an interpreter in the U.S.A." who would be
"subject to none of the ... suspicions" to which Englishmen were prone. An
Australian could stress "the fundamental responsibility and obligation of all
free peoples for the preservation of law and order and democratic ideals in
Europe and elsewhere." The British case could be made alongside the
Australian.(14)
Clunies-Ross went on to recommend, drawing on his own wool-promoting
experiences in America, that "American-Australian and British American
Relations" could be sold just as was "International Wool" or "Tea", by
employing a professional -'Counsel of Public Relations" who would help with
the creation and dissemination of news designed to change and create public
opinion towards a specific end, but so disguised that its purpose, unlike
advertising, is not apparent." He emphasised that "It must first be news and
be accepted without payment by media such as newspapers, magazines, the radio,
etc., purely for its news value."(15)
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S.M. Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner in London, was very much
interested in these plans. An experienced campaigner in the marketing of
Australian products to Britain since the 1920s, when F.L. McDougall and to a
lesser extent Casey had acted as his London agents, (16) Bruce discussed with
the British Ministry of Information Clunies-Ross's "extremely practical and
useful suggestions", won the approval of its American section, and suggested
to Menzies that he "instruct Casey to put his back into getting results" (17)
No sooner had Casey arrived in the United States than Menzies ordered him to
see Earl Newsom, a public relations expert in New York. (18) Newsom, 42, headed
a small and exclusive company whose clients included at various times Standard
Oil, Maceys, Ford, General Motors and the Columbia Broadcasting Service. As a
former U.S. Navy pilot in the first world war Newsom was also likely to be
sympathetic to the Allies.(19) With Newsom as adviser, Casey set about making
contact with many of the country's leading broadcasters, journalists and
newspaper and radio proprietors, including most importantly those of the New
York Times, The New York Herald-Tribune, Time-Life, the Radio Corporation of
America, the Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting
Company. Among the journalists, Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, Mark
Sullivan and George Fielding Eliot were prominent.(20) The campaign had
started.
III
"One is told ten times a day that 'Public opinion is moving'", Casey wrote in
an early diary entry, but "the speed of the movement is, to us, most
irritatingly slow." (21) Soon after his arrival he learnt that the American
politicians were extremely interested in the newly-invented public opinion
polls conducted by Dr. Galiup and others. Though Casey himself initially
questioned their validity, he noted that they "were very widely accepted as
being true reflections of American public opinion" and "taken seriously by the
majority of people... They create opinion as well as attempt to record it".(22)
On the advice of Professor Fred Alexander, attached for three months to the
legation while on a Rockefeller fellowship in the United States, Casey had
lunch with Galiup and later made contact with Dr. Hadley Cantril, Galiup's
rival at Princeton.(23) Armed with the poll results Casey was better able to
determine where in America to speak and what to say.
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He early determined basic tactics. He would only speak to worthwhile bodies,
and would concentrate on describing Australia's war effort and policies
avoiding at all costs "the charge that I am telling the American people
publicly what to do and advocating their active intervention in the war."(24)
He would write no articles for the press himself, but rather rely on his
speeches being reported.(25)
His first major speech, to the National Press Club in Washington in March
1940, set a pattern. Australians, he said, "had a high regard for" the United
States, they admired American "enterprise" and shared its democratic spirit.
Like Americans Australians were "pioneers", "easygoing" and "virile". They
were cousins across the Pacific. Though Australia was in the British Empire,
"we do now exactly as we please". Australia had chosen to go to war because
they saw democratic values across the whole world to be in jeopardy. At the
end he returned to praise for the United States
"What you were, we are
What you are we hope one day to be."
The implication was clear: Australia and Britain shared a democratic way of
life with the United States and were worth defending. But Casey studiously
avoided saying this explicitly.(26) in May Casey toured the heartland of
isolationist sentiment, the mid-West, speaking in Chicago, Milwaukee and
Madison, stressing the same points.(27)
With the fall of France and Italy's entry into the war in June, Japan's
forcing the closing of the Burma Road in July and Japan's joining the Axis in
September, and with the Battle of Britain raging, the polls began to indicate
a weakening of isolationism. In May 64 of those polled were against the
United States helping the Allies in any special way, by September 52 wanted
the United States to help them, though fewer than 10 would do so by going
to war. (28) Roosevelt took action immediately with the destroyers-for-bases
agreement.
This movement of opinion encouraged Casey to become more explicit in his
speeches. In a New York radio broadcast in October he said that Australia and
the United States should move towards closer economic relations in the Pacific
and recalled Lyons' 1937 call for a Pacific non-aggression pact. Australia
and New Zealand, he said, were "outposts of great strategic and political
significance" to the United States.(29) In private he was discussing with
Roosevelt the use of British bases in the Pacific by the U.S. Navy.(30) He
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began also to concentrate more on the need for American business to concern
itself with the outcome of any war in the Pacific. Whoever controlled the
economies of Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies and Australia "could run the
United States and the Europeans out of business", he told a group of New York
bankers.(31)
Events in the six months after Roosevelt's re-election to the Presidency in
November 1940 enabled Casey to be even more outspoken. As Japan edged South
an opinion poll in February 1941 showed that 58.8 thought the United States
should stop Japan before she reached Singapore. (32) The Lend-Lease Act was
passed in March.
Secret British-American strategic talks were held in
Washington from February to March. A U-Boat sank an American merchantman, the
Robin Moor in May. By July 1941 the polls showed that two-thirds wanted the
President to go to war, though the Congress was still against it.(33)
In a radio broadcast in July Casey made his strongest plea yet.
"We Australians did not go to war because of some
European dispute. We went to war because we realised
that if everyone of us did not stand by Britain and throw
ourselves across the track of the Nazi juggernaut, the
writing was on the wall for democracy and our way of life
and for us. "
This was not just "Britain's war", he said, it was "your war."(34) Again, in
August, in what was his last major speech, he followed the pro-German Charles
Lindbergh into Oklahoma, one of the most isolationist states in the Union, and
made a similar plea: "We believe that when this war is over there will be
freedom for all, or for none."(35)
In his time in Washington Casey made in all some seventy major speeches,
including sixteen broadcasts - three coast-to-coast -, many apparently
arranged by Newsom. He made speaking visits to the Mid-West six times,
Florida and California twice, North Carolina once, and spoke many times in the
Washington-New York-New England area. (36) Casey's effectiveness as a speaker
cannot be doubted. As early as May 1940, unbeknown to Casey, the British
Foreign Office was holding him up as an example of how "a Dominion spokesman,
particularly one like Casey who is the Diplomatic Representative of his
country and speaks so well, can bring home to an American audience the meaning
of the British Commonwealth in a way which is new and very effective." And in
November 1941 the Foreign Office was still praising his "direct talk" and
"straightforward methods" which were doing "much to improve American
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understanding. (37)
He also won private praise from the American State
Department. J.P. Moffat, formerly American consul-general in Australia, 1935
to 1937, and at the time minister at Ottawa, praised Casey in August 1941, for
"a unique job in the United States...he has put Australia on the map." (38)
This was no mean achievement: when Casey first arrived in the United States he
made a point of carrying with him a map of the world so that he could show
Americans he met that Austria was in central Europe and that Australia was
somewhere quite different.(39)
IV
But Casey did more than make public speeches. He kept himself and Australia
in the news in all sorts of ways. Sir Alan Watt, Casey's first secretary in
Washington, later called Casey's publicity work an "obsession". (40) We might
add, it was a fortunate one. Casey's dashing appearance earned him the title
of "Australia's Anthony Eden"; his habit of flying his own aeroplane, another
title - "the flying diplomat". (41) He made sure Mrs Casey and their two
children, who arrived some weeks later than he did, arrived in Washington by
air, then an unusual way for diplomatic families to arrive, and they captured
the headlines again. Newsreel shots later showed him landing his aircraft. On
another occasion he gave selected American friends photographs of their
estates taken from the air. And when he flew over Melbourne, Florida, in
February 1941, he made impromptu radio contact with the local radio station
and gave them an interview about their larger namesake in Australia.(42)
Other press stunts included: sending free Australian stamps and coins to the
New York Herald-Tribune; teaching the U.S. Vice-President to throw a
boomerang; keeping a sprig of wattle on his desk; presenting Australian
animals to the New York Zoo; and an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Walt
Disney to introduce two new cartoon characters, a kangaroo and a koala.(43)
He constantly sought out and entertained media personalities, among the most
important Harry Sulzberger, proprietor of the New York Times, and George
Fielding Eliot, defence writer for the New York Herald-Tribune and a CBS
broadcaster. He often visited them and Newsom on his New York visits which he
made on average once a month. These contacts must have had an influence on
their writings, though it must be added that these men were in favour of
joining the war before Casey ever met them. Eliot, was an American who had
attended Melbourne Grammar (Casey's old school) and fought beside Casey in the
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AIF on Gallipoli, though Casey, who was four years older, had not previously
known him. As early as 1938, in his book. The Ramparts We Watch, Eliot had
advocated Australian-American co-operation in Pacific defence by means of the
material use of each others' bases.(44)
The only evidence of anything Casey wrote finding its way directly into the
New York Times and Herald-Tribune was in July 1940, when articles by Mark
Sullivan and Eliot referred to the way the Royal Navy acted as a guarantee for
the Monroe Doctrine, ideas contained in a paper Casey had prepared for
Roosevelt. But this, as Casey makes clear, occurred when the U.S. State
Department forwarded the document confidentially to the press. (45) Thus the
State Department was fully aware of this aspect of his activity and encouraged
it.
Casey's connections with the media led to two important events in the second
half of 1940. In August a contingent of ten American journalists went on the
first Pan-Am trans-Pacific flight to New Zealand and then on to a tour of
Australia. The Australian government, it appears, financed the trip and
organised it through Casey and Sir Keith Murdoch, Director-General of the
Department of Information in Melbourne. The articles they produced were
invaluable. (46) This trip was followed up in September by an extended visit to
Australia by a Time-Life film journalist, Victor Jergin, to make a March of
Time newsreel about Australia at war.
Casey arranged the trip, paid the
fares, and even wrote a draft scenario of some eight pages for the film.(47)
The scenario was not followed, but, interestingly, when the newsreel was
screened in January 1941 it emphasised United States defence interests in the
south-west Pacific much more explicitly than Casey's script had done.(48)
These activities, of course, were clandestine propaganda, but there is no doubt
that the State Department knew about them and tacitly condoned them. There
was no State Department protest at the journalists' government-sponsored trip
to Australia. It is also clear that, though the American newspaper companies
had accepted the Australian government's financial and other assistance, the
journalists were not told by the Australian government what to write in their
reports, apart of course from being subject to normal censorship procedures.(49)
Casey, it seems, discussed his publicity activities with Cordell Hull who
approved of them.(50) The President certainly did. At the time of the exchange
between Roosevelt and the British Embassy's main public speaker,
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Wheeler-Bennett, recorded earlier, Wheeler-Bennett had been late for a
"speaking" engagement and Roosevelt allowed him to join the Presidential car
party in order to get him there on time.(51)
But Casey came close to the discretionary limit in late 1940.
After a
conference in New York with Newsom, Clunies-Ross and Murdoch, he planned to
open an Australian News and Information Bureau in New York the following
February. Using David Bailey, the Australian Associated Press man in New
York, Murdoch and Casey had been sending Australian news items to the American
press and getting an average of 300 lines a day printed. Now they planned for
Bailey to start the Bureau and place even more. (52) Casey wanted to hire Newsom
as the Bureau's official publicity agent and take out ten-page paid
advertisements in the American press advocating closer Australian-United
States co-operation. The whole operation was to cost U.S.$300,000. 53 In
Australia Gauss got wind of the proposal and relayed it to the State
Department. (54) It seems that Gauss was acutely aware of his failure to break
British monopolies and preferences in Australia and obtain trade, shipping and
airline concessions for the United States and was using Casey's and Menzies's
widespread pro-British propaganda activities as a sort of excuse for his lack
of success.(55)
Thinking that such an obvious use of advertising would be more assistance to
the isolationists than to their own cause, the State Department advised Casey
that the Bureau could only be started if Newsom were not associated with it
and if it restricted itself to providing factual briefings for the press.(56)
Significantly, however, Casey's speech-making, arranged and facilitated as it
was by Newsom, was not questioned at all. Clearly it was not so much the
extent of Australian activity that the State Department objected to, as Birgan
and Esthus assert,(57) but that the new proposal was so blatant that it would
be counterproductive to the interventionist cause. Casey's more "indirect"
methods continued unchecked until the Americans entered the war in December
1941.
V
As a psychological antidote to his saccharine praise of America and the
Americans in public, Casey made acid comments on them in the privacy of his
diaries.
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Of course the isolationists were his betes noires. Senator Borah was "one of
the really evil influences of our times"; William Bullitt was "without
background or bottom"; and Senator Vandenberg "was the only known living man
who could strut sitting down". The Mayor of Iowa was "drunk, argumentative,
anti-British." He was a "typical ignorant 'America first'" in charge of a
state whose "real life" was based on "corn and hogs". Casey objected to big
businessmen who were natural "appeasers" and who had no concern for the
"public interest". And he condemned the "dirty line of thought", the "jackal
mentality" of many businessmen and officials who wished to use the war as an
opportunity to shepherd Australia and New Zealand out of the "British" and
into the "American economic fold", though he thought that there would be
more American influence in Australia after the war;(58) he anticipated the
process which quickened when Australia and the United States were finally
linked directly by radio telephone in December 1941, Pan Am was granted
lending rights in Australia in August 1942, and the American forces started
spending vast amounts of money in Australia from March 1942.
Though at times an admirer of publicity and enterprise, he thought there was
too much of the "horsetrader" ethos in American life and groaned at the
"wearying" prospect that "nearly everyone in this country is trying to sell
something - from USA to toothpaste."(59) Visiting Miami in early 1941 he was
appalled at the "Modern Babylon... representing in concentrated form almost
all the things that I most dislike." He jotted:
"It is highly artificial - nature altered and distorted.
I'll be surprised if nature doesn't hit back one of these
days - and the human element most revolting, large
numbers of rich and offensive Jews - and generally fat,
unhealthy and unintelligent people who overdress and sit
about and eat and drink and gamble, stay up half the
night, and generally conduct themselves on high pressure
'social' lines - which means in an artificial and useless
fashion. Ostentation, silly gossip, physical and mental
sloth - vulgar and senseless display of wealth that, in
the condition of the world today, is not only criminal
but frightening ... feel as if I need a phenyle bath."(60)
The United States played while Britain and her Empire alone fought and shed
blood in the fight against Fascism.
When the Battle of Britain was at its height, Casey wrote that "It needs all
the self-command one possesses not to be bitter and recriminatory towards this
country." Trying to analyse the reasons for United States isolationism he put
it down to - the "Ancient grudge" of the American revolution; "an inferiority
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complex" with respect to Britain; "central heating and other softening
influences"; the "hostile attitude of ...Irish elements" and of "many other
national groupings in USA"; resentment over Britain's first world war debts to
the United States; and "preoccupation with domestic affairs", especially the
"Presidential election of November 1940." His racial pride in British blood
emerged when he noted that, though the Irish Catholic Americans like Joseph
Kennedy, Henry Ford and Randolph Hearst were appeasers, there was a
"percentage" of "British descent" which provided a "real good leavening with
guts, conscience, etc." who supported the war. On another day he scribbled:
"the British race is the finest race in the world."(61)
He often mentions his British sentiments. Rather strangely in the light of
his propaganda successes, when Walter Lippmann once challenged him about why
"we (the British people here) don't use the sympathetic U.S. press enough",
Casey added "We have to realise that we've got to be sensible about these
things." (62) In fact he had been quite "sensible" about them since he had
arrived, over eighteen months before he wrote this. His nostalgia for things
British came through in all sorts of trivial ways, such as in the
Knickerbocker Club in New York where he was delighted to see good old British
brass taps rather than the ubiquitous American chromium ones, or in his
requests to London to have silk socks from Bond Street sent to him in the
diplomatic bag as gentlemen found them very difficult to obtain in the United
States.(63)
All of these negative reactions in private are a measure of the necessity he
found in his mind to balance the excessive public praise he gave America and
the Americans at every opportunity.
VI
By the time of Pearl Harbor Casey had more than vindicated his selection by
Bruce and Menzies as Australia's salesman in the United states. Though, no
doubt, events did much more to bring the American people into the war,
culminating in the final event of Pearl Harbor, Casey had done an
extraordinary job in presenting the Australian case - and through it the
British case - and in focussing American attention on the issues of the war.
The Foreign Office in London held him up as a model publicist for all British
speakers. (64) The American diplomat J.P. Moffat minuted privately that
"Australia has a remarkable press in the United States and Casey has done a
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unique job ... At times I think he has tended to over-play his cards, but by
and large he has put Australia on the map."(65) This he did by persistent
speechmaking, by fostering contacts with American newsmen and politicans, and
by exploiting every opportunity for publicity. These activities were known to
and mostly tacitly approved by the President and the State Department. They
involved in nearly every case influence and goodwill not money.
When Casey left the United States the American press was extremely
complimentary. The New York Times commented that Casey had "brought his
country closer to us than it has ever been before." The Herald-Tribune
editorial thought his departure was "a loss to this country...Rarely has a
minister from another country made as many friends in so short a
time... Americans felt he was one of them." And the Washington Post described
him later as "one of the ablest diplomatists in Washington."(66) Several
months before Casey's departure his old mentor, Bruce, was moved to write to
him that
"...you have put up a completely star turn performance
... you have made for yourself the position of the
outstanding representative of the British Empire in the
U.S.A. not excluding the United Kingdom ambassador ...
Yours has been a remarkable performance ... which has
stirred even me, almost to a point of effusive praise
were such a thing in me."(67)
Sir Alan Watt's verdict is just:
"It has always been my view that Casey's work in
Washington and the United States generally has been
underestimated in his own country. It was not easy, in
advance of Pearl Harbour, to develop a favourable climate
of opinion towards Australia. This the Australian
Minister undoubtedly did."(68)
In the end his "information" proved excellent "propaganda".
Carl Bridge, Casey and the Americans
NOTES
1.
Wheeler-Bennett was personal assistant to the British Ambassador in
Washington, 1939 to 1942. The conversation quoted was 10 June 1940. J.
Wheeler-Bennett, Special Relationships (London, 1975), p. 97.
2.
M Birgan, "Lord Casey: Britain's Secret Agent", The Bulletin, 20
November 1984, p. 60.
3.
Ibid., pp. 60-2.
4.
Raymond Esthus, From Enmity to Alliance (Melbourne, 1964), p. 93.
5. W.S. Churchill to Lord Halifax, cable, 28 June 1940, copy sent to Casey,
Washington Legation files, CRS A 3300/67, Australian Archives [AA] . See
also, Casey Diaries (CD], 29 June 1941, MS. 6150, National Library of
Australia [NLA] .
6.
This paper examines Casey's attempts to influence public opinion. I
have analysed Casey's government-to-government diplomacy in my "R.G.
Casey, Australia's First Washington Legation and the Origins of the
Pacific War, 1940-2", Australian Journal of Politics and History, 28,
2(1982), pp. 181-90.
7.
For Casey's background see W.J. Hudson, Casey (Melbourne,1986) — an
excellent book which does not, however, discuss in any detail the
allegations and activities which are the subject of current paper. See
also C. Bridge, "Richard Gardiner, Baron Casey", in Lord Blake and C.S.
Nicholls (eds.). Dictionary of National Biography, 1971-80 (Oxford,
1986), pp. 127-28.
8.
Walter Crocker, "Richard Casey", Overland, 107 (1987), p. 48.
9.
Sydney Morning Herald, 21 February 1940.
10. New York Times, 21 February 1940.
11. CD, 6 May 1940, 9 March 1940.
12. Lothian to H.A. McClure-Smith, 20 Dec. 1939, cited in J.R.M. Butler,
Lord Lothian (London, 1960), p. 271.
13. For his career see I. Clunies-Ross, Memoirs and Papers, Frank Eyre ed.,
Melbourne, 1961, pp. ix-xii.
14. I. Clunies-Ross, "Australia and the United States", January 1940, S.M.
Bruce papers, M104/1940/8, AA.
15. Ibid. My emphasis.
16. The story can be followed in W.J. Hudson and J. North (eds.). My Dear
P.M. (Canberra, 1980) and W.J. Hudson and W. Way (eds.), Letters from a
'Secret Service Agent' (Canberra, 1986). Casey also had experience as a
Commonwealth Public Servant in Melbourne in 1927 sending out weekly
selected information to "about 200" Australian newspapers, and to universities
and other institutions, in an attempt to create the beginnings of an intelligent
public opinion on Foreign Affairs", Casey to T. Jones, 22 July 1927,
K. Middlemas (ed.), Thomas Jones Whitehall Diary, Vol. II (London, 1969), p. 107.
17. Bruce to Menzies, 16 Feb. 1940, M103/1940, AA.
18. Menzies to Casey, cable, 19 March 1940, Prime Minister's Dept. files,
A1608, L37/1/5, AA.
19. New York Times, 12 April 1973.
20. All of these names and organisations recur frequently in the Casey
Diaries, March 1940 to March 1942.
21. CD, 5 and 7 June 1940.
22. Casey to J. McEwen, 6 May 1940, CD. Casey's emphasis.
23. Loc. cit., and CD, 18 Feb. 1941. Alexander to author, 13 Aug. 1986.
24. CD, 5 June 1940, 14 Aug. 1940.
25. CD, 14 Aug. 1940.
26. Text of Casey's National Press Club Speech, 12 March 1940, External
Affairs files, CRS A 981/Australia 221, AA.
27. E.g. the report of his Chicago speech, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May
1940.
28. CD, 24 Sept., 1940.
29. Sydney Morning Herald, 24 Oct. 1940.
30. CD, 16 Oct. 1940.
31. Age, 28 Oct. 1940.
32. CD, 18 Feb. 1941.
33. CD, 2 July 1941.
34. New York Times, 5 July 1941.
35. New York Times, 1 Sept. 1941.
36. Calculated from the entries in CD.
37. Notes of 23 May 1940 and 7 Nov. 1941, FO 371/24239 and 355. Public
Record Office, London.
38. J.P. Moffat to J.R. Minter (U.S. Legation, Canberra) 19 Aug. 1941, cited
in Esthus, p. 97.
39. Author's interview with Sir Alan Watt, Canberra, 25 May 1979.
40. Sir Alan Watt, Australian Diplomat (Sydney, 1972), p. 37.
41. Ibid., P. 35. New York Times. 25 Dec. 1939.
42. CD, 22 March 1940, 26 Oct. 1940, 7 Feb., 14 Sept., 1941.
43. DC, 23 Feb.. 23 Sept., 1940, 29 July, 17 Sept., 1941.
44. The diaries record many visits to see Newsom, Eliot and New York Times
men. For Eliot's background see CD, 17 Sept., 1940.
45. CD, 15 June, 4 July 1940. R.G. Casey, Personal Experience, 1939-46
(London, 1962), ch. 6.
46. See E.D. and A. Potts, "American Newsmen and Australian Wartime
Propaganda and Censorship, 1940-1942", Historical Studies, 21, 85
(1985), pp. 566-67. Sydney Morning Herald, 9-19 Aug. 1940. CD, 7 Aug.
1940.
47. CD, 21 Aug., 5 Sept. (scenario) 1940; Age, 22 Aug., 2 Oct. 1940; Sydney
Morning Herald 12 and 30 Nov. 1940. In December 1940 Casey negotiated a
half-fare discount with Pan Am for a Paramount Newsreel team intending
to go to Australia, CD, 6 Dec. 1940.
48. March of Time, "Australia at War", Vol. 7, issue 8, 1941.
49
There is no evidence in Casey's diaries or the Washington Legation files
of any censoring of U.S. journalists' material from Australia.
50. Casey, Personal Experience, p. 120.
51. Wheeler-Bennett, Special Relationships, p. 97.
52. CD, 5, 15 and 18 June, 29 July, 7 Aug. 1940. Potts and Potts, "Newsmen",
pp. 565-6; J.Hilvert, Blue Pencil Warriors (St Lucia, 1984), p. 78.
53. Watt, Australian Diplomat, p. 37; Esthus, From Enmity to Alliance, pp.
92-3.
54. Esthus, From Enmity to Alliance, pp. 92-3.
55. Ibid., ch. 9.
56. Ibid., p. 93; Watt, Australian Diplomat, p. 37; Casey to Senator H.S.
Foil (Australian Minister of Information), cable, 24 Feb. 1941,
Washington Legation Files, CRS A 3300/149, AA.
57. Esthus, From Enmity to Alliance, p. 93; Birgan, "Secret Agent", pp.
61-2.
58. CD, 6 May, 14 Aug., 5, 11, 23 Nov., 14 Dec. 1940, 18 April, 11 Aug.
1941.
59. CD, 17 Sept. 1940, 9 Dec. 1941.
60. CD, 29 Sept. 1940, 5 Jan. 1941.
61. CD, 13 July, 9 Dec., 27 June 1940; Esthus, From Enmity to Alliance, p.
86.
62. CD, 22 Aug. 1941.
63. CD, 11 Sept. 1941. Private information.
64
FO 371/24239 and 355, 23 May 1940. 7 Nov. 1941, Public Record Office,
London.
65. Moffat to Minter, 19 Aug. 1941, cited in Esthus, From Enmity to
Alliance, p. 97.
66. New York Times, 21 March 1942, New York Herald-Tribune, 31 March 1942,
Washington Post, 28 Dec. 1943.
67. Bruce to Casey, 17 Sept. 1941, cited in Hudson, Casey, p. 122.
68. Watt, Australian Diplomat, p.35.