Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
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) -1- 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 -2- 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. -3- 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) -4- 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. -5- 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 -6- 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 -7- 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 -8- 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, -9- 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. -10- 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 -11- 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 -12- 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.