A political life
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Bridget Griffen-Foley
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Bridget Griffen-Foley's biography and other articles by this writer
Alan Reid thought his brilliant career had gone bung. As a result of articles he and his editor-in-chief, David McNicoll, had written in the Packer-owned The Sunday Telegraph and The Bulletin, the Labor MP Tom Uren had been awarded £30,000 ($60,000) damages, the highest sum ever obtained in an Australian defamation case. In 1963, Reid had scored perhaps his greatest scoop (more of an exposé, really) to date, recording the ALP national executive meeting to discuss defence policy while its parliamentary leaders loitered in the street. Now, a year after the publication of the famous "36 faceless men" story that was haunting the ALP, Reid was intent on avoiding his volatile boss.
Sir Frank Packer finally rang Reid and asked him for a favour. Reid was to go to the Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) residence in Red Hill and rummage around in the hallway cupboard. "You'll find a shotgun and some shells," Packer said. "If you load it and put it to your head, I'll pay somebody to pull the trigger." Having had his little joke, Packer assured the worried political correspondent that the payout was "only money" and, besides, it would be a long time before Uren got his hands on it. Refusing to let the matter rest, Packer dragged it through the courts until 1969. According to Reid, it was only after he acted as an intermediary that Packer and Uren agreed to settle out of court.
The story is vintage Alan Reid. Here he is, apparently telling a story against himself, while actually placing himself at the centre of the action. We see Reid responsible for ACP's loss (even though McNicoll and the lawyers had also played a role); enjoying a jocular camaraderie with his employer; being too valuable as a political correspondent to lose; and resolving (with a little unacknowledged help from others) an expensive legal saga.
Much ink about Reid has been spilled by fellow journalists, many of them protégés; "legendary" is the adjective used most frequently. Having dodged a bullet in 1964, Reid continued to write for ACP and churn out books and even plays until ill health forced him to retire in 1985. Reid may not have produced an autobiography but he wrote himself into the public record nevertheless – with articles on "My Role in the Labor Split", "Prime Ministers I have known" and "A strange rooftop sect", and in his book The Gorton Experiment (Shakespeare Head Press, 1971). He also recorded lengthy oral history interviews - one in 1972 and two more in 1986-87, shortly before his death. The tapes and transcripts are copious, often containing multiple accounts of the same incident; there are subtle shifts in emphasis and in the ostensibly verbatim recollection of long-ago conversations. When relaying his story about the Uren case to Daniel Connell, Reid asked his interviewer: "Have I told you this story?" Reid's career was about breaking and, at times, embroidering stories as he became, quite self-consciously, the éminence grise of the federal parliamentary press gallery and a player in, as well as a reporter on, political events for nearly half a century.
THE ENGLISH-BORN SON OF A SEAMAN, REID CAME TO SYDNEY in 1927 and was educated by the Christian Brothers at Waverley College. He was no conventional product of a poor working-class Catholic family, refusing to attend Mass and opting instead to read Marx under his desk. He harangued fellow pupils – including Frank Browne, who was destined to emerge as another important Canberra insider/outsider – about the merits of Premier Jack Lang. Leaving school during the Depression, Reid went bush and was unemployed for long periods before R.C. Packer (Sir Frank's father) took him on as a copy boy at Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Sydney newspaper The Sun. Reid became a cadet journalist but was fired for drunkenness, before being given a reprieve and sent off to Canberra.
In years to come, probably no journalist who had disgraced his or her copybook would be dispatched to the national capital. But in 1937, Canberra had been home to federal parliament for only a decade and barely two dozen political correspondents were based there permanently. Arriving in Canberra a "mad Jack Lang man", Reid was deeply influenced by the Labor government during the war. He was captivated by the combination of John Curtin – "a superb thinker" – and his trusted lieutenant Ben Chifley – "earthy, well-read and eminently practical" – and the government's dedication to winning the war and planning for postwar reconstruction convinced him to join the ALP. Reid became certain that the party was the dynamic of Australian politics, whether in government or opposition. He rejected all forms of totalitarianism, coming to the pragmatic view that "Australian socialism consists of a fair go to everyone". It seems that Chifley (who was to remain Reid's favourite prime minister) attempted to entice the young journalist into politics. Reid declined the invitation, fearing he would be corrupted by power far too quickly: "I like string-pulling and the like, getting numbers together, I like doing that and I view that in me as a bad weakness so I decided against entering politics."
He learned much from the Melbourne Herald's established political correspondent J.A. Alexander who, with Sir Keith Murdoch, had cultivated Joe Lyons's dissatisfaction with the Scullin Labor government and took some credit for installing Lyons as prime minister in 1932. Reid was less concerned with the result of Alexander's political machinations (Reid did, after all, view Lyons as the "great rat") than with his methods: "He had an uncanny sense, Joe did, just from watching people, of realising what they were talking about and being able to hit the mark pretty well ... Joe realises [sic] all the forces that were at work in the show, as well as those mechanical leaks. He could play one off against the other and do it very well."
Emulating Alexander's prowess in avoiding "mechanical" leaks, Reid identified the forces at work within the Labor caucus and subtly set source against source to build up a complex composite picture. Appointed head of the Canberra bureau of Associated Newspapers, Reid boasted that he could "find out almost anything I like about the Labor Party – its aims, its thought trends, the clash of opposing forces within its ranks". By the 1950s he had been around long enough to have an intimate knowledge of the cabinet hierarchy, the mechanics of the Labor caucus, the workings of the committee system, the tensions between the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the interaction between public servants and ministerial staffers. As journalist Sam Lipski noted, Reid believed that politics could only be understood as something that went on at many levels outside Canberra - in employer organisations, trade unions, party branches and party machines.
REID WAS INTERESTED IN THE WORKINGS OF POLITICAL MACHINES as he was in parliamentary debate and electoral campaigning. A later political correspondent, Richard Farmer, credited Reid with being the first to really understand the ALP's factional nature: "He was fascinated with factional politics and recognised it in the 1950s before others knew it existed." For years, Reid was the only correspondent to bother with meetings of the ALP federal executive and national conference. Newspapers traditionally sent their industrial roundsmen to such meetings; they reported the formal resolutions but rarely related them to the wider political scene.
Reid's interest in the internal machinations of the labour movement led, in September 1954, to perhaps the first (and one of the most melodramatic) articles about social commentator B.A. Santamaria's connection with the Industrial Groups. While the article helped precipitate ALP leader, Dr H.V. Evatt's famous statement about disloyal elements within the ALP, a "very insistent and persuasive" Frank Packer was attempting to lure Reid to his stable. Reid moved across to ACP in October but refused Packer's demand that he resign from the ALP, saying it was not up to his employer to determine what he did in his spare time. The proprietor of the increasingly conservative Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph relented, as he found in Reid a man with an almost unparalleled knowledge of goings-on in Canberra and someone capable of teasing out the divisions within Labor ranks. Criticised for devoting his forensic pen to the beleaguered ALP rather than exposing any faults in the coalition, Reid had a simple response: "I think I expected more of Labor." With Curtin and Chifley gone from the scene, Reid fell out with Evatt and his deputy, Arthur Calwell. By 1957, rank-and-file ALP members were complaining that the views Reid expressed in his column "Political Parade" and other articles for The Daily Telegraph were "incompatible with Labor principles". At the end of the year, the South Canberra branch failed to renew his membership.
The man who had rejected Catholicism and had in turn been rejected by the ALP operated as something of a loner. Reid's unnerving trademark was to walk down the corridor past the other offices in the press gallery, whistling, when he was on to something good. His interest lay in the political game rather than in ideas and philosophies. He delighted in shocking his colleagues when they took a stance during the 1960 case involving Max Stuart, an Aborigine controversially convicted of the murder of a young girl: "I didn't give a continental whether they hanged Stuart or did not hang him as it was still a good story either way." Reid also wrote a play in the 1950s that was finally performed in Canberra in 1975, that most dramatic of political years; The Indelible Stamp was set in what Reid called our "national theatre, the Australian Parliament". He was even capable of writing a book about Christ's death "purely from the political angle, with no religion in it"; The Christ Killers was deemed too controversial to publish.
FOR DECADES MPs, JOURNALISTS AND VISITORS HAVE BEEN MINGLING in King's Hall, the geographical centre of Parliament House. Dubbed the "Red Fox", the redheaded Reid was an almost permanent fixture as he waited for politicians to come to him while he leaned over the glass case containing the legislation assenting to the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. Dwarfed by the towering statue of King George V, politicians from all parties and factions would stop at "Reid's Rest" to talk – and to listen. The common excuse for being seen with Reid was: "Oh, I was just trying to find out what was going on." Addressing each contact as "comrade", he rarely went seeking information in ignorance and when he made a telephone call, he usually started by offering a small piece of the mosaic in exchange for another piece. Indeed, Reid preferred to gather news rather than write stories. Towards the end of his life he revealed that he wished he had been wealthy enough to just observe politics and gather information about it: "I don't enjoy writing."
By the 1960s, Reid was no longer known only to politicians and fellow journalists. At the November 1963 election, which Menzies called early, largely to exploit the immensely damaging "36 faceless men" tag, Reid was recruited to help with the coverage on the Packer-owned TCN-9 and GTV-9. For the first time in Australia there was to be a live television network broadcast but an array of technology and a team of statisticians were unable to pick up an early trend for viewers. The camera cut to Reid, his face wreathed in smoke from the omnipresent cigarette in the corner of his mouth, standing before a Sunday Telegraph billboard poster proclaiming "MENZIES WINS!". Reid's prediction of the margin was sound and he became a regular part of Nine's election broadcasts.
Unintentionally, the "36 faceless men" episode helped to encourage the ALP to reform and modernise, with parliamentary representation becoming embedded in the party's structures and national conferences being opened up to the press. At the same time, Reid was to seize the opportunity to balance out his systematic dissections of the ALP. As the Liberal Party began to quarrel and divide following Menzies' retirement in 1966, Reid was to analyse – and play a role in – affairs on the conservative side of politics. He had become, in his own words, a "manoeuvrer" rather than simply an observer or a reporter on events.
Reid achieved his greatest public notoriety during these years. In early 1969, an ACP subsidiary published his first book, recounting the battle to succeed Harold Holt. Reid later observed that he turned to contemporary political history because he was concerned about "the illiteracy of the Canberra press gallery". With more than 6000 books in his personal library, he regarded himself as a political historian as well as a reporter, and The Power Struggle (Shakespeare Head Press) was one of the earliest studies of the Liberal Party. Reid enthused that the book, which was written in a colourful, at times rather melodramatic, style, was about "that most exciting of all human activities – the struggle for political and personal power". It relied on the extraordinary network of informants Reid had built up over the years but there could only be one source for some crucial sections: the Treasurer and Frank Packer's protégé, Billy McMahon. Minister for External Affairs Paul Hasluck, later pointed out several factual errors in the book and sections that could only be sourced to the ambitious McMahon. (The Power Struggle was also a source of bemusement to Menzies, who was sent a copy by Packer's elder son, Clyde; the former prime minister, who had never quite forgiven Reid for writing him off in 1941, privately noted, "Much of the book was ‘news' to me".) Nor did Hasluck, Australia's official World War II historian, give Reid's disclosures about Labor and the coalition much credence. He dismissed Reid as "a competent though somewhat venal purveyor of political gossip" with "no intellectual qualification to be the historian of anything".
The diaries of displaced minister Peter Howson, which constitute a truly remarkable account of a political era by a contemporary player, show Reid relishing the role of Packer's "eyes and ears" in Canberra. The diaries make it clear that the press, particularly Reid, was busy "developing the crisis" concerning John Gorton's leadership. Reid was initially interested in promoting David Fairbairn as a leadership contender but, in time, his interest in undermining the prime minister coalesced nicely with Packer's desire to boost McMahon. In September 1969, Howson recorded that Reid was working on a new book, The Gorton Experiment, which would probably "have an effect on the leadership during next year". The book finally appeared in mid-1971, with a postscript concerning Gorton's displacement by McMahon a few months earlier, and it was clearly designed to destroy Gorton as a possible continuing rival to McMahon. Both his books demonstrated again that Reid was primarily interested in intrigue rather than ideas. In his newsletter Things I Hear, Frank Browne declared that his old classmate had hurled "a rock of devastating force" at Gorton; a review credited to Whitlam but written by his adviser, Graham Freudenberg, described The Gorton Experiment as "in essence a political polemic written by one of the most determined politicians in Australia". An unmerciful and unrelenting account of Gorton's troubled prime ministership, the book prompted Gorton to lash out at Reid in a series of articles in Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Australian; the first instalment resulted in Gorton being forced to resign from cabinet.
IT WAS ONLY DURING THIS PERIOD THAT REID SECURED his first interview with Whitlam, who had been elevated to the Labor leadership some four years earlier. There was no rapport between the pair as Whitlam, like Hasluck, instinctively disliked and distrusted Reid. He became even more isolated in 1972-75, when most of the press gallery were captivated by the euphoria of the Whitlam government; Reid presumably relished the opportunity to dissect the government's problems and controversies in The Whitlam Venture (Hill of Content, 1976). When the Telegraphs were sold to News Ltd in 1972, Reid was retained by the Packers, writing for The Bulletin and hosting a Sunday night political program, Federal File, on the Nine network. He missed the intensity of filing daily political stories, telling a journalist in 1982 that if Kerry Packer would "fire or retire me I'd be back to a daily like a shot". But in 1985, cancer and peripheral neuropathy forced him to retire. Canberra was no longer the "village" that he fondly reminisced about; he left a press gallery that had ballooned in size since his arrival in 1937, was staffed by many journalists with tertiary qualifications and featured numerous representatives of the electronic media.
On his retirement, Reid became the first member of the gallery to be invited on to the floor of parliament so that the speaker could pay tribute to his long career. Half a century earlier, if Reid is to be believed, he had relinquished the possibility of a parliamentary career for himself. Oddly, he viewed a liking for string-pulling and number crunching as a weakness for a politician, but he had no qualms about behaving in a similar way as a member of the press gallery. An outsider who was often happy to shock his colleagues, Reid once compared the political correspondent to "a private soldier, unable to determine how the army is run"; the comment was a little disingenuous as he had, for decades, been able to pursue a number of big political stories without proprietorial direction. He had also played an important role in informing the political machinations of Frank Packer, who belonged to a generation of Australian media proprietors who could afford to be driven by political ideology as much as commercial opportunism. As the Whitlam camp noted in 1971, Reid had become one of the most determined politicians in Australia; he may have worked behind the scenes but his influence and, indeed, his public profile, were significantly greater than those of a humble backbencher. No wonder one of Reid's last public comments before his death in 1987 was this lament: "My legs have gone on me so I can't walk the corridors of power." ♦