A political life - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Bridget Griffen-Foley
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." ♦