Australia's war in American eyes: Owen Dixon in Washington, 1942-43. (History).(Australian Minister to Washington)(edited excerpt from Philip Ayres' "Owen Dixon")(Excerpt)

IN APRIL 1942 John Curtin appointed Owen Dixon Minister to Washington in place of R.G. Casey, who had resigned. The most brilliant man on the High Court, Dixon had already contributed to the war effort by chairing key wartime boards including the Central Wool Committee. It was a feature of his appointment that he was to be directly responsible to Curtin and not to the Minister for External Affairs, H.V. Evatt (who had sat with Dixon on the High Court), an arrangement which would cause problems with Evatt.

On the very day Dixon reached Washington, June 2, Evatt returned there from London. Evatt proceeded to introduce him to all the important people, having spent much of April and May pressing them with Australia's war needs--and antagonising them with his abrasive, bad-mannered ways. In fact the key people in Washington had become fed up with Australia's incessant demands, and with what they saw as its extraordinary myopia--as if other countries were not equally imperilled by the Axis. However, Evatt had managed to secure President Roosevelt's agreement to set up and chair the Pacific War Council on which Australia (represented by Evatt at the first meeting) sat with the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, China and the Philippines. The Council was less a forum than a briefing by the President on the week's developments in the war, followed by unstructured discussion. The main value was that Roosevelt was kept aware of the concerns of the Pacific allies.

On Dixon's first full day in Washington, June 3, Evatt introduced him to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Hull's Under-Secretary Sumner Welles, and took him to lunch at the Supreme Court with Mr Justice Frankfurter, a close friend of Roosevelt's and soon to be a close friend of Dixon's.

Dixon's friendship with Frankfurter, and soon with Dean Acheson at the State Department, would give him an enviable entry into the centre of American power, something that Dixon's First Secretary, Alan Watt, with all his diplomatic correctness and cultivated networks at lower levels, could never have provided. Almost from the beginning Dixon was able to conduct diplomacy in the personal style he preferred, confidently independent of his First Secretary, to whose advice, however, he occasionally listened, weighing it against countervailing arguments. In Watt's view "he was inclined to assume too many responsibilities himself and to rely too little upon his staff", but the result for Dixon was full command of the facts and the control that goes with it, a visceral necessity for him.

To an undefined extent Dixon's responsibilities overlapped with those of Lewis R. Macgregor, Australian Government Trade Commissioner in North America and Director of the Australian General War Supplies Procurement Mission, who had just been relocated by Evatt from New York to Washington. Many problems would arise with Macgregor, whom Dixon regarded as Evatt's fifth columnist. Evatt would circumvent diplomatic channels (and the arrangement for direct communication between Curtin and Dixon) by sending instructions directly to Macgregor and requiring him to deal with various American bodies without informing the Legation. There was also an Australian military mission in Washington headed by Lieutenant-General Edward K. Smart with whom Dixon would liaise on Australia's changing military and strategical circumstances.

During his first few days in Washington Dixon met the key people in the military, men with whom his relations would be close and whose admiration he would enjoy--General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations (who briefed Dixon and Evatt on June 6 on the Battle of Midway), General Henry H. Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, and others including Field Marshal Sir John Dill, British representative on the Combined (British and American) Chiefs of Staff Committee in Washington.

Influence with these men, influence within the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, influence with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson (who briefed Evatt and Dixon on Midway on June 5 with the battle still in progress), influence with Edward R. Stettinius, who headed the Lend-Lease Administration and was Special Assistant to the President, was vital to Australia's interests at a time when materials of war were scarce and in high demand within the United States itself and from Britain. It was partly as a result of Dixon's representations to these men, not just in formal meetings but at lunches, cocktail parties and other gatherings, as well as through pressure exerted from a distance by MacArthur, that the flow to Australia of aircraft, aviation fuel, petrol, diesel, oil, rubber, aluminium and the other essentials of war increased substantially in the second half of 1942. Dixon's relations with the senior military were good because he shared their factual, empirical approach to things (something that had long been evident in his legal judgments). But Dixon quickly saw that he would need to develop interlinked relationships with both military and government and earn the respect of each.