Volume 1 | Issue 11 | Article ID 1754 | Nov 02, 2003 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

Wilfred Burchett's Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: Lessons from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Iraq

Stuart McIntyre

Wilfred Burchett’s Memoirs of a RebelAustralian troops also participated, Burchett Journalist: had by then become the target of a decades- Lessons from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Iraq long official witchhunt which saw him barred from his home country for twenty years. Only By Stuart McIntyre with the election in 1972 of an Australian Labor government did Canberra finally restore his revealed on October 31, Australian passport, at the same time 2005 that an in-house historian of the US withdrawing the country's forces from Vietnam. National Security Agency has investigated the In a right-wing political vendetta, even August 4, 1964 'Tonkin Gulf Incident' that the Burchett's children were long denied their US government used to escalate the Vietnam Australian birthright. Some of the conservative War. According to this official U.S. historian, criticism of Burchett's pro-communist views what happened that fateful day waswas sincere and correct, but inadequate in the deliberately misrepresented by officials who eyes of his personal and political enemies. They quickly discovered important mistakes in their waged a long campaign to blacken his name agency's real-time reporting but immediately with lies while preventing him from returning covered them up. A non-existent 'attack' then to Australia. became a lie that took the United States into a new war against North Vietnam, at a cost of Only after Burchett's death in exile did much 58,000 American lives and over a million of the truth come out, in a series of studies Vietnamese. It now seems clear that not one written by Gavan McCormack, a leading but both of the most disastrous conflicts in U.S. Australian historian of Japan and Korea. These history, those in Vietnam and Iraq, were included McCormack's seminal articles, "An sparked by US officials disseminating lies and Australian Dreyfus?" and "Burchett in Korea" in convincing the American public to go to war. the monthly Australian Society (August 1984 Indeed, according to the New York Times, the and September 1985), and "The New Right and NSA historian's extensive analysis of the official Human Rights: 'Cultural Freedom' and the dishonesty was scheduled for publication in Burchett Affair" (Meanjin 3, 1986), as well as a 2002-03, but the work was withheld from the 50-page chapter entitled "Korea: Wilfred public once the case then being disseminated Burchett's Thirty Years' War," in my 1986 to take the US into war against Iraq (its anthology Burchett: Reporting the Other Side 'weapons of mass destruction') was itself of the World, 1939-1983. Recent Australian already becoming controversial. research in British and US archives has since vindicated much of what McCormack wrote Among the earliest and most prominent twenty years ago, highlighting the scandalous Western opponents of the Vietnam War was the official mistreatment of Burchett and his family Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This died in 1983. Having first opposed USmistreatment helped not only to silence involvement in the Korean War, in which Burchett's on-the-spot war reporting but also to

1 1 | 11 | 0 APJ | JF mislead and American publics, at It’s difficult to put it down because it is written great human cost. with the freshness and immediacy of an outstanding reporter who was there when As a youthful traveler in inter-war Europe, history was made: in Germany on the eve of Burchett had helped rescue German Jews from World War Two assisting Jewish refugees, with Hitler, and had then covered the Pacific War Wingate on the Burma Road, in China as the for British newspapers. But it may have been Red Army struggled against the Japanese and his experience as the first Western reporter Kuomintang forces, in Hiroshima after the into Hiroshima after the A-bomb, and the first bomb was dropped (despite attempts to prevent to break the story of radiation, that turned him his access), and then in Germany after the war, into a dissident. Horrified at what he saw of the in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, China, human and physical destruction of the Japanese Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and many other city, and also at its censorship by US officials, arenas of contestation and conflict. Burchett soon commenced his career-long opposition to several American wars in Asia. He He was not only there, he had first-hand entitled one of his last books Shadows of knowledge and personal dealings with the Hiroshima. decision-makers: Macarthur, Harriman and Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, Ho Chi Minh and Yet there was also an important Australian Sihanouk. dimension to his writing. Burchett's son George, an artist now living in Sydney, has co- But this book is something more than an eye- edited a long-lost work, his father'switness record of contemporary history. It’s unpublished autobiography, covering his early also the story of a remarkable man. Wilfred life as well as his world-wide career. At the Burchett reported events for a large number of Melbourne launch of Memoirs of a Rebel news outlets, and he also wrote some 35 books, Journalist, published in 2005 by the University which were translated into as many languages. of New South Wales Press, the distinguished Australian historian Stuart McIntyre, Dean of The story he tells of himself is of a largely self- the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University, educated man (he taught himself a number of stressed Burchett's youthful upbringing in an languages simultaneously and by rote while independent Australian farming family as an labouring on the land) who came from a strong, important influence on Burchett's inimitable close family background of nonconformity, style of reporting against the grain in a series perseverance and industry, and practised all of international crises. -- Ben Kiernan the family characteristics.

The Burchetts came to Australia from south- Nick Shimmin explains in the preface to this east England in the 1850s and were pioneers in book how Wilfred Burchett’s son George southern Gippsland in the 1870s, enterprising obtained the typescript of Wilfred’sbuilders in Melbourne during the 1880s, then autobiography: it was kept, along with other forced back onto the land by the depression of papers, by his widow Vessa, who lived in the 1890s. Wilfred’s father similarly went into Bulgaria, and brought back to Australia two the building industry but was ruined by the years ago by George’s wife Ilza. depression of the 1930s, and Wilfred (the younger son) went onto the track, experiencing Despite its length, George read the entire book the hardship and exploitation and mateship of in one weekend — and so did I, last weekend. an itinerant adventurer.

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He was in Sydney in 1934 when a Methodist rest of his life. minister and family friend died at the Domain when speaking out against the refusal to permit As early as 1953 Wilfred Burchett was the Egon Kisch to enter Australia. Kisch, asubject of a book published by the Australasian flamboyant roving reporter and publicist for Book Society, He Chose Truth. In 1986 Ben left causes, clearly inspired Wilfred’s career. Kiernan edited a collection of essays that Burchett remembers him here as a champion of appraised his work. His own memoirs appeared noble causes, ‘the world was his beat’. And in two previous versions, Passport in 1969, and Kisch was also the victim of official surveillance then the bowdlerised and heavily reduced and vilification. version of this one, At the Barricades, which appeared in 1981. The Memoirs conclude with Wilfred Burchett made the world his beat, the libel suit and omit a final chapter from At championed noble causes and also incurred the Barricades. victimisation. He became a marked man in Japan after the Second World War when he There has been a hostile life of Wilfred by the defied the American control of information to ineffable Roland Perry, a far less distinguished publicise the effects of atomic radiation. journalist, who then turned his attention to and ; there are He lost the support of his Fleet Street editors security files in Canberra and other places, and as the Cold War gripped Europe. He was there have been countless spiteful and accused of aiding the enemy in Korea, and of derogatory articles. interrogating or even brainwashing American and Australian prisoners of war. He was Burchett’s journalistic career was always subsequently accused of working for the KGB, something more than reportage, it was a and living in luxury, while he plied his trade, commitment to a cause. That cause for always at the front line, surviving danger and Burchett was the liberation of humanity from sickness, hammering out stories on hisoppression, the defeat of fascism, the success typewriter. of national liberation movements and the building up of an alternative political, economic He was persecuted by another Australian and social order. journalist, Denis Warner, who himself had close links with ASIO. When I googled Wilfred He insisted that he was not a member of the Burchett, the entry for Denis Warner’s papers Communist Party, and none of his critics have in the National Library was close to the top ever shown that he was. But he was a because they contain an extensive Burchett file. supporter of the communist movement in a period when the bipolar logic of the Cold War Wilfred’s passport was stolen in the mid-1950s interpreted that support as treachery. His very and he was refused entry back into his own ability to work on the other side (despite country and threatened with violence when western attempts to prevent his doing so) eventually he did return by light plane from allowed him to report world events with Noumea. knowledge and insights denied to others.

The autobiography concludes with hisBurchett repeatedly broke stories. He was the subsequent and unsuccessful suit against the man on the spot who did not rely on official DLP’s former Senator Pat Kane, his failure to briefing and handouts, but went and saw for gain justice and the ruinous award of costs that himself. He drew not just on his interviews with effectively kept him out of his homeland for the leading figures in China, Korea, Vietnam and

3 1 | 11 | 0 APJ | JF elsewhere but intimate contact with other against China. participants. Moreover, his informed knowledge was As Ben Kiernan has observed, he was at his respected by conservative diplomats such as best when a story was breaking and he could Frederic Eggleston and Keith Waller. take the reader behind the scenes, or in We are indebted to George Burchett and Nick challenging and rebutting the spurious Shimmin for preparing the memoirs for allegations that were part of the Cold War publication. It is perhaps inevitable that there propaganda battle. are some slips Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s journalist father appears in the index as He was less successful in his judgement of Crabbe, Wallace, but such are the hazards of a communist regimes. As Ben Kiernan has double-barrelled surname. Zelman Cowan lacks observed, he was no analyst and he could not an e in his surname, Gregory Clark gets a assess the direction of slow historical changes. superfluous one in his. He praised the achievements of Stalinism and These are minor flaws in the remarkable life- downplayed its repression. story of a remarkable Australian.

He was a crusading journalist who almost instinctively took a contrary line to Western Stuart McIntyre, a Laureate Professor and news and news commentary. Hence he was Dean of the Arts Faculty at the University of gullible at best in his reports on the show trials Melbourne, is author of The History Wars and in Eastern Europe after the Second World War; volume 4 of the Oxford History of Australia. and he was slow to see the murderous Ben Kiernan, author of The Pol Pot Regime, is character of the Khmer Rouge regime, or the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History recognise the plight of boatpeople who fled and Professor of International and Area Studies Indochina. at Yale University, and editor of Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World, But to suggest he simply hoed the party line is 1939-1983. to ignore the fact that he had to and did take sides in the conflict within the communist bloc. George Burchett and Nick Shimmin, eds., He supported the Soviet Union against Tito, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist. The China against the Soviet Union, Vietnam Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett.

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