Labor wasn’t his only victim. John Grey Gorton, Liberal prime minister from 1968 to 1971, felt Reid had brought him down on Sir Frank Packer’s instructions, crossing the line between reporting party room plots and shaping them. Gorton described Reid as a ‘slightly built balding man with little darting eyes and an expression of perpetual cynicism… peeping under a drooping eyelid from the corner of one eye… one expects momentarily to be nudged in the ribs with a confidential elbow and given a hot tip for the 3.30 at Randwick’.

Reid’s 50-year career reporting federal politics started in 1937 at the Sun. He switched to the Frank Packer-owned Telegraph in 1954. When he died in 1987, Reid was Kerry Packer’s personal emissary in Canberra, his lobbyist, as well as a reporter for the Bulletin and Channel 9. This was a brazen conflict. Yet his professional success subsumed all: he delivered scoops with mischief and relish, and MPs spilled secrets to him like stricken sinners in the confessional.

His most remembered front page appeared in March 1963 and put paid to the ALP’s chances of beating the Menzies government in that year’s federal election. A special ALP conference had met in Canberra’s Kingston Hotel to determine the party position on a US communication station at North West Cape in Western Australia.

Under the then party rules, leader Arthur Calwell and deputy leader Gough Whitlam were not delegates. They were caught loitering, somewhat pathetically, under a street light waiting for unknown union and party officials to arrive at a policy and hand it to them. Reid grabbed a passing photographer and captured the humiliation of the Labor leadership at the hands of what became immortalised as ‘the 36 faceless men’. It was instant political devastation for a profoundly unworldly Labor party.

Reid wrote three books, but none on the affair that sealed his journalistic reputation: the Labor split of 1954 -7. It was Reid, in the Sun, who had unveiled B.A. Santamaria, the leader of the so-called Movement, which was mobilising within the unions and party: ‘…in the tense melodrama of politics there are mysterious figures who stand virtually unnoticed in the wings, invisible to all but a few in the audience, as they cue, Svengali-like … the actors on the stage.’

Reid was fond of the John Curtin-Ben Chifley era of Labor leadership and hostile to Santamaria, whom he portrayed as an ‘exotic’ force. He even advised H.V. Evatt on his 1954 statement attacking the Santamaria forces. The statement provoked the split, but was entirely unnecessary as Santamaria’s influence was containable and, as leader, Evatt should have been able to straddle his party’s factions as Curtin and Chifley had done.

Reid recoiled from ‘the Doc’ as the flailing Evatt resorted to anti-Catholic sectarianism, as reflected in this exchange with Reid, patched together from Reid’s oral history:

Evatt: Alan, you’ve left me… You’re anti-Santamaria but you’re not with me in this campaign… I’ll tell you something Alan, for every Catholic vote I’ll lose I will get two Protestant votes.

Reid: You’re out of your cotton- picking mind, Doc.

In their biography of Reid, Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt refer to Evatt’s ‘rapprochement with communists and fellow travellers in the broader labour movement’. This is a good insight, the key to Evatt’s position through the split. This accommodation of a pro-communist Left was documented by Reid in story after story, especially after he joined the Telegraph and his contempt for Evatt merged with Sir Frank Packer’s fierce conservatism.

When Ross Fitzgerald told me he and Stephen Holt were going to write a biography of Alan Reid, I told him the material would be too scant, the result too meagre. The authors have proved me wrong. They have written an invaluable history of the interaction of the Press Gallery and politicians.

When I launched the book, I quoted the American writer Susan Sontag, who said in 1982: ‘Imagine the preposterous case of somebody who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only the Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of communism? There’s no doubt it would have been the Reader’s Digest reader.’

The same is true here, I suggested. Through the Fifties and Sixties, Reid and his tabloid insights into Labor, communism and Evatt would have offered more truth than the pages of Meanjin or Outlook.

Reid would have found little to disagree with in The Family File. On the surface this is surprising, because Mark Aarons’ book is the story of four generations of a family of communists. But it is told through the archives of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), hence its unique flavour. The author’s good sense — he let lapse his communist party membership in 1978 — rescues it from being another soft-headed memoir of heroic revolutionaries struggling for peace, workers’ rights and democracy.

As a boy in 1959, Mark Aarons saw a car pulling into the backyard of the family’s Fairfield home and a suitcase being handed to his father, Laurie, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Opened, it revealed wads of cash: 45,000 Australian pounds from the Soviet Union, he later learned, sent through a Romanian trade union to keep Australian communism afloat.

The book confirms that the Soviet Embassy delivered orders to the leadership of the CPA and, when the party criticised Russia after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the embassy worked with a pro-Soviet faction to create a pro-Soviet breakaway party.

The revelation at the epicentre of the book, however, is the story of the party’s involvement in Soviet espionage. Enter stage left the conspiratorial figure of Wally Clayton who, from 1943 to 1949 and at the direction of the CPA leadership, worked with the Soviet embassy in Canberra. He collected files from party members and sympathisers in the public service in Canberra and delivered them to the TASS correspondent in Kings Cross, Sydney, who was the local KGB man.

After the CPA dissolved itself in 1991, Laurie Aarons, who had been the party’s national secretary from 1965 to 1976, taped an interview with Clayton, by then 90 years old. Clayton admitted in this tape that he delivered material to Soviet intelligence, something he had insolently denied at the Petrov Royal Commission into Soviet Espionage (1954-5), and that he had done it at the request of then party secretary Lance Sharkey. This revelation should nudge Australian historians towards a more benign view of the Petrov Royal Commission, which had been denounced so thoroughly by Evatt and criticised by Labor-inclined historians.

After the commission, Laurie Aarons claims he terminated any dealings with the Soviet embassy that may have fed intelligence to Soviet spies. Mark Aarons quotes him as saying: ‘The thing about spying is that it’s a very dangerous thing to have alleged against you.’ True indeed. Yet Mark Aarons reports that a first secretary of the Embassy, Ivan Skipov, was to beat a path to Bill Brown, a CPA leader and later a leader of the pro-Soviet breakaway party, who gave him the names of sympathisers. To people like Brown, the Soviet Union was the country of the mind, the object of their patriotism.

For Labor party people, the most arresting material in Mark Aarons’ book is the confirmation that the CPA recruited and managed dual ticketholders, that is, left-wingers who held secret membership of the communist party while they held office in the ALP. The big fish here was Arthur Gietzelt, eventually a minister in the Hawke government. This practice, of course, magnified the influence of a relatively tiny Marxist-Leninist party, giving it a say — how much of a say can be debated — at ALP conferences.

Some leftists have said in reference to Aarons’ book: ‘Big deal. Everybody knew it.’ Maybe. But we’ve never had a combination of ASIO file notes and a member of the Aarons family laying it down for the record. Moreover, no dual ticketholder has ever admitted it; Gietzelt continues to deny it. And historian Stuart Macintyre in his writings on the history of the CPA never revealed it.

A book is now being written on Gietzelt and research taking place on others on the Labor Left who may have held dual membership. A number of ALP leftwingers could be revealed as long-term CPA plants. As a result, some leftist activism could be exposed as less indigenous Labor radicalism and rather emanations and diktats emerging from a Marxist-Leninist party that could never poll one per cent at a general election under its own name.

This has implications for the historiography of Australia in the Cold War era. It strengthens the indictments of Evatt and Calwell because they accommodated what we can probably now objectively define as a pro-communist Left and thus made Labor close to unelectable. It elevates Gough Whitlam’s role as the leader who broke the power of the Victorian ALP executive and prevented Jim Cairns becoming Labor leader. In acres of speeches and writings on foreign policy by Cairns, a single criticism of the Soviet bloc would be a discovery of gem-like value. Perhaps not a dual ticketholder, he wore the appellation ‘fellow traveller’ like a second skin.

The revelations are also a historic justification for the existence of a NSW-based Labor Right with a lineage embracing Premiers McKell and Cahill (the later warded off both Santamaria and Evatt forces as his government of 1952-59 became the only state Labor government to survive the split) and machine man John Ducker, who blocked a Gietzelt-led takeover of the ALP’s biggest branch in 1970-71. Gietzelt-led? Knowing what Aarons and his ASIO files have confirmed one can write, rather, communist-led. Paul Keating took over from Ducker when control in NSW Labor again wobbled in 1979-80. From his time in Young Labor, the hard Left have always been ‘the comms’ to Paul Keating.

Gietzelt’s wife Dawn was once overheard saying she ‘did not care which labour party her children favoured’, and clearly meant the CPA was to be regarded as another labour party. Obviously no reader of Solzhenitsyn, she — like the ALP Left of her generation, including Cairns — could never see the difference between the totalitarian and democratic brands of socialism. I always suspected their spiritual homelands were the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe, and was inclined to imagine some of our lefties as members of an Australian Politburo, wolfing pork and caviar at banquets for visiting Soviet delegations and, with a bark or two, despatching social democrats and liberals to the Gulag.

Aarons is blunt about these forces in his dad’s old party. Other communist memoirs cast a rosy hue over the comrades, idealistic fighters for the rights of workers and Aborigines. Of course, idealism is never a defence. Isaiah Berlin identified the desire of idealists for a ‘rational reorganisation of society’ as the very source of totalitarianism. ‘The search for perfection,’ he wrote, ‘does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heart.’

Former Tribune editor Rupert Lockwood once told me that in a lifetime in the CPA he had met people perfectly capable of lining enemies against a wall and machine-gunning them.

ASIO penetrated the CPA comprehensively. Its agents were present at every meeting and even worked as full-time staff. If this were overkill, then the espionage of the Forties, now confirmed, provides the justification. I find myself hoping that ASIO now demonstrates the same spycraft as it infiltrates every Islamist cell that harbours the faintest enthusiasm for blowing us up. And I’m struck by ASIO’s restraint. After all, a leaked copy of Gietzelt’s ASIO file could have killed Labor’s chances at any number of elections.

I know one journalist who would have torn a half-proffered copy from an agent’s gloved hands. He, above all, understood the implications. The adjective ‘explosive’ or the noun ‘time bomb’ would have been in the first par of his Telegraph exclusive.

Bob Carr on two new books that reveal the extent of the Labor Left’s overlap with the Australian Communist Party during the Cold War.

Bob Carr was Labor premier of NSW from 1995 to 2005. Alan ‘The Red Fox’ Reid: Pressman Par Excellence is published by University of New South Wales Press, price $49.95. The Family File by Mark Aarons is published by Black Inc, price $34.95.
Spectator Australia, 17 July 2010

His name is Ross and he’s an alcoholic. Don’t blame me. He outed himself in his own book. He can thank the Almighty God that no one reads any more or everyone will be pointing at him. On the other hand he has no one to blame but himself. He doesn’t even believe in God so he adds “Please” before the Serenity Prayer so it goes “Please God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Professor Ross Fitzgerald is a name I hear all the time but I can never put my finger on him. He leaves parties as I arrive. He exits dinner tables at will if I am late, as usual.

Two clients for whom I recently appeared in court in difficult circumstances both sent me copies of Fitzgerald’s book, My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey, while I was deciding what, if anything, I should charge. They are gifts that keep on giving – and are probably all I will get. In reality, I received infinitely more than my few hours of court appearances.
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Fitzgerald has written 32 books, fiction and nonfiction, but none is as important as the two I have. At 25 he took his last drink and pill. He is now 65. As an alcoholic, writing an autobiography is the stalking of yourself. Old schools of thought suggest Alcoholics Anonymous should live up to its name and remain the best kept secret in town.

At AA meetings, you were more likely to come across a satanic orgy than a meeting of yearning people trying to get or stay sober. Practising alcoholics tend to be loners during practice sessions and unless there are neon signs, electronic walkways or valet pick-up services, they might never hear of AA.

It is no use waiting for alcoholics to hit the gutter, the shelter or the morgue before they are allowed in on the secret. Fitzgerald speaks at high schools about his journey, disabusing the romantic dream world that teenagers naturally are attracted to in the world of excess. A drunk I met at Rogues Nightclub one night told me he was never going to go back to those Alcoholic Unanimous meetings. There was no room for anyone debating the virtues of the drink. And so it is …

My Name is Ross is a very timely book for me. The trouble with alcoholism and attending meetings of AA is that there is no graduation class, no diploma that allows you access to the world without returning to the halls of meetings. You have to go to the school of AA for the rest of your life, one day at a time. There is a tendency to drop out of this school. “How much more can I learn?” says one of the debating society living in your head, next thing you are a dry drunk, white-knuckling on a raft without a paddle.

AA is not a self-help group but depends on others helping each other. There is something in the human spirit that responds to storytelling and the DNA of AA is storytelling. One at a time, a speaker addresses the meeting with an outline of where he was, how he stopped drinking, drugging or whatever and where he is now. Many times it is like a stand-up comedy night. Sometimes it is a wake. There’s never a meeting that you don’t carry out a germ of an idea or a skerrick of helpful information. Meetings begin and end on time. Alcoholics need strict routine. You can always tape Underbelly, if there is a clash.

Fitzgerald writes that alcoholics are like pod people and can somehow pick each other out in a crowd. I don’t know about that but at meetings we are like fingerprint experts, pointing out similarities and dissimilarities in our groves and whorls. At times in reading Fitzgerald’s book, I suspected he accessed my computer files. His home truths were my home truths. The half-truths he told in drink were my half-truths.

He is however a far more matured human being than I would ever be, even if I lived as long as Methuselah. Fitzgerald had so much electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) before they used general anaesthetic that it wiped out many potential chapters in his book. He could ask surviving friends or relatives to write in and publish the lost years that way. Drinking and depression go hand and gland. He soared at school, university and in academia while sipping from rum bottles planted in cisterns during exams. He lived counter-intuitively and occasionally on liquid counter lunches.

Like many alcoholics, he is a hypochondriac who will outlive everyone. He won a Fulbright Scholarship to America where he spent much of the time in saloons, mental homes and in the arms of women who took mercy on him.

A psychiatrist told me I had an almost supernaturally excessive need for nurture. I spent much of my life hoping to be rescued from myself by women. Women are no longer attracted to shipwrecks who love the relentless rocks. I once snuck a glance at a referral from my GP to a new psychiatrist, “Charles, is a difficult customer with a lot of baggage.” It is little wonder our sessions didn’t work out with such a sordid letter of introduction.

So it is not on the couch that we alcoholics try to get well but on the hand chairs in church halls or school auditoriums. We respond to the sound of many hands cupping. I envy the meetings in Los Angeles in the 1970s when sobriety reignited the sex organs of men and women, who had meetings in spa pools naked, at least according to James Ellroy. AIDS wiped out nearly everything.

Fitzgerald’s book is far deeper and wider and funnier than the picture I paint. He has a prodigious memory, not corrupted by ECT or alcohol or drugs in the past 40 years. He gives us the highlights, the lowlights and the spotlights in a razzle-dazzle of words and characters. Alcoholics who are out he names. Others are called Broken Hill Jack, Cast-iron Kate, Under-the-Stars Len and so on. I remember some of them.

Anonymity guaranteed, Fitzgerald’s past did not condemn him to it. AA helped him not to live in the wreckage of the future. Long before the Power of Now, AA practised it a day at a time.

There are some quaint hangovers, so to speak, from the strictly anonymous early days of AA. Members of the fellowship would swap or pass on tape recordings of especially gifted speakers whose identification talks were sometimes electrifying. I got a plastic covered tape with Sir Anthony H on the white sticker on the side. His voice was unmistakably Hannibal Lecter’s slimy tongue-licking brogue. Yet we nod to each other as we pass back the tape as if the secret is safe with me.

Anyway, shout Ross Fitzgerald’s name form the steps of the Town Hall. He has come to free us, to free us all.

By Charles Waterstreet

Reid was already a legend of Australian political reporting. In the 1950s he’d been the first to expose the activities of B.A.Santamaria and his ‘groupers’. In the 60s it was his ‘36 faceless men’ scoop that helped keep Menzies in power but also eventually allowed Whitlam to break the unions’ grip on parliamentary Labor. When I returned to Canberra a decade after my first meeting with Reid (to work for the ABC), he still commanded his favourite lookout spot in King’s Hall, and the same desk in the Telegraph office. More than any other gallery journalist, The Fox embodied both the history and standpoint of political reporting in Australia.

Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt have now written an admirable account of Reid’s journalistic career. He was a notoriously private man who – perhaps wisely – culled many of his personal papers in retirement. But while the domestic details of his life are scant, this survey of his 50-year innings reporting federal politics is impressive. The book uses the great events of national affairs from 1930 to 1985 as its chronological framework, with Reid’s involvement as a reporter the constant sub-plot. What’s remarkable to learn is how often this esteemed journalist was prepared to sprint ahead of history’s footprint in an attempt to change its course.

Reid, like so many gallery tragics, was fascinated by power, not policy. (It’s no surprise that he named the alter-ego character in his unpublished novel about politics “Macker Kalley” – Machiavelli.) Almost everything he wrote, or later said on TV programs such as Meet the Press and Federal File, was concerned with leadership, threats to leadership and winning or losing elections. From the earliest days of his Canberra career with The Sun (1937-53), plots and conspiracies – indeed any form of conflict or melodrama – were his perennial themes. He was a tabloid man, through-and-through. Policy development and the legislative work of government rarely interested him, even as a commentator for The Bulletin in the last few years of his working life. For Reid, politics boiled down to who held power and who wanted to grab it from them – the rest was inconsequential fluff.

But despite his legendary status, he didn’t always get it right. Three times he was on the wrong side of major defamation actions prompted by damaging stories he could not substantiate sufficiently. At least twice he attracted the attention of the House Privileges Committee for breaches of parliamentary convention or confidence. And his habit of sometimes drawing an exceptionally long bow on the basis of unsourced quotes or information – and then splashing that speculation across the Telegraph front page – earned him a reputation for poisonous cunning. Paul Hasluck dismissed Reid as “a competent though somewhat venal purveyor of political gossip”, while Arthur Calwell called him “the lowest thing to crawl around this House”. (Reid was a good hater: he castigated Calwell at every opportunity for the next 20 years.)

At the centre of this book (although not specifically explored in any depth) is the most contentious issue of national affairs journalism: to what extent – if at all – should we tolerate the intrusion of a gallery correspondent’s personal views, or the interests of their proprietors?

Reid, almost every time he sat down at his typewriter, crossed what today would be recognised as the threshold where opinion begins to seep into straight political reporting. Fitzgerald and Holt document scores of occasions on which he not only wrote from a plainly biased standpoint, but actively inserted himself into events with the avowed intention of influencing their outcome.

So addicted was Reid to the processes of political power that for more than 40 years he acted as much as a participant, go-between and adviser – often even conspirator – as he did as a reporter. Yet despite his staunch and lifelong membership of the Australian Journalists’ Association it appears he never recognised the ethical obligation of disclosure in these situations. It was as if he believed the men’s club of Parliament House conferred on him a cloak of mutually-agreed invisibility.

Worse, at least to my mind, were the frequent occasions on which Reid took, and carried out, direct instructions from his Daily Telegraph proprietor, Frank Packer. These went well beyond the customary subtle indications from Head Office as to which policies or politicians might be favoured in tomorrow’s news report or column. Packer expected his man in Canberra to toe the company line unquestioningly, and often to take an active role in precipitating events (for instance, the undermining of Gorton’s prime ministership and ludicrous championing of Billy McMahon in his place).

The patient historical research of Fitzgerald and Holt confirms what any half-aware journalist of his period already knew: Reid pushed plenty of private agendas, but in the end he always did what he was told by Park Street. It’s disheartening that a man whose lifelong socialist sympathies were formed during the Depression (and often called his mates “comrade”) could have so comprehensively sold his soul to one of the most unprincipled buccaneers in Australian media history. As Laurie Oakes remarks in his judicious Foreword to this book, Reid “combined the best and some of the worst aspects of political journalism”.

Reviewed for The Walkley by David Salter. David Salter has been an independent print and television journalist for more than 40 years. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of THE WEEK magazine.

Speaking of photos, in our biography of Alan Reid the mystery of the ALP’s Faceless Men story and photos has been solved. There is absolutely reliable evidence that the famous 1963 photographs of what became known as the ALP’s 36 “Faceless Men” were taken by a Canberra friend of Alan Reid’s named Vladimir Paral – known as Val – who was a scientific photographer at the John Curtin Medical School.

Ross speaks at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

As ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID makes clear, Reid got Vladimir, who lived in south Canberra, not far from the Kingston Hotel, to take the photos, develop them in a dark room at the Australian National University, and they were then dispatched to Frank Packer for publication in The Daily Telegraph. Reid never revealed Paral’s role to protect him – the use of ANU property for political purposes was highly irregular – but Val Paral can be named because he is no longer in the land of the living.

Ross introduces former NSW Premier Bob Carr at the launch - Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

This needs to be mentioned tonight, as many punters under 50 won’t know that this revelation is indeed something special!

The 1963 photos of then ALP federal leader Arthur Calwell and his ambitious deputy Gough Whitlam waiting in the dark under a lamppost outside the Kingston Hotel in Canberra, where a special ALP party conference was in session, and which Calwell & Whitlam were not allowed to attend, significantly helped the Liberals win the next two federal elections.

Ross signs books at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Throughout his life, Alan Reid never disclosed who took the damning photographs, despite considerable pressure and speculation, including suggestions they had been taken by a working pressman. But that night there were no press photographers at the Hotel Kingston in Canberra.

With regard to finding the source of the photos about the Night of the Faceless Men, and Vladimir Paral’s identity, what happened is that my appeal for information about Alan Reid in THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper’s STREWTH column flushed out the story about Paral from Mr Ralph Westen of Canberra who had worked with Paral at the same dark room at the ANU in 1963. Westen saw the faceless men photos when he turned up to work on the Thursday morning.

Ross signs books at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Westen responded to my appeal, and as my co-author Stephen Holt (who is here tonight) lives in Canberra he had a chat with him to verify what Westen had told me. So there we are. The riddle of who photographed the 36 unelected delegates in 1963, with Calwell & Whitlam waiting meekly outside in the dark, has been solved.

Later that year, Australia’s first televised election results featured Creighton Burns, then a lecturer in Political Science at Melbourne University, armed with a state of the art computer. The 9 Network telecast began at 8pm. A mere ten minutes later, Alan Reid, wreathed in tobacco smoke, announced, “The government’s back in.”

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

At 9pm, despite Burns continuing to announce that Calwell still had a good chance of winning the election, Reid reappeared in the telecast in front of a news-board, which proclaimed “MENZIES WINS”.

The wily pressman opined: “Menzies is back with a majority of about thirteen.” Confident that his man Reid had bested the machine, then and there Sir Frank Packer ordered Burns’ computer to be removed from the telecast!  And as many of us here would know, this was the very same Creighton Burns who later edited The Guardian on the Yarra i.e. The Melbourne Age – from 1981 to 1989.

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

A final point. Unlike much of my previous work, Stephen Holt and I have deliberately written this book, without editorialising, so that you, and you, the reader, can make up your minds about the efficacy and morality of Alan (the Red Fox) Reid as a journalist, a participant, and a person, who played such a pivotal role in twentieth century Australian history and politics.

Thank you all for coming here tonight.

Author, Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s speech at the launch of Alan (“The Red Fox”) Reid, June 8, 2010

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, is worthy of a book as he combined some of the best and worst aspects of political journalism. Not only was he a superb chronicler of the news, he was also a player, using his contacts to shape the events themselves.

At the beginning of his career, Reid was close to Labor prime ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley, but changed sides after the Labor split of the 1950s. This is a must-read for any student of Australian politics, because it provides a well-researched, readable history of the events that ripped open the ALP and kept it out of office for 17 years. By the time Reid started working for Sir Frank Packer in 1954, he had moved to the Right, crafting his coverage to suit his boss and boost the prospects of Robert Menzies and Billy MacMahon.

The book was launched in Sydney last night by Bob Carr, who said that although Reid was a superb journalist, he was occasionally wrong: “for instance he was the last journalist to stop calling Bob Hawke a left-winger”.

“He asked some fundamentally big questions. Was the ALP fit to govern, who should rule and where should power lie? He saw that in the 1950s; Australian Labor was in a pretty wretched state.”

Reid thought people with communist backgrounds were trying to manipulate Labor leaders Doc Evatt and Arthur Calwell, Carr said — “it was a pretty ramshackle and dishevelled ALP”.

The news veteran broke many stories, but he is best remembered for his 1963 piece about Labor’s “36 Faceless Men”, a phrase that has now entered the lexicon. What gave it such impact was the photographs Reid commissioned of Calwell and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, waiting for instructions under a street lamp outside Canberra’s Hotel Kingston late at night. Inside, the machine men of Labor’s national conference were deciding a key policy issue.

“That will be history in the making, my friend,” he told the photographer, Vladimir Paral.

In his story, Reid said that the photographs indicated a “sad commentary of the decline in status of Labor’s parliamentary leadership”. The article created a furore by presenting Calwell and Whitlam as wholly dependent on decisions made by invisible forces in the party machine. It damaged Labor badly in the next two elections, before Whitlam finally succeeded in reforming the party’s structure.

The book also relates a prescient conversation between Reid and Evatt, the then leader of the opposition, in 1955. They were discussing the consequences of the ALP split, which led to the formation of the Catholic-dominated DLP.

Evatt: “I’ll tell you something, Alan, for every Catholic vote I’ll lose I will get two Protestant votes.”

Reid: “You are out of your cotton-picking mind, Doc. The Church of England mob belong with the Protestant party which is the Menzies party; they will applaud you but they won’t shift. You have all the non-conformists that Labor ever is liable to pick up, so all that is going to happen is that you’re going to lose the Catholic vote.”

Press gallery doyen Laurie Oakes, in the foreword to the book, says “it is not possible to write the political history of Australia without including a section on Alan Reid”:

“Nor is it possible to discuss the evolution of political journalism in this country sensibly without an examination of Reid’s methods, motives and influence.”

Later in the book, the authors relate an exchange between Reid and a group of young reporters on the day of Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975.

“What do you think of this?”, they asked the 61-year-old newsman. “It’s a great story,” he replied.

“You wouldn’t have said that if it happened to Menzies,” one tearfully retorted. Reid said: “I’d say it if it happened to my own mother — it’s a great story.”

As is this book.

By Margot Saville, www.crikey.com.au

It was the late 1950s and Reid, by then the most influential figure in the Canberra press gallery, had already twice failed at fiction. He had written a 100,000-word novel about the crucifixion of Christ. It was a tale of politics, not religion, and publishers in London rejected it as too controversial.

Then Reid read The Man from Laramie in The Saturday Evening Post and decided to write an “Australian western” set in the Snowy Mountains, one of his favourite bush places. He wrote 50,000 words in a fortnight and sent them to the Post. Rejected again: unfamiliar setting, strange idiom, too Australian.

So here was Reid, three years after the Labor split, hunched over a typewriter, a roll-your-own dangling from his lips, a cup of black tea within reach, tapping out a novel in which H. V. Evatt, the Labor opposition leader, and B. A. Santamaria, the Catholic activist and anti-communist, appear as Kaye Seborjar (a play on Cesare Borgia) and Carr Domenico respectively. Seborjar is cranky, untrustworthy and ambitious to the point of megalomania. Domenico hides fascist sympathies behind “the surface mildness of an oriental sage”. Just about everyone in the novel is unlovely. Politics, Reid is saying, is grubby and ignoble and idealists are mugs.

But, for our purposes, the most interesting character in the manuscript is a 40-year-old political insider called Macker Kalley (a play on Machiavelli). He enjoys reading and going bush. He is drawn to plots and intrigues and likes to think he influences the course of events. He sees politics with a pitiless eye:

In the final analysis, energy, tenacity, ambition and, above all, luck were more rewarding political attributes than integrity, ability or originality of mind . . . All politicians are bastards, but some are bigger bastards than others.

Kalley tries to quarantine his wife and daughter from this world. The calling is, by definition, degenerate.

This novel didn’t get published either (it got to final proofs before fears of defamation actions arose) and maybe this was just as well. Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, the authors of this biography of Reid, have read the manuscript, which is in the National Library of Australia. The characters, they write, are wooden and the dialogue flat. There is not “a robust sense of background or a loving re-creation of detail”, just “a lifeless hothouse air”. But the question that arises is this: is Macker Kalley the alter ego of Alan Reid?

Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, lives on as one of the grand figures of the Canberra press gallery. Those of us who saw him towards the end of his career remember a small and wiry man in a rumpled suit, his red hair (hence the nickname “the Red Fox”) thinning and thatched with grey. He was invariably sucking on a cigarette and staring out with hard eyes that narrowed under bristling eyebrows and seemed to be taking the measure of everyone around him. He was kind to newcomers to the gallery, free with advice and wisdom, but, for all that, they probably saw him as the past rather than the future.

He was almost a caricature of the blokey reporter before the era of media studies and live crosses. John Gorton (a jaundiced witness, it should be said) wrote that Reid wore an expression of perpetual cynicism and spoke from the corner of his mouth. “One expects momentarily to be nudged in the ribs with a confidential elbow and given a hot tip for the 3.30 at Randwick.”

Few broke more big stories than Reid. He exposed the offstage manoeuvrings of Santamaria that led to the Labor split of 1955, a great festering wound that helped keep Labor out of office for the next 17 years. In 1963, Reid had the wit to summon a photographer to Canberra’s Hotel Kingston to capture Arthur Calwell, the leader of the opposition, and Gough Whitlam, his deputy, waiting under a street lamp late at night while inside the 36 machine men of the national conference, most of them unknown to the electorate, debated the conditions under which Labor might allow an American base to operate in Australia.

Calwell and Whitlam looked like lackeys waiting for their orders, largely because, in this instance, they were. Thus were born the “36 faceless men”, and Robert Menzies, the prime minister, would trot them out with the aplomb of a police inspector staging a line-up.

Reid also broke many of the stories that led to Gorton’s fall as prime minister. There were so many scoops in a career that took in 14 prime ministers. Reid had better contacts than the other Canberra journalists. He had the instincts of a bloodhound, which was right enough because he thought he was covering a blood sport. Other reporters had pencils in their pockets; Reid carried a gambrel as well, and every now and then politicians wandered up and impaled themselves on it. Sometimes he knew more about what was going on than cabinet ministers. Everyone felt they had to talk to him.

Late in this book the authors tell of an exchange on the day John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government in 1975. Reid, still working but no longer the eminence he had once been, ran into a group of younger reporters, some with tears in their eyes.

Reporters: What do you think of this?

Reid: It’s a great story.

Reporters: You wouldn’t have said that if it had happened to Menzies.

Reid: I’d say it if it happened to my own mother — it’s a great story.

It was the perfect answer, a proper journalist’s answer. Get the story. Stay detached. Weep, if you need to, when you get home.

So, if we stop here, the subtitle of this book, Pressman Par Excellence, stands up well. Reid was a supreme example of the energetic newsman, a role model, to use a silly phrase. But we can’t stop here because it is only half the story, the sunny bit, the fluffy stuff of mythology.

Reid was also a political player, much more so than the reporters weeping for Whitlam when they should have been chasing the story. He was a plotter and a schemer who had read too much Machiavelli, a man who not only reported conspiracies but also fired them up like a frenzied stoker on a tramp steamer. He was in love with intrigue and the intrigues he uncovered mostly pleased his boss, Frank Packer, proprietor of The Daily Telegraph and the fledgling Nine Network.

Packer saw the existence of the Labor Party as a threat to the propertied classes, so Reid’s stories on Santamaria and the 36 faceless men came as manna. Packer wanted Billy McMahon as prime minister, probably because he knew he could manipulate him, and Reid helped bring this about. Reid, an intelligent man, must have known that McMahon, a leaker with the leadership qualities of a small insect, was unfit to be prime minister, but he went along with the boss.

Reid wasn’t simply another journalist in the gallery, another seeker of truths. He was also there to look after Packer’s corporate interests which, one is entitled to assume, made him a seeker of favours. Trying to reconcile these two roles is the sort of exercise that gives cynicism a bad name.

Pressman par excellence? One thinks not, good as Reid was at sniffing out a story. Still, it is this dark side that, when set alongside Reid’s front-page triumphs, makes him a hopelessly interesting subject for biography.

And, in fairness to the authors, they never seek to hide or justify Reid’s double life. They are on to it on the opening page with a quotation from Laurie Oakes of the Nine Network at a Walkley ceremony more than a decade ago:

If you want to talk about the medium being a participant, when I was first posted to Canberra about 30 years ago, I suppose Alan Reid was the king. And Reidy was also the champion of being a participant in politics. He was much more a player than a journalist. He used to spend more time advising politicians than reporting on them.

Oakes, as fine a reporter as the gallery has produced, pens a stylish foreword to this book. While he clearly has affection for Reid the man and respect for Reid the news breaker, he acknowledges the dark side as well. Oakes joined the press gallery 40 years ago. “I thought then, and still do, that Reid combined the best and some of the worst aspects of political journalism.” And elsewhere: “While Reid’s growing disapproval of Gorton was genuine enough, his role in the campaign to install McMahon in the Lodge was squarely in line with the Packer agenda and it went well beyond mere journalism.”

Reid’s life makes for good biography because, as they say in Hollywood, there is a dramatic character arc, and the authors have brought this out well. Reid, born in Britain in 1914, grew up in poverty in non-gentrified Paddington. He left school after obtaining his leaving certificate and, shades of Billy Hughes, worked at odd jobs in outback NSW and Queensland before being hired by Robert Clyde Packer (father of Frank) as a copy boy on the Sydney Sun.

Reid did the stock exchange quotes, reported the fish and produce markets and had a stint captioning photographs, as punishment for a drunken episode. He was already a Labor man, having joined the party after leaving school. Sent to Canberra in 1937, he became an admirer of John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Chifley would remain his favourite prime minister.

Reid was a true believer and Chifley at one point suggested he run for parliament. Reid’s best contacts were with Labor, which he saw as the serious player. As he wrote later, Liberals thought of politics as an amateur game for gentlemen, whereas Laborites saw it as “a tough professional fight for existence”. There may still be truth in this observation.

Reid in 1954 moved to Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph. That was the year when the overture to the Labor split set off sectarian hatreds similar to those that marked the conscription debates of 1916 and 1917. Reid was on his way to becoming the great news breaker. He was kicked out of the Labor Party in 1957, but its numbers men kept leaking to him and he kept uncovering feuds and plots. Labor, as the authors say, was fighting for its soul. Reid had grabbed the best seat at ringside. Between rounds he rushed from one corner to the other to rasp out advice and occasionally climbed into the ring himself.

Here was a world now long gone. The class war was alive. Unionists called each other “comrade” and trades hall council meetings were sometimes adjourned to the nearest pub. Capitalists harrumphed in their clubs. Strikes were common and often nasty. Trotskyites, groupers and Maoists skirmished around the edges of the Labor Party.

The Cold War was alive, too: spies and defections and questions of loyalty. Menzies worked this war well and Evatt didn’t. Older reporters, Reid included, wore hats, thumped rickety typewriters and could still get stories into their papers at midnight. There was a pecking order in the Canberra press gallery. The veterans set the agenda and sometimes exchanged carbon copies of stories.

Then Reid’s world began to change. Younger reporters arrived: Oakes, Allan Barnes, Alan Ramsey, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan and others. They did things their way. Whitlam and Bob Hawke found new constituencies for Labor among the middle classes. Schoolteachers became as important as shop stewards; doctors’ wives would come later.

Reid thought Whitlam was favouring an “articulate avant garde”. He was bothered, too, by the rise of multiculturalism and the Aboriginal land rights movement. It all seemed a long way from shearers’ strikes and unity tickets.

Packer sold The Daily Telegraph, Reid’s main outlet, in 1972 and died two years later. Reid got on well with Kerry, Frank’s son, but Kerry, whatever his personal beliefs, was a pragmatist. He knew he could make money under a Labor government just as easily as under the Liberals. There was no need to keep attacking Labor, as his father had, simply because it was Labor. Reid, on the other hand, was still seeing tiny fissures in the Labor monolith and thinking they might be cracks.

Fitzgerald and Holt have given us a biography that reads better than most Australian political tracts. Their research is impressive. They strive to be fair and never lapse into hagiography. The book picks up pace nicely after its opening chapters, where the authors seem less sure of their material than later in the narrative and are inclined to generalisations and the odd lazy sentence.

But the best thing about this book is the light it shines on murky places. It tells us much about how the Canberra gallery works, and not just back then, because mischief making did not end with the Reid era. It reminds us that journalism can be as morally hazardous as politics and that journalists can get too close to their sources.

Above all, it shows us what happens when journalists become players.

Not long before Reid died, a local priest called on him offering spiritual consolations. “I’d be a hypocrite if I accepted them,” Reid told him. “But remember this, Father, keep your running shoes on, because you might get an important call and there’ll be a swift deathbed repentance. I’m a great believer in each way betting.”

Tired and shrunken, he could still do the numbers. Reid was a brilliant getter of stories and he was also Svengali. That is the triumph and the tragedy of his journalistic life. In the end, he was out of time and place, but we should not be too judgemental. It will happen to all who play at journalism, especially those of us who look back fondly on smoky newsrooms and still hear the clatter of linotype machines.

By Les Carlyon The Australian Literary Review, June 2, 2010
Alan “The Red Fox” Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by By Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, New South, 384pp, $49.95 (HB)

The Australian, May 31, 2010

Alan 'The Red Fox' Reid book cover

THE Canberra press gallery was once prowled by political reporters said to be more influential than many Ministers.

The biggest scoop, by one of the most fearsome in their ranks, Alan Reid, is chronicled in a new book.

In the autumn of 1963 the major national political issue in Australia was the Labor Party’s response to the Menzies government’s new security agreement with the United States, under which a communications station to control Polaris nuclear-armed submarines was to be established at North West Cape (also known as Exmouth Gulf) in Western Australia.

The agreement provoked clamorous opposition. A resolution from Labor’s WA state branch opposed “any base being built in Australia that could be used for the manufacture, firing or control of any nuclear missile or vehicle capable of carrying nuclear missiles”.

Some federal members began to treat the WA resolution as official party policy, but Labor’s federal opposition leader Arthur Calwell and deputy leader Gough Whitlam felt that support for the base was not in conflict with party policy provided the base was subject to joint control.

Veteran Canberra gallery journalist Alan Reid, then of Sydney-based media owner Sir Frank Packer’s The Daily Telegraph, sensed that a great story was in the offing. It was surely a sign of instability and weakness that Calwell, worried about the attitude of NSW federal MP Tom Uren and other leftists, twice sought a favourable ruling on North West Cape from the ALP federal executive.

He could not, Reid reported, “take a trick”; the executive referred the issue to the party’s federal conference, where the left faction, with the support of the West Australian, Victorian and Queensland branches and a couple of Tasmanian delegates, had “a clear-cut majority” of the 36 delegates (six from each state). A special federal conference, the first since Labor prime minister John Curtin’s conscription initiative in 1942, was called for March to determine the issue.

The federal executive, in calling the special conference, directed the relevant conference committee to prepare a policy report on North West Cape. The committee produced a majority report that accepted the American base provided certain conditions were met. A minority report opposed the base under any circumstances.

Relying on an inside source, whom Uren later suggested was NSW MP and former Packer journalist Les Haylen, Reid wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the Left could count on having 17 to 19 votes in the 36-member conference. This was not a clear-cut majority at all.

The conference assembled at Canberra’s Hotel Kingston on Monday, March 17, 1963, and ran through the next couple of days before coming to a head in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

At 8pm on that endless Wednesday night, Reid could see that “delegates were still running around” with no decision, compromise or otherwise, having been reached. Calwell and Whitlam, who had both addressed the conference, were in their offices at Parliament House waiting for a telephone call to tell them of the conference’s decision.

Half an hour later the parliamentary leadership began ringing the Hotel Kingston to see how things were going. The delegates had voted 21 to 15 against a complete ban, and the conference was now deadlocked at 18 votes each as left-wing and right-wing negotiators tried to formulate a resolution that would get up.

The issue was determined at 1.45am by 19 votes to 17 after a Queensland delegate (state opposition leader John “Jack” Duggan) abandoned the Left and voted for a resolution which the delegates from NSW, South Australia and Tasmania supported, under which the conference accepted the US base subject to joint controls.

Uren treated this decision as a historic defeat for the Left. The key paragraph amid a forest of “ifs” was: “A defence radio communication centre capable of communicating with submarines operated by an ally in Australia would not be inconsistent with Labor policy.”

In the lead-up to the final vote Reid and his fellow pressmen were gathered in the foyer of the Hotel Kingston. As things stood, he realised that he did not have a memorable news story on his hands. Labor, he knew, would have plenty of time to recover from this display of disunity and indecision, the next federal election not being due until the end of 1964.

The decision to accept the base would have removed a major point of difference between the Opposition and the Coalition. Labor now had a breathing space to turn the focus of attention back on to the more favourable battleground of domestic issues.

Even at midnight Reid remained unflustered. He knew he still had time to conjure up a good news story given that his journalistic working day could often last until 3am. As Wednesday ticked over into Thursday he asked a colleague (who can tentatively be identified as the seemingly ever-present John Bennetts of The Age) to see what was happening outside in the darkened environs of the Hotel Kingston.

A report came back to the effect that Calwell and Whitlam had just arrived from Parliament House. This piece of information caused Reid to have a brainwave. Experience told him that a picture was worth a thousand words. Were the two loitering Labor leaders, he hoped, doing something that might make an arresting or embarrassing photograph? As luck would have it, they were.

Calwell and Whitlam could be seen outside the Hotel Kingston conferring with West Australian-based powerbroker Joe Chamberlain and other conference identities under a street lamp.

Delegates were ducking out of the hotel to tell them of the latest developments as the final decision was about to be made. An inspired Reid instantly envisaged a graphic take on the scene: “Almost as though they were emphasising their exclusion from the conference, then debating a subject on which it could legitimately be argued Australia’s future could depend in the event of a major war, they stood forlornly under a street lamp. Conference delegates emerged from the hotel to confer with them almost patronisingly.”

A scoop would be plucked, Prospero-like, from the jaws of frustration if the moment could be captured in a photograph. Reid went into full poker-playing mode. Never was the Red Fox, as he was known, more vulpine than on this night. After waiting to ensure that the other pressmen with him did not know what he was up to, he went to a nearby phone and asked for a newspaper photographer to be sent over. Although told that no photojournalist was available, Reid’s run of luck continued, as he later revealed in oral history.

After making his fruitless phone call Reid suddenly discovered, to his great relief, that among the people who had come to the Hotel Kingston to have a squiz at the proceedings was someone who was both a highly skilled photographer and a friend, or at least the friend of a friend, their familiarity springing from the fact they were both enthusiastic anglers who loved to go fishing for trout at the famed Blue Water Hole at the head of the Goodradigbee River.

Reid promptly asked this saviour — since identified as Vladimir Paral, a senior scientific photographer at the John Curtin School of Medical Research — to rush home and get his equipment and take as many photographs of Calwell and Whitlam as he could. Reid told Paral that he need not worry if the shots did not glamorise the subjects.

The more disordered and confused people appeared to be in the photos the better, for Reid’s purposes. In some shots Paral only got the backs of the heads of the party insiders Whitlam or Calwell were talking to. Such was the way in which the photographic images of the “faceless men” who ran the Labor Party were created.

A few hours later the pressman and the photographer met up in King’s Hall, where Paral’s unflattering photographs, which had been developed in a darkroom at the John Curtin School, were handed over and dispatched to Sydney by the first flight out of Canberra.

The midnight photographs accompanied Reid’s final story on the ALP conference in Friday’s edition of The Daily Telegraph and were presented as indicating “a sad commentary of the decline in status of Labor’s parliamentary leadership”. Calwell and Whitlam, the Telegraph’s story lamented, had been forced to wait in the darkness outside the Hotel Kingston as the federal conference delegates — 36 “virtually unknown men” — decided Labor policy on the proposed US communications base. One of the photographs showed Calwell and his speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, huddled with Labor’s lord mayor Clem Jones of Brisbane, pleading with him (he was a delegate) to oppose the call for a complete ban on the base. Another picture showed Calwell and Whitlam earnestly buttonholing Frank Waters, another Queensland delegate.

In a third photograph Calwell was seen conferring with Joe Chamberlain. The West Australian still believed he had the backing of 18 of the 36 delegates to go for broke and block approval of the base, which would have forced Calwell, in Reid’s view, to “defend the indefensible”.

A worried-looking Duggan provided the denouement in Reid’s version of the Bayeux Tapestry. After being photographed with Whitlam and Calwell, Duggan returned to the conference room where, after some uncertainty, he finally voted with right-wing delegates to get the diluted resolution of support through.

The intention was to provide “an electoral face-saver for himself and for Mr Calwell”, but Reid was not convinced: “[A]fter the vote left wingers say openly in the hotel lounge: ‘You can forget Duggan after this — he’ll be finished as parliamentary leader in Queensland within six months. [Duggan in fact lasted until 1966.]‘ In this manner federal Labor leadership was publicly humiliated. The conference has demonstrated that it regards the federal parliamentary Labor leader not as an alternative prime minister, a leader and an adviser but as a lackey.”

The substance of the policy adopted at the Hotel Kingston was no longer the immediate concern; what Reid had succeeded in doing was to present Calwell and Whitlam, whose policy had got up at the conference, as wholly dependent on decisions made by invisible forces in the party machine. The result was, in the opinion of a Whitlam aide, “a publicity disaster”. Reid’s story was directed against Calwell and Whitlam. Demonising the organisational wing of the party was merely a means to this end. Labor’s machine men had been among Reid’s most reliable sources of political information for years.

The focus on Labor’s machine men intensified as Menzies, bent on reversing the Coalition losses of the 1961 election, searched for issues on which he could fight an early election. Initially the alliance with the US was the key point of differentiation, but as 1963 progressed it was Labor’s division on whether to support state aid for Catholic schools that was increasingly mined as an issue.

Here was a domestic issue that could be put to good use. Divisive sectarianism was still alive. Labor’s fear of Catholic political activist Bob Santamaria, unmodified since the party split of the 1950s over communist influence in the ALP, made it wary of supporting state aid. Reid and the Telegraph were caught up in the action as the parties jostled for advantage.

When covering the 1963 NSW ALP conference, Reid had been impressed by a policy document that proposed state aid for libraries and science blocks. It was not adopted, but Reid did not forget it. He mentioned the document to Menzies, who asked for a copy.

On October 15 Menzies announced that the nation would go the polls in an early election November 30 to elect a new House of Representatives. This statement was followed by a rare Menzies press conference.

In reporting this event Reid waxed lyrical about the prime minister’s “aplomb and gusto”.

The suggestion of a possible post-election decision to retire or go to the House of Lords, diffidently raised by pressmen, was greeted with “withering cheerful scorn”. [Menzies did retire as PM in the next term, in early 1966.] A gruelling election campaign was being embraced with “the casual off-handedness of a Sydneysider talking about a Manly ferry trip”. It was clear, Reid wrote, that the prime minister had the zest to carry out his demanding job.

But as a result of an “imaginative and appealing” policy speech, Calwell and his colleagues, Reid thought, had for a brief moment “a real chance of becoming the next government of Australia”.

The tide turned once Menzies delivered his policy speech on November 12, 1963. After relating his government’s contribution to economic growth, Menzies asked his television and radio audience the following loaded questions: “In the very heyday of our progress, the Australian Labor Party asks you to dismiss us; to commit the national fortunes to the hands of its members of parliament and the famous outside body, 36 ‘faceless men’, whose qualifications are unknown, who have no elected responsibility to you. Do you feel tempted? Why?”

Reid, powerfully aided by Paral’s back-of-the-head shots of conference delegates, had originally written about the “virtually unknown men” and their role at the 1963 special conference.

He had posited a void, which Menzies had filled up with scary imagery. The Menzies formulation of “36 faceless men” reinforced the idea in the mind of a fearful electorate. The notion was milked for all it was worth.

A Liberal Party election leaflet featured one of Reid’s photographs of Calwell waiting outside the Hotel Kingston. It was a worrying day, the leaflet said, when “national leadership on great affairs is surrendered to unknown outsiders bitterly fighting with one another about action on national survival”.

Labor’s faceless men rejected state aid for Catholic schools, so Menzies pledged pound stg. 5 million for science blocks for private as well as state schools.

As polling day drew nearer Reid made much of a pledge made by Calwell to abolish preferential voting. He suggested that such an action, by preventing the Liberal and Country [now Nationals] parties from pooling their votes, “would mean that a federal Labor government once in power would continue in office almost indefinitely”.

Within a few days the need for scare tactics was obviated, in tragic circumstances. The assassination of president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, confirmed the electorate’s determination to steer clear of political change at a time of intense insecurity.

On the following weekend, as voters trooped to the polls, media coverage of an Australian election reached a new technological level. Frank Packer, eager to turn the event into the nation’s first televised election night, devoted the manpower and technical resources of TCN9 and its Melbourne associate, GTV9, to an election night telecast covering Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Newcastle and Wollongong.

The linchpin was the advent of an interstate coaxial cable which, in those landline-only days of local TV, linked television coverage in Melbourne and Sydney with the Canberra tally-room, where the Packer team featured psephologist Creighton Burns, who had a state-of-the-art computer at his disposal to process the results.

Election night kicked off at 8pm, when Brian Henderson in Sydney introduced viewers to “the first network election coverage”. Behind the scenes an epic race between man and machine was under way. At 8.10pm the news director at the Telegraph called the master control room to say that “Alan Reid’s got something to say”. There were few results on the tally board and the computer had yet to enlighten anyone about anything when the control room cut to the Telegraph newsroom, prompted by the sight on the monitor of Reid’s worldly wise face wreathed in cigarette smoke. “The government’s back in, and we’re saying so in the edition that’s going out now,” the pressman announced.

At about 9pm Reid reappeared in the telecast, standing in front of a news board that proclaimed “Menzies Wins”. “Menzies is back with a majority of about 13,” he said. It was soon clear that Reid had bested the computer, and Packer ordered the computer to be removed from the presentation after Burns, despite Reid’s correctness by then being in no doubt, continued to announce that Calwell still had a good chance of winning the election.

The 1963 election had proven to be a highly successful referendum directed against Labor’s faceless men. The process of winding back the power of the faceless men gathered pace over the rest of the decade. Labor’s modernising wing marketed the structural reforms, which came into effect in 1967, as “the greatest change in the framework of our party on a national scale” since the formation of the federal executive in 1915. Whitlam, elected Labor leader in 1967, was proud to announce that the party had “now demolished the cry of the 36 faceless men”.

But despite the rhetoric, Labor’s faceless men lived on. They were not extinguished; their position was merely modified.

The parliamentary leadership, state and federal, was rudely grafted on to the federal conference, whose composition otherwise remained exactly the same.

The six state conferences continued to pick six national conference delegates and two delegates to the national executive. The faceless men, while no longer the sole controllers of the party organisation, were still a part of it.

Their influence was further sustained by factional ties between them and individual members of Labor’s parliamentary leadership group. Further reform, involving restructuring of various dysfunctional state branches of the party, was required to make the organisation of the ALP truly seem less exclusive and anachronistic.

The faceless men story of 1963 showed that a working journalist could make an impact on national affairs without having to move up the hierarchy to the level of an editor or senior manager.

Reid was a force to be reckoned with, but he was keen to give the impression power had not gone to his head.

Management, he insisted in a rare public address in 1965, determined what journalists did and managers, for the most part, did what the private owners of the Australian press told them to do.

Pressmen such as himself were humble hewers of information. Laborites and unionists who were at the receiving end of Reid’s journalism in Packer-owned publications refused to accept this self-deprecation.

This is an edited extract from Alan “The Red Fox” Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, to be published next week by New South, $49.95.

Ross Fitzgerald is a writer, broadcaster, historian and political commentator who writes a regular column for Inquirer. He has published 33 books, most recently My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey.

Stephen Holt is a Canberra-based historian and speech-writer. His biography of Manning Clark was published by Allen & Unwin in 1999. As a policy officer, he has drafted speeches and letters for past and present ministers, including Joe Hockey and Julia Gillard.

* * *

Packer ‘stooge’ was the ultimate insider
Ross Fitzgerald

“ALAN Reid was a famous journalist who worked in Canberra’s parliamentary press gallery, mostly for the then Frank Packer-owned The Daily Telegraph, for 50 years until he retired in the 1980s.”

The author of this summary of Reid’s long career was another famed political journalist, Laurie Oakes, writing in his nationally circulated column in the winter of 2008. A decade earlier, when accepting one of Australian journalism’s Walkley Awards (for journalistic leadership), Oakes fleshed out Reid’s historical significance for the benefit of his peers at the gala ceremony: “If you want to talk about the medium being a participant, when I was first posted to Canberra — about 30 years ago, I suppose — Alan Reid was the king. And Reidy was also the champion of being a participant in politics. He was much more a player than a journalist. He used to spend more time advising politicians than reporting on them.”

Reid died more than 20 years ago, on September 1, 1987, to be precise, but his presence, on the strength of Oakes’s comments, persists in the folk memory of his journalistic successors. Reid is still remembered as well by the politicians whom journalists write about, if we are to judge by a tantalising entry in Mark Latham’s notorious political diary: “[Paul] Keating once told caucus to be cautious with

this bloke [journalist and Inquirer columnist Mike Steketee] — he’s a protege of the Packer stooge and infamous Labor hater Alan Reid.”

For much of Reid’s career it was hard to tell where a straight reporting of events ended and a behind-the-scenes involvement in politics began. The Depression politicised him for life. Mass unemployment led him to support the Australian Labor Party as emboldened by its NSW leader Jack Lang. Reid’s Langite connections eased his entry into the inner ranks of political journalism.

To sustain his career after Lang’s appeal weakened, Reid, in the era of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, made new contacts, notably ALP numbers man Pat Kennelly. He liked being close to power. It was good to know key political players and to be able to directly scrutinise their thoughts and deeds.

He had entree to party leaders and senior figures in both the Labor and non-Labor side of politics. He conversed with Curtin and was close to Chifley. In later years he counselled Robert Menzies and Harold Holt on how to win elections. He sought to boost Bob Hawke’s career in the 1970s by championing him as the nemesis of the Labor Left. Near the end of his career, in the 80s, he inadvertently inspired Malcolm Fraser to set up Frank Costigan’s royal commission into the affairs of the Ships’ Painters and Dockers Union, an inquiry that took on a life of its own, as Fraser and his treasurer John Howard (a keen student of Reid’s writing) found, to their cost.

Reid traded in information as he worked to construct a richer and wider understanding of what was going on. He needed to keep the trust of his sources and he did so by treating the journalistic code of confidentiality as sacrosanct. Politicians from all parties could swap stories with him in the knowledge that they would never be identified. At times Reid’s stories were tweaked to disguise or conceal the identity of the people who provided him with information.

Reid’s standing as an insider was greatly enhanced because he was linked to the Packer media empire. But any empire, if it is to last, needs to attract the support of able and proficient retainers. For such retainers, this need creates scope for autonomy and, in the case of an outstanding journalist such as Reid, freedom of expression. Reid’s professionalism and discretion — qualities evident for years before he joined Packer — were vital in allowing him to maintain his impressive network of contacts.

Through them he had access to the inner workings of the nation’s politics and government.

Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, The Weekend Australian, May 29-30, 2010

Alan “The Red Fox” Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by By Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, New South, 384pp, $49.95 (HB)

The book reveals the story behind the 1963 photographs of Arthur Calwell and his deputy Gough Whitlam that so superbly illustrated the long-held idea that Labor Party policy was set not by the leadership but by the party’s unelected “faceless men”.

For those who do not know the story, in 1963 the Labor Party was wrestling with its policy on a US plan to build a base on Australian soil. The Left was opposed; the Right was more pragmatic.

The policy was thrashed out by 36 Labor delegates at Canberra’s Kingston Hotel and it was Reid who found a photographer to capture Calwell and Whitlam standing in the gloom, under a street light, while the battle for the soul of the party went on inside.

The book reveals who took those photographs and much more besides. Extracts appear in The Weekend Australian tomorrow.

“I was so enclosed and enmeshed in myself”, he writes, “that I virtually didn’t see anything outside”.

Sober for 40 years, Dr Fitzgerald calls himself an atheist. His AA group is the Higher Power that alcoholics rely on to remove their compulsion to drink. “These days in some sort of primitive ‘prayer’, I sometimes speak directly to the moon and the sea and the stars,” he says. The sight of a Willy-Wagtail especially cheers him up and the little dancing bird appears throughout his book. In the beginning is an alcoholic and in the end there is still the alcoholic, but My Name is Ross is one long look backwards at a wonderful life that would have ended prematurely in suicide had he not found a way to stop drinking.

Terrible hallucinations propelled Ross to get help after he was hospitalised six times in Cleveland, Ohio aged 25 and it’s hard to believe this sodden human being self-obsessed, self-centred, a user of women, an abuser of trust could transform into a vibrant voice for free speech, an author of 32 books and a trusted servant of many governments, as well as a man beloved by his wife and daughter and his many friends from all walks of life.

Full of humour, honesty and hope. Highly recommended.

Barbara Farrelly – South Coast Register 10 March 2010