Alan ''The Red Fox'' Reid: Pressman par excellence
By Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt
(University of New South Wales Press, 2010, 384 pages)
Ben Chifley maintained that political journalists made the best biographers of politicians. But who should write the biographies of political journalists?
In most cases, the answer should probably be no-one. However, in the case of Alan Reid, arguably the Canberra press gallery's most influential member ever, a biography is well merited.
It has been written by a pair of historians, the prolific Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, previous biographer of Manning Clark and speechwriter for various ministers on both sides of the Canberra political divide. They are not the academic types Chifley thought too detached lor the task of writing political history.
The fact that the authors have been around a bit helps them bring the right sort of balance to the task of writing about Reid. They joyfully describe all the colour of his career, while not attempting to either obscure, or condemn the fact that many of his actions would not rank highly in the journalists' code of ethics. Ihe authors judge Reid by the standards of his time, and their commitment to a realistic representation of the past is underscored by the fact that they resisted a push to change the cover photograph, to which some objected on the grounds it shows Reid hunched over his typewriter and, horror of horrors, smoking.
Reid smoking his way through his working life is just one example of how his methods would go against everything students would now be taught in a media studies course. Yet, there is an enormous amount to be learnt from studying his career.
Reid was a member of the press gallery for a period covering 20 federal elections from 1937 to 1984. He worked originally for the Sydney Sun, an afternoon and Sunday paper (which did not come under Fairfax control until 1953), before shifting to the Frank Packer-owned Daily Telegraph in 1954. He was to remain in the Packer stable for the rest of his career, but lost some of his clout when the Packers sold the Tele to Rupert Murdoch in 1972, leaving him with Channel 9 and The Bulletin as outlets for his work.
This book will reinforce the Reid-Packer link, as it somewhat skims over Reid's career prior to 1954, (whether due to a lack of source material, or perceived lesser interest is unclear) but, once it hits its straps, Reid's involvement with all the big stories makes it almost a general political history of the next three decades.
As much as his daily journalism was important, Reid also deserves recognition for his three landmark books on recent political events -- The Power Struggle (about the machinations following Harold Holt's disappearance), The Gorton Experiment and Ihe Whitlam Venture -- books which have had legions of subsequent imitators, few of which have been better.
The writing of these books only came after Reid abandoned attempts to write fiction. Fitzgerald and Holt explain that ''behind the cynical mask there lurked a wish to write a serious and lasting work of literature'' and this manifested itself in a novel about the crucifixion; a tale about bushrangers in the Snowy Mountains; and, closer to his personal experience, a book about Australian politics.
Reid's alter-ego in this last work, Macker Kalley, underlines his Machiavellian view of politics. The fact that all the leading political figures of the day were equally identifiable meant that once potential publishers had consulted their lawyers, the novel was never likely to see the light of day. Ironically, Reid's non-fiction books were also to fall victim to litigation, most notably when Gough Whitlam sued over aspects of The Whitlam Venture.
While the book-writing highlights that Reid was ''never satisfied with being a successful 1950s-style daily newspaper-man'', he was certainly good at that role. It was he who first broke the story of the influence that B.A. Santamaria's Movement was having on the ALP. Then, there was the moment that he organised one of the most famous photographs in Australian political history -- the picture of Labor Leader, Arthur Calwell, and his Deputy, Gough Whitlam, standing outside Canberra's Hotel Kingston in the early hours of Thursday, 20 March, 1963 waiting for the ALP's Federal Executive to determine the Party's policy on state aid. The picture created the concept of the ''36 faceless men'', still recycled almost half a century later whenever backroom players influence Labor's front of house.
The book explains how, unlike his gallery colleagues, who were also waiting for a decision that night, Reid realised the potential for a devastating picture. However, he also wanted to get it without tipping off any other journalists to the idea. It almost never happened, as there were no press journalists available at that late hour. But in a stroke of good fortune, Vladimir Paral, a senior scientific photographer who Reid knew through some mates with whom he went trout fishing, was also at the Hoiel Kingston that night. Reid got Paral to get his camera and take some shots which highlighted the absurdity of the situation.
It was not just his journalistic colleagues that Reid outperformed in 1963. That year's election featured the first ever networked election night coverage as Channel 9 linked Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne through the coaxial cable and also invested in a state-of-the-art computer to process results. Machine was still suggesting a close result, long after man -- in the form of Reid -- had declared Menzies returned. He ran the story in the first edition of the Sunday Telegraph to underline his confidence. Thankfully, Channel 9 has got its computer working much better in recent elections.
However, it was not only through his news sense and writing skill that Reid influenced the course of Australian political history. He not only reported events, he influenced them, sometimes to further his own views, sometimes to push Frank (and later Kerry) Packer's views and sometimes to push Packer business interests. Some politicians such as Billy McMahon served the dual purpose of being both on-side and a great source of stories.
As a young man, Reid had been a supporter of Jack Lang, and in his early days in Canberra he very much approved of Curtin, and especially Chifley. Reid was actually a member of the ALP until the late 1950s, but for much of the second half of his career he was perceived as a ''Labor hater''. In reality, Reid remained an old-fashioned Labor man to the end of his days, and, while he believed that in Bob Hawke Labor had finally found a decent leader, his old Labor attitudes meant that ''he did not believe in deregulation and thought Chifley had been right in trying to nationalise the banks''.
The Labor leaders between Chifley and Hawke had been a big disappointment to Reid. When he reported on Santamaria's influence, Reid had thought it would assist Evatt to galvanise the centre of the Labor Party against both Groupers and Communists. Evatt's apparent softness towards the latter not only made Labor unelectable for a generation, but also set Reid on a path where his personal views coalesced with his employer's view that the problems within the ALP needed to be exposed at every opportunity, until communists and fellow-travellers were driven out.
A further factor in pushing Reid away from his former Labor home was his distaste for the new class of journalists and advisers who invaded his world from the mid sixties onwards and came to dominate the Whitlam era. While getting on well with most of these younger people on a personal basis, he disliked their preoccupation with trendy issues and he disliked their overt and emotional partisanship in favour of Whitlam.
The most dramatic day in Australian political history highlighted the generational divide. In the hours after the Dismissal, Reid ran into a group of younger reporters, some wirh 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.
Reid covered, and created, many great stories. If you enjoy the stories of Australian politics you will enjoy this biography.
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