Don Watson

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Welcome to The Book Show again, Don.

Don Watson: Hi Ramona.

Ramona Koval: Before we explore this idea of breaking the contract, let's remind listeners that you went into Keating's office as a speechwriter in 1992. You were at first a bit reluctant to do this job.

Don Watson: Yes, I decided I was going to be a serious writer again. I had been writing comedy and stuff for a while. And having just made this decision almost a few days before and signed a contract to write a serious history of Australia, I got this offer to go and talk to the new Prime Minister. I was advised by friends that I should take the job, even though I decided I wouldn't. And I liked him so much instantly that I did, and of course I thought it would last a year because I think the polls were lower than Julia Gillard's are at the moment just then. We were coming out of a recession but no one really was feeling it, and it was generally regarded as Paul Keating's own personal recession. So he wasn't popular. But he was certainly interesting.

Ramona Koval: You say that when you met him his sadness and his melancholy were why you liked him. And I've asked you this before, I think I asked you this at the time, but just remind us, why were you attracted to this sadness and melancholy?

Don Watson: I don't know, I think we see so few politicians who have another dimension to them, who seem to exist as people as well as public figures. Paul seemed to me very much a whole character, a rather unique one. But there was a sort of self-awareness there, an awareness of other things which you don't see in public figures very often. When we complain about machine men and these sorts of things, I think that's what we lack, that's what we feel is missing, is character.

Ramona Koval: But do you think that was compared to other politicians that you'd seen, but you'd never seen anyone up that close, or not?

Don Watson: Well, I worked for John Cain when he was Premier, I had been a consultant speechwriter for him for four or five years, and who equally was a person with rather deep beliefs about things. If what you're getting at is am I attracted to melancholy people...

Ramona Koval: No, I'm getting at that when you meet somebody face-to-face as you were when you met him and you noticed his sadness and melancholy and you thought, well, this is an unusual combination or an unusual personality for a politician, I'm not used to seeing politicians like this, was it just him or was it that you had never been so up-close to someone like that?

Don Watson: I think probably the latter. It was interesting because he had got the job...in a way he didn't want to get it, the Kirribilli agreement had been broken and he simply had to outmanoeuvre Hawke and wear him down and take it, and I don't think that was a happy experience for Paul any more than it was for Hawkey. I think it was gruelling and it would leave you feeling a little...there's something vaguely oedipal about it, knocking off the old Silver Fox, and that might have had something to do with it.

But I think it was also that there was just a gravity about speaking to him. He saw the great economic project or Australia as a project of...it was deeply significant to him. And I think the thing about Keating was and what we miss now in politicians is that Paul was always engaged in a dialogue with the future, that's what he thought about. When he got up in the morning he thought about the long-term and how things could be here. For some people the vision thing is an add-on, something you have around election time, you come up with it and normally it is as empty as a drum. But with Keating it wasn't, it was actually what he was always in a conversation about. And if you wanted to provoke him, you got in the way of that vision.

So when he had a blue with Mahathir in Malaysia, or I could think of a dozen instances if you gave me time, he was not going to take a backwards step because this person was in the way of the future. So when he called Mahathir recalcitrant, that's a man standing in the way of the APEC leaders meeting which was the future of Asia, and he was dead right. And Mahathir is a scrap by comparison, but we are all worried about offending Mahathir...I know we in the office persuaded Paul to back off a bit, but I think we were wrong, we should have just let him go.

Ramona Koval: You decided to keep a diary when you began this job, and did you make it clear that you were planning to write more than a diary?

Don Watson: Everyone knew I was going to write a book about it and everyone knew I was keeping a diary. The diary wasn't religiously kept, but it was kept certainly every week and very often every day, and it was often written in a state of exhaustion, a lot of it was written on aeroplanes coming between Canberra and Melbourne. But I'm very glad I did. It's funny, when I went back to it eventually, it told a story that was quite different to the one I remembered.

Ramona Koval: That's always the case, isn't it.

Don Watson: It's curious, isn't it.

Ramona Koval: And he reminded him that whenever you thought it might have slipped his mind that you were keeping a diary, you were going to write a book?

Don Watson: I don't know whether he'd remember it in the same way, but I used to say occasionally when people were being silly around the place, I'd say, 'Just remember I'm writing all this down, you blokes.'

Ramona Koval: How silly?

Don Watson: Often people would say silly things. No one could have been in any doubt that this was what I was doing or that I was going to write the book. But how I was going to use the diary, I didn't know, and in the end I chose to use it as the spine of the book I suppose. At one point I was thinking about...just on the recommendation of Barry Smith, the historian, who said, 'Look, no one is going to read a book...I am never going to read a book written so soon after the events, the judgements are unreliable, such books are always parti pris, it's not worth bothering about, but if you published the diary, then I might read it.' And I was at that point having great trouble writing the book in the third person as if I hadn't been there.

Ramona Koval: Like a straight history?

Don Watson: Yes, the magisterial history. And the contradiction in that was that I was not an objective observer, and to suddenly lift myself out and make myself a sort of fly on the wall observer when I had actually been a fly on the floor just didn't work. So I eventually decided that it was too cute to write it that way really, so I wrote it really from where I was, that is in the middle of a whole lot of stuff. I wasn't in caucus meetings, I wasn't in cabinet meetings, I wasn't in all sorts of places where decisions were made, so it's really a history of a political office and Paul Keating in the middle of it, seen through my eyes, unashamedly subjective in that sense. And there's probably I think for Paul's taste far too much of me in it, but that also seems to me the most honest way of presenting the judgements that I make. I'm not pretending that these are the only judgements to be made.

Ramona Koval: What kind of a book do you think he thought you were writing?

Don Watson: I think something much more...a book in the third person with less of the daily minutia in it...

Ramona Koval: Less of the blood, sweat and tears?

Don Watson: Less of that, a book where the judgements are made according to weight, that is policy weight, what really mattered and what was done, and leave out all the other stuff.

Ramona Koval: When you wrote about his personality and his social reticence in those more difficult times...I remember reading a bit where he didn't want to meet the cricket team coming back from overseas because he didn't feel like he had anything to say...

Don Watson: He walked right through them and didn't recognise them.

Ramona Koval: This kind of thing. Did your knowledge of this reticence and his sadness and melancholy that you'd seen from that first meeting, did it make you think about what the uncovering of him, what effect that might have on this seemingly very sensitive man?

Don Watson: No, because Paul isn't only melancholy and he is a very well defended person...

Ramona Koval: Very sharp...

Don Watson: Very sharp, and very funny in a quite unique way, and can walk into a room...one of those people who can actually bring a certain amount of joy into a room just by smiling, and I make this point many times. So you get angry with Paul but it would never last for long, you just couldn't, he'd just flash his teeth and it was all over. So he was much more than...I think he would say that because I was melancholy I saw him as melancholy. This is not true however. I've lost track of your question...

Ramona Koval: I was just asking about whether you thought that he was supersensitive in this way, given what you knew about him.

Don Watson: Well, more sensitive than I expected. But that's not that hard to understand, now I think about it. Politicians take abuse every day. I don't know how they get up and there's some cartoon presenting you as a complete idiot, there is an article written by some hack telling you what you are doing wrong, and then there are the ones that just simply traduce every effort you're trying to make. So you have to put up with that, that's par for the course. But when it comes to the record, that's a kind of existential question for a political leader, how you will be remembered, and it really cuts very deep. And I think because we were good friends it cut deeper when it wasn't the book that he expected and where it was critical in parts. I don't think in any way that...I think the book is overwhelmingly affectionate and that's the way I've always felt about him, and I think the book reflects that, and everyone I've spoken to apart from Paul feels the same way.

Ramona Koval: It's clear you must have had to leave some things out about all kinds of things, his personal life. But were there issues with permission or legal threats to deal with as well?

Don Watson: There was an awful lot of legal preparation for it, but that wasn't concerning Paul's position so much as other people talked about in the book. This is the cruel thing in a way, the book was written in the context of perfect trust between us.

Ramona Koval: So you say that Paul Keating let you know what he thought about the book a few days before the launch. How did he convey this to you, what did he say?

Don Watson: By a fax, a ferocious fax, and we had a ferocious exchange, and then the launch came...

Ramona Koval: And you want to say what the fax said?

Don Watson: I put it in an envelope and placed it with my other papers in the National Library almost immediately. I found it very tough. But then I suppose after that, apart from one telephone conversation a year later which wasn't pleasant, nothing was said between us, we never met or spoke again. But I feel like I've been spruiking since March 1996 around the country and everywhere I can. And it was kept very personal between the two of us really. A lot of people knew, but not the public generally.

Ramona Koval: What happened on the launch?

Don Watson: He spoke very...it was a very clever speech in a way, but, as Noel Pearson who had launched the book said, he basically filleted me...it felt less like filleting than just being bashed like a piece of abalone or something. But I think the audience didn't really pick it up that he was actually giving me a thorough pummelling.

Ramona Koval: What did he say that the audience wouldn't have been able to interpret that you did?

Don Watson: Really that I had missed a lot of the heavy stuff. I think they were so exhausted from Noel's 45-minute speech that they were missing a lot of things, I think some of them were half unconscious. That it was a sort of black box recorder that tended to get everything but not the main stuff. There was a good line in there about my being like a bat that always returns to the dark, to which I wanted to say as well a bat that retires to the dark as a moth that seeks the light in a frenzy.

Ramona Koval: But this was what you thought of afterwards, was it?

Don Watson: Yes.

Ramona Koval: That's always the case.

Don Watson: But it was a bit of a savaging, but then Paul came out and gave me a working-over in a column he chose to write last year, which I just found a bit crazy really. I simply cannot accept the premise of his argument.

Ramona Koval: Let's talk about this in a second, but when you said he called the book the black box recorder of his prime ministership, you're saying it was a hand-held camera. Tell us about those different...

Don Watson: Calling it a black box recorder, I don't know that he intended it but I think it was the nicest thing he said about the book, that at least I had picked up what went on in the last days of a dying government. But I think really what it misses is that it picks up everything, and I couldn't, all I could pick up was what I saw, and that's really the mode I adopted for writing, which was to write about what I saw principally close up, put the details in because often they are very telling, not to try to write the definitive authoritative history of the big picture. But I do think that the big picture is in there and I think the character of Paul is in there. None of us likes to be written about, we all feel traduced by anything that is said, it's one of the advantages of being dead at your funeral is that you don't hear what people make of your life. If the situation were reversed I just simply wouldn't read it, I couldn't bring myself to read a book about me.

But as far as the personality goes, I think Paul resented that I talked about his psychology, if you like, but you can't be like Paul and have a persona like his without expecting it to be written about. I mean, how could I have written a book about Paul without writing about Paul and trying to figure out what drove him? And I go into some detail about that, not a lot but some, and I think you have to. And I actually found it useful, it's useful for working with him to think about...we're all motivated by something, by things which we're not perhaps conscious of. So I had a go at that, and I don't think he enjoyed reading that, which again, I would just skip the pages. If he can't say something nice about me I'll go to page 73 where he does.

Ramona Koval: You say here in your essay: 'The veneer of a disinterested narrative might go some way to meeting the requirements of an unwritten clause in that unwritten contract of Paul Keating's, which in essence is between the writer and the history he witnessed, but there is no such contract, and if there were, a self-respecting citizen invited to work in a political office would no more sign up to it than to one requiring that his tongue be drilled before returning to society. As much as they might stray towards believing it is their right and duty, history's great actors cannot lay down the terms of good history. They may prefer the elevated vantage point for the elevated authority and tone it grants the story of their lives, but elevation doesn't guarantee the quality of observation, the sympathy and curiosity of the reader or the judgement of posterity.' So you're really taking issue with [the question of] what kind of history does a self-respecting historian write.

Don Watson: You can only write according to your own lights, and if you are an insider, if you are in the middle of the swim I don't think you can pretend that you weren't, that was the principal thing. But I also don't think, as I say there, that a more elevated view is necessarily going to be a truer picture because you're going to miss some of the truth that you see close up.

And I quote an example of a book that Paul liked, William Manchester's biography of Churchill, which Christopher Hitchens called 'among all the hagiographies, this is the most hagiographic'. And yet not even the hagiographer, the worshipful author, could avoid saying things about Churchill that Churchill wouldn't have liked, in fact simply turning away from the fact that he wouldn't hear a word against Edward VIII, and which describes in great detail Churchill's very, very strange eccentric behaviour including massive alcoholism, bouts of great depression, spending entire days either naked or in his pyjamas sitting in a perfectly calibrated bath with the morning newspapers. I mean, he was a very strange fellow, and drinking about 40 bottles of wine a day.

So I don't think anyone could write about Paul, from whatever angle you wrote it, without talking about Paul's very powerful personality, especially in a political climate where everyone seems to be exactly the same, and we think eccentricity is Bob Katter or someone like that. Paul is Paul, there is no other Paul, and to write about him you have to try and get inside and find out what it is that made him the way he is.

Ramona Koval: Get some Paulishness.

Don Watson: Get some Paulishness.

Ramona Koval: So he says you've broken a contract, this is in this article he wrote. What does he mean?

Don Watson: Well, the contract...as I understand it, the contract is speechwriters write speeches. I had to say that much because I did, I couldn't pretend that I was working in the garden or something like that at Parliament House, I was actually writing the speeches, that's what I did, and a few other things as well. But when you write the speech, and this is understood by all speech writers, the person who delivers the speech owns the speech in every sense because they own the responsibility for it, they own the purpose of it, they decide what they're going to use, what they're not going to use, whether they like it or not. That's just the game. And it's been the same with speechwriters and politicians for a very long while. We all know that Ted Sorensen wrote Kennedy's first inaugural and most of his other speeches, we also know he wrote a lot of Profiles in Courage, the book that sold socks off...

Ramona Koval: That Kennedy was supposed to have written.

Don Watson: Yes, but Sorensen wrote some of the great lines. But no one thinks when they hear 'Ask not what your country can do for you...' et cetera, 'oh that's Ted Sorensen, it wasn't really Kennedy', they don't, they think 'that's Kennedy', and that's the way it works. No one thinks of the Blacktown address as Graham Freudenberg's, but he wrote it. They know that Whitlam wouldn't have delivered it had he not believed in it. This is just a simple function of speechwriting and politics. The contract is the moment you hand it over it becomes his, and that's all I've ever said 1,000 times, it's all Freudenberg has ever said, we've said it together on stages here and there around the country...

Ramona Koval: You've sung it.

Don Watson: Probably sung it. I mean, I don't know what more you can do, and that's why I was startled by this...

Ramona Koval: And you think that was the contract that he was talking about or was it another kind of contract, a more sort of metaphysical contract about loyalty?

Don Watson: I think it has to be more than simply the business about speech writing because it just doesn't make sense. Peggy Noonan wrote all of those Reagan speeches with a team of a dozen or so and wrote a book about it, and the Reagan cult doesn't seem to be a Noonan cult, it's a Reagan cult. So what has offended here I'm not entirely sure, but I think the speechwriting thing must be a surrogate for a deeper grievance I think.

Ramona Koval: You say that Paul Keating believes you've deceived him in some way, and others see your book as treacherous, others in the Labor Party.

Don Watson: No one has ever told me that.

Ramona Koval: But this was in your book.

Don Watson: I've heard about it but no one's ever said anything.

Ramona Koval: But why bring it all up again now?

Don Watson: Well, I want to keep the book alive, that's the first thing, is just keeping it out after ten years. Also because I think after Paul wrote that piece last year I thought, well, I didn't want to get into an op-ed pages argument, it's very unseemly...the fact that it was over the Redfern speech I found particularly repellent. It made me think what do you say next time you run into Pat Dodson or Noel Pearson or someone, actually the speech was really about us, it wasn't about Aboriginal matters at all, it was about who wrote the damn thing.

So I thought, well, if I'm going to bring the book out I may as well write about that matter. It's not a point I want to concede to Paul. Frankly I think we both should give up on it, I just think it's a balmy argument, but it's not a point I can concede, I wanted to explain why the book was written the way it was written. I don't think that's entirely understood, it's a bit different to the way most political history has been written in this country. I also wanted to make the point that, despite what Paul said, that Graham Freudenberg does not believe I broke the contract, absolutely doesn't believe that. I think the afterword and the end was written not to provoke a barney but to really help to put it to rest.

Ramona Koval: You wrote in your book, 'Nothing in his nature, including a sadism it sometimes seemed, would allow him to forgive, even when it was clear that his contempt only made their spite and revenge more certain.' I mean, it's all there in the book. But did you tell yourself that after ten years things should be better between you?

Don Watson: Oh yes, I think they should be. I don't believe they will be, I honestly don't.

Ramona Koval: It seems like you almost wanted to write this afterword to Paul Keating in the absence of being able to say it to him.

Don Watson: A little bit. To anybody else who thinks that this book was unnecessarily hard, unfairly hard, was a betrayal or a deception, any of those things, I wanted to make it clear that the book...I think I say at the end that the principal thing that needs to be understood is the reasons for writing it the way I wrote it were reasons to do with writing, and they are as compelling to a writer as the reasons politicians have for seeming to break faith or whatever. Political reasons are compelling, so are the reasons for writing; you have to do it the way you see it, or you don't write a good book.

Ramona Koval: So you don't regret having written the book?

Don Watson: Not one bit, and I couldn't have done it any other way, I don't believe, and said what I wanted to say.

Ramona Koval: So never write a book about a living object, is that the advice finally to give to somebody who's contemplating this?

Don Watson: Think hard before you do it, yes. But it's an odd thing because of course it's done all the time, the pages of every newspaper every day are full of people writing what purport to be definitive pieces about active public figures, and the thing is with a newspaper, as people will always tell you, today's news is tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper. And it doesn't really matter, but a book has this weight about it that worries the subject a great deal more. It should a bit, but there's every opportunity for Paul to write a book about history, and I think I would say that the method I used means that the judgement was never more than mine. It's not history's judgement, someone else will make that judgement, as they're now making it, for instance, about Kennedy 50, 60 years later, they're deciding Kennedy was a bit of a...hmm, not such a good fella. You can't second-guess history at all, but at least here I'm not saying, well, 'this is the judgement ten years or six years after the event', this is just me, what I saw when I was there.

Ramona Koval: Don Watson, thank you so much for coming to The Book Show.

Don Watson: Thanks Ramona.

Ramona Koval: The book is Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, it's published by Random House.

Publications

Title: Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM

Author: Don Watson

Publisher : Knopf