When Keating went to war with the White House
Secret cables reveal for the first time that prime minister Paul Keating’s right-hand man and a senior White House official engaged in an extraordinary war of words in 1992, sometimes in personal terms.
A senior adviser to George H.W. Bush warned Paul Keating’s chief of staff in 1992 that his push to engage Australia’s economy more with Asia was “a shoe in the gut” to the US-Australia alliance and that the then-prime minister was forgetting “who [their] true partners really were”.
In an exchange extraordinary for its blunt and sometimes personal language, and being revealed for the first time by The Australian Financial Review, White House deputy chief of staff Robert Zoellick told Australia’s ambassador in Washington, Michael Cook, that Keating should “understand – indeed should be in no doubt – that the USA had long memories”.
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