A complex, accomplished witness to NZ history Gerald Hensley
David Lange and Gerald Hensley had little in common, but in the 1980s both men played pivotal roles in events that continue to shape Aotearoa to this day. Hensley, who has died aged 88, leaves a legacy that sees him ranked as one of New Zealand’s most influential public servants.
A career diplomat, Hensley was also a talented writer and historian who in later life became a winemaker.
But some critics have questioned his actions over New Zealand’s nuclear-free stance, suggesting he undermined Labour and its then leader, Lange.
His funeral attracted a who’s who of former diplomats, high-ranking military figures and former politicians.
Although he had a long and distinguished career as a diplomat and civil servant, it was the events of the 1980s, working with two very different prime ministers, for which he will largely be remembered.
After serving a four-year stint as New Zealand High Commissioner to Singapore, he returned to New Zealand in 1980 to become Head of the Prime Minister’s Department.
He had to work with a prime minister Robert Muldoon, who was often drunk, dictatorial and a bully, according to Hensley. It soon became clear that his best strategy was to avoid Muldoon in the afternoon, when the alcohol had taken over.
On the face of it, the two men could not have been more different. Hensley had grown up in Christchurch and had an MA in history. By the time, he was given the task of looking after Muldoon, he had had a successful career with Foreign Affairs.
In contrast, Muldoon disliked intellectuals and used his formidable presence to intimidate anyone who dared stand up to him.
After his retirement, Hensley wrote in great detail about Muldoon.
“He had a straightforward character, what you saw was what you got. He was a combative man, a squat tyrannosaurus, so what you got was not always pleasant.”
Ministers in his government were afraid of him and the picture Hensley paints of Muldoon is not pretty.
“Muldoon, small and rather shapeless, had an intimidating physical presence. Everyone from his ministerial colleagues to journalists and hecklers were a bit frightened of him, not because of the slight risk of being punched, but because of that fearsome willpower.”
As well as ignoring policy papers, Muldoon was easily bored, largely uninterested in anyone, including ministers, who did not agree with him. Hensley said he “was one of those men who regarded women as either untouchable ladies or fair game” and that his marriage was one of convenience.
In the office, Muldoon was brisk and decisive and enjoyed his role in government.
“A paper sent to him would often come back in 20 minutes, read and decided.“
By 1984 Muldoon was tired and Hensley noted “his predictable loss was turned into a constitutional crisis” by his stubborn and irrational refusal to devalue the dollar.
With the New Zealand dollar and potentially the economy at the point of collapse, Muldoon refused to back down.
“He had an emotional view of devaluation as a wrestling match between him and greedy speculators rather than as help for an overweight jockey riding a tiring horse.” It was only the intervention of his deputy, Jim Mclay, that saved the economy, Hensley wrote.
Read as a whole, his descriptions of Muldoon spell out the threat he posed to democracy and good government. Hensley refers to him as a dictator, who ruthlessly put down anyone he disagreed with.
“His ‘dictatorship’ was personal because it required a formidable effort to disagree with him, as his ministers and advisers came to feel.”
Other than discouraging him from making decisions when he was drunk, there is little evidence that Hensley tried to rein in Muldoon. Reading his accounts of working with Lange, Hensley makes much of the claims that Lange did not follow due process and acted alone.
When Muldoon was defeated, Hensley continued in his role as head of department. Labour Party members viewed him as untrustworthy and Hensley’s role was abruptly ended. His next role was as Domestic and External Security director.
It was not to be the end of his involvement with Lange, whom he describes as “secretive”, easily bored, “murky and furtive”, and lacking in ambition. Hensley is critical of his handling of a number of events, including the coup in Fiji, New Zealand becoming nuclear-free and the row over the USS Buchanan.
Lange’s Labour government had swept to power on a tide of dissatisfaction with Muldoon and on a promise to make New Zealand nuclear-free.
US Secretary of State George Shultz visited New Zealand after the 1984 election and would later claim that Lange had promised him the anti-nuclear policy, effectively banning US warships, would be ended.
Lange, however, said no such undertaking had ever been given, and the fallout led to a policy rift between New Zealand and its superpower ally.
The government refused the USS Buchanan entry because the United States would neither confirm nor deny the ship had nuclear capability.
Within days Washington cut intelligence and military ties and downgraded political and diplomatic exchanges. Shultz confirmed that the United States would no longer maintain its security guarantee to New Zealand – Anzus, a security pact signed between the United States, Australia and New Zealand in 1951.
Hensley portrays Lange as the villain, describing him as a liar and someone who did not follow rules and protocols.
In doing so, Hensley not only overlooked the facts but the impact of the New Zealand nuclear-free movement. It gave New Zealand credibility as a country that was prepared to defend its principles. Google the impact of New Zealand’s nuclear-free stance and you are taken to a post by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Taking a nuclear-free policy to the world) singing the praises of what Lange achieved.
“The fight against nuclear weapons provides one of the most sustained examples of the independence with which New Zealand has crafted much of its foreign policy.”
From a political point of view it was, and remains, a success. When the policy was announced, more than 40 towns and cities quickly became nuclear free.
Reading Hensley’s accounts of what happened it seems he viewed going nuclear-free as being anti-american. History, however, made a nonsense of such views. In the 40 years since the policy was announced, New Zealand has remained an American ally, sending troops to Afghanistan and other conflicts in support of American policy.
The issues around Lange came to the fore again in 2013, when Hensley published Friendly Fire, a book alleging Lange had misled America and had lied about his intentions.
By that time Lange was dead and unable to defend himself. His widow, and former speech writer, Margaret Pope, however, came out swinging, noting Lange had never trusted Hensley, and said it was Hensley who was not telling the truth.
“David inherited him from (former Prime Minister Rob Muldoon) and he did not trust him and he wanted him to go but Gerald would never take the hint... The reason why he didn’t trust him wasn’t anything to do with Gerald personally, but because he was so much of the world view that said we had to be in Anzus, no matter what.“
Pope refused to be interviewed for Hensley’s book, claiming that Hensley was prone to ignoring the facts.
“I have absolutely no interest in helping Gerald reinvent history in which he and the establishment play the heroes in their cause, ignoring what the electorate has actually voted for and doing what they saw was best for their country, and makes David out to be a villain or pantomime figure to explain away why they thought they knew better than the Government and the public.”
Pope noted that Labour had two policy planks in the 1984 election: to be nuclearfree and to remain in Anzus, and Lange had worked hard to achieve that.
She said Lange made a genuine attempt to sort the issue out with the Americans and Hensley was out of his depth in writing about the internal workings of the Labour Party.
Former academic and international relations expert Malcolm Mckinnon says that when Lange declared New Zealand nuclear-free, it would have been hard for senior officials in defence and diplomacy, who had spent their entire careers building the relationship with America, to comprehend.
Forty years after the event, it is hard to unravel the facts but it was not only his wife who supported Lange.
Merv Norrish, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, backed Lange’s account. In 2006, former diplomat Malcolm Templeton published Standing Upright Here, New Zealand in the Nuclear Age. Templeton’s measured conclusion was that while it “seems possible that Lange may have given the impression that some modification of Labour Party policy might be achievable, given time, perhaps in respect of visits by nuclear-powered ships. Prima facie, it seems most unlikely that he would have undertaken to try to put the policy of excluding nuclear-armed ships into reverse.”
Templeton then cites Norrish, from a 2004 conference where he said that while there might have been some ambiguity, Lange did not say he would change Labour’s anti-nuclear stance.
In a reference to senior defence and diplomats like Hensley, Templeton notes his stance upholding Labour Party policy would have been “a nasty shock” but they should not have been surprised by the policy.
In 2023 journalist Nicky Hager gave the Michael King Memorial Lecture at Otago University, on the early years of the nuclear-free policy.
His research, based on documents from the time, concluded that the biggest threat to Lange and the nuclear policy was a group of senior New Zealand officials, including Hensley, who worked behind the scenes to undermine Lange and who had little respect for democracy.
“They were also the greatest opponents of the government they were supposed to serve, a government that had campaigned and been elected on the promise of a nuclear ban, and which was then trying to fulfil its promise.”
Gerald Christopher Philip Hensley was born in Christchurch on December 4, 1935, attending St Bede’s College and then Canterbury University, where he was a top student. At St Bede’s, he started a school newspaper and was chosen to represent the school on a radio quiz. At Canterbury University College, he excelled at history and again worked on the newspaper.
Historian Jock Phillips says his father, Professor Neville Phillips, always said that Hensley was his brightest student.
It was at university, where he met and married Juliet Mary Austen Young, who was to prove a major influence. A talented journalist and gifted writer, she helped him with his books and reports.
Hensley joined the Department of External Affairs in 1958, quickly rising up the ranks. His first post was to Samoa and then the New Zealand Permanent Mission to the United Nations. In 1965 he was appointed Special Assistant to the Commonwealth Secretary-general, when the Commonwealth Secretariat was established in London.
Before becoming head of the Prime Minister’s Department, he had successful stints in America and Singapore, where he became a close friend of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
He retired in 1999, but that was not the end of his interest in politics and diplomacy. He wrote books, was a regular media commentator and produced numerous articles for his webpage Kahu Dispatches.
After retiring, he moved to Martinborough, where he owned a winery, enjoyed making marmalade and continued to write.
His son, also called Gerald, says his father was a man who enjoyed a laugh and was an engaged father to his four children.
“He was a very good father who enjoyed us, supported us and entered into our struggles, and we adored him for that.”
The impact Juliet had on Hensley both professionally and personally, was significant, he says.
“Juliet helped fill the house with music and books and hospitality. And was a key driver of the success of his writing, Everything he wrote was lovingly (and competently) edited by a journalist with an eye for what will read well.”
Among the many tributes to Hensley was one from his long-time secretary, Jean Gee.
“He was not only a statesman, but a gentleman, and I respected his qualities as an upright, thoughtful and considerate human being.”
Visiting dignitaries were conscious they were in the “presence of an officer and gentleman” who knew how to behave.
“A myriad of others privileged to work with Gerald would have benefited from his fine mind, sense of humour (often wry and ironic) – and above all, the wisdom and balance he brought to everything he did.”
Those were the qualities noted by former secretary of Foreign Affairs Simon Murdoch, who said Hensley was an outstanding civil servant and diplomat who had been in a unique position to observe, influence and later write about some key historical moments.
As a diplomat, he fostered important personal relationships and was highly regarded in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Murdoch had called on Hensley’s advice to try to persuade Muldoon not to go ahead with the 1981 Springbok tour.
“That is when I saw Gerald`s steadiness of temperament and cool judgment at its best – with a tired, distracted, less than well but still combative prime minister.”
Murdoch said former diplomat Neil Walter nicely summed up his contribution to New Zealand.
“Gerald epitomised all the qualities, professional and personal, looked for in a NZ diplomat; he was instrumental in determining NZ’S response to many of the most difficult and most important foreign and defence challenges we as a small nation faced in the second half of the 20th century.”
Hensley is survived by his children, Gerald, Caroline, Sarah and Sophie. In 1999 he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Sources: Kahu Despatches, Gerald Hensley (son), Simon Murdoch, Malcolm Mckinnon, Malcolm Templeton Standing Upright Here - New Zealand in the Nuclear Age, Jean Gee, Stuff Archives.