Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria
b.14 August 1915 - d. 25 February 1998

A public intellectual who held no university post, a lay leader who exerted a strong religious influence, an anti-communist who made economic rationalism the object of his last crusade, a life-long political operator who never entered parliament. Bob Santamaria was no ordinary man, no ordinary Australian, nor a typical son of immigrants, and he left more consensus behind in his death last week at age 82 than in any of the actions he ever took in public life.

Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria was born and raised in Brunswick, the son of devoutly Catholic Sicilian immigrants. His adolescence was spent in the shadow of the Great Depression and his journalistic debut was an article critical of rampant capitalism, a theme he was to revisit forcefully in his last years. However, the intervening decades were the defining ones: years of passionate and sedulous work to rid the ALP and trade unions of communist influence which he regarded as a long-term threat to democracy in this coun-try.

His efforts were largely successful, though not without cost to his standing in the Labor movement, irrespective of the centrality one gives to the role of Labor leader, Dr H. V. Evatt, in splitting the ALP. Santamaria undertook this work with the full endorsement of his religious and temporal mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, and with the fervour and pitiless resolve which were the hallmark of his politi-cal foes. He had a profound impact on a number of Jewish anti-communist intellectuals, including Frank Knopfelmacher and Robert Manne.

Legions of columnists, pundits and partisans have recounted the decisive influence Bob Santamaria had on Australian political life and it would be fruitless to paraphrase them. One curious irony, however, has interested many. Santamaria spent his last years reconciling or becoming acquainted with political foes (as opposed to estranged political allies) whom he never previously met or with whom decades had passed without contact.

They tended to find common ground on issues other than the ones that formerly divided them and from this follows another irony. Santamaria had been perhaps Australia’s foremost Cold War Warrior.

His incisive analyses of the complexities of Soviet policy had been all the more valuable for being rare and well-informed. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the final disintegration of the Soviet Empire in 1991 ought to have been, on his own criteria, his moments of triumph. But the reader of Santamaria’s columns will notice no gloating, no inflated pride or the whiff of retrospective vindication. If anything, his often maudlin, foreboding, tone became distinctly more pronounced. Why? The answer seems to be that Santamaria was a genuine pessimist. He was never just a Cold War Warrior or anti-communist. He had distinct ideas on public and private life, economics, democracy and accountability.

At least he could claim to have the US-led western world on his side in the conflict with the Soviet Union, even though he used to fret repeatedly for the future of western resolve. Once that consensus disbanded in the aftermath of its victory, he had none. As a voice against market-driven economics and for traditional cultural and religious values, he had few allies, certainly no governments. Insofar as this applied to international affairs, his own views took a sea change. A strong supporter of all democracies in their fight with Soviet-sponsored regimes and terror-ist revolutionaries, he had been sup-portive of Israel. Jews in Australia had reason to appreciate his opposition to anti-Semitism in earlier times when it was a not-uncommon phenomenon in some Catholic circles. It was, therefore, with a sense of sorrow rather than anger that many Jews greeted a distinct cooling of relations with Santamaria, starting in the late 1980s with his opposition to War Crimes legislation.

The insistent editorials of his publication, News Weekly, replete with assertions of Jewish strong-arming of the Australian government on the subject, estranged many Jewish friends.

Oddly enough, Santamaria had put himself on record as in favour of the prosecution and punishment of convicted war criminals within a specified, limited period. Yet he took the Jews to task over advocating legislation to make this possible and was critical of the eventual Act. The reason, it appears to me, was that he accepted arguments put to him by some East European communities that they were being libelled as a group, although Jewish community figures frequently emphasised that the targets were guilty individuals alone.

Matters may have rested here had he not also changed tack on Israel and Jewish causes more generally. Here, his concern stemmed at least in part from his own perception of increasing Israeli political isolation and demographic weakness in the immediate post-Cold War era.

Legitimate as he saw Israeli security concerns, he foresaw Israel having to negotiate with the PLO. In doing so, he was merely pointing the way, but he supplemented these views with attacks on Israel for supporting the search for Nazi war criminals and on various Israeli and Jewish actions with respect to issues of Christian concern.

Even an unexceptionable case of technical assistance given by Israeli authorities to the makers of a documentary which challenged some of the tenets of Christianity led him to publicly doubt the worth of Jewish-Christian dialogue. There was potential for tempers to flare on both sides on these matters. Santamaria unerringly fanned them, then was surprised when Jews got upset. Jewish academics of varying political persuasions, like Bill Rubinstein and Ron Taft, took up the debate through private correspondence.

Santamaria was upset that he was perceived as being hostile, yet carried on in precisely the same way as he had done.

I was familiar with his customary formal press photograph, so I was a lit-tle surprised on the day to find the con-servative intellectual in a green sweatshirt atop the conventional busi-ness shirt and tie. Personable and forthright, he did not stand on ceremony and he had the knack of assuring you that he was giving you his undivided atten-tion.

We spoke desultorily at first. I had just started post graduate research on the Labor leader, Dr H.V. Evatt, and he gave me a few anecdotes which bore out the quite well-known view of Evatt as an incorrigible schemer.

How we arrived at the subject of Pope John Paul I, I no longer remem-ber, but he had a surprising explana-tion for the absence of an autopsy re-port on the late pontiff: he believed he had died in a fire in his bed caused by his inveterate smoking.

As for our subject, he insisted that, despite misgivings about the whole Zi-onist enterprise at the time, he was sup-portive of Israel’s creation and regarded the western obligation to its existence as ‘contractual,’ a position, he said, he would never change.

We spoke about the need for some form of Arab-Israeli negotiations, dif-fering only on his strategic view that buffer zones mattered little to Israel in the age of missiles: missiles, I countered, could destroy lives and property but not sovereignty, and territory mattered to geographically small nations with hostile neighbours. We had the recent example of Kuwait to hand, so he appreciated the point.

Next he wanted to know what Jews were finding so offensive in his columns. I produced a few recent ones which had a common theme of Israel’s interests being depicted in conflict with international ones for peace and stability and the allegedly injurious impact of the pro-Israel lobby on US policy.

He never saw that interest groups inevitably exist in a democratic framework and lobby roughly in proportion to the strength of their conviction, nor that such activity is feasible only within a framework of advancing the national interest.

Santamaria thanked me ‘for giving me something to think about’ and I left, although not before he told me, doubtless for my own assurance, that he opposed immigration from Muslim countries. I have always thought that his willingness to make a group determination of this sort sat poorly with his stated support for equality for all Australians.

Needless to say, his carping on dual loyalty, Jewish assertiveness and the pro-Israel lobby continued unabated. In fact, it got worse. Legislation to outlaw racial vilification had many critics, but Santamaria was one of a number to argue openly that the Jewish community sought by these means to intimidate its critics into silence.

Bill Clinton’s appointment in 1993 of an Australian-born Jew, Martin Indyk, as Middle East adviser, was the occasion for another imputation of Jewish dual loyalty. Presumably, any Jew sharing Indyk’s position on Middle Eastern issues (which Santamaria, rather heedlessly described as pro-Likud) was not committed to the inter-ests of their country. So hostile had he become to putatively pro-Israeli components of US policy that the same man who supported the Gulf War (and indeed advocated the removal of Saddam Hussein) ended up opposing the US policy of dual containment of Iraq and Iran in their designs to acquire unconventional and nuclear weapons. A strange political epitaph for a Cold War Warrior and champion of freedom.

I concluded then, as now, that a deep disappointment with the Western world, politically, culturally and socially, tilted him to a mordant critique of the US, whose support for Israel became but another feature of a picture of general failure he was predisposed to paint. This disappointment also underlined the perception of his own marginality. He said in recent years that the oligarchic media stifled discussion of the kind of views he held. Yet he had his own publication for decades and was, after 22 years, The Australian’s longest-standing regular columnist at the time of his death.

In death, the chorus was unanimous: his impact on Australian life had been profound. Only he would have disagreed. A modest family man and no egotist, he never possessed the common vice of political figures, that of excessive self-regard and he took an accordingly unsentimental view of his role in history.