A diplomat and fine raconteur

Gerald Hensley's colourful time in the public service saw him rub shoulders with 10 Prime Ministers. He tells AUDREY YOUNG some of the highlights.

After nearly 41 years in the public service, the retiring Secretary of Defence, Gerald Hensley, has seen just one case of bribery.

It was 1983 and he was in New Delhi as head of the Prime Minister's department with Sir Robert Muldoon after the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

It had finished and by midday the New Zealand contingent was aboard the RNZAF Boeing 727 waiting for airport clearance to leave.

"It was very hot. The plane sat there with the door open. The Prime Minister was leaning back with a magazine over his face, snoozing. And nothing happened. The plane sat there and sweat was trickling down everybody's back.

"I said to the PM's private secretary Harold Hewitt 'go and find out what the problem is'.

"He came back and said 'they say it's a very busy time. It may be some time before we get away'.

"After a minute I suddenly said to Harold 'go and ask him how much'. Harold came back quicker the second time and said '$300'. All this was carried on in whispers because the PM was across the aisle snoozing away.

"I thought for a moment, and the plane was getting hotter and hotter. So I said to Harold 'pay it'. Harold being a very good private secretary said: 'out of what vote?'

"I was pondering this and a voice rumbled from behind the magazine 'put it down to disbursements'.

"So Harold vanished with the $300 and a few minutes later the doors were shut and the engines started and we were away."

Gerald Hensley has a reputation as a fine raconteur and lives up to it well in an interview on his career.

Having worked in various capacities with 10 Prime Ministers, and very closely with Sir Robert and David Lange, he has a wealth of experience to draw upon.

"Two Prime Ministers with very different temperaments," he says diplomatically.

He will talk about them. But he won't talk about the modern public service or matters political, such as Labour's veto in 1990 of his appointment as Secretary of Defence, after David Lange had left office.

"I think I must have set a record though in the sense that I was fired from my present job before I even started it."

Of course, Mr Hensley has any amount to say on his special areas of expertise, foreign affairs, defence, and security. But in between, when he leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head and starts reminiscing, he makes history come alive.

Tonight he will be formally farewelled in the Grand Hall at Parliament the same date, he notes, as the 25th anniversary of Norm Kirk's death.

Mr Hensley and his wife, Juliet, went to the Kirk house in Seatoun the night he died.

The Governor General, Sir Denis Blundell, was there, and so were Matt and Nellie Rata.

Mrs Hensley and Mrs Rata had put Dame Ruth Kirk to bed and the group had decided to stay until the sons arrived.

"At about 2.30 in the morning, someone said 'what a shame we can't get some fish 'n chips at this time'.

"Matt Rata said leave it to me and vanished. Half and hour later Matt staggered through the door with an armload of parcels of fish n' chips.

"It's a mystery to this day how he managed it, but they were piping hot and extremely good."

Mr Hensley was obviously destined for high things, from the day he joined foreign affairs in 1958, graduating from Canterbury University with a masters degree in history.

His first job was writing a speech for the Prime Minister, Walter Nash., for a Commonwealth conference he was opening. And it brought the young Hensley into direct contact with Alister McIntosh (Mac), the secretary of external affairs from its inception in 1943 to 1966.

"I wrote this laborious academic kind of thing. And then I was summoned into Mac's presence and he said 'this speech won't do.'

"My heart sank into my boots and Mac said 'look, this is the way the Prime Minister likes to speak.' He called in his PA who had marvellous shorthand and Mac then launched into this marvellous speech of Walter Nash's.

"It trembled on the verge of parody but never quite crossed it. It was reminded of other things, it rambled around. It came back to the point it first made; then it shot off at a tangent and I listened absolutely enthralled.

"This was the most marvellous speech of Walter's being delivered for me right there by his permanent head then to my horror, half way through, Mac broke off and said 'well, there you are, you get the general idea now finish it.'"

The speech taught him a valuable lesson on day one of his career: "You've got to adapt yourself to the way Prime Ministers think. It's no good expecting it the other way around."

Mr Hensley says it is was difficult to adjust from Sir Robert to Mr Lange because they were so different.

"David Lange was a man who liked to talk things through, a people man who liked to talk things through face to face.

"Sir Robert was a very methodical worker. He worked on paper. He read things in detail. He would discuss things with his officials but really only at the end of the process."

Mr Hensley is generous towards Sir Robert, given his treatment during the constitutional crisis after the 1984 election.

Mr Hensley, the Secretary of Treasury, Bernie Galvin, and the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Spenser Russell, met the day after the Labour win and decided the day after the election that devaluation was the only option. Mr Hensley was elected the one to ring Sir Robert, the caretaker Prime Minister.

"So I rang him and I said the three of us would like to come and see you this afternoon, Prime Minister. And for the first time ever in my experience of coming to see him, he said 'no.' I was so startled I said 'what do you mean, no?'

"He said 'no I don't want to see you.' I was really quite surprises. I said we can't open the foreign exchange tomorrow with the present situation and he said 'do what you like,' and hung up."

In an extraordinary move, the three senior public servants on their own authority issued a press statement on Sunday night saying that the foreign exchange markets would not open for the next few days.

"The Prime Minister still continued to refuse to consider devaluation. The situation got more and more difficult. The secretary of the Treasury Bernie Galvin went and talked to David Lange as the incoming Prime Minister.

"In the end the Prime Minister's deputy, Jim McLay, spoke to the PM and on the Wednesday agreed to call a cabinet meeting at which devaluation was agreed."

Contrary to popular belief, Mr Hensley, the Muldoon appointment, got along famously with the new Prime Minister, David Lange.

They continue to contradict each other as to whether Mr Hensley frightened the PM one day him by advising that that Soviet missles were heading for the US and nuclear war was on the way.

"I'm baffled by that," says Mr Hensley. "I have no recollection of that whatsoever."

But Mr Hensley has huge respect for Mr Lange. "He was a very charming and very entertaining man to work for.

"He is the funniest man I've ever known. It bubbled like oil out of the ground."

The pair shared a public works hut in Tuvalu for a conference, and they shared history together in the lounge of the New Zealand consul in Los Angeles while a State Department official, Bill Brown, formally spelled out the US reprisals against New Zealand for the anti-nuclear policy.

"It's the only time I saw his moustache quiver," says Mr Lange.

Mr Hensley agrees he was very upset but like many historical moments he witnessed, it was a more absurd element that captured his imagination.

The sombre official, after completing his serious business, was left stranded without a car at the consul so Mr Lange and Mr Hensley gave him a lift into town.

His favourite Lange story also involves a large dose of absurdity. The pair were flying around the outer reaches of East Coast in a helicopter after the devastation of Cyclone Bola in 1988.

The chopper had been loaded up with boxes of fresh food for victims. They had one left and were on their way back to Gisborne when they spotted a house completely cut off by slips.

"So we dropped down into the back paddock. The farmer's wife was in the kitchen and she heard this extraordinary clattering noise in the back garden and she came to the door, feeling that there was nobody within 20 miles, a reasonable assumption.

"She appeared in a short pink nightie and gumboots to be greeted by the Prime Minister of New Zealand and I advancing upon her with bags of orange juice.

"She burst into tears. So we hastily popped our goodwill down, got back in the helicopter and shot off."

Mr Hensley had often wondered how she was going to explain to her husband that night when he returned from counting dead sheep that the Prime Minister had brought them fresh food.

And from the ridiculous, to the sublimely ridiculous, Mr Hensley tops off the interview with a vivid account of a brush he had with death earlier in his diplomatic career.

It was January 1966, Lagos, Nigieria, and he was assistant to the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Arnold Smith. They were attending the first Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings outside London:

"The night the conference had finished there was a coup in which the Prime Minister who chaired the meeting and finance minister and certain others were killed.

"I was awakened by gunshots but naturally didn't recognise them for what they were.

"An unfortunate Nigerian army brigadier along the corridor from me was assassinated. He opened the door and soldiers gunned him down."

He and Mr Smith were ordered to pack immediately and leave for the airport.

"The assassins had closed the door thoughtfully of the brigadier's room. The body was presumably lying just inside the door. But a trail of blood had gone down the corridor.

"And one my abiding memories was Arnold Smith, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, and I dancing a curious minuet along the corridor trying to avoid stepping into the long thin trail of blood."

It was a "somewhat exciting ride" to the airport, being attacked twice by a mob. But the airport control tower was the subject of a struggle so the check-in counters were closed.

"We ended up in a bungalow at the end of the runway which was like one of those Hollywood movies where a disparate group of people turn up in a lifeboat.

"The Hon David Astor who was then the proprietor of the London Observer, the Syrian ambassador, a couple of expatriate women and toddlers.

"Every so often the rattle of small arms fire would move down the runway towards us and conversation would die away with everyone trying to appear nonchalant.

"At 4 o clock in the afternoon there was a great thump of a helicopter which landed on the lawn in front of us. Suspense rose and the guards went out into the garden and cocked their weapons. Finally the door opened and at the top of the steps in full regalia appeared Archbishop Makarios [of Cyprus].

"And he raised his hand and said 'ah, there you are' as if he had been in his helicopter covering the whole of Nigeria looking everywhere for us.

"We welcomed him into the party but after a while he took a look at our sweaty conditions where all the Fanta had run out so he buggered off and left us to it." The group was eventually evacuated at 9pm by the Royal Air Force.

Mr Hensley's colourful career and love of history will be put to immediate use in two retirement projects: the life of Alister McInstosh; and a modern history of New Zealand's foreign policy from 1935.

Before that, he and his wife are planning a walking holiday in Sicily before settling back home at their Martinborough vineyard in the Wairarapa, more rich fodder for one of the best unwritten memoirs around.

Gerald Hensley:

* 1958 Joined Department of External Affairs.

* 1959 Posted to NZ High Commission in Samoa under Sir Guy Powles.

* 1961 Posted to NZ mission at United Nations.

* 1965 Special assistant to the Commonwealth Secretary-General.

* 1969 Posted to Washington embassy under Frank Corner.

* 1973 Head of economics division of foreign affairs.

* 1976 High commissioner to Singapore.

* 1980 Head of Prime Minister's Department under Sir Robert Muldoon.

* 1984 Head of the Prime Minister's Department under David Lange.

* 1987 Co-ordinator of domestic and external security.

* 1990 Vetoed by Labour cabinet as Secretary of Defence.

* 1991 Appointed by National as Secretary of Defence.

* 1999 Retires as Secretary of Defence