Gerald Hensley had tales to tell about bribery, pink nighties and prime ministerial lies. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Gerald Hensley, the former diplomat, historian, public servant and raconteur who worked at the heart of government with Sir Rob Muldoon and David Lange, has died but he leaves a rich trove of stories of his career.
Hensley was head of the Prime Minister’s department when Lange defeated Muldoon in 1984 and Muldoon refused to deal with the looming currency crisis.
He was also head of the Prime Minister’s Department during Lange’s diplomatic crisis with the United States over the anti-nuclear policy, which ended in New Zealand being suspended from the Anzus security alliance.
Hensley’s career included diplomatic postings to Samoa, the United Nations, Washington and Singapore where, as High Commissioner, he developed an enduring friendship with then Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. He also had a job as special assistant to the Commonwealth Secretary-General and was Secretary of Defence for eight years.
In his various roles, he rubbed shoulders with 10 New Zealand Prime Ministers.
Some of his best work stories are recorded in his memoir Final Approaches, his book Friendly Fire on the Anzus breakdown and in various interviews about his career.
He once recounted having been caught up in a military coup after the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in 1966 in Lagos, Nigeria, which included an assassination just down the corridor in his hotel and their rapid evacuation.
“One of 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,” he told the Herald in an interview in 1999.
One of Hensley’s more colourful stories about Muldoon involved a visit to India with him in 1983, also for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
The meeting had finished and the New Zealand delegation was sitting on board the RNZAF 727 on the tarmac in the searing heat in New Delhi, waiting for the go-ahead to take off.
“The plane sat there with the door open,” Hensley said in the interview.
“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’.
Hewitt vanished with the $300 and a few minutes later the doors were shut and the engines started and they were away.
The following year, Muldoon and National lost power and Hensley was at the centre of a currency crisis and constitutional crisis.
After meeting with the head of Treasury Bernie Galvin and the Reserve Bank Governor Spenser Russell the day following the election, Hensley had been tasked with ringing Muldoon, by then the caretaker Prime Minister, to set up a meeting about devaluation.
Muldoon shocked Hensley when he refused to meet them and told him to “do what you like” and then hung up on him. The three senior public servants, on their own authority, issued a statement closing the foreign exchange markets for the next few days.
The matter was eventually resolved with the intervention of Muldoon’s deputy, Jim McLay, and the outgoing National Cabinet approved the devaluation.
The adjustment from Muldoon to Lange had been difficult because they had such different ways of working, Hensley told the Herald.
Lange had liked to talk things through face to face whereas Muldoon preferred to work on paper and discuss things with officials at the end of the process.
Hensley described Lange as the funniest man he had ever known.
“It bubbled like oil out of the ground.”
His favourite story about Lange involved a helicopter ride around the East Coast of New Zealand with him shortly after Cyclone Bola in 1988, Hensley told the Herald.
They had been dropping off boxes of food and had one box remaining when, on their way back to Gisborne, they spotted a farmhouse completely cut off by slips.
“So we dropped down into the back paddock,” Hensley said.
“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.”
Hensley said he 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.
He also had some bad work stories involving Lange. In the 2013 book Friendly Fire, based on access he had been given to official papers from the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, he concluded that Lange had lied about his early involvement in the crisis.
Lange, along with Hensley and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Merwyn Norrish, had been involved in the decision to dispatch the Chief of Defence Force Sir Ewan Jamieson to Honolulu to discuss a US ship visit to New Zealand, which settled on the USS Buchanan.
Lange had eschewed the offer of a draft Cabinet paper, saying he would brief his colleagues.
The request by the US for a ship visit arrived when Lange was overseas and it was handled by his deputy, Sir Geoffrey Palmer.
But Hensley was shocked to discover during his research that Lange had not only not briefed his colleagues, he had told some that the ship visit invitation had all been the work of Hensley, Foreign Affairs and Defence.
“I hadn’t actually thought of him being an actual liar,” he said in an interview about the book. “But I’m afraid you really can’t use any other word for this. It was a conscious lie to protect himself in the debacle that followed the collapse of the Buchanan visit. And I was a bit shocked.”
Lange’s wife Margaret Pope said that Lange had not trusted Hensley because he had been so much of the world view that New Zealand should be in Anzus, no matter what.
Hensley believed the events leading to the collapse of Anzus were New Zealand’s biggest foreign policy mistake, saying as soon as it happened “we set about for the next 25 years trying to get back more or less to where we started”.
The book also detailed a conversation between Lange and Margaret Thatcher, in which Lange had raised the possibility of him stepping down.
In recent years, he remained engaged in public discourse over New Zealand’s defence and security through op-eds and his own site, Kahu Despatches.
Commenting in the Herald last year on the concept of New Zealand’s “independent foreign policy,” Hensley wrote: “The idea of New Zealand as the playboy of the Western world, open to offers and able to choose its partners free from the demands of our traditional friends is a delusion.”
Hensley died at home in Martinborough, aged 88. He was married to Juliet Hensley, a journalist, who died in 2013. He is survived by their children Caroline, Gerald, Sarah and Sophie.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters said Hensley had served New Zealand with distinction during some seriously challenging periods and had been widely respected by his peers and successors in the foreign policy and defence communities.
“He took the world as it was and understood that a small country like New Zealand must forcefully protect its interests - working in concert with our close partners.”
Former diplomat and former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Sir Maarten Wevers, said Hensley was “a public servant of the highest integrity and acumen”.
“Gerald was intelligent, insightful and very well-informed, and respected by his domestic colleagues and international counterparts. He maintained a wide network of professional relationships internationally,” Wevers said,
He had been the leading force behind the establishment of New Zealand’s national security and disaster management system that was still in use today.
Former diplomat and former Secretary of Defence John McKinnon said Hensley was very sharp, able and articulate and a very good raconteur.
“In many ways, he was something of an inspiration to people who would aspire to be as able as him and were struck by the way he conducted himself professionally and personally,” McKinnon said.
Hensley had been an excellent observer and writer.
“Gerald set a very fine example in terms of what he wrote and how he wrote it.”
- 1958: Joined Department of External Affairs.
- 1959: Posted to New Zealand High Commission in Samoa under Sir Guy Powles.
- 1961: Posted to New Zealand 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: Retired as Secretary of Defence
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