Read Online First Among Equals by Kim; Derry Hogue; Wildman - Free Book Online Page B

Japan, earning himself the nickname ‘Black Jack’.
    On Fadden’s retirement on 26 March 1958, McEwen became both Country Party leader and deputy prime minister under the Menzies and Holt coalition governments. As deputy prime minister when Holt disappeared, McEwen became the country’s third caretaker prime minister. With the Liberal Party the stronger coalition partner, McEwen worked quickly to blackball William McMahon, Holt’s most likely successor, announcing that he would break the coalition if McMahon took office. John Gorton was then elected as the new Liberal Party leader and became prime minister in 1968.
    Under Gorton, McEwen served as the minister for trade. Following Gorton’s poor performance and the Coalition’s near defeat in the October 1969 election, McEwen eventually lifted his veto on McMahon. In 1971 at the age of 70, McEwen retired from parliament. He then lived quietly on his property at Stanhope with his second wife Mary Byrne, whom he married in 1968 after Anne died, until his death almost ten years later on 20 November 1980.

    SIR JOHN GREY GORTON
    HE DID IT HIS WAY
    TERM
    10 January 1968-10 March 1971
    S ir John Grey Gorton, Australia’s nineteenth prime minister, was a larrikin in every sense of the word. A World War II fighter pilot with an adventurous spirit, Gorton was a nationalist and centralist who insisted on doing it his way until the bitter end. When he concluded that the coalition government could not survive under his leadership, he fell on his own sword and voted himself out of office.
    Even in his birth Gorton was courted by controversy. The illegitimate child of John Rose Gorton and Alice Sinn, he was born in Melbourne on 9 September 1911. However, even this is uncertain as the Victorian registry office’s records show only a ‘John Alga Gordon’ born in Prahran on this day and lists the father as ‘John Robert Gordon’. When Gorton was seven, his mother died. With his father returning to his wife, Gorton became a boarder at Sydney’s Shore and Victoria’s Geelong Grammar schools.
    After working briefly for his father on his orchard farm at Kerang in northern Victoria, Gorton went to Britain to study at Oxford University. While at university, he joined the university squadron and gained his flying licence. On a vacation to Spain in 1944 he met Bettina Brown, an eighteen-year-old American, whom he married the following year. Graduating with a Master of Arts, Gorton returned with Bettina to work the family orchard after his father’s death in 1936.
    Following the outbreak of war, Gorton enlisted with the Royal Australian Air Force in 1940. He then spent four years serving as a fighter pilot in Britain, Malaysia and New Guinea. Gorton survived two serious aircraft crashes, the first of which inflicted severe facial injuries requiring extensive reconstructive surgery. Although left permanently disfigured, he was eventually discharged in 1944.
    On his return to his property, Gorton entered local government becoming a member of the Kerang Shire Council in 1946, and, eventually, Shire president in 1949. While originally joining the Country Party, he later switched to the Liberal Party and after an unsuccessful attempt to enter state parliament, was then elected as a Liberal senator in late 1949. Gorton then spent nine years on the backbench, before Robert Menzies made him the minister for the navy, where he set about modernising and expanding the navy’s fleet.
    In early 1964 he was promoted to the minister for works and the minister assisting the prime minister in Commonwealth activities in education. After Harold Holt’s disappearance just before Christmas 1967, Gorton eventually became prime minister. The Country Party, headed by John McEwen, who had been appointed caretaker prime minister, ruled out serving under William McMahon, then deputy prime minister, because of long-held animosity. In the finalballot to decide