Journalism from a ‘Remarkable Outsider’: Wilfred Burchett’s Lens on the Portuguese Revolution
Read Daniela F. Melo's introduction to Wilfred Burchett's The Captains' Coup.
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In the morning hours of 25 April 1974, a movement led by captains and servicemen in the Portuguese Armed Forces set in motion the manoeuvres that, within twenty-four hours, would bring down Europe’s oldest conservative dictatorship and abruptly end more than five centuries of Portuguese colonialism. The group, which came to be known as the Armed Forces Movement (MFA in the Portuguese acronym), planned to take over the management of state affairs until free elections could be held. However, as news of the coup d’état spread, ecstatic crowds took to the streets in support of the MFA – and soon enough, citizens began to make pressing political demands. Within a few days, it became transparently clear that what had started as a military coup had now evolved into a fully fledged revolutionary process.
In order to carry out the coup, the MFA secured media broadcast sites, closed the airports and all territorial borders. Three days later, when the airport reopened, the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett – well known for his controversial coverage of the ‘other side’ (meaning non-Western forces) during conflicts in Korea and Vietnam – secured a ticket on the first flight from Paris to Lisbon. Like most journalists, he claimed that he felt the need to be in the thick of history. He was eager to see for himself what might become of this strange situation: a military coup that promised democracy, development and decolonisation under civilian rule. In stark opposition to the trends of military coups in the 1970s – think Latin America – these Portuguese officers claimed to not want power after the transition. This uncharacteristic aspect intrigued Burchett from day one.
Burchett would go on to interview some of the main protagonists of the Portuguese Revolution, including MFA leaders like Vasco Gonçalves, Ernesto de Melo Antunes and Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. He zigzagged across the country, venturing into the inland northern region of Trás-os-Montes, to fishing towns like Peniche, and into the heart of the Alentejo region, in the south. His narrative is colourful and rich in detail, discussing the Portuguese Revolution in its national and international dimensions with the skill that only an experienced international correspondent could achieve. After decades of reporting from hotspots like China, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the journalist was well positioned to understand the magnitude of the Portuguese revolutionary process and the disintegration of empire in the global context of the Cold War.
In a style reminiscent of George Orwell’s journalistic output in books like Homage to Catalonia or The Road to Wigan Pier, Burchett offers a mixture of reflection, analysis and intimate interviews with important historical protagonists of the revolutionary process in the capital, Lisbon, but also with average people in the provinces – farmers, fishermen, factory workers. As a result, he captured the zeitgeist of the revolution like few could. He unapologetically revealed his enthusiasm for the captains who led the coup and for the social mobilisations taking place in the streets, factories and farms around the country.
Burchett’s journalistic output during the Cold War was often labelled by his detractors as communist propaganda against the West. But Burchett always vehemently denied being a member of a communist party. In an interview with John Pilger towards the end of his life, he answered the question about his purported Communist membership in a telling way:
Pilger: Have you ever been a communist? Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Burchett: No, and I’m not saying this because I dislike or despise [inaudible]. It just simply hasn’t occurred, probably because I have been travelling around all the time. By the time maybe that I started thinking about that, who are right? Which ones are right? The Yugoslavs?
He was a self-avowed anti-colonialist, thus against imperialism and on the side of the liberation and self-determination of the so-called Third World. This positioning and the point of view in his reporting clearly aligned him with the communist world. Given his answer to Pilger, it is safe to assume that he did consider the idea of joining a communist party, but never acted on it. Purported evidence to the contrary remains a controversial aspect of his biography.
When he arrived in Lisbon, as he recounts in the volumes printed here, his first connection with the dissident left of the Estado Novo was happenstance. He cashed travellers’ cheques at the bank where Vasco Martins worked. Martins had been the director of the publisher Seara Nova, which, during the Portuguese dictatorship, had published Burchett’s books on Vietnam, and would later contract his volumes on Portugal. He went on to use connections with the Portuguese Communist Party to find his way around the country.
Throughout his travels in Portugal, Burchett offered remarkable eye-witness reportage and analysis, interspaced with verbatim interviews, and vivid descriptions of the settings. Burchett’s two books on the transition to democracy in Portugal, reproduced here for the first time with minimal editing for clarity, in their original English versions, are neither to be taken as an academic exercise to narrate the history of the revolution nor as a distanced, dispassionate journalistic assessment of the events. No, Burchett has a clear point of view and political preferences. Yet, his interviews are so rich and the analysis so frequently insightful as to render these writings a valuable historical document in their own right.
Furthermore, it bears mentioning that, of all the titles in Burchett’s opus, these books are the least known, often skipped in bibliographies of his work. Burchett was a prolific author, penning more than thirty books that frequently became bestsellers across the world. In his biography of Burchett, Tom Heenan refers to letters exchanged between Wilfred and his brother, Winston Burchett, in which he first revealed that not many presses appeared interested in his books on Portugal. In fact, these works would never be published in their original rendering, until now.
The Long Shadow of Burchett’s Journalism
Wilfred Burchett requires little introduction for those who lived through the Cold War and can remember his reporting from some of the world’s most hotly contested spots, as various US presidents and general secretaries of the USSR attempted to reshape the global order in their own image.
Famously, Burchett was the first journalist to report on the horrific effects of atomic radiation after the Hiroshima bombing. His first-hand account of the radiation sickness and devastation in Hiroshima was strenuously disputed by President Truman’s administration but proved to be accurate. At a press conference in Tokyo held soon after Burchett’s report, the US spokesperson accused Burchett of falling prey to Japanese propaganda. Days later, Burchett learned that General McArthur had withdrawn his press accreditation and that he was, therefore, required to leave Japan immediately.
This episode proved to be the first of many in the following decades that pitted Burchett’s journalistic mission against the foreign policy of the United States and his own native country, Australia. As the Cold War evolved and Burchett’s coverage offered in-depth, sympathetic considerations of the communist side’s motives, and the perspective of anti-colonial liberation movements, he became persona non grata with Western governments, including that of his homeland, the Australian government. In fact, citing his purported communist affiliation and active attempt to lower the Australian troops’ morale during the Korean War, the Australian government refused to renew his passport – effectively an attempt to revoke his citizenship. For years, Burchett travelled on a North Vietnamese laissez-passer and, later, a Cuban passport.
Burchett embraced his journalism with an activist point of view, while persistently rebutting Western accusations of printing propaganda for the other side. By his own attestation as well as objective accounts, his journalistic ethos was driven by a strong sense of social justice and a genuine desire for human equality. A product of his century and experiences, his journalism favoured the rights of the downtrodden and the aspirations of those seeking to wrest self-determination from the colonial powers that oppressed them. In the same interview with John Pilger, Burchett summarised his approach with a simple image:
You’ve got to be ready to live with yourself. You need to be able to look at your children in the eye and look at yourself in the eye when you shave in the morning and not be ashamed of anything you’ve done. And I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done despite all the attacks . . . I’d call myself an independent radical . . . I’m not, in fact, a commie.
In his introduction to the book At the Barricades, the New York Times journalist Harrison Salisbury illustrated how – despite his advocacy journalism – Burchett was able to earn the trust of his colleagues around the world. According to Salisbury,
Burchett’s conventional journalistic companions have found him a well-informed, useful source and a warm and decent friend. They almost always could check out a report or a rumor with Burchett regardless of whether it fitted Communist ideology or party propaganda. On most occasions, they got a straightforward answer, one which was trustworthy, and which stood the test of time. In written reportage it might be a different story. Burchett was an advocate, and he wrote in support of the cause to which he adhered at a given moment.
Burchett’s sympathies for revolutionary government shifted across the years as the Cold War unfolded. He was close friends with Ho Chi Minh and Zhou Enlai and openly manifested his admiration for them. However, after periods of enthusiasm, he had changes of mind regarding the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia. As his biographer Tom Heenan points out, by the late 1970s, Burchett considered that ‘only Vietnam remained true to the revolutionary legacy’.
A clear example of Burchett acting according to his ethic as an ‘independent radical’ is his role as an intermediary between the United States and Hanoi for the release of American prisoners of war. In a series of developments well documented in Heenan’s study of Burchett’s life, US Ambassador-at-large Averell Harriman aggressively sought to make contact with Burchett to enlist his help in the negotiations. Burchett acquiesced, apparently keen to be of aid in a humanitarian mission. Heenan concluded that ‘Harriman had found Burchett a reasonable man who could be entrusted with a confidence. As the need for dialogue between the two protagonists increased, so too did Burchett’s influence.’
In an interview for the 1980 documentary film Wilfred Burchett: Public Enemy Number One, directed by David Bradbury, Burchett commented further about his motives and journalistic moral compass:
I’ve come to believe over the years that my duties as a journalist go beyond my responsibilities to an editor or to a publisher and that my duties as a citizen of the world go beyond my responsibilities only to my own country. In other words, I reject the ‘my country right or wrong’.
Interestingly, President Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s strategy of ‘thawing’ in the early 1970s not only opened the doors to China, but to Wilfred Burchett as well. The Nixon administration pursued a foreign policy strategy known as détente, the easing of tensions with the Soviets. A key aspect of this strategy involved Vietnam and China. In short, Nixon sought to use the rivalry between China and the USSR as leverage with both Hanoi and Moscow. Reaching out to Beijing and ‘breaching’ the Chinese wall, Nixon hoped, would aid negotiations with the Soviets on arms control, and strengthen Washington’s position in the stalled negotiations with Hanoi for US withdrawal from Vietnam.
It was in this context that Wilfred Burchett once again got pulled in as a participant in backroom diplomacy. In 1971, Burchett received an invitation to visit Kissinger at the White House. Burchett was at the United Nations covering the debate about China; on 19 October, he made the trip to Washington, DC, for a private breakfast with the secretary of state and national security adviser to discuss North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh’s openness to negotiations. The contact between the two took place at the suggestion of Ross Terrill, an influential Harvard political scientist and expert on China, whose work informed the Nixon administration as it readied its approach to China. Terrill wrote that he ‘had known from talks with Kissinger that he was rather interested in Burchett’s writings, and that he regarded Burchett as a highly intelligent and well-informed man . . . Henry later rang me. He found his talk with W.B. highly interesting.’17
Soon after, Ross Terrill wrote a letter to the renowned Australian journalist Bruce Grant, telling him the details of Burchett’s visit with Kissinger. While requesting anonymity, Terrill considered the story too ‘piquant’ to remain in obscurity. In a subsequent article for the Australian publication The Age, Grant pondered why his government continued to ostracise and attack Wilfred Burchett when even the Americans recognised his value. ‘Wilfred Burchett’s reporting,’ Grant wrote, ‘has given him an international reputation as an intelligent and well-informed man, despite his political prejudices.’ He further argued that Burchett’s ‘value as an observer of politics in Hanoi, Peking and Moscow has now been put to the test by Kissinger’, concluding that, at a juncture in which Australia needed its own sources of information, ‘Burchett could be considered such a source, long neglected’.
In fact, it is abundantly clear that the Americans paid close attention to Burchett’s writings and statements and regarded him as a credible interpreter and interlocutor with the Vietnamese. Burchett made frequent appearances in the presidential daily briefings in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, as the CIA kept a close eye on all his journalistic production. In 1972, when Nixon and Kissinger arrived for their groundbreaking meeting with Zhou Enlai, Burchett was in Beijing, finding himself once again present at a momentous juncture in history. Burchett and Nixon shook hands, reportedly.
When the Portuguese Revolution erupted, the United States administration was embroiled in a national scandal – Watergate. Three months into the revolution, President Nixon announced his resignation and his vice-president, Gerald Ford, took the reins of government. Henry Kissinger was front and centre in formulating US foreign policy posture towards the Portuguese provisional governments throughout 1974. I could find no evidence that Kissinger was preoccupied with Burchett’s travels and writings about the Portuguese revolutionary process. The converse is also true: in these books, Burchett does not expend much energy considering the role that the US government or the CIA may have been playing behind the scenes in the MFA’s revolution as it developed.
This is particularly interesting when one considers the proliferation of conspiracy theories at the time regarding US Ambassador Frank Carlucci and a possible CIA operation in Portugal. Burchett briefly refers to this conspiracy theory in Chapter 20 of The Captains’ Coup but does not develop the topic. Either way, his analysis does not centre on the role of the United States in the Portuguese story, but does highlight the Portuguese MFA struggle within the context of the broader Cold War moment, as well as contemporary struggles for decolonisation, specifically in lusophone Africa. At the heart of it, though, Burchett appreciated how much of the revolutionary process was an internal Portuguese affair, playing out between old and new elites and political activists, all vying for relevance in the upcoming regime.
Contextualising Burchett’s take on the Portuguese Revolution
Burchett was not a scholar, but, rather, an extremely well-informed observer with a knack for finding angles that mattered to his readers. It was that intuition that made him an important voice among dissident journalists. His telling of the first year of the Portuguese Revolution offers a powerful account of the early stages of the revolutionary process, as well as of the root causes that led to the coup of 25 April 1974.
The interviews he secured with multiple leaders within the MFA are long, detailed and provide unparalleled insight into their thinking during this time. They merit being added to the historical record. That said, he was not the only journalist to enjoy access and secure coveted interviews with the MFA leadership; as the Australian historian Michael Pearson noted, individuals like Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Vasco Gonçalves were hardly camera-shy, seizing every opportunity to speak with national and international journalists. No, Burchett’s most poignant interviews are not the ones with the officers or party leaders. The most arresting statements in his book come from his descriptions of the countryside, of common folk going about their lives as the revolution is unfolding. Equally fascinating are his interviews with illiterate peasants, which elevated the voices of these individuals in telling their own stories of political and especially economic repression at the hands of landlords and patrões (bosses), and their hopes for the future. The testimonies are powerful: the lack of access to education, to healthcare, to living wages, the ubiquity of child labour . . . it all conjures up an image that only older generations now remember of a Portugal that has completely vanished.
Even so, it is fair to say that Burchett’s interpretation of the Portuguese Revolution is one that is, primarily, elite-centred. He places the Armed Forces Movement and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) on the foremost plane of action, and other key institutional actors – like the Socialist and the Social Democratic parties – on the secondary plane. This is not to claim that he was oblivious to other social actors in the revolution. As a seasoned political journalist who had covered many social and anti-colonial uprisings around the world, he was attuned to that dimension, as illustrated by his interviews and insights, which explained how average citizens engaged in the revolutionary process. A focus on the elites was to be expected, considering his target international audience for the book. That is, Burchett was seeking to contextualise the events of the Portuguese Revolution for an inter- national audience that knew little about the country. Thus, he spent considerable time explaining the structures of power in Portuguese society and the macro socio-political variables that led mid-ranking military officers to stage a coup against the regime, as well as the emerging positionings of new actors during the revolutionary stage.
Like Burchett, the first wave of academics writing on the events of 1974–75 emphasised the elite-driven processes of the revolution. Other scholars highlighted the role of the PCP and the influence of Marxism– Leninism throughout the period, often ignoring competing ideologies within the broad umbrella of socialism that were also a part of the revolutionary process (for example, the Maoists) and social movements that were not involved with labour (like radical feminists, or LGBT groups). A few studies, like Nancy Bermeo’s well-known investigation of the land occupations in southern Portugal, expanded on the role of specific social movements in the revolution, often from a structural perspective.
In more recent years, a new wave of scholarship has revisited this approach, focusing the spotlight on the social movements that converted a coup into a revolution. Historians, sociologists and political scientists have been reassessing the revolutionary process from a bottom-up perspective, often influenced by social-movement theory. Doing so involves thinking about the Portuguese Revolution as a complex process that resulted from the interaction of institutional (e.g. parties) and extra-institutional (e.g. activists) actors, competing to shape the cycle of contention and seeking to influence the emerging new regime. Such social-movement organisations were key actors that are largely absent from Burchett’s narrative, though he does cover the trade unions and the landless peasants’ movement in the agricultural south.
A final critical note on this matter is that Burchett’s treatment of institutional elites is uneven. As mentioned earlier, his journalism makes it clear that he is well disposed towards the MFA and its programme. In fact, he casts the Revolution as a struggle primarily between three main camps: the MFA, the Communists and the reactionary right. While mentioning other institutional actors, like the centre-left Socialist Party (PS), the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PPD-PSD) and other smaller parties on the far left, he often casts them as supporting actors in the struggle. Yet, the PS and the PSD played oversized roles after winning the Constituent Assembly elections of April 1975. Their leaders – especially Mário Soares and Francisco Sá Carneiro – were instrumental in bolstering the centrist, pro-Western-style democracy faction of the MFA, and in securing international financial and political support for the centrist forces in the provisional government.
In fact, as the revolution evolved into its most intense phase in 1975, Portugal went through a situation of dual power. Revolutionary legitimacy was heavily contested between the political parties that won the election to the Constituent Assembly – the centrist PS and PPD-PSD – and the parties to their left that lost the election but had strong pockets of support south of Lisbon, were well established in many of the trade unions, and claimed extra-institutional revolutionary legitimacy. That is, they asserted that they rightly wielded support from the social movements representing ‘the people’. Concomitantly, the MFA was fracturing along three separate visions for the post- revolutionary regime, only one of which aligned with support for the PCP.
Unfortunately, Burchett was not in Portugal during the period that came to be known as the Verão Quente (‘Hot Summer’), when there was a credible threat of civil war, and episodes of violence were erupting across the country. At the end of his first book, he extolls the alliance between the MFA and ‘the People’ in almost romantic terms and seems hopeful – almost naively confident – that counter-revolutionary forces would not be able to shake that alliance.
In the second book (Chapters 18–20 in the present volume), his tone has completely changed. Written after the Hot Summer, he captures its tensions and tries to disentangle the complex and quickly changing dynamics between the institutional and extra-institutional actors, and their alliances, which were also in flux. As he does so, he tends to favour the PCP’s narrative about the evolution of events between the Constituent Assembly elections of April 1975 and the events of 25 November 1975, when the ‘centrist’ MFA faction came out victorious over the far-left factions and set the country on the path towards a Western European model of social democracy.
Burchett’s fascination with the MFA was understandable because the MFA was, in fact, a very unusual type of institution. The MFA was a pro- democracy, leftist military organisation. It led a coup d’état not just against the Estado Novo regime, but against the top echelons of the Portuguese Armed Forces. Despite its ideological fracturing throughout 1975, the MFA adhered to its basic promise of wanting to transition the country to democracy, development and decolonisation. In 1982, with the dissolution of the Revolutionary Council as an institution, the MFA quietly retreated from public life. Power had been ceded to elected officials and the military returned to their barracks.
Burchett’s second book also captures the uncertainty and disillusionment that the Communists and far left felt about the revolution in its final weeks. Like the PCP and much of the far left, Burchett entertained the possibility that the 25 November actions were planned by counter- revolutionary forces within the MFA and the parties to the right of the PCP (perhaps even the CIA). He also considered the alternative: that these insurrections were not centrally organised in any way that could lead to a left-wing coup within the provisional institutions. In summary: the centrists and the far-left parties accused the PCP of seeking to mount a coup with the help of rebellious armed forces units; the PCP, in turn, blamed the far left for fomenting insurrection in some armed forces units, denied any PCP role in an attempted coup, and accused the centrists of being counter-revolutionaries; finally, the centrist parties (and the centrist MFA faction) defended their actions, maintaining that they were a response to a coup attempt, and that their consolidation of power was a path correction setting the revolution on the road to democracy (one of the primary original goals of the MFA in overthrowing the Estado Novo).
It is telling that, fifty years later, the memory of that day remains a matter of great dispute in Portugal. Two new parties on the right, Iniciativa Liberal and the far-right Chega, have politicised the memory of the revolution using events of 25 November 1975 to galvanise the electorate against the left. In 2024, Chega attempted to turn 25 November into a national holiday, claiming that it was the ‘true day of freedom and democracy’. All the parties on the right approved, instead, a motion to celebrate 25 November in parliament every year with a solemn session. The entire left voted en bloc against it.
Burchett quite accurately predicted that the right would almost immediately reassert itself politically, and that opportunities for mobilisation would be severely curtailed after 1975. Furthermore, he warned that the gains made by the popular movements (of urban and rural squatters, agricultural and industrial workers), such as Reforma Agrária, would soon be retrenched. This retrenchment process occurred over many years, but it is fair to say that Burchett was correct on that point.
As the Portuguese Revolution turns fifty, Burchett’s insightful books appear more relevant – and may prove more valuable – than ever. His experiences in Portugal are of interest to historians, political scientists and sociologists, but also a great starting point for a general public interested in this period, because his telling is so vivid and engaging. These books are also a must-read for those interested in the great debates about journalism, its value, ethics and power. Burchett was, after all, the ultimate dissident journalist during the Cold War. His unique style of merging interviews with storytelling and analysis transports the reader to the events and emotions of the most significant years in Portuguese contemporary history. And, as the past turbulent ten years of political developments in the country reveal, the Portuguese elites still need to come to terms with the legacy and memory of the MFA and the revolution. Rediscovering and reading Burchett’s books about this unique ‘captains’ coup’ is a good start.
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