Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan sets high standards for the subjects she chooses to write about. They have to have dramatically, undeniably, altered the course of the 20th century.
Her previous book, the award-winning “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World,” looked at how the Paris Peace Conference ending World War I created global ethnic and territorial disputes that still haunt us today, including Iraq.
As the title indicates, the crucial time period covered by “Nixon and Mao” is shorter – the one week in 1972 when President Richard Nixon visited China to meet its legendary and militantly revolutionary communist leader, Party Chairman Mao Tse- tung, in a successful move toward reducing world tensions. (At the time, the U.S. had no official relations with China.) Ultimately, it set forth China’s re-engagement with the modern world, which has led to it becoming an economic power if not yet a democracy.
This book has the same mixture of high drama, shrewd political analysis and humorous anecdotes that made “Paris” such a good read. Who knew, for instance, that the electric socks CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite wore while accompanying Nixon on a tour of the Great Wall malfunctioned and shocked him?
Even now, it seems incredible that Nixon’s visit to China happened. He was an old Cold War warrior hated by U.S. liberals for his disastrous involvement in Vietnam, still going on at the time. Mao’s China, with Chou En-lai running the government as premier, was shrilly anti-American and struggling with the excesses of its Cultural Revolution.
But MacMillan, using only the most trenchant of quotes but availing herself extensively of research so rich and deep she must have spent years finding it, explains why and how it happened. She gives equal time to both sides and gets inside the minds of the principals to investigate their motives.
It turns out her knowledge of the peace treaties ending World War I served her well here, too. Unlike some of the other allies, the U.S. was relatively sympathetic to Chinese pleas to not carve up their country into foreign zones of influence. That created some long-lasting goodwill, although the Cold War had sorely tested it. So, too, did the United States’ ongoing support of Taiwan as the “real” Chinese government.
The opening for Nixon’s dramatic trip to China came in a most unexpected way: via ping-pong. In 1971, China surprisingly invited members of the U.S. Table Tennis Team to tour. There’s enough in that event for an entire book – or movie – and MacMillan succinctly yet colorfully recalls the details, especially how it forced the U.S. team’s photogenic, hippieish member, Glenn Cowan, to become an impromptu diplomat.
Laying the groundwork
But the real diplomat was Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s realpolitik-loving national security adviser. Seeing a way, possibly, to get China’s aid in helping the U.S. out of its Vietnam entrapment, as well as to play China off the Soviet Union, he arranged a secret trip there from Pakistan.
This was the preparatory visit for Nixon’s trip, and MacMillan’s recounting of it is as thrilling as a spy novel. It’s also nostalgic, about a time when allies like Pakistan were cleanly defined by Cold War politics rather than the tricky, confusing and destabilizing religious issues of today.
Kissinger, on an official trip to Pakistan, one night said he was sick and retired early to hide from the press. Then, wearing a “floppy hat and dark glasses,” according to MacMillan, he was driven through city streets at night to a waiting plane. And so history was made.
Steven Rosen is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
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Nixon and Mao
The Week That Changed the World
By Margaret MacMillan
Random House, 432 pages, $27.95
