Chapter One
SETTING OUT
On Thursday, February 17, 1972, President and Mrs. Nixon walked out to the south
lawn of the White House, where a helicopter waited for them. A small crowd,
among them Vice President Spiro Agnew and his wife, Republican and Democratic
congressmen, and the two Nixon daughters, Tricia and Julie, saw them off as they
started the first leg of their long trip to China. The brief ceremony was
carried live on American radio and television. Nixon spoke briefly. He was
making, he said, “a journey for peace,” but, he added, he was under no illusions
that “twenty years of hostility between the People’s Republic of China and the
United States of America are going to be swept away by one week of talks that we
will have there.” Nevertheless, he was going in an optimistic spirit: “If there
is a postscript that I hope might be written with regard to this trip, it would
be the words on the plaque which was left on the moon by our first astronauts
when they landed there: ‘We came in peace for all mankind.'” It was classic
Nixon, that mixture of pragmatism and grandiloquence.
Inside the waiting plane at Andrews Air Force Base, the rest of Nixon’s party,
which included his secretary of state, William Rogers, and his national security
adviser, Henry Kissinger, watched the ceremonies on television. Winston Lord, a
young aide to Kissinger, joked nervously that if the plane blew up, they would
all see themselves going sky high. As Nixon was boarding the plane, one of the
waiting reporters handed him an atlas of China that had the seal of the CIA on
its cover. “Do you think they’ll let me in with this?” asked the president,
sharing a rare joke with the press as he climbed aboard Air Force One.
He, the man who had made his name as a dogged and vociferous anti-Communist,
was reversing two decades of American policy by traveling to Beijing, into the
very heart of Chinese Communism. As the plane climbed into the air, Nixon felt
like an explorer: “We were embarking,” he said in his memoirs, “upon a voyage of
philosophical discovery as uncertain, and in some respects as perilous, as the
voyages of geographical discovery of a much earlier time period.”
He was taking a considerable gamble: that conservatives at home would not attack
him and that liberals would not be disappointed in the results of his trip. He
was pleased by the many fervent messages he had received wishing him well-but
also concerned. “I told Henry that I thought it really was a question of the
American people being hopelessly and almost naïvely for peace, even at any
price,” he recalled. Kissinger was, as always, reassuring. Americans were
excited by the boldness of Nixon’s move.
Nixon also did not know whether the Chinese themselves would overcome their
decades of hostility to the United States and make his visit a success. Although
every detail of his trip had been negotiated with the Chinese, Nixon did not
know, when he clambered aboard his plane, whether he would have a meeting with
Chairman Mao Tse-tung, who, from his seclusion in Beijing, still controlled
China. If Nixon came back to the United States without having met Mao, his trip
would be regarded as a failure and, worse, a humiliation for the United States.
After the trip was over, the Nixon people always maintained that they’d felt
quite confident about a meeting. “Well, we knew in our gut,” said Winston Lord,
“that Mao would meet Nixon.” The Americans had no firm promise, though, only
vague assurances from the Chinese. “I know,” Lord remembered, “that we made
unilateral statements that Nixon would, of course, be seeing Mao. We said that
we would like to know when this would be, but we knew that this was going to
happen. It would have been unthinkable if it didn’t.”
It was a gamble that Nixon was prepared to take because he felt that it was
crucial for the United States. He had always taken risks-as a young soldier in
the army, when he passed the time (and made a lot of money) playing poker, and,
later, as a politician. He had not spent those long and often difficult years
making his way to the presidency to be a caretaker. And the United States needed
some good news. The war in Vietnam had cost the country much, in lives, in
money, and in reputation. It had led to deep divisions at home and a loss of
influence and prestige abroad. The failure of the United States to finish, much
less win, the war had contributed to a decline in American power. But it had
only contributed; the extraordinary military and economic dominance that the
United States had possessed from the end of the Second World War to the start of
the 1960s could not last forever.
That dominance had been, in part, the product of the times. In 1945, other world
powers lay defeated or, like Britain, so weakened by the huge costs of victory
that they could no longer play a world role. The Soviet Union had great military
strength and, by 1949, its own atomic bomb, but it had to make good the hideous
costs of Hitler’s invasion and of the war. By the end of the 1960s, though,
western Europe and Japan had revived. The Soviet Union, although it would never
be an economic power to match the United States, was investing heavily in its
military. Newly independent countries such as India were playing their parts in
the world. China’s potential remained a question mark; the Communists had
brought unity, but for much of the time since 1949 Mao’s policies had sent the
country down wasteful and destructive paths. Nevertheless, the Chinese
revolution had become a model and an inspiration in many Third World countries.
Throughout the 1960s, Nixon worked on a political career that most people
thought was over after his defeat by John F. Kennedy in the presidential race of
1960 and his even more humiliating failure to win the governorship of California
in 1962. And he continued to develop his ideas on his favorite area of public
policy, international relations. In the summer of 1967, he was invited to
California to give the Lakeside Speech at Bohemian Grove, an institution that
could only exist in North America, where rich and powerful men enjoy the arts
and the simple, contemplative life for a couple of weeks in carefully rustic
luxury. Nixon later said that he got more pleasure out of that speech-“the first
milestone on my road to the presidency”-than any other in his career. In what
would become known as the Nixon Doctrine, he argued that the United States could
no longer afford to fight other nations’ wars. Although the United States would
offer support, its allies must be prepared to stand on their own feet. On the
other hand, there were encouraging signs on the world scene. The Soviet leaders
were still striving for Communist domination of the world, but they did not want
war with the United States. Moreover, the Communist monolith had broken apart
and China and the Soviet Union were at loggerheads. Nixon came to this
realization, he told Chou when they finally met, in those years in the 1960s
when he was out of office and traveling about the world.
Nixon, it has often been said, especially by his supporters, was the only
American president of the late twentieth century who could have taken advantage
of the split in the Communist world and made the breakthrough in China-U.S.
relations. The man and the times were right for each other. As Nixon himself
once told an interviewer, the mark of a leader “is whether he can give history a
nudge.” For the United States to refuse to deal with a major Asian power and
one, moreover, that was the world’s most populous country had never made much
sense. As Nixon himself had written in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs,
“Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside
the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and
threaten its neighbors.” In a revealing comparison, he said that dealing with
China was like dealing with angry blacks in America’s ghettos: “In each case a
potentially destructive force has to be curbed; in each case an outlaw element
has to be brought within the law; in each case dialogues have to be opened.” In
the short term, China would simply have to be contained; in the longer term,
though, it ought to be brought back into the community of nations. His article
did not show the slightest sympathy for Chinese Communism; nor did it hold out
much hope for an immediate change in China’s relations with the world. By the
time he was president, however, Nixon was starting to become more optimistic. In
the election campaign, he repeated his warnings about the dangers of leaving
China outside the international system and referred obliquely to it in his
inaugural address in January 1969: “We seek an open world-open to ideas, open to
the exchange of goods and people-a world in which no people, great or small,
will live in angry isolation.”
By the early 1970s, both the United States and China realized that the world had
changed and that they needed new friends. As Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national
security adviser and close collaborator, wrote years later, “For both sides
necessity dictated that a rapprochement occur, and the attempt had to be made no
matter who governed in either country.” And while public opinion did not matter
in China, it did in the United States, and Americans, by and large, no longer
felt the antipathy and fear toward Chinese Communism that had been such a
feature of American politics in the 1950s.
Moreover, Nixon had banked the political capital he needed at home. Dealing with
Communists was always tricky during the Cold War. American public opinion had
been slow to recognize the threat from the Soviet Union immediately after the
Second World War, but once convinced that the threat was real, it had become
seized with the idea that Communists were very powerful and that they were
everywhere, in Russia, in the center of Europe, in Asia, and throughout American
society. Nixon himself had ridden to power by calling to those fears, no matter
how exaggerated they sometimes were. His anti-Communist credentials were beyond
challenge. From the time he had first entered politics in California, running
against the liberal Democrat Jerry Voorhis in 1946, he had charged that his
opponents were soft on Communism or worse. Nixon’s campaigning, with its
insinuation and accusation and its reliance on unproven statistics and stories,
won him the name “Tricky Dick,” but it worked. Americans listened to his
repeated and forceful warnings about the threat that Communism posed to the
United States and to American society. They watched as he stood up to Communists
around the world, whether swapping boasts with the Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev in Moscow or defying the mobs who spat at him and tried to turn his
car over in Venezuela.
Nixon’s other great advantage was that he had the determination, the
intelligence, and the knowledge to sense the currents in history and to take
advantage of them. And he loved foreign policy. Indeed, he much preferred it to
dealing with importunate congressmen and the minutiae of schools or highway
building. “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically
without a President,” he told the journalist Theodore White in an interview
during the presidential campaign. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run
the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of
State is really important; the President makes foreign policy.” While presidents
had always given State of the Union addresses to Congress, Nixon also started
making annual reports on the world situation. And he made it quite clear from
the moment he took office that he was going to use an enhanced National Security
Council to run major foreign policy issues out of the White House. His first
appointment, the morning after his inauguration in January 1969, was with his
national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. The first formal meeting he called
was of his new NSC. Six weeks later, he was off on his first foreign trip, to
see European leaders, among them a man he revered, Charles de Gaulle.
In the long and rambling conversations he had with his few intimates, Nixon
returned constantly to the subject of the great leader, the man who boldly went
on ahead, dragging his nation with him and changing the world. De Gaulle, of
course. Winston Churchill-a favorite, it seems, with many American presidents,
including George W. Bush. And General George Patton. The movie, starring George
C. Scott, was one of Nixon’s favorites, and he kept a biography of Patton beside
his bed. Such great leaders, in Nixon’s view, were usually lonely and often
misunderstood, but they nevertheless worked indefatigably to advance the
interests of their nations. “There were never tired decisions,” he told
Kissinger in one of their phone conversations, “only tired commanders.”
The world, with its great issues, was, for Nixon, where the leader could show
what he was made of. He had prepared himself thoroughly for this moment. As vice
president, he had traveled more than any of his predecesors; in the 1960s,
before his run for president, when he was meant to be a private citizen, he had
toured the world incessantly, meeting with local leaders and browbeating
American diplomats as though he were still in office. A low-ranking foreign
service officer who had to entertain him in Hong Kong remembered his “tremendous
intellectual curiosity.” Nixon asked question after question, “picking my brain
for everything and anything I could tell him about China.” Marshall Green, later
assistant secretary of state with responsibility for East Asia during the Nixon
administration, met Nixon in Indonesia in 1967 and had long conversations with
him, which Nixon tape-recorded for later reference. “I remembered him as the
best informed on foreign affairs of all the luminaries who visited Jakarta
during my four years there,” Green said. The result of all the travel and the
hours of questioning and conversation was that Nixon was the best-prepared
president on foreign policy until Clinton. He also knew many foreign heads of
state and foreign ministers personally.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Nixon and Mao
by Margaret MacMillan
Copyright © 2007 by Margaret MacMillan.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2007
Margaret MacMillan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6127-3
