The Chinese people were not watching. News of the visitors had been kept from them. The presidential motorcade entered the city on silent streets. All the inhabitants seemed to be elsewhere. But five hours later, when Nixon was still settling down in a two-story buff brick guesthouse, he was unexpectedly summoned to the private study of seventy-eight-year-old Mao, the living legend of the new China. The President and the Chairman chatted for a full hour, accompanied only by Chou and Henry Kissinger. The substance of the conversation remained secret, but obviously there was rapport; at one point the No. 1 International Bandit reached across the tea table and softly held the hand of the No. 1 Imperialist Dog, and next morning a picture of the meeting, with the principals smiling, appeared on the front page of the People’s Daily. The message was clear: the visit had the Chairman’s blessing. Now there was excitement in the streets. When Nixon appeared there, people clapped hands—in unison, to be sure, but that was how things were done here—and Mao designated his fourth wife, the revolutionary firebrand Chiang Ching, to be the President’s official hostess.
Each day for five days Nixon and Chou conferred for four hours at a long green table. There was less there than met the eye, as the vague communiqué at the end made clear; it mostly dealt with the need for more friendship among the Chinese and American peoples, and the only real concession came from the President, a promise to withdraw U.S. military forces from Taiwan. But the real significance of the talks is that they were held at all. The President and the First Lady were determined to be amicable. It showed, and was appreciated. Every evening they sat through a three-hour ceremonial banquet in the Great Hall of the People, pluckily grappling their way through eight courses with ivory chopsticks and drinking toasts with mao tai while a Chinese orchestra played such tunes as “Billy Boy” and “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” They watched exhibitions of ping-pong, badminton, and gymnastics, and one evening Chiang Ching took them to a ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, which was all about cruel landlords. Nixon, who was trying to reduce the taxes landlords paid in the United States, nevertheless applauded heartily, and next morning his wife gamely continued her inspections of nursing homes, kitchens, agriculture communes and acupuncture clinics, though she was squeamish about the needles.
After a visit to Peking’s Forbidden City and a walk along the ramparts of the twenty-two-hundred-year-old Great Wall of China, the Nixons left the Spirit of ’76 behind and flew to Hangchow with Chou on a white Ilyushin airliner. There, in the city which Marco Polo had proclaimed as the greatest in the world seven centuries earlier, the President roamed through parks and cruised on historic West Lake with the premier. From Hangchow the presidential party flew on to Shanghai, their last stop, where the communiqué was issued, and then home for a report to the American people.
On the whole his countrymen gave Nixon high marks for his performance, though some thought that at times he had been obsequious. In his Peking speeches he had proposed that the two nations “start a Long March together,” and he repeatedly quoted Chairman Mao, saying that “so many deeds cry out to be done, and always urgently,” and recommending that his audience “Seize the day, seize the hour.” He had also been banal. Shown the elaborately carved sedan chair on which each Ming emperor was carried from the Hall of Supreme Harmony to the red gates of the Forbidden City, the President remarked, “He didn’t get much exercise if he was always carried on the chair.” Of the Great Wall he said, “A people that can build a wall like this certainly have a great past to be proud of, and a people who have this kind of a past must also have a great future.” Then: “As we look at this wall, we do not want walls of any kind between people.”
Among the people on the far side of this particular wall were the Russians, and they were uneasy about possible implications of the visit. Tension between Moscow and Peking had been growing since Stalin’s death nineteen years earlier. It had reached a peak the previous autumn when Lin Piao, vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and Mao’s designated successor, had tried to fly to the USSR in a military plane. On orders from Mao and Chou, the craft had been shot down. The Soviets had regarded that as a slur on their hospitality, and now they suspected that the Chinese and the Americans were up to no good. In a Mandarin language broadcast beamed to Mao’s subjects, Radio Moscow declared that nothing was “more shameless and hypocritical” than the Shanghai communiqué. China, said the Muscovite commentator, was entering into a “dangerous plot with the ruling circles of the U.S.A.”
This was less a sign of anti-Americanism than of the growing friction within the Communist world. The Russians were jealous—unreasonably so, since the Nixons were going to visit them three months later. The prospect of that summit, in turn, had aroused Radio Hanoi, which called it “dark and despicable.” Here there was a difference, however. Unlike Peking and Moscow, Hanoi was not interested in detente. On the contrary, the North Vietnamese were prepared to sabotage friendly relations between Washington and the two Communist capitals to the north. They didn’t succeed, but they tried hard, and for a time it seemed that they were going to prevail.
***
News of the Peking talks reached troops of South Vietnam’s 3rd Division, just south of the DMZ, over the small Japanese transistor radios then popular among ARVN forces. Not much was happening in that sector, and with the Americans and the Communists sitting down together, Thieu’s men had let their guard down. There was another reason for their complacency. Since Nixon’s submission of a new eight-point peace plan to the North Vietnamese there seemed to be a real movement toward peace. Thus the 3rd Division didn’t feel threatened by the reports of a fresh buildup of Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam (DRVN) forces across the 17th Parallel. As the sullen gray clouds of the northeast winter monsoon began to clear in March there was a noticeable increase in artillery fire from the north, but the South Vietnamese were unalarmed. They remained in their bunkers and sent out few patrols. Better troops would have been warier, but the 3rd Division was not a crack unit, which was precisely why the DRVN’s General Vo Nguyen Giap had marked them as the first target of a new offensive, his biggest drive since Tet four years earlier.
Led by tanks, infantrymen of Giap’s 304th Division bounded across the DMZ on March 30 in a savage attack which was the exact opposite of Tet—a power play, a blitz meant to overwhelm Saigon’s forces with sophisticated Soviet weapons and the sheer weight of numbers. The assault units quickly captured fifteen border outposts. Over the next five weeks they advanced twenty-two miles in heavy fighting, taking ground which had been successfully and bloodily defended by U.S. Marines. The 3rd Division was virtually destroyed and the provincial capital of Quang Tri was lost. It was, as Defense Secretary Laird called it, a “massive invasion,” and it was to be only one of four major North Vietnamese thrusts into South Vietnamese territory.
On April 6, four days after Easter, a DRVN tank column struck from Cambodia, driving ARVN forces from Loc Ninh. In less than a week the attackers had surrounded the provincial capital of An Loc, sixty miles north of Saigon, penning up the entire South Vietnamese 5th Division, which was one of the key units assigned to the defense of Thieu’s capital. On April 18 another Red drive routed defenders in the coastal province of Binh Dinh, threatening to cut South Vietnam in half across its narrow waist. Finally, on April 22, four DRVN divisions burst into the Central Highlands, seizing Dak To and virtually encircling the provincial capital of Kontum.
Nixon responded by sending the B-52s north, pounding Hanoi and Haiphong in the first raids there in over three years. Antiwar senators reacted swiftly; Muskie of Maine introduced a resolution calling for an immediate end to all American military activity in North Vietnam. Laird, unmoved, warned Hanoi that the B-52 sorties would continue until all DRVN forces were withdrawn from South Vietnam. He said that the administration regarded the offensive as a “flagrant” violation of the 1954 Geneva accords and that Washington would spare nothing in its determination to turn the invaders back. In reality
the White House mood was compounded of as much embarrassment as outrage. For three years the President had been proclaiming the success of Vietnamization, and the dispatches from Saigon strongly suggested that that policy was a failure.
The prospect of humiliation made Nixon a dangerous adversary. On May 8 he took a breathtaking step which he called Operation Linebacker. To cripple the DRVN’s war-making capacity he ordered a massive air-sea blockade; the U.S. Navy would mine the waters of Haiphong and other North Vietnamese ports, and U.S. aerial sorties would smash rail lines leading out of southern China. This took him to the brink of confrontation with the very men in Peking and Moscow that he and Kissinger were wooing. He acknowledged the conflict with the Russians. In his televised address he said: “I particularly direct my comments tonight to the Soviet Union. We respect the Soviet Union as a great power. We recognize the right of the Soviet Union to defend its interests when they are threatened. The Soviet Union in turn must recognize our right to defend our interests…. Let us and let all great powers help our allies for the purpose of their defense—not for the purpose of launching invasions against their neighbors.”
The President’s aggressive response to Giap’s drive gave new life to the antiwar movement, and the Committee for the Reelection of the President spent thousands of dollars to fake support for it which did not, in fact, exist. So many bogus telegrams were sent that the White House could announce with complete honesty a five-to-one ratio in favor of the move. In addition, a New York Times editorial critical of it was answered by a spurious ad headed “The People vs. the New York Times,” the “People” being Charles Colson and a few aides. That was illegal, and, as it turned out, unnecessary. By the end of that month the North Vietnamese offensive had begun to falter. After laying waste 75 percent of Binh Dinh the DRVN forces there melted away. An Loc and Kontum held out, and a widely heralded Giap attempt to capture Hue never materialized. Abruptly the Hanoi menace seemed diminished. The Communists had committed all but two training divisions to the push, had lost one hundred thousand men, and had won little of strategic value. Their all-or-nothing gamble had failed. Le Duc Tho, a member of North Vietnam’s politburo and Hanoi’s chief negotiator, sent word to Kissinger that he was ready to reopen the talks in Paris. He still insisted that a cease-fire would be conditional upon Thieu’s dismissal, but a genuine suit for peace appeared to be very near.
Moscow had something to do with that. In early May the blockade had made the likelihood of a Nixon-Brezhnev summit seem remote, but the Russians were determined to make the detente work. This became clear when Nikolai S. Patolichev, the Soviet foreign trade minister, called at the White House to exchange a few ideas about world trade. Reporters summoned to the oval office were astonished to find Nixon, Patolichev, and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin grinning, laughing, and bantering over how to say “friendship” in the two languages. A correspondent asked the minister whether the President’s May 22 visit to Moscow was still on. “We never had any doubts about it,” Patolichev replied. “I don’t know why you asked.” The Russians were simultaneously urging Hanoi to break off hostilities and readying a Kremlin apartment which had once belonged to the czars for occupancy by the President. The North Vietnamese were outraged by the prospect of Soviet and American leaders feasting on caviar and champagne with Giap’s dead still warm in their graves, but nothing could stop deals between the world’s two dominant powers—which was one of the points the Soviets wanted to make.
Improbable as it seemed to anyone aware of the history of the past two decades, American flags were waving beside the hammer and sickle when the Spirit of ’76, arriving from Austria, descended over the glittering domes of the Kremlin churches and taxied to a stop beside the waiting figures of the Soviet president, premier, and foreign minister. Brezhnev was not there; like Mao he postponed his reception of Nixon until after the President had unpacked. That evening the Americans were guests of honor at a welcoming banquet in the Grand Kremlin Palace. In the morning the First Lady was off on tours of Soviet schools, Red Square, the famous Moscow subway, and the state-run GUM department store. Her husband’s picture was on the front page of Pravda; it would be there every day throughout the week of talks. Appearing on the “blue screen,” as Russians call their television, Nixon greeted viewers with “Dobry vecher” (Good evening), and parted at the end with “Spasibo i do svidaniya” (Thank you and goodbye). In between, another voice translated his cordial message, which was rich in the earthy Russian maxims that they cherish.
Unlike the Peking trip, this summit was more than symbolic. The banquets, the toasts, and the ballet performances were lavish, but the real meaning of the visit emerged in conferences beneath the huge gilt chandelier of the Kremlin’s St. Vladimir Hall. The White House described the sessions as “frank and businesslike”; Brezhnev, bluff and hearty all week, called them “businesslike and realistic.” A routine developed. The two national leaders would reach an agreement, or endorse a Russo-American understanding which might have been negotiated over a period of months or even years. Kissinger and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would settle the details. Then protocol aides would appear with blue and red leather folders, and Nixon and Brezhnev would sign the documents. The two agreed to collaborate in space exploration, achieving a joint docking of a manned spacecraft in 1975. Joint research projects would examine problems of public health, cancer, heart disease, and pollution. Each consented to stop molesting the other’s ships on the high seas. Both acknowledged the need to reduce troop strength in central Europe and the necessity for a conference on European security. Most important, they concurred on missile control. The two nations would limit their deployment of ABMs and freeze offensive missiles at current levels for five years.
There were some disappointments. There was no meeting of minds on the Middle East. Nixon wanted the Russians to talk Hanoi into a cease-fire; they wouldn’t do it. Brezhnev was eager for a trade pact; the issue had to be referred to a commission for further discussion. The Soviet World War II lend-lease debt of 10.8 billion dollars was unresolved; they offered 300 million, Nixon wanted 800 million, all attempts at a compromise failed. On the other hand, the talks had yielded a dividend, a twelve-point statement of principles to establish rules of diplomacy for great powers, a breakthrough in international law. “We have laid out a road map,” said Kissinger. “Will we follow this road? I don’t know. It isn’t automatic.” But unless all signs failed, the implications for the future were vast. The difference between the two great systems of government were now likely to be expressed in treaties, not ideological jehads. Russia, through the coming European security conference, would draw closer to the continent and away from Asia. Trade and technology would continue to draw the two superpowers together, and understandings between them, not the fissioning of a multipolar world, which had been widely predicted, would be the paramount fact of world politics for a long time to come. The cold war was over, ended in large part through the efforts of an American President who had been one of the most resolute of the cold-warriors.
Not the least of its attractions for Nixon was the fact that it had occurred in an election year. In Peking, and then in the Kremlin, he had taken two giant steps toward four more years in the White House. Each passing day now seemed to bring him closer to victory in November. Unfortunately for his place in history, some of those around him weren’t satisfied with that. They wanted to be absolutely sure. It was to be his tragedy that they were prepared to go to any lengths to guarantee a second Nixon term. Their attitude was summed up by one of them, Charles Colson, when he posted over his bar the slogan, “If you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow,” and said, “For the President I would walk over my grandmother, if necessary.” There was a word for the more extreme measures they were taking in pursuit of their goal: criminal. It was about to acquire a synonym: Watergate.
***
The 1972 campaign had begun to simmer in January, when a Harris poll showed Edmund Muskie running nec
k and neck with the President in public favor—42 percent for him, 42 percent for Nixon, and 11 percent for George Wallace. The Maine senator was clearly the strongest Democratic candidate; that same month Gallup reported that in a trial free-for-all Muskie emerged with 32 percent, Edward Kennedy with 27, Humphrey with 17, and McGovern with 3. Whoever their opponent, Republicans were preparing to come on strong. Appearing on the Today Show, H. R. Haldeman said that critics of the war were “consciously aiding and abetting the enemy,” and the White House moved swiftly to exploit suburban indignation over the January decision of Federal Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr., who ordered busing of white schoolchildren in the two counties surrounding Richmond, Virginia, to achieve racial balance in the city’s 70-percent-black schools. Judge Merhige would be reversed in June, but by then Muskie’s potential adversaries would have rung all the changes on his support of busing.
In Florida Republican zealots were putting the finishing touches on a bogus letter to the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader charging that while campaigning in the South Muskie had referred to French Canadians as “Canucks”; this would cripple him in the New Hampshire primary. Other Nixon operatives were taking similar steps to torpedo the senator’s campaign, or—in the case of Howard Hunt—planning to burglarize the safe of a Las Vegas editor which was supposed to contain anti-Muskie dirt. At 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington CREEP was fleshing out its staff. Within a month John Mitchell would resign as attorney general to become in title what he already was in fact: CREEP’s director.
Meanwhile the Republican war chest was rapidly being filled while that of the Democrats remained six million dollars in debt. There had always been some truth in the Democratic charge that the GOP was the party of big business. This year there would be no doubt of it. A bill requiring the naming of big donors would become law on April 10. The two chief GOP fund raisers, Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans and Herbert Kalmbach, the President’s personal attorney, were crisscrossing the country in a successful pursuit of contributions from the wealthy before the deadline. As the Nixon men warmed to their task they began to skirt the borders of indiscretion, and sometimes to cross them. Gifts totaling $114,000 were deposited in the Miami bank account of Bernard L. Barker, Hunt’s chief burglar. And although political donations from corporations were illegal even under the old law, the fund raisers solicited them and got them—$100,000 from Ashland Oil, $100,000 from Gulf, $100,000 from Phillips Petroleum, $55,000 from American Airlines, $40,000 from Goodyear, $30,000 from Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. Ultimately they refused sums of less than $100,000; smaller donations were not worth the trouble. A list of two thousand secret donors was kept in the desk of Rose Mary Woods, the President’s secretary, at the White House, where it was known as “Rose Mary’s baby.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 191
