Looking out on the Washington jungle through his heavy, old-fashioned spectacles, Kissinger thoroughly agreed with his new boss’s plans for more consistent, coordinated, rational foreign policy-making. He too believed in teamwork, but there had to be a captain and a quarterback. Kissinger was ready to take charge of the team, not only to defend the United States against its foreign foes but to accomplish the even more difficult task of defending the President’s and his own powers against domestic enemies— radical agitators, carping congressmen, overly inquisitive journalists, stubborn feds in State and Defense, White House rivals, the President’s inner inner circle, the President himself.
Finding China
Few American leaders of national standing had rivaled Richard Nixon in denouncing communism in general and the Chinese communists in particular. He had climbed the first rung of the political ladder by stigmatizing his congressional opponent, the rather idealistic New Deal Democrat Jerry Voorhis, as communist-supported. He had clawed his way up the second rung, in a 1950 contest filled with red-baiting on both sides, by tarring his rival for the Senate, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a consistent follower of “the Communist Party line.” He made enormous political capital out of the Alger Hiss case. He became a favorite of the China Lobby that guarded the Taiwan ramparts in Washington and again and again during the 1950s castigated Truman and Acheson and other Democrats for “losing China.” He warned of a monolithic, global communist conspiracy.
“Now, what do the Chinese Communists want?” he demanded during his election battle with John Kennedy in i960. “They don’t want just Quemoy and Matsu. They don’t want just Formosa. They want the world.”
Later in the sixties Nixon seemed to be changing his line on “Red China.” In a 1967 essay for a foreign affairs journal, he wrote that, “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.” The essay was ambivalent enough to suggest a new Nixon, China sector. But on closer reading one found the old Nixon labeling China as the “epicenter of world revolution,” referring to the “poison from the Thoughts of Mao,” decrying Peking’s “imperial ambitions” in Asia, and making clear that it was China that must change. And his approach, he carefully added, did “not mean, as many would simplistically have it, rushing to grant recognition to Peking, to admit it to the United Nations and to ply it with offers of trade—all of which would serve to confirm its rulers in their present course.” The article was ambivalent enough to support wrath against Peking or rapprochement with it.
Yet he had a curiosity about China. He kept turning toward it, like a soldier of fortune to an old battle zone. He even tried to visit mainland China in 1965, when he was a private citizen, but LBJ’s State Department denied him permission. Even before the end of his first presidential year, however, Nixon began an exchange of signals with the Chinese leadership. Each side had good reason for seeking rapprochement. Indeed Nixon had several: to play Moscow off against Peking, to take some striking initiative in a period when his foreign policy seemed moribund, to weaken Chinese ties to Hanoi, to draw this vast nation with its exploding population more into the world community, and above all to win reelection in 1972 by end-running the Democrats on the peace issue.
Peking had one towering reason for rapprochement with the American superpower: Russia. After veering apart earlier on ideological and geopolitical issues the two communist powers now were at each other’s throats. A series of clashes broke out between Soviet and Chinese border guards during the spring of 1969 along the Amur River and on the Kazakhstan-Sinkiang border 3,000 miles to the west. Moscow was shifting into eastern Siberia a dozen infantry divisions, late-model Soviet aircraft, and even, it was rumored, nuclear-equipped missiles. In 1968 Moscow had demonstrated its own border phobia by its invasion of Czechoslovakia. Would China be next? There were reports that the Soviets were readying an attack. Peking desperately needed a nuclear ally, and there was only one available: the capitalist barbarians across the Pacific. It was time for triangular diplomacy.
In his increasingly mixed feelings toward China, Nixon was continuing an old American tradition of “a curious ambivalence in our China policy,” as the historian John K. Fairbank called it, a gap between attitude and reality. For a century and a half Americans had gone to Cathay in a state of high-mindedness, intent on bringing proper religion, education, trade, and freedom to the Orientals. The reality they found was of an old culture fixed in its ways, stratified in its classes, oblivious of its innumerable poor, established in its religion. It was hard to exert much influence, benign or not, on this ancient people. So the Americans tended to talk of moral uplift but to act opportunistically. Thus they deplored the hold of opium on the masses while Yankee traders bought the drug in Turkey and sold it in Canton. For decades hardly more than junior partners to the British, they inveighed against imperialism and colonialism but accepted extraterritoriality and most-favored-nation treatment. Missionaries preached the Gospel—“When we step in here we bridge over in a second twelve hundred years of history,” a booster of Protestant Christianity told the young army officer Joseph Stilwell in 1911—without much effect on the natives. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, Washington replied with Stimson’s righteous but ineffectual nonrecognition doctrine; during World War II the United States sent aid—including Stilwell—to China but kept eastern Asia at the bottom of its military priority list; and after the war provided aid to Chiang Kai-shek insufficient to dam the revolutionary forces of Mao, even if Chiang had used it effectively.
Ultimately the contradictory attitudes among Americans and Chinese produced conflicting memories. “The American memory,” wrote Dennis Bloodworth, “was one to inspire a daydream of fond reminiscence—of selfless Protestant missionaries striving to save the heathen soul of nineteenth-century China; of a morally upright Washington that had stood aside when greedy European colonialists plundered the Celestial Empire, endowing it instead with the Open Door policy; of a generous administration that had lavished military aid and moral counsel on the Chinese during the war against Japan; and of a culture that had given them the precious message of democracy and the American way of life.” The Chinese memory, observed Bloodworth, “had been scarred by all the love bites.”
It was these crosswinds of history, memories, and attitudes, East and West, through which Richard Nixon would have to find his way. “When the moment comes to jump—leapfrog over the position immediately ahead,” was Nixon’s style as described by his speech writer William Safire. The President’s leaping was more like the knight’s on a chessboard—forward and to the side, after a cautious assessment of the new position. To influence Hanoi and counter Moscow he would use Peking. To reach Peking he would use Henry Kissinger.
The national security aide hardly appeared a promising player on the Chinese chessboard. An admirer of the nineteenth-century diplomats Castlereagh and Metternich and a student of the post-Napoleonic “conference system” of powerful and independent Foreign Ministers managing an intricate balance of power, Kissinger had as little knowledge as his chief of Asian politics. Twenty years of distance from the Chinese leadership, he now discovered, had left Washington ignorant even of how to approach Peking. Its eastern Asia expertise decimated by the red hunts following the fall of China to the communists, the State Department had by now regained a pool of China hands. But here another difficulty arose. The President suspected the State Department of invariably leaking, so he viewed absolute secrecy as essential, while Professor Kissinger was contemptuous of the academic orientation of the experts at State. The department, for its part, was institutionally dubious about the “loose cannon” personal diplomacy of Presidents. Above all, Nixon did not wish to share with Secretary Rogers the glory of being the modern Marco Polo who had rediscovered China. He even wanted to omit any initial trip to China by an emissary because it would “take the glow off his own journey”—or so Kissinger supp
osed.
The approach to Peking, Kissinger wrote later, began like “an intricate minuet between us and the Chinese so delicately arranged that both sides could always maintain that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative.” This was a Metternichian view; the rapprochement might rather be likened to one of those arranged marriages in the East, requiring much clandestine family negotiation through obscure channels and myriad brokers, carefully timed overtures and withdrawals, conjuring up of rival swains as a way of applying genteel pressure, and the final production of the blushing bride and her dowry.
Once the elaborately contrived invitation to Kissinger from Peking was received, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to keep this initial trip a secret not only from enemies like Russia but from rivals like the State Department. An elaborate cover was contrived for Kissinger, under which he would ostensibly tour Asian capitals but in fact would fly unobserved into China from friendly Pakistan. When the President finally broke the news to the Secretary of State—after Kissinger was well on his way—Nixon deceived Rogers, telling him that Kissinger’s trip was in response to a last-minute invitation received while his aide was in Pakistan.
All this maneuvering hardly diminished Kissinger’s excitement as he and three NSC colleagues flew from Islamabad to Peking early in July 1971. As Kissinger’s plane crossed the snowcapped Himalayas, “thrusting toward the heavens in the roseate glow of a rising sun,” and then flew for hours over arid deserts dotted by oases, he reflected that he was about to begin an extraordinary adventure that would make time stand still while he penetrated the mysteries of this almost unknown nation of 800 million people. Nor was he disappointed by the kaleidoscope of events: meeting the welcoming party in their Mao uniforms at a military airport on the outskirts of Peking—driving through wide, clean streets with little traffic save bicycles—settling down in guesthouses connected by tiny bridges around the former imperial fishing lake—driving to the Forbidden City, whose huge grounds had been closed off to the public—touring its superbly proportioned halls and gardens, stone carvings, and bronze lions— holding sessions in the Great Hall of the People, which struck Kissinger as a cross between Mussolini neoclassicism and communist baroque.
Most of all, Kissinger was impressed by the chief negotiator for the Chinese, Premier Chou En-lai. More than any leader save Mao, Chou incarnated the revolution. The product of a middle-class family in Kiangsu province, Chou in his twenties had studied in France and Germany. A veteran of the Long March, Premier of the People’s Republic for over twenty years, he was a political survivor of the civil war, the war with Japan, the cold war, the Korean War, the Cultural Revolution, and the break with Moscow. Yet it was no embittered or fanatical zealot whom Kissinger faced but an urbane, knowledgeable statesman who appeared equally accomplished in history, philosophy, geopolitics, and humorous repartee.
The presidential aide found Chou a formidable adversary. And an informed one. Chou threw him off stride by quoting from a recent Nixon speech of which Kissinger knew nothing. Chou forcefully laid out Peking’s position: that Taiwan was part of China; that China supported the North Vietnamese; that not only Russia and the United States but India and Japan were overly aggressive toward China; that China had no wish to be a superpower. Kissinger, compelled by the secrecy factor to work quickly and charged above all with producing an invitation to the President from Peking, made no serious effort to extract concessions from Chou or to offer any. He left Peking with the assurance of an invitation to Nixon. Three days later Chou flew to Hanoi to reassure the North Vietnamese that an American pullout from South Vietnam was China’s main objective.
A euphoric Nixon preempted the networks to tell the world of Kissinger’s just completed trip and his own forthcoming one. He reassured Russia that his search for “a new relationship with the People’s Republic of China” was not directed against any other nation, and Taiwan that it would not “be at the expense of our old friends”—deceiving neither nation.
The White House began feverish preparations for the presidential visit. Kissinger was dispatched again to China to plan specific arrangements. Dismayed by the amount of publicity that the security aide was reaping from the China initiative, Nixon and Haldeman were determined that the presidential trip be bathed in television coverage. Network people received ample travel accommodations, at the expense of newspaper reporters. Long tormented far more by the print press than by the electronic, Nixon found the trip to China, Kissinger noted, “a great opportunity to get even.” The Chinese fell in with the spirit of full television coverage, doubtless with more interest in its ratings in Moscow than in how it played in Washington.
His trip to China surpassed even Nixon’s hopes. Air Force One arrived in Peking at 11:30 A.M. on February 21, 1972, which happened to be excellent television time—10:30 P.M.—in Washington and New York. Television cameras followed him as he and Mrs. Nixon descended the ramp and he extended his hand ostentatiously to the waiting Chou En-lai, while a Chinese band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The handshake was symbolic—many years earlier, at the Geneva Conference on Indochina, John Foster Dulles, in one of his more boorish moments, had refused to shake hands with Chou. This injury, which the Chinese had never forgotten, Nixon now rectified. But he insisted on doing so alone; on the plane a burly aide blocked the aisle so that neither Kissinger nor anyone else could interrupt Nixon’s solo performance before the cameras.
The drive into Peking was less successful from a public relations standpoint, since the Chinese masses appeared merely to be going about their business, unaware of the barbarians in their midst. But marvelous photograph opportunities opened up in the days following, as the presidential party toured the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace, watched table tennis and gymnastics in the Sports Palace, attended a revolutionary ballet, and made the obligatory tour of the Great Wall, where Nixon proclaimed to the waiting press, “This is a great wall.”
The President was elated early in the meetings when Chou sent word that Mao Tse-tung would see him. Taking Kissinger with him but not Rogers, who was excluded from the most important meetings, the President and his aide were driven to the Imperial City and ushered into a modest house. There they found Mao sitting in a medium-sized, book-lined study. Though ailing and infirm, the Chairman could not have been more affable. He joked to Nixon that “our common old friend,” Chiang, did not approve of this meeting. To the President’s suggestion that his writings had “changed the world,” Mao replied modestly that he had been able to change only “a few places in the vicinity of Peking.” He implied that he preferred to deal with predictable conservatives rather than wobbling liberals, and even added smilingly that “I voted for you during your last election.” He skirted policy issues, preferring to discuss questions of “philosophy” and leaving specifics to his Premier. But it was clear that he looked on the Russians, not the Americans, as the real adversary.
Nixon was as willing to delegate the hard, hour-to-hour bargaining to Kissinger as Mao was to turn it over to Chou. The negotiators did not face momentous strategic decisions. The harsh facts of Soviet intimidation, Chinese and American commitments in Indochina, Chinese-American conflict over Taiwan, had already determined strategy. The problem rather was to reduce a complex balance of power to a formula that could be presented as a joint statement by Peking and Washington without unduly straining the alliances of either with third parties. The Americans were playing a three-dimensional game that required skill and patience. If they leaned too far toward Moscow, China might try to repair its old friendship with the Soviet Union; if too far toward Peking, the Russians might even try, Kissinger feared, a “preemptive attack on China.” Vietnam and Taiwan had to fit into this broader framework.
The Shanghai Communiqué, issued at the end of the trip, spoke of the belief in freedom the two nations shared—the Americans in “individual freedom,” the Chinese in “freedom and liberation.” But then, using a for
mula worked out in earlier meetings, the communiqué listed the differences between the two countries. Taiwan was still the main issue. The Chinese reiterated that the island was wholly their internal affair. The Americans adroitly acknowledged and agreed “that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” Hoping for a peaceful settlement of the question by the Chinese themselves, the United States “affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”
The presidential party flew back to Washington and a hero’s welcome. Senators and congressmen from both parties, headed by Vice President Agnew, greeted Nixon at Andrews Air Force base and voiced strong support the next day at a conference. The Republican right did not seem unduly disturbed. Governor Ronald Reagan of California joked that the China initiative had been a wonderful television “pilot” and should be made into a series. A few newspapers wondered whether the future of Taiwan had been bartered away in exchange for a presidential visit, a dramatic initiative, and breaking the taboo of noncommunication between East and West. But in general the press was not critical. Indeed, when a reporter in Shanghai pressed Kissinger about the American commitment to Taiwan, Kissinger had said that he would “appreciate it” if the press would stop asking about it “in these circumstances,” and the reporters desisted.
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