Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  Occasionally there were hints that both sides would like to move away from what was becoming an increasingly tedious impasse, but something would always go wrong. An American pilot would be shot down on a spy mission over China; a Chinese diplomat would defect; and the insults would start up afresh. Then, in the 1960s, two events made the deep freeze even deeper. With Mao’s Cultural Revolution, China virtually ceased to have a foreign policy at all as its diplomats were summoned home to be cleansed of imperfect attitudes. And the United States plunged headlong into Vietnam. With American troops pouring into South Vietnam and American planes bombing the North, China could not abandon its ally North Vietnam and engage in talks with its enemy.

  The end of the 1960s brought shocks to both countries and their leaders, and, perhaps, a new sense of realism. The Chinese and, most importantly, Mao realized just how isolated they were in the world. Among China’s neighbours only Pakistan was friendly and the Soviet Union was distinctly hostile, amassing vast armies along the common border and talking, none too quietly, about the possibility of a nuclear strike on China. The United States was not as friendless but it was newly aware of its own vulnerabilities. Vietnam had fuelled passionate debate and dissent at home, and, abroad, had made both American friends and enemies wonder just how strong the superpower really was.

  President Nixon and Chairman Mao often take the credit for ending the absurd stand-off between their two countries, and they deserve it – but not all of it. The times were ripe for each side to make a move towards the other. In both countries there were influential voices saying that the advantages of a relationship, even a cool one, outweighed continuing non-recognition. For each the other was a card to play against the common enemy, the Soviet Union.

  Bringing the United States and China together, though, was not easy. History, particularly recent history, stood in the way. National pride, too, was an impediment. The United States so often saw itself as the shining city on the hill, the repository of the right ways of managing a society and running an economy, its values those for all of humanity. The Chinese were not much different. If the old China of the dynasties had seen itself as the centre of the world and all other nations as subordinates, the new Communist one held itself out as the world’s revolutionary vanguard with Chairman Mao as the only guide for the future.

  Nixon’s visit to China that February in 1972 had taken three years to arrange, three years of delicate feelers, of careful signals sent out and usually but not always received, of indirect contacts, of intense internal debates, and finally of direct negotiations. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Adviser, had made a secret trip to Beijing in the summer of 1971 and then a public one in the autumn to prepare the way for a visit by Nixon himself. He had discussed grand strategy with Chou En-lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, and, in sharp exchanges, the issues that still divided their two countries. Kissinger and Chou had also discussed the details of Nixon’s coming trip. Was the American President a supplicant, asking to come to China, or were the Chinese inviting him? Such questions matter in international relations, especially between two countries, each convinced that it is the more important.

  The Chinese leadership, who had worked so hard to make China the centre of world revolution, now found themselves with the leader of the world’s greatest capitalist nation coming to visit. The Americans, for their part, risked attacks from conservatives at home and possible humiliation in China. Both sides knew that they were taking a terrific gamble. On the one side lay a new relationship that would change the balance in international relations and, if all went well, produce great benefits. For the United States, a friendly China could put pressure on the recalcitrant North Vietnamese to negotiate an end to the war. For China, the relationship promised access to technology and vital strategic information. For both, the other provided a counterbalance to potential enemies, Japan and the Soviet Union in the case of China, the Soviet Union above all for the United States. If the trip went wrong, then the recriminations and the renewed suspicions would send Chinese–American relations back to where they had been at the start of the 1960s.

  To the end of his life, through the long dreary years after the disgrace of Watergate, Nixon maintained that the opening of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China was the high point of his time in office. Good relations between the two countries, so he held, were a way not only of keeping the Soviet Union under control but of bringing stability and peace to Asia and indeed to the world. As he prepared to leave Shanghai at the end of his momentous trip, he made a toast. ‘We have been here a week. This was the week that changed the world.’1 Typical bombast, one might say. Does it really matter now that Nixon and Mao chatted among the antimacassars and spittoons of Mao’s study? That the Cold War, itself now vanished, saw a realignment of forces? Or that the United States and China finally began to trade with each other and exchange visitors?

  Of course it matters. We worry, as we must, about terrorism, about the potential for conflict between the values of liberal democracy and religious fundamentalism. We look at the instability in the Middle East with concern. We must not, however, forget Asia. With its vast population, its wealth and its extraordinary rate of economic growth, it promises to be the continent of the future. Already the edge in technology and the lead in development and power are shifting eastwards. Asia will be at the centre of the world again. Yet there will be no peace for Asia or for the world unless those two great Pacific powers, the United States and China, the one supreme today and the other perhaps tomorrow, find ways to work with each other. To understand their relationship we need to go back to 1972, to the moment when it started anew.

  I

  Setting Out

  ON THURSDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 1972, President and Mrs Nixon came on 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 ‘20 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.”’1 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 which had the seal of the CIA on its cover. ‘Do you think they’ll let me in with this?’ asked the President in a rare joke with the press. He, the man who had made his name as a dogged and vociferous anti-Communist, was reversing two decades of American policy by travelling to Beijing, into the very heart of Chinese Communism. As the plane climbed into the air, Nixon, so he said in his memoirs, felt like an explorer: ‘We were embarking 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.’2

  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 almo
st naïvely for peace, even at any price.’ Kissinger was, as always, reassuring. The Americans were excited by the boldness of Nixon’s move.3

  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, he did not know, when he clambered aboard his plane, whether he would have a meeting with Chairman Mao Tsetung, who, from his seclusion in Beijing, still controlled China. If he came back to the United States without meeting 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 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.’4

  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 officer in the navy 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 which the United States had possessed from the end of the Second World War to the start of the 1960s could not last forever.

  It 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 the war. By the end of the 1960s, however, 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. Yet, despite that, the Chinese revolution had become a model and an inspiration throughout what was coming to be known as the Third World, those undeveloped countries emerging from foreign empires or attempting to free themselves from foreign domination.

  Throughout the 1960s, Nixon worked on a political career which 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 favourite 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 which could exist only 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 his 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 US 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 had come to this realization, he told Chou when they finally met, in those years in the 1960s when he was out of office and travelling around the world.5

  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–US 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, one moreover which was the world’s most populous country, had never made much sense. Nixon wrote in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, the leading American foreign policy journal, ‘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 neighbours.’ 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, though, he 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.’6

  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 wrote years later, ‘For both sides, necessity dictated that [a] rapprochement occur, and the attempt would have had to be made no matter who governed in either country.’7 And while public opinion did not matter in China, it did in the United States, and Americans, by and large, no longer felt the same antipathy towards and fear of 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 of the idea that Communists were very powerful and that they were everywhere, in Russia, of course, throughout 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 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.’8 While presidents always gave State of the Union addresses to Congress, Nixon 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 favourite it seems with many American presidents including George Bush junior. Or General George Patton – the movie with George C. Scott was one of Nixon’s favourites and he kept a biography of Patton beside his bed. Such great leaders, in Nixon’s view, were usually lonely, often misunderstood, but they worked indefatigably nevertheless to advance the interests of their nations. ‘There were never tired decisions,’ he told Kissinger in one of their phone conversations, ‘only tired commanders.’9

  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 travelled more than any of his predecessors and, 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.’10 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 heads of state and foreign ministers personally.