Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  ‘Looking back,’ said Bill Brown, who was deputy director of the State Department office which dealt with the People’s Republic of China, ‘I don’t feel that the American people were such sheep or that it was so delicate in Congress and in the American body politic.’ It has never been clear, though, why the fact of Kissinger’s trip to Beijing had to remain secret until it was over. Kissinger’s own, unconvincing explanation was that the Chinese insisted. The trip did, of course, make a wonderful adventure and a wonderful announcement and that in itself may have appealed to both Kissinger and Nixon with their great awareness of history.

  The Chinese received the American message on 17 May and, a few days later, an assurance that a recent advance in arms-limitation talks between the Soviet Union and the United States was not directed against China. ‘President Nixon wishes to emphasize’, the message transmitted through Pakistan said, ‘that it is his policy to conclude no agreement which would be directed against the People’s Republic of China.’ In Beijing, Mao ordered Chou to call together the Politburo, the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party, to prepare a reply. In his opening speech, Chou talked about how American power was declining and how the United States was now anxious to get out of Vietnam. That gave China an opportunity to improve relations with its former enemy, a move that would help China in several ways such as furthering the peaceful reunification of its territory and providing support against its enemies. (The Soviet Union was not mentioned specifically.) If the opening succeeded, it would make the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union even fiercer; if it failed, well, it would show the Chinese people the reactionary face of American imperialism.39

  Mao approved the report and Chou despatched a reply. The Pakistanis alerted Kissinger that they were sending a highly important message by special courier. At 8 p.m., on 2 June, Hilaly, his hands shaking, handed over two sheets of paper to Kissinger, who read them with relief and then elation. Chou extended a warm invitation to Kissinger to come to Beijing in June to prepare the way for Nixon’s visit. ‘It goes without saying’, Chou added, ‘that the first question to be settled is the crucial issue between China and the United States which is the question of the concrete way of the withdrawal of all the US Armed Forces from Taiwan and Taiwan Straits area.’ As Kissinger recognized, this was a considerable modification of the original Chinese position that the forces must be withdrawn before talks could take place. Kissinger rushed over to the White House, where Nixon was hosting a state dinner for the unlovely dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. As Nixon read the message Kissinger said solemnly, ‘This is the most important communication that has come to an American President since the end of World War II.’ He later pushed the date back to the Civil War.40

  The two men talked until nearly midnight about what lay ahead. As Kissinger was leaving, Nixon decided that they ought to celebrate, so he hunted out a bottle of very good brandy. The two men raised their glasses and Nixon, according to his memoirs, proposed a toast. ‘Henry, we are drinking a toast not to ourselves personally or to our success, or to our administration’s policies which have made this message and made tonight possible. Let us drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done.’41

  12

  The Secret Visit

  NIXON’S TOAST in the White House when he and Kissinger received Chou’s invitation was, he admitted, rather formal, but it was after all ‘a moment of historical significance’.1 It was also merely a beginning. So much had to be arranged before Nixon could go to China, from technical details about landing his plane safely to the sorts of subjects he would discuss while he was there. Presidential visits always required detailed advance work and China was unknown territory. Moreover, until all the details were worked out, there was always the danger that one side or the other would pull back. The choice, therefore, of the emissary was crucial.

  In their message which reached Washington on 27 April 1971 the Chinese had suggested that Kissinger himself might be Nixon’s special envoy. Kissinger, understandably, was longing to go. He had already sent a message through Hilaly telling the Chinese that it was ‘essential’ that he be the first to meet Chou: ‘No one except Kissinger is best qualified to have these discussions as he is the only person (repeat only) who knows President Nixon’s thinking and his mind and can take decisions on the spot without having to refer back to Washington for advice & instructions.’ Kissinger was right: he was the obvious choice, but it was one that Nixon shrank from making. He was already envious of the press coverage Kissinger was getting and of Kissinger’s growing reputation as a smooth man about town. And so Nixon, much as Eisenhower had once done with him, refused to commit himself. Kissinger could not go, so he said initially, ‘because that would break all the china with State’. Kissinger had to sit by as Nixon wondered out loud about going himself. That would be too dangerous, Kissinger argued. What about Rogers? Kissinger rolled his eyes. ‘Henry wasn’t too enthusiastic,’ Nixon recalled later. ‘Let me put it that way.’ Perhaps those experienced and distinguished diplomats David Bruce and Henry Cabot Lodge? Nixon ruled them out because they were both too much identified with the American presence in Vietnam. Or Kissinger’s old patron, Nelson Rockefeller? ‘Intriguing’, said Kissinger, but Rockefeller would not obey his instructions. Or George Bush, the US ambassador to the UN? ‘Too soft and not sophisticated enough.’ Thomas Dewey, the distinguished Republican elder statesman? Unfortunately, said Kissinger, he had been dead for several months.2

  ‘Henry,’ said Nixon, ‘I think you will have to do it.’ The decision was hard to avoid. Kissinger knew Nixon’s mind and had been involved at every stage of the secret negotiations. Moreover, said Kissinger, who understood his President well, ‘of all the potential emissaries I was the most subject to his control’. As a still relatively obscure National Security Adviser, he did not have his own constituency or his own power base. Nixon still hoped to downplay the significance of what was clearly an extraordinary trip. Perhaps Kissinger could meet Chou somewhere other than Beijing. Kissinger made sure that all other sites were ruled out. Surely, Nixon also suggested, there was no need to have Kissinger’s name appear on any joint communiqué announcing that a representative of the American government had visited China. ‘Reality’, said Kissinger, ‘took care of this problem.’3 He set his staff to preparing briefing books while he and Nixon waited for the final confirmation from the Chinese.

  In Pakistan, the American ambassador, Joseph Farland, received a mysterious message ordering him to meet Kissinger somewhere in California. He was to travel to a private airport and ask for a certain aircraft. He was not to tell the State Department about his trip. An irritated Farland followed orders and found himself on a patio in Palm Springs with Kissinger. ‘“Henry, I’ve come halfway around this damn earth and I don’t know why.” He said, “I want you to put me into China.” I said, “I don’t think that’s very funny, Henry.”’ Once Farland was persuaded that Kissinger was serious, the two men concocted a plan. Kissinger was due to make a tour of Asia which he intended to make as boring as possible in order to shake off the press. His schedule would include a weekend in Pakistan, where the embassy would put out word that he had come down with a bug he had picked up in India. As a result all his appointments would be cancelled and, so everyone would be told, he would retreat to the hill station of Muree to recuperate. While his aircraft remained conspicuously parked on the runway, he would fly into China on a civilian plane provided by the government of Pakistan.4

  Pakistan was an obvious jumping-off place to go into China. Its government had shown its discretion and its loyalty to the Americans in setting up the channel and its national airline had regular flights to Beijing. Yahya Khan, who promised Washington that he would make ‘absolute fool-proof arrangements’ at his end, entered into the plans with enthusiasm, checking off all the details himself. Farland did his part before Kissinger arrived by insisting that a couple of his more observant s
taff in the embassy take their annual leave. He despatched the embassy doctor to East Pakistan. The Chinese sent in an aircrew in readiness.5

  In Beijing, Chou En-lai set up a special high-level group and took personal charge of the preparations for Kissinger’s visit. Under Mao’s orders, he also called together an extraordinary meeting of the Politburo to prepare for the negotiations. Chou started out the deliberations explaining that the United States was no longer as powerful as it had been at the end of the Second World War. It had lost ground economically, and its involvement in Indochina in particular had done its position in the world much damage. The Americans’ anxiety to extricate themselves from a hopeless struggle had prompted the need for contact with China, and this was China’s opportunity to promote its own security and achieve the reunification of the country ‘by peaceful means’. The Politburo sent on its recommendations to Mao, who approved them. To prepare the Chinese people for the shock that a country which had been treated as its main enemy for twenty years was now becoming something else, Chou spoke to a meeting of party officials from around the country to outline the new policy. Mao also ordered that the transcript of his chat with Edgar Snow, in which he invited Nixon to come to China, be released in the Chinese press.

  The recommendations demonstrated the importance that Taiwan had in Chinese thinking. The United States must indicate that it was going to withdraw its troops from the island and must recognize that Taiwan was Chinese territory and that the government in Beijing was the only one representing China. On the other hand, China would undertake to liberate Taiwan peacefully. This was significant because up to this point the government in Beijing had always refused to rule out the use of force. If the Americans brought up the issue of the United Nations, the Chinese must make it clear that they would not accept two Chinas being represented there, a solution being suggested by the United States and other nations. The Chinese should also let the Americans know that they should withdraw their troops from the rest of Asia, from Indochina to Japan. If all went well, the two sides might be able to talk about permanent diplomatic representation in each other’s capitals. There was nothing in the recommendations about any sort of concerted policy towards the Soviet Union.6

  In Washington, the Americans were also getting ready. Winston Lord, Kissinger’s assistant, prepared separate sets of briefing books, for those who were going on the public Asian tour and for those who knew about the secret detour, now christened Polo One, to Beijing. (Somehow, as the Kissinger party made its way from one Asian capital to another, he managed to keep the different briefing notes and itineraries in the right hands.) Kissinger’s own notes for Polo One ran to eighty pages of careful statements of America’s position on areas it considered important: Indochina, Taiwan and relations with the Soviet Union, of course. His briefing book also included the American positions on Korea and on South Asia, where relations between India and Pakistan were fast deteriorating, as well as drafts of the toasts which Kissinger intended to give. The Chinese, he argued, were likely to be tough negotiators. They might well ask that the United States pull its troops out of Taiwan, but the United States had some bargaining chips on its side. China very much wanted to be recognized as a great power, and a summit meeting with Nixon would be ‘spectacular proof ’. The Chinese might also suggest some form of alliance directed against the Soviet Union.7

  On 1 July, the day Kissinger left for Asia, Nixon gave him last-minute instructions with, as Kissinger put it, ‘his invariable hard-line rhetoric with which he sent me off on every mission’. Nixon warned him against being too forthcoming. Kissinger should be ‘somewhat enigmatic’ on Taiwan and not suggest that the United States was abandoning its support for Taiwan ‘until it was necessary to do so’. He should raise three spectres with the Chinese: what he, Nixon, might do if the stalemate in South Vietnam continued, and the threats to China from Japan and the Soviet Union. If the Chinese wanted a summit with him they would have to release all the American POWs shot down on aerial spying missions, be helpful on Vietnam and – this was to appeal to American farmers – accept some grain shipments from the United States. In return, Kissinger could suggest that, once the summit had been held, the United States would be happy to set up a hotline between Beijing and Washington and perhaps make an agreement on avoiding an accidental nuclear war. Nixon’s advice was mostly ‘boilerplate’, Kissinger said dismissively in his memoirs.8

  Although Kissinger had co-opted some foreign service officers to serve at the National Security Council, he had not shared the news of his upcoming trip to China with the State Department, even with Rogers himself. The State Department was understandably puzzled by why the National Security Adviser needed to go off on a fact-finding mission to Asia. It was also concerned that, by going to India and Pakistan, he might be giving the impression that the United States was interfering in their already tense relationship. The secrecy also caused difficulties with Vice-President Agnew, who had to be talked out of a long-planned visit to Chiang Kai-shek which would have placed him in Taiwan just as Kissinger was arriving in Beijing. Although Nixon and Kissinger did not know it until later, one part of the government had ferreted out the secret. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, exasperated by the secrecy around American foreign policy, had set their own spy to work. Charles Radford was assigned from the navy to work as a stenographer and clerk at the National Security Council. He simply made extra copies of all documents that came his way and passed them on to his military superiors.9

  Fortunately for Nixon and Kissinger, their initiative remained secret. Both men of course were taking a considerable risk. Kissinger was going off into the unknown. According to Yahya, he was apprehensive, even frightened, and asked the President of Pakistan to accompany him on that first trip. ‘I told him’, said Yahya, ‘that I’d send one of my generals along, if he wanted moral support, but I personally could not go. Chou En-lai had given me his word that he would look after him.’10 Kissinger was taking a political risk too. If he did not bring back concrete results from his meetings with Chou, his own position in Washington would be weakened and that of the State Department, which had warned all along about rushing too precipitously into negotiations, would be enhanced.

  In 1971, Nixon needed successes, particularly in foreign policy, which he had always claimed as his own. He was already looking ahead to the next presidential election, but his record so far was mixed: the war in Vietnam was grinding on and negotiations with the North Vietnamese were stalemated; Laos and Cambodia were slipping further under Communist influence; and the Soviet Union was being difficult. ‘We’re playing for very high stakes now,’ Nixon had said to Kissinger that April as the Americans waited to hear from the Chinese. ‘We have very little time left, and we cannot diddle around.’11

  Kissinger and his party left Washington on the evening of 1 July. Because all the presidential planes were in use ferrying Nixon to the West Coast or Agnew off to the Middle East and Africa (his compensation for not going to Taiwan), Kissinger was given a converted air force tanker, so old that it needed extra-long runways. ‘On takeoff,’ remarked Kissinger, ‘one had the feeling that the plane really preferred to reach its destination overland.’ While Kissinger had a large, comfortable cabin, the rest of his group, which included Winston Lord, John Holdridge and some others from the NSC and two Secret Service men, were jammed in together along with their typewriters and briefcases. Every so often Kissinger would emerge in his dressing gown to go over his messages. ‘The scene was reminiscent of a Roman galley,’ said Holdridge, ‘with the captain directing imperiously from the stern and the rowers laboring uncomfortably in banks of two along the hull!’ The plane lumbered on to Saigon, Bangkok and then India, where Kissinger had dinner with an intensely suspicious Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. She was covertly supporting the forces in East Pakistan that were rebelling against Yahya’s government and may have suspected that the United States was planning to offer Pakistan assistance.12

  On 8 July, Kissinger reached Rawalpindi in
West Pakistan. He was suffering, so his aides said, from an attack of Delhi belly. A sharp-eyed American diplomat was impressed at how much he nevertheless managed to eat at Ambassador Farland’s buffet lunch. That evening Yahya gave a small private dinner and, as Kissinger continued to complain about his stomach, insisted that his guest must go with his aides into the hills to Yahya’s own bungalow where the cool air would revive him. One of the Secret Service agents with brisk efficiency sent a colleague to check out the presidential quarters; the Pakistan government was forced to keep him there until Kissinger had gone and returned.