The Chinese agreed that the announcement would be issued on the evening of Thursday, 15 July, so that the Americans could get good coverage in the weeklies such as Time and Newsweek and in the weekend papers. As the Americans prepared to leave for their flight, Kissinger expressed his hopes that his visit had laid the groundwork for a new friendly relationship between the Americans and the Chinese. Chou said they had taken the first step. He had, said Kissinger, been deeply moved ‘by the idealism and spiritual qualities of yourself and your colleagues’. Chou replied, ‘I suggest that we have a quick lunch.’33
The last meal was a cheerful one with even dour Chinese officials smiling. Chou presented the Americans with Chinese tea, ‘a little token’, and when they boarded the PIA plane the Americans found sets of Mao’s works in English and photograph albums of their visit. On the way to the airport, Marshal Ye talked to Kissinger about his early days fighting for the Communists. None of them on the Long March had thought that they would live to see victory. ‘Yet here we are and here you are.’34
‘Those forty-eight hours, and my extensive discussions with Chou in particular,’ Kissinger wrote in his subsequent memorandum for Nixon, ‘had all the flavor, texture, variety and delicacy of a Chinese banquet. Prepared from the long sweep of tradition and culture, meticulously cooked by the hands of experience, and served in splendidly simple surroundings, our feast consisted of many courses, some sweet and some sour, all interrelated and forming a coherent whole.’ Kissinger found in Chou not only an intellectual equal but an extraordinary and subtle negotiator who never bothered with petty details or with scoring points. The Chinese, he felt, were generally good to negotiate with; they laid out the main things they felt strongly about right at the start. It was such a pleasant change, Kissinger told Nixon, after the Soviets with their pettiness, their bullying and their bluster. Chou for his part thought Kissinger ‘very intelligent’, and, as he said on a later occasion to visiting American newsmen, ‘He can talk for an hour without giving one substantive answer.’35
As the American party headed back towards Pakistan, their secret, amazingly, was still safe. In Rawalpindi, Farland, the American ambassador, put on a convincing display of annoyance to explain why Kissinger was late in coming down from his rest in the hills. ‘That stupid ass is up there in the Muree bazaar arguing about some horrible piece of rug or something, looking for bargains.’ On the other side of the world in Washington, a small group in the State Department inadvertently learned the truth when Marshall Green, the Assistant Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific, joked to his colleagues that Kissinger probably did not have Delhi belly at all but had gone off to China. As he spoke, Green realized what he had just said. He dashed up to see Rogers, who went pale and made him swear that he and his staff would not say another word.36
The Kissinger party finally landed in Pakistan and piled into cars to drive up to meet the road coming down from Muree and then back to the airport. Kissinger stopped briefly to see an excited Yahya and to talk to American officials. Farland managed to get Kissinger to one side: ‘I got everything I wanted,’ Kissinger said. ‘It was a total success on my part. I did a beautiful job.’ At six o’clock that evening, the Americans, back on their own uncomfortable plane, took off for Teheran, where Kissinger had a brief meeting with the Iranian Foreign Minister and sent off a telegram. In California, Haig read its one word – ‘Eureka!’ – and went at once to see the President. Nixon said, ‘Al, I told you so. I told you so.’ Forgetting all his earlier instructions about keeping communications to a minimum, he ordered Kissinger to send an immediate report. ‘Conversations’, wrote back Kissinger, ‘were the most intense, important, and far-reaching of my White House experience.’ He urged Nixon not to talk to anyone, not even Rogers, until he, Kissinger, was back in the United States.37
Early on the morning of 13 July, Kissinger arrived in California. He and Nixon and Haldeman, with some help from Rogers, went over the trip and discussed how to deal with the news over the next few days. What had it meant when Chou wished Kissinger well in his negotiations with the North Vietnamese? How would the Soviet Union react to the announcement that Nixon was going to China? Should Nixon make a dramatic or low-key speech on his television appearance scheduled for 15 July? Haldeman worried about press coverage. Kissinger was exhausted and perhaps a bit let down after all the excitement of the previous days. Rogers was gentlemanly and generous in congratulating him. The President was thrilled and excited and longing to spill the news. On 14 July, he took the distinguished British journalist Henry Brandon and his wife around the garden at San Clemente. He hinted that he was about to make a major statement and stopped to pick a white Peace rose for Mrs Brandon. By the time he had finished struggling with the stem, it had almost no petals left.38
At 5.45 the next evening, Nixon went to a studio in Burbank for his speech. He spoke briefly, revealing that Kissinger had held talks with Chou En-lai in Beijing. He then read out the announcement that Kissinger and Chou had agreed on. He was taking this step, Nixon said, because of his conviction that all nations would benefit from a better relationship between the United States and China. ‘It is in this spirit that I will undertake what I deeply hope will become a journey for peace, peace not just for our generation but for future generations on this earth we share together.’ He reassured old friends, and, without mentioning it by name, the Soviet Union, that the United States did not intend to harm any nation with its new relationship. As he left, a handful of protesters shouted, ‘Get out of Vietnam.’ Nixon, who rarely took his staff out to dinner, carried them off to the faded splendour of what had once been a leading Los Angeles restaurant and ordered an exceptionally expensive bottle of wine. (Ehrlichman later bargained the price down from $600 to $300.)39
Although Nixon had been braced for loud criticism from the right, his announcement was greeted with general approval and even enthusiasm in the United States. The Senate Democrat leader, Mike Mansfield, said, ‘I am astounded, delighted and happy.’ Enthusiastic entrepreneurs dreamed, as their predecessors had done a century earlier, of huge untapped markets. The State Department heard from a casket-maker in Texas who wanted to be the first to sign up Chinese for American coffins for their ancestors. The agent for a nightclub singer tried to get Kissinger to help arrange a tour of China’s nightclubs.40
A few conservatives, and inevitably the China lobby, grumbled about surrendering to Communism, but Nixon did his best to reassure them. They should realize, he told Haldeman, that the opening to China was useful against the Soviets and would help in Vietnam. It also helped Nixon. The Vietnam War dragged on and the negotiations in Paris with the North Vietnamese were not producing significant results. He was struggling domestically. The economy was in trouble, with inflation running at over 7 per cent. Thanks largely to Vietnam, massive holdings of American dollars were now in foreign hands, and the booming economies of countries such as Japan and West Germany were producing goods to challenge American exports. Nixon was under pressure to impose wage-and-price controls and to devalue the American dollar. By late August, thanks in part to the way in which his move towards China showed him as a master of foreign policy, the polls were indicating that he had taken a significant lead over Senator Ed Muskie, his Democratic challenger in the presidential race of 1972. Nixon let the Chinese know that he would prefer that they did not allow in American politicians before his own trip.41
American allies were divided. The British, who already had diplomatic relations with the Chinese, approved of the change in American policy, but Prime Minister Edward Heath was deeply hurt by not being taken into Nixon’s confidence. The Western Europeans were generally pleased; leaders such as Willy Brandt in West Germany hoped that the Soviet Union might now become more amenable to better relations between East and West in Europe. The Japanese were insulted by being told only at the last moment and the Taiwanese were furious and very worried. The Soviet leadership was, according to an adviser to Brezhnev, ‘in a state of confusion, if
not shock’. Many feared that China was moving into the American camp and might even form a common front against the Soviet Union. The Soviets told the United States that the summit, which they had postponed, could now take place. While there was no way of gauging Chinese public opinion, one person at least was happy. ‘With this move by the Chairman,’ exclaimed the old Marshal Chen Yi, ‘the whole game is enlivened.’42
Two days after Kissinger left Beijing, Chou En-lai flew to Hanoi to reassure the North Vietnamese that China was not abandoning them. Indeed, he argued, better relations between China and the United States would eventually convince the Americans that they need not worry about Asia but should concentrate on Europe and the Soviet challenge there. That in turn would help North Vietnam bargain with the United States. The North Vietnamese were not persuaded. China, in their view, was ‘throwing a life buoy to Nixon who had been drowning’. When the North Vietnamese Prime Minister visited Mao later that year he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Chairman not to receive Nixon. The busts of Mao and copies of his Little Red Book started to vanish from the Hanoi shops as the Chinese move became yet another in the litany of grievances Hanoi had against Beijing.43
Chou then flew on to North Korea to deliver a similar message. Back in Beijing, he met with Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, who had been exiled from his own country by an American-backed general, and with the Albanian ambassador. Sihanouk had little choice but to accept the news. In Tirana, Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator, was shocked. ‘The Chinese’, he wrote in his diary, ‘have made a major opportunist mistake, have shown themselves to be rightists and their action is revisionist and to be condemned.’ He was also furious that he, such a loyal ally to the Chinese, had been kept in the dark. ‘What shamelessness on the part of the Chinese!’ he complained. ‘We, naturally, were to be informed after the Prince of Cambodia!’44
In the months after Kissinger’s visit, the Chinese also faced a major political crisis at home. It is still not clear whether this arose from Mao’s paranoid fantasies or from a real plot against him. By the summer of 1971, he had become convinced that his Defence Minister and chosen successor, Lin Biao, was leading a move to supplant him. (Kissinger, who of course could not know this, had brought a present for Lin.) In a typically indirect move, Mao ordered several generals close to Lin to make self-criticisms. On the night of Kissinger’s first day in Beijing, when Chou was briefing Mao on his opening encounter with the Americans, the Chairman had spent an hour on the issue of whether or not the generals were really sincere. They were not, he concluded. Moreover, behind them, ‘someone’ was plotting.45
Being close to the Chairman had always been dangerous, as Lin well knew, and he had done his best to avoid doing anything that might make Mao see him as a rival. During the Cultural Revolution he had turned the People’s Liberation Army into Mao’s tool. He energetically held up Mao and Mao Tse-tung Thought as the infallible guides for China and for revolution. His standard response, even to the most outlandish of Mao’s decrees, was ‘If the Chairman has expressed his approval, then I approve.’ He had asked Mao not to name a successor at all and, when Mao had insisted, reacted by doing his best to avoid any decisions. Lin may not have been entirely sane. He had been in ill health ever since he was badly wounded in the war against Japan in 1938. There were stories that he had become a morphine addict, cured only after a trip to the Soviet Union, and later reports that he restored himself by inhaling fumes from a motorcycle he kept in his house. He panicked at the sound of water and hated going outside. He had to have shots of what was said to be vitamin C before he went out in public or received foreign dignitaries. During the Cultural Revolution, he stayed in seclusion at his house, working as little as possible.46
While he had occasionally intervened to protect the People’s Liberation Army from being seriously disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, Lin’s advice to a subordinate who faced attack was ‘You should be passive, passive, and passive again.’ It had not worked and now Mao was attacking Lin’s closest associates and muttering darkly that Lin had said things that were not ‘particularly proper’. Lin’s son, an ambitious air force officer, had gathered about him a group of like-minded young men who were concerned about the continuing chaos of the Cultural Revolution and who feared for China’s future. He was also rightly worried that his father was about to suffer the same fate as other eminent Communists such as the disgraced former President Liu Shaoqi. The group may have simply talked or may have actually started plotting a seizure of power.
By the second week of September 1971, it was clear that Mao was assembling a case against Lin. On the evening of 12 September, Lin’s son apparently persuaded his parents, who were resting in the resort town of Beidaihe, to board a plane he had standing by. They would run either south to Guangdong or north to the Soviet Union, as far from Mao as possible. Lin’s daughter, an unhappy and troubled young woman who deeply resented her mother for pushing her into a marriage she did not want, informed the authorities. For some reason, and we may never know what it was, the plane with the elder Lins and their son was allowed to take off. It crossed out of China over Outer Mongolia and apparently ran out of fuel. None of those on board survived.47
The incident led to a major crisis within the top leadership of the People’s Republic. For several days all planes were grounded and staff worked late in government buildings in Beijing as the limousines came and went. Party officials and gradually the Chinese public were fed a string of improbable stories about how Lin had been a traitor for years and how Mao, out of the goodness of his heart, had kept hoping to redeem him. Mao himself, according to his doctor, was extremely depressed at Lin’s apparent betrayal.
Increasingly, access to Mao was controlled by his bodyguards and his young women. As his health failed and his slurred speech and thick Hunanese accent became increasingly difficult to make out, his close companion Zhang Yufeng became more and more important as one of the few people who understood him. When he met foreign visitors, he was invariably accompanied by one or more of what people in the Foreign Ministry called ‘the five golden flowers’. The two most important were nicknamed the Mesdemoiselles Wang-Tang. Nancy Tang was Mao’s personal interpreter, Wang Hairong his grand-niece. Both had risen to prominence and to high office during the Cultural Revolution by attacking their seniors in the foreign ministry. Both enjoyed their new power and became increasingly arrogant and self-righteous. Wang, of course, had the added advantage of being related to Mao and could stop all argument by claiming that she was relaying the sacred words of the Chairman himself.48
When what came to be known as the Lin Biao affair finally leaked out in the autumn of 1971, the Americans assumed that part of the trouble, perhaps the major issue, between Lin and Mao was Mao’s shift towards the United States. Lin, after all, had always been vociferously anti-American in his public statements. But that was true of all the Chinese leaders, including Mao himself. Lin may well have disliked the idea of a rapprochement with the United States but there is little firm evidence to date that he told Mao so. In a speech to party officials that December, it is true, Chou said, ‘That US–China relations are a betrayal of principle, of revolution, of Vietnam, as Lin Biao said, is nonsense and an insult to the Party.’ By this point, the dead Lin was being accused of all sorts of crimes. In his first conversation with Nixon, Mao also dropped hints: ‘In our country, also there is a reactionary group which is opposed to our contact with you. The result was that they got on an airplane and fled abroad.’49 On the other hand, Lin had survived over the years by subordinating himself to Mao, not by disagreeing with him.
From the American perspective, whatever its causes, Lin’s disappearance removed a possible focus of opposition to Mao’s shift in policy. It also made the violently anti-American radicals such as Mao’s own wife, Jiang Qing, draw back, while Chou En-lai, who was known to agree with Mao, gained in authority. Word went out to party officials to prepare for Nixon’s visit by studying Mao’s negotiations with the Guomindang
after the Second World War. ‘Why shouldn’t we negotiate with President Nixon?’ Chou asked a visiting British journalist. ‘For instance, in the past we talked with Chiang Kai-shek.’ American and Chinese diplomats had talked for sixteen years in Warsaw, but, Chou went on, the Communists had learned during their civil war with the Guomindang that big problems could be solved only by talking to the man at the top. To get ready for Nixon, the top Communist leaders watched American movies and American-made television shows on technology. Chou, who had taken personal charge of the planning for the visit, ordered that all officials under the age of fifty who were going to be involved with the visit learn English. (It was optional for the rest.) He also prepared himself by reading parts of Nixon’s Six Crises and watching that Nixon favourite, Patton,.50
13
Getting Ready
IN FEBRUARY 1972, Ron Walker, head of the White House advance team, arrived in China with his party of nearly a hundred technicians and specialists to prepare for Nixon’s visit. They took with them tons of equipment and emergency supplies, from American toilet paper to whisky, to a world where there were, in those days, no ice cubes, no telexes and no hamburgers. They found the Chinese hospitable, polite and very concerned to make the Nixon trip a success. What exactly did the President eat for lunch? What temperature would he like his villa to be?
Both sides found their new relationship challenging, occasionally difficult and frequently bewildering. What, asked a young interpreter who had heard the Americans’ favourite song, ‘American Pie’, did the line about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost mean? An American who tried to explain was startled when the interpreter said she had never heard of Jesus. From time to time, the Chinese joined the Americans to watch movies brought out from the United States, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. One day, to much embarrassment, a Chinese official walked in on a showing of The Graduate, just as Mrs Robinson was undressing. There were potentially more serious incidents, like the evening a homesick technician smoked too much of the marijuana and drank too much of the vodka he had brought with him and set his hotel room on fire.1
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