At 5:45 the next afternoon Nixon went to a studio in Burbank for his televised 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 protestors shouted, “Get out of Vietnam.” Nixon, who rarely took his staff out to dinner, carried them off to the faded splendor of what had once been a leading Los Angeles restaurant and ordered a hugely expensive bottle of wine. (Ehrlichman later bargained the price down from $600 to $300.)46
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 Democratic 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.47
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 was dragging 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 percent. Thanks largely to Vietnam, huge 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 toward China showed him as a master of foreign policy, the polls were indicating that he had taken a significant lead over Senator Edmund Muskie, his Democratic challenger in the 1972 presidential race. Nixon let the Chinese know that he would prefer that they not let in American politicians before his own trip.48
American allies were divided. The British, who already had diplomatic relations with the Chinese, approved of the change in American policy, but their prime minister, Edward Heath, was deeply hurt by not having been 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 Soviet Union let the United States know that the summit, which the Soviets had postponed, could now take place. While there were no ways 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.”49
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.50
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 Tiranë, 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!”51
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 a real plot against him. By the summer of 1971, Mao had become convinced that his defense minister and chosen successor, Lin Biao, was leading a move to supplant him. (Kissinger, who of course could not have known 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 first encounter with the Americans, the chairman 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.52
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, to even 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, had 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.53
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 a group of like-minded young men about him 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, it was clear that Mao was assembling a case against Lin. On the evening of September 12, 1971, 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.54
The incident led to a major crisis within the top leadership of the People’s Republic. For several days all planes were grounded and the lights burned 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 but that 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 harder 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, who had been born in the United States (Kissinger liked to joke that she could be president while he could not), was Mao’s personal interpreter, Wang Hairong his grandniece. 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.55
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 toward the United States.56 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.57 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.”58 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.”59 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.60 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 Kaishek.” American and Chinese diplomats had talked for sixteen years in Warsaw but, Chou went on, as the Communists had learned during their civil war with the Guomindang, big problems could only be solved 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 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 favorite, Patton.61
CHAPTER 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 whiskey, 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 about making 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 listened to the popular American 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 the team had brought 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, too, 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
Walker, code-named Road Runner after the hyperactive cartoon character, was used to dropping in on cities and towns around the world and bullying and cajoling the locals to make sure that every detail for a presidential visit, including thorough press coverage, was in place. This time, he complained to Washington that he was finding it hard to get clear answers to his demands and questions. When the Chinese head of protocol demurred over a particular arrangement, Walker snapped back, “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you say, we’re going to do it this way. We always do it this way.” The Chinese was puzzled: “What’s a rat’s ass?” When it gradually dawned on him, there was a major crisis, and a senior official had to fly out from Washington to smooth everything over.2 The agreement that Nixon would visit China was the first, most important step, but there were many times in the next few months when it looked as though the visit might never take place. The minuet, in Kissinger’s description, was performed on the edge of a cliff, by dancers who were never quite sure what moves others were about to make.
After Kissinger’s first visit, the Chinese and the Americans used the Paris channel to talk about everything from refueling the American airplanes to relations with the Soviet Union.3 In October, Kissinger traveled back to Beijing to start drafting the joint communiqué that was to be issued by both sides at the conclusion of the president’s visit and to continue work on the arrangements for Nixon’s trip. “China,” Kissinger told Chou, “despite its long experience in handling outsiders, has never undergone anything like the phenomenon of a visit by an American President.”4 Kissinger flew on Air Force One so that the Chinese could get used to dealing with the president’s aircraft. He also brought a much larger party, which included communications and security experts as well as Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, from the White House advance team. This time, too, there was an official representative from the State Department, an experienced China hand named Al Jenkins. “My task,” said Kissinger in his memoirs, “was to give him a sense of participation without letting him in on any key geopolitical discussions, especially the drafting of the communiqué.”5
Kissinger left from the United States this time and landed in Shanghai on October 20. From there two Chinese pilots took over the controls, just as they would when Nixon arrived. In their conversations in Beijing, the Chinese also insisted that Nixon should travel in a Chinese plane for part of his trip within China. It was not usual, Kissinger said, for American presidents to travel on any planes but their own. “It’s on our territory
,” Chou said simply, pointing out that he himself would accompany Nixon. “We will be responsible, and your Secret Service men can also have a look in our plane because everything will be all right.”6
In Beijing, although the American party had no way of knowing it, the repercussions from Lin Biao’s flight were still causing trouble in the upper echelons of the Communist Party. Chou En-lai was much preoccupied with trying to clean up the mess and in fending off attacks from the radicals. At the Diaoyutai, where the Americans were again housed, a ripple from offstage reached them when they discovered copies in their rooms of an English-language news release condemning American imperialists and calling on the people of the world to overthrow them. Kissinger gathered all the releases up and handed them over to a Chinese official with the comment that some previous guests must have left them behind. Chou was furious and embarrassed over what may have been an attempt by radicals in the official Chinese news agency to derail the delicate process of opening up relations with the Americans. He immediately reported the incident to Mao, who made light of it: “Tell the Americans, these are nothing but empty words.” The next day, as Kissinger was driven to the Great Hall of the People, the Chinese deputy foreign minister tried to explain that just as the Americans communicated with one another through newspapers, so did the Chinese through slogans. He showed Kissinger a wall where a poster denouncing the United States had been freshly covered up with a welcome for the Afro-Asian Ping-Pong Tournament.7
The American party stayed in Beijing for a week trying to work out the details, both small and large, of Nixon’s visit. (To guard against Chinese listening devices, they played a tape of Johnny Cash songs; whenever they wanted anything like a cup of tea from the Chinese, they turned the music off and spoke loudly.)8 The Americans toured some of the sights Nixon would see: the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, and the Summer Palace. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, put on one of her famous revolutionary operas for them. Interestingly, the program also contained a performance of a Beethoven symphony by the Beijing Philharmonic, which was appearing for the first time since the Cultural Revolution had started. The communications experts met, trying to reconcile the huge demands of the Americans for rapid communications with the antiquated state of the Chinese telephone system and to make arrangements for satellite transmission. The Americans wanted to bring the president’s special armored limousine; the Chinese insisted that he would be perfectly safe in one of their cars. The issue was finally settled when Nixon said he did not care about which car he used. The American chief of security bewildered the Chinese when he asked them to round up all the usual troublemakers before Nixon arrived. His Chinese counterpart complained about the American’s arrogant manner.9
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