One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “From one extreme to another”

  SO NIXON went to China. And only Nixon, cold warrior playing peacemaker, could have gone to China in that era. The trip was seen at the time as the greatest achievement of his presidency.

  Nixon made sure the world saw it. Live broadcasts, via American military channels, went to the major networks. Millions sipping coffee at breakfast watched Nixon toasting his hosts with mao-tai, the potent Chinese liquor, while the Red Army orchestra played “America the Beautiful” at a sumptuous banquet.

  “It had a tremendous impact back here in the United States,” said Winston Lord, Kissinger’s Chinese-speaking aide, who attended and transcribed all the president’s meetings with the Communist leaders. “In fact, this coverage led to almost instant romance and euphoria. That was overstated. After all, horrible things were still going on in China. We swung from one extreme to another, from picturing China as an implacable enemy to a new friend.”

  Kissinger warned Nixon at the outset that “the intangibles of your China visit will prove more important than the tangible results.” He was right. Very few knew how close the summit came to being a diplomatic debacle. And only in retrospect did future American ambassadors to China, such as Winston Lord, see that romancing the world’s biggest Communist dictatorship would create new tensions and turmoil, after the euphoria was over.

  * * *

  Nixon and his entourage of nearly two hundred Americans spent two days flying across America and the Pacific, stopping in Hawaii and Guam. In a sign of what was to come, Nixon and Kissinger put Secretary of State Rogers and his Asia hands in the rear of Air Force One.

  They landed in Beijing on February 21, 1972. The president was driven through eerily empty streets; the Chinese had barricaded the route. He engaged in informal chitchat with Prime Minister Zhou En-lai and then went to the government’s guest compound, a calm oasis within the cold, gray capital. About ninety minutes later, unannounced and unexpected, Zhou arrived and asked if Nixon would like to see Chairman Mao right now—an utter surprise. The president took off with Kissinger and Lord.

  “We had no idea when they’d be back, or what would happen,” Haldeman wrote.

  Nixon entered the leaders’ compound in the Forbidden City, the immense complex of red-and-gold palaces facing Tiananmen Square, where Chinese emperors had ruled for nearly five hundred years. He walked down a dark, long hallway and into a modestly appointed study. There, attended by two nurses, sat the last of the twentieth century’s great dictators, a frail old man of seventy-eight, but still projecting power.

  The United States knew less about Mao’s China than Mao knew about the United States. Many years would pass before Western eyes saw reliable accounts of the horrors under Mao, the many millions of deaths by starvation caused by his mad schemes to modernize China, the murderous brutality of his political purges, the merciless repression of his rule.

  Mao, like Nixon, was a farmer’s son, born nearly twenty years before the president, in 1893. He became one of the founders of the Communist Party of China in 1921, inspired by Lenin’s Russian Revolution. In 1927, a new Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, began killing and jailing Communists. Mao led a guerrilla army of peasants into the mountains, far south of Beijing. Seven years later, Chiang tried to destroy them. Mao led a strategic retreat, the Long March, to the north. Perhaps two-thirds of the original one hundred thousand Maoists survived the grim trek over mountains and through swamps. While Mao was leading the Long March, Nixon was entering law school.

  Then Japan attacked China in 1937. Chiang made a desperate strategic alliance with Mao. Together, throughout World War II, they fought the Japanese. When Japan was defeated in 1945, Mao and Chiang turned on each other again, and China fell into a brutal civil war. Four years later, in October 1949, Mao triumphed and proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In December 1950, seven weeks after Nixon was elected as a senator, Mao sent an enormous regiment into the Korean War, where his troops slaughtered thousands of American soldiers and altered the tide of battle.

  Chiang fled to the island of Taiwan after Mao’s revolution and established the anticommunist Republic of China; he remained its leader, at the age of eighty-four, when Nixon arrived in Beijing. American support for Taiwan had been absolute for two decades, a political imperative for Republicans. Nixon had been Chiang’s staunch supporter, like every American president since Harry Truman—until now.

  * * *

  Seated in plush leather armchairs in the book-lined study, Nixon and Mao began to exchange pleasantries.

  “I have read the Chairman’s poems and speeches, and I knew he was a professional philosopher,” Nixon said. The Chinese laughed. The two sides bantered. Nixon flattered Mao: “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world.”

  “I haven’t been able to change it,” Mao said flatly. Switching subjects, he turned to Taiwan. “Our common old friend, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek … calls us Communist bandits,” the chairman said. Nixon responded, “What does the Chairman call Chiang Kai-shek?” Zhou replied, “A bandit.… We abuse each other.” Mao said, “Actually, the history of our friendship with him is much longer than the history of your friendship with him.”

  Nixon said, “Yes, I know.”

  Mao abruptly changed topics again. “We two must not monopolize the whole show,” he told Nixon. “It won’t do if we don’t let Dr. Kissinger have a say. You have been famous about your trips to China.”

  “It was the President who set the direction and worked out the plan,” Kissinger said with false modesty.

  “He is a very wise assistant to say it that way,” Nixon responded, drawing laughter from Mao. “He doesn’t look like a secret agent. He is the only man in captivity who could go to Paris twelve times and Beijing once and no one knew it, except possibly a couple of pretty girls.” Now Zhou laughed as Nixon made fun of Kissinger’s reputation as a swinger: “Anyone who uses pretty girls as a cover must be the greatest diplomat of all time.”

  Chairman Mao, who had had many concubines as a younger man, said, “So your girls are very often made use of?”

  President Nixon replied, “It would get me into great trouble if I used girls as a cover.”

  “Especially during elections,” Zhou said, still laughing.

  Nixon tried to return to the hard issues between them: the two Chinas, Vietnam, U.S.-Soviet relations—“the immediate and urgent problems.” But Mao said, “All those troublesome problems, I don’t want to get into very much.” In the remaining half hour, Nixon did most of the talking. Mao’s replies were disjointed. Nixon saw the chairman starting to fade.

  The president concluded: “The chairman’s life is well-known to all of us. He came from a very poor family to the top of the most populous nation in the world, a great nation.… I also came from a very poor family, and to the top of a very great nation. History has brought us together. The question is whether we, with different philosophies, but both with feet on the ground, and having come from the people, can make a breakthrough that will serve not just China and America, but the whole world in the years ahead. And that is why we are here.”

  Mao responded, “It is all right to talk well and also all right if there are no agreements”—an odd note to end on. The two leaders rose, and Mao walked the Americans to the door, moving in a slow shuffle. He told the president that he was not well. Nixon said he looked good. “Appearances are deceiving,” the chairman said. Mao’s last public appearance had taken place on May Day 1971. He would remain an invisible emperor until he died in September 1976.

  * * *

  The question persisted: how would the two sides agree on a joint statement, a communiqué set to be issued at the end of the summit, in Shanghai? Zhou had suggested in his 1971 meetings with Kissinger “a different kind of communiqué, which was unprecedented in diplomatic practice, in which each side would state its own position,” Winston
Lord said. “We had been separated, we had been hostile to each other, and we had these continuing differences. So when we get to agreements, people will believe us because they have seen our candor beforehand.”

  “Frankly, this was a brilliant idea,” Lord said. But nothing else had been agreed to; each word would have to be negotiated that week.

  The Shanghai communiqué had to address the issue of the two Chinas. A dramatic break in the U.S. diplomatic relationship with Taiwan would appall millions of Americans, including prominent members of the Nixon administration. Among those who had declared unswerving support for Taiwan was the American ambassador to the United Nations, George H. W. Bush.

  “The conventional way,” Nixon said to Zhou in a brief meeting before the night’s grand banquet, was “to have discussions and discover differences, which we will do, and then put out a weasel-worded communiqué covering up the problems.” Zhou responded, “If we were to act like that we would be not only deceiving the people, first of all, we would be deceiving ourselves.”

  Through five days of pomp and pageants, featuring a visit to the Great Wall of China—“It truly is a great wall,” Nixon famously said—Kissinger and Lord labored long nights with their Chinese counterparts on the wording of the communiqué. Secretary of State Rogers remained on the sidelines, shut out by Nixon’s orders, at Kissinger’s demand.

  Nixon and Zhou spoke at length about Vietnam. The president asked the prime minister several times to send a message to Hanoi stating that Nixon wanted a military and political settlement, but without overthrowing the Saigon government. He pounded away, hoping the Chinese would help him end the Vietnam War. But that hope was an illusion.

  “Why not give this up?” Zhou told him. “You should adopt a most courageous attitude and withdraw.” China and North Vietnam were not the closest allies, but if the war went on, “we will, of course, continue our aid to them.”

  Zhou insisted time and again that “the Taiwan question is the crucial question.… Once agreement is reached on that, all others can be solved easily.” Nixon replied, “My goal is normalization with the People’s Republic. I realize that solving the Taiwan problem is indispensable to achieving that goal.” But he could not allow his opponents “a chance to seize upon the communiqué and say that the President of the United States came 16,000 miles in order to repudiate a commitment to the government on Taiwan.”

  The president said he would have to “sell” his own secretary of state on a solution. “That is our problem.” Kissinger worked all night to resolve it. The only solution, he concluded, was to allow China to call for “the liberation of Taiwan” and the withdrawal of American military forces from the island. The document was drafted. The president read it and approved.

  Nixon allowed Rogers to meet Zhou at a brief meeting at the Beijing airport on February 26. But he did not allow Rogers to see the communiqué itself until some hours later, at an overnight rest stop in Hangzhou, a resort town one hundred miles outside Shanghai. Rogers showed the text of the communiqué to Marshall Green, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific.

  Green immediately saw a fatal flaw. The communiqué had a paragraph saying that the United States reaffirmed its commitments to all its allies in Asia—with one exception. It did not even mention America’s Cold War treaties with Taiwan.

  “This would almost certainly be seized upon by the world press, and especially by those in the Republican party who were opposed to the President’s trip,” including members of Nixon’s own Cabinet, who would charge that the President had sold Taiwan down the river, Green wrote in a privately published State Department memoir. The language could be interpreted as saying Beijing “could attack Taiwan without involving the U.S.” The secretary of state immediately called the president’s guesthouse. He got Haldeman on the phone instead. Haldeman refused to put Nixon on the line. He said the president had already approved the statement.

  Hours later, after 1:00 a.m., Green was awakened by the news that “all hell had broken loose in the Presidential suite.”

  The mild-mannered secretary of state finally had gotten through to the president to warn him in the strongest language: do not sell out a long-standing ally. Rogers said that “this communiqué was a disaster” and that “President Nixon was going to get killed at home and around the world,” Winston Lord vividly recalled many years later, and now Nixon had to make “a terrible decision.”

  The Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party had already approved the communiqué—and so had the president. But now Nixon feared that the press would surely ferret out the essential fact that the United States was betraying Taiwan. That could turn his great achievement abroad into a political disaster at home.

  “He said: ‘Henry, you’ve got to go back to the Chinese,’” Lord recounted, which was “embarrassing, to say the least. It was our own fault for having cut out the State Department in the negotiations.… The omission of Taiwan would have been glaring.”

  Kissinger dreaded telling Zhou En-lai that the United States needed to reopen the Taiwan issue. The public release of the announcement in Shanghai was set for that evening, Sunday, February 27—and it was already well past midnight.

  * * *

  The presidential party flew to Shanghai in the morning. Zhou En-lai was there, and a farewell banquet was set to take place after the formal release of the communiqué. Zhou made the rounds at the high-rise Ching Kiang government guesthouse, where the Americans were ensconced, making a point of dropping in on Secretary of State Rogers and Marshall Green, whom he had barely seen in the course of the week.

  After Zhou left, the secretary of state again demanded to see the president. Haldeman recorded the confrontation: “Rogers arrived at the suite and said he wanted to see the P. The P originally first said, tell him I’m asleep or something, then he agreed to see him, and had him come in. Rogers made the point that he wasn’t trying to undercut the communiqué, that he would support it, but Rogers did want it understood that there were, in his mind, some real problems.… P clearly hit Bill hard, and said he expected him to tell his bureaucracy to stay behind us 100 percent.”

  Green recalled twenty-five years later that Nixon had the penthouse suite, Kissinger was one flight below, and Rogers was on the next one down—on the thirteenth floor: “The symbolism escaped no one.” He was perplexed when Kissinger invited him to join an off-the-record briefing for American reporters that afternoon. “I was not happy about the prospect of being conspicuously identified with a communiqué I found badly flawed, and it was left unclear whether that flaw would remain,” he recounted. “Kissinger never told me.”

  Not until the briefing was under way, and copies of the communiqué circulated, was it clear that the flawed passage had vanished.

  Kissinger had been up all night, working in secret to avoid a disaster of his own making, and winning Zhou’s tacit approval to rework the statement. At the last minute, “Zhou En-lai handled the matter very skillfully,” Lord said. “He tried to avoid making this situation any more awkward and embarrassing than it really was.” And Kissinger, answering a planted question from a reporter, verbally reaffirmed America’s commitment to Taiwan.

  It was weasel-worded, to quote Nixon, but it worked. The president privately acknowledged, in an Oval Office talk three weeks later, that the communiqué “had very little to do with substance.” The symbolism, the pictures of Nixon and Zhou feasting together, was what would endure. As Haldeman wrote, “The network coverage of four hours, live, of the banquet … got all the facts the P wanted, such as his use of chopsticks, his toast, Zhou’s toast, the P’s glass-clinking, etc. So that came off very well.”

  One last banquet, and many more toasts, and Nixon sat in his Shanghai penthouse, drinking a bottle of Chinese firewater and talking for hours after midnight to the exhausted Kissinger. The tireless teetotaler Haldeman took it in with his gimlet eye: “Henry sitting on the couch just itching to go to bed, which I tried to bring about several times
, but the P made the point that Zhou En-lai stays up all night, so will he. He ordered some Mao Tai and had several of those, which he had also done at dinner, and had at least half a dozen before and during lunch today. He did finally let us go out on his terrace and take a look at Shanghai at night.… Obviously, he was feeling the historic nature of the occasion.”

  * * *

  Shanghai looks east over the Pacific, toward America, and as Nixon cast his gaze over the night sky, he could foresee good fortune. In eleven weeks, he would travel to Moscow for a summit with the Soviets, signing treaties, sealing his status as a great statesman. At home, his Democratic opponents were in disarray. Only one cloud darkened his horizon.

  Zhou En-lai warned Nixon on the morning of February 28, just before he left on Air Force One, “If the war in Vietnam … does not stop, no matter what form it continues in, it will be impossible to relax tensions.” And China would continue its military, economic, and political support for America’s enemy.

  Twelve hundred miles southwest of Shanghai, Hanoi’s leaders were preparing their biggest military campaign against the United States in four years. They had been planning the attacks for nine months. Their official military history laid out their ultimate goal: to force the United States “to negotiate an end to the war from a position of defeat.”

  Nixon knew the offensive was coming—and that it would come at the time and place of the enemy’s choosing. He knew only one way to strike back.

  “We’ll bomb the hell out of the bastards. There’s not going to be anymore screwing around,” Nixon told Kissinger in the Oval Office on March 14. “If they think … I am just going to roll over and play dead, they’re crazy.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “This is the supreme test”

  NIXON HAD only a month to savor the glory of his China trip. On March 30, 1972, he and Kissinger were thinking over May’s summit meeting in Moscow when a news flash hit the Oval Office.

  “It looks as if they are attacking in Vietnam,” Kissinger said.