Cowan next began to explain how Californian hippie communes were different from their Chinese counterparts, that theirs was an American revolutionary culture. That was too much for Errol Resek, the Dominican immigrant. “Why the hell do you keep talking to them about revolution?” Resek interrupted. “What do you know about revolution? I come from the Dominican Republic. I know about revolution. You don’t.” Cowan stared at him nonplussed. Where did the aggression come from?
Dick Miles interviewed Tannehill before they left Shanghai. Did he really want to stay in China? No, said Tannehill, he wanted to go back to Cincinnati and keep on “developing myself and helping others. Like living for the revolution.”
“Nonviolent,” asked Miles, “or violent?”
“Nonviolent for now. Till we get enough people behind us.”
On the steps to the plane back to Guangzhou, Tannehill squeezed the last round of applause from Shanghai by waving his silk-screen portrait of Chairman Mao at the small crowd who had gathered to see the team off.
Their last evening in China was spent with Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife, who treated the team to a performance of her revolutionary ballet, The Red Detachment of Women. It was a stultifying political polemic crafted by Jiang herself to explain the central tenets of the Cultural Revolution, yet some of the team managed to find things to admire in the grace of the flying bodies that crossed the stage. They were at least more polite than Kissinger would be. Months from now, when he was subjected to his first piece of revolutionary opera, he’d call it “an art form of stupefying boredom [in which] as far as I could make out, a girl fell in love with a tractor.”
The next morning, they boarded the train to the border. As they walked back across the bridge into Hong Kong’s New Territories, they could see the dense pack of press waiting for them. Boggan estimated that six hundred newsmen were now covering their story. Cowan looked up at the mass of men draped in cameras and recording equipment and said, “There are the vultures.”
As the Chinese waved good-bye, the calculations were already being computed in Beijing. The “Chinese had carefully analyzed each member of the US team on their arrival and had found an array of attitudes towards China.” And now? “On departure, however, Chinese found all team members unanimous in expressing satisfaction over warmth of reception, treatment received, and progress of China.” By Chinese standards, the visit had already been judged a success.
The press rode beside the Americans on the second train from the bridge into Hong Kong. Judy Bochenski, the youngest of the group, remembered the trip as mayhem, with “cameras and elbows in our faces.” An AP reporter bought the film right out of her camera for $200 without any idea of what it might contain. The Ping-Pong players hadn’t seen how the world had covered their trip. Now the reporters slapped copies of various front pages into their laps. “Look,” said a man pushing a newspaper at the teenage Bochenski, “there you are with Zhou Enlai!”
For the first few minutes, Steenhoven presumed to speak for everyone, muttering one or two of his paternal aphorisms. The newsmen swept over the party. The group was bound to splinter. Individuals were surrounded and dragged away into private conversation. But something strange happened that the players didn’t notice.
The usual routine for any American coming out of China was for the US Consulate in Hong Kong to interview them extensively and send the information directly to Washington. Kissinger had decided against this and ordered the consulate “to stay away from these people coming and going,” saying that they should stick to the channel already open—Bill Cunningham waiting in Tokyo, where they would board their flights home. The telegram from Washington was very specific. “No repeat no contacts should be initiated without prior direct approval.”
Once in Tokyo, Steenhoven and Harrison checked into a hotel. Steenhoven changed into a rumpled blue suit, walked out the door without telling Harrison, and waited on a street corner a few blocks away. A taxi pulled up with the passenger window wound down. “Steenhoven?” Graham Steenhoven nodded and got in. Cunningham looked at Steenhoven, noted his exhausted appearance, and gave the driver the address of his house about three miles from the center of Tokyo.
While the US team had been touring eastern China, Cunningham had been manning the phones, inundated by calls and accusations. The Japanese Foreign Ministry and most embassies had hounded him with the same questions: “Was the United States government behind this? Was Steenhoven working for the CIA?”
When Steenhoven walked into Cunningham’s house, he was immediately greeted as Fred by Mrs. Cunningham. Steenhoven corrected her. “Graham,” he said. Mrs. Cunningham replied, “Our kids will just be delighted to tell everybody that Fred Graham had breakfast with us this morning.” Finally, it clicked—the house was most likely bugged. The truth was less dramatic. Cunningham didn’t want his five young children blurting Steenhoven’s name in a local playground and having locals tying the trip to the Tokyo Embassy.
To Steenhoven’s credit, he immediately brought up his concerns about Tannehill, calling him an “unsophisticated youth in unusual circumstances.” What Cunningham really wanted to know was whether there were any specific messages from the Chinese. Yes, said Steenhoven, he was carrying a message that the Chinese wanted conveyed directly to President Nixon. “Zhou Enlai told me that they want to send a team to the United States.”
Back in Beijing, Zhou Enlai was magnificently coy. “Sometimes, one single event can bring about strategic changes,” he noted. “The inevitability of things usually appears in the contingency of things. Similarly strategic changes often express themselves in trivial details.” A State Department spokesman tried to downplay the moment, calling it a “conscious if limited diplomatic initiative by Peking.” But a Gallup poll quickly conducted in the United States revealed something else entirely. For the first time ever the number of Americans in favor of China’s inclusion in the United Nations had vaulted to a positive majority.
CHAPTER 45 | Nixon’s Game
That summer, in the dusty hills of Pakistan, Henry Kissinger’s car wound up the sweeping roads to the Pakistani presidential retreat near Murree. The national security adviser had announced his plan to spend the next two days recovering from a serious bout of stomach flu. It was far from the truth. The suited man resting in the backseat of the government car wasn’t even Henry Kissinger but a double.
The elaborate deception had begun at a state dinner the night before, with the full cooperation of Pakistani president Yahya Khan. Kissinger rose at 3:30 AM and drove to Chaklala Airport in a red Volkswagen Beetle. He boarded a Boeing 707, where seven Chinese awaited him, including Mao’s own interpreter, the Brooklyn-born Nancy Tang, herself so high-ranking “that she did not hesitate to argue with Zhou En-lai” in the presence of visiting diplomats. Three months earlier, she had sat next to Glenn Cowan at the revolutionary ballet in Shanghai and explained “how every move, every gesture, every line had a symbolic meaning.” In Chinese culture, Cowan had learned, everything meant something.
Kissinger was accompanied by six Americans, including his special assistant, Winston Lord. Lord waited until they were at 30,000 feet and nearing the Himalayas before entering the cockpit to sit with the pilots. As the plane whipped over the border toward Beijing, Lord secured his position as the first American diplomat in China in two decades. Only when they were in Chinese airspace did Kissinger realize he had failed to pack a clean shirt. He would be meeting Zhou Enlai in a borrowed white shirt three sizes too big. It still carried the Made in Taiwan label inside the collar.
The US table tennis team had been invited to China just three months previously, on April 8. In the Oval Office that morning, toward the end of a ranging conversation, Kissinger mentioned to President Nixon, “I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, incidentally, but the Chinese have invited the American Ping-Pong team.”
“No,” said Nixon.
“To visit China,” continued Kissinger. “Maybe it doesn’t mean a damn thing. On the ot
her hand—”
“A lot,” said Nixon, interrupting.
“Exactly,” said Kissinger.
There followed a pause in which, it’s tempting to imagine, the minds of both men rushed through the momentous possibilities that might unfold. What were the Chinese up to? Nixon and Kissinger had fired off their last message to Zhou Enlai over three months before. The main worry was that the entire initiative had died. Ping-Pong was obviously a signal, but what kind? Was it official? Should the White House count it as such? If so, was it their turn to respond?
After the American table tennis team had landed in Beijing and the reports started to flood back, both Nixon and Kissinger were fascinated at the speed with which the fairy dust of table tennis was changing the way Americans thought about Red China. Nixon wrote, “I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.” Kissinger had other worries. What if the table tennis team “screwed up all these back channel plans that we had very carefully been trying to put in place?”
In the days to come, Nixon’s favorite line with visitors to the Oval Office was, “Have you learned to play Ping-Pong yet?” The last time the game had been so keenly noted in Washington was during its first crazed boom and bust in 1902, when “justices of the Supreme Court, members of the cabinet . . . play and talk about Ping-Pong as though it were one of the most important affairs in life.” Now, apparently, it actually was.
On April 13, the day before Glenn Cowan “laid his rap” on Zhou Enlai, President Nixon was on the phone with his assistant for international economic affairs. If the Ping-Pong team’s presence truly heralded a détente, then Nixon knew that history was up for grabs. The memorandum they were preparing was fine, announced Nixon, “except that rather than thirteen months ago, it was twenty months ago that we started this initiative with regard to the Chinese.” Nixon deserved much credit for the initiative, but success without recognition was worthless, especially nearing an election year.
Be sure we get the tone, The Chinese thing is going just the way we want it. . . . I don’t want us to appear to be exploiting it. . . . Say that the President took the initiative and it was my decision . . . you can honestly say that there was some opposition in the Foreign Service, some of the Kremlinologists, because they were concerned about . . . our Soviet relations. That Ping-Pong team is worrying them right up the wall.
Russian anxiety was obvious from the reports of American ambassadors stationed around the world. In Australia, the Soviet ambassador “warned that US did not understand what kind of people it was dealing with in China.” The Soviet ambassador to Uganda, Kurdyukov, advised that the Americans “must be very, very careful with PRC.” The Chinese, he assured the State Department, “are racists” and “very, very tricky.” In Laos, the Soviet ambassador “made big show of demonstrating annoyance at recent developments in US-PRC situation” and suggested that the US ambassador “learn Ping-Pong quickly.” He facetiously told his American counterpart that if there were any questions about Southeast Asia, “Nixon could ask Mao when he visited Peking” or when the Chinese came to New York for a UN session. These would turn out to be extraordinarily prescient words.
On April 16, after 11:00 PM, Kissinger and Nixon were discussing China again. Nixon was seeking reassurance that he hadn’t gone too far in talking to the press that morning, when he’d expressed his hopes that maybe his children, or even the president himself, might one day visit China. No, said Kissinger, “it was a human touch. Very moving.”
“If we make the breakthrough in China, this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in twenty years, Henry.”
Kissinger agreed. “It’s a historic turning point.”
There was a small pause. Then the president said, “No dove could have done this.”
Winston Lord, Kissinger’s special assistant, remained skeptical. He knew that there still might be an edge to China’s positive gesture. Zhou Enlai’s table tennis overtures contained a “subtle warning.” The North Vietnamese had already proved that they could undercut American leverage by “dealing publicly with the Jane Fondas of the world” while remaining tough in the actual negotiations. What if the Chinese started to play with the goodwill engendered through table tennis? One worrying report was filed from the American Embassy in Rome, where an “unknown Chinese” was overheard explaining that “The recent visit of American Ping-Pong players meant strengthening of friendship with American people and, therefore weakening of imperialist camp.” The report went on to insinuate that the recent antiwar protests in Washington were the fruit of Chinese policy. Was this really a breakthrough, as Kissinger and Nixon were now presuming, or could it be a setup?
Lord kept his worries to himself. Vice President Spiro Agnew did not. He ruffled Nixon’s feathers by calling in nine reporters for a three-hour off-the-record chat that went straight into the next day’s papers. Agnew called the Ping-Pong visit “a propaganda beating” for the United States.
If Agnew’s comment upset Nixon, what really rankled was Beijing’s official silence. The US decision whether or not to respond to the table tennis tour would have to be taken in a vacuum. Nixon and Kissinger decided to hold back to avoid seeming overeager. To do otherwise, despite the ocean of newsprint inspired by the table tennis players, would be to suggest that Ping-Pong was directed by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On April 23, the White House suffered a reminder of how the Vietnam War could grab the headlines again. More than a thousand veterans marched on Washington, “approached the wire fence around the Capitol and pitched the medals . . . over the fence.”
Four days later, on April 27, contact with the Chinese was finally reestablished through the Pakistani channel, ending an American anxiety that had dated back to the unanswered communication in January. Zhou Enlai made no reference to table tennis. “The Chinese Govt,” he wrote, “reaffirms its willingness to receive publically in Peking a special envoy of the President of the US (for instance, Mr. Kissinger) or the US Secy of State or even the President of the US himself for a direct meeting and discussions.” Since the secretary of state had been kept out of the loop, Nixon chose Kissinger, quelling his own worry that despite being the instigator of China policy, he was about to let his national security adviser become “the mystery man of the age.”
Kissinger first proposed that he meet Zhou Enlai “preferably at some location within convenient flying distance from Pakistan to be suggested by the People’s Republic of China.” Kissinger would be 2,800 miles from Islamabad, 7,000 miles from Washington, DC. Zhou would be a short walk from his own bed. Not only was Zhou the more experienced statesman by some twenty-three years, but he was the premier of a country deigning to meet with a mere national security adviser. Just as he had soothed the table tennis players into the role of grateful guests, in Beijing Zhou could now play the role of a welcoming dean to Kissinger’s bemused freshman.
Nixon and Kissinger deserved much credit. They had been like a pair of fishermen skimming international waters with a dozen hooks trailing their boat. But Zhou made sure that when he bit, their boat was in Chinese waters. The speed, the method of delivery, and the chosen moment were all controlled by the Chinese. Considering the difference in the strength of the two nations, it was a diplomatic feat by Mao and Zhou when compared to the utter chaos of Mao’s domestic policies. With Soviets on their borders, a nation traumatized and isolated by the Cultural Revolution, and a still largely agricultural economy, they had played their hand well against industrialized, powerful America. Table tennis had been the catalyst but, vitally, one that the Americans had not seen coming.
Kissinger’s mission in Beijing was to establish contact with Zhou and lay the groundwork for a possible meeting between Mao and Nixon. To the rest of the world, that idea still seemed preposterous. But for the four men at the center of this vortex, Kissinger and Nixon, Zhou and Mao, it remained highly desirable.
As Kissinger’s plane descended, he had much to be preoccupied by. Pla
y his cards well, and he could hasten the end of the Vietnam War, bring the Soviets to heel, and draw 800 million Chinese out of self-imposed isolation.
Zhou led off the discussion:
The first question is that of equality . . . all things must be done in a reciprocal manner. . . . Recently we invited the US table tennis delegation to China—perhaps you met some of them—and they can bear witness that the Chinese people welcomed this visit of the American people. We have also received many repeated invitations from the US Table Tennis Association to send a delegation to the US. We feel this shows that the US people want to welcome the Chinese people.
“We have talked to Mr. Steenhoven,” said Kissinger.
Zhou nodded. “He recently sent us a cable.”
The conversation wandered far and wide. Kissinger reasserted Nixon’s wish to keep their meeting secret, “so we can meet unencumbered by bureaucracy, free of the past, and with the greatest possible latitude.”
“You don’t like bureaucracy either,” said Zhou.
“Yes,” said Kissinger, “and it’s mutual; the bureaucracy doesn’t like me.”
Both men showed off a deep and supple knowledge of the world’s balance of power over hundreds of years and, above all, a mutual suspicion of Russia. The Soviet Union, said Zhou, “will also be defeated as it stretches out its hand so far.” Kissinger sympathized, “Even today their constant probing makes it very hard to have a real settlement with them.” Zhou allowed himself something close to self-congratulation, “You saw just throwing a Ping-Pong ball has thrown the Soviet Union into such consternation.”
CHAPTER 46 | Political Ping-Pong
If Zhou Enlai believed he held any leverage, it was partly thanks to the publication on the front page of the New York Times of information about the Pentagon Papers just weeks before, revealing the desperate state of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia and how the prime objective of policy for years had been to avoid a humiliating defeat.
Ping-Pong Diplomacy Page 24