Zhou was also aware that Nixon had an election to win. When Glenn Cowan was talking to Zhou, the president and Kissinger had been almost giddy at the relief the Ping-Pong story was providing them. Nixon asked how the coverage of the table tennis tour had been that day. “It was tremendous,” Kissinger answered. “The lead item on television.” “Rather than Vietnam for a change,” exhaled the president. And the newspaper editors Kissinger had just met with, asked Nixon. What did they think? “Intrigued by China,” said Kissinger.
To remove Vietnam from the front pages, Kissinger was willing to put almost anything on the table with Zhou Enlai, especially the issue of Taiwan—the sine qua non for China’s Communists. As Nixon would soon write, “1. Taiwan—most crucial. 2. V. Nam—most urgent.” By the end of the two days, both men were talking as if Taiwan returning to China was an inevitability, despite the fact that America and Taiwan shared a mutual defense treaty. As an added bonus, Kissinger made it clear that Chiang Kai-shek’s seat in the United Nations was within reach, something Zhou probably thought probable with or without Kissinger’s help. “You would get the Taiwan seat now,” Kissinger told Zhou, suggesting that the United Nations and the United States were suddenly on track to follow Montagu’s move to bring China into his federation by nudging Taiwan into limbo.
If Ping-Pong remained a metaphor for communication, attack, and defense, then Kissinger’s talks with Zhou were the real thing. Kissinger wrote to President Nixon as he flew back from Beijing; at first his tone was almost breathless: “It is extremely difficult to capture in a memorandum the essence of this experience,” since it was “an event so shaped by the atmosphere and the ebb and flow of our encounter, or to the Chinese behavior, so dependent on nuances and style.”
Kissinger was hardly naïve, though it seemed he was occasionally in danger of being overwhelmed by his sense of his own place in the American narrative. “We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history,” he wrote to Nixon. “But we should have no illusions about the future. Profound differences and years of isolation yawn between us and the Chinese.”
Back in Beijing, Marshal Chen Yi felt deep relief. His advice had been followed. He might have been acting unofficially, but his recommendation to stride toward America and distance China from the Kremlin had been followed by Mao. “With this move by the Chairman,” said Chen, “the whole game is enlivened.”
In the middle of July 1971, the president appeared on television with an urgent message for the nation. Nixon explained to America that Kissinger had been in Beijing and that he himself would fly to China to meet with Mao Zedong the following February.
In his mother’s house in California, William Cunningham was stunned. He wasn’t alone. The moment actually introduced the word shokku (shock) into the Japanese language. The US ambassador to Japan had already noted that the table tennis invitation had caused “exquisite nerve twitching” in April. But now, in July, he was halfway through a haircut when he heard the news; he was so upset that he threw the barber out of his office. The State Department’s top Asia hand, Ambassador Marshall Green, had also been kept out of Kissinger and Nixon’s tiny loop. Thanks to his exclusion, he was considered by his colleagues to have been a broken man at the time.
In February 1972 Nixon rolled into China in the wake of the largest advance team in presidential history. Air force planes touched down carrying “tons of equipment,” including everything from cameras, microphones, and Xerox machines to whiskey and American toilet paper. When the president himself finally arrived, his wife was by his side in a startling red coat. It was her own fashion gesture to the Beijingers who greeted her, the color of celebration favored for the New Year. Once again the Chinese were the hosts, and Americans watched their every word. Not once in the State Department’s official record of the trip, “including the speeches, toasts and press conferences,” was the word “Communist” used.
The banquet Zhou Enlai hosted for Nixon garnered the second-largest television audience in American history, after the first lunar landing. The images were as incongruous as the previous year’s Ping-Pong visit, but this time they were live. They showed “the Chinese army playing American songs in the Great Hall of the People, and Nixon and Zhou Enlai clinking glasses at a banquet.” This was the same Beijing administration that had compared Nixon’s first foreign visit to Europe as a presidential nominee to “a rat running across the street.”
Zhou himself chose the song “America the Beautiful.” It rang out across the world and caused either amazement or conniptions, depending on your politics. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s dictator and old friend to China, emptied his bile into his diary. “The orchestra at the banquet played ‘America the Beautiful’! . . . America, the center of fascism and barbarous imperialism!”
With such startling images being broadcast simultaneously on every US television network, it was easy to forget the sequence of events that had led to the president’s visit. Before his banquet had come the American table tennis banquet. A decade before that was the banquet for the teams from thirty-two Ping-Pong-playing nations, held in the midst of the famine. And another decade before that, when an American secretary of state refused even to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai, there was a handshake and a banquet for Ivor Montagu.
For the audience watching back in America, those most amazed were the missing generation of China watchers—not because a breakthrough had been made, but because it was clear their absence had left a wasteland. Watching Nixon and Kissinger “as they hobnobbed with their hosts in Peking and Shanghai, they kept explaining to each other, ‘My God, they don’t know who’s sitting next to them!’ ”
Mao had not attended the Nixon banquet. Increasingly frail, he had signaled his approval of the president’s visit by inviting Nixon to meet with him within two hours of the president’s arrival. To enter Mao’s room, the visitors had to walk past the table tennis table. Kissinger, Nixon, and Lord shook hands with the Chairman. They talked of everything from Mao’s recent betrayal by Lin Biao, his number two, who had objected to the détente with the Americans and then died in a suspicious plane crash, to Mao’s opinion that Nixon had been correct in wanting to meet rather than let the most contentious issue of Taiwan separate them forever. “I saw you were right,” said Mao to Nixon, “and we played Ping-Pong.”
Ping-Pong remained the metaphor through which to study the Chinese. On Nixon’s second night in Beijing, when the city’s populace was ordered to clear a sudden snowfall from the streets, the president was treated to a performance by Chinese athletes and table tennis players. There was Zhuang Zedong, dashing around in front of the first lady and her husband. Nixon called their performance “superb.” Later that night he confided to his diary:
Not only we but all the people of the world will have to make our best effort if we are going to match the enormous ability, drive and discipline of the Chinese people. Otherwise we will one day be confronted with the most formidable enemy that has ever existed in the history of the world.
If Nixon always regarded the détente with China as the pinnacle of his presidency, then Ping-Pong had provided not only the catalyst but also a sobering coda. Table tennis, Kissinger admitted, “had played a huge role” in April 1971. As propaganda it had opened a new door and opened it wide. Since Zhou Enlai stressed how important reciprocation was, the onus was on America to host a return visit. A Chinese Communist Party delegation would be heading to the United States for the first time. These were not political innocents, like the US team; they were the Ping-Pong-playing extension of the Chinese government, or, as one player put it, not just an “important adjunct in the communist struggle” but “an instrument of subversion.”
PART FOUR | Aftermath
CHAPTER 47 | Return Game
In the spring of 1972, the National Committee on United States–China Relations was putting the last touches on the upcoming visit of the Chinese table tennis team. Since the USTTA had trouble raising enough money to attend a Wo
rld Championship, let alone funding an eight-city whistle-stop tour, the National Committee was in charge of organizing the two-week event and had turned to more than 125 sponsors. If the China tour the previous year had smelled strongly of politics, this was a more American recipe of individuals, businesses, cities, and states.
China’s input in the tour would come from its new UN mission, itself a direct result of the warmth engendered by Ping-Pong diplomacy. To help coordinate the trip, the National Committee’s president, Carl Stover, had set up a tiny temporary office in New York’s old Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue, where he worked with his young consultant for press affairs, Marcia Burick. As the two returned from lunch one day, Burick unlocked the door to the hotel room. It swung open. The room had been ransacked.
Burick had been shopping at Saks that morning; for an instant, she worried about her purchases. Oddly, they were still there. In fact, as she and Stover rummaged through the mess, it seemed as if “the only thing missing was the tour schedule for the team with the plane flights, hotels, everything.” Stover reached into his back pocket, “pulled out a piece of paper,” and sat down to use the phone. The call went directly to the White House.
The response was simple. The State Department would have to assign agents to cover the visit. There were three main threats. First, the American antiwar movement might bubble back to boiling point at any US surge in Vietnam. Second, the Chinese Nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek’s vocal supporters, still regarded him as the rightful ruler not just of Taiwan but of all China. They had been horrified at the prospect of a “Bandit Table Tennis” team touring the United States and thought of the visit as an opportunity to plead their case in front of the American people, hopefully steadying what they now knew was the declining power of the Taiwan lobby in Washington.
The third threat was the strange figure of Carl McIntire, a firebrand minister from the Bible Presbyterian Church in New Jersey who had a taste for publicity that far outshone Glenn Cowan’s. Among his other attention-seeking projects was the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem in Florida, as well as a plan to assemble a replica of Noah’s ark off the Jersey shore. A rabid anti-Communist, he planned to hound the Chinese players from coast to coast.
The Chinese team’s point of entry on April 12, 1972, was Graham Steenhoven’s hometown of Detroit. The first to step onto American soil at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan, outside Detroit, were members of the Chinese press contingent, taking a hundred pictures of the American crowd gathered to welcome them.
Next out of the plane was Steenhoven, who had flown to Ottawa as the Chinese passed through Canada so he could escort the team south. Only months before, rumors had Steenhoven considering a run for Congress. He had, after all, had a private audience with Nixon. Nixon had been given a list of talking points but was unable to cope with a conversation about table tennis. “Let’s talk about anything,” said Nixon. “Like what?” asked Steenhoven. Nixon looked stumped. “What’s the price of a Ping-Pong ball?” he ventured. The important thing for Nixon had been the photograph with Steenhoven in the American press, sure to be picked up by the Chinese as another positive signal.
Zhuang Zedong emerged from the plane twenty pounds heavier than the year before. As a reward for his performance in Nagoya, he had been promoted to vice president of the Table Tennis Association, and more surprisingly was a newly established deputy from Beijing to the National People’s Congress. Instead of being an embodiment of politics within Ping-Pong, he was something new in China—the Ping-Pong within politics.
Zhou Enlai had announced some of his picks for the traveling squad at the Great Hall of the People. “It’s not the turn for the officials” to head to America, he explained. The players came first. Those selected were a mixture of young and old, but mostly they were chosen because they were considered politically reliable enough to travel to the heartland of imperialism.
The American team awaiting them on the tarmac was positively shiny in their new uniforms, the men in white pants, blue turtlenecks, and bright blue blazers, the women in orange turtlenecks and white pants. They looked like the crew of a cruise ship. As Zhuang moved away from the airplane, he spotted Cowan, hard to miss with his mop of hair. Zhuang stepped toward the Californian, and they raised their hands into the air together. It was a generous move. The music behind the two table tennis players suddenly changed to a brassy version of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain When She Comes.”
Even before the team had landed, a professor from Columbia had briefed all who would come into contact with the Chinese. “Those of you who expect country bumpkins, be disabused,” he’d declared. “They are, most of them, well-traveled. They consider themselves political personages.” They weren’t in the United States for the shopping. Last of all, be careful with food choices. “Do not serve them lamb—they find its odor offensive.” A New York Times reporter heard one of the American table tennis officials grumble, “Nobody told them we don’t like sea cucumber.”
Though the tour was supposedly apolitical, Nixon had handpicked an informational aide to welcome the team. The aide’s speech was built around Zhou Enlai’s vague promise to send the team “when flowers bloom.” The language was friendly, but in the Sheraton hotel that awaited the delegation, security agents were using a dog to check for explosive devices.
The team was shown to their rooms, then quickly came down for lunch, where a moment of awkwardness awaited them. Each member of the Chinese delegation had a map, a copy of Audubon’s Birds of North America, and a Polaroid camera sitting in front of their plates as welcoming gifts. One of the translators, Perry Link, noted that it was painful to watch that “kind of awkward, naked commercial pitch” as a Polaroid representative explained how the cameras worked.
Another American translator, Vee-ling Edwards, who had been born in Fukien in 1918, found the tension hard to bear. “The air was like a solid piece of ice,” she noted. “People didn’t even dare to talk.” In the hotel, the Chinese were apprehensive. The members of the Xinhua News Agency accompanying the tour included a smattering of undercover Chinese security officers. One of the translators remembered a Xinhua man briefly taking off his coat to reveal not one but two revolvers—adequate protection, thought a player, in a country where he’d “heard that everyone carried a gun.”
The players had been raised knowing that America was really the land where a handful of rich ruled the desperately poor. It was quickly apparent to them that this wasn’t the full truth. They passed scenes of unthinkable abundance—malls surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of parked cars, enormous supermarkets bursting with color, hardware stores with stacks of building materials on the sidewalk. The Los Angeles Times lamented that “the Chinese got a glimpse of the American consumer society at its zenith, from billboards proclaiming cars and whiskey to hotels that offer color TV in every room.” To the Chinese, it was enlightening. Perhaps, thought one player, America had become such a strong country because of its “combination of different people.”
A banquet was hosted for the Chinese delegation on the first night by the mayor of Detroit. The Chinese “were extraordinarily quick to feel condescension.” In China, the dignitary would have greeted a visiting delegation on the street and walked them inside. Here, the mayor awaited them on the first floor, which they saw as an act of “coldness.”
The Chinese weren’t the only ones feeling ill at ease that evening. Cowan attended, but seemed to be hiding behind his friend and agent, Bob Gusikoff. Where was the confidence, the easygoing chitchat? The man who had offered to negotiate between Zhou Enlai and Nixon seemed to struggle negotiating the buffet table. Before the dinner was even over, Gusikoff escorted Cowan from the room and whisked him back to his mother’s house in California. Was he high on pot again, or using stronger drugs, or was he actually mentally disturbed? Soon Cowan would enter a frightening downward spiral. On that night in Detroit, it left Cowan’s counterpart, Zhuang Zedong, drifting between dignitaries, carried by his wide sm
ile.
Stanley Karnow, an old China watcher from the Washington Post, was finally given time with the Chinese officials during supper. Perhaps fearful that he wouldn’t be given a second chance, he immediately asked the question that haunted the whole tour: “Don’t you find it ironic that you are visiting the United States while our Government is bombing North Vietnam, who are your country’s allies?” The question was sidestepped like a well-marked land mine.
Despite the stuttering start, eleven thousand people showed up at Detroit’s Cobo Hall for the first exhibition match. Was Steenhoven right? Was Cowan right after all? Was there a future for table tennis in America? Best of all, the game was covered by ABC’s hugely popular TV program Wide World of Sports. “It’s a very spectacular kind of sport to watch,” enthused host Jim McKay. “I think you’re going to be quite surprised by it, if you haven’t seen it at this level before.”
Once again, the Chinese were in full control of the outcome of the matches. But this was America, and the one thing they couldn’t predict was the crowd. A banner unfurled above the seated teams: “Send us our POWs not Ping-Pong players.” Next, hundreds of anti-Communist leaflets spiraled from the upper levels of Cobo Hall. Finally, dead rats came floating down in miniature parachutes. One “had a red coat on it and the name Kissinger.”
The two teams marched out amicably, except for Tannehill, who stood in line with a clenched fist raised high. Was that for Black Power? Solidarity? Solidarity with whom? The protesters, the Chinese, his fellow students? Perhaps he already knew that Steenhoven had decided not to let him play. “Steenhoven didn’t want to take a chance on me,” he’d say, before calling the Chrysler man “a motherfucking racist bastard” for picking local CPA Dell Sweeris over George Brathwaite for the televised match. Steenhoven sent him home. So now the two youngest men, Cowan and Tannehill, the most controversial players on the China visit, were gone.
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