Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  Over the years, Chou became a great negotiator. One of his early heroes, when he lived in Europe in the early 1920s, was David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister of the time. Chou admired him for his realism, his understanding of the contemporary scene, and his ability to bring different sides together in a way that benefited Britain. Lloyd George, he said, was ‘cunning’. Everyone who dealt with Chou found the same thing. ‘He shifts his line so subtly’, wrote a Guomindang official, ‘that it often escapes your notice. Of course he makes compromises, but only minimal and nominal compromises at the very last moment just to keep the negotiations going. When you study his statements afterwards, you realize that he hasn’t made any substantial concession on any important issue at all.’20

  4

  Diaoyutai

  NIXON’S MOTORCADE SWEPT on through Tiananmen Square to the west of the city. Important foreign visitors to Beijing stayed, as they still do today, in a special, heavily guarded compound. The Diaoyutai had been created at the end of the 1950s for the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Most of its villas were new but the site itself was very old. Generations of scholars had loved its lakes and groves. A famous Chinese poem talked of its weeping willows against the darkening hills to the west: ‘Peach blossoms float on the water at sunset.’ Emperors and noblemen built their pavilions there and fished from its terraces and the great eighteenth-century Qianlong Emperor, renowned among much else for his calligraphy, wrote out its name – the Fishing Terrace, or Diaoyutai – for a plaque which is still by one of the gates. The Communists had surrounded the area with barbed wire, searchlights, high walls and armed guards, and appropriated it for themselves and their friends. Mao and his wife each had villas there which they used from time to time. Kim Il Sung, the dictator of North Korea, Nikita Khrushchev and Che Guevara had all preceded Nixon there. So, several months earlier, had the Prime Minister of North Vietnam. The US press corps heard rumours that Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, whose clever balancing act between the Communists and their American enemies was finally over, had just moved out of Villa 18 where Nixon and his immediate entourage were housed. (Today, in the new China, it can be rented for US$50,000 a night.)

  In that nineteenth-century bourgeois style so loved by the Soviet and Chinese Communists, its rooms were filled with over-stuffed armchairs and sofas, each with its antimacassar. Nixon and Chou En-lai sat side by side on a sofa in the main reception room while the other Americans and Chinese sat in a semi-circle drinking tea and listening to their exchange. (Although the Americans had brought their own interpreters, they had agreed to use Chinese ones for most meetings.) ‘Both seemed to be very friendly, but noncommittal,’ Haldeman recorded in his diary. ‘They didn’t get off of the trivial ground at all during the session.’ Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, watched the body language. ‘I found it extraordinary that Chou Enlai would be focused on the President, would drill in on him, but the President kind of would look off or look down on the floor and would not focus directly on Chou Enlai . . .’ Kissinger found the conversation itself troubling. Nixon, he complained later to Haldeman, had responded to Chou’s compliments about Kissinger’s work in getting the trip organized by saying that other Americans had done the advance work, ‘which had Henry disturbed that it would put him down in the eyes of the Chinese’.1

  It was not unusual for Kissinger to be worried about his position. His time in the Nixon administration, first as National Security Adviser and then, after the 1972 election, as Secretary of State, was punctuated by complaints, about his rivals, his subordinates, his colleagues. He repeatedly accused William Rogers and the State Department of stabbing him in the back and moaned that the President did not do enough to defend him. Nixon in turn worried about his mental state. As Raymond Price, one of Nixon’s speech-writers, put it, ‘The care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of his presidency, but he was worth it.’2

  He was worth it, in Nixon’s view, for his brains and his enormous knowledge of the world and because he represented the East Coast intellectual establishment of which the President was secretly in awe. Although Nixon was grudging with his praise, his memoirs grant that Kissinger had ‘intensity and stamina’ and was ‘so enormously endowed with extraordinary intellectual capacity’. In the end, though, Nixon valued Kissinger because he found in him someone who saw foreign policy as he did. ‘I knew’, Nixon wrote in his memoirs, ‘we were very much alike in our general outlook in that we shared a belief in the importance of isolating and influencing the factors affecting worldwide balances of power.’3

  Like Nixon, Kissinger recognized that the United States had lost ground internationally in the 1960s, partly because of Vietnam and partly because other nations had grown in power. ‘In the forties and fifties’, Kissinger wrote in a 1968 essay, ‘we offered remedies; in the late sixties and in the seventies our role will have to be to contribute to a structure that will foster the initiative of others. We are a superpower physically, but our designs can be meaningful only if they generate willing cooperation.’ Like Nixon, too, he believed that the United States needed to look to its friends and allies to share the burden of maintaining international order. He also saw the world as a series of overlapping relationships. Statesmen should always be aware of the ways in which issues were linked and be prepared to use that linkage. If China wanted better relations with the United States, then it could be asked to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to come to an agreement with the Americans.4

  Nixon and Kissinger did not always see eye to eye. Nixon was more American, more optimistic. He believed that the United States, by its very nature, was a force for good. Kissinger was deeply suspicious of talk of morality or principles in foreign relations. ‘It is part of American folklore’, he wrote in the same 1968 essay, ‘that, while other nations have interests, we have responsibilities; while other nations are concerned with equilibrium, we are concerned with the legal requirements of peace.’ He was inclined to be pessimistic and to see the international arena as an anarchic, savage place, where nations struggled in an endless Darwinian competition for survival. What Kissinger valued was stability and peaceful change. What he feared were active, revolutionary nations which wanted to overturn the existing order. Nevertheless, in the pursuit of stability, he argued, statesmen should be prepared to deal with any power. ‘Our objective’, he said of himself and Nixon, ‘was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality.’ American policymakers should always ask themselves two questions: ‘What is it in our interest to prevent? What should we seek to accomplish?’5

  American statesmen did not usually talk in such terms because they smacked too much of the old Europe, and Kissinger often used circumlocutions such as ‘geopolitics’ or the ‘rules of equilibrium’. European alliance systems – often referred to as ‘entangling’ – spheres of interest and balances of power were all part of the bad old game of politics which, in the eyes of many Americans, led to wars. European statesmen such as Metternich, Bismarck and others who practised Realpolitik (a practical policy based in reality) were seen on the other side of the Atlantic as cold-hearted operators who sought power for their own countries at the expense of others. The United States ought to be wary of being drawn into their destructive games. In his farewell speech in 1796, George Washington famously warned against ‘the insidious wiles of foreign influence’ and asked, ‘Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?’ Over a century later, as his country stood poised to enter the First World War, Woodrow Wilson told the Senate that the United States had war aims unlike those of any other nation. ‘I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences intruded from without.’6

  As a graduate stud
ent at Harvard, Kissinger had written his thesis on that classic period after the French Revolutionary Wars when the peace of Europe depended on the balance of power and when those great practitioners of diplomacy, Lord Castlereagh and Prince Metternich, had made the system work. ‘Their goal’, wrote Kissinger approvingly, ‘was stability, not perfection, and the balance of power is the classic expression of the lesson of history that no order is safe without physical safeguards against aggression.’ The best and most effective statesman, in his view, was the one who understood the world and that other nations than his own had interests and goals. Such a person worked with the world as it was, not as he hoped it might be. ‘His instrument is diplomacy, the art of relating states to each other by agreement rather than by the exercise of force, by the representation of a ground of action which reconciles particular aspirations with a general consensus.’7

  For Kissinger, diplomacy was a marvellously enjoyable art, and a very important one. The great statesmen, he believed, embraced their calling, even the moments of crisis. ‘The few prepared to grapple with circumstances are usually undisturbed in the eye of a hurricane.’ He admired, of course, both Metternich and Bismarck, and, like Nixon himself, Churchill and de Gaulle. When necessary, they had boldly gone against conventional wisdom. Such statesmen, Kissinger complained, often went without honour in their own countries because it was difficult to get domestic support for policies which appeared to require compromises, with other powers or of a nation’s own dearly held principles. In what became a notorious interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1972, the short, plump Kissinger compared himself to that American icon, the cowboy. ‘Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse,’ he told her. ‘He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time.’8

  Nixon knew something of Kissinger’s ideas but not the man himself when, in late November 1968, after the presidential election, he sounded him out about becoming National Security Adviser. It was, as Nixon himself said, ‘uncharacteristically impulsive’. Kissinger had worked for a rival Republican candidate, Nelson Rockefeller. What is more, it was well known that Kissinger was not a Nixon fan. ‘The man is unfit to be president,’ he had said repeatedly during the primaries.9 Nixon was forgiving. ‘I expected this from a Rockefeller associate, and I chalked it up to politics.’ On 25 November, as Nixon was putting together his new administration, he summoned Kissinger to New York to invite him to be his National Security Adviser, a post first created by Harry Truman in 1947 to provide the President with comprehensive advice on American foreign affairs. Both the position and the National Security Council itself had been sidelined in earlier administrations. Nixon was determined to make the NSC the vehicle for his foreign policy.

  It was only the second time the two men had met. Kissinger found the conversation interesting but unsettling. Nixon, as he usually was with unfamiliar people, was shy. He avoided small talk and plunged straight into a discussion of foreign affairs. He wanted, he told Kissinger, to avoid Johnson’s trap of devoting all his time and energy to the Vietnam issue. The United States must concentrate on the longer-term problems that threatened its very survival: disunity in the North Atlantic Alliance, the Middle East, and relations with the Soviet Union and Japan. Nixon also mentioned one of his major preoccupations – the need to look again at American policy towards the People’s Republic of China. ‘We also agreed’, said Nixon, ‘that whatever else a foreign policy might be, it must be strong to be credible – and it must be credible to be successful.’10

  The conversation ended without any mention by Nixon of a post for Kissinger. ‘After frequent contact,’ Kissinger later wrote, ‘I came to understand his subtle circumlocutions better; I learned that to Nixon words were like billiard balls; what mattered was not the initial impact but the carom.’ Nixon also hated being turned down, so, as much as he could, he avoided being put in a position where that might happen. Kissinger went back to Harvard, intrigued but uncertain about where he stood. Two days later, he was asked to come back to New York for a meeting with Nixon’s friend John Mitchell. What, asked Mitchell, had Kissinger decided about the national security job? Kissinger replied that he had not been offered it. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ said Mitchell, ‘he has screwed it up again.’ Kissinger, after some thought, accepted. He had now, he wrote in his memoirs, changed his mind about Nixon. ‘I was struck by his perceptiveness and knowledge so at variance with my previous image of him.’ Just after the new President’s inauguration, Kissinger made sure that Haldeman knew how enthusiastic he now was about Nixon. ‘K. is really impressed with overall performance,’ Haldeman recorded in his diary, ‘and surprised!’11

  ‘The combination was unlikely’, Nixon himself admitted, ‘– the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic. But our differences made the partnership work.’12 And Henry Kissinger, the chubby professor with the thick glasses, the heavy German accent and the fingernails bitten to the quick, was an unlikely American statesman. Yet although Nixon and Kissinger had followed very different paths to power, the two also had much in common. Nixon was a politician through and through, but he was also a highly intelligent and reflective man. Of all American presidents, with the exception perhaps of Bill Clinton, he had the best grounding in foreign relations. He had been preparing for years. Kissinger, it is true, was an academic, but he had a tremendous instinct for power. He knew how to get it and how to use it. Even as a professor, at Harvard, he had shown himself adept at attaching himself to powerful patrons. Every summer he had run a special international seminar which brought together young leaders from the United States and its allies. Over the years that gave him a network of contacts which included prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers around the world.

  That Kissinger was at Harvard at all is an indication of his extraordinary talent and determination – and perhaps some luck as well. Born in 1923 into a solid middle-class Jewish family in a small Bavarian town, he had seen his happy and secure childhood overshadowed by the rise of the Nazis to power at the beginning of the 1930s. Like other Jewish children in Germany, he found himself forced out of the local school and barred from ordinary activities, whether sports or dances. Jews were taunted in the streets and beaten up. Kissinger’s gentle, scholarly father was shattered by the change in the Germany he loved. His energetic and practical mother decided in 1938 that the family should leave for the United States, where her cousin was ready to welcome them. The Kissingers, parents and two sons, were among the fortunate ones; many of their relatives and friends died in the concentration camps. Kissinger rarely talked about that period in his life, but it is hard not to imagine that it had something to do with his antipathy to revolution and revolutionary ideologies and with his insecurities as an adult. His first significant mentor, a Prussian called Fritz Kraemer who fought for the Americans in the Second World War, believed, ‘It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.’13

  And most people were Kissinger’s intellectual inferiors. He was a brilliant student. In his American high school, his unfamiliarity with English scarcely held him back at all. His grades were virtually all 90s or higher. (Unlike his younger brother, Walter, though, he always kept his pronounced German accent. In Walter’s view, it was because he listened to others where Henry did not.)14 He sailed into the City College of New York and was doing equally well there when, at the start of 1943, the draft took him into the army and a new life.

  Kissinger learned much in the army, both on special courses for particularly bright soldiers and from his fellow conscripts, most of whom came from very different backgrounds to his own. He began to develop his famous charm and his ability to laugh at himself. Thanks to a chance encounter with Fritz Kraemer, who had a keen eye for talent, he soared out of the ranks to become a counter-intelligence officer in occupied Germany at the en
d of the war. He did a superb job, rooting out senior Nazis and getting local administrations running again, and he did so without vindictiveness. Thanks to Kraemer again, he decided to apply to Harvard when his military service finished in 1947.

  The Henry Kissinger who joined the faculty at Harvard in 1954 was a mature intellectual who had already seen much of the world. He was drawn by academic life, but even then he found it limited. Early on, he developed contacts in the centres of power in New York and Washington. In 1955, he took a leave from Harvard to research and write a book on nuclear weapons for the Council on Foreign Relations, the pre-eminent foreign policy forum for the East Coast establishment. The project brought him into contact with a number of powerful people, among them Nelson Rockefeller, who was to become another Kissinger patron. The resulting book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, surprised everyone, including Kissinger himself, by becoming a bestseller. Richard Nixon read it and was impressed. The book also made his name outside the university world as someone to watch and, for his critics, as a cold and calculating strategist who talked calmly about using nuclear weapons in limited wars.

  Kissinger spent much of the next decade at Harvard, broadening his already wide range of acquaintances and burnishing his academic reputation with articles and lectures. Increasingly he used the university as a base. In the 1960s he spent much time in New York and Washington, working as a consultant on and off for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Politically, though, he was finding that his natural home was with the Republicans. In personal terms, he was drifting away from his first wife, a childhood sweetheart whom he had married in 1949. In 1964, they divorced and he became, for a few years, a dashing bachelor. In the White House, Nixon loved the stories of Kissinger’s reputed girlfriends and made ponderous jokes about his sex life.