After a few more courses, it was Nixon’s turn to reply. He wanted his toast to appear spontaneous even though he and his staff had been working on it for weeks. This had led to an awkward scene with Charles Freeman, his young interpreter from the State Department, just before the banquet. Freeman, who came from an old New England family, was an immensely civilized, cultivated and witty man with, among other abilities, a great gift for languages. He had learned Chinese in the US and in Taiwan and spoke an elegant, fluent Chinese studded with allusions to classical literature. Although both Nixon and Kissinger did not like to use State Department interpreters for fear they might leak information, Freeman was told earlier that evening that he would be interpreting for Nixon. When he asked for the prepared text of the toast, Chapin, the appointments secretary, had said that there wasn’t one. Freeman pointed out that he worked on earlier drafts and that he also knew that Nixon was planning to quote some of Chairman Mao’s poetry. ‘And if you think I’m going to get up in front of the entire Chinese politburo and ad lib Chairman Mao’s poetry back into Chinese, you’re nuts.’ Fortunately Ji Chaozhu, who was Chou En-lai’s interpreter, agreed to fill in and Mao’s poetry was translated back into Chinese correctly. Nixon glowered at the unfortunate Freeman throughout the dinner, making him so nervous that he took up smoking again. Two days later, after Freeman had shown his usefulness in interpreting, Nixon offered a tearful apology and said fulsomely to Chou En-lai that Freeman might well be the first American ambassador to China. ‘It was odd,’ thought an embarrassed Freeman as Chou muttered something that sounded like ‘That’ll be the day.’24
Nixon’s reply to Chou started with compliments to his hosts for their hospitality. The food was ‘magnificent’, as was the army band. ‘Never have I heard American music played better in a foreign land.’ Like Chou, he admitted that there were many differences between China and the United States. Nevertheless, together both peoples could build a peaceful world, in which the young, like his own daughters, could be free from the fear of war. ‘So, let us, in these next five days, start a long march together, not in lockstep, but on different roads leading to the same goal, the goal of building a world structure of peace and justice in which all may stand together with equal dignity and in which each nation, large or small, has a right to determine its own form of government, free of outside interference or domination.’ Coming to the passage that Freeman had so dreaded, he quoted Mao: ‘Chairman Mao has written, “So many deeds cry out to be done, and always urgently. The world rolls on. Time passes. Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day, seize the hour.”’25
Nixon raised his glass in a toast to the absent Mao, to Chou En-lai and to the friendship of the Chinese and American peoples. The band struck up ‘America the Beautiful’. Nixon was delighted to learn that Chou had chosen the tune himself because it had been played at the President’s inauguration, and when Chou raised his glass to his guest’s next inauguration, Nixon thought it ‘very significant’. To the sound of music, the President did his round of toasts at the important tables. ‘It was really quite spectacular,’ thought Haldeman, who watched Nixon with the pride of a good stage manager. ‘He moved very forcefully, took a firm stand in front of the individual, looked him squarely in the eye, raised his glass and clinked the other person’s, took a quick sip, then he raised his glass again and gave a little staccato bow to the individual, and then he turned, marched to the next individual, and repeated the performance.’26
Not everyone shared Haldeman’s pleasure. ‘The effect’, according to William Buckley, the conservative journalist, ‘was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels and Doenitz and Hess, begging them to join with him in the making of a better world.’27 On the other side of the world, Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator whose country had been one of China’s few friends in the dark days of the 1960s, wrote in his diary: ‘The orchestra at the banquet played “America the Beautiful”! The beautiful America of millionaires and multimillionaires! America, the centre of fascism and barbarous imperialism!’
According to Chinese custom, the banquet ended abruptly with the last course. The guests headed for the cars and the journalists rushed to file their stories. A famous American television reporter ran after a bewildered Qiao Guanhua, the Deputy Foreign Minister, trying in vain to get an exclusive interview. ‘I’m Eric Sevareid,’ he announced to a man who had probably never heard of him. John Burns, a Canadian journalist, took Nixon’s chopsticks as a souvenir. Although a New York dealer sent a cable with an offer of $10,000, Burns kept them.28
Back at his guesthouse, a euphoric Nixon called Haldeman and Kissinger into his bedroom for an hour to go over the events of the first day in China, from the arrival to the meeting with Mao and finally the banquet. To Nixon’s pleasure, Haldeman was able to report that the press coverage so far had been very good. ‘P. finally decided to fold up for the day after we reviewed the schedule for the week again, and that’s the end of a very memorable day in American history.’29
11
Opening Moves
GIVING HIS TOAST at the banquet, Chou had said: ‘The peoples of our two countries have always been friendly to each other. But owing to reasons known to all, contacts between the two peoples were suspended for over twenty years. Now, through the common efforts of China and the United States, the gate to friendly contacts has finally been opened.’ Opening that gate had been a tricky and difficult process and there had been many times when it looked as though it would never occur.
Kissinger later described the steps by which the United States and China overcame their own prejudices to open up relations as an intricate minuet, ‘so delicately arranged that both sides could always maintain that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative, so elliptical that existing relationships on both sides were not jeopardized’.1 The setting was right; both sides had their own reasons for wanting to talk. Yet, without the right individuals to push the process ahead, it could have failed any number of times. Given his supreme authority in China, Mao, once he was convinced of the need to deal with the United States, could direct that his officials work with the Americans. He could also ensure that no word came out in China of Kissinger’s first visit and the painstaking negotiations leading up to it. He could not, though, guarantee how the Americans would behave or prevent the American press from jumping on the story. Fortunately Nixon, with Kissinger in a crucial supporting role, was determined to carry off the opening to China and do so before public opinion could form.
If each step in the negotiations to arrange Kissinger’s secret visit and then Nixon’s had been conducted publicly, the Americans would have found themselves with a very public controversy. As General Alexander Haig put it: ‘The sensitivity of opening up a dialogue with the People’s Republic of China could not be over-estimated and was very likely to have caused such a brouhaha in our legislature that the whole initiative could have been squashed before it was even born’.2 And American allies such as Japan and of course Taiwan would have certainly made their views known. The Chinese Communists, who had little understanding of how an open society worked, would have concluded that the American government was not sincere in wanting an opening and would have pulled back.
It is true that Nixon and Kissinger were able to take advantage of a powerful current that was already flowing in favour of a Sino-American relationship, but without their skilful and, yes, secretive handling of the opening it might well not have happened. Both men had a natural bent towards secrecy which some of their colleagues have characterized as obsessive, and it did not always serve them well when they failed to keep their own experts informed or when, in Nixon’s case, he tried to cover up the Watergate break-in. While secrecy is not always necessary in human affairs, in negotiations of this delicacy, with such huge potential for misunderstandings, it was essential. Nixon and Kissinger claimed, perhaps unfairly
, that the State Department always leaked, but they were probably right to keep knowledge of their first contacts with China restricted to a very small number. As it was, a New York Times correspondent managed to figure out that something was up in the autumn of 1970 by merely picking up hints on the diplomatic circuit.
In later years both Nixon and Kissinger also made much of their own courage and determination in creating the opening to China in defiance of a timid bureaucracy and the enormously powerful pro-Taiwan China lobby whose tentacles stretched everywhere, into Congress and throughout the media. In an interview he did in 1998, Kissinger claimed that the State Department thought that any rapprochement with the People’s Republic was ‘extremely dangerous’. Soviet specialists warned of the dire effects on Soviet–American relations if the United States tried to play at triangular diplomacy. ‘Of course,’ wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, ‘we envisaged nothing so crude as “using” the People’s Republic against the Soviet Union.’ The bureaucracy, he claimed, not only leaked like a sieve but refused to accept Nixon as its legitimate leader. ‘Here was a President who didn’t follow the New York Times editorial direction. And that was considered against nature.’3
Although he constantly complained about liberal eggheads, Nixon could actually count on considerable support from the academic community, and from within the State Department. By 1968, the old hardliners who had shaped policy towards China had pretty much retired. The younger generation felt, as one of them said, ‘we should be moving in the direction of rapprochement with Peking’.4
In the months before Nixon took office, both China and the United States continued, as they had done over the years, to send out the equivalents of messages in a bottle, and sometimes an answer came back. The Voice of America had moderated the language it used in its Chinese broadcasts directed at the People’s Republic. And so the Guomindang’s Beiping became the Communists’ Beijing. Although the Americans did not know until later, this change in language was remarked upon in China, where there was much speculation about what it meant.5 Just after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the State Department sent a message to the Chinese suggesting that both sides resume the talks which had gone on between the American and Chinese ambassadors in Warsaw since the mid-1950s. The Chinese, who were alarmed by the Soviet interference in the affairs of a fellow Communist state, agreed with unusual speed.
John Holdridge, who was in China as part of the Nixon trip, remembered the excitement in Washington, especially when the Chinese reply said, ‘It has always been the policy of the People’s Republic of China to maintain friendly relations with all states, regardless of social systems, on the basis of the five principles of peaceful coexistence.’ The Five Principles – Chou mentioned them in his toast at Nixon’s welcoming banquet – had been sacrosanct in Chinese foreign relations ever since Chou had brought them up with Prime Minister Nehru of India in the early 1950s. Although they had not prevented India and China from going to war some years later, they expressed high-minded sentiments about equality, non-aggression, mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, and, curiously, peaceful coexistence, the phrase that had so infuriated the Chinese when Khrushchev used it about Soviet relations with the United States. ‘Boy,’ said Holdridge, ‘bells bonged all over.’6
Both sides agreed that they would restart the Warsaw talks. The first of the new round was scheduled for 20 February 1969, but before this could take place a Chinese diplomat jumped out of a window of his embassy in The Hague and asked for, and was granted, asylum in the United States. (He turned out to be mentally disturbed and proved to be no use to the Americans.) The Chinese immediately accused the CIA of arranging to abduct him. ‘All this once again’, said their note, ‘reveals the vicious features of the new US Government which has inherited the mantle of the preceding US Governments in flagrantly making itself the enemy of the Chinese people.’7 The meeting was postponed indefinitely. The Americans did not move at once to reopen contacts with the People’s Republic. And it is doubtful, given their continued preoccupation with the Cultural Revolution and their longstanding suspicions of the Americans, that the Chinese would have responded. Mao’s change of heart towards the United States, furthermore, did not take place until the autumn, after the fighting with the Soviet Union.
Throughout the year, nevertheless, the Americans sent out strong hints that the United States hoped to mend fences with the People’s Republic. In a major foreign policy speech in New York that spring, Rogers declared, ‘We shall take initiatives to reestablish more normal relations with Communist China and we shall remain responsive to any indications of less hostile attitudes from their side’.8 Nixon had ordered an end to the provocative sweeps by high-speed US Navy patrol boats near the coast of China in the Taiwan Strait in his first month in office and that autumn he ended the regular patrols through the Strait by the Seventh Fleet. Although his press conference in Guam in late July 1969 referred to the People’s Republic of China as having a ‘very belligerent’ foreign policy, he also announced, in what became the Nixon Doctrine, that the United States was going to learn from its mistakes in Vietnam and not get militarily involved in supporting its allies.
In July, Kissinger’s revamped National Security Council recommended that the United States should take steps to improve the relationship with China without waiting for any Chinese response. The administration eased up its restrictions on trade and travel between the United States and China. American passport holders from certain professions – scholars and doctors, for example – were now allowed to travel to China and bring back whatever they bought there to the United States. (At first only a handful of Americans were able to take advantage of this.) American companies would no longer get into trouble if their foreign subsidiaries sold goods to China. Small changes, perhaps, but they signalled that a major rethinking of American foreign policy was under way.
The Americans also used roundabout channels to send a quiet message to the Chinese. American diplomats suggested to the Poles, the Cambodians and the French that they let Beijing know that the United States wanted to start talking again with a view to improving relations. In Paris, the American military attaché was told to stand by for a visit – which never came – by Donald Rumsfeld, in those days a minor member of the administration, who would be bringing a letter for the Chinese. On the plane carrying him from Guam on his Asian tour, Nixon ordered Holdridge to draft a letter with the same message to the People’s Republic. During a brief stay in Pakistan, which had cordial relations with China, Nixon urged General Yahya Khan to be his intermediary with the Chinese. He may have asked the same of another dictator, President Nicolae Ceau¸sescu of Rumania, whom he visited next. In late August, the Americans tried to reactivate their Warsaw contacts. When American diplomats called on the Chinese embassy, they were received cordially, but the Chinese declined to discuss resuming the talks. (The Chinese ambassador himself was back in China for re-education.)9
Nixon, who liked leaks when they were his own, was also working quietly at home to prepare the way for a shift in American policy towards China. At the beginning of February, he directed the NSC to undertake a study of current US policies towards both Chinas, of possible Communist Chinese intentions in Asia and of ‘alternative US approaches on China and their costs and risks’. He also told Kissinger to let it be known quietly in government and political circles that the administration was exploring the possibilities of a rapprochement with China. ‘I would continue to plant this idea.’ Nixon himself planted it with key figures such as Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, when he told him that the time had come to involve China in ‘global responsibility’. Later that June, Mansfield used Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia to contact Chou En-lai to ask whether he could visit China, a move the Chinese noted with interest although they did not send a reply10
That autumn Nixon suggested to Kissinger that he bring up the possibility of a ‘subtle’ Am
erican move towards China with two old hardliners, Walter Judd, a Congressman from Minnesota, and Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota. Where the China lobby, that collection of Cold Warriors who steadfastly opposed recognition of the People’s Republic, had once thrown its weight about to effect, it had run out of steam by the late 1960s. Many of its initial supporters, such as Henry Luce, had disappeared from the scene, though his widow, Claire Booth Luce, was still active; others like Nixon himself were thinking that it was time to move on. American public opinion, always difficult to gauge, seemed torn between fear and suspicion of Red China and a willingness to accept its membership of the United Nations. By the late 1960s, academics were increasingly calling for opening up contacts with their counterparts in China. Perhaps more important, people in business were calling for trade relations.11
For most of Nixon’s first year in office, the People’s Republic of China showed no signs of being aware that anything had changed in American attitudes. In June, in response to an American query, the Chinese chargé in Warsaw said that his government had no immediate plans for resuming the suspended talks. In fact, the Chinese government, and in the end that meant Mao, was paying attention to the American signals. The Chinese also had a spy in Washington, in the CIA. Mao, moreover, was already inclined to think that Nixon was someone he could deal with. He had apparently read Nixon’s 1967 article in Foreign Affairs and recommended it to Chou En-lai. When Nixon became president, Mao approved the publication of his address in the People’s Daily. True, it appeared under the headline ‘A Desperate Confession’, but it disseminated Nixon’s message about wanting an open world, where no people lived in ‘angry isolation’. At some point Chou En-lai ordered all government departments with any interest in the United States to watch American policies closely. In July, when an American yacht sailed into Chinese waters near Hong Kong and the local security forces arrested the two American crew, Chou dealt with the case personally. He ordered that there be no publicity and none of the usual rhetoric about CIA agents.12 The two Americans were later quietly released.
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