Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  On the morning of 26 October, as Kissinger and Chou En-lai were conducting their last-minute discussions on the draft communiqué in Beijing, it was still the evening of the 25th in New York and the crucial vote was approaching in the General Assembly. Suddenly, to the dismay of the Americans, the Saudi ambassador proposed a break for dinner. The delegates poured out of the hall and, although the Americans searched the cafeteria and nearby restaurants, many simply vanished into the night. When the General Assembly reconvened, two votes took place: one to have the admission of the People’s Republic determined by a simple majority, the second to expel Taiwan. When the result was announced, many delegates, from African countries for example, danced in the aisles, while the delegation from Taiwan slowly filed out. Nixon told the press that he was ‘outraged’ by the display but privately he was relieved that the issue had finally been resolved. He detailed Kissinger and Haldeman to tell conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater that the administration had fought as hard as it could to keep Taiwan in the UN.18

  In New York, Bush told the American delegation that their job was now to meet the representatives of the People’s Republic and treat them courteously. There must be no regrets. He could not resist a moment of irritation, though, when Kissinger said how disappointed he was. ‘So was I. But given the fact that we were saying one thing in New York and doing another in Washington, the outcome was inevitable.’19

  In Beijing the news caused something close to consternation. The Foreign Ministry was still painfully rebuilding itself after the Cultural Revolution and China had very few experienced diplomats available. And Mao himself had said that whatever happened China would not join the United Nations that year. Chou hastily called his top officials together to discuss China’s response. The radicals took a hard line. China should not belong to a bourgeois and bureaucratic institution, ‘where people drank coffee, chatted and fought each other orally, which could not speak truly for the oppressed nations and peoples’. The moderates argued that China needed at least a year to study the UN and prepare for participation. As Chou was agreeing, a messenger arrived to summon them to Mao’s house. They found a smiling Mao, who brushed aside all objections. China must sent a delegation right away. He had enjoyed two major victories that year, Mao said, first when Lin Biao’s plot against him had been uncovered, and now China’s victory at the UN. The United States had lost the votes of even its old allies such as Canada and the United Kingdom, who had behaved like good rebellious Red Guards. China’s first speech at the UN must throw down the gauntlet to the imperialist superpowers and encourage the peoples of the world to make revolution. If China’s spokesmen needed ideas, Mao advised, they could use the notes prepared for the discussions with Kissinger.20

  China’s ambassador to Canada, the relatively experienced Huang Hua, was hurriedly sent to New York and an official party flew into LaGuardia on a Chinese plane. Mao spoke to them before they left: ‘One cannot capture the tiger cubs unless one risks going into the tiger’s den.’ The Chinese representatives had little idea of what to expect in the United States, a Chinese diplomat later recalled, beyond the stories of poverty and oppression which were standard fare in the Chinese press. There were inevitably awkward moments, when a small band of pro-Taiwan supporters demonstrated outside the Chinese headquarters, and a potentially serious incident when one of the Chinese delegation unexpectedly died of what turned out to be food poisoning. On the whole, though, the Chinese were pleasantly surprised to find the Americans friendly. The Americans, for their part, were impressed by the serious and low-key way in which the Chinese set about learning the ropes.21

  Kissinger and Nixon found the presence of Chinese diplomats at the UN useful, too, as yet another private channel to Beijing. Outside a small circle in the White House, only Bush, under strict instructions not to tell the State Department, knew that Kissinger was meeting Huang Hua and his colleagues in a safe apartment in New York. Kissinger suggested that the Chinese limit their contacts with their American opposite numbers at the UN itself. ‘We do not want to overwhelm you with every bright idea of our bureaucracy.’ Huang could call him at the White House on a special line. It would not cause any comment, said Kissinger, if he gave a woman’s name. The only one he should not use was ‘Nancy’.22

  The channel was useful for working on Nixon’s trip and very helpful when a major crisis blew up in South Asia. It had been brewing for decades. The relationship between India and Pakistan had been an uneasy one ever since 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned to leave a predominantly Hindu India and an overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan. Partition had seen the mass killings of minorities caught on the wrong side of the divide and had given rise to prolonged disputes over the distribution of resources, over water and over territory, notably the mountainous state of Kashmir. In 1965, a major war broke out which ended with an uneasy ceasefire brokered by the Soviet Union. Both sides looked for allies; Pakistan placed itself firmly in the Western camp in the Cold War and drew closer to the United States, while India positioned itself as a leader of the non-aligned nations but tilted towards the Soviet Union. The emergence of China as a major player in Asia after the Communist victory in 1949 added another factor. The Chinese Communists initially built good relations with India but those soured in the late 1950s as both the powers vied for leadership in Asia and the Third World. India infuriated China by giving shelter to Tibetan refugees, including the Dalai Lama himself, and the two sides clashed over disputed territory along their common borders. In 1962, the two countries went to war. The result was a Chinese victory. Pakistan, despite the fact that it was pro-West and was firmly opposed to Communism, understandably supported China. It was rewarded with Chinese arms shipments and diplomatic support against India.

  In the early 1970s, Pakistan, to the concern of both China and the United States, started to fall to pieces. Partition had left an awkward and probably unworkable country, its two wings separated by almost a thousand miles of an unfriendly India. Only Islam held East and West Pakistan together and that was never enough to overcome linguistic and cultural differences. The army, with officers largely from the West, developed the habit of intervening in politics on the grounds that no one else could hold the country together, and from 1958 to 1969 Pakistan was ruled by a general, Ayub Khan. When he stepped down, he handed over power to Yahya Khan, like Ayub another Westerner. The inhabitants of East Pakistan increasingly resented what they saw as the political dominance of West Pakistanis. In the summer of 1970, a series of cyclones devastated much of the East, but aid was slow to arrive from the central government. In December, when Yahya reluctantly held general elections, the separatist Awami League took almost every seat in the East. ‘Mr President,’ said Kissinger when they met in the summer of 1971, ‘for an elected dictator you ran a lousy election.’23

  The Awami League held enough seats to form the government of Pakistan, but Yahya simply refused to call the Assembly together. During 1971, the two halves of Pakistan moved towards an open confrontation. In March, the Awami League called a general strike and declared East Pakistan independent. The army cracked down harshly, arresting Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Awami League, and using American-supplied tanks and planes to crush opposition. Thousands, then millions, of refugees fled across the border into India. The crisis proved both a burden and an enormous temptation for India to break up its enemy. It was an open secret that Indira Gandhi’s government was supporting East Pakistan’s resistance with arms and money. Much of the world condemned the brutality of Yahya’s regime, and senior State and Defense Department officials in Washington as well as virtually all foreign service officers in East Pakistan urged the American government to take a stand and rein in Yahya’s government. In addition, most senior officials in Washington argued that, because India was bigger, richer and more stable than Pakistan, it made more sense for the United States to remain on friendly terms with it than to do so with Pakistan. Kissinger, though, talked obliquely about Yahya’s specia
l relationship with Nixon. What none of his listeners knew until the summer, because of the extreme secrecy surrounding the contacts with China, was that Nixon and Kissinger saw protecting the channel through Pakistan to Beijing as a matter of paramount importance. Even when the contacts between China and the United States came out into the open, both men felt a sense of gratitude towards Pakistan. ‘Why is it our business how they govern themselves?’ Kissinger complained to a high-level inter-agency group in Washington that summer. ‘The President always says to tilt toward Pakistan, but every proposal I get is in the opposite direction. Sometimes I think I am in a nut house.’24

  Nixon and Kissinger also preferred Pakistan to India. ‘The Indians are no goddam good,’ said Nixon as he and Kissinger discussed the crisis. ‘Those sons of bitches’, Kissinger agreed, ‘have never lifted a finger for us.’ And they found Yahya, the helpful, brisk soldier, much easier than the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, whom they saw, among other things, as moody, snobbish and devious. In their private conversations, where admittedly they tended to let off steam, they called her an old witch and a bitch. As the subcontinent drifted towards war in the summer of 1971, however, it was the soldier who made matters worse, not the bitch. Yahya refused to make any serious concessions to the people of East Pakistan and talked of trying Rahman for treason. Mrs Gandhi, on the other hand, was apparently trying to find a political and not a military solution to the crisis throughout the spring and summer of 1971.25

  Kissinger, however, was convinced after his visit to New Delhi in July that war was likely and when, on 9 August, India signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, he concluded that it was inevitable. He also assumed that, in helping India, the Soviets were sending a contemptuous signal to China: if it did nothing to help Pakistan, China would stand revealed as weak; yet, if it did intervene, the Soviets could use the excuse to attack it. And if Pakistan lost a war with India, as was almost certain, a good friend of both the United States and China would be humiliated.26

  The signals from China, though, were far from clear. On Kissinger’s first visit in July, Chou said that China would not stand idly by if Pakistan were attacked, although he did not say what form China’s assistance might take. Chou was also probably trying to put over a lesson, Kissinger later assured Nixon; ‘those who stand by China and keep their word will be treated in kind’. During Kissinger’s second, October visit, Chou not only was reluctant to spend much time on South Asia but sounded more cautious when it came to support for Pakistan. ‘I believe’, Kissinger wrote in his summary of their talks, ‘the PRC [People’s Republic of China] does not want hostilities to break out, is afraid of giving Moscow a pretext for attack, and would find itself in an awkward situation if this were to happen.’27

  Hostilities did break out. Indian troops were making minor incursions into Pakistan by late November and, on 3 December, Pakistan attacked India in force in the west. Both Nixon and Kissinger saw the conflict as a Cold War confrontation, with the Soviet Union backing India and the United States therefore obliged to keep the balance in the subcontinent by backing Pakistan. If Pakistan broke up, Kissinger argued, it would be a triumph for the Soviet Union. That in turn would have a catastrophic impact on the American position in the Middle East, where Arab states backed by the Soviets would be emboldened, and on American relations with China. Moreover, the Chinese, Kissinger insisted, needed to be shown that the Americans were reliable friends.28

  Nixon and Kissinger had been working hard behind the scenes to help Pakistan. ‘We are trying desperately’, Nixon told Pakistan’s Foreign Minister in November 1971, ‘not to allow this terrible tragedy, this agony that you’re going through, to be the pretext to start a war.’29 In the second week of December, as the war raged, Kissinger got a message to the Shah of Iran, who agreed to send ammunition into West Pakistan. Following Nixon’s instructions, Kissinger also ordered an American naval task force to sail towards the coast of East Pakistan, or Bangladesh, as it was starting to be known. This was to put pressure on the Indians and warn the Soviets off, although the reason given out publicly was that the aircraft carrier and its escort ships were needed to save the handful of American citizens left in Bangladesh. For all their sympathy for Pakistan, once the war had actually started Nixon and Kissinger also worked with the Soviet Union to get ceasefire proposals acceptable to both sides.

  On 12 December, Nixon and Kissinger had a panicky conversation about the situation in the subcontinent and its ramifications for the larger global scene. They feared that India, which was already occupying most of East Pakistan, was going to invade West Pakistan and turn it into a satellite state. And behind India, so they assumed, was its patron, the Soviet Union. The time had come, they agreed, to stand up against India’s naked aggression and force the Soviet Union to decide between continuing to back India and working with the United States for a ceasefire. ‘A typical Nixon plan,’ said Kissinger. ‘You’re putting your chips into the pot again. But my view is that if we do nothing, there’s a certainty of a disaster.’30

  At that point, Haig entered to say that the Chinese mission in New York urgently wanted a meeting. Kissinger, who had talked to Huang Hua, the Chinese ambassador to the UN, two days before, was already extremely nervous about China’s intentions. Huang had talked about how the Soviet Union and India were trying to encircle China and expressed his country’s support for Pakistan. At Haig’s news, Kissinger exploded: ‘They’re going to move. No question, they’re going to move.’ If China came in to protect its friend Pakistan, then it was likely that the Soviets would also intervene. The United States, Kissinger argued, could not simply stand by. If it did, China might be defeated or humiliated. At best, the American initiative to open relations with China would be finished. So what, Nixon asked, should they do? ‘Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?’ Kissinger did not answer directly but painted an apocalyptic picture. ‘If the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese, and if the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis, what we are having now is the final, we may be looking right down the gun barrel.’ Even if the United States managed to stay out of the widening conflict, it would be damaged, perhaps irrevocably. ‘It will be a change in the balance of power in the world of such magnitude.’ Nixon was less pessimistic; ‘Russia and China aren’t going to war.’ He was right. When Haig dashed off to see Huang Hua he discovered that China intended to support ceasefire proposals already before the United Nations.31

  By 16 December, India and Pakistan had agreed to ceasefires in both the east and the west, Yahya Khan had left office in disgrace, and Bangladesh was an independent state. India was stronger and what was left of Pakistan much weaker, a factor that was going to drive the latter in the search for its own nuclear weapons. On the other hand, the new American relationship with China remained good. Chou En-lai, so Kissinger heard through Zulfikar Bhutto, the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, thought that the United States had saved West Pakistan. Kissinger himself suffered a temporary eclipse. Nixon was already annoyed at his increasing public prominence. Moreover, Kissinger’s behaviour during the crisis, when, for example, he leaked a threat to cancel the forthcoming summit with the Soviets, made Nixon wonder about his judgement. When the columnist Jack Anderson ran sensational and accurate stories about how Nixon and Kissinger had tilted towards Pakistan, Nixon blamed Kissinger’s office, unfairly, for that as well. For a couple of weeks, Kissinger found that the President did not have time to meet with him or return his phone calls. He threatened to resign but, in the end, so he told Haldeman, decided that Nixon and the country needed him, especially with the trip to China coming up and then the Moscow summit. The freeze ended and the two men resumed their relationship, ‘close on substance, aloof personally’, as Kissinger put it.32

  There were now only a few weeks left before Nixon’s trip to China. The State Department and the National Security Council were working hard on briefing books for Nixon and Rogers. In the State Department itself, a special
three-man team, under orders of the strictest secrecy, was writing a series of position papers and opinions for Kissinger. Because none of their colleagues was supposed to know what they were doing, the unfortunate trio had to do their regular work and then sneak away for much of the night to do Kissinger’s. At the NSC, Charles Freeman, who had been moved over from State, was also churning out material. He worked round the clock, often getting only two or three hours of sleep a night and forgetting to eat. At the last moment, someone decided that Pat Nixon should have her own briefing book. Freeman had twenty-four hours to produce a summary of Chinese arts and culture with brief descriptions of every place she would be seeing. ‘For me’, he recalled, ‘that period of a couple of months, I guess, six weeks, felt like a year.’ All over Washington, under orders from Kissinger, different departments of the government were doing specialized studies. The reports would disappear into the National Security Council, where Kissinger’s own team would use what they wanted. Sometimes the NSC staff would simply take the first page of a briefing off and substitute their own. The State Department fought back with a special letterhead which made it more difficult for the NSC staff to pass off State papers as their own.33

  The Chinese were also making their preparations. The policy for receiving the Nixon party, the government decided, should be ‘treat guests with politeness and respect; not an arrogant attitude, nor a servile one; not too warm treatment, nor too cold’. Chou set up a special team at the Diaoyutai which included Ye Jianying, one of the Four Marshals; Zhang Wenjin, an experienced diplomat who had been one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution in the foreign ministry; and Xiong Xianghui, a protégé of Chou’s who had worked closely with the Four Marshals. Chou himself frequently chaired their meetings. The team prepared analyses of the international situation and American domestic politics and gathered whatever information they could about Nixon and Kissinger, from their thinking to their personalities. Although Mao had approved the visit, Chou still had to deal with the radicals who quibbled over details. The Ministry of Culture objected to a Chinese band playing ‘America the Beautiful’ at the welcome banquet. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, did not want American television crews ‘doing propaganda for Nixon on Chinese soil’.34