Kissinger and Nixon both assumed that a major factor in the Soviet Union’s unwillingness to make an issue over Haiphong and to move ahead on détente was its obsession with the Chinese menace and a fear that the United States would draw closer to China. The evidence so far from the Soviet side is mixed. It is true that the Soviet Union was concerned about China. Indeed the Soviets continued their military preparations along the Soviet–Chinese border. Nevertheless, the chief Soviet concern in the early 1970s appears to have been Europe, where the Soviet Union wanted to get Western recognition of the borders left behind in the aftermath of the Second World War. That would confirm, or so it appeared at the time, both the division of Germany and Soviet control over its satellites in Eastern Europe.2
Nixon went to Moscow in May 1972 and the summit went ahead as planned in a generally friendly atmosphere. The United States and the Soviet Union signed a major arms limitation agreement, SALT 1, and an agreement on the basic principles to govern their relations. The Soviets also suggested that the two sides formally promise not to use nuclear weapons against each other. That left the door open, though, for their use by, for example, the Soviet Union against China. Kissinger duly let the Chinese know about the Soviet proposal with the assurance that Nixon would accept it only if the Soviets promised as well not to use their weapons on China. Not surprisingly, the Chinese were alarmed both by this and by the overall progress of Soviet–American détente. When Kissinger made two more visits to Beijing, in February and then in November 1973, not only was he granted the honour of meetings with Mao but he was given a particularly friendly welcome. The Chinese took a major step towards normalization of relations by agreeing that the United States and China would establish liaison offices, in many ways indistinguishable from embassies, in each other’s capitals.
Mao and Chou both expressed concern over the Soviet Union. Where Kissinger had once been rebuffed by the Chinese when he suggested a defensive alliance, he now found Mao talking about the need for a ‘horizontal line’ of countries stretching along the borders of the Soviet Union, from the United States, through China and into Europe, to contain Soviet power. ‘The driving force on the Chinese side’, Kissinger told Nixon after his November trip, ‘remained their preoccupation with the Soviet Union.’ The Chinese were counting on the United States as a counterweight. ‘The key,’ commented Nixon in the margin. The China card seemed to be working as both men had intended, to keep the Soviets in line and to bring the Chinese into the American camp.3
At the start of 1973, too, there was more good news for the Nixon administration when the war in Vietnam finally came to an end. Kissinger and his counterpart in Paris, Le Duc Tho, reached an agreement which allowed the United States to get out, leaving behind an apparently viable South Vietnam and peace for Laos and Cambodia as well. Taiwan felt a sudden chill, but, as James Shen, Taiwan’s ambassador in Washington, commented sourly, selling South Vietnam out meant that his own country was temporarily safe: the United States could not be seen to be abandoning all its allies.4
By 1974, however, the China card appeared to be losing its effectiveness. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had been badly strained by the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 when the Americans backed Israel and the Soviets its Arab opponents, by the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, and by the increasingly aggressive Soviet inroads into the Third World. And the Chinese no longer seemed as friendly. The small American mission in Beijing found local officials obstructive and difficult and grew used to repeated lectures on offences it had unwittingly committed against the Chinese people. A detachment of Marines, assigned, as was standard practice, to guard the American mission, caused particular trouble. The Chinese objected to their uniforms, to their jogging in formation through the streets of Beijing, and, above all, to their bar, the Red-Ass Saloon, where lonely and bored foreigners crammed in to drink and listen to loud Western music. The Chinese insisted that the Marines leave.5
While Sino-American relations did not go back to what they had been before Nixon’s visit, they did not move ahead either. The Shanghai communiqué had promised that China and the United States would continue to consult about the full normalization of relations, but that proved to be impossible in the mid-1970s because in each country there was a major leadership crisis: Nixon struggled to stay in office and Mao lay dying.
At his moment of greatest triumph, Nixon had embarked on the series of steps which led him to the Watergate scandal and his eventual disgrace. In June 1972, less than four months after his triumphant return from China, five men with strong links to CREEP, Nixon’s campaign committee, and to the White House itself, were arrested trying to bug and burgle the Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex in downtown Washington. The news made the papers, initially as a minor story. As reporters started to uncover direct connections between the Watergate burglars and the circles around Nixon, the reaction in the White House and the Nixon campaign was to shred documents, deny everything and try to keep a lid on the news. According to Haldeman, the first and fatal mistake was to treat Watergate as a potential public relations disaster. Each attempt to contain it merely led deeper into a full-blown cover-up as Nixon and many of those close to him committed illegal acts and seriously abused government power.6
In the run-up to the presidential election of 1972, however, the White House strategy appeared to be working. The major domestic news story was the Democratic campaign, which was imploding as anonymous tips revealed that the vice-presidential candidate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had not disclosed that he had been treated for depression. Haldeman assured Nixon that, although the Watergate burglars and two of their superiors were going to be indicted that September, everything was under control. All the men had been paid off handsomely to keep quiet. The Justice Department was on side and did not intend to charge anyone else. At the Washington Post, though, a couple of junior reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were starting to uncover some interesting details of payments made to the burglars from CREEP.7
Nixon was in a cheerful and confident mood that autumn. The Republican Convention had renominated him by a vote of 1,327 to 1 and the Democrats’ candidate for president, George McGovern, was far behind in the polls. Nixon intended, so he said in interviews, to make the next four years even more successful than his first term. He had turned things around for the United States, with bold moves like his China initiative. The long-awaited peace in Vietnam was nearly at hand. In private he told his associates that he was going to get back at his enemies. ‘They are asking for it and they are going to get it,’ he told John Dean, the White House counsel. Even the Woodward and Bernstein story that October about Donald Segretti and his ‘pranksters’ with their dirty tricks did not worry Nixon. ‘Sue the sons of bitches,’ he told Haldeman.8
Nixon won the election in November in a landslide. He happily made plans to overhaul the government and centralize decision-making even more in his office. Time magazine made him its man of the year in its New Year’s issue of 1973. Nixon was pleased but also annoyed that he had to share the honour with Kissinger. On 9 January 1973, his sixtieth birthday, he received a present in a cable from Kissinger, who was in Paris: peace terms had finally been concluded with the North Vietnamese. Two days later Nixon wrote down his goals, both for the United States and for himself. He intended to pursue détente, including major new arms agreements with the Soviet Union. Perhaps he could get a settlement in the Middle East. And for the presidency, ‘Restore respect for office.’ That day the Watergate trial began.9
In the next year and a half, it all unravelled for Nixon. In February 1973, the Senate set up its own committee to investigate. In March, it made public a letter from the one burglar who had broken ranks, which stated that highly placed officials in the White House had known in advance of the break-in. The Justice Department began its own investigation of the original incident and the subsequent cover-up. More stories surfaced, of the destruction of evidence, of extensiv
e and illegal wiretapping, and of other burglaries to find incriminating evidence against Nixon’s enemies. In April, Nixon let go of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, his Berlin Wall. It was too late to stop what was now a major scandal. As a Special Prosecutor began digging into the sorry story, the Senate Committee started its televised hearings. In August, it learned that Nixon had hours of tapes of conversations. When Archibald Cox, the Special Prosecutor, got a court order in October requiring that the relevant ones be turned over, Nixon not only resisted but fired Cox. There was now talk of impeaching Nixon.
By 1973, according to Kissinger, Watergate was distracting Nixon and seriously harming the ability of the United States to conduct its foreign relations. Reports came in that spring that the Chinese were discreetly asking about how much authority Nixon still possessed. Nixon had always been bored by domestic issues; now he had to deal with them to the neglect of the international affairs he loved so much. Much to his displeasure, he had to let Kissinger take on a more prominent role. In August 1973, he grudgingly appointed him his Secretary of State. ‘With the Watergate problem,’ Nixon later told Kissinger’s biographer, ‘I didn’t have any choices.’10
At the end of 1973, the White House released transcripts of part of the tapes but fought to keep the rest private. In July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Nixon. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee approved the first of the articles of impeachment. On 8 August, Nixon announced his resignation to the nation. In his last conversations as president with Kissinger, he went over the great moments of his foreign policy including the opening to China. ‘For some reason,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘the agony and the loss of what was about to happen became most acute for me during that conversation. I found myself more emotional than I had been at any time since the decision had been set in motion.’ Nixon pulled out the bottle of old brandy which he and Kissinger had drunk from three years previously when they toasted Chou’s letter inviting an American emissary to travel to China, but neither man had the heart to drink much. An emotional Nixon asked Kissinger for one last favour; would he kneel beside him for a silent prayer? Kissinger was deeply moved.11
Gerald Ford, who had succeeded the disgraced Agnew as Vice-President and now found himself Nixon’s successor, kept Kissinger on as Secretary of State but he was not prepared to move as fast as Kissinger wanted on China. American public opinion was cooling off after the initial excitement over Nixon’s visit. Ford was concerned about the Republican right, which largely supported Taiwan and was not prepared to push for full normalization of relations with China, even if the Chinese had been willing on their side. A visit to China by Ford in 1975 produced little in the way of results. ‘I think it was very useful,’ said an American official, ‘but I can’t suggest why I think that.’12
The Chinese never really understood Watergate, just as they never really understood how democracies worked. In one of his last coherent conversations with Kissinger, Mao made light of it. ‘Why is it in your country’, he asked, ‘you are always obsessed with that nonsensical Watergate issue?’ To embarrassed laughter from the Chinese, his interpreter explained that she was watering down Mao’s original expression which really meant ‘breaking wind’. Watergate, Mao thought, was no reason to get rid of a president. While Mao’s own power remained unassailable, he faced a challenge of another sort. His health was deteriorating rapidly. By the start of 1974, his eyesight was going and he had difficulty talking and swallowing. Saliva dribbled from his half-open mouth. In July, he finally agreed to be examined by a team of specialists. The doctors concluded that he had the rare and fatal disease of the nervous system known in English as Lou Gehrig’s disease. No one dared tell Mao himself, but it was clear to those around him that he had only a year, perhaps two, to live. Mao with his deep-rooted suspicion of doctors initially refused to have treatment of any sort.13
He also refused treatment for Chou, whose doctors had discovered in 1973 that he had cancer of the bladder. Chou looked perfectly healthy, Mao said; no need to make him uncomfortable with what were probably useless attempts to cure him. ‘Leave the patient alone and let him live out his life happily,’ Mao ordered. It was only in the following summer, when a pretty, young laboratory technician coaxed Mao, that he agreed to let Chou have an operation. By then it was too late – Chou’s cancer had spread rapidly. In March 1975, he went into hospital for yet another operation. There he stayed, working on with what strength he had left. He received foreign dignitaries and high-ranking Chinese Communists in his room. Kissinger saw him one last time. Chou refused to talk politics but he was not able to escape them, as it turned out, even in death.14
As Mao moved inexorably towards his own end, his colleagues and servants, as at the court of a dying emperor, jockeyed for power. Much of the infighting and intrigues went on behind the scenes, in the villas of the top leaders or government offices, but distorted reverberations reached the outside world. The press carried strange articles denouncing incorrect thought or work habits of this historical figure or that one. In 1973, a campaign flared up to attack Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher of the sixth century bc. He had supported feudalism, so it was said, and urged rulers to use experienced officials, even if their outlook was old fashioned. Somehow, improbably, Lin Biao, the disgraced, dead Defence Minister, was said to have had the same views. The real targets, hated by Jiang Qing and her coterie, were still alive: Deng Xiaoping, a Communist Party elder who had suddenly been called back from the countryside to become vice-premier, and Chou En-lai himself. Counterattacks, equally indirect, appeared, perhaps inspired by Chou. Jiang Qing was known to like Beethoven. An article in the People’s Daily accused the Philadelphia orchestra, which had visited Beijing, of playing counter-revolutionary Western music, especially Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.15
In the background, alternatively stirring up conflict and damping it down, lurked a reclusive and ailing Mao. He communicated with the outside world mainly through his young women assistants. By 1975, he was partly paralysed and could not stand on his own. Zhang Yufeng, once his mistress and now his chief nurse, fed him laboriously by spoon. At Mao’s last Chinese New Year, in February 1976,the two of them celebrated alone. ‘A faint smile’, she recalled, ‘crept over his old and weary face when he heard the firecrackers in the courtyard.’ Only a select few visitors came to disturb his seclusion. Kissinger came one last time in the autumn of 1975. An American diplomat who spoke Chinese watched as Mao tried to speak: ‘Despite my language ability, I couldn’t follow the dialogue, but it seemed rather contrived. One grunt became many coherent English sentences, etc. Not necessarily phony, but surely padded out by Mao’s female assistants.’ Nixon, making one of his periodic trips to China, paid his last respects a few months later, and found it painful to see Mao’s deterioration. ‘Whatever one may think of him,’ he said with admiration, ‘no one can deny that he was a fighter to the end.’16
During Mao’s death-watch, Chinese policy, both domestic and foreign, remained in a state of suspension. High-ranking Chinese tried simply to survive. Many developed convenient illnesses and checked themselves into hospital. Deng, in disgrace again, retired to south China where he was under the protection of the army. Qiao, who was increasingly nervous and depressed as he came under ever-fiercer attacks, tried in vain to get himself posted abroad or be allowed to resign. At the start of 1976, Chou died. His death was marked by perfunctory ceremonies. Mao, who was too ill to attend his funeral, showed no emotion at the disappearance of one of his oldest and most faithful servants. The Chinese public, in what was an extraordinary and rare spontaneous outburst, showed what they felt during the traditional spring festival for paying respects to the dead: Tiananmen Square filled with crowds leaving wreaths. Mao, who was told about this by a furious Jiang Qing, appears to have given orders to suppress the demonstrations and remove the wreaths. By this point, since he could communicate only by grunts and scribbled characters, it is impossible to know how much he understood.17
Mao memorabilia, especially from the Cultural Revolution when the Mao cult reached its crazed peak, is for sale all over China. The government, though, has difficulty getting rid of the billions of copies of his works which sit mouldering in warehouses around China. People prefer Mao on T-shirts and New Year’s greetings. Bars have karaoke versions of his favourite revolutionary songs. In the 1990s, Chinese television ran a Mao quiz show where teams competed to give Mao facts and Mao quotations. Mao has become kitsch. He has also become a talisman. Old women put his image over their stoves as their ancestors would have put the god of the kitchen, and taxi drivers have his picture on their dashboards to save them from accidents. In 1993, the new Maxim’s in Beijing held a Mao birthday buffet; guests wore Mao suits and listened to excerpts from one of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary operas.18
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