The career he had chosen placed a terrific strain on him, and from time to time, it showed. When he was tired and tense, even one drink would tip him over into slurred and rambling speeches. He often had trouble sleeping, and his colleagues grew accustomed to the middle-of-the-night phone calls. Unsubstantiated rumors circulated for years that Nixon had seen a psychoanalyst or that his doctor had treated him for impotence. One of his doctors, in New York, talked mysteriously in his old age about Nixon’s neurotic symptoms and how difficult it was to discuss them with a patient “so very inhibited.”42 It is hard to know how seriously to take such stories. It is certainly true, though, that many people found Nixon puzzling. “The strangest man I’d ever met,” said one White House assistant. Kissinger, usually cautious in public, once told a reporter that he found Nixon “odd, artificial, and unpleasant.”43
“I do not recall a moment,” said Herb Klein, Nixon’s director of communications, “when I saw him completely lost in happiness.”44 Nixon could never forget past humiliations and setbacks. As he told Chou En-lai when they finally met, “An election loss was really more painful than a physical wound in war.” The latter wounded only the body, the former the spirit. On the other hand, adversity gave you “strength and character.” All he wanted, he told Chou, “was a life in which I had just one more victory than defeat.”45 It was a curious and revealing way to talk to someone he scarcely knew.
Nixon went through agonies even as vice president, and when he was running for the presidential nominations in 1960 and 1968, because Eisenhower, whom he admired so much, would never wholeheartedly support or endorse him. Although he prided himself on his self-control, there were moments of uncontrollable rage or self-pity. He broke down famously in public in 1962 at the end of his unsuccessful campaign for governor of California; in a rambling statement he blamed the press for his loss: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”46
It was not, of course. “Once you get into this great stream of history,” he once said, “you can’t get out.”47 Why would a man who was uncomfortable with strangers choose a life in politics? “It doesn’t come naturally to me to be a buddy-buddy boy,” he told a journalist. “I can’t really let my hair down with anyone.”48 What spurred him on after so many setbacks—his narrow loss to Kennedy in 1960, his humiliating loss for the governorship of California, and, of course, being driven from office by the Watergate scandal? Who or where was the real Nixon? Was it the man who barked orders at his aides to fire this son of a bitch and to get that opponent? The man who wrote, in a 1970 New Year’s memorandum to himself, “Cool—Strong—Organized—Temperate—Exciting”? Or the man whom an aide, a liberal Jewish lawyer from New York, remembered for his “intelligence, idealism and generosity” and who never believed that, for all the ranting about Jews on the tapes, Nixon was anti-Semitic? The writer Russell Baker once came up with a striking image: of Nixon as a row of suits that came out of the closet in turn and that ran from the demagogic anti-Communist to the elder statesman.49
When he was at college, Nixon loved acting. Many of the journalists who followed him over the years felt that he had never stopped. He could be brilliant, drawing crowds to their feet with his speeches. When he talked to his fellow statesmen, he was wise and dignified. But the acts were not always convincing. Eisenhower’s secretary thought that Nixon “sometimes seems like a man who is acting a nice man rather than being one.”50 In public appearances, he sweated too much, gestured stiffly, wrung his hands together until his knuckles went white. When he was president his staff tried to set up opportunities to show him being relaxed and spontaneous, as the Kennedys, who fascinated and infuriated Nixon, so easily were. Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, got him an Irish setter, but it had to be cajoled with a trail of dog biscuits to go near Nixon. A scene staged to show the press a rugged Nixon strolling by the Pacific Ocean somehow did not come off; he’d worn polished leather shoes and dress trousers.51 When visitors came to his office he tried to set them at ease, but when he brought out a memento, a pin or a pen perhaps, he thrust it out awkwardly with one of his unfunny jokes. “He was a man totally lacking in personal grace,” said a senior State Department official, “with no sense of the proper distance to keep in human relations.”52 Yet when he gave out posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor (something he shrank from doing), he was direct and simple with the families.53
He loved the idea of being president, although he found some of the reality, such as cabinet meetings, tedious. (He simply gave up holding them.) He loved being greeted abroad as a head of state.54 He loved living in the White House. He tried to enhance its already considerable pomp with new uniforms in white and gold for the White House police. (After a press comment compared the new uniforms to those in comic operas, the uniforms quietly disappeared; the elaborate hats popped up later at a rock concert.)55
He knew how he wanted to be seen: with the charm of a Kennedy and the leadership of a Churchill or a de Gaulle. “At his best in a crisis. Cool. Unflappable” were the qualities he wanted the press to perceive, he told Kissinger. “Steely but subtle.”56 He wished to be mysterious: “always like the iceberg, you see only the tip.”57 His staff had orders to stress how hard the man Nixon referred to as “N.” or “the P.” worked, how he needed only a few hours of sleep, how focused and energetic he was.58 This was true, but not always. Nixon was easily distracted. “P. is all of a sudden enamored with the use of the Dictaphone,” Haldeman wrote in his diary one day, “and is spewing out memos by the carload.” Nixon fussed endlessly about the details for state banquets or the latest story in the press.59
“All people think the P’s doing an excellent job,” he told Haldeman in 1972 just before the China trip, “but no one loves him, fears him, or hates him, and he needs to have all three.”60 He had the last two, at least in some circles. He suspected, though, that even his own staff did not take his orders seriously when, like the Red Queen, he demanded that this person be fired at once and that office be closed down immediately. If sheer hard work and attention to image could have done it, Nixon would have had love too, but he knew well and sometimes despaired that he was not naturally charismatic.61
He was generous to his staff, but he seems not to have known how to treat them as human beings. He never thought, for example, to ask Haldeman how many children he had. And although his chief of staff spent hours with Nixon every day, the president only once invited him and his wife to a purely social dinner with Mrs. Nixon.62 But then Nixon had few purely social occasions or friends. Haldeman, who tried to anticipate everything, once tried to find a friend for Nixon, someone he could confide in. Nixon was astonished. In any case, he already had the perfect friend in Bebe Rebozo, “a genial, discreet sponge,” who sat silently for hours while Nixon held forth.63 Otherwise it is difficult to know whom he was close to. His daughters certainly; perhaps his wife, Pat, although he rarely showed any interest in her after the first few years of their marriage. He had thousands of acquaintances but very few close friends.
He often talked about his mother, who was widely held to be a saintly figure who had suffered the early deaths of two of her children. She was a cold saint, however, doing her duty uncomplainingly but never showing her children open affection or warmth. Nixon told his sympathetic biographer, Jonathan Aitken, that his mother had never kissed him. When Aitken seemed surprised, Nixon grew angry. Aitken’s reaction, Nixon felt, was like something from “one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists.”64 Yet he wept in Billy Graham’s arms when his mother died. Henry Kissinger, who could be so cruel about Nixon, once said, “He would have been a great man had somebody loved him.”65
The area where Nixon came closest to real greatness, in his own mind and in those of his defenders, was foreign relations. As he took off from Washington that February day in 1972, he was flying not just toward China but to, he thought, a shift for the better in the United States’ position in the world. Perhaps even
more important to him was the historic nature of his trip. He talked about it incessantly in the months before his departure.66 He was the first American president ever to visit China, and he was going to a country that was a mystery to most of the world. “A trip to China,” he told journalists, “is like going to the moon.”67 He was determined that it would go well.
“I know of no Presidential trip,” wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, “that was as carefully planned nor of any President who ever prepared himself so conscientiously.”68 Nixon summoned the venerable and mendacious André Malraux from Paris; the French man of letters and former minister of cultural affairs, after a brief encounter with Mao, claimed to be a China expert. Malraux assured Nixon that if de Gaulle stood in his place, he would salute him as well for the step he was taking: “You are about to attempt one of the most important things of our century.” Kissinger was less impressed, saying, “Unfortunately Malraux was grossly out of date about China.” He did admit, with the respect of a connoisseur, that Malraux was wonderfully eloquent.69 John Scali, a press adviser on foreign affairs in the White House, was blunt: “I felt I was listening to the views of a romantic, vain, old man who was weaving obsolete views into a special framework for the world as he wished it to be.”70 Nixon, however, was enthralled, even though the sage’s severe facial tic made his every statement painful to listen to: “Time had not dimmed the brilliance of his thought or the quickness of his wit.”71 And Malraux had been a friend of the Kennedys.
The CIA sent the president analyses of Mao’s and Chou’s personalities. Old China hands sent in lots of unsolicited advice. The State Department drew up background papers on all the outstanding disputes—on property, for example—between the United States and China and on major policy issues. (It is not clear that Nixon ever saw these because they had to go through Kissinger, who had no love for the department.)72 Kissinger and his NSC staff prepared their own briefing books and sent the president extracts from books and articles they felt he should read. Nixon did his homework meticulously, bearing down particularly hard in the week just before his trip.73
On the plane, Nixon and Mrs. Nixon, along with his close advisers, including Henry Kissinger, sat in comfort at the front; the State Department personnel were relegated to the back of the plane. The flight to China was carefully planned so that Nixon would arrive as well rested as possible. He also took advantage of the time to go over his papers and practice using chopsticks. While two planeloads of journalists went on ahead to Shanghai, Air Force One (or, as Nixon preferred to call it, especially for this trip, the Spirit of ’76) stopped in Hawaii at an air force base for a couple of days. The president’s party, including Kissinger, was housed with the commanding officer, while the lower ranks stayed in the greater comfort of a local luxury hotel. Clare Boothe Luce, who with her husband, Henry Luce, had used their publications, such as Time, to support the other China, the one in Taiwan, gave a dinner for some of the party at her spectacular house overlooking the Pacific. “You liberals,” she said, “don’t really understand this trip.” But, she added, times were changing and the Communist Chinese would recognize that the United States had always been a friend to China.74 On February 21, with military music and hula girls, the plane took off for Guam, where there was another overnight stop. That left a short flight to Shanghai for the next day. In Shanghai, after a brief welcome and a rapid breakfast, Chinese pilots came on board (this had been the subject of intensive negotiations) and piloted the plane for its final leg to Beijing.
The presidential plane was to land at the civilian airport in Beijing at 11:30 A.M., on Monday, February 21, a time chosen carefully to ensure that Nixon’s arrival would make television news in all time zones back in the United States, where it would be 10:30 P.M. on the East Coast and 7:30 P.M. on the West. Nixon had been worrying about his first moments in the Chinese capital for days. On the flight earlier that day from Guam to Shanghai he had gone over the details of the Beijing arrival yet again with his chief of staff. “He’s very concerned,” wrote Haldeman in his diary, “that the whole operation at Peking airport be handled flawlessly since that will be the key picture of the whole trip.”75
CHAPTER 2
ARRIVAL
AS AIR FORCE ONE FLEW NORTH FROM SHANGHAI TOWARD BEIJING, Nixon anxiously went over the arrangements for his arrival and pestered Kissinger with questions about the Communist Chinese.
In the heart of Beijing, an old and sick Mao Tse-tung woke up early and had his first shave and haircut in months. As Nixon’s plane neared the Chinese capital, Mao’s subordinates phoned him repeatedly to report its progress.
The morning was cold and gray and slightly hazy. At the last moment before the plane’s wheels touched down, Chou En-lai, China’s prime minister, dressed in a dark blue overcoat over a gray Mao suit, appeared on the runway with a party of about twenty-five officials. An honor guard, some in the drab green of the People’s Liberation Army and others in the blue of the navy, together with a military band, marched out to join them. The red stars that glinted in their caps were the ubiquitous symbol of the new Communist order in China. Two solitary flags, one the American, the other the Chinese, hung limp in the still air. The only other witnesses to the historic arrival were American journalists, who had been sent on ahead of the president’s plane. Otherwise the airport was largely empty. A Canadian diplomat, one of the handful of foreign representatives in Beijing, had asked whether he could attend the welcoming ceremonies. A Chinese official told him that it would be necessary to get a special pass. How, asked the Canadian, was he to get his pass? The answer was simple: “Special passes will not be issued.”1
On the terminal building, one of the standard big character signs carried a famous phrase from an article Mao had written in 1949, attacking the United States: “Make trouble fail, make trouble fail again, until their doom / This is the nature of all imperialists and capitalists and they cannot go against it.” Another said simply “China 5, U.S. 1”; it was not clear whether this referred to war or to the ping-pong tournament that had recently been held in Beijing.2 From inside the plane, the head of the president’s security radioed his agent who had come with the advance party to ask his usual question on presidential visits: “What about the crowd?” The answer came back, “There is no crowd.” “Did you say, ‘No crowd’?” “That is an affirmative.” Nixon, joked one reporter, was enjoying his best reception since he had been to the annual meeting of American trade unionists in Bal Harbour, Florida.3
The Chinese were making a point, but what it was remained obscure. Perhaps they intended to demonstrate that even the head of the most powerful nation in the world did not impress them. Perhaps it meant that they feared the Americans, for their part, would be cool on their arrival. Perhaps they wanted to show that the trip was strictly about business and not friendship. After all, the Chinese authorities could summon up pliable crowds whenever they wished. Haile Selassie, soon to be deposed from the throne of Ethiopia, had visited Beijing in October 1971. For him, the airport had been alive with dancers and workers and schoolchildren, all waving enthusiastically. The Ethiopian emperor’s drive into the city had been seen by some 250,000 people, waving Ethiopian flags and Little Red Books, which contained Mao’s wisdom, banging drums and clashing cymbals, and cheering as though they actually knew where Ethiopia was and why its friendship mattered to China. Tiananmen Square, the monumental parade ground in the heart of the city, had been draped with banners of welcome in English and Chinese, and in the stands teenagers had spelled out “Haile Selassie” in red and yellow paper flowers.4
Inside the plane, Nixon’s staff peered out to see whether Chou Enlai was wearing an overcoat. When they reported to Nixon that indeed he was, Nixon kept his own coat on. It would not do to appear to be trying to show American superiority in braving the cold.5 The door of Nixon’s plane opened, and the president appeared to faint applause from the small crowd on the ground. Partway down the stairs, he paused and briefly returned the claps. Inside the ai
rcraft, Haldeman and the Secret Service men held everyone else back so that Nixon would savor this moment by himself—and so that the American newsmen assembled on the ground would catch it. Nixon, in a dark blue suit and gray overcoat, looked solemn. What one journalist called “those famous twitching hands” were for once still.6 Nixon’s wife, Pat, then emerged, wearing a vivid red coat. She had ignored the warnings of American China specialists that only prostitutes wore red in China; but then their knowledge, like so much of what Americans knew about China, was probably out of date. Mrs. Nixon gave a tentative little wave at the top of the stairs and hastened down to join her husband.
As Nixon reached the last steps, he thrust his arm out toward Chou and the two men shook hands, seemingly for longer than usual. The press cameras homed in on the clasped hands. Chou, who spoke several languages, said a few words to Nixon in English. How was Nixon’s flight? “Very pleasant,” said Nixon. As the rest of the American party clambered down, Chou noticed Kissinger and said, with what seemed like genuine warmth, “Ah, old friend.”7 The two men had met twice already, when Kissinger had come to pave the way for Nixon.
Nixon and Mao Page 3