Nixon and Mao

by Margaret MacMillan

  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 division 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 cease-fire 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 nonaligned nations but tilted toward 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 firmly in the Western camp and was firmly opposed to Communism, understandably supported China. It was rewarded by 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 West Pakistan, 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, Mohammad Ayub Khan. When he stepped down, he handed over power to Yahya Khan, like Ayub another West Pakistani. The inhabitants of East Pakistan increasingly resented what they saw as the political dominance of the West Pakistanis. In the summer of 1970, a series of cyclones devastated much of East Pakistan, 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 East Pakistan. “Mr. President,” said Kissinger when they met in the summer of 1971, “for an elected dictator you ran a lousy election.”27

  The Awami League held enough seats to form the government of Pakistan, but Yahya simply refused to call the National Assembly together. During 1971, the two halves of Pakistan moved toward 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 with Pakistan. Kissinger, though, talked obliquely about Yahya’s special 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 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 toward Pakistan. “Why is it our business how they govern themselves?” Kissinger complained to a high-level interagency 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.”28

  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 toward 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 1971.29

  Kissinger, however, was convinced after his visit to New Delhi in July that war was likely and when, on August 9, 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 would have an 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.30

  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 was 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.”31 During Kissinger’s second visit, in October, 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 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.”32

  Hostilities did break out. Indian troops were making minor incursions into Pakistan by late November, and on December 3, 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.33

  Nixon and Kissinger had been working hard behind the scenes to help Pakistan. “We are trying desperately,” Nixon told Pakistan’s foreign secretary in November 1971, “not to allow this terrible tragedy, this agony that you’re going through, to be the pretext to start a war.”34 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, he also ordered an American naval task force to sail toward 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 a
nd Kissinger also worked with the Soviet Union to get cease-fire proposals acceptable to both sides.

  On December 12, Nixon and Kissinger had a panicky conversation over the situation on 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, they assumed, was its patron, the Soviet Union. The time had come, they agreed, to stand up to India’s naked aggression and force the Soviet Union to choose between continuing to back India and working with the United States for a cease-fire. “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.”35

  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 U.N., 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 had 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,” Kissinger said. 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 cease-fire proposals already before the United Nations.36

  By December 16, India and Pakistan had agreed to cease-fires 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 it in the search for its own nuclear weapons. On the other hand, the new American relationship with China remained good. Chou En-lai, 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 behavior during the crisis—when, for example, he leaked a threat to cancel the forthcoming summit with the Soviets—made Nixon wonder about his judgment. When the columnist Jack Anderson ran sensational and accurate stories about how Nixon and Kissinger had tilted toward 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. Kissinger threatened to resign but, in the end, 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.37

  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 were supposed to know what they were doing, the unfortunate trio had to finish their regular work, 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 around 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 special letterhead that made it more difficult for the NSC staff to pass off State papers as their own.38

  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 that 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.”39

  In January 1972, when Kissinger sent his deputy, Alexander Haig, to China to make the final preparations for the Nixon trip, the radicals continued to cause difficulties. Haig, who was checking out the places Nixon would see, spent an evening in Shanghai, a radical stronghold. At the banquet, something went badly wrong. According to the Chinese, Haig sat silently through the meal and refused to return a toast from one of his hosts. Haig’s version is that the toast was offensively anti-American and that he decided not to reply. Moreover, according to Haig, at the end of the banquet, Wang Hongwen, a leading radical who would later be tried as a member of the Gang of Four, came up to him and rudely announced that the banquet was over. When Haig’s party continued on to Hangzhou, they received a cool greeting from the local officials. Although it was bitterly cold, they were all taken out on the famous West Lake, as Nixon would be. There was nothing on the boat to eat, just cups of tea. Zhang Hanzhi, one of the interpreters accompanying the Americans, asked the locals what was going on. All sorts of delicacies had been prepared, she was told, but they had received a phone call from Shanghai ordering them to be unfriendly. “Everyone is scared of the Shanghai radicals so we withdrew all the food.” Zhang and the others who had come with the Americans had an emergency meeting and reported the situation to Chou, who in turn called Mao. “Chou En-lai really criticized us very, very seriously,” Zhang recalled. “And he said, what happened in Shanghai and Hangzhou almost upset the whole strategy of Mao Tsetung’s plan of breaking the ice between the U.S. and China.”40

  Haig had been sent out to do more than sightseeing; he had a delicate mission. He had to reassure the Chinese that the United States was firmly on their side against the Soviet threat, and he also had to downplay the bombing campaign that the United States was carrying on against North Vietnam. In addition, he was to see if he could get some modification in the wording in the communiqué on Taiwan. “I have complete confidence in him,” Kissinger had told Chou in October, although Haig was, he took care to point out, more of a soldier than a
negotiator. It was an impression that Haig, who was both clever and devious, liked to play up.41

  On their arrival in Beijing, Haig and his party were given the obligatory banquet with the repeated toasts with mao-tai. Just as Haig was collapsing into bed, he was summoned back to the Great Hall to meet Chou. He found the prime minister surrounded by senior officials and a host of journalists and cameras. When he saw Haig, Chou began a strident denunciation of American imperialism. At the end, Haig said firmly that he was not prepared to have his country insulted. If necessary, he and his party would leave. Chou at once dismissed most of the officials and the journalists and his tone changed to a more friendly one. How was Kissinger? Chou had heard that he had the flu. And was this Haig’s first trip to China?42

  The two men talked until early in the morning. The Soviets, Haig said, offering what he called a blunt soldier’s assessment, had tried—unsuccessfully, of course—to divide the United States from the People’s Republic during the recent conflict in the subcontinent. The Soviet Union was bent on encircling China. That was why they were supporting India, why their foreign minister had just visited Japan, and why they were encouraging Hanoi to step up its activities in Laos and Cambodia. What was more, the North Vietnamese were unwilling to talk to the United States about ending the war in Indochina; indeed, they seemed determined to humiliate the Americans. Haig did his best to portray the American bombing campaign against North Vietnam as a way of countering the Soviet Union: “We feel strongly that Moscow is urging Hanoi in the direction of continued military action and as such, they are forging another link in the chain which is designed to constrain the People’s Republic.” Chou was not impressed by the reasoning: “the U.S. bombing has increased the Soviet influence in this area.” Nor was Mao impressed when Chou made his report. So the United States was worried about China? Mao asked. “Its concerns for us are just like a cat feeling sad for a mouse!”43