Nixon and Mao

by Margaret MacMillan

  A month before his secret trip to China, Kissinger had a meeting with Dobrynin, who, yet again, was evasive on setting a date for a Soviet-American summit. “It was comforting,” thought Kissinger, “to hold cards of which the other side was unaware.” As he was on his way toward China, Kissinger got word that the Soviets had postponed the summit yet again. That freed him up to press for an early meeting between Nixon and the Chinese leadership. When Chou expressed a desire that Nixon should come to China after he had been to Moscow, possibly because the Chinese did not want to anger the Soviets unnecessarily, Kissinger was able to explain that if Nixon visited Beijing before Moscow, it was not the Americans’ doing but the Soviets’.5

  The announcement of Kissinger’s secret trip and, even worse, that Nixon himself was going to visit China came as a complete shock to most of the top Soviet leadership. (Their knowledge of the world outside the Soviet Union, said Dobrynin pityingly, was understandably limited, since it came mainly from the columns of Izvestia and Pravda.) The mood in the Kremlin, where suspicion and fear of China ran deep, was one of confusion and, indeed, almost hysteria. Initial comment in the Soviet press talked darkly about anti-Sovietism and hinted that somehow the Israeli lobby in the United States was pushing American policy toward a rapprochement with China. The official reaction was terse and warned the United States against using its new contacts against the Soviet Union. Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet Union’s leading expert on North America, urged his superiors to remain calm. With their approval, he published an article that argued that an American-Chinese summit was nothing to worry about in itself as long as the Americans were also intending to improve their relations with other socialist countries. If the United States was willing to work on such issues as arms control and settling regional conflicts, then the opening to China was a good thing. The message, as was intended, was heard by the Americans, who had, in any case, no intention of alienating the Soviets, merely pressuring them.6

  On his return from China, Kissinger immediately called Dobrynin to pass on a message from Nixon to Brezhnev: the United States remained committed to improving the relationship between their two countries. Nixon’s trip to China was not directed against any third country. A few days later, Kissinger invited Dobrynin to dinner at the White House to discuss his trip and its implications. Kissinger was reassuring: the Chinese, he said, not entirely truthfully, had said very little about the Soviet Union and appeared to be more worried about the Japanese. Dobrynin asked, “almost plaintively,” said Kissinger, whether Soviet dithering over their summit with Nixon had persuaded the United States to take the initiative toward China. Kissinger did not answer directly but pointed out that the Soviet response to repeated American requests for a summit had been “grudging and petty.” Dobrynin, who secretly agreed, was, in Kissinger’s description for Nixon, “almost beside himself with protestations of goodwill.” The Soviet leaders were very serious in wanting a meeting. Could it happen before Nixon went to Beijing? Kissinger was firm; the summits should take place in the order in which they had been announced. The most Dobrynin could get was an agreement that the announcement for the Moscow summit would be made before Nixon’s trip to China.7

  Although Nixon and Kissinger later claimed that the announcement of Kissinger’s trip brought the Soviet Union into a more accommodating frame of mind in other areas, the evidence is mixed. The negotiations over West Berlin (primarily about its political and actual links to West Germany) were virtually concluded by the time Kissinger went to Beijing. The SALT negotiations were going to move ahead significantly after July 1971, culminating in the final treaty, which was signed in Moscow in May 1972, but agreements on certain key areas had already been reached in the spring of 1971. The most that can be said, perhaps, is that the Soviet Union became more aware of the need to work with the United States and even more sensitive to perceived slights. When Nixon gave his toast at the opening banquet in Beijing, he referred to the United States and China together solving the world’s problems. “That cut to the quick,” Brezhnev’s personal interpreter remembered. “Where was the Soviet Union in this equation?”8

  The Japanese were also shocked by the new direction in American foreign policy because it threatened a bargain Japan had made with the United States in the early 1950s. When Japan regained its independence in 1952 after the American occupation, it agreed to be a part of the American Cold War coalition in Asia, promising, for example, to sign a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Taiwan. It also accepted continued American control of the island of Okinawa and allowed American bases on its own islands. At the same time, Japan agreed to renounce its militarist past. The new Japanese constitution of 1946 specifically ruled out the use of force to settle international disputes. In return, the United States guaranteed Japan’s defense with a security treaty and allowed Japanese industry access to American markets. Although China was a more natural market for Japan, the ruling political party, the Liberal Democrats, bowed to what they felt was inevitable, at least for the time being, and accepted American limitations on trade with China and an outright ban on recognizing it. Asakai Koichiro, the Japanese ambassador in Washington in the late 1950s, had a recurring nightmare, though, that one day he would wake up and find that the United States had reversed its policy on China without telling any of its allies.

  By the end of the 1960s, Japan was much stronger and more confident than when the bargain with the United States had first been struck. Vietnam had shaken Japanese confidence in American power, and the American control of Okinawa was becoming an increasingly tricky issue for Japanese public opinion, especially when there were, from time to time, highly publicized incidents of rape or brutality against Japanese by American servicemen. On the American side, Congress and the American public were going through one of their periodic fits of antipathy toward Japan. Many people believed that an American ally, no matter what its constitution said, should lift some of the burden from the American taxpayer and do more to defend itself. Not only that but Japanese manufacturers, who had had a reputation for shoddiness, were now cutting into American markets as American consumers snapped up well-made Japanese electronics and textiles.

  Nixon quite liked Japan; he had visited there often and knew many of the leading Japanese politicians. He watched its dramatic recovery from defeat, though, with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. “The Japanese are all over Asia like lice,” he told Edward Heath. “What must be done is to make sure we have a home for them.” A Japan going off in its own direction, as it had done before the Second World War, could only be dangerous to its neighbors and to American interests.

  Kissinger, with his focus on Europe and Soviet-American rivalry, had never had reason to know much about Japan. Although in his memoirs, which he wrote in the late 1970s, he waxed lyrical about its mist-covered mountains and green valleys and its complex and subtle inhabitants with their unique society, in the early 1970s he was capable of the crudest generalizations. “The Japanese,” he told Chou, “are capable of sudden and explosive changes. They went from feudalism to emperor worship in two to three years. They went from emperor worship to democracy in three months.” Kissinger was also bored by Japanese issues. He is said to have described Japanese officials as “little Sony salesmen.” Moreover, since neither he nor Nixon was interested in economics, a power whose chief strength lay in its economy rather than in its military did not strike them as needing to be taken seriously. And with the Middle Kingdom beckoning, Japan seemed, if not expendable, certainly less important than it had once been. Lack of attention rather than positive malice explains much of what went wrong with American policy toward Japan in the first years of the Nixon presidency.9

  Sato Eisaku, who was prime minister from 1964 to 1972, remained convinced that it was in Japan’s best interests to foster the relationship with the United States and prepared to renew the security treaty for another ten years. Nixon, for his part, recognized that the status of Okinawa was an unnecessary irritant, and negotiati
ons over its return to Japan started in 1969. Both sides agreed that the Americans could continue to have bases there. Two other issues, unfortunately, got mixed in: whether or not the United States could station nuclear weapons there (a very sensitive issue in the only country in the world to have suffered a nuclear attack) and textiles. Kissinger persuaded Nixon that the two could be profitably linked, with the Americans giving up the nuclear weapons in exchange for a voluntary Japanese quota on its textile exports to the United States.

  The deal appeared to have been struck by the time Sato arrived in Washington in November 1969. The Japanese prime minister had also made a verbal commitment, which he repeated in Washington, to accept the limits the Americans wanted on textiles. Nixon promised to return Okinawa by 1972 and to withdraw nuclear weapons from American bases; Sato had agreed in a secret letter that the Americans could bring them back to Okinawa in an emergency. There is a curious story, still not completely verified, that Nixon also hinted that the United States would be understanding if Japan decided to develop its own nuclear weapons. Another, equally curious addendum is that in their discussions in Beijing, according to the journalist Seymour Hersh, first Kissinger and then Nixon used the threat of allowing Japan to become a nuclear power partly as a way to pressure the Chinese to work with the United States against the Soviet Union and to protect Japan. “We told them,” Nixon apparently also said, when he testified to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1975, “if you try to keep us from protecting the Japanese, we would let them go nuclear.” If such stories are true, it shows a deeply ambivalent attitude on the part of Nixon and Kissinger toward a country that, they repeatedly said, was thoroughly capable of becoming an aggressive military power all over again.10

  Sato was, it turned out, promising more than he could deliver on the textile issue, because of furious opposition from Japanese textile manufacturers and their allies in the government. The Okinawa treaty moved ahead, but Nixon did not get the quota he wanted. Comments came out of the White House, perhaps from Nixon himself, suggesting that the United States was worried about Japan sliding back into militarism or going Communist. In private, Nixon talked about “Jap betrayal.” As Kissinger prepared to leave on his secret trip to China in the summer of 1971, the United States’ relations with Japan were already strained.11

  For fear of leaks, Nixon and Kissinger had decided not to inform their allies (or, indeed, their own State Department) about the trip until the day of Nixon’s televised announcement. Alexis Johnson, who was undersecretary of state for political affairs, was summoned to San Clemente on July 15; there he found a frantic Rogers, “left behind as usual by the President,” trying to track down ambassadors in Washington, where the working day had already ended. When Johnson finally managed to get hold of the Japanese ambassador, Ushiba Nobuhiko cried out, “Alex, the Asakai nightmare has happened.” In Japan, Sato had three minutes’ warning, and the American ambassador was lying in a barber’s chair when he heard the news on an American armed forces broadcast. The Japanese were furious and humiliated. In Washington, the normally calm Ushiba had a stormy interview with Marshall Green at the State Department, in which he accused the United States of betraying a lack of trust toward Japan. Sato tried to put a brave face on it, but he tearfully unburdened himself about the Americans to the Australian prime minister, saying, “I have done everything they asked but they have let me down.” Sato’s own political position was seriously undermined, and in Johnson’s opinion, the Japanese and American governments never recovered the trust and confidence they had formerly had in each other.12

  The Japanese probably should have guessed that something was in the wind. The signs of a thaw between China and the United States were clearly visible by 1971, and American diplomats had tried to tip the Japanese off to expect more developments. “If I had only listened more carefully to what you were saying,” a Japanese diplomat told Charles Freeman of the State Department disconsolately, “this would have not been the surprise that it was.” Chou had also apparently hinted that spring to a Japanese trade negotiator that the two countries were about to start serious discussions. For the Japanese, it was as much the way the Americans handled the announcement as the trip itself. A new word entered the Japanese language: shokku.13

  And there was more to follow. On August 15, 1971, Nixon announced a package of measures to deal with inflation and a growing American trade imbalance with the world. The United States stopped backing the dollar with gold, effectively devaluing its currency, and placed a surcharge on imports. Nixon knew that both measures would hurt Japan. “We’ll fix those bastards,” he said. The second shokku led to the yen going sharply upward against the dollar and restrictions on Japanese exports to the United States.

  Then, in October, while Kissinger was on his second trip to China, Japanese delegates at the United Nations found themselves committed to supporting the American delegation in resisting Taiwan’s expulsion at a time when the American government itself was abandoning the struggle. Sato’s government—reasonably, under the circumstances—decided that given the American example, the time had come to push ahead to expand Japan’s trading and diplomatic relations with mainland China.14

  Nixon and Kissinger tried halfheartedly to make it up to the Japanese. In September, they flew to Anchorage to meet the emperor Hirohito while his plane was being refueled on the way from Japan to Europe. Nixon described their meeting as a historic event, “a spiritual bridge spanning East and West.” To Chou a month later, Kissinger was dismissive: “Not a very profound conversation, Mr. Prime Minister.” The Americans also invited Sato to Washington for a summit in January 1972. In his private conversation with Nixon and Kissinger, Sato was polite but critical. Japan was rather concerned about Nixon’s visit to China. Kissinger said that he had been very firm with the Chinese, who could be under no illusions that the Americans intended anything but to stand by their commitments to their friends. “We have made no deal,” Nixon interjected. The announcement of Kissinger’s trip, Sato went on, had come as a great shock to the Japanese people, who thought—wrongly, of course—that it had been arranged behind Japan’s back. Nixon was unapologetic; the important thing, in his view, was that on policy issues their two nations must consult fully. The Japanese, he noted, appeared to be moving quickly to establish full relations with the People’s Republic of China. “If Japan were to crawl, or to run to Peking,” Nixon warned, “its bargaining position would evaporate.” He was not so much worried that Japan would give away too much to get full diplomatic relations with China as that this would happen before the United States could do the same. In an election year, he did not want allies or Democrats taking the limelight.15

  Sato left the United States pessimistic over the future of the Japanese-American relationship. His own political position had been irretrievably undermined by the series of shokkus. He resigned in the summer of 1972 and was replaced by Tanaka Kakuei, who moved rapidly to open up Japan’s relations with the People’s Republic of China. Japan’s relationship with the United States remained highly important, but as a senior official had said at the end of 1971, “it will be necessary for us to recognize, once again, that Japan is an Asian nation.”16

  If Japan felt tremors from the shift in American policy, Taiwan was hit by an earthquake. After Truman had guaranteed Taiwan’s defense, its Guomindang rulers had confidently but unwisely assumed that the United States would be their friend and protector in perpetuity. They had not noticed that a new generation of Americans, less affected by the early Cold War and the battle for Korea, was moving into influential positions in government, the media, and the academic world. They had counted, too, on the ability of the China lobby to keep American governments in line. They had failed to see that it was slowly fading away, although they should perhaps have taken notice when its chief organizer abruptly resigned in 1969 and moved to London to start producing plays and when the New York Times referred to the “once powerful China Lobby.” The Guomindang government did little
to prepare its own citizens for the possibility that American allegiances might one day shift. An old and stubborn Chiang kept tight control on the media and refused to allow any consideration of such issues as dual membership for both his government and that of the mainland in the United Nations. “There is no room for patriots and traitors to live together,” he declared.17

  As the signs of a major shift in American policy—from Nixon’s first use of the term “People’s Republic” to ping-pong diplomacy—multiplied, the leadership in Taiwan drifted glumly along in a state of indecision. When Nixon made his announcement in the summer of 1971 that Kissinger had secretly visited Beijing, the first reaction in the capital, Taipei, was “utter disbelief.” To James Shen, the Taiwanese ambassador in Washington, Kissinger was reassuring: in his conversations with Chou, he had stressed that the United States had no intention of turning its back on its loyal ally and friend. He had not made any secret deals with the Chinese over Taiwan. Just before he left on his second trip, Kissinger saw Shen again. He had no intention, Kissinger said, of bringing up the issue of Taiwan, but it was possible that Chou might. In any case, Nixon was going to make completely clear that the American relationship with Taiwan was “nonnegotiable.” He himself, Kissinger went on, with his many friends in Taiwan, found going to China “exceedingly painful,” yet he had no choice but to accept the assignment. Was this, the ambassador wondered, sincere or a case of crocodile tears?

  In October, shortly before Kissinger’s second trip to China, Nixon sent Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to Taipei to talk to Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang sat like a stone, looking straight ahead. Reagan, who was a strong supporter of Taiwan, later said that he regretted helping Nixon out. Shortly after Reagan’s visit, Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations. To add to Taiwan’s humiliation, a number of countries made it clear that they were going to switch their recognition to the People’s Republic of China. Japan, Taiwan’s prominent supporter and most important trading partner, hinted that it was starting negotiations with Beijing. For many Taiwanese, it was not just their status but their newfound prosperity that was threatened.18