Nixon and Mao
Page 38
As an olive branch, and because it was useful to associate the State Department publicly with the communiqué, Kissinger had asked Green to join him in the briefing. The crucial question came: why had the United States not reaffirmed its treaty commitment to Taiwan in the communiqué? Kissinger answered that as Nixon had said earlier that year in his report on foreign policy to Congress, the United States was maintaining the treaty with Taiwan. He had nothing further to say, and he would appreciate it if the journalists did not pursue the subject. Much to Nixon’s and Haldeman’s relief, the press reports were, if not wildly enthusiastic, reasonably positive. Among the White House staff, though, Pat Buchanan, a speechwriter and later a prominent conservative journalist, was appalled at what he considered a sellout.24
Kissinger also attempted to mollify the State Department by giving the impression at the press conference that Rogers had been involved at every step in the negotiations of the communiqué. Rogers himself may have been more soothed by the unexpected visit that Chou paid him that same afternoon. Chou was well aware of the divisions among the Americans and the hurt feelings on the State Department side. The Chinese interpreters had reported back to Chou on the angry comments from the State Department officials about the communiqué. Kissinger had also hinted broadly in a conversation just before they left Beijing that it might be a good idea to do something for “those who feel neglected.” Chou agreed. He now told Rogers how much he regretted that his duties as prime minister of China had kept them from meeting more often. “Secretary Rogers, you have done so much and we appreciate it.”25
That night the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee put on a final banquet for the Americans. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s longtime and deeply conservative secretary, kept everyone waiting as she and Buchanan commiserated with each other. “Don’t rush me,” she snapped when she was told to hurry up. “As long as we have sold out to these bastards, it doesn’t make any difference.” Chou and Nixon did the usual round of toasts, perhaps knocking back more mao-tai than usual. The host, Zhang Chunqiao, who had risen to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and who was later to be tried along with Mao’s wife as one of the Gang of Four, made a brief speech of welcome and toasted the friendship between the great Chinese and the great American peoples. Nixon replied with a carefully crafted metaphor about building bridges across sixteen thousand miles of ocean and twenty-two years of hostility. Under the influence of the mao-tai, or so Kissinger suspected, Nixon got carried away and suggested that the United States stood ready to defend China if any foreign power tried to attack it. Their joint communiqué, Nixon said proudly, would make international headlines the next morning. After all, “This was the week that changed the world.”26
After the banquet, while most of the Americans watched a display of acrobatics, Kissinger went off to hand over to Qiao a last batch of top secret military intelligence about Soviet forces. He would, he told Qiao, continue to send special information privately through Huang Hua, the Chinese ambassador at the United Nations. It would be best if the Chinese did not tell the State Department about this secret channel. The two men went back over the old familiar subject of Vietnam, with Kissinger saying how sincere the United States was in wanting to get out of its war and Qiao reiterating that the Chinese had no intention of interfering. It was well after midnight when they parted with sentiments of mutual esteem. “Maybe you will have some rest tonight,” Qiao said.27
Kissinger still had one last duty to perform before he could get to his bed. Haldeman, who had been sitting up with an excited Nixon, called him into the president’s suite. The three of them sat there until after 2:00 A.M. as Nixon drank more mao-tai, going over the past week and praising Kissinger for his role in making the visit such a success. “Sort of recapping problems and triumphs,” wrote Haldeman in his diary, “…the real breakthrough, the lack of understanding of what really has been done, but the fact will come out eventually.” Kissinger felt that, as so often, Nixon was asking for reassurance. He and Haldeman gave it to him, moved, said Kissinger, in part by a longing to get to bed but also “by an odd tenderness for this lonely, tortured, and insecure man.” The evening finally came to an end as the three stood on the terrace of Nixon’s suite and took one last look at the great, dimly lit city lying below them.28
Many people went short of rest that night. Walter Cronkite, along with other American journalists, was wakened out of a deep sleep by a pounding on his door. Two army officers stepped in, presented him with a huge box of candies, saluted, and left. The Chinese had been convinced, ever since Kissinger’s first visit, that all Americans loved candies because the bowlfuls left out had been emptied every day as the Americans amassed souvenirs. The attendants at the Diaoyutai, where the Kissinger party stayed in Beijing, had reported, much to Mao’s amusement, that the Americans ate not only the candies but the wrappers too.29
On Monday morning, at Nixon’s request, he had one last private meeting with Chou. Nixon wanted, he said, to reassure Chou that the record of their talks would remain secret, even from the rest of the American government. The two of them had made considerable progress in the past week; he hoped that when they disagreed in the future, as they must, given the fact that they represented such different countries, that they would keep the rhetoric cool and not attack each other personally. Although the two of them had discussed other powers, such as the Soviet Union, India, and Japan, he also intended, Nixon said, to mention virtually nothing about their discussions either to the American press or to the leaders of those countries. Chou agreed that their two countries should not attack each other unnecessarily but pointed out that there were still many areas where they disagreed. Taiwan, of course, but there China was prepared to wait. Vietnam was the most pressing issue. The Chinese were particularly sad because the Americans had continued their bombing. Kissinger intervened; he was sure that there had not been any bombing during the Nixon visit. Chou politely but firmly insisted that there had been.30
As Nixon left the hotel, the staff lined up in order of their rank along the driveway. He was accompanied to the airport by Shanghai’s revolutionary leader, Zhang, who took the opportunity to remind a foreigner, yet again, of China’s century of humiliation. Zhang pointed out a former golf course, now a children’s park; before the Communist victory, a sign had said, “No Chinese allowed.” Haldeman, who had gone off to buy miniature trees, nearly missed the motorcade. The reporters took off their long underwear with relief and piled it on Barbara Walters’s bed as a last joke. As she waited in line to say goodbye to Chou, a hotel attendant rushed up with a large and very smelly package for her.31
At the airport, as the American planes took off, a Chinese worker hauled down the American flag, and all over Shanghai people rushed to hang their laundry out of their windows. Charles Freeman, from the State Department, remembers the mood on his plane as euphoric: “We had accomplished our purpose, which was a strategic one. We had not given away very much on Taiwan. We had held our ground on other international issues. We had established the framework for a relationship.” The staff on the “Zoo Plane,” for the second-tier journalists, had decorated the cabin and laid in special meals and wines. The passengers settled into their seats and most did not wake again until the plane reached Anchorage. On his plane, Nixon continued to worry over his problems with Rogers and how to, as he put it to Haldeman, consign his secretary of state to the deep freeze. He went over what Kissinger should say in a detailed background briefing to the press back in the United States. Haldeman, Nixon said, should make a note that Kissinger had been working very hard, and as a reward, Haldeman was to contact Bebe Rebozo and ask him for all the phone numbers of women under thirty in his little black book.32
Not all the Americans went directly home. Five journalists did stay on in China for a short period. Green and Holdridge went off to brief American allies throughout Asia and the Pacific. The Nixon visit, they were to say, had not altered anything; indeed, the allies’ interests had been furthered by the re
duction of tensions between the United States and China. This was not an easy sell. The South Korean foreign minister was not convinced by assurances that Chou had told Nixon that China—which was, after all, a strong supporter of North Korea—wanted stability in the peninsula. In Taiwan, Chiang Kaishek refused to meet Green and Freeman at all and sent his son instead. The young Chiang listened politely and had only a few questions. He probably had a very good idea of what had happened during the talks in China because one of the designated American interpreters, who was a close personal friend, had just been on a hunting trip with him.
The Japanese had not gotten over their earlier shokkus or the latest one, when the Shanghai communiqué was released; Sato, the prime minister, had walked out of a press conference mumbling angrily at Nixon. Green was unable to convince him that Nixon had not made secret agreements with China and that American friendship for Japan remained as strong as ever. In South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, where the governments depended on American support for their survival, the reaction was muted. The Thai, Indonesian, and Malaysian governments were polite but skeptical.
In the Philippines, the Americans found an atmosphere close to hysteria. Imelda Marcos, the wife of the president, threatened to leave for Beijing immediately to establish a new relationship between her country and China. Green and the American ambassador were called before the Philippine senate to explain why the United States was repudiating its former policies on Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. When they reached Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister, told Holdridge and Green that their country had “just sprung the trap” on their friends. The reaction was much the same on their last stops, in Australia and New Zealand. Green made a particularly bad impression on the Australians. As their senior Foreign Ministry official said, “He was either consumed with personal vanity to such an extent that he believed a lot of the optimistic nonsense he talked or alternatively, he was lying to bolster a bad case.”33
Such reactions were not sufficient to diminish the pleasure Nixon took in his trip. Back in Washington, he had received a hero’s welcome. Fifteen thousand people had turned out at Andrews Air Force Base to see his plane land. Although both he and Kissinger grumbled about it, the press coverage was generally favorable. In the polls, Nixon’s popularity rose sharply to a 56 percent approval rating, the highest he had enjoyed in over a year. Nearly 70 percent of those polled believed that his trip would be useful. When Nixon met his cabinet the day after his return, he told them that the United States had a “profound new relationship” with China. Nixon turned his attention back to the Soviet Union and the perennial sore of Vietnam, and at home, he increasingly focused on the presidential election.34
CONCLUSION
NIXON’S WEEK IN CHINA IN 1972 WAS THE CULMINATION OF A long and delicate process, as two old adversaries moved to establish contact with each other. As the last-minute negotiations over the Shanghai communiqué so clearly showed, the process could have gone badly wrong, and the relationship might have slid back into the deep freeze. Both sides rightly felt both relief and a certain guarded optimism about what the future now held. The Chinese assumed that American concessions on Taiwan, in particular, would lead in due course to a solution of that particular issue as the United States wound down its military presence and ended its support for the government in Taipei. Taiwan, no one perhaps knew quite how, would be merged into the homeland. Equally important, from the Chinese perspective, their country had been recognized as a major power and could now move to take its rightful place on the world’s stage. The Americans, for their part, hoped for a major realignment in the balance of power that would give them China, with its massive population, huge territories, and enormous potential, as a counterbalance against the Soviet Union and also as a new means of pressuring North Vietnam.
At Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Nixon arrived to an enthusiastic welcome organized by his vice president, Spiro Agnew. “My God,” said Hugh Sidey of Life, “it’s like the arrival of the king.” At 98 percent, Nixon’s trip to China registered the highest public awareness of any event in the Gallup poll’s history. The right wing fulminated to little apparent effect. A furious Buchanan threatened to resign from the White House staff on the grounds that the United States had made a deal with a Communist regime and sold out its ally Taiwan, but in the end he did not carry out his threat. The conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr., who had been brought along on the trip in an attempt to win him over, publicly condemned the Shanghai communiqué and went off to support John Ashbrook of Ohio, a little-known Republican congressman who was trying to stop Nixon’s reelection.1
American allies murmured—a “distinct whiff of ‘peace in our time,’” said the British ambassador in Washington—but the overall position of the United States in the world seemed strengthened by its new relationship with China. True, North Vietnam suddenly attacked South Vietnam at the end of March 1972. On the other hand, when the United States resumed its heavy bombing of targets in South Vietnam and, for a brief period, of Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong, the Chinese protested but did nothing. In May, when Nixon went even further and mined Haiphong’s harbor to prevent much-needed Soviet supplies from reaching North Vietnam, the Soviet Union made a pro forma protest, but it did not attempt to break the blockade and, more important, did not cancel the approaching summit.
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 I, 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, he was not only granted the honor of meetings with Mao but found a particularly friendly welcome. The Chinese took a major step toward 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 had 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 of Kissinger’s memo. 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 that allowed the United States to get out, leaving behind an apparently viable South Vietnam and peace for Laos and Cambodia as well. (The two men were both awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1973, but unfortunately the fighting started up again in 1975.) 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 of 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, in which 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 offenses 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, 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.