Nixon and Mao

by Margaret MacMillan

  At his moment of greatest triumph, Nixon had embarked on the series of steps that led him into the Watergate scandal and his eventual disgrace. Less than four months after his triumphant return from China, in June 1972, five men with strong links to CREEP, Nixon’s campaign committee, and to the White House itself were arrested for 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 their 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 fall. 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, 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 said to John Dean, the White House counsel. Even the Woodward and Bernstein story that October about 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 honor with Kissinger. On January 9, 1973, his sixtieth birthday, Nixon 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 goal, 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 unraveled 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 stating 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 extensive and illegal wiretapping, and of other burglaries to find incriminating evidence against Nixon’s enemies. In April, Nixon let Haldeman and Ehrlichman go. 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 demanding that the relevant tapes 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 saying 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 Kissinger as 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 August 8, 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 that he and Kissinger had drunk from three years previously when they had 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 favor; would he kneel beside him for a silent prayer? Kissinger was deeply moved.11

  Gerald Ford, Nixon’s vice president and now successor, kept Kissinger on as secretary of state, but he was not prepared to move as fast as Kissinger wanted to 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. 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 out of 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 Mao had only a year, perhaps two, to live. Because of his deep-rooted suspicion of doctors, Mao initially refused to have treatment of any sort.13

  He also refused treatment to 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 the following summer, after a pretty, young laboratory technician coaxed Mao, that he agreed to let Chou have an operation. By then it was too late, and Chou’s cancer spread rapidly. In March 1975, he went into the hospital for yet another operation. There he s
tayed, 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 toward his own end, his colleagues and servants, like 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 and in government offices, but distorted reverberations reached the outside world. The press carried strange articles denouncing incorrect thought or work habits or this historical figure or that one. In 1973 a campaign flared up to attack Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher of the sixth century B.C. 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 defense 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 counterrevolutionary 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 partially paralyzed 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 disturbed his seclusion. Kissinger came one last time in the autumn of 1975. An American diplomat who knew 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, who was 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,” Nixon said with admiration, “no one can deny that he was a fighter to the end.”16

  During Mao’s deathwatch, 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 the hospital. Deng, in disgrace again, retired to southern China, where he was under the protection of the army. Qiao, who was increasingly nervous and depressed as he came under more frequent 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. Since by this point he could communicate only by grunts and scribbled characters, it is impossible to know how much he understood.17

  In July 1976, a huge earthquake shook the north of China. When dynasties fell in traditional China, nature, it was believed, often provided such signs. On September 9, Mao finally died. His body, or what is left of it, still lies in its giant mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. Crowds of Chinese, who appear to be curious rather than sad, file by. Many have bought plastic flowers at the entrance, which they leave by Mao’s portrait as they make the traditional three bows of respect. Attendants whisk the flowers back outside, where they are sold again. By the exit, there are more items for sale: postcards, buttons, boxes, and scarves decorated with Mao’s round red face as well as cigarette lighters in the shape of the Little Red Book.

  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 had difficulty getting rid of the billions of copies of his works that sit moldering in warehouses around China. People prefer Mao on such things as T-shirts and New Year’s greeting cards. Bars have karaoke versions of his favorite 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 hang his image over their stoves where their ancestors would have put the god of the kitchen, and taxi drivers keep 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

  A month after Mao’s death, his chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, and his allies in the armed forces moved. Jiang Qing and her fellow radicals in the Gang of Four, along with many of their followers, were arrested. Gradually some of the more radical policies of the Cultural Revolution were put aside, and China began to slowly wake out of its nightmare. Experienced officials and managers were brought back from exile; universities started to reopen; and official propaganda proclaimed that China must modernize itself. Deng Xiaoping returned from the south and gradually made himself the most powerful man in China. Hua was no match for him, and by 1980 he had been forced onto the sidelines as Deng, who preferred to remain in the background, put his own men into office. The pace of change quickened: new economic zones were set up to encourage foreign investment; farmers were allowed to keep a greater share of what they produced; workers were given cash incentives to work harder; and an increasing amount of private enterprise was permitted, indeed encouraged. The government now had a new slogan: “To get rich is glorious.” Over the next two decades, China’s gross domestic product grew at almost 10 percent per year, an extraordinary figure.

  In 1980, too, the Gang of Four was finally brought to trial. Its members were charged and convicted, conveniently for everyone involved, with all the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing was portrayed as a demon, an unwomanly woman and a modern-day empress who had plotted to murder her own husband and seize power. Even her favorite American movie, Gone with the Wind, was hauled in as evidence to show that, like Scarlett O’Hara, she was out to bring men under her sway. Although Jiang was sentenced to death, the sentence was suspended and she was locked away in China’s elite prison north of Beijing, where, it is said, she knitted sweaters and embroidered dolls, none of which could be sold because she always put her name on them. There are stories that she wrote her memoirs but that Deng, who feared what she could tell, ordered them destroyed. In 1991, she died, perhaps of cancer of the throat. The official news agency reported that she hung herself with the belt of her trousers. Like much about Jiang, we will probably never know the truth. Her body has been cremated, and the ashes have disappeared.

  Qiao Guanhua’s career came to an unhappy end in 1976 when he was dismissed in the purges that followed Mao’s death. Although he had tried desperately to steer between the factions that tore the Foreign Ministry apart, he was accused both of rightist mistakes and of taking part in the Gang of Four’s conspiracies. He and his wife, Zhang Hanzhi, were held under arrest for the next two years and subjected to public meetings where they were criticized and manhandled. Qiao, who had tuberculosis, became increasingly feeble. As Deng began to consolidate his power, he was able to intervene and make sure that Qiao received medical treatment. In 1982, the last of the charges against Qiao were withdrawn. He died in 1983. His wife, who still lives in Beijing, refused to have him buried in the special plot for
high-ranking ministers, and his ashes are in the beautiful city of Suzhou, in a tomb flanked by two pine trees from Geneva, a city where he was once happy. Their daughter went to Vassar and now edits a magazine in China devoted to profiles of celebrities and filled with advertisements for luxury goods.19

  Henry Kissinger survived the turmoil of the Nixon White House and stayed on as Gerald Ford’s secretary of state. Ford, who trusted and admired him, gave him a free hand to run American foreign policy. In 1976, with the election of Carter to the presidency, Kissinger found himself out of a job. He confidently expected that Harvard University would invite him back as a distinguished professor; when it only offered him his old post back, he turned down the offer with disdain and some bitterness. He ended up with many compensations, though: an apartment in New York with his second wife, Nancy; a country house in Connecticut; a circle of famous and powerful friends; well-paid consultancies for banks and television networks; and an enduring reputation as one of the United States’ most brilliant and fascinating men. He continued to write: articles, columns, three huge volumes of memoirs, and several books on international relations. When there were international crises, the press inevitably came calling; his comments were incisive, clear, and amusing, but although he continued to hope that he would be asked to come back to office, especially when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, the call never came. He increasingly devoted his time to his work as a high-level consultant. Kissinger and Associates, which still flourishes in New York, provides the sort of analysis and contacts with governments around the world for which companies are willing to pay handsomely. As China opened up as a field for trade and investment, Kissinger was much in demand to help get American business in the door. He was able to provide introductions to virtually every important official, including Deng himself.