I began to write good-bye letters to Lee, and then I would tear them up. How could I leave a man who had done me no harm? When our biggest mistake was that we had no life in common anymore? I didn’t feel I wanted to reduce my workload. In fact I had increased it by taking on Not for Women Only. Lee couldn’t change his lifestyle or ambitions either. I decided once again that I was no good at marriage and that basically the failures were my fault. Perhaps, like my mother, I was looking at the seams. I felt awful, but I didn’t know how to make things better.
Then, in July 1971, the newspapers announced to everyone’s total surprise that Henry Kissinger had made a secret trip to China, which had been closed to America since the Communists had taken over in 1949. President Nixon, the headlines said, was himself going to visit China. Unimaginable.
Nixon’s historic trip was scheduled to take place in February 1972. A small group of reporters was going to go with him. To my utter joy NBC selected me to be one of them.
I decided then that before I went off on this faraway adventure, Lee and I finally had to face our disintegrating marriage. Over a long and teary dinner we decided to separate. At first Lee wanted us to continue to try, but then he admitted that he was no happier than I. We decided that when I left for China, in a month, he would move out of the apartment and find a new place to live. I would keep the apartment, as it was home to Jackie.
I was ending my second marriage. What was worse was that I was taking away from Jackie the daddy she loved. She was only four years old, and even though she would continue to see her father, it would never be the same. She had never met her biological father. Would she now feel in some part of her little being that her second father was leaving her too?
But it was too late to change things. I began to pack for China, and added another notch to my belt of guilt.
Historic Journey: China with Nixon
PRESIDENT NIXON said that the trip to Communist China, a week that changed the course of history, was like going to the moon. He was right. But though it was the trip of a lifetime, like Chinese food it was both sweet and sour. And like the man in the moon I have never felt so lonely.
First the sweet. The fact that I was there at all for NBC was to me a minor miracle. Because of the historic nature of the trip, the television networks sent their heavyweight, politically experienced superstars: Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Eric Sevareid from CBS; Tom Jarriel, Ted Koppel, and Harry Reasoner from ABC. NBC was represented by its number one anchor, John Chancellor, along with two other very experienced correspondents, Herb Kaplow and John Rich, and me.
Why me? One, because NBC didn’t want what might look like competition between Chancellor and McGee, had he been chosen to go. Two, which I didn’t find out until much later, because all the journalists from every network vying for the assignment were middle-aged white males, Dick Wald, the executive vice president of NBC News, felt that I might bring something different to the coverage. If nothing else I would stand out to the viewing audience in contrast to all the male correspondents. And three, the time difference.
Thirteen hours separate New York and Peking, as Beijing was then called. Nighttime in China is morning in the United States, when the Today show would be on, the same time slot when I would be reporting from China on the night’s big banquets, speeches, important toasts, and cultural events. The viewers of Today expected to see me in the morning. And there I’d be, reporting live by satellite, albeit from the other side of the world.
My inclusion in what was really a very small group of journalists ruffled a lot of feathers at NBC. For every reporter who got to go, ten or more didn’t. Even John Chancellor, I found out later, was against my assignment. I was relatively inexperienced, for starters, and a woman in a sea of experienced men. John would have been more comfortable with another male correspondent, but Dick Wald was determined to take the gamble, though he confessed to me recently he had fairly low expectations of what I would bring to the the NBC team. Dick put my name on the NBC News proposed list, and the White House took it from there. The president’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, said he personally selected the traveling press corps out of hundreds of applications.
I was terrified. Even the list of print journalists was intimidating, including William Buckley for the Washington Star; Theodore White, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the series The Making of the President, for Time/Life and Public Broadcasting; the prolific, Pulitzer Prize–winning author James Michener, for the Reader’s Digest. Giants, all.
There were very few women on the trip. One, in the president’s entourage, was a very pretty, young blond with whom I would have a nodding acquaintance but no real contact. She was the assistant to Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, and her name was Diane Sawyer.
There were only two other women journalists in the whole China group, the venerable and fearless UPI correspondent Helen Thomas, and another very experienced journalist, Fay Wells, from Storer Broadcasting. Helen was writing for newspapers. Fay was reporting primarily on radio. I would be the only woman broadcaster. And with Frank McGee’s backhanded blessing. “Get Barbara out of the studio for a week?” I learned later he’d said to Dick Wald when he heard of my assignment. “China’s not far enough!”
It certainly felt far enough away for me when we arrived on our own press plane a day ahead of the president and his entourage. We were met by a small group of Chinese officials from the Department of Information who all looked exactly alike. Both men and women were dressed identically in navy blue pants and Mao jackets, also navy blue—mandarin collars, shapeless and unadorned except for a round red pin with a silver likeness of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and founder of the People’s Republic of China.
I was introduced to my interpreter, Miss Tang, who I later learned was married, but like all Chinese women at that time, she wore no wedding ring and used her maiden name. Miss Tang was serious and sullen. She always called me “Miss Barbara Walters,” never “Miss Walters” or “Barbara.” She started every sentence like this, “And so, Miss Barbara Walters, today we will visit a factory.” She wore absolutely no makeup, was thirty-one, and looked at least forty.
Her very first question to me was: “How old are you?” I answered that we were around the same age. We talked briefly about children. I told her I had a little girl at home who was almost four. Miss Tang then told me that she had a daughter who was two and a half and lived at a day-care center; she saw her on weekends. After this brief exchange, Miss Tang never expressed any further curiosity about me or Americans in general. Instead she answered every question I asked, and you can imagine how many there were, as if they came from a political handbook. For example, when I asked her later if she could take me to a beauty salon, thinking that I might be able to find an interesting story there, she replied, “We have no need for beauty salons. We have loftier thoughts.” Take that, Miss Barbara Walters!
Even the arrival of the president of the United States attracted little curiosity—and gave me my first anxiety attack. I was reporting from a makeshift studio at the hastily constructed broadcast center at the airport. (All our live broadcasts by satellite would be made from there.) None of us had been given any advance information about who would be in the Chinese meet-and-greet party, or what ceremony there would be, if any. There we were, about to go on the air to report the historic moment to millions of Americans, without a clue as to what was happening.
The answer was: not much. Only a small, official delegation met President Nixon at the airport, one of whom was the seventy-three-year-old premier, Chou En-lai. (In contrast, four months before, the Chinese regime had rounded up more than 300,000 people to greet the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie.) Mrs. Nixon was wearing the bright red coat we would come to know so well, the same color, ironically, as the large signs all around the airport calling the “oppressed peoples of the world” to unite and pay tribute to Marxism-Leninism and the Chinese Communist Party. Her coat and the sig
ns were the only bright spots in the whole scene.
The president’s arrival was indicative of the tightly controlled, doctrinaire atmosphere in China. After the brief welcoming ceremony at the airport, the Nixons got into a limousine with the Chinese premier and sped the forty minutes or so into Peking—along empty streets. There were no curious crowds along Peking’s “Street of Perpetual Peace” or in the vast, one-hundred-acre Tiananmen Square, the “Plaza of the Gate of Celestial Peace.” Seventeen years later hundreds of freedom-seeking students would be brutally put down by the government in Tiananmen Square, but when Nixon’s presidential motorcade swept through it in 1972, the square was nearly empty and silent. There were just people on bicycles going about their business without even looking up.
Some veteran China hands attributed the lack of public enthusiasm to the fact that America and the People’s Republic of China had no official diplomatic relations, but I think Bill Buckley got it right. During a roundtable interview I did later with a few of the print journalists, Buckley said he didn’t think the Chinese public knew who Nixon was. After all, he pointed out, they still didn’t know that we—or anyone—had landed on the moon a few years before. That’s how controlled the news was there.
My job in China was to cover the daytime activities of the Nixons, report on any stories I gathered myself, and to describe, live by satellite, the major evening activities, which I could not actually attend. Our cameras were in the Great Hall but I was almost an hour away at the broadcast center watching the banquets on a TV monitor. “On the menu tonight are Spongy Bamboo Shoots, Shark’s Fin in Three Shreds, Fried and Stewed Prawns,” I would report to the Today show audience. “Hear the music? Sound familiar? The large Chinese orchestra is playing ‘Home on the Range.’” I ad-libbed much of what I said, just as I had ad-libbed in Persepolis, but this time I didn’t have a friendly colleague talking into my ear on a headphone.
When I finished my banquet reporting for television, I was rushed by our radio producer to another makeshift studio to describe to listeners what had just been shown on television. One night about midnight, on my way home from the radio broadcast, I talked with Mr. Ching, one of the interpreters.
“How old are your children?” I asked. “I have three—eleven, seven, and three years old,” he replied. “But I have not seen my three-year-old since he was born.” Turned out the interpreter had been an office worker, as had his wife. During this decade of the Cultural Revolution, in which millions of Chinese teachers, educated office workers, and intellectuals were forced to live as peasants so as to toe the party line, Mr. Ching had been sent to an adult “reform school” and then to work in the fields. His wife was still working at a different farm. He had no idea when he would see her again. His children were living with their grandmother. He didn’t know when his wife would be back to care for them.
We heard similar stories throughout our trip, especially when we visited Peking University, which had been newly reopened after being forced to close during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. It had been one of the finest universities in Asia until it was shut down and its students disbanded. Some of the most prominent professors had been paraded down the street wearing dunce caps and jeered at by teenage members of the Red Guard. Like Mr. Ching, most of the teachers had been sent away to “reform” centers and were then imprisoned or sent to work in the fields. They were just now returning. With this kind of attitude against almost anyone who was educated, it is all the more astonishing to realize what the Chinese have accomplished in the thirty-odd years since the demise of the hated Cultural Revolution.
President Nixon’s attempt to bridge the philosophical gap between our two countries was challenging, to say the least, but he was certainly trying. During the days he and his entourage, for the most part, met privately with their Chinese counterparts. We followed Pat Nixon as she visited schools, day-care centers, factories, and communes, all carefully selected by her hosts.
Mrs. Nixon, who seemed shy and remote to most Americans, blossomed in China. She was having a wonderful time, gracious and smiling and particularly good with the children. The Chinese opened up to her as much as they could open up to anyone at that time. How sad that her life in the White House would end in grief and isolation two years later, when her husband was forced to resign his office over the Watergate scandal. I was reminded of the book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, written after President Kennedy’s assassination. There could easily have been another book called Pat Nixon, We Hardly Knew You.
Traipsing around after the first lady, however, had more than its share of challenges for me. I was carrying my own camera and a tape recorder. They looked very much alike and, as I am the least handy person you could find, I often took out my camera when I wanted the tape recorder or the tape recorder when I wanted the camera. Even worse, at one point I found myself almost alone with Mrs. Nixon and, hoping to get a brief exclusive interview with her, I beckoned over the only camera crew I could see and asked if they would film it. They looked kind of startled but did the filming. Only later did I learn that they were a CBS crew, not NBC. CBS was furious that I got this scoop and at first wouldn’t release the film. NBC then became furious with CBS for not releasing the film, and it almost became an international incident until I apologized profusely and everyone cooled down. But that gaffe did not go over well with my fellow journalists in China. Instead of thinking of me as a klutz, which I was, they thought I was being a prima donna. It did not add to my popularity.
When I wasn’t following Mrs. Nixon or going out to find my own stories, always accompanied by Miss Tang, I repaired to the neat, sparse room I shared with Fay Wells at the hotel. There, waiting for me, was a most comfortable bed with a big puffy quilt. Also waiting, a comb, brush, toothpaste, shaving cream, pencils, pens, postcards with scenes from Chinese ballets, hard candies, hot water for tea, which I could also use to sterilize my contact lenses, and always tangerines. Thank God for the tangerines. On busy days, I lived on them. Herb Kaplow, one of my fellow NBC correspondents, joked that on his first day back home, he woke up, reached for a tangerine, and ate his lightbulb.
We also had big roomy bathtubs, no showers—and unexpected luxuries. One-day laundry service and one-hour pressing, a godsend since we were allowed to bring only one small suitcase, and floormen on each floor to wait on us and bring us food at any hour. Breakfast was the highlight. We could choose Western or Chinese and I chose Chinese, which included delicious chicken noodle soup, a selection of cold meats, vegetables, spring rolls, and, one lucky morning, spareribs with sweet and sour sauce. Who needed oatmeal anyway?
We certainly didn’t need a wastebasket. One of the most maddening Chinese habits to deal with made us unable to throw anything out. Whatever we tried to dispose of—a torn pair of stockings, a used Kleenex, an empty bottle of shampoo—was neatly wrapped up and returned to us.
Stories did not come so neatly wrapped. Though we were supposedly free to go wherever we wanted, there was no way to get there. There were no taxis, no private cars, no transportation whatsoever except for the official buses and cars which moved us from place to place. I had seen a department store within walking distance of the hotel, so I asked Miss Tang to take me and my cameraman to film what turned out to be called the Number One Department Store. (Stores had no names. They were numbered as they were built.) My theory has always been: show me a department store and I’ll show you how people live.
The Macy’s of China was large, crowded, and cold, heated by one coal stove near the entrance. Bicycles, the most prized possession—no one owned a car—cost about sixty dollars. The average factory worker made about twenty dollars a month. Denying himself all the extras, a worker could probably buy a bicycle at the end of the year…or maybe a sewing machine, the next most cherished item, which also cost about sixty dollars. Shoes cost a dollar fifty a pair, and face cream and shampoo were sold by the glob. I did a show-and-tell report on the store for broadcast later that evening.
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sp; Next door to the store was a pharmacy (the Number One Pharmacy?) that sold the prize souvenirs for foreigners—plastic acupuncture dolls. They were small, white, slimy-feeling dolls with innumerable markings for insertion of the needles. The needles themselves were from three to eight inches long, a sort of do-it-yourself acupuncture kit. The pharmacy also had white, slimy acupuncture ears (Chinese doctors thought that the ears contain most of the nerve endings of the body). The dolls and the ears turned out to be the most popular souvenirs I brought home, along with the large red buttons bearing the face of Chairman Mao that virtually all the Chinese wore.
Dr. Paul Marks, my friend at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, went crazy over the ear I brought him. Acupuncture techniques had barely reached this country, and the Chinese were boasting that they did operations with no anesthesia, only needles. One afternoon, before we left Peking, some of the reporters were treated to a view of an actual operation. The patient, I was told, was lying on an operating table, had his eyes open, and seemed totally relaxed. I, who can’t bear a pinprick, avoided this excursion and settled for bringing home a half a dozen plastic ears. What I didn’t bring home, which was also for sale—and would you believe it in that puritanical country where I was told no one married for love, but because they were “politically compatible”?—was a selection of aphrodisiacs.
I managed to get permission to film another story, this one at the Evergreen People’s Commune. The agricultural commune was just ten minutes from our hotel, where we enjoyed hot and cold running water and quite luxurious bathrooms. The commune had neither.
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