Being Nixon: A Man Divided (43 page)
Read Being Nixon: A Man Divided Online
Authors: Evan Thomas
Worried about Nixon’s chronic sleeplessness, Nixon’s aides spread out the trip from Washington to Beijing over three days, with layovers in Hawaii and Guam, to let the president adjust to the thirteen-hour time change. Al Haig, who had been sent to Beijing to advance
the historic meeting, warned about the 100-proof mao-tai brandy that Nixon would be required by his hosts to drink. Haig cabled, perhaps unnecessarily: UNDER NO REPEAT NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE PRESIDENT ACTUALLY DRINK FROM HIS GLASS IN RESPONSE TO BANQUET TOASTS.
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On February 17, 1972, Air Force One—renamed
The Spirit of ’76
by Nixon—took off from Andrews Air Force Base. As they flew half-way around the world, Kissinger and Nixon picked up their intricate minuet and staged a bit of role reversal. With mild disingenuousness, Nixon acted the part of world-weary, cynical statesman while Kissinger, for his part, reflected a refreshing sense of wonder about trotting the globe that was much closer to Nixon’s true feelings. That night, Nixon, who had begun a recorded personal diary three months earlier, dictated, with perhaps more self-consciousness than self-awareness: “As Henry and Bob both pointed out on the plane, there was almost a religious feeling in the messages we were receiving from all over the country, wishing us well. I told Henry that I thought it was all really a question of the American people being hopelessly and almost naïvely for peace, even at any price. He felt that perhaps there was also some ingredient of excitement about the boldness of the move, and visiting a land that was unknown to so many Americans.”
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“I have absolutely no sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Nazism,” Liddy told
Playboy
in 1980.
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Burns, who had revered Nixon, was shaken and “saddened” by the president’s transformation in the weeks after the release of the Pentagon Papers. “I watched his face, as he spoke, with a feeling of dismay,” Burns wrote in his diary on July 8, “for his features became twisted and what I saw was uncontrolled cruelty.”
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Volcker, influenced by Milton Friedman, was the brains behind Connally’s plan to go off the gold standard. (“I can play it round or flat,” Connally would say. “Just tell me how to play it.”)
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But Volcker wanted higher interest rates to control inflation. Nixon wanted low interest rates to heat the economy and create jobs at election time. In Volcker’s view, Nixon bullied Burns at the Fed into easing up on the money supply, feeding the inflationary spiral. Volcker later regretted his support for wage and price controls.
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4
Nixon loathed the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who spoke to him in a condescending tone redolent of the British Raj. In a taped conversation with Kissinger, Nixon referred to Gandhi as a “bitch” and a “witch.”
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Nixon vastly preferred Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, a bluff soldier and his secret go-between to China.
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In his diary, Haldeman recorded the same wishful thinking over Vietnam that afflicted the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In August of 1971, he described how Kissinger lamented U.S. Senate efforts to cut off funding for the war because, Kissinger insisted, “we really won” and “if we just had one more dry season,” the North Vietnamese would “break their backs.” Haldeman wrote: “This, of course, is the same line he’s used for the last two years, over and over, and I guess all Johnson’s advisers used with him [Johnson], to keep things escalating. I’m sure they really believed it at the time, but it’s amazing how it sounds like a broken record.”
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Nixon could be more fatalistic, telling Haldeman that the war would never be won, just “dribble on,” but at other times he wanted to double down with Duck Hook–type bombing campaigns.
Speak Quietly
A
board
The Spirit of ’76
on the morning of February 21, 1972, the chief of President Nixon’s security detail radioed an advance man on the ground at the Beijing Airport: “What about the crowd?”
*
1
The answer came back: “There is no crowd.”
“Did you say, ‘No crowd’?”
“That is an affirmative.”
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Beijing Airport was dull, sooty with coal smoke, and almost empty. Giant banners denounced Western imperialism.
Nixon peered out the window of the airplane as it came to rest and saw a solitary figure in a gray overcoat standing on the tarmac. When de Gaulle, tall and erect but coatless against the winter chill, had greeted the American president in Paris in February 1969, Nixon had taken off his overcoat, too. Now, seeing that Prime Minister Chou En-Lai, thin and frail, was wearing an overcoat, Nixon kept his on.
Five steps from the bottom of the ramp, Nixon extended his hand and kept it out as he walked the several paces toward Chou. Nixon knew that, almost three decades earlier, when John Foster Dulles had met Chou En-lai at a peace conference in Geneva, the American secretary of state had reportedly refused to shake the hand of Red China’s
foreign minister. The Chinese had added the snub to their centuries-long list of grievances against the West.
The handshake.
Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
In the limousine, a bulky Soviet-made vehicle with curtains, Chou said, with rehearsed formality, “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world—twenty-five years of no communication.”
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Nixon had been pleased when a Chinese military band struck up “The Star Spangled Banner” at the airport. A chill had run up his spine (“it always has that effect on me,” he recalled to Frank Gannon); he noted, gratefully, that the band had not mangled the tune, as foreign military bands usually did.
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Nixon knew that the TV footage back home would be excellent.
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Once at his guest house, he could not bring himself to look his host in the eye. “I found it extraordinary that Chou En-lai would be focused on the President, would drill in on him, but the President kind of would look off or look down on the floor,” recalled Dwight Chapin, the president’s aide, who was closely watching the body language.
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Aside from his normal social awkwardness, Nixon was distracted. He was anxious to hear if Chairman Mao would meet with him. Nixon knew that the trip would be deemed a failure if he did not see the Chinese ultimate leader face-to-face.
Chou left, and Nixon stripped down to his underwear in order to take a shower. A breathless Kissinger burst in: They had been summoned to Mao’s residence. In imperial China, the emperor had always kept visitors on edge, making them wait for an audience. Truly, Communist China was still the Middle Kingdom.
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Five minutes later, Nixon clambered into another limousine (with the Secret Service in hot pursuit) to drive to Mao’s villa, a modest house at the edge of the ancient imperial Forbidden City.
On that cold winter morning, Mao was so weak from bronchitis that he could only walk a few steps, supported by the pretty nurses he kept around. He held Nixon’s hand for a minute—“the most moving moment,” Nixon recorded in his diary.
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Mao’s overstuffed chair was surrounded by books, many of them lying open. Recalling his briefing on Mao’s Little Red Book, the chairman’s sayings and required reading for China’s nine hundred million people, Nixon opened the conversation
in a literary vein. “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world,” he said. In a guttural, almost gasping voice, Mao replied, “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.”
Nixon, relaxing now, began bantering with Mao about calling the Nationalist Chinese “bandits.” Noticing Kissinger standing nearby, Mao showed that he was familiar with the national security adviser’s high standing with the Western media. “We two must not monopolize the whole show,” Mao said to Nixon. “It won’t do if we don’t let Dr. Kissinger have a say.” He nodded toward Kissinger. “You have been famous about your trips to China.”
KISSINGER:
It was the president who set the direction and worked out the plan.
MAO:
He is a very wise assistant to say it that way.
The chairman and his number two, Chou, had a good chuckle. Nixon began broadly joking about Kissinger and girls, which provoked a laugh from Chou and, after a beat, from Kissinger as well.
Nixon showed off his homework again. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “we know you and the Prime Minister have taken great risks in inviting us here. For us also it was a difficult decision. But having read some of the Chairman’s statements, I know he is one who sees when an opportunity comes, that you must seize the hour and seize the day.”
Mao seemed more interested in teasing and dropping oblique pearls of wisdom. There was no substantive discussion of tricky issues like Russia and Taiwan. Nixon tried relating in his familiar persona of the poor boy who overcomes the odds:
Mr. Chairman, the Chairman’s life is well known to all of us. He came from a very poor family to the top of the most populous nation in the world, a great nation. My background is not so
well known. I also came from a very poor family, and to the top of a very great nation. History has brought us together. The question is whether we, with different philosophies, but both with feet on the ground, and having come from the people, can make a breakthrough that will serve not just China and America, but the whole world in the years ahead. And that is why we are here.
Mao looked at Nixon and said, offhandedly, “Your book,
Six Crises
, is not a bad book.” Nixon retorted with an aside to Chou and Kissinger: “He reads too much.”
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Chou was looking at his watch. Mao slowly shuffled his visitors to the door and said that he had not been feeling well. “But you look very good,” said Nixon. “Appearances are deceiving,” said Mao, with a slight shrug.
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Later that night, at the Great Hall of the People, a titanic Soviet-style structure, the Chinese orchestra played a medley of classic American tunes—“Oh! Susannah,” “Home on the Range,” “Turkey in the Straw.” Nixon raised his glass of fiery mao-tai (but did not drink) again and again. His own, carefully rehearsed “extemporaneous” toast was “superb,” Haldeman reported in his diary, and the photo opportunity was spectacular. The White House had shipped in tons of TV equipment, and half a world away, millions of Americans watched the evening banquet on the
Today
show. At Yale Law School, a student named Hillary Rodham rented a TV with a rabbit-ears antenna so that she could watch in her room.
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Day after day, the improbable images of Nixon in China reeled on—Nixon at the Great Wall, Nixon in the Forbidden City, Nixon in earnest discussion with men in Mao suits. Pat, too, did her part at hospitals, orphanages, and schools. In the sometimes callous way he referred to his wife while discussing her with his chief of staff, Nixon had told Haldeman that the First Lady could come along as a “prop.”
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Watching her mother depart, Julie wrote David, “The difficult
part about yesterday [the departure] was seeing how harassed and tired Mother looked. She has really aged! She told me she was sick to her stomach on Saturday and Sunday. It must have been nerves.”
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But the First Lady performed gamely, as she invariably did on foreign tours. (On a visit to a kitchen, she did puzzle her hosts slightly by using a dry Americanism to describe food that looked “good enough to eat.”)
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She had mastered a few Chinese phrases; Bill Safire had recommended that she study Chinese because “it would make Jackie Kennedy’s knowledge of French, which went over so big in Europe, look totally insignificant.” (“Good, if PN willing to develop some key phrases—or a brief little speech,” Nixon had scribbled on the margin of Safire’s memo.)
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Mao’s wife made no effort to charm Nixon. She had become a power during China’s Cultural Revolution, ironically named because it had sought to erase millennia of Chinese culture by burning books and forcing scholars to become rural peasants. Vindictive and humorless, she once described herself as “Chairman Mao’s dog. When he said, ‘Bite,’ I bit.”
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At the opera with Nixon, she was abrasive, demanding to know why he had not come to China sooner. Nixon, who was watching the performance, did not respond. The opera,
The Red Detachment of Women
, celebrated a pre-revolutionary woman who had led the people of her town in a revolt against an oppressive landlord. “It was rather a sight to see the P clapping at the end of this kind of thing, which would have been horrifying at home,” Haldeman wrote in his diary that night, “but it all seems to fit together, somehow, here.”
Nixon and Chou En-lai made an odd couple. The American politician was awkward and stiff, the Chinese diplomat smooth and urbane. But they understood each other; survivors, they had learned from setback and defeat. As they traveled around the country, applauded by vast crowds now permitted to see the spectacle of the visiting American head of state, Nixon and Chou engaged in a deepening dialogue, at once personal and universal. On Saturday, February 26, Nixon dictated to his diary:
Chou En-lai and I had a very interesting conversation on the way to the airport in Peking. He spoke of Mao’s poem which he wrote on returning to his hometown after thirty-two years. He returned to the point he has made quite often, that adversity is a great teacher. I related it to adversity generally, and pointed out that an election loss was really more painful than a physical wound in war. The latter wounds the body—the other wounds the spirit. On the other hand, the election loss helps to develop the strength and character which are essential for future battles. I said to Chou that I found that I had learned more from defeats than from victories, and that all I wanted was a life in which I had just one more victory than defeat.
I used also the example of de Gaulle in the wilderness for a period of years as a factor which helped build his character. He came back with a thought that men who travel on a smooth road all their life do not develop strength.
Chou said that I had a poetic turn of mind like Mao, when I had in my last toast said that it was not possible to build a bridge across 16,000 miles and twenty-two years in one week. Much of the Mao poetry, of course, is simply a vivid and colorful example.
He referred again to his admiration for
Six Crises
, and I jokingly said that he shouldn’t believe all the bad that the press said of me, and that I would follow the same practice with regard to him.
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By day six, Nixon was exhausted and cranky. He complained privately that the press did not understand him, notwithstanding the best media coverage of his life. Still, he had been a masterful diplomat, plotting his game of triangular chess between China and Russia, winning no guarantees of help on North Vietnam but shrewdly playing rivals against each other. The endgame was tense—Kissinger had to find a formulation to paper over the future of Taiwan. The island refuge of the Nationalist Chinese government driven from the mainland
by the Communists in 1949 had been a protected ally of the United States—and a potential flashpoint in the Cold War. As vice president, Nixon had sat through anxious meetings of Eisenhower’s National Security Council, deliberating whether protecting Taiwan from a Red Chinese invasion was worth World War III. The crises over Taiwan seemed like relics of an earlier age, but the island remained a sore spot between China and America.
“That place is no great use for you,” Chou told Kissinger, “but a great wound for us.” Nixon had come a long way since the days when he and other Republican senators would toast “Back to the Mainland!” at banquets hosted by the Nationalist Chinese; even so, he had to worry about his right flank at home, which would revolt if he were to be seen abandoning America’s old allies. Working all night, Kissinger found an artful finesse—the Americans acknowledged that Taiwan was part of “one China” but left it to the “Chinese themselves” to settle the matter peacefully.
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“This was the week that changed the world,” Nixon said in a farewell toast. That night he could not sleep. He kept awake the dead-on-his-feet Kissinger as he downed a few farewell mao-tais. “P sort of recapping problems and triumphs of the whole visit,” Haldeman recorded. “His admiration for Henry’s accomplishments and the whole thing, with Henry sitting on the couch just itching to get out and go to bed, which I tried to bring about several times, but the P made the point that Chou En-lai stays up all night, so will he.”
Nixon came home to hosannas of praise from around the world. Conservatives protested their astonishment. Columnist William F. Buckley wrote that as he had watched Nixon toast Mao, “I would not have been surprised if Mr. Nixon had lurched into a toast to Alger Hiss.” But any carping in the press was overwhelmed by the stunning visual images, seen by virtually every American. Ronald Reagan, the California governor who had emerged as Nixon’s possible successor, complained to Kissinger about Taiwan but joked that the China visit had been a great television “pilot” and ought to be made into a series.
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