Nixon and Mao (29 page)

By this point it was after 2:00
P.M.
Their Peking duck was getting cold, Chou said, and the Americans might like a break. The summer heat and the tension of the morning were too much for one of the Americans, who fainted just as they moved in to lunch. Over their duck, Chou asked Kissinger whether he had heard of the Cultural Revolution. It had been a difficult period, Chou said, and at one point he had been locked in his office by Red Guards. Mao, of course, was right to have launched it. Even the violence, while it got out of hand at times, was necessary to keep the revolutionary spirit alive: “China was now firmly guided by the thought of Mao Tse-tung.” Perhaps, Chou remarked later that afternoon, Mao would talk more about the Cultural Revolution when Nixon visited, adding, “We sometimes wonder whether we can talk about such things. But Chairman Mao speaks completely at his will.” At the end of lunch, Chou, the thoughtful and gracious host, took the Americans off to the kitchens to show them how their meal had been prepared.
³⁴

After the friendly interlude, the two sides resumed their tough debate. Indochina and the American presence there, Japan, Korea, the Soviet Union, the tension between India and Pakistan in South Asia—these subjects were to become staples of their discussions over the next years. Of more immediate concern was the question of Nixon’s visit. The Chinese, Chou said, were prepared to issue a formal invitation, but they had a concern about the timing. Would it not be better for Nixon to meet the Soviet leaders first? China did not want to create any more tension with the Soviet Union. “You saw,” he said, “just throwing a ping-pong ball has thrown the Soviet Union into such consternation.” Kissinger said that the United States expected to have a summit with the Soviet Union, possibly in the next six months. In fact, he had learned in Bangkok that the Soviets had postponed the summit indefinitely, so he decided to push for an early Nixon visit, partly as a way of putting more pressure on the Soviet Union. Kissinger suggested that Nixon should visit China in March or April of the following year. Chou agreed and said he would take the matter to Mao.
³⁵

He regretted, Chou said, that he had to leave for an appointment, which would last until 10:00
P.M.
(It was with a delegation from North Korea.) He and Huang Hua would come later that evening to continue their discussions and to work on a common announcement, both of Kissinger’s trip and of Nixon’s forthcoming one. The Americans went back to their villa at the Diaoyutai for dinner. They drafted an announcement and waited for the Chinese officials to reappear. Ten
P.M.
came and went with no Huang and no Chou. The Americans walked in the gardens to avoid eavesdroppers and wondered what the delay meant. “For all we knew,” wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, “the Chinese had had second thoughts.” At the very least, Kissinger suspected, the Chinese were trying to unsettle them.
³⁶
In fact, Huang was waiting for Mao to give him instructions. Sometime after 11:00, Chou appeared, full of apologies. Huang Hua would come shortly with a Chinese draft, and they could compare their wordings. Kissinger and Chou chatted for a short time, and then Chou took his leave.

Huang finally arrived around midnight with wording that had Nixon asking for an invitation to China so that he could settle the issue of Taiwan, as a necessary first step toward normalizing relations. “I rejected both propositions,” Kissinger said later. “We would not appear in Peking as supplicants. We would not come for the sole purpose of discussing Taiwan or even simply to seek ‘normalization of relations.’”
³⁷
The wrangling went on until 1:40 in the morning, when Huang suggested that they take a short break. He disappeared, and the American group waited until nearly 3:00
A.M.
before they learned that he would not be back until 9:00
A.M.
The Americans were puzzled and disturbed. Their plane had to leave by 1:00
P.M.
if Kissinger was to make his schedule in Pakistan, and they needed that announcement.

Although they could not know it, Huang had rushed back to Mao’s house, only to find that the chairman had gone to bed. When Huang finally managed to see him the next morning, Mao dealt briskly with the issue of who wanted the invitation: “None took the initiative, both sides took the initiative.” The wording was now sorted out easily. Chou En-lai, “knowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China,” had duly invited him. Nixon would come sometime before May 1972. The meeting between the American and Chinese leaders was to seek the normalization of relations and to exchange views on matters of concern to both sides. “President Nixon has accepted the invitation with pleasure,” the statement would say. Kissinger, who was so deeply impressed by Chou En-lai and his “extraordinary personal graciousness,” might have been taken aback if he had heard Chou’s speech to his colleagues later that year. Nixon, said Chou, had “eagerly” asked to be invited to China, like a whore who would “dress up elaborately and present herself at the door.”
³⁸

The Chinese agreed that the announcement would be issued on the evening of Thursday, July 15, so that the Americans could get good coverage in such weeklies as
Time
and
Newsweek
and in the weekend papers. As the Americans prepared to leave for their flight, Kissinger expressed his hopes that his visit had laid the groundwork for a new, friendly relationship between the United States and China. Chou said they had taken the first step. Kissinger had, he told Chou, been deeply moved “by the idealism and spiritual qualities of yourself and your colleagues.” Chou replied, “I suggest that we have a quick lunch.”
³⁹

The last meal was a cheerful one, with even dour Chinese officials smiling. Chou presented the Americans with Chinese tea, “a little token,” and when they boarded the PIA plane the Americans found sets of Mao’s works in English and photograph albums of their visit. On the way to the airport, Marshal Ye talked to Kissinger about his early days fighting for the Communists. None of them on the Long March had thought that they would live to see victory. “Yet here we are and here you are,” he said.
⁴⁰

“Those forty-eight hours, and my extensive discussions with Chou in particular,” Kissinger wrote in his subsequent memorandum for Nixon, “had all the flavor, texture, variety and delicacy of a Chinese banquet. Prepared from the long sweep of tradition and culture, meticulously cooked by the hands of experience, and served in splendidly simple surroundings, our feast consisted of many courses, some sweet and some sour, all interrelated and forming a coherent whole.” Kissinger found in Chou not only an intellectual equal but an extraordinary and subtle negotiator who never bothered with petty detail or with scoring points. The Chinese, Kissinger felt, were generally good to negotiate with; they laid out the main things they felt strongly about right at the start. It was such a pleasant change, he told Nixon, after the Soviets, with their pettiness, their bullying, and their bluster.
⁴¹
Chou, for his part, thought Kissinger “very intelligent”; and, as he said on a later occasion to visiting American newsmen, “He can talk for an hour without giving one substantive answer.”
⁴²

As the American party headed back toward Pakistan, their secret, amazingly, was still safe. In Rawalpindi, Farland, the American ambassador, put on a convincing display of annoyance to explain why Kissinger was late in coming down from his rest in the hills. “That stupid ass is up there in the Murree bazaar arguing about some horrible piece of rug or something, looking for bargains,” he said. On the other side of the world, in Washington, a small group in the State Department inadvertently learned the truth when Marshall Green, the assistant secretary of state for Asia and the Pacific, joked to his colleagues that Kissinger probably did not have Delhi belly at all but had gone off to China. As he spoke, Green realized what he had just said. He dashed up to see Rogers, who went pale and made him swear that he and his staff would not say another word.
⁴³

The Kissinger party finally landed in Pakistan and piled into cars to take the road coming down from Murree back to the airport. Kissinger stopped briefly to see an excited Yahya and to talk to American officials. Farland managed to get Kissinger to one side. “I got everything I wanted,” Kissinger said. “It was a total success on my part. I did a beautiful job.” At 6:00 that evening, the Americans, back on their own uncomfortable plane, took off for Tehran, where Kissinger had a brief meeting with the Iranian foreign minister and sent off a telegram. In California, Haig read its one word—“
EUREKA!
”—and went at once to see the president. Nixon said, “Al, I told you so. I told you so.” Forgetting all his earlier instructions about keeping communications to a minimum, Nixon ordered Kissinger to send an immediate report. “Conversations,” wrote back Kissinger, “were the most intense, important, and far-reaching of my White House experience.” He urged Nixon not to talk to anyone, not even Rogers, until he, Kissinger, was back in the United States.
⁴⁴

Early on the morning of July 13, Kissinger arrived in California. He and Nixon and Haldeman, with some help from Rogers, went over the trip and how to deal with the news for the next few days. What had it meant when Chou wished Kissinger well in his negotiations with the North Vietnamese? How would the Soviet Union react to the announcement that Nixon was going to China? Should Nixon make a dramatic or low-key speech on his television appearance scheduled for July 15? Haldeman worried about press coverage. Kissinger was exhausted and perhaps a bit let down after all the excitement of the previous days. Rogers was gentlemanly and generous in congratulating Kissinger. The president was thrilled and excited and longing to spill the news. On July 14, he took the distinguished British journalist Henry Brandon and his wife around the garden at San Clemente. Nixon hinted that he was about to make a major statement and stopped to pick a white Peace rose for Mrs. Brandon. By the time he had finished struggling with the stem, the flower had almost no petals left.
⁴⁵

At 5:45 the next afternoon Nixon went to a studio in Burbank for his televised speech. He spoke briefly, revealing that Kissinger had held talks with Chou En-lai in Beijing. He then read out the announcement that Kissinger and Chou had agreed on. He was taking this step, Nixon said, because of his conviction that all nations would benefit from a better relationship between the United States and China. “It is in this spirit that I will undertake what I deeply hope will become a journey for peace, peace not just for our generation but for future generations on this earth we share together.” He reassured old friends and, without mentioning it by name, the Soviet Union that the United States did not intend to harm any nation with its new relationship. As he left, a handful of protestors shouted, “Get out of Vietnam.” Nixon, who rarely took his staff out to dinner, carried them off to the faded splendor of what had once been a leading Los Angeles restaurant and ordered a hugely expensive bottle of wine. (Ehrlichman later bargained the price down from $600 to $300.)
⁴⁶

Although Nixon had been braced for loud criticism from the right, his announcement was greeted with general approval and even enthusiasm in the United States. The Senate Democratic leader, Mike Mansfield, said, “I am astounded, delighted and happy.” Enthusiastic entrepreneurs dreamed, as their predecessors had done a century earlier, of huge untapped markets. The State Department heard from a casket maker in Texas who wanted to be the first to sign up Chinese for American coffins for their ancestors. The agent for a nightclub singer tried to get Kissinger to help arrange a tour of China’s nightclubs.
⁴⁷

A few conservatives and, inevitably, the China lobby grumbled about surrendering to Communism, but Nixon did his best to reassure them. They should realize, he told Haldeman, that the opening to China was useful against the Soviets and would help in Vietnam. It also helped Nixon. The Vietnam War was dragging on, and the negotiations in Paris with the North Vietnamese were not producing significant results. He was struggling domestically. The economy was in trouble, with inflation running at over 7 percent. Thanks largely to Vietnam, huge holdings of American dollars were now in foreign hands, and the booming economies of countries such as Japan and West Germany were producing goods to challenge American exports. Nixon was under pressure to impose wage and price controls and to devalue the American dollar. By late August, thanks in part to the way in which his move toward China showed him as a master of foreign policy, the polls were indicating that he had taken a significant lead over Senator Edmund Muskie, his Democratic challenger in the 1972 presidential race. Nixon let the Chinese know that he would prefer that they not let in American politicians before his own trip.
⁴⁸

American allies were divided. The British, who already had diplomatic relations with the Chinese, approved of the change in American policy, but their prime minister, Edward Heath, was deeply hurt by not having been taken into Nixon’s confidence. The western Europeans were generally pleased; leaders such as Willy Brandt, in West Germany, hoped that the Soviet Union might now become more amenable to better relations between East and West in Europe. The Japanese were insulted by being told only at the last moment, and the Taiwanese were furious and very worried. The Soviet leadership was, according to an adviser to Brezhnev, “in a state of confusion, if not shock.” Many feared that China was moving into the American camp and might even form a common front against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union let the United States know that the summit, which the Soviets had postponed, could now take place. While there were no ways of gauging Chinese public opinion, one person, at least, was happy. “With this move by the Chairman,” exclaimed the old marshal Chen Yi, “the whole game is enlivened.”
⁴⁹

Two days after Kissinger left Beijing, Chou En-lai flew to Hanoi to reassure the North Vietnamese that China was not abandoning them. Indeed, he argued, better relations between China and the United States would eventually convince the Americans that they need not worry about Asia but should concentrate on Europe and the Soviet challenge there. That, in turn, would help North Vietnam bargain with the United States. The North Vietnamese were not persuaded. China, in their view, was “throwing a life buoy to Nixon, who had been drowning.” When the North Vietnamese prime minister visited Mao later that year, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the chairman not to receive Nixon. The busts of Mao and copies of his Little Red Book started to vanish from the Hanoi shops as the Chinese move became yet another in the litany of grievances Hanoi had against Beijing.
⁵⁰