American Experiment (370 page)

The drive into Peking was less successful from a public relations standpoint, since the Chinese masses appeared merely to be going about their business, unaware of the barbarians in their midst. But marvelous photograph opportunities opened up in the days following, as the presidential party toured the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace, watched table tennis and gymnastics in the Sports Palace, attended a revolutionary ballet, and made the obligatory tour of the Great Wall, where Nixon proclaimed to the waiting press, “This is a great wall.”

The President was elated early in the meetings when Chou sent word that Mao Tse-tung would see him. Taking Kissinger with him but not Rogers, who was excluded from the most important meetings, the President and his aide were driven to the Imperial City and ushered into a modest house. There they found Mao sitting in a medium-sized, book-lined study. Though ailing and infirm, the Chairman could not have been more affable. He joked to Nixon that “our common old friend,” Chiang, did not approve of this meeting. To the President’s suggestion that his writings had “changed the world,” Mao replied modestly that he had been able to change only “a few places in the vicinity of Peking.” He implied that he preferred to deal with predictable conservatives rather than wobbling liberals, and even added smilingly that “I voted for you during your last election.” He skirted policy issues, preferring to discuss questions of
“philosophy” and leaving specifics to his Premier. But it was clear that he looked on the Russians, not the Americans, as the real adversary.

Nixon was as willing to delegate the hard, hour-to-hour bargaining to Kissinger as Mao was to turn it over to Chou. The negotiators did not face momentous strategic decisions. The harsh facts of Soviet intimidation, Chinese and American commitments in Indochina, Chinese-American conflict over Taiwan, had already determined strategy. The problem rather was to reduce a complex balance of power to a formula that could be presented as a joint statement by Peking and Washington without unduly straining the alliances of either with third parties. The Americans were playing a three-dimensional game that required skill and patience. If they leaned too far toward Moscow, China might try to repair its old friendship with the Soviet Union; if too far toward Peking, the Russians might even try, Kissinger feared, a “preemptive attack on China.” Vietnam and Taiwan had to fit into this broader framework.

The Shanghai Communiqué, issued at the end of the trip, spoke of the belief in freedom the two nations shared—the Americans in “individual freedom,” the Chinese in “freedom and liberation.” But then, using a formula worked out in earlier meetings, the communiqué listed the differences between the two countries. Taiwan was still the main issue. The Chinese reiterated that the island was wholly their internal affair. The Americans adroitly acknowledged and agreed “that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” Hoping for a peaceful settlement of the question by the Chinese themselves, the United States “affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”

The presidential party flew back to Washington and a hero’s welcome. Senators and congressmen from both parties, headed by Vice President Agnew, greeted Nixon at Andrews Air Force base and voiced strong support the next day at a conference. The Republican right did not seem unduly disturbed. Governor Ronald Reagan of California joked that the China initiative had been a wonderful television “pilot” and should be made into a series. A few newspapers wondered whether the future of Taiwan had been bartered away in exchange for a presidential visit, a dramatic initiative, and breaking the taboo of noncommunication between East and West. But in general the press was not critical. Indeed, when a reporter in Shanghai pressed Kissinger about the American commitment to Taiwan, Kissinger had said that he would “appreciate it” if the press
would stop asking about it “in these circumstances,” and the reporters desisted.

The voyagers were not modest about their success, or about its historic importance. It had been “the week that changed the world,” as the President put it in a farewell banquet toast in China. Nixon’s mere announcement of his forthcoming trip to Peking had “transformed the structure of international politics” overnight, Kissinger maintained years later. Certainly they had much to brag about. They had penetrated and demystified the inscrutable Orient, put Moscow on the defensive, and expanded trade and “people-to-people exchanges.” They displayed extraordinary skill and patience not only in negotiating with their erstwhile enemies in Peking but in fending off their adversaries in State and Defense, in Congress, in the old China Lobby. Moreover, they had been blessed with that priceless gift for diplomats negotiating on a confused and darkling plain—luck. China’s leadership had been undergoing a massive internal convulsion that still had not ended when Kissinger first arrived. Washington’s political intelligence on China was so poor that the voyagers knew little of the intensity of the conflict between the anti-Soviet, moderate faction represented by Chou and the hard-line “anti-imperialists” led by Lin Piao and supported by the military. This left them in blissful ignorance of a conflict whose merest spasm could have upset all their plans.

Still, the test of their success lay in Moscow as well as in Peking. They were above all playing triangular diplomacy. Soon after returning the summiteers redoubled planning for another historic meeting.

At the end of March 1972, only four weeks after the return of the exuberant voyagers from China, three divisions of North Vietnamese infantry, backed by two hundred tanks and new recoilless artillery, smashed south across the Demilitarized Zone. There ensued one of the most bizarre series of events in the Vietnam War. While General Creighton Abrams’s forces to the south had long anticipated such an attack, they took days to discern just what was happening. Although the United States had long been pulling out its troops by the thousands, Hanoi converted the attack into a major offensive after the breakthrough. Although strategic air and sea power could have little immediate impact on a land offensive, Nixon resumed intensive bombing of Haiphong and Hanoi—the first since 1968—and mined Haiphong harbor and other North Vietnamese ports. Although the White House at this point was desperately eager for a Moscow summit, mainly in order to persuade Moscow to persuade Hanoi to
accept a settlement, American aircraft sought to interdict Soviet ships bringing military supplies to Hanoi, which risked provoking a major incident. Although such an event did occur when American bombs hit four Soviet merchant ships in Haiphong harbor, the Kremlin merely protested and continued with plans to welcome the Americans in Moscow.

All these incongruities could be explained by one circumstance—the desire of two nuclear superpowers to parley within the triangle of great-power rivalry, giving only secondary consideration to tertiary powers. But the incongruities challenged the popular shibboleth that Moscow or Peking headed up a massive, global, coordinated communist movement. For neither government had decisive influence over a North Vietnamese leadership that gloried in its own autonomy.

Washington’s rapprochement with Moscow took much the same form as the opening to Peking. Once again the President dispatched Kissinger to “advance” the trip. Once again he sidetracked his Secretary of State—this time by repairing to Camp David, ostensibly with Kissinger, and then informing Rogers that his security aide had flown to Moscow on receiving a sudden invitation from Brezhnev. And once again the President blew hot and cold about the prospective summit. He was eager to be the first President since FDR to visit the U.S.S.R., the very first to go to Moscow—a trip that Ike had missed after the U-2 debacle. But he feared a debacle of his own making, if Moscow saw the parley as a means of strengthening its hand in Vietnam and weakening the American, or if on the other hand the Kremlin suddenly called off the whole summit. For Moscow was becoming huffy. When Kissinger invited Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, with whom he had a close working relationship, to view Chinese-made films of Kissinger’s Peking visits, this interlude of triangular diplomacy with a vengeance ended in a sharp exchange between the two over the American buildup in Southeast Asia.

But the Kremlin did not call off the summit, nor did the White House. The Soviet Union wanted to throw its weight against Chinese influence, to hold tight its corner of the triangle, to persuade Washington to put its full effort behind West German ratification of postwar treaties with Russia and Poland, to discuss arms control, to make deals for grain and other Soviet needs. Nixon’s aims were simpler but no less compelling: to persuade Moscow to press Hanoi for an acceptable settlement; to emerge from a second summit as the supreme peacemaker; above all to dish the Democrats on the peace issue and win big in November.

Late in May 1972, Air Force One, bearing the President and Mrs. Nixon and the usual big presidential party, soared off into the skies over Washington, this time heading east. The mood, in Kissinger’s memory, was
optimistic, even jubilant, unspoiled by undue humility. “This has to be one of the great diplomatic coups of all times!” the President recalled Kissinger saying. “Three weeks ago everyone predicted it would be called off, and today we’re on our way.”

President Nikolai Podgorny, Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and a conspicuously small crowd greeted the Americans at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. As party boss, Brezhnev was not required to be there and chose not to be. The presidential motorcade raced to the Kremlin through emptied streets. Soon the Nixons were installed in opulent quarters inside the Kremlin’s Grand Palace, and shortly after that the President was closeted with Brezhnev.

He faced a large, active man with heavy swept-back hair over bushy eyebrows and powerful features. Brezhnev’s rapidly alternating friendliness and pugnacity reminded the President of Irish labor bosses back home, or even Chicago’s Mayor Daley. Wasting little time on formalities, the General Secretary launched into vigorous complaints about Vietnam. This over, he became almost convivial as he proposed a close personal relationship between them and spoke of the memory of Franklin Roosevelt cherished by the Soviet people, and he warmed up even more when Nixon said that in his experience disputes among subordinates were usually overcome by agreement among the top leaders.

“If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats,” Nixon ventured, “we will never achieve any progress.” Brezhnev laughed heartily at this common complaint of leaders. Kissinger was not present at this initial meeting.

“They would simply bury us in paper!” the General Secretary said, slapping his hand on the table.

The parley that followed underwent the zigs and zags, the starts and stops, that had always characterized Soviet-American negotiations. The crucial business was nuclear arms negotiations. Kissinger conducted the hard bargaining. He and the President had kept control of the American side by excluding from a direct role in the summit talks not only Rogers but the SALT experts in Helsinki, who had been negotiating on arms for many months. Hour after hour, jotting down on yellow pads endless combinations and permutations of arms calculations, Kissinger hammered out compromises with his Kremlin counterparts, under the watchful eye of the President. And this was the greatest incongruity: here inside the Kremlin, the historic citadel of Russian authority, ringed by military might in and around the capital, in a nation bristling with nuclear arms, this magically transported White House, with its President and aides, secretaries and secretaries to secretaries, communications and transportation experts, security men and chauffeurs, was closeted with the Soviet power elite
commanding those nuclear arms from a cluster of ancient buildings around them.

Communication was easy with the help of a gifted Soviet interpreter, but the language was arcane: throw weights and first strikes, hard targets and soft, silos and delivery vehicles, ABMs (antiballistic missiles), ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), and MIRVs (multiple independent reentry vehicles). These bland and bureaucratic terms, as Bernard Weisberger noted, “hid the appalling realities of the subject and made seemingly rational discussion possible.” The two nuclear powers had continued to operate on the premise that their goal was not to win a nuclear exchange but to forestall one by making clear that if one side launched a first strike, the other would, with its surviving weapons, inflict an unbearable counter-strike. Thus neither side could hope for victory. But each side had to guard against the possibility that reckless leaders in the other camp might nevertheless be tempted to take out its weapons or to encase theirs in hardened silos and other devices, or to turn science fiction into reality by developing technology that could destroy or turn away incoming missiles. Thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons had been piled up in each nation to guard against the unthinkable—a situation in which one’s own side had no nuclear weapons left and the other had at least one.

The key outcome of the Moscow summit was a strategic arms limitation treaty limiting the deployment of antiballistic missile systems to two for each country—one to protect the capital and one to protect an ICBM complex—and an “Interim Agreement” freezing for the next five years the number of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles each side could possess. There were collateral agreements and understandings: a grain deal for the Soviets, who were facing a potentially catastrophic crop failure, implicit promises by Moscow that it would not intervene in Vietnam against the United States, and a set of “Basic Principles” piously promising that each nation would try to avoid military confrontations, would respect the norm of equality, would not seek unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, all this in the spirit of “reciprocity, mutual accommodation and mutual benefit.”