Nixon and Mao (27 page)

Neither man lost his job. Nixon and Kissinger were surprised but delighted at the invitation. A rather bewildered group of players and officials from the U.S. Table Tennis Association headed for China, filled with last-minute advice from American diplomats and laden with cameras and tape recorders reporters had pressed on them, as well as all the American pens the embassy in Tokyo could find to give as presents. The team, which was the first American delegation into China since 1949, arrived in Canton by train and then flew north to Beijing and, later, Shanghai. Everywhere they saw the giant portraits of Mao, the cartoons with a pygmy Nixon and a giant Chinese, and the signs that said, “Down with the U.S. imperialists.” On the streets the locals stared at them with amazement, especially at Glenn Cowan, with his long hair, and a teenage player in her miniskirt, and the Americans stared back. One young American girl spent much of the time in tears because she would not eat Chinese food; finally the Chinese made her a hamburger and French fries.
⁶⁸

Chou oversaw all the detailed arrangements for their reception and even had the Forbidden City, which he had closed to save it from the Red Guards, reopened for sightseeing. The trip, “an international sensation,” in Kissinger’s words, received huge publicity in the world press. The handful of foreign journalists stationed in Beijing were joined—and this was another breakthrough—by reporters from the big American news services. In China itself, all the matches were broadcast live on television and radio. Chou ordered the Chinese players to let the Americans win some of them.
⁶⁹

On April 14, Chou held a lavish reception in the Great Hall of the People for the visiting teams. In alphabetical order, the teams from Canada, Colombia, Great Britain, Nigeria, and the United States climbed up the great staircase that Nixon would ascend a year later. Chou was a charming host, chatting with all the players, posing patiently for photographs, and deprecating his own ability at ping-pong. He made jokes about the weather with the British and talked to the Canadians about his admiration for Dr. Norman Bethune. His most significant words were, of course, directed at the Americans. To the president of the U.S. Table Tennis Association, he quoted a Chinese proverb about the joy of having friends from afar. “Your visit,” he said as he toasted the Americans, “has opened a new chapter in the history of the relations between Chinese and American peoples.” And he went on: “With you having made the start the people of the United States and China in the future will be able to have constant contacts.”
⁷⁰

As the reception came to an end, Chou asked if there were any more questions. Glenn Cowan popped up to ask, “What do you think of the hippy movement?” He did not know much about it, Chou said, so his views might be rather superficial. Perhaps young people around the world were dissatisfied and wanted change but had not yet found the ways to bring that about. “When we were young,” the old revolutionary said, “it was the same thing too. Therefore, I understand the ideas of youth, they are very curious.” Cowan replied that the hippy movement was really very deep: “It is a whole new way of thinking.” Chou suggested that more was needed: “Spirit must be transformed into material force before the world can move forward.” (Cowan’s mother apparently sent Chou flowers with thanks for educating her son.) Chou concluded by commending Cowan for not playing too badly against the Chinese team and wished him progress. “I could talk for hours,” Cowan told reporters. He became, temporarily, a great Sinophile, talking about staying on in China, which, in his view, was so much less conformist than the United States. That desire vanished when he found himself ill in a Chinese hospital.
⁷¹

The whole visit was “vintage Chou En-lai,” in Kissinger’s opinion. “It was a signal to the White House that our initiatives had been noticed.”
⁷²
The Americans were careful to respond. On April 14, Nixon ended most of the remaining restrictions on trade between the United States and China. Two days later, he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and while he was careful to warn them not to get their hopes up about an immediate breakthrough with China, he added that he had told his daughter Tricia that he had a suggestion for her honeymoon: “I hope sometime in your life, sooner rather than later, you will be able to go to China to see the great cities, and the people, and all of that, there.”
⁷³
He was noncommittal about his own chances of getting there, but at the end of April he told a press conference, without any prodding, “I hope, and, as a matter of fact, I expect to visit Mainland China sometime in some capacity.”
⁷⁴

Because Nixon and Kissinger had kept the secret of their contacts with Chou En-lai so well, the United States also sent out some contradictory signals. Spiro Agnew, the vice president, in a rambling impromptu press conference late one night, complained vociferously about the favorable press coverage of China during the ping-pong team’s visit and the whole policy of removing obstacles to contacts. Nixon sent orders to Agnew to keep quiet about China and to the White House press office to say that Agnew completely supported the president’s China policy.
⁷⁵
At the end of April, a State Department spokesman said rightly that the United States’ position on Taiwan was “an unsettled question.” In London, William Rogers, who knew nothing of the secret channels to China, said that Mao’s remarks to Edgar Snow did not constitute a “serious invitation” to Nixon to visit China. He added some pointed remarks about Chinese foreign policy being “expansionist” and “rather paranoid.” Kissinger was unreasonably outraged at these “bureaucratic shenanigans,” which he saw as a power grab by the State Department.
⁷⁶

On April 27, fortunately, Hilaly, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, finally brought the long-awaited reply from Chou En-lai to Nixon’s secret message of the previous December. The Chinese repeated their insistence that the United States must withdraw its forces from Taiwan before relations could be restored but—and this was a softening of their previous position—suggested that the matter be discussed in Beijing by a special envoy from Nixon or even Nixon himself. Kissinger was elated. As he later wrote, “Every once in a while a fortunate few can participate in an event that they
know
will make a difference.” Sitting in his study that night, he recalled, he experienced a rare moment of peace and hope: “The message from Peking told us above all that despite Indochina we had a chance to raise the sights of the American people to a future of opportunity.”
⁷⁷

Through the good offices of Hilaly, Nixon sent a swift reply to Chou. The Chinese message was “constructive, positive and forth-coming,” and the United States intended to send one back in the same spirit. With an eye on his domestic politics, Nixon also asked that the Chinese not give visas to any American politicians for the time being.
⁷⁸
On May 10, Kissinger called Hilaly in and handed him the formal American reply for transmission to the Chinese. Nixon accepted Chou’s suggestion that he visit Beijing himself for conversations to deal with the important issues dividing their two countries. In order to arrange that, he proposed a secret visit by Kissinger to exchange preliminary views on “all subjects of mutual interest” and to work out the details of the visit and its agenda. One facet of the trip was emphasized: “
It is also understood that this first meeting between Dr. Kissinger and high officials of the People’s Republic of China be strictly secret.
” The Chinese again were mystified by this insistence on secrecy. “If they want to come,” said Mao, “they should come in the open light. Why should they hide their head and pull in their tail?”
⁷⁹
Kissinger has always made a good case for the need for secrecy before his first visit. He also points out that the Americans proposed a second, public, one for him once the ice had been broken. When the only contact the United States had with China was through Pakistan and when American and Chinese statesmen had no idea of the others’ thinking, it would have been very dangerous to allow several weeks of public and potentially damaging speculation before the visit took place. Such open comment, whether from enthusiasts or opponents, might have spooked the Chinese, worried American allies, and made the trip a domestic liability in the United States. American opponents of an opening to China would have had time to rally, and other nations might have intervened. “The tender shoot so painstakingly nurtured for more than two years might well have been killed.”
⁸⁰
“Looking back,” said Bill Brown, who was deputy director of the office that dealt with the People’s Republic of China, “I don’t feel that the American people were such sheep or that it was so delicate in Congress and in the American body politic.”
⁸¹
In any case, it has never been clear why the fact of Kissinger’s trip to Beijing had to remain secret until it was over. It did, though, make a wonderful adventure and a wonderful announcement, and that in itself may have appealed to both Kissinger and Nixon, with their great awareness of history.

The Chinese received the American message on May 17 and, a few days later, an assurance that a recent advance in arms limitation talks between the Soviet Union and the United States was not directed against China. “President Nixon wishes to emphasize,” the message transmitted through Pakistan said, “that it is his policy to conclude no agreement which would be directed against the People’s Republic of China.”
⁸²
In Beijing, Mao ordered Chou to call together the Politburo, the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party, to prepare a reply. In his opening speech, Chou talked about how American power was declining and how the United States was now anxious to get out of Vietnam. That gave China an opportunity to improve relations with its former enemy, a move that would help China in several ways, such as furthering the peaceful reunification of its territory and providing support against its enemies. (The Soviet Union was not mentioned specifically.) If the opening succeeded, it would make the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union even fiercer; if it failed, well, it would show the Chinese people the reactionary face of American imperialism.
⁸³

Mao approved the report, and Chou sent off a reply. The Pakistanis alerted Kissinger that they were dispatching a special courier with a highly important message. At 8:00
P.M.
on June 2, Hilaly, his hands shaking, handed over two sheets of paper to Kissinger, who read them with relief and then elation. Chou extended a warm invitation to Kissinger to come to Beijing in June to prepare the way for Nixon’s visit. “It goes without saying,” Chou added, “that the first question to be settled is the crucial issue between China and the United States which is the question of the concrete way of the withdrawal of all the U.S. Armed Forces from Taiwan and Taiwan Straits area.” As Kissinger recognized, this was a considerable modification of the original Chinese position that the forces must be withdrawn before talks could take place. Kissinger rushed over to the White House, where Nixon was hosting a state dinner for the unlovely dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. As Nixon read the message, Kissinger said solemnly, “This is the most important communication that has come to an American President since the end of World War II.” He later pushed the date back to the Civil War.
⁸⁴

The two men talked until nearly midnight about what lay ahead. As Kissinger was leaving, Nixon decided that they ought to celebrate, so he hunted up a bottle of very good brandy. The two men raised their glasses and Nixon, according to his memoirs, proposed a toast. “Henry, we are drinking a toast not to ourselves personally or to our success, or to our administration’s policies which have made this message and made tonight possible. Let us drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done.”
⁸⁵

CHAPTER 12

THE SECRET VISIT

N
IXON’S TOAST IN THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HE AND KISSINGER
received Chou’s invitation was, he admitted, rather formal, but it was, after all, “a moment of historical significance.”
¹
It was also merely a beginning. So much had to be arranged before Nixon could go to China, from technical details about landing his plane safely to the sorts of subjects he would discuss while he was there. Presidential visits always require detailed advance work, and China was unknown territory. Moreover, until all the details were worked out, there was always the danger that one side or the other would pull back. The choice of the emissary, therefore, was crucial.

In their message that reached Washington on April 27, the Chinese had suggested that Kissinger himself might be Nixon’s special envoy. Kissinger, understandably, longed to go. He had already sent a message through Hilaly telling the Chinese that it was “essential” that he be the first to meet Chou: “No one except Kissinger is best qualified to have these discussions as he is the
only
person (repeat only) who knows President Nixon’s thinking and his mind and can take decisions on the spot without having to refer back to Washington for advice & instructions.”
²
Kissinger was right: he was the obvious choice; but it was one that Nixon shrank from making. He was already envious of the press coverage of Kissinger and of Kissinger’s growing reputation as a smooth man about town. And so Nixon, much as Eisenhower had once done with him, refused to commit himself. Kissinger could not go, he said initially, “because that would break all the china with State.” Kissinger had to sit by as Nixon wondered out loud about going himself. That would be too dangerous, Kissinger argued. What about Rogers? Kissinger rolled his eyes. “Henry wasn’t too enthusiastic,” Nixon recalled later. “Let me put it that way.” Perhaps David Bruce or Henry Cabot Lodge? Nixon ruled them out because they were both too much identified with the American presence in Vietnam. Or Kissinger’s old patron Nelson Rockefeller? “Intriguing,” said Kissinger, but Rockefeller would not obey Kissinger’s instructions. Or George Bush? “Too soft and not sophisticated enough.” Thomas Dewey, the distinguished Republican elder statesman? Unfortunately, said Kissinger, he had been dead for several months.
³

“Henry,” said Nixon, “I think you will have to do it.” The decision was hard to avoid. Kissinger knew Nixon’s mind and had been involved in every stage of the secret negotiations. Moreover, said Kissinger, who understood his president well, “of all the potential emissaries I was the most subject to his control.” As a still relatively obscure national security adviser, Kissinger did not have his own constituency or his own power base.
⁴
Nixon still hoped to downplay the significance of what was clearly an extraordinary trip. Perhaps Kissinger could meet Chou somewhere other than Beijing. Kissinger made sure that all other sites were ruled out. Surely, Nixon also suggested, there was no need to have Kissinger’s name appear on any joint communiqué announcing that a representative of the American government had visited China. “Reality,” said Kissinger, “took care of this problem.”
⁵
Kissinger set his staff to preparing briefing books while he and Nixon waited for the final confirmation from the Chinese.

In Pakistan, the American ambassador, Joseph Farland, received a mysterious message ordering him to meet Kissinger somewhere in California. He was to travel to a private airport and ask for a certain airplane. He was not to tell the State Department about his trip. An irritated Farland followed orders and found himself on a patio in Palm Springs with Kissinger. “‘Henry, I’ve come halfway around this damn earth and I don’t know why.’ He said, ‘I want you to put me into China.’ I said, ‘I don’t think that’s very funny, Henry.’” Once Farland was persuaded that Kissinger was serious, the two men concocted a plan. Kissinger was due to take a tour of Asia, which he intended to make as boring as possible in order to shake off the press. His schedule would include a weekend in Pakistan, where the embassy would put out word that he had come down with a bug he had picked up in India. As a result, all his appointments would be canceled and Kissinger, so everyone would be told, would retreat to the hill station of Murree to recuperate. While his airplane remained conspicuously parked on the runway, he would fly into China on a civilian plane provided by the government of Pakistan.
⁶

Pakistan was an obvious jumping-off place for China. Its government had shown its discretion and its loyalty to the Americans in setting up the channel, and its national airline had regular flights to Beijing. Yahya Khan, who promised Washington that he would make “absolute fool-proof arrangements” at his end, entered into the plans with enthusiasm, checking off all the details himself. Farland did his part before Kissinger arrived by insisting that a couple of his more observant staff in the embassy take their annual leave. He sent the embassy doctor off to East Pakistan. The Chinese sent in an aircrew in readiness.
⁷

In Beijing, Chou En-lai set up a special high-level group and himself took personal charge of the preparations for Kissinger’s visit. Under Mao’s orders, he also called together a special meeting of the Politburo to prepare for the negotiations. Chou started the deliberations by explaining that the United States was no longer as powerful as it had been at the end of the Second World War. It had lost ground economically, and its involvement in Indochina, in particular, had done its position in the world much damage. The Americans’ anxiousness to extricate themselves from a hopeless struggle made them need contact with China, and this was China’s opportunity to promote its own security and the reunification of China “by peaceful means.” The Politburo sent its recommendations to Mao, who approved them. To prepare the Chinese people for the shock that a country that had been treated as its main enemy for twenty years was now becoming something else, Chou spoke to a meeting of party officials from around the country to outline the new policy. Mao also ordered that the transcript of his chat with Edgar Snow, in which he invited Nixon to come to China, be released in the Chinese press.

The recommendations demonstrated the importance that Taiwan had in Chinese thinking. The United States must indicate that it was going to withdraw its troops from the island and must recognize that Taiwan was Chinese territory and that the government in Beijing was the only one representing China. On the other hand, China would undertake to liberate Taiwan peacefully. This was significant because up to this point, the government in Beijing had always refused to rule out the use of force. If the Americans brought up the issue of the United Nations, the Chinese must make it clear that they would not accept two Chinas being represented there, a solution that had been suggested by the United States and other nations. The Chinese should also let the Americans know that they should withdraw their troops from the rest of Asia, from Indochina to Japan. If all went well, the two sides might be able to talk about permanent diplomatic representation in each other’s capitals. There was nothing in the recommendations about any sort of concerted policy toward the Soviet Union.
⁸

In Washington, the Americans were also getting ready. Winston Lord, Kissinger’s assistant, prepared separate sets of briefing books, one for those who were going on the public Asian tour and one for those who knew about the secret detour, now christened Polo One, to Beijing. (Somehow, as the Kissinger party made its way from one Asian capital to another, he managed to keep the different briefing notes and itineraries in the right hands.) Kissinger’s own notes for Polo One ran to eighty pages of careful statements of the American position on areas it considered important: Indochina, Taiwan, and relations with the Soviet Union, of course. His briefing book also included the American positions on Korea and on South Asia, where relations between India and Pakistan were fast deteriorating, as well as drafts of the toasts that Kissinger intended to give. The Chinese, he argued, were likely to be tough negotiators. They might well ask that the United States pull its troops out of Taiwan, but the United States had some bargaining chips on its side. China very much wanted to be recognized as a great power, and a summit meeting with Nixon would be “spectacular proof.” The Chinese might also suggest some form of alliance directed against the Soviet Union.
⁹

On July 1, the day Kissinger left for Asia, Nixon gave him last-minute instructions with, as Kissinger put it, “his invariable hard-line rhetoric with which he sent me off on every mission.” Nixon warned him against being too forthcoming. Kissinger should be “somewhat enigmatic” on Taiwan and not suggest that the United States was abandoning its support for Taiwan “until it was necessary to do so.” He should raise three specters with the Chinese: what he, Nixon, might do if the stalemate in South Vietnam continued, and the threats to China from Japan and the Soviet Union. If the Chinese wanted a summit with him, they would have to release all the American POWs they still held, be helpful on Vietnam, and—this was to appeal to American farmers—accept some grain shipments from the United States. In return, Kissinger could suggest that, once the summit had been held, the United States would be happy to set up a hotline between Beijing and Washington and perhaps make an agreement on avoiding an accidental nuclear war. Nixon’s advice was mostly “boilerplate,” Kissinger said dismissively in his memoirs.
¹⁰

Although Kissinger had co-opted some foreign service officers to serve on the National Security Council, he had not shared the news of his upcoming trip to China with the State Department, even with Rogers himself. The State Department was understandably puzzled about why the national security adviser needed to go off on a fact-finding mission to Asia. It was also concerned that, by going to India and Pakistan, he might be giving the impression that the United States was interfering in their already tense relationship. The secrecy also caused difficulties with Vice President Agnew, who had to be talked out of a long-planned visit to Chiang Kai-shek, which would have placed him in Taiwan just as Kissinger was arriving in Beijing. Although Nixon and Kissinger did not know it until later, one part of the government had ferreted out the secret. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, exasperated by the secrecy around American foreign policy, had set their own spy to work. Charles Radford was assigned from the navy to work as a stenographer and clerk at the National Security Council. He simply made extra copies of all documents that came his way and passed them on to his military superiors.
¹¹

Fortunately for Nixon and Kissinger, their initiative remained secret. Both men, of course, were taking a great risk. Kissinger was going off into the unknown. According to Yahya, he was apprehensive, even frightened, and asked the president of Pakistan to accompany him on that first trip. “I told him,” said Yahya, “that I’d send one of my generals along, if he wanted moral support, but I personally could not go. Chou En-lai had given me his word that he would look after him.”
¹²
Kissinger was taking a political risk too. If he did not bring back concrete results from his meetings with Chou, his own position in Washington would be weakened and that of the State Department, which had warned all along about rushing too precipitously into negotiations, would be enhanced.

In 1971 Nixon needed successes, particularly in foreign policy, which he had always claimed as his own. He was already looking ahead to the next presidential election, but his record so far was mixed: the war in Vietnam was grinding on and negotiations with the North Vietnamese were stalemated; Laos and Cambodia were slipping further under Communist influence; and the Soviet Union was being difficult. “We’re playing for very high stakes now,” Nixon had said to Kissinger that April as the Americans waited to hear from the Chinese. “We have very little time left, and we cannot diddle around.”
¹³

Kissinger and his party left Washington on the evening of July 1. Because all the presidential planes were in use ferrying Nixon to the West Coast or Agnew off to the Middle East and Africa (his compensation for not going to Taiwan), Kissinger was given a converted air force tanker, so old that it need extra-long runways. “On takeoff,” remarked Kissinger, “one had the feeling that the plane really preferred to reach its destination overland.” While Kissinger had a comfortable large cabin, the rest of his group, which included Winston Lord, John Holdridge and some others from the NSC, and two Secret Service men, were jammed in together along with their typewriters and briefcases. Every so often Kissinger would emerge in his dressing gown to go over his messages. “The scene was reminiscent of a Roman galley,” said Holdridge, “with the captain directing imperiously from the stern and the rowers laboring uncomfortably in banks of two along the hull!”
¹⁴
The plane lumbered on to Saigon and Bangkok, and then to India, where Kissinger had dinner with an intensely suspicious prime minister, Indira Gandhi. She was covertly supporting the forces in East Pakistan rebelling against Yahya’s government and may have suspected that the United States was planning to offer Pakistan assistance.
¹⁵