Nixon and Mao (44 page)

In the Philippines, the Americans found an atmosphere close to hysteria. Imelda Marcos, the wife of the president, threatened to leave for Beijing immediately to establish a new relationship between her country and China. Green and the American ambassador were called before the Philippine senate to explain why the United States was repudiating its former policies on Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. When they reached Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister, told Holdridge and Green that their country had “just sprung the trap” on their friends. The reaction was much the same on their last stops, in Australia and New Zealand. Green made a particularly bad impression on the Australians. As their senior Foreign Ministry official said, “He was either consumed with personal vanity to such an extent that he believed a lot of the optimistic nonsense he talked or alternatively, he was lying to bolster a bad case.”
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Such reactions were not sufficient to diminish the pleasure Nixon took in his trip. Back in Washington, he had received a hero’s welcome. Fifteen thousand people had turned out at Andrews Air Force Base to see his plane land. Although both he and Kissinger grumbled about it, the press coverage was generally favorable. In the polls, Nixon’s popularity rose sharply to a 56 percent approval rating, the highest he had enjoyed in over a year. Nearly 70 percent of those polled believed that his trip would be useful. When Nixon met his cabinet the day after his return, he told them that the United States had a “profound new relationship” with China. Nixon turned his attention back to the Soviet Union and the perennial sore of Vietnam, and at home, he increasingly focused on the presidential election.
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N
IXON’S WEEK IN CHINA IN 1972 WAS THE CULMINATION OF A
long and delicate process, as two old adversaries moved to establish contact with each other. As the last-minute negotiations over the Shanghai communiqué so clearly showed, the process could have gone badly wrong, and the relationship might have slid back into the deep freeze. Both sides rightly felt both relief and a certain guarded optimism about what the future now held. The Chinese assumed that American concessions on Taiwan, in particular, would lead in due course to a solution of that particular issue as the United States wound down its military presence and ended its support for the government in Taipei. Taiwan, no one perhaps knew quite how, would be merged into the homeland. Equally important, from the Chinese perspective, their country had been recognized as a major power and could now move to take its rightful place on the world’s stage. The Americans, for their part, hoped for a major realignment in the balance of power that would give them China, with its massive population, huge territories, and enormous potential, as a counterbalance against the Soviet Union and also as a new means of pressuring North Vietnam.

At Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Nixon arrived to an enthusiastic welcome organized by his vice president, Spiro Agnew. “My God,” said Hugh Sidey of
Life,
“it’s like the arrival of the king.” At 98 percent, Nixon’s trip to China registered the highest public awareness of any event in the Gallup poll’s history. The right wing fulminated to little apparent effect. A furious Buchanan threatened to resign from the White House staff on the grounds that the United States had made a deal with a Communist regime and sold out its ally Taiwan, but in the end he did not carry out his threat. The conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr., who had been brought along on the trip in an attempt to win him over, publicly condemned the Shanghai communiqué and went off to support John Ashbrook of Ohio, a little-known Republican congressman who was trying to stop Nixon’s reelection.
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American allies murmured—a “distinct whiff of ‘peace in our time,’” said the British ambassador in Washington—but the overall position of the United States in the world seemed strengthened by its new relationship with China. True, North Vietnam suddenly attacked South Vietnam at the end of March 1972. On the other hand, when the United States resumed its heavy bombing of targets in South Vietnam and, for a brief period, of Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong, the Chinese protested but did nothing. In May, when Nixon went even further and mined Haiphong’s harbor to prevent much-needed Soviet supplies from reaching North Vietnam, the Soviet Union made a pro forma protest, but it did not attempt to break the blockade and, more important, did not cancel the approaching summit.

Kissinger and Nixon both assumed that a major factor in the Soviet Union’s unwillingness to make an issue over Haiphong and to move ahead on détente was its obsession with the Chinese menace and a fear that the United States would draw closer to China. The evidence so far from the Soviet side is mixed. It is true that the Soviet Union was concerned about China. Indeed, the Soviets continued their military preparations along the Soviet-Chinese border. Nevertheless, the chief Soviet concern in the early 1970s appears to have been Europe, where the Soviet Union wanted to get Western recognition of the borders left behind in the aftermath of the Second World War. That would confirm, or so it appeared at the time, both the division of Germany and Soviet control over its satellites in Eastern Europe.
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Nixon went to Moscow in May 1972, and the summit went ahead as planned, in a generally friendly atmosphere. The United States and the Soviet Union signed a major arms limitation agreement, SALT I, and an agreement on the basic principles to govern their relations. The Soviets also suggested that the two sides formally promise not to use nuclear weapons against each other. That left the door open, though, for their use by, for example, the Soviet Union against China. Kissinger duly let the Chinese know about the Soviet proposal with the assurance that Nixon would accept it only if the Soviets promised as well not to use their weapons on China. Not surprisingly, the Chinese were alarmed both by this and by the overall progress of Soviet-American détente. When Kissinger made two more visits to Beijing, in February and then in November 1973, he was not only granted the honor of meetings with Mao but found a particularly friendly welcome. The Chinese took a major step toward normalization of relations by agreeing that the United States and China would establish liaison offices, in many ways indistinguishable from embassies, in each other’s capitals.

Mao and Chou both expressed concern over the Soviet Union. Where Kissinger had once been rebuffed by the Chinese when he had suggested a defensive alliance, he now found Mao talking about the need for a “horizontal line” of countries stretching along the borders of the Soviet Union, from the United States, through China, and into Europe, to contain Soviet power. “The driving force on the Chinese side,” Kissinger told Nixon after his November trip, “remained their preoccupation with the Soviet Union.” The Chinese were counting on the United States as a counterweight. “The key,” commented Nixon in the margin of Kissinger’s memo. The China card seemed to be working as both men had intended, to keep the Soviets in line and to bring the Chinese into the American camp.
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At the start of 1973, too, there was more good news for the Nixon administration when the war in Vietnam finally came to an end. Kissinger and his counterpart in Paris, Le Duc Tho, reached an agreement that allowed the United States to get out, leaving behind an apparently viable South Vietnam and peace for Laos and Cambodia as well. (The two men were both awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1973, but unfortunately the fighting started up again in 1975.) Taiwan felt a sudden chill, but as James Shen, Taiwan’s ambassador in Washington, commented sourly, selling South Vietnam out meant that his own country was temporarily safe: the United States could not be seen to be abandoning all of its allies.
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By 1974, however, the China card appeared to be losing its effectiveness. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had been badly strained by the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, in which the Americans backed Israel and the Soviets its Arab opponents; by the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union; and by the increasingly aggressive Soviet inroads into the Third World. And the Chinese no longer seemed as friendly. The small American mission in Beijing found local officials obstructive and difficult and grew used to repeated lectures on offenses it had unwittingly committed against the Chinese people. A detachment of marines assigned, as was standard practice, to guard the American mission caused particular trouble. The Chinese objected to their uniforms, their jogging in formation through the streets of Beijing, and, above all, to their bar, the Red-Ass Saloon, where lonely and bored foreigners crammed in to drink and listen to loud Western music. The Chinese insisted that the marines leave.
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While Sino-American relations did not go back to what they had been before Nixon’s visit, they did not move ahead either. The Shanghai communiqué had promised that China and the United States would continue to consult about the full normalization of relations, but that proved to be impossible in the mid-1970s because in each country there was a major leadership crisis: Nixon struggled to stay in office and Mao lay dying.

At his moment of greatest triumph, Nixon had embarked on the series of steps that led him into the Watergate scandal and his eventual disgrace. Less than four months after his triumphant return from China, in June 1972, five men with strong links to CREEP, Nixon’s campaign committee, and to the White House itself were arrested for trying to bug and burgle the Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex in downtown Washington. The news made the papers, initially as a minor story. As reporters started to uncover direct connections between the Watergate burglars and the circles around Nixon, the reaction in the White House and the Nixon campaign was to shred documents, deny everything, and try to keep a lid on the news. According to Haldeman, the first, and fatal, mistake was to treat Watergate as a potential public relations disaster. Each attempt to contain it merely led deeper into a full-blown cover-up as Nixon and many of those close to him committed illegal acts and seriously abused government power.
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In the run-up to the presidential election of 1972, however, the White House strategy appeared to be working. The major domestic news story was the Democratic campaign, which was imploding as anonymous tips revealed that the vice presidential candidate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had not disclosed that he had been treated for depression. Haldeman assured Nixon that although the Watergate burglars and two of their superiors were going to be indicted that September, everything was under control. All the men had been paid off handsomely to keep quiet. The Justice Department was on their side and did not intend to charge anyone else. At the
Washington Post,
though, a couple of junior reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were starting to uncover some interesting details of payments made to the burglars from CREEP.
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Nixon was in a cheerful and confident mood that fall. The Republican convention had renominated him by a vote of 1,327 to 1, and the Democrats’ candidate for president, George McGovern, was far behind in the polls. Nixon intended, he said in interviews, to make the next four years even more successful than his first term. He had turned things around for the United States, with bold moves like his China initiative. The long-awaited peace in Vietnam was nearly at hand. In private he told his associates that he was going to get back at his enemies. “They are asking for it and they are going to get it,” he said to John Dean, the White House counsel. Even the Woodward and Bernstein story that October about Segretti and his “pranksters” with their dirty tricks did not worry Nixon. “Sue the sons of bitches,” he told Haldeman.
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Nixon won the election in November in a landslide. He happily made plans to overhaul the government and centralize decision making even more in his office.
Time
magazine made him its Man of the Year in its New Year’s issue of 1973. Nixon was pleased but also annoyed that he had to share the honor with Kissinger. On January 9, 1973, his sixtieth birthday, Nixon received a present in a cable from Kissinger, who was in Paris: peace terms had finally been concluded with the North Vietnamese. Two days later Nixon wrote down his goal, both for the United States and for himself. He intended to pursue détente, including major new arms agreements with the Soviet Union. Perhaps he could get a settlement in the Middle East. And for the presidency, “Restore respect for office.” That day the Watergate trial began.
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In the next year and a half, it all unraveled for Nixon. In February 1973, the Senate set up its own committee to investigate. In March, it made public a letter from the one burglar who had broken ranks stating that highly placed officials in the White House had known in advance of the break-in. The Justice Department began its own investigation of the original incident and the subsequent cover-up. More stories surfaced: of the destruction of evidence, of extensive and illegal wiretapping, and of other burglaries to find incriminating evidence against Nixon’s enemies. In April, Nixon let Haldeman and Ehrlichman go. It was too late to stop what was now a major scandal. As a special prosecutor began digging into the sorry story, the Senate committee started its televised hearings. In August, it learned that Nixon had hours of tapes of conversations. When Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, got a court order in October demanding that the relevant tapes be turned over, Nixon not only resisted but fired Cox. There was now talk of impeaching Nixon.

By 1973, according to Kissinger, Watergate was distracting Nixon and seriously harming the ability of the United States to conduct its foreign relations. Reports came in that spring saying that the Chinese were discreetly asking about how much authority Nixon still possessed. Nixon had always been bored by domestic issues; now he had to deal with them to the neglect of the international affairs he loved so much. Much to his displeasure, he had to let Kissinger take on a more prominent role. In August 1973 he grudgingly appointed Kissinger as his secretary of state. “With the Watergate problem,” Nixon later told Kissinger’s biographer, “I didn’t have any choices.”
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At the end of 1973, the White House released transcripts of part of the tapes but fought to keep the rest private. In July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Nixon. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee approved the first of the articles of impeachment. On August 8, Nixon announced his resignation to the nation. In his last conversations as president with Kissinger, he went over the great moments of his foreign policy, including the opening to China. “For some reason,” he wrote in his memoirs, “the agony and the loss of what was about to happen became most acute for me during that conversation. I found myself more emotional than I had been at any time since the decision had been set in motion.” Nixon pulled out the bottle of old brandy that he and Kissinger had drunk from three years previously when they had toasted Chou’s letter inviting an American emissary to travel to China, but neither man had the heart to drink much. An emotional Nixon asked Kissinger for one last favor; would he kneel beside him for a silent prayer? Kissinger was deeply moved.
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