Nixon in China Read online

  The presents issue had caused much anxiety in the White House – what to expect from the Chinese and what to give them. On Kissinger’s secret trip in July 1971, he had taken along a piece of rock brought back by American astronauts from the moon. The Chinese had received it much as the Qianlong Emperor had received British woollens brought by Lord Macartney – with a certain amount of disdain. Medals in lucite were considered and dropped and finally ceramic models of American birds were made for senior officials while more junior ones got silver bowls, cigarette lighters or cufflinks with the presidential seal. Nixon also presented a pair of musk oxen and two giant redwood trees from California. The trees, in particular, proved awkward to transport; once in China, one of them promptly got worms and languished, though the other flourished. (The Canadians, when they cemented their new relationship with China, chose to send their national animal. A pair of beavers were loaded into a washroom on an Air Canada plane to splash about on their way to China.)6

  At their places at the banquet, each person had three glasses, one for water or orange juice, one for wine and one for China’s famous maotai (‘white lightning’ to the American journalists, or, as Dan Rather put it, ‘liquid razor blades’). At their table, Chou En-lai said proudly to Nixon that maotai, with its alcohol level of more than 50 per cent, had been world famous since the San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915. He took a match to his cup. ‘Mr Nixon, please take a look. It can indeed catch fire.’ (Back in the United States, when the President tried a similar demonstration by setting a bowlful on fire, he nearly burned down the White House.) He understood, Nixon said, that Red Army soldiers had once drained dry the town where maotai was produced. ‘During the Long March, maotai was used by us to cure all kinds of diseases and wounds,’ Chou answered primly. ‘Let me make a toast with this panacea,’ said Nixon. (Alexander Haig, who had experienced maotai on his advance trip to Beijing in January, had worried about its effect on the notoriously weak-headed Nixon. ‘UNDER NO REPEAT NO CIRCUMSTANCES’, he had cabled, ‘SHOULD THE PRESIDENT ACTUALLY DRINK FROM HIS GLASS IN RESPONSE TO BANQUET TOASTS.’)7

  ‘At banquets,’ the White House had warned, ‘the wine and Maotai are for toasting only. These glasses should not be raised without toasting one of your Chinese friends.’ With Chinese sitting at each table, the toasting started early on. Haldeman, who was a teetotaller, tried repeatedly to explain to his incredulous hosts that he could not drink alcohol. John Holdridge found himself playing an old drinking game of counting fingers with the Minister of Electric Power. The loser had to drain his glass to a shout of ganbei. ‘Aided only in part by the mooted’, Holdridge remembered, ‘the atmosphere in the Great Hall was electric. Surely everyone there, and every TV watcher, must have sensed that something new and great was being created in the U.S.–China relationship.’8

  From their tables at the far end of the hall, the journalists, most of them American, stood on their chairs and used field glasses to watch the historic scene. Nixon wanted them there, just as he wanted the live television coverage, because he understood their power so well. He always read the thick daily summaries of press coverage and filled their margins with comments and orders. He wanted their attention but not too much; as he told Haldeman, his image should be ‘more aloof, inaccessible, mysterious’. Yet he also delighted in showing the press his boorish side; as he once told an aide, ‘So much for their fucking sophistication.’9

  Nixon despised most journalists as ‘clowns’ who were irredeemably liberal in their bias. And he was convinced that they hated him in return ‘because I have beaten them so often’. They had been wrong and he had been right on a whole range of issues, from Alger Hiss to what the American people wanted. (Early on in his presidency, he ordered his senior staff to prepare lists of friends and foes among the press; the latter was much the longer list.) He intended to circumvent what he saw as the liberal establishment in the media and reach out directly to middle America, where his support lay. With the powers of the presidency he could make news, whether by creating photo-opportunities or by going on the networks with major policy statements. (He could also, and did, place wiretaps on reporters to see where they were getting their stories.) The camera, Nixon believed, was more effective for him than print. As Kissinger said unkindly, ‘Television in front of the President is like alcohol in front of an alcoholic’.10

  In Haldeman, he found the man he needed. With his background in advertising, Haldeman was quick to see the possibilities of television. As he told Nixon in the run-up to the presidential election, the time had come ‘to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye’. With Haldeman’s help, Nixon created a new office of communications and a separate office for television. The White House generated a stream of material. A presidential photographer and a navy film crew stood by to catch Nixon being presidential or playing with his dog, Prince Timahoe. Staff writers composed editorials and news releases which went not just to the major papers but to thousands of small-town papers across the United States. Washington reporters complained that they no longer had access to the President and no way of finding out what that remote and isolated figure was thinking. That was the way Nixon and Haldeman wanted it. When the press criticized the President, over his failure to bring the Vietnam War to an end, for example, the administration fought back. In late 1969, Vice-President Spiro Agnew was unleashed; in a series of speeches, overseen by Nixon himself, he excoriated the media as ‘a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one’. Journalists seen as particularly hostile found they were no longer included on presidential trips or given background briefings. In some of the worst cases, the tax people or the FBI turned up to investigate them.11

  When Chou En-lai had suggested to Kissinger, in their discussions on the President’s visit, that ten journalists might be about the right number to accompany Nixon, the Americans had negotiated the number upwards until they got permission to bring approximately ninety. When some 2,000 applications from journalists came into the White House press office, the President’s staff announced criteria for selection. In fact, Nixon himself picked the reporters, making sure that the television networks got far more spaces than print media. He also took great pleasure in refusing places to papers like the New York Times. (On his first trip to China, Kissinger managed to warn Chou En-lai obliquely about talking to the Times’ James Reston, who was about to arrive in Beijing.) A reporter from the New York paper Newsday, who had just written a series investigating the complicated financial relations between Nixon and Bebe Rebozo, and who apparently met the criteria for going to Beijing, was told simply ‘no room’.12 Several of the top network brass managed to get themselves accredited as technical staff, much to the annoyance of the beleaguered print journalists. Few of them, apart from the writer Theodore White, had ever been to China or had any particular knowledge of it.

  Nixon, for all his distrust of the press, understood how important it was that his visit received favourable coverage. American public opinion, for so long hostile to Communist China, still had to be persuaded that the President was doing the right thing in opening up relations. Nixon, as always, was also conscious of his own place in history. When Kissinger made his second, public trip to China in the autumn of 1971, part of his mission was to discuss press coverage. Staff from the White House whose job it was to prepare for presidential visits reviewed the schedule and checked out possible sites for photoopportunities. At the beginning of 1972 Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s assistant, spent a week in China working on the final arrangements with a party of technical experts. Then, on 1 February, an advance party of nearly a hundred arrived in China to prepare for Nixon’s visit. One of their most pressing tasks was to set up the communications that would make live television coverage possible.

  The Chinese expected to work with the advance team on the trip but they were amazed by the detailed planning it undertook to make sure, among other things, that the President would get maximum media coverage. At Beijing
airport, for example, the Americans carefully worked out the best place for the President’s plane to land so that it would stop in the right place and at the right angle for good shots of Nixon’s descent towards the waiting reception party. The runway was carefully measured and marked up with paint.13

  Because of China’s relative isolation, the Chinese had not kept up with the sort of technology the Americans took for granted. When Kissinger flew in on the President’s own plane on his October 1971 visit, Chinese assumed the controls for the flight from Shanghai to Beijing. The Chinese pilots took one look at the inertial navigation systems in the cockpit and then ignored them completely, flying visually, with one making hand signals to the other. The Chinese had never seen a Xerox copier and were fascinated by the one the American advance party brought. (When the Americans realized that the Chinese were copying all their documents out by hand, they arranged to leave their copier behind.) China did not have the facilities to transmit to satellites or to ship film rapidly out of the country. Nor were the Chinese media expected to get stories out quickly. The senior Chinese journalist who was assigned to cover the Nixon visit (one of only a handful) remembered being struck by how fast American journalists worked, how they used newsflashes for a breaking story or how one would write a lead paragraph and others finish up a story. ‘We will have to compete in speed,’ she told herself, ‘we will have to make some reforms in the way we do things.’ She also looked longingly at their equipment, the portable telephones or the microphones on long sticks.14

  While the Americans were prepared to bring in whatever they needed, they found that they had to be careful of Chinese sensitivities. On his October 1971 visit, Kissinger raised the issue of a ground station for satellite transmissions. Perhaps, he suggested, the necessary equipment could be flown in on a Boeing 747 which could then act as a self-contained unit. Chou offered to buy the plane, equipment and all. ‘If we cannot buy it, we will rent it from you.’ The compromise reached was that the Chinese would put up a suitable building (which they did in record time) and rent it to the Americans. The Americans would provide the equipment which the Chinese in turn would rent. (The negotiations proved difficult because the Chinese became convinced that the Americans were undercharging them and they insisted, to the confusion of American officials, on paying more than the asking price.) Chou also expressed a certain skepticism about the American hope that the visit would enhance Nixon’s image as a world leader. ‘This we find difficult to understand,’ he told Haig. ‘The image of a man depends on his own deeds and not on any other factors. We do not believe that any world leader can be self styled.’15

  In the three weeks before Nixon arrived, the advance party worked around the clock to set up press facilities, work out camera angles at all the places the President and Mrs Nixon might visit and make sure that the Chinese knew what they needed. Could they get a telex going? Were there going to be phone lines at the Great Wall? Were there forklifts in China capable of unloading heavy equipment? The Chinese were bewildered but co-operative. Their technical experts fell on unfamiliar new technology with enthusiasm and asked to copy all the manuals into Chinese. Giant US Air Force planes flew into Shanghai to disgorge tons of equipment including gallons of chemicals for developing film. As the first plane landed and the first big network control truck rolled out, Tim Elbourne, the White House staffer responsible, stood with his astonished Chinese colleagues and wept with pride.16

  Back in the United States, the administration continued to try to add names to the list of journalists who would be arriving with the President. The lucky ones received special briefings. Beijing was cold in the winter, they were warned; many journalists rushed off to buy special fur coats and long underwear. They should look after their health; if they went into a Chinese hospital, they might never come out. They must expect to work very long hours because they would have far fewer staff than they were used to.17

  Two chartered planes carried the reporters, camera crews and their support staff along with their briefing books and equipment to China just ahead of Nixon. The journalists, who included television stars such as Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, the writer James Michener and William Buckley, a conservative the White House was wooing, travelled together on one plane. A young Barbara Walters, one of only three women in the group, was annoyed to find herself relegated to what was nicknamed the Zoo Plane with the photographers and technicians.18

  On the way out to China, the journalists practised, just as the official party was doing, using chopsticks on the airline food. They also played cards for the Chinese currency with which they had all been issued. According to Helen Thomas, a reporter, some of her colleagues even gave up drink and immersed themselves in their books and papers on China and their guidebooks. As she said, in what was a common metaphor used by most Americans from Nixon down, visiting China was like going to the moon. Even the most experienced and worldly-wise old hands rushed to their windows to take their first pictures of China as the planes crossed into Chinese airspace.19

  In Beijing, the press corps was housed near Tiananmen Square in the cavernous Soviet-style Minzu Hotel (Nationalities, in English). In the rooms, plainer than most of the journalists were used to, boxes of sweets, fresh fruit, tea and stamps had been thoughtfully laid out. In the bathrooms the wooden toilet seats had been freshly lacquered; unfortunately the extract of sumac in the lacquer brought out painful boils on those who were allergic to it. (The advance party had already encountered what they nicknamed ‘Baboon bottom’.)20 Next door was a new building with a basketball court and a bowling alley, thrown up in a matter of weeks after one of the Americans in the advance party had mentioned that the journalists might like to exercise.

  Chinese, many of them journalists themselves, were assigned to each American, as interpreters, guides and minders. A young student brought in from a local university was deeply impressed by the Americans’ dedication to their work; he decided then to become a journalist. Many of the Chinese, although the Americans never knew it, had been brought back from the countryside where, as intellectuals, they had been undergoing thought reform. The Chinese were invariably polite and openly curious about American ways of doing such things as filing stories, or about exposures and film speeds. Sometimes the Chinese had to admit that they were baffled. ‘I understand almost everything you are saying,’ said one to a television producer. ‘The feed, the uplink, the standup, but there is one thing you keep saying that I don’t understand. Please explain what is “the Fucking Audio”?’21

  Partway through the banquet, Chou En-lai got up onto the stage on one side of the hall. Speaking through his personal interpreter, he welcomed Nixon and Mrs Nixon on behalf of Chairman Mao and the Chinese government. The President, Chou went on, was visiting China ‘at the invitation of the Chinese Government’. This innocuous phrase had caused much difficulty on Kissinger’s first, secret trip when the Chinese wanted to make it look as though Nixon had asked to come to China.

  The banquet, like Nixon’s trip itself, was about symbols, about handshakes and about the exchange of toasts between leaders whose countries had for decades treated each other with suspicion. It was about status, about fears of being snubbed as Dulles had once snubbed Chou and about losing or maintaining prestige in the eyes of the world, or, equally important, in the eyes of the Chinese and American peoples. It also carried echoes of the long and sometimes difficult relationship between the Chinese and foreigners. Whether or not China really was the kingdom at the centre of the world, Chinese governments down the centuries had used rituals that implied that their emperor was chosen by heaven to rule the world and that all other rulers were his inferiors. Presents sent to the Chinese emperor and trade with China were both described as tribute. It may not have been a realistic view of the actual relationships between China and foreign nations, but it was a very powerful one. Inferior rulers, in other words all those outside China, had to ask for permission to enter the emperor’s lands; they were not invited by the emperor
because that would have implied a relationship of equals.22

  Continuing his toast, Chou En-lai sounded a more modern note. In a reflection of the Chinese Communist view that the masses of the world would one day unite, he said that the Chinese people sent cordial greetings to the American people. Both peoples wanted a normalization of their relationship. ‘The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.’ All present there knew why there had been a twenty-year freeze between their two nations. Thanks to efforts on both sides contact had been re-established. Of course, it was not going to be easy. ‘The social systems of China and the United States are fundamentally different, and there exist great differences between the Chinese Government and the United States Government.’ Neither side wanted war, though, and both were willing to work together on a basis of mutual respect. ‘We hope’, Chou concluded, ‘that, through a frank exchange of views between our two sides to gain a clearer notion of our differences and make efforts to find common ground, a new start can be made in the relations between our two countries.’ And he lifted his glass in a toast to the Americans and Chinese in the room and to friendship between the Chinese and American peoples. Coming down from the stage, Chou circled the tables of the official party, toasting each person in turn. One of the Americans noticed that he only touched his lips to his glass each time.23