Nixon in China Read online

  Rogers had few obvious qualifications for his position as Secretary of State. He could not, said a leading conservative journalist, ‘find the State Department in broad daylight with a flashlight’. He had not shown much interest in foreign affairs before he was appointed and, according to some of his critics, never developed any. In the State Department, where he was regarded with a sympathy tinged with disdain, he had the reputation of never reading anything that was more than three pages long. When Charles Freeman, from the China desk, tried to brief him during the layover in Hawaii on the trip out to China, Rogers was his usual courteous self. He was, Freeman recalled, ‘able to sustain some interest in the trip for a while, but, as others seem to have remarked, did not have a great attention span for such matters and quickly drifted off and went off to play golf’.34

  Nixon frequently complained about the tension between Kissinger and Rogers, but he also deliberately stirred it up. He would invite Rogers to private dinners in the White House, for example, something he rarely did with his National Security Adviser. Kissinger would stay in his office, checking with the Secret Service agents to see if Rogers had left yet. ‘He would seem paranoid,’ said Haldeman, ‘ranting that he couldn’t understand why the president would want to talk to Rogers.’35

  Nixon may have seen Rogers’ inexperience as an asset. ‘I recognized’, Rogers told the journalist Seymour Hersh, ‘that he wanted to be his own foreign policy leader and did not want others to share that role.’ Rogers’s deputy, Elliot Richardson, felt that Rogers was not prepared to try to work seriously with Nixon in the making of American foreign policy. ‘Rogers felt that in terms of character and judgment he was a better man and he could not subordinate himself, which an effective Secretary of State must do.’36 He had not perhaps counted on having to subordinate himself to Kissinger as well.

  Rogers allowed himself and the State Department to be outmanoeuvred in the early days of the Nixon presidency when Kissinger and the National Security Council became the centre of policymaking and, although he came to resent it, he never managed to recover what had been lost. He complained frequently to Nixon himself and to Nixon’s aides that the President did not trust him and that Kissinger did not treat him properly. ‘It would be goddam easy to run this office’, said Nixon after one conversation with Rogers, ‘if you didn’t have to deal with people.’ Nixon tried to reassure him but, in the end, perhaps he did not entirely mind seeing Rogers humiliated by Kissinger. Rogers had helped him over the Checkers scandal, when Nixon was accused of accepting presents from lobbyists, but, as a result, had also seen him at a low point in his life. The President was clear, in any case, that Kissinger was the indispensable one. ‘If we got to the stage’, he told Haldeman, ‘where somebody had to fall on a sword in order to save the P, Henry would do it, but Rogers wouldn’t.’ Haldeman agreed but added, ‘If Henry did do it, he would do it with loud kicking and screaming and make sure that the blood spurted all over the place so he got full credit for it.’37

  After their welcoming remarks, the Chinese gave the Americans a lavish lunch and left them to settle in. Kissinger wandered about aimlessly, waiting for his scheduled meeting with Chou at 3 p.m. The three American interpreters were called in to see Nixon to go over arrangements for the banquet that night. Charles Freeman, from the State Department, remembered being struck by Nixon’s pancake makeup. ‘There was a large glob of Max Factor hanging from a hair in the middle of the groove at the end of his nose.’ (Ever since the debates with Kennedy when his five-o’clock shadow had given him a sinister cast, he had taken care to wear heavy makeup when there were cameras about.) The President merely shook hands and said how delighted he was to meet his interpreters but did not give them any instructions. He also called Haldeman up to his room to go over the low-key welcome. ‘We talked a little’, Haldeman said, ‘about getting out the line that we weren’t concerned at all about the lack of people in the streets and so forth.’ It was just what they had expected, Nixon insisted. What was more important was that the Chinese had played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the airport.38

  The Americans still had not had word on the crucial encounter between Nixon and Mao. In the discussions Kissinger had had with him in 1971, Chou had suggested that there might be two meetings: perhaps a first formal one with an American party including the President and the Secretary of State and then one with just Mao and Nixon and possibly Kissinger. ‘You recommend early in the visit?’ Kissinger had asked. ‘Not the first day,’ Chou replied. ‘There are a lot of formalities on the first day.’39

  5

  Meeting with Mao

  TO THE SOUTH of the Diaoyutai, in the Zhongnanhai compound where the top Communist leadership lived, the most powerful man in China sat propped up on a sofa, in a new suit and shoes made especially for the occasion, waiting anxiously for news of Nixon’s arrival. Although the Americans did not know it, Mao was barely well enough to be seen. He had been sick for months with congestive heart failure. His legs had swollen; his blood pressure was dangerously high; and his lungs were filled with fluid so that he coughed incessantly.

  The top leadership and Li Zhisui, his long-suffering personal doctor, urged him to receive treatment, but Mao, with a stubborn peasant suspicion of medicine, generally refused. He did not, he told his doctor, believe in traditional Chinese remedies and he would not have injections. On the rare occasions when he consented to take antibiotics in the shape of pills, he stopped as soon as he felt better. At the start of 1972, he had insisted on going out in the bitter Beijing winter to the funeral of an old comrade, Chen Yi. The result was pneumonia. Mao spent the next weeks in bed, growing increasingly weak and disoriented. On the morning of 18 January, a month before Nixon was due to arrive, one of his nurses panicked when she could no longer find his pulse.1

  Beijing’s top medical specialists examined him and prescribed a course of drugs. Mao agreed, reluctantly, to try antibiotics again but refused all others. At his bedside, Chou and Dr Li tried to make him aware of how sick he was, while Jiang Qing, Mao’s estranged wife and no friend to Chou, accused Li of trying to poison her husband. Mao rallied briefly to tell her off and then murmured to Chou that he was done for and that Chou must take over after his death. A furious Jiang Qing, making dark references to spy rings, rushed outside to summon a meeting of the Politburo, the inner party council. In spite of hours of high-level debate and entreaties from his colleagues and doctor, Mao continued for days to refuse all treatment. Suddenly on 1 February, with three weeks to go before Nixon arrived, Mao asked his doctor whether he could make him better.2

  The Zhongnanhai clinic was stripped of its emergency equipment. The United States government made an unwitting contribution as well; oxygen tanks and a respirator which had been sent on ahead in case Nixon fell ill were moved into Mao’s bedroom. Dr Li and his team worked round the clock to get the Chairman well enough to receive Nixon. They managed to get his heartbeat under control and started him on diuretics. By the third week of February, Mao could get out of bed and walk a few steps. He was still bloated – the new suit and shoes were in fact essential – and had trouble getting his words out, but he was well enough to show to the Americans. The emergency medical equipment, including that from the United States, was hidden in a giant lacquer chest or behind potted plants, and Mao’s hospital bed was taken away.3

  On 21 February, Mao was ‘as excited as I had ever seen him’, remembered Li. As soon as Air Force One landed, he had ordered Chou to bring Nixon around at once. Chou urged that Nixon be taken to his villa first. Mao reluctantly agreed. By 2.30 he could no longer wait and called Chou again at the Diaoyutai. Chou went immediately to call on Kissinger to tell him that Mao wanted to see the President and ‘fairly soon’. Like those other great dictators, Stalin and Hitler, Mao was used to making others fit his timetable. His colleagues had long since grown accustomed to sudden meetings in the middle of the night. Mao was also a master at keeping his friends and enemies off balance. So too had been generations o
f Chinese rulers before him. To Winston Lord, this was ‘a typical example of the Chinese style, where the Emperor used to keep visitors on edge, and the schedule was never fixed until the last minute’. The purpose, he thought, was ‘partly to make us feel grateful when the actual meeting took place and that it did take place’. It also reminded Lord of the traditional Chinese approach to the world: ‘it was typical of the Chinese Emperor indicating that he was the head of the Middle Kingdom and that we were showing obeisance’.4

  It was tempting to assume, and many foreigners did, that the Chinese remained Chinese in some essential and timeless way whether they were Communist, nationalist or something else. After all, China had over 2,000 years of virtually continuous existence as a state and 2,000 years of dealing with the outside world. History, as a source of lessons and analogies, had tremendous power over Chinese thinking. As one American scholar said, ‘It was as if the Egyptians at the beginning of the twentieth century still wrote in hieroglyphics, studied in their schools a variant of the ancient cults of Isis and Ra, and were still ruled by a dynasty modeled after that of the Pharaohs.’5 When the Communists debated policy among themselves, they drew as easily on the events of the third century bc as on those of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

  Whoever led China had inherited deeply rooted ways of looking at and dealing with foreign powers. What this meant, or so observers like Lord argued, was that the Chinese still saw China as the kingdom at the centre of the world and the ruler of China as superior to all other rulers. While the Chinese possessed civilization, others were merely barbarians. For much of its history, certainly, China had been the dominant civilization and the dominant power in its world. Geography – seas, deserts, mountains, wastelands – had combined to insulate it from sustained contact with other great civilizations. Those peoples the Chinese knew well were at lower stages of development; they looked to China as the model of civilization. And so the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mongols and Tibetans borrowed from China, whether it was a written language, religion, manufacturing techniques or philosophy.

  The idea that China was merely a nation among other nations was not an easy one for many Chinese to absorb and the country’s first steps into international diplomacy in the nineteenth century were often difficult. When the Qing dynasty finally decided to send scholars abroad to report back on other countries, it had trouble finding anyone who would agree to go. One man resigned his official position rather than suffer the shame of being sent among barbarians. A scholar who did tour foreign countries and who sent relatively favourable reports back was accused of losing his senses. Conservatives at court tried to prevent his reports from being disseminated. A hundred years later, when the People’s Republic of China was established, Mao reacted with fury to a suggestion that China might act as a bridge between the Soviet Union and the United States. ‘This is nonsense! That means the Chinese people should bend their heads down to allow Americans to walk to the Soviet Union and to allow Soviets to walk to the States on our back. Can we do this?’6

  At times, the Communists reflected, perhaps without their realizing it, the old assumptions about China being the centre of the world. In 1936, a young left-wing American writer, Edgar Snow, was granted one of the most dramatic scoops of twentieth-century journalism when he was able to interview Mao and the other top Communist leaders just after they had finished the Long March. In an exchange which Snow did not include in his famous book, Red Star over China, he asked Mao what effect a successful Communist revolution in China would have elsewhere. ‘The Chinese revolution’, replied Mao without hesitation, ‘is the key factor in the world situation, and its victory is heartily anticipated by the people of every country, especially by the toiling masses of the colonial countries.’7 It was an attitude that infuriated the Soviets and contributed to the split between them and the Chinese at the end of the 1950s.

  Yet to see China as locked into such a limited sense of itself as the Middle Kingdom overlooks the richness and variety of the Chinese past.8 The Chinese had many different traditions to draw on and a great many centuries. Their history had other lessons to offer. In the Warring States period, before the Qin Emperor united China in 221 bc, or in the Three States period of the third century ad, statesmen saved their nation through their skills in fighting and negotiating. The lessons from those years sound like ones that Machiavelli could have taught, about how to manoeuvre in an anarchic world. Even when it was united, China had not always been strong. Chinese rulers may have claimed to have the Mandate of Heaven to rule the earth, but for much of the time they knew it was not true, that other rulers did not obey the Chinese Emperor. China had suffered invasions by the same peoples it sometimes patronized. It had been obliged to make deals and bargains with powerful leaders on the periphery. In its turn, it had learned from others. As a much-watched Chinese documentary of the late 1980s on the Yellow River put it, China always had the choice before it of looking inward or turning outward and embracing the world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as China’s rulers tried to come to grips with outside powers, the same choice came up repeatedly: should China seek its security by dealing with other powers and manoeuvring through the complex world of international relations or should it rely only on itself and, as much as possible, shut the world out? Such questions have also occurred to Americans over the centuries.

  The Chinese Communist Party reflected the tension in that choice. It had its genesis in the fury of Chinese nationalists at the depredations of the outside world, yet it drew its inspiration from a foreign ideology. It belonged to a worldwide movement but it also had moments of profound chauvinism. To Chinese Communists, as to other Chinese nationalists, the record of past humiliations at the hands of foreigners was a painful and a living one. In their conversations on Kissinger’s first two trips to China, Chou En-lai returned again and again to past injuries at the hands of the Americans. On the other hand, the Chinese Communists knew that China needed alliances and friendships. One of China’s first acts after 1949 had been to obtain a treaty with the Soviet Union and, in the 1950s at least, it had participated energetically in international bodies, from the Geneva conference of 1954 to the non-aligned movement of Third World countries. In 1972, Mao had decided on a radical new friendship.

  When Chou brought Mao’s summons to the Diaoyutai that February afternoon, Kissinger, or so he claimed in his memoirs, remained ‘somewhat cool’ and asked Chou about a few minor details for the banquet scheduled for that evening. In fact the news was intensely exciting and a relief to both Kissinger himself and Nixon. Lord recalled their reaction: ‘It was going to send a clear signal to the world and to the Chinese people that Mao personally was behind this visit and the historic importance of the event. So this was obviously very good news, even if it was a somewhat unorthodox way to proceed with the leader of the Free World.’9 American conservatives, many of whom were already unhappy about the trip, would have been incensed if the Chinese had appeared to insult their President – and they would have blamed Nixon for putting himself in such a position.

  Kissinger darted upstairs to get Nixon and the two men piled into a Chinese limousine along with Chou En-lai, Lord and a Secret Service agent, leaving consternation in their wake. The agent, torn between following his orders not to tell anyone where he was going and his responsibility to protect the President, managed to alert Dwight Chapin, the man responsible for Nixon’s schedule, on the way out. Chapin consulted Haldeman, who in turn called in Ron Ziegler, the press secretary, and the three men spent what Haldeman described as ‘a very long hour and a half trying to figure out what the various contingencies were’. There was a moment of panic when the agent’s radio went dead. (It turned out that the tin roof on Mao’s house briefly blocked communication.) He could not avoid, Haldeman admitted, ‘all the wild range of possibilities you have when you’re sitting in a Chinese guest house with Red Army troops guarding you outside and you kind of wonder if the P’s taken off alone with no staff, no security,
except one agent, no doctor, etc.’10

  Haldeman, as always, also worried about press coverage. No one knew when Nixon would be back, and in the meantime a plenary session between the Americans and the Chinese had been scheduled for 4.30 p.m. The American press corps was already being assembled at the Great Hall of the People in preparation and the networks were planning for live coverage. (When Haldeman and Ziegler postponed the start of the plenary, there was eager speculation among the journalists but most dismissed the outlandish rumour that Nixon was meeting Mao.)11

  The car bearing Nixon towards his momentous meeting turned in at the gate of the walled Zhongnanhai, named after the two manmade lakes, the Central and the Southern, which separated it from the Forbidden City. Just as the old imperial complex had been ‘forbidden’, off limits to anyone except the imperial family, their court and their servants, so too was the Zhongnanhai. Very few foreigners and few ordinary Chinese had ever been allowed past its ubiquitous special guards. It was impossible even to peer into its extensive grounds, where the top Communist Party leadership lived in their special villas. Many of the Zhongnanhai’s buildings dated back to the time of the Qing emperors, and it was as secluded and remote a seat of power for China as the Forbidden City had once been. Special farms all over China provided supplies for its inhabitants. Mao’s food was treated with particular care; it went first to a laboratory in Beijing which checked on its freshness and tested for poison. Special food tasters then did another check.12