Dear Jim Mann:
Richard Bush, the guest of honor and featured speaker at a banquet hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the Friends of Taiwan, was roundly praised by the Los Angeles expat Taiwanese crowd there as "a good friend of the Taiwanese."
In a Q&A following his address, Bush put on a brave front, parrying a barrage of insistent questions about future -- but certainly not distant future -- scenarios and probable US responses. Uppermost in everyone's minds, of course, was the biggie: What will the US do if Beijing throws missiles at the March 18 election?
But even politicians have their limits. His patience had run out. Making light, he shrugged and begged off: questions concerning the future were now off limits. And a joke to clinch the base truth: "Politicians have learned never to answer hypotheticals or make predictions."
The participants were there because they loved Taiwan, were concerned about its security, and hoped for comfort from the man at State who might, unlike many a Mann source, go on record as saying that the US will do this or that, should Beijing do this or that. It did not take much of this back-and-forth concerning possible scenarios to see that Bush's audience was far from content with yet more of this "we've-learned-the-Korean-War-lesson-well-and-we're-not-going-to-commit" mantra.
Still, the questions kept coming, and tempers got testier. No wonder, then, that when he declared by way of panicked riposte, "The US is the best friend that Taiwan ever had," all he got by way of polite response were two unenthusiastic claps from two people.
Well, I exaggerate. It also got one person off his behind and up front to the floor microphone.
"So, Mr. Bush, history's fair game? How about what happened in December 1978, when Carter up and announced the breaking of relations with the ROC just days before a nationwide election scheduled for later that month? As you know, the KMT government used the pretext of the `shock' of this development to cancel the elections. The terrible setbacks dealt the democratic opposition -- including the Kaohsiung Incident -- can be traced back to that diplomatic tsunami. My question: What were Carter and State thinking when they pulled the plug on the KMT? Was there no one paying any attention at all to what effect this crude insult might have on Taiwan domestically? How explain the cold indifference to the possible consequences for the struggle for democracy?"
Poor Bush. After flunking the future -- "prophesy," not policy, mind you -- he was now about to take a dive in history.
"I wasn't there at that time," he said, passing the buck, and adding:"Read Mann's book."
Our own L.A. homeboy Mann was the man with the answers. Don't you feel lucky?
Like that September crowd who came to Bush in quest of answers, only to be disappointed, my time spent with your book About Face was quite rewarding, and I thank you for a good read. Yet still, if measured against the questions put to Mr. Bush that evening, the book falls far short, for the simple reason that you, like Carter, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Bush, Clinton and the rest of them, see China, see the US -- but for the life of you, can't seem to make Taiwan out at all.
What sort of political considerations propelled Carter and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to establish relations with China according to such a compressed timetable?
RSS