MacMillan explores the tectonic shift in the thinking of both top leaders that made the overture possible, then follows the intrigue of their tentative probes, through Poland, France and Pakistan, to open negotiations.
Mao, at the time still championing the Cultural Revolution that was tearing his country apart, determined that he liked dealing with "rightists" like Nixon. Nixon, whose red-baiting anti-communism carried him to the highest office in the land, fawned before Mao when invited to meet the chairman in his study.
Both men, perhaps especially Nixon, were self-conscious about making a grand historical gesture. But they acted out of weakness. Nixon could find no face-saving solution to the Vietnam War. Mao's boundless paranoia had focused on his chosen successor, Lin Biao (林彪), even as his own health deteriorated sharply. Both sides worried deeply about the Soviet Union.
MacMillan makes skillful use of the trove of archival information that has recently become public, mining it for detail that gives her narrative fullness and subtlety.
Nixon's presidential advance team left behind a Xerox machine when the Americans realized that the Chinese had to copy every diplomatic document manually. The Chinese insisted on having their own pilots fly Air Force One over Chinese territory, but they did not know how to use the advanced navigation system on the Boeing 707.
The theme that comes through most clearly is the mendacity and pettiness of the Nixon White House. Nixon and Kissinger schemed to exclude their own State Department from any significant role and competed with each other to get credit with the news media.
Kissinger, in a gesture that now seems recklessly generous, passed along to the Chinese reams of top-secret intelligence on the Soviet Union and India. That, and the fact that Nixon went to China without any assurance that Mao would meet him, signaled clearly that the Americans came as supplicants.
MacMillan presents much of this information unvarnished and remains aloof from the raging debate over the conspiratorial style of Nixon and Kissinger. About Face, by Jim Mann, and A Great Wall, by Patrick Tyler, a former Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times, offered more polemical versions of the same events. William Burr also analyzed much of the material in The Kissinger Transcripts.
MacMillan's dispassionate approach does not challenge the historical record. She also does not fulfill her own promise of showing how the world was forever altered. But Nixon's meeting with Mao was undeniably a shock, and MacMillan has written an electrifying account.
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