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Seize the hour, change the world

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Jul 01, 2007, Page 18

Margaret Macmillan scored a success with her last book, Peacemakers, about the 1919 Versailles Conference that redrew the map of Europe after World War I. In this she combined an understanding of the broad political realities with detailed pen-portraits of the often eccentric participants. Now in Seize the Hour (published as Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World by Random House in the US) she takes on former US president Richard Nixon's visit to China in February 1972. Documents recently made public in the US prompted her to take up the task, and the result is a combination of new detail with oft-told tales from the era, of ping-pong diplomacy, the Kissinger-Nixon relationship, panda gifts, and the rest.

Early feelers were put out by the US via their ambassador to Poland in December 1969. There was a Yugoslav fashion show in Warsaw, and the whole diplomatic corps was invited. At the event the ambassador's Chinese-speaking assistant went up to the chief PRC representative and said he wanted to introduce him to his boss, who subsequently handed over a message from the US government suggesting talks. As Zhou Enlai (周恩來) subsequently said to his American guests, "If you want Chinese diplomats to suffer a heart attack, you just have to speak to them on diplomatic occasions."

The most interesting chapter is on Henry Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing in July 1971 to set up the mission. The key link between the two countries, which had no formal diplomatic relations, was former Pakistan president Yahya Khan. Kissinger arranged a tour of Asia designed to be as boring as possible to shake off the press. He then concocted a stomach ailment in Rawalpindi. Meanwhile US vice president Spiro Agnew was persuaded to cancel a visit to Taiwan where he would have been just as Kissinger was arriving in Beijing.

At 3:30am Kissinger, disguised in floppy hat and dark glasses, was whisked to the airport and onto a PIA plane. A UK reporter happened to be there seeing off his mother. When a duty policeman explained what was happening, he wired a story to London where his editor spiked it as being too far-fetched to be true. Kissinger himself, we learn, had forgotten to pack a change of shirts, but managed to borrow a couple, conspicuously labeled "Made in Taiwan." The book is full of this kind of detail.

In Beijing, Kissinger and Zhou had 17 hours of conversations about the intended visit, some of them pointedly in the Fujian Room at the Great Hall of the People. The Chinese probably hadn't noticed Kissinger's shirts, but they were to go on to insist that the removal of US troops from Taiwan was crucial to any thawing of relations.

The visit itself is given full-color coverage. You read about the menu at the banquet, how an aide in Washington telegraphed that under no circumstances should Nixon be allowed to actually drink the mao-tai offered for toasts, how the Chinese band played America the Beautiful while on the other side of the world Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator, wrote in his diary "America the Beautiful? The beautiful America of millionaires and multimillionaires, the center of fascism and barbarous imperialism!"

Other fascinating details are the panic among the US security officials when they heard the presidential party would be flying from Beijing to Shanghai on a Chinese plane, the belief by attendants at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse (were the Kissinger party stayed in Beijing) that the Americans ate not only the candies but also their wrappers, and that today Walmart's imports from China place that one company ahead of Canada, Russia and Australia among the PRC's trading partners.

As for Taiwan, Macmillan records how Nixon wrote a memo for himself (probably on one of the yellow legal pads he was so fond of), "Taiwan - Vietnam = tradeoff." He apparently meant that if Beijing helped the Americans get out of Vietnam without losing face, he in the turn would accept a "one China" policy, if not in so many words. In the event there was serious concern in Taiwan over the wording of the Shanghai Communique that concluded the visit. In fact, the wording on Taiwan had nearly prevented agreement altogether, and many in the US considered it a sell-out. But in general the Taiwan chapter is the least interesting in the book, and doesn't appear to contain any revelations.

There's no mention of John Adams' 1987 opera on the trip, Nixon in China. In it the Kissinger character is a figure of fun who keeps getting stopped in mid-sentence by others. When asked if he'd seen the work, Kissinger apparently replied, "No," and he never would either. He'd clearly read the reports.

By and large this book sees the China visit from a neutral, non-confrontational perspective. Others might choose to portray it as a meeting of two Americans who'd been personally responsible for the deaths of millions through their illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia and a Communist leader who had the blood of countless Chinese on his hands. There's little of that sort of talk here. Instead Nixon is shown as more of a statesman than his critics would ever allow.

His insecurity is in no doubt, however. When he met Mao Zedong (毛澤東) he told him they were alike in being children of poor parents who'd risen to lead great powers, but he was still overjoyed when a Washington newspaper independently made the comparison. Kissinger is reported as thinking Nixon hadn't understood the reality of what had been done, but that he reassured him nonetheless "by an odd tenderness for this lonely, tortured and insecure man."

All in all, though, the trip was a huge public-relations success, not least in the US. Nine months after returning home, Nixon was re-elected to another term of office in the White House. He was a hero, though not of course for long.

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