Dick does China — but good
New book examines Nixon’s clever diplomacy during 1972 visit to China
Quentin Mills-Fenn

In 1972, Richard Nixon became the first president of the United States to go to China.

That’s not such a big deal today, but the visit, planned in secret during the Cold War, stunned the world.

Sino-American relations had been freezing over since the Communist takeover of China in 1949, but the face-to-face meeting between Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong was a bold political move that changed the balance of power between the Chinese, the Soviets and the Americans. A landmark of diplomacy and theatre, the event is surely the only political summit meeting made into an opera: Nixon in China by John Adams.

Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World (Viking Canada) is the name of the new book by Margaret MacMillan, an author who specializes in making history compelling for the average reader.

The historic meeting, MacMillan writes, was an immense gamble. Whereas the current American president won’t talk with countries he disapproves of, Nixon, whose stock in foreign affairs has risen since his death in 1994, thought it necessary to go to China to put his real enemy, the Soviet Union, at a disadvantage. Along came his own Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger.

“Kissinger was a great negotiator,” MacMillan says. “I don’t know how he did it. They would meet four times a day. They would start in the morning. They waited and waited for the other side to make a slip.”

So eager was Kissinger to please the Chinese at the expense of the Soviets that he gave his hosts secret intelligence about the U.S.S.R.

“That really surprised me,” MacMillan says. “A lot of that stuff has just been declassified. He was giving the Chinese details of secret talks with the Soviets. You could see the Chinese were thrilled.”

The whole thing was stage-managed by Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff. With a background managing advertising accounts such as Disney and Sani-Flush, Haldeman knew how to sell an image. And selling Nixon — cold, petty-minded, ruthless and extraordinarily tough — couldn’t have been an easy task.

“He didn’t like people,” MacMillan says of Nixon. “He didn’t like kissing babies. But he forced himself, again and again, defeat after defeat.

“But Haldeman was an advertising guy. He had the Disney account.”

In addition to the meetings with Mao, Nixon ate with chopsticks and toasted his hosts with maotai, the fearsome Chinese alcohol. Meanwhile, his long-suffering wife, Pat, looked at panda bears and sat through performances of patriotic songs. The Nixons were followed by 90 American journalists carefully chosen by the president himself. Back home, the American public was enthralled by the television coverage. All agreed it was a huge success.

“Nixon was odd about the press,” MacMillan says. “He thought the press were jerks, but he knew how to use them.

“But people are so cynical about that now. I think George Bush is the apogee of the image,” MacMillan adds, referring to the president’s “Mission Accomplished” announcement on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln not long after the start of the war in Iraq.

“Those guys were at sea for months and he held them up for a day so that he could arrive in a helicopter.”