'Nixon and Mao': the handshake felt round the world

Nixon's 1972 trip to China was a daring and astounding piece of diplomacy. The globe has been feeling its impact ever since.

By Erik Spanberg

from the March 27, 2007 edition

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Thirty-five years ago, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger completed a diplomatic masterpiece. In 1972, after 23 years of fro-zen relations between the two nations, Nixon went to China.

This being Nixon, plenty of oddities and insecurities surrounded the week-long trip. There were no daily press briefings, a symptom of the administration's paranoid and dismissive attitude toward a media corps it nonetheless monitored with a gimlet eye. Even more oddly, Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser, conspired with the President to omit secretary of State William Rogers from high-level negotiations as well as the unprecedented meeting between the American head of state and Chairman Mao Zedong.

Foreshadowing the events of Watergate that began just four months after Nixon's triumphant trip, John Chancellor of NBC News noted: "Never before had an American President traveled abroad in peacetime under such a cloak of secrecy."

In truth, the furtive machinations had begun three years earlier. On Kissinger's first, secret trip to Beijing a year earlier, he engaged in a bit of stealth international travel while on a diplomatic tour of Asia. With the assistance of Pakistani leaders, Kissinger claimed to have been taken ill and was whisked to a remote bungalow to recover. Disguised in a floppy hat and dark glasses, Kissinger sneaked away from the bungalow and was driven to the Rawalpindi airport at 3:30 a.m. There he boarded a chartered Pakistan International Airlines flight, bound for China and his first meeting with Mao's top deputy, Chou Enlai. A British newspaper stringer witnessed the scene while he was taking his mother to the airport. He dashed off a story to his London editor, who killed the piece, assuming the man had confused his facts.

Delicious anecdotes such as these fill Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan's thorough, absorbing account of the Chinese-American rapprochement.

It is, principally, the tale of four men: Nixon and Kissinger on the American side, and Mao and Chou on the Chinese. MacMillan offers telling details that evoke life as it was at the time of Nixon's visit.

It is hard to imagine a contemporary American president dispensing complimentary cigarettes, replete with the presidential seal side by side with the surgeon general's warning, as the Nixon staff did in China. Then, too, conjuring a China dazzled by imported American office equipment – copiers and other mundanities – seems all but impossible.

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