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ixon had been considering a trip to China even before his inauguration. The implausible drama of it had immense ap-peal. Richard Nixon, a lifelong anti-Communist, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s most reliable supporters, would turn up in Beijing with Mao at his side. By 1969, Mao had pulled back from his Cultural Revolution and was viewing America as the counterweight to an increasingly hostile Soviet Union. In June 1970, Beijing had agreed that the next time Kissinger came unobserved to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese, he could also conduct secret talks with the Chinese ambassador. That December, Mao used Edgar Snow to convey a private invitation to Nixon to visit.
The White House, then, was less than surprised in early April when – during the 31st World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan – the Chinese invited the U.S. team to go to China. The American Ping-Pong players arrived on April 14. Zhou Enlai greeted them and predicted that they were opening a new chapter in Chinese-American relations. After another six weeks of guarded messages, Zhou sent an invitation for a special envoy – he specifically mentioned Kissinger – or the secretary of state or the president himself.
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On July 15, Nixon read a statement, which Beijing was releasing at the same time, announcing his forthcoming visit. He went on to reassure Japan, India, the Soviet Union and any other country that might be disconcerted by the seismic new alignment. “We seek friendly relations with all nations,” Nixon said. “Any nation can be our friend without being any other nation’s enemy.”
At Perino’s restaurant in Los Angeles that evening, Nixon and his senior aides celebrated with crab legs and Château Lafite-Rothschild 1961. Even before Kissinger’s trip, Nixon had assured them that they were approaching a great watershed in history, clearly the greatest since World War II. Kissinger went him one better: in its effect on the United States, Nixon’s China trip would be the greatest event since the end of the Civil War.
Kissinger found a less receptive audience in Paris when he tried to use his trip to influence the Communist delegation. He finished telling of his diplomatic coup and waited for a reaction. The North Vietnamese were determined not to show their dismay. “That is your affair,” Le Duc Tho said curtly. “Our fighting is our preoccupation, and that will decide the outcome for our country. What you have told us will have no influence on our fighting.”
In Hanoi, reaction was even more dispirited. One high-ranking official from the Foreign Ministry came home for his customary lunch with his family just after he heard the news. Luu Doan Huynh, a member of the Vietminh since his teens, was one of those men who had turned his back on a privileged family to ally himself with the landless poor. For 30 years, dedicated to Ho’s dream of independence, Huynh had studied Marx and Mao and put his faith in international Communism. Now he stared numbly at his bowl of rice.
“Daddy, Daddy,” Huynh’s young son cried.
“Yes?” he said, thinking about Mao’s betrayal and what it meant for his country.
“Don’t you see, Daddy?”
He forced himself to shake off his despair and look up. “What is it?”
“Mama’s got a new haircut!”
AS HE PREPARED for his trip to China, Nixon read the Anti-Memoirs of André Malraux, fascinated by the portraits of Mao and Zhou Enlai, men Malraux had met in China almost 40 years earlier. Hoping for more insights, Nixon invited the 70-year-old French writer to the White House, where Malraux explained what the North Vietnamese knew all too well. China, he said, had never helped any other country. “China’s foreign policy is a brilliant lie! The Chinese themselves do not believe in it. They believe only in China. Only China!”
Malraux predicted that Nixon would find Mao obsessed with his own death. Five years ago, he had been afraid that Washington or Moscow would destroy China’s industrial cities with nuclear weapons and set China back so far that Mao would not live to repair the damage. Now, with his own nuclear arsenal, that fear had abated. But Mao was facing his own mortality. Malraux predicted that on meeting Nixon, Mao’s first thought would be, “He is so much younger than I.”
Once Nixon arrived in Beijing, Mao’s impatience to meet him did seem to reflect a concern with the time left to him. Bill Rogers had been stewing over protocol for the introductions, determined to avoid having Mao appear at the top of a staircase so that the president of the United States would have to climb to reach him. But Nixon’s party had scarcely been installed in government guest houses when Zhou said Mao wanted to see Nixon immediately at his residence.
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The Nixon entourage drove past a red gate and through a wooded expanse to the road that led to Mao’s unimposing house. The Americans were led into a study crammed with books, and Mao rose from one of a semicircle of easy chairs. To Kissinger, no one but de Gaulle radiated such intense will. Mao had suffered several strokes and seemed to expel his words with great effort. But his smile remained sly, his good humor contagious.
“Our common old friend, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, doesn’t approve of this,” Mao said, as he took Nixon’s hand in both of his own.
The previous October, the United Nations had voted 76 to 35, with 17 abstentions, to expel Chiang’s Taiwan and admit Mao’s government as China’s only representative. The United States had expected only a vote for equal status, and Nixon remained committed to aid for Taiwan. Mao went out of his way to indicate how little the issue troubled him. “Actually,” he said, through his translator, “the history of our friendship with him is much longer than the history of your friendship with him.”
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Mao cautioned Nixon that if the Democrats won in November, the Chinese would be dealing with them instead. “We understand,” Nixon said, still jocular. “We hope we don’t give you that problem.”
Beneath the banter, Mao was serious when he explained that a reactionary group within his own leadership had opposed Nixon’s visit. “The result was that they got in an airplane and fled abroad,” Mao said. Zhou explained that the airplane, with Lin Piao aboard, had crashed in Outer Mongolia.
Mao listed the countries with right-wing governments and said he liked rightists, which led Nixon to expound on a favorite theme. “Those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about,” he said, an oblique acknowledgment that he might have savaged any Democrat who made this trip to Beijing. Later, Nixon granted to Zhou that he had held views very much like those of Foster Dulles during the Eisenhower years but that the world had changed since then.
The interview ended with Mao shuffling to the door to see them out. He said he had not been well.
Nixon protested, “But you look very good.”
Mao shrugged. “Appearances are deceiving.”
OVER THE NEXT DAYS of discussion, Nixon offered his rationale for the United States maintaining troops in Japan and claimed that a vacuum there would be as dangerous for China as for America. When talk turned to the Soviet Union, Zhou seemed to appreciate Nixon’s realism. The fact that the American president had come to Beijing before scheduling a trip to Moscow meant that the Soviet leadership was “mobilizing a whole mass of their people, their followers, to curse us,” Zhou said. “But let them go on. We don’t care.”
On the subject of Vietnam, Zhou said that of course Nixon could not resolve the problem by coming to China. “We are not in a position to settle it in talks.”
IN HANOI, THE NORTH Vietnamese looked for portents in what was being revealed from Nixon’s audience with Mao. “You want to bring back some of your troops to the United States,” Mao had said. “Ours will not go to other countries.” That seemed to mean that Washington could stop worrying about China intervening militarily in Indochina. And although Zhou reaffirmed support for North Vietnam, he distanced Beijing from Hanoi’s demand that Thieu be overthrown. To Hanoi’s Politburo, it was simple: Nixon had neutralized China. Next he would expect Moscow to curb North Vietnam.
Excerpted from Our Vietnam by A.J. Langguth. Copyright © 2000 by A.J. Langguth. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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