Nixon and Mao Read Free Page A

area of public policy, international relations. In the summer of 1967, he was invited to California to give the Lakeside Speech at Bohemian Grove, an institution that could only exist in North America, where rich and powerful men enjoy the arts and the simple, contemplative life for a couple of weeks in carefully rustic luxury. Nixon later said that he got more pleasure out of that speech—“the first milestone on my road to the presidency”—than any other in his career. 7 In what would become known as the Nixon Doctrine, he argued that the United States could no longer afford to fight other nations’ wars. Although the United States would offer support, its allies must be prepared to stand on their own feet. On the other hand, there were encouraging signs on the world scene. The Soviet leaders were still striving for Communist domination of the world, but they did not want war with the United States. Moreover, the Communist monolith had broken apart and China and the Soviet Union were at loggerheads. Nixon came to this realization, he told Chou when they finally met, in those years in the 1960s when he was out of office and traveling about the world. 8
    Nixon, it has often been said, especially by his supporters, was the only American president of the late twentieth century who could have taken advantage of the split in the Communist world and made the breakthrough in China-U.S. relations. The man and the times were right for each other. As Nixon himself once told an interviewer, the mark of a leader “is whether he can give history a nudge.” 9 For the United States to refuse to deal with a major Asian power and one, moreover, that was the world’s most populous country had never made much sense. As Nixon himself had written in a 1967 article in
Foreign Affairs,
“Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” 10 In a revealing comparison, he said that dealing with China was like dealing with angry blacks in America’s ghettos: “In each case a potentially destructive force has to be curbed; in each case an outlaw element has to be brought within the law; in each case dialogues have to be opened.” In the short term, China would simply have to be contained; in the longer term, though, it ought to be brought back into the community of nations. 11 His article did not show the slightest sympathy for Chinese Communism; nor did it hold out much hope for an immediate change in China’s relations with the world. By the time he was president, however, Nixon was starting to become more optimistic. In the election campaign, he repeated his warnings about the dangers of leaving China outside the international system and referred obliquely to them in his inaugural address in January 1969: “We seek an open world—open to ideas, open to the exchange of goods and people—a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation.” 12
    By the early 1970s, both the United States and China realized that the world had changed and that they needed new friends. As Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and close collaborator, wrote years later, “For both sides necessity dictated that a rapprochement occur, and the attempt had to be made no matter who governed in either country.” 13 And while public opinion did not matter in China, it did in the United States, and Americans, by and large, no longer felt the antipathy and fear toward Chinese Communism that had been such a feature of American politics in the 1950s.
    Moreover, Nixon had banked the political capital he needed at home. Dealing with Communists was always tricky during the Cold War. American public opinion had been slow to recognize the threat from the Soviet Union immediately after the Second World War, but once convinced that the threat was real, it had become seized with the idea that Communists were