Nixon and Mao Read Free Page B

very powerful and that they were everywhere, in Russia, in the center of Europe, in Asia, and throughout American society. Nixon himself had ridden to power by calling to those fears, no matter how exaggerated they sometimes were. His anti-Communist credentials were beyond challenge. From the time he had first entered politics in California, running against the liberal Democrat Jerry Voorhis in 1946, he had charged that his opponents were soft on Communism or worse. Nixon’s campaigning, with its insinuation and accusation and its reliance on unproven statistics and stories, won him the name “Tricky Dick,” but it worked. Americans listened to his repeated and forceful warnings about the threat that Communism posed to the United States and to American society. They watched as he stood up to Communists around the world, whether swapping boasts with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow or defying the mobs who spat at him and tried to turn his car over in Venezuela.
    Nixon’s other great advantage was that he had the determination, the intelligence, and the knowledge to sense the currents in history and to take advantage of them. And he loved foreign policy. Indeed, he much preferred it to dealing with importunate congressmen and the minutiae of schools or highway building. “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President,” he told the journalist Theodore White in an interview during the presidential campaign. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy.” 14 While presidents had always given State of the Union addresses to Congress, Nixon also started making annual reports on the world situation. And he made it quite clear from the moment he took office that he was going to use an enhanced National Security Council to run major foreign policy issues out of the White House. His first appointment, the morning after his inauguration in January 1969, was with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. The first formal meeting he called was of his new NSC. Six weeks later, he was off on his first foreign trip, to see European leaders, among them a man he revered, Charles de Gaulle.
    In the long and rambling conversations he had with his few intimates, Nixon returned constantly to the subject of the great leader, the man who boldly went on ahead, dragging his nation with him and changing the world. De Gaulle, of course. Winston Churchill—a favorite, it seems, with many American presidents, including George W. Bush. And General George Patton. The movie, starring George C. Scott, was one of Nixon’s favorites, and he kept a biography of Patton beside his bed. 15 Such great leaders, in Nixon’s view, were usually lonely and often misunderstood, but they nevertheless worked indefatigably to advance the interests of their nations. “There were never tired decisions,” he told Kissinger in one of their phone conversations, “only tired commanders.” 16
    The world, with its great issues, was, for Nixon, where the leader could show what he was made of. He had prepared himself thoroughly for this moment. As vice president, he had traveled more than any of his predecesors; in the 1960s, before his run for president, when he was meant to be a private citizen, he had toured the world incessantly, meeting with local leaders and browbeating American diplomats as though he were still in office. A low-ranking foreign service officer who had to entertain him in Hong Kong remembered his “tremendous intellectual curiosity.” Nixon asked question after question, “picking my brain for everything and anything I could tell him about China.” 17 Marshall Green, later assistant secretary of state with responsibility for East Asia during the Nixon administration, met Nixon in Indonesia in 1967 and had long conversations with him, which Nixon