Nixon and Mao (38 page)

Kissinger left Beijing confidently expecting that Chou was going to put some pressure on the North Vietnamese to come to terms with the Americans. In fact, shipments of weapons from China to North Vietnam were already going up sharply (as North Vietnam later said, “to cover up their betrayal and to appease the Vietnamese people’s indignation”). Chou made his trip to Hanoi right after Kissinger left, to brief the North Vietnamese and to reassure them that China’s commitment to their struggle was as strong as ever. At some point during the year, he also told a leading North Vietnamese Communist that China intended to press the Americans to withdraw their forces completely and by a fixed date, saying, “If they do not comply we will fight hard.” If Nixon was not sincere in saying that he wanted to get out of Vietnam, China would be able to expose his “deceptive schemes.”
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China found itself in an awkward position. It could not, for the sake of its revolutionary credentials, openly abandon North Vietnam, but it was finding its small, recalcitrant ally an increasing liability. In December 1971, Chou spoke relatively frankly to a Chinese Communist Party meeting. Of course, he said, China remained committed to supporting Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in their struggle against American imperialism. “But, for the present, it is not appropriate to praise Vietnam excessively; we should treat her as we do the other two nations.” In the end, the nations of Indochina had to settle their own issues. North Vietnam was nervous about Nixon’s visit, Chou went on, even though the Chinese had explained why it was necessary: “If she cannot figure it out for the moment, just let her watch the development of the truth.”
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The North Vietnamese leaders, in shock at the news of the sudden breakthrough in Sino-American relations, were not to be consoled. “Vietnam is our country, not yours,” one exclaimed to Chou. “You have no right to say anything about it; you have no right to discuss this issue with the United States!” Kissinger’s visit had come at a particularly bad time because their front organization in South Vietnam had shortly before issued a program that was designed to appeal to American public opinion with a call to end the war and allow democracy and self-determination for the people of Vietnam. In the general enthusiasm with which the announcement of Kissinger’s visit was received, the program’s impact was blunted. The Hanoi newspapers did not mention the news that Nixon was going to visit China for months. In Paris, the chief negotiator from North Vietnam complained about Nixon’s “perfidious maneuver” to divide socialist nations from each other.
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The day Nixon arrived in Beijing, the Chinese embassy in Hanoi had its customary spring party. To the surprise of the Chinese officials, not a single North Vietnamese came. Another Chinese friend from Indochina also showed his displeasure. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, whose government had been overthrown by forces backed by the United States, could not bear to remain in Beijing while Nixon was there. He left his comfortable villa in the Diaoyutai for Hanoi and did not return until Nixon had gone.
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Although Nixon barely touched on Vietnam in his opening remarks on February 22, Chou homed in on the issue at once. Nixon had talked about the whole world; he, Chou, preferred to deal with the areas, close at hand, that mattered most to China. He urged the United States to get out of Indochina, and quickly: “As to how to resolve this issue I can’t say, since we do not take part in the negotiations nor do we want to take part.”

Nixon tried to persuade Chou that American intentions to withdraw were sincere and honorable but that the obstacle was the North Vietnamese, who were refusing to negotiate in good faith. If Hanoi remained obdurate, Nixon warned Chou, when the subject came up again two days later, the United States might have to step up the war. Nixon added that he would understand if China had to react. He also tried to put pressure on Chou by pointing out that he and the Republicans would be in trouble if the Democrats were able to say that the United States had compromised on Taiwan but gained no concessions in return from the Chinese on Vietnam. Nixon urged the Chinese to use their influence with Hanoi.
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Chou, as he had with Kissinger, refused to commit himself to helping the United States. China, he repeated, when he and Nixon returned to the subject of Indochina two days later, must support its friends, even—and this was a prescient observation on Chou’s part—if the peoples of Indochina embarked on wars among themselves after the Americans left. Whatever occurred would not be the fault of China, which only wanted peace and tranquillity in the region. If North Vietnam was expanding into Cambodia and Laos, he said, ignoring the long history of Vietnamese expansion into its neighbors’ territory, this was only because of its need to counter the United States. Now there was also the danger that “a certain big power” might try to move in to set up a sphere of influence. (Indeed, Alexander Haig firmly maintained after his trip to China in January 1972 that the Chinese had hinted to him that they would prefer the United States to remain in South Vietnam as a counter to the Soviet Union.)
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“The channel of negotiations should not be closed” was the most Chou would say. “We can only go so far,” he added. “We cannot meddle into their affairs.” China would not negotiate on behalf of the peoples of Indochina. Nixon was forced to recognize that, as with the Soviet Union, linkage did not always work: “What the Prime Minister is telling us is that he cannot help us in Vietnam.” Chou underlined the message on February 28 as Nixon was preparing to leave China: “We have no right to negotiate for them. This I have said repeatedly. This is our very serious stand.”
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The mere fact that Nixon went to China, though, did help the United States. The North Vietnamese were obliged to recognize that China placed a high priority on enhancing its new relationship with the United States. When Chou flew to Hanoi in March 1972 to brief the North Vietnamese on the Nixon visit, he told them, “If the problem of Indochina is not solved, it will be impossible to realize the normalization of China-U.S. relations.” Although he also reassured them that China intended to continue its support for North Vietnam, his North Vietnamese comrades got the message. “Now that Nixon has talked with you,” said the party secretary, Le Duan, “they will soon hit us even harder.”
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The Americans did indeed hit hard that spring; in retaliation for a major North Vietnamese attack in the south, American planes bombed the north and mined Hanoi’s harbor of Haiphong. China criticized the United States publicly and continued to send large amounts of aid to North Vietnam but, through one of Kissinger’s private channels, made it clear that it still wanted to proceed with normalizing relations. The Chinese also encouraged both the United States and North Vietnam to bring the Paris peace talks to a conclusion. Why not let South Vietnam’s President Thieu participate in the provisional coalition government for the south, Mao suggested to the North Vietnamese. Once the American troops left, they were unlikely to come back. “After rest and reorganization,” he said, “you can fight again to reach the final victory.”
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That is, in effect, what happened. On January 27, 1973, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, his opposite number in Paris, signed a peace agreement that brought America’s Vietnam War to an end. The two men were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but the peace lasted only until the spring of 1975, when North Vietnam’s armies, in violation of the agreements, swept down on the south. Saigon fell in April, and Vietnam was finally reunited. In the same month, the Khmer Rouge, now independent of what had once been a Vietnamese-dominated Indochinese Communist Party, swept out of the jungles of Cambodia to seize the capital, Phnom Penh. In Beijing, a frail Mao welcomed Pol Pot with maudlin enthusiasm. “You have achieved in one stroke,” he told him, “what we failed with all our masses.”
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Pol Pot, who already had his own hideous and utopian plans for Cambodia, needed no encouragement. He restarted Cambodia’s calendar at year zero and did his best, through mass murder and brutality, to transform Cambodian society into his own bizarre vision of Communism. At the end of 1975, Laos fell to the Pathet Lao, a Communist party backed by the Soviet Union.

The peace and tranquillity that Chou had claimed to wish for Indochina did not occur immediately. Outside powers, this time predominantly the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, continued to meddle in its affairs. Vietnam and Laos moved increasingly into the Soviet camp, and Cambodia, now renamed Kampuchea, gravitated toward China. Pleading poverty, the Chinese cut their aid to Vietnam back sharply. Yet they managed to find substantial amounts for Kampuchea. Almost immediately Vietnam and Kampuchea clashed over disputed territory, and in 1978 Vietnam invaded Kampuchea and installed its own puppet government. The Vietnamese occupation lasted for ten years, until 1991. Relations between China and Vietnam also went from bad to worse, and in 1979 Chinese troops invaded Vietnam to teach, so China said, a lesson. History, long-standing cultural differences, and more contemporary disputes about such issues as borders all contributed, as they had done in the case of China and the Soviet Union, to the triumph of national interests over Communist internationalism.

CHAPTER 17

HALDEMAN’S MASTERPIECE

“T
HE CHINA TRIP WAS BOB HALDEMAN’S MASTERPIECE, HIS SISTINE
Chapel,” said a member of the White House staff. The images flowed back to the United States, targeted for prime-time evening television: the handshakes, the glasses raised in toasts, the American flag flying in Beijing; Nixon with Mao, Nixon on the Great Wall, at the Forbidden City, and in the Great Hall of the People; Mrs. Nixon at a model farm, in a kitchen, kindergarten, or factory. It was a presidential election year at home, and Haldeman wanted to make sure that Nixon shone as the great leader and statesman while the Democratic candidates beat one another up in the primaries. The American press corps joked about Nixon’s primary being in Beijing. The stage management of the trip was superb, and obsessive in its attention to detail. The advance parties had checked out virtually every site Nixon would visit, paced out the steps he might take, and planned every camera angle.
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In his conversations with Chou, Nixon was loftily dismissive about publicity. “I do not believe,” he said, as he told Chou about the American musk oxen, “in making a public spectacle of a state gift.” And he was, typically, rude about the American press. As Chou arrived at Nixon’s guesthouse for their talks one morning, the prime minister asked the waiting crowd of journalists if they were enjoying their time in China. “Better than they deserve,” said Nixon in a loud whisper. Yet every morning while he was in China, Nixon pored over the detailed summaries of the press coverage back home—the hours of television and radio and the stories in the big national papers as well as the small local ones. The most important thing, as Nixon knew well, was the image he was projecting; as Haldeman put it in his diary, “On TV the American President received by a million Chinese is worth a hundred times the effect of a communiqué.” There were bound to be some obliging Chinese masses, he and the president thought. Kissinger, in the preparations for the trip, had urged that Nixon’s trip not be a media circus, staged for the American public on the eve of the new presidential campaign. It would, he pointed out, hurt the image of the United States in the wider world. “Pretty hard to argue it,” wrote Haldeman, “except that from our viewpoint, and the P concurs in this, we need maximum coverage in order to get the benefit from it, especially in the short term.”
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Nixon had found the perfect stage manager. A tireless worker, Haldeman was about order and control, starting with himself. He did not drink or smoke and, as a Christian Scientist, did not believe in illness. Although he had been a Republican since his college days at Stanford and had worked on Nixon’s campaigns in California, he had no political ambitions of his own. He served Nixon with ruthless efficiency. As chief of staff, he kept the president’s schedule. The Berlin Wall, his enemies sometimes called him and Ehrlichman, because he was the president’s gatekeeper, but he was more of a buffer between the world and a man who was uncomfortable dealing with strangers or with difficult confrontations. (He also knew when not to pay attention to Nixon’s wilder orders.) Haldeman’s failing, in Kissinger’s view, was that he saw everything from a public relations perspective. From his days as a successful advertising man in Los Angeles, where he had looked after, among others, the Sani-Flush and the Walt Disney accounts, Haldeman knew how to sell an image. Like Nixon himself, he believed that virtually every political problem could be solved by getting out the story the White House wanted. Like Nixon, too, he despised the press. During that week in China, there were no daily press briefings and there was virtually no hard news about what was taking place in the high-level discussions. “Never before,” complained John Chancellor from NBC News, “had an American President traveled abroad in peacetime under such a cloak of secrecy.”
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The Chinese used their own press coverage to accustom the Chinese people to the great shift in China’s foreign policy. The authorities had already let the news of the Kissinger visits out; once Nixon met with Mao, the newspapers and Beijing television and radio filled up with stories and pictures. The Chinese also did their best to manage the American coverage. The American journalists had Chinese helpers (who were also minders) constantly at their sides. The hotel staff went through the wastebaskets to make sure that nothing was thrown out by mistake and carefully laid out paper clips, empty toothpaste tubes, used razor blades, and carbon paper. At factories, managers made prepared speeches filled with impressive statistics and praise for Chairman Mao’s thought but were suddenly shy when it came to answering questions. The same little girl presented flowers to Pat Nixon in each city on the tour. When the Nixon party visited the Ming Tombs, they saw carefully staged scenes: children, with touches of rouge on their faces, skipping; families dressed in bright new clothes having picnics and listening to revolutionary songs on their transistor radios; groups of friends playing cards, apparently oblivious to the bitter cold. At the end of the Nixon visit, a sharp-eyed Canadian journalist noticed, a party official marched around with a large bag to collect the radios. “Your press correspondents have pointed this out to us,” Chou later admitted to the Americans in what amounted to a public self-criticism. “We admit that this was wrong.”
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The Chinese laid on a packed program, designed to show both the New China, with its factories and schools, and the glories of the Old. The American journalists grumbled at the lack of hard news about the conversations between Nixon and Chou, and at the lack of contact with ordinary Chinese. Their reports, especially those of conservatives such as William Buckley, took on a sardonic edge. Nixon worried that his hosts might be upset by criticisms. Haldeman reassured him; it would only show the Chinese authorities what sort of problems his administration faced back home. As the relentless pace of sightseeing went on, the American journalists also grew increasingly tired. The members of the press were working without their usual backup staff; network executives, who had gotten themselves listed as ordinary reporters, found themselves pressed into service to carry lights. Moreover, they regularly had to stay up late into the night to file their stories back to the United States. Dirck Halstead, a photographer from the Associated Press, found that he was managing on bourbon and about one hour of sleep a night. His Chinese minder, who had to stay with him, pleaded in despair, “Please, Mr. Dirck, you must get some sleep! You will die if you don’t!”
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Nixon regarded sightseeing as a waste of time and, as he had done throughout his career, set his wife, Pat, to work. As he had put it bluntly to Haldeman before the trip, she could come along as a “prop” to provide material for the press while he, Nixon, had his conversations with Chou. Mrs. Nixon had dutifully prepared for the trip. Her briefing book had provided her with summaries of the key points of Chinese history and culture, and she had read some of Mao’s poetry and the selected quotations in the Little Red Book. Pat Buchanan, then a speechwriter in the White House, had sent her some sample questions and answers for exchanges with the press. If she was asked about her role, Buchanan had suggested, she should say that while she was out meeting the Chinese people, the president was devoting his time to the all-important work of meeting the Chinese leaders—and that she enjoyed being part of the president’s team.
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Pat Nixon had always been a good team player, from the moment she had had to take on the responsibility of looking after her brothers. Her mother had died when she was fourteen, her father four years later. “As a youngster life was kind of sad,” she once confided, “so I had to cheer everybody up. I learned to be that kind of person.” She worked her way through college and took a job teaching at Whittier High School, where she met the young lawyer Richard Nixon. Marriage to him gave her much: two daughters she adored, position, wealth, and, finally, the White House. Whether she wanted it all is another matter.

In the early years of Nixon’s career, she continued to hope that he would give it all up and return to California to practice law. Occasionally Nixon promised her that he would, but the pull of politics was always too strong. When he decided, against her wishes, to run for the vice presidential nomination in 1952, she heard about it first on television. She dutifully campaigned, as she always did and always would. “I don’t know anyone,” said a former teacher of Nixon’s, “who has so disciplined herself to endure a life she does not like.” Pat Nixon never allowed herself to be sick and never complained about the endless days traveling and the nights in hotel rooms. Nixon was a devoted but absent father, and she brought their two daughters up largely on her own. She took all her duties, as a senator’s wife, then as a vice president’s, seriously and sometimes to the point of obsession. When she became the First Lady, she insisted, as she had always done, on answering every letter she received with a personal reply. Some of Nixon’s staff thought her desperately lonely and admired her stoicism; others, like Haldeman, found her irritating and impossibly stubborn.
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Nixon once dictated some notes about his wife to his devoted secretary, Rose Mary Woods. (He was hoping they might be useful for an article in a woman’s magazine.) “She has,” he said proudly, “great character and determination and is not the type of person who makes a fool of herself in public in order to get attention.” Nixon—and this reflects his generation as much as his own reserve—did not ever show his wife much affection in front of others. Indeed, he ignored her much of the time. In the 1968 campaign, Ehrlichman noticed, Nixon sat at the front of their airplane, while Pat and the girls were at the back, until the next landing. “Day after day, four, five, or six times a day, the family would be assembled and disassembled, along with the camera tripods and loudspeakers,” Ehrlichman wrote. By the time he was president, Nixon was spending more and more time apart from his wife; for relaxation, he went off with his male friends, such as Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. In Washington, there were stories of Pat Nixon’s anger with Nixon, hints that she had long since ceased to care for him. The first time Kissinger met Mrs. Nixon, he praised her husband immoderately. “Haven’t you seen through him yet?” she asked. Nixon’s enemies used his marriage as yet another example of his deformed character. He was, it was said, incapable of human affection. “They tried to love each other,” said Harry Truman’s daughter, Margaret, “but the gulf remained, a kind of black hole that sucked into it the good feelings that might have made Nixon a more human, more stable President.” She was seeing them from the outside, as most people did. Perhaps, in the end, all that can be said is that they had a working partnership and that it took more of a toll on Pat Nixon than on her husband.
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On the China trip, she worked as hard as always. She inspected the kitchens at the Beijing Hotel. The food, she said politely, looked good enough to eat. How do the workers make their glass flowers? she asked at a factory. “Can they just take a little bit of this and a little bit of this?” The manager explained that they had to follow a design. She watched acupuncture on an elderly patient and hugged children in a hospital. When her guides lauded the leadership of Chairman Mao, she smiled blandly and said, “Oh, yes, I’m acquainted with his philosophy.” She shopped for souvenirs, brocade for the girls and white silk pajamas with green piping for Nixon. The staff in the Friendship Store, assuming that the wife of the American president must be another acquisitive capitalist like Imelda Marcos, who had recently been in Beijing, showed her an expensive piece of jewelry. She hastily put it down before she could be photographed. Occasionally another Pat Nixon surfaced. At the Evergreen People’s Commune, she wondered what breed of pigs she was seeing. “Male chauvinist,” snapped back an American woman journalist. Everyone, including Mrs. Nixon, laughed.
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On Tuesday afternoon she toured the Summer Palace, the extraordinary collection of pavilions, lakes, and gardens built at the end of the nineteenth century by the tyrannical dowager empress who had controlled China in the dying days of the Qing dynasty. That evening, with Nixon, she met China’s modern empress when Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, put on a performance of one of her new proletarian operas. Chou En-lai had obliquely warned Nixon that morning about what to expect, saying, “It was difficult to combine classical ballet with revolutionary themes.” Like everyone in China, Chou was very careful about what he said about Jiang Qing. As she targeted first one, then another of China’s top leaders in the factional fights during the Cultural Revolution, he adeptly switched his support to her.
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Humorless, self-righteous, capricious, and vengeful, Jiang was a dangerous enemy. The Cultural Revolution had brought her out of the shadows, into the center of power. She and her fellow radicals, many of them, like her, from Shanghai, had answered Mao’s call to rid China of its old culture and to attack all those counterrevolutionaries who stood in the way. Jiang Qing and her closest associates (they were later tried and condemned as the Gang of Four) enthusiastically spearheaded the purging of the Communist Party and the evisceration of China’s cultural and educational institutions. They burned books and banned China’s traditional art forms, as well as most foreign culture. Mozart and Beethoven were too bourgeois, and so were many foreign instruments. (The piano, though, was spared because Jiang Qing had played as a girl.) Chinese filmmaking came to a halt as directors tried, in vain, to meet the changeable standards laid down by the revolutionaries.