DEEDS OF THE HISTORY MAKERS
About 2:20 p.m. on Feb 21, 1972, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai turned up at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, where a little more than an hour earlier he had said good-bye to Richard Nixon, the visiting United States president, whom he had met at the city’s Capital Airport that morning.
The official schedule had called for the president to rest, after a long journey that had brought him and his 350-member entourage from Washington to Beijing, and before the two sides engaged in some preliminary talk followed by a welcoming banquet.
“Here Zhou came and asked to see Kissinger,” recalled Winston Lord, special assistant to Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser.
“He said that Chairman Mao wanted to see President Nixon right away.
“Kissinger, to my everlasting gratitude, asked me to go,” said Lord, 84.
Lord, convinced he had earned the right to sit in the chairman’s book-lined cave of a study by being a core member of the trip’s preparation team and “one of the world’s greatest note takers”, would later “tie for first place among Americans with Kissinger in meeting with Mao five times”, to use his own words.
“He (Mao) was a forceful leader just by atmosphere.”
While Nixon and Mao treated themselves to a lively hour-long meeting that included philosophy, history and much banter, others were left wondering. (“I voted for you during your last election,” Mao said. “I think the important thing to note is that in America, at least at this time, those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about,” Nixon said.)
“We were scheduled to gather for a plenary session to kick off the proposed counterpart discussions,” wrote Nicholas Platt, now 85, in his 2009 book China Boys: How U.S. Relations with the PRC Began and Grew.
“It was abruptly postponed, and we waited — and waited — and waited,” said Platt, who on that trip was the special assistant to U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers. “The secretary of state was not included and, to my knowledge, not even aware of the meeting.”
Fourteen months after that meeting, Platt would find himself in Beijing again, to “physically build the U.S. Liaison Office”.
On July 9, 1971 Lord was with Kissinger and two other Americans as they crossed the Pakistani-Chinese border into Chinese air space onboard Pakistani President Yahya Khan’s plane. It was dawn and the plane skirted the planet’s second-tallest peak, Qiaogeli Feng, known as K2 in the West.
“I was overwhelmed as much by the unraveling scenery as by the huge implications and repercussions that we were about to unleash together with the Chinese,” said Lord, who “by my good fortune”, was sitting ahead of all his fellow Americans on the plane at that point.
“I’ve said ever since then that I was the first American official to visit China since 1949. And Kissinger reluctantly agreed.”
The main goal of what is known today as “Kissinger’s secret trip to China” was to decide whether there would be a visit by Nixon. And Lord had been covertly preparing for that “mountaintop experience” for a year.
“If we got out in advance, those who were fiercely against any rapprochement with the Chinese, and the pro-Taiwan lobby, would be invading the White House,” he reckoned. “The trip was kept a top secret, privy only to a select few.”
This meant that Lord had to gather for Kissinger a lot of briefing material from various bureaucracies, the CIA and State Department, for example, “in innocent ways”. The material was kept “in special briefcases from the CIA with locks on them”.
Today the best-known story from that trip was Kissinger’s upset stomach. The national security adviser, on the last leg of a publicly announced trip that included Vietnam, Thailand, India and Pakistan, pleaded stomachache. While he was supposedly recuperating in a hill station, the Pakistanis, who had been acting as a major channel of communication between the Americans and the Chinese, ferried him and his four-man group to an airport in Islamabad in the wee hours of July 9, 1971.
However, there is a twist to that story, Lord said.
“Ironically, Kissinger came down with a real stomachache in India; he covered this up as much as possible because he wanted to save his real illness until he arrived in Pakistan,” Lord said.
On July 15, four days after the secret visit, which lasted 49 hours, Nixon announced on U.S. national TV that he planned to visit China “before May, 1972”, convinced that “all nations will gain from a reduction of tensions” between the U.S. and China.
“If Mr. Nixon had revealed he was going to the moon, he could not have flabbergasted his world audience more,” a reporter for The Washington Post wrote, clearly having in mind what Lord dubbed the “constant propaganda exchanges and mutual isolation” that had characterized the bilateral relationship.
Fifty years ago, on Feb 17, 1972, Nixon, his wife Pat, other core members of the group including Kissinger, Lord and Secretary of State Rogers, and a half dozen reporters took off from Andrews Air Force Base in Air Force One.
The rest of the entourage, including Platt and most of the 87 journalists who had gleefully joined in “this voyage into the history books”, were onboard two specially
chartered Boeing 707s named “Ni Hao One” and “Ni Hao Two”, ni hao being the Chinese equivalent of hello.
Throughout the trip, Lord, who during preparations had put together six black briefing books that, if stacked, “would easily have been more than a foot tall”, continually received requests coming from Nixon for more information.
“I have never seen any president work as hard for a single event or trip as Nixon worked for this trip,” Lord said.
“Nixon wanted to have a good sense of Chinese culture and history…how he could work in little Chinese sayings and poetry in his toasts,” he reflected, believing that the president was driven both by “a genuine interest in China” and by “his recognition of the mission’s tremendous scope and challenge”.
No single image spoke more powerfully about a shared willingness to take on that challenge than the handshake between Nixon and Zhou Enlai at Beijing Capital Airport on that morning of Feb 21, 1972, one that was chilly yet drenched in sunshine.
Having landed before Nixon, Platt joined the press in “an area just behind the left wing of President Nixon’s aircraft after it rolled to a stop”.
From a vantage point framed by the engines of the Boeing 707, he took his own films of the “historic, and some felt endless, handshake”.
Lord, meanwhile, remained seated with everyone else on the president’s plane, not to mar the visit’s establishing shot. Yet his inclusion in the Nixon-Mao meeting barely three hours later secured his place in the diplomatic breakthrough.
Calling Mao’s style of conversing “self-deprecating”, “casual and episodic” yet “purposeful”, Lord said: “Rather than using elegant, long phrases like Zhou did, he would use analogies, metaphors and similes — briefbrushstroke comments that you had to sometimes interpret or decipher … We soon realized that he was outlining, with those broad and brief brushstrokes, the strategic policy guidelines which Zhou would then elaborate in great detail.”
Clearly Nixon and Mao recognized “each other’s vision and courage in taking this important step”, Lord said, pointing to Mao’s decision to meet Nixon immediately upon the latter’s arrival as a deliberate show of endorsement.
The opening banquet that night was “magic”, Platt said, hosted by Zhou and held in the Great Hall of the People, whose size “made one feel like an ant in a movie set”.
“News coverage in the U.S. led to almost instant romance and euphoria,” Lord said. “This reflected an inbuilt respect and affection for the Chinese people, which certainly was reciprocated.
“Americans, fatigued and demoralized by years of domestic turmoil and the costly Vietnam War, saw that
we could still act dramatically on the world stage”.
It was “a cool-headed, hard-headed and calculated sense of geopolitics which drove our desire to open up to China”, he said.
To stabilize Asia and have more flexibility on the world stage, to gain more leverage and improve relations with the Soviet Union and to end the Vietnam War are the three major reasons listed by Lord, a major drafter of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that eventually ended the 20-year-conflict.
Then there was the fourth, “much less important for Nixon and Kissinger but a long-range consideration”, and that was “the potential of economic relations with China”, Lord said.
On the morning of Feb 24, 1972, Nixon and his wife visited the Great Wall, from which they gazed pensively into the distance while being insatiably photographed or filmed by U.S. reporters.
Neither Kissinger nor Lord went there, or the Forbidden City, which the president toured the following day amid a sprinkling of snow. Both were busy working on what became to be known as the Shanghai Communique.
In fact, the two had some intense exchanges with Zhou over the communique during their visit the previous October.
“Rather than haggling over details and inflating positions, Zhou established clear goals and bottom lines for the Chinese side that we could try to discuss with them together with our own goals and bottom lines,” Lord said.
And the premier, with his “tremendous command” of all issues strategic and tactical without the help of briefing books, had inadvertently heaped pressure on Kissinger, who tried to put away during the negotiations the big briefing books prepared for him by Lord “out of ego”.
In October 1971, Zhou, who Lord believes “must have checked it with Chairman Mao”, came up during a later stage of the negotiations with the idea of “a different kind of communique”.
Zhou’s suggestion, “unprecedented in diplomatic practice” to quote Lord, was that each side would state its own position. “Kissinger and I were at first disappointed that we weren’t going to have some nice document that would record the major achievements at this forthcoming summit meeting, but we soon came to see the wisdom of this approach that Zhou had advocated.”
The Shanghai Communique, which opened with separate statements from both sides instead of a joint declaration, was issued on the afternoon of Feb 28 on the grounds of Jinjiang Hotel. (Nixon and his entourage left Beijing for Hangzhou on the morning of Feb 26, where they did more sightseeing, before arriving in Shanghai, their final stop in China, the next day.)
“There’s never been a communique before in a sense like the Shanghai Communique,” Lord said, referring to Zhou’s approach. “Its merits have been proven because after 50 years it is still being invoked as one of the foundations of our relationship, while most communiques disappear within weeks.”
The Taiwan part comes toward the end of the communique.
“The Chinese side reaffirmed its position … the Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China,” it goes.
“The U.S. side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position.”
One day before the communique was issued Zhou paid a surprise visit to Rogers, while “we were unpacking” in Rogers’ suite in Jinjiang Hotel, Platt said. The meeting was “cordial”, and when it ended, Rogers turned to his special assistant and asked, “What was that all about?”
“I thought Zhou was trying to make up for the exclusion of Rogers from the meeting with Mao,” Platt said. “Later when he got home, the U.S. press asked him how he felt about being left out of that meeting, and Rogers’ response was that the Chinese paid a lot of attention to me, particularly Premier Zhou.”
At the farewell evening banquet on Feb 28, Nixon toasted the “week that changed the world”.
Later that night, toward the end of a group meeting in Nixon’s suite, Platt, who learned Chinese after “Senator McCarthy had purged the U.S. Foreign Service of many competent China specialists”, thanked him for “making it happen”.
Nixon, who looked “drained but satisfied”, accompanied Platt to the door. Placing “an avuncular arm” on his shoulder, Nixon said: “You China boys are going to have a lot more to do from now on.”
“There’s never been a communique before in a sense like the Shanghai Communique. Its merits have been proven because after 50 years it is still being invoked as one of the foundations of our relationship, while most communiques disappear within weeks.”
WINSTON LORD