What we do here can change the world….So, let us…start a long march together….

—PRESIDENT NIXON, February 21, 1972

The voice on the other end of the phone was Haldeman’s, from San Clemente. The President is going on national television tonight to make an announcement, the chief of staff said in his best drill sergeant’s tone, “and he wants no one talking to the press—especially you.”

It was July 15, 1971. That night from the NBC studios in Burbank, President Nixon announced to the nation that Henry Kissinger, “during his recent world tour,” had spent two days secretly in Peking. Nixon then read the historic announcement that was being made at the same time in China.

“Knowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China,” Nixon began, Premier Chou En-lai had extended an invitation for a visit before May 1972. To assure allies and adversaries alike about his stunning move on the Cold War chessboard, Nixon went on, “Our action in seeking a new relationship with the People’s Republic of China will not be at the expense of our old friends. It is not directed against any other nation.”

Leonid Brezhnev was no more reassured by that second sentence than was Chiang Kai-shek by the first. In moving, as Nixon said, “for more normal relations” with Peking, he and his old friends on Taiwan knew the United States had begun a strategic shift—away from them and toward the People’s Republic of Mao Tse-tung, whose armies, two decades before, had been killing GIs on the Korean peninsula and brainwashing our POWs. By the next morning, I had a “profit and loss statement” on his China initiative on its way to the President, which he sent on to Kissinger to answer.

On the positive side, I wrote, there would be both “confusion” and “astonishment” in Hanoi and suspicion of “Sino-American collusion” at its expense. “Paranoia in Moscow” was another plus, though this might cause Brezhnev to accelerate his strategic arms buildup. Third, I wrote,

Loss of China’s ideological virginity; blow to morale of Communists everywhere (i.e., Cuba)—not dissimilar to the effect of the Nazi-Soviet Pact upon Western Communists. If anti-Communism suffers a blow to morale—so, too, does Communism—when the leading “imperialist” power sits down to talk with the capital of militant Asian communism.

On the downside, “enormously enhanced respectability and standing” for Mao’s China, as “she is now seemingly being chaperoned into the United Nations by her ancient foremost adversary, the United States.” Of greatest concern to me was the “degree of psychological and moral disarmament of the world and American anti-Communist movement, to whom Hitler’s Germany was but a scale-model of Mao’s China….”

There would now be a stampede by America’s friends and allies to recognize Peking. “Chinese embassies will likely begin sprouting in those Latin American, African, Asian nations which had heretofore followed America’s lead, and withheld recognition.” And so it came to pass. As for the war in Vietnam, I asked President Nixon, “[H]ow do we ask American troops to die fighting the evil of aggressive Asian Communism—when the President is hailing as a triumph his prospective visit to the capital of Asian Communism?”

Having laid out the reasons why I felt the trip to Peking could turn into a strategic disaster, I sent Nixon a single-page memo with eight reasons why I was the speechwriter he should take along. Foremost among them was that I was a conservative, and Nixon would need conservative cover for this trip, and, second, “Buchanan works okay with Marshal Kissinger.”

The Manhattan Twelve

With many on the right, the China initiative broke it. After Nixon’s announcement, a dozen conservative leaders met at Bill Buckley’s East Side apartment on July 26 to issue a “Declaration” to “suspend” support of the President. Among the signers were Buckley, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and William Rusher of National Review; Tom Winter and Allan Ryskind of Human Events; Dan Mahoney, chairman of the Conservative Party of New York; former Nixon campaign staffer Jeff Bell, of the American Conservative Union; Neil McCaffrey of the Conservative Book Club; and Randall Teague, executive director of Young Americans for Freedom. Briefly relating the Nixon administration’s failings in domestic policy—“excessive taxation and inordinate welfarism”—the declaration zeroed in on foreign policy. Nixon had failed to respond to the growing Soviet presence in the Mediterranean or to West Germany’s flirtation with Moscow under the “Ostpolitik” of Willy Brandt. Nixon’s “overtures” to Peking had been made “in the absence of any public concession by Red China.” The declaration went on:

And above all, [Nixon’s] failure to call public attention to the deteriorated American official position, in conventional and strategic arms, which deterioration, in the absence of immediate and heroic countermeasures, can lead to the loss of our deterrent capability, the satellization of friendly governments near and far, and all that this implies.

Yet this was no conservative call to battle stations; rather, it was a trial separation in a troubled marriage. The twelve had moved their flag to a nearby hill, for they had closed their declaration thus:

We reaffirm our personal admiration and—in the case of those of us who are his friends or who have been befriended by him—our affection for Richard Nixon, and our wholehearted identification with the purposes he has over the years espoused as his own and the Republic’s. We consider that our defection is an act of loyalty to the Nixon we supported in 1968.

When news of the suspension of support surfaced, I advised Nixon to “take these conservative defections more seriously than we have to date.” All twelve had supported us in 1968, and Governor Reagan, reelected by half a million votes in California in 1970, had been informed of the meeting and given his nihil obstat. If this rebellion is allowed to fester and grow, I told Nixon, it could lead to a Gene McCarthy–style challenge against us in the primaries in 1972. Such had been the beginning of the end for LBJ.

Yet, I added, this threat is “a potential not an actual danger.” As of now, these conservatives have “not yet crossed the Rubicon” and “have no horse to ride.” “Nothing is to be gained by attacking them,” I wrote Nixon. “[N]othing is to be gained by attempting to discredit people we hope will return to the fold—except to further alienate them. We should use the olive branch rather than the stick….” In August, half of the Manhattan Twelve were brought in to the White House to be briefed by Kissinger.

The defection of the twelve proved of great benefit to me. For two years I had been warning Nixon of problems on the right. Now the breach was public. Now the possibility of a secession and a “Kamikaze run” by a conservative against us in the primaries was real. This was something Nixon wanted to avoid. For he believed that the attacks on him in the California Republican primary for governor in 1962, by rival Joe Shell and the Birchers, were a primary cause of his defeat by Pat Brown that November.

Nixon wanted to avoid an open break. Colson and I were detailed to bring the renegades back onto the reservation. Yet the defection of the Manhattan Twelve dealt high cards to us in the game that never ended in that White House. How do we keep satisfied a militant and rising right, which, though short on national leaders and abhorred by the national press, was ascendant in the party and nation and indispensable to Nixon’s reelection?

—

In October 1971, the UN General Assembly voted to recognize Mao’s People’s Republic as the sole legitimate government of China and gave it China’s permanent seat on the Security Council. The Republic of China, our World War II ally, was thrown out. The morning after Taiwan’s expulsion, Bill Rusher was on the phone, and later wrote of our brief conversation:

I was surely not the only conservative who, in outrage, had phoned Pat Buchanan at the White House on the morning after the UN’s expulsion of Taiwan…it cannot have been a happy day for the beleaguered loyalist at Richard Nixon’s “conservative desk.”

“I am just phoning,” I said in my iciest tone, “to say goodbye. And,”—as an afterthought it occurred to me—“since you are an old friend of mine, to invite you to come with me.”

“Yeah?” Pat croaked, nervously but non-committally, “Where’re we going?”

After a request from Nixon to find out how Taiwan’s expulsion was being received on the right, I wrote back that “the Nationalists are putting the word around town that the President did not ‘personally’ issue a vigorous statement,” but left it to Rogers and Bush at the UN, and that “older conservatives especially and some of the conservative money men are outraged over what took place.” I urged Nixon to issue a statement himself:

My view is that the President, not Rogers or Ron [Ziegler], might well in a 90 second statement indicate his feeling that this is a disgraceful, shameful hour in the history of the United Nations, when a member of long-standing, loyal, honorable, having fulfilled all its obligations, has been cast out. The President knows that he expresses the feelings of the American people, at this unconscionable act on the part of the General Assembly. Don’t see how a straight, tough statement of deep Presidential displeasure could harm us on this.

Nothing came of my recommendation.

The End of Bretton Woods

Though Nixon was an idealist, he was no ideologue. Seen as one of America’s most implacable anticommunists, he was a realist who believed that, to attain his dream of a generation of peace, he must, and could, deal with the communists. And while he could flawlessly recite the catechism of Republican orthodoxy on economics, one sensed this was more a product of memorization than devotion. Nixon was always willing to hear out heretical ideas. After a January 4, 1971, interview with ABC’s Howard K. Smith, he confided, “I am now a Keynesian in economics.” Smith likened the remark to a Christian declaring, “All things considered, I think Mohammad was right.” No better example exists of Nixonian flexibility than the dramatic weekend at Camp David in the summer of 1971.

In the second week of August, the British ambassador arrived at the Department of the Treasury, now headed by John Connally, to demand $3 billion in gold for $3 billion in dollars. Under the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the foundation of the postwar world economic order, foreign currencies were tied to the US dollar at fixed exchange rates, and the dollar tied to gold with the solemn pledge that Treasury would redeem dollars for gold bullion at the rate of $35 an ounce.

America was in a box. If the British started carting off our gold, other nations would swiftly be at Treasury’s door, and US gold reserves, given the dollars sloshing around the world, would be wiped out. By one estimate, there were seven US dollars abroad for every dollar in US gold. We were staring at a run on Fort Knox.

Nixon called a secret meeting of his economic advisers and chairman of the Fed, Arthur Burns, at Camp David, on Friday, August 13, to last the weekend. There Connally presented the plan Treasury had been working on. Nixon agreed to it all—a 10 percent tax on imports; an investment tax credit for business; tax cuts for individuals; closing the “gold window” and canceling the US commitment to redeem dollars for gold, turning the dollar loose; and a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices. In an address to the nation on August 15, Nixon shocked the world with his actions, which the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Herb Stein, rightly called “one of the most dramatic events in the history of economic policy.”

This was Nixon as he wished to be, and to be remembered—a president, not bound by ideology or precedent, underestimated by enemies and critics, a leader who could brush aside the counsel of timidity and act swiftly, boldly, decisively to deal with crises and change the course of history. Coming a month after he astonished the world by announcing a trip to the China of Mao Tse-tung, Nixon rightly concluded that his presidency would now be seen as historic. And, truth be told, Richard Nixon could be—as he had shown with his Silent Majority speech and Cambodian invasion—a bold leader who could swim against the current and act alone.

Connally understood Nixon’s ambition to be one of the great men of history, and he played to it. I was in the November 22 meeting with Republican congressional leaders when Connally anticipated Donald Trump with his nationalistic defense of what had been done at Camp David. My notes read:

Connally’s conversation as usual was rich in language; they’re all saying said the Treasury Secretary that “if that Big Cowboy doesn’t mend his ways, we’re all going down the drain.” Well, this cowboy knows that you can ride a good horse, to death, and the world has been riding the U.S., a good horse, to death in the post-war years and this has got to stop. He noted that we got 30% of Japan’s exports—while Europe only took 5%—why is this so, he argued, because Europe keeps these goods out, while we take them….

Generally, agreed at the meeting that Connally’s approach, his “economic nationalism” if you will, was the proper tack for GOPers to take.

With his “Big Cowboy” persona, Connally dominated meetings and often produced a like response from the President. Nixon echoed Connally’s economic nationalism during that meeting. “The businessmen are bitching like hell,” said Nixon, but “they ought to get in line on this.”

At that meeting, Nixon also volunteered that had the Supreme Court enjoined and halted the five-megaton nuclear test on Alaska’s Amchitka island, two weeks before, he would have defied the Court and fired off the hydrogen bomb on his own authority. “We wouldn’t have canceled the shot,” Nixon said of the test of the warhead of a Spartan antiballistic missile. This was the largest underground nuclear explosion ever on American soil. On busing for racial balance, Nixon would not defy the Court. When it came to national security and foreign policy, where he believed the President supreme, Nixon would. And the presence of the “Big Cowboy” had that effect on him.

The Child Development Act

The Manhattan Twelve would make three demands as the price of a return to the fold: the retention of Agnew, more money for defense, and abandonment of the Nixon-Moynihan Family Assistance Plan. All three would be met. And I would use the leverage the twelve provided, along with the threat of other conservative defectors, to get a blank check to write the veto message to bury the Child Development Act of 1971.

Congress had passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act to create a national network of federally funded childcare centers—to assume the traditional role of mothers and families in rearing children from infancy until school days. Its author was Senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale, a rising star. And his proposal had support in the Republican Party and Nixon Cabinet.

Fortunately, for those of us who opposed it vehemently, it arrived at the White House in a bill that also reauthorized the controversial Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and created a new Legal Services Corporation. This last was the great white whale pursued by my conservative friend Howard Phillips. And Phyllis Schlafly was then a leading adversary of federal child development. Yet the fate of the bill was uncertain in the White House. As Nancy L. Cohen wrote in The New Republic, more than forty years later:

Nixon had requested two statements from his staff, one to sign and one to veto the act; the administration had helped to draft the bill; most of those in the administration who opposed it wanted Nixon to say only that it would be too costly to administer. Instead, Pat Buchanan, then a special assistant to Nixon, prevailed. Itching to escalate the nascent culture war, Buchanan inserted his fevered imaginings into Nixon’s official message.

As early as November 17, I had gotten word of the impending fate of the bill and had written Haldeman and Ehrlichman, whose shop had custody, asking that I be assigned to write the veto message:

Understand that the final appeals for “Child Development” are being made before an altogether unsympathetic court, and that the execution is likely to take place as currently scheduled. If so, as I have versed myself fairly well in the matter, as well as with the problems of legal services, I would like to have a crack at drafting the veto.

Once we had won the argument that the Child Development Act was too costly, I specifically urged that the veto message “be designed to appeal to the majority of the country, and to energize some of those who care most strongly….” I wanted the bill rejected on philosophical as well as economic grounds, to help bring the estranged right home. After an internal struggle, Nixon gave me carte blanche to proceed.

In the veto, Nixon rejected the OEO authorization because it would make OEO an operational agency, rather than one devoted to social research and experimentation. As for the Legal Services Corporation, Nixon rejected that on the grounds that his right to appoint directors was being restricted in the bill, and the structure lacked accountability. We sent a warning shot back to Congress: “It would be better to have no legal services corporation than one so irresponsibly structured.” In short, fix this thing up, or your Legal Services Corporation is dead. Then the veto message proceeded on to the primary target: “But the most deeply flawed provision of this legislation is Title V, ‘Child Development Programs.’ ”

America needs “to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization,” the President said, but these child development programs contain provisions that are “family-weakening” and constitute “a long leap into the dark for the United States Government and the American people.” We went on, point by point, to drive a stake through its heart:

I must share the views of those of its supporters who proclaim this to be the most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the Ninety-second Congress.

I also hold the conviction that such far-reaching national legislation should not, must not, be enacted in the absence of a great national debate upon its merit, and broad public acceptance of its principles….

Fifth…good public policy requires that we enhance rather than diminish both parental authority and parental involvement with children—particularly in those decisive years when social attitudes and a conscience are formed, and religious and moral principles are first inculcated….

Ninth, for the Federal Government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.

This last passage ignited Osborne of The New Republic. Citing the line about “communal” approaches to childrearing, he went on a tear against the President. This veto, Osborne wrote, “reflect[s] his worst characteristics and indicates obeisance to the worst elements in his national constituency.”

None of the administration witnesses who opposed various parts of the vetoed bill during committee hearings raised that [communal] objection. Mr. Nixon’s resort to it is a straight echo of Vice President Agnew, who began suggesting in November that comprehensive child care on the proposed scale was a notion borrowed from Communist Russia and exploited by professional American behaviorists who yearn to precondition and control the attitudes of everybody from kindergarten tots to public officials. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina held forth to the same effect in a floor speech from which Pat Buchanan, one of Mr. Nixon’s more conservative assistants, might have lifted the “communal” and similar passages in the veto message. They opened the President to the charge, promptly made by critics of the veto, that the entire action was a patent and unjustified concession to know-nothing rightists to whom Mr. Nixon must look for support in 1972.

Osborne was not all wrong. I had been in the USSR for eighteen days in November and been exposed to the “Young Pioneers,” where children were indoctrinated in communism and sang songs to Lenin. It was chilling. It reminded me of how we were instructed in Catholic grade schools about God. Only their god was a monstrous tyrant. And there was a clear danger of indoctrination in these child development facilities, as there came to be in our public schools. And bringing the conservatives back into camp was a crucial argument I used to win authorship of the veto. But though this veto and writer have been denounced for killing one of the greatest progressive ideas and programs of the twentieth century, the truth is that the country, once the debate we demanded was fully engaged, turned against comprehensive federal childcare.

Forty-five years later, the left still had not won that argument. What they were attempting in 1971 was to smuggle onto the statute books and have up and running a vast federal program the nation had never fully considered. If the idea was so great, why did Carter and Mondale not implement it when they had both houses of Congress? Why did Bill Clinton and Barack Obama not take it up when they controlled the Congress? Osborne said the arguments raised in the veto message were never raised by administration witnesses on the Hill. That only underscores the point made in these pages. Our domestic Cabinet officers in 1971, such as Elliot Richardson and George Romney, were liberals, as were many Republican senators.

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin railed that the veto message “was written by someone in the White House who pulled phrases right out of the John Birch Society literature.” James J. Kilpatrick, however, wrote that the Nixon veto “ranks among his finest state papers.”

Wrote “Kilpo,” “It was beyond belief that Conservatives knowingly could have supported the bill…[which] points to a virtual Sovietization of America’s children….It was, in brief, a lemon of a bill; but it was a honey of a veto.” In 2014, in a New York Times book review, Ann Crittenden wrote,

Pat Buchanan…more than anyone else destroyed the prospect of a high quality universal child care system in the United States.

In 1971 Congress passed a bipartisan bill that would have established such a system, to be run by community organizations. Buchanan, whose own Roman Catholic mother stayed home to raise nine kids, conjured up a vision of factory-raised automatons brought up by a soulless state, and the anti-Communist right swung into action….“We wanted not only to kill the bill,” Buchanan told [author Brigid] Schulte, “we wanted to drive a stake right through its heart.” Bowing to the pressure, Nixon vetoed the bill and Congress sustained the veto.

Indeed, Congress sustained the veto the next day, December 10, though the original bill had passed the Senate 88–1. The veto message was indeed political but also persuasive. It has stood for half a century. Had we not killed the child development bill then and there, by today, forty-five years later, it would be another huge federal entitlement.

Javits and Mondale Make Another Run

Yet, the left often succeeds, simply because it perseveres.

On January 31, 1972, David Keene of Agnew’s staff alerted me to a move on the Hill to reintroduce the Child Development Act, newly baptized as “Home Start,” with $700 million buried in Head Start. “The new bill was put together by Mondale, Javits and Nelson and does not include the rhetorical crap we were able to see in the previous legislation,” said Keene, but “it is just about the same thing.”

Keene noted that HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson, testifying before a House committee, had “skipped over this particular section of the bill.” Conservatives pressing Richardson to make his opposition clear had been rebuffed. If Elliot was not colluding with Mondale and Javits to resuscitate what we thought we had killed, he seemed at least to be signaling neutrality. Even in our Domestic Council, headed now by Ehrlichman, there was a push to prevent the White House from flashing any “veto signal” if the daycare provisions remained in the bill.

Not until mid-1972 did Colson assure me in writing that “we would veto any child care bill that comes down here, according to Ehrlichman and I would, therefore, think you might want to let this word get around to the conservatives as one way we can keep them, hopefully, reasonably calm and contented.” The 92nd Congress would adjourn without sending us a bill.

The episode is instructive. It was fear of conservative defections in the primaries and fall election that gave us the leverage to run a sword through the Child Development Act. Yet Javits and Mondale had ideological allies not only heading our domestic departments, but high in the Nixon White House. And the President, an ideological eclectic, knew it, and was comfortable with it.

Nixon in China

The first stop on Nixon’s historic trip to China was Honolulu, where Clare Boothe Luce, whom I had met at our campaign headquarters in late 1967, hosted a cocktail party for the Nixon staff and traveling press. All of us knew we were on a journey that would make history. Nixon did not attend the party. And we found that the network anchors and Washington bureau chiefs had “big-footed” their White House correspondents and taken the seats assigned to their news organizations. Some of us crowded around as Bill Buckley and Teddy White went at it over China. Teddy had been in Yenan with Mao’s army during World War II and come to admire Chou En-lai, who would be hosting Nixon’s visit. Clare, the widow of Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life, who had been born in China and regarded himself as an expert, offered a toast, urging the Nixon staff and the press, who bore no love for one another, in pungent terms, not to foul this up.

From Hawaii, it was on to Peking. As one of fifteen members of the official delegation, led by President Nixon, the First Lady, Secretary of State Rogers, and Kissinger, I exited down the front steps of Air Force One. Chou En-lai was at the bottom of the ramp to shake our hands. What caught my attention was the size of the Chinese soldiers at “present arms” in the honor guard. All looked well over six feet tall. They dwarfed Nixon. This was the picture the Chinese wanted to go out to the world. Prussian King Frederick William I, the father of Frederick the Great, had also recruited giants for his Potsdam Grenadiers—to awe his visitors.

From the airport the motorcade seemed to take off at 70 miles an hour. We were racing as we crossed Tiananmen Square and I wondered what was going on. There was no traffic, only a few bicycles. Early that afternoon, Nixon and Kissinger went off to their sole meeting with Mao, a photo of which went out to the world. The US official party had been assigned to two guest houses in the visitors’ compound. President and Mrs. Nixon, Kissinger, Haldeman, Ziegler, and Chapin were in one. I was in the State Department guest house with Secretary Rogers.

The state dinner was held the first night in the Great Hall of the People, off Tiananmen Square, and it was a cultural and political shock to be there clinking glasses with Chou En-lai as the People’s Liberation Army band played “Home on the Range.”

While I had worked on the toast the President read that night, so, too, had Henry. And Nixon embellished it, declaring, “let us start a long march together,” a reference to the Long March, the strategic retreat of 1934–35 that enabled the Chinese Communists to escape from the Nationalist armies and survive. The Long March put Mao into the leadership of the Communist Party and the Red Army that would, in the Chinese civil war of 1945–49, defeat Chiang Kai-shek, whose Nationalists did most of the fighting against the Japanese from 1937 to 1945. Nixon went on:

There is no reason for us to be enemies. Neither of us seeks the territory of the other; neither of us seeks domination over the other; neither of us seeks to stretch out our hands and rule the world.

Chairman Mao has written, “so many deeds cry out to be done, and always urgently. The world rolls on. Time passes. Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day. Seize the hour.”

This is the hour. This is the day for our two peoples to rise to the heights of greatness which can build a new and better world.

What makes Nixon’s remarks astonishing was that China was in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which would continue until Mao’s death in 1976. In the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, Mao had declared, “Let a hundred flowers bloom!” While this had been taken as an invitation to dissent from party orthodoxy, the dissenters had been cut down.

Now, as we sat in the Great Hall, another purge was under way with old comrades being killed in the thousands. On the fiftieth anniversary of Mao’s launching of that decade of “murderous insanity” from 1966 to 1976, one scholar wrote: “As many as 1.5 million Chinese were beaten to death, driven to suicide, or killed in fighting among Red Guard factions.” Nor had China given up on world revolution. A decade earlier, Mao had denounced Khrushchev for capitulating in the Cuban Missile Crisis, called America a “paper tiger,” and said China was prepared to lose 300 million people. “This paper tiger has nuclear teeth,” Khrushchev retorted.

One problem we all had that night was the drinking. The mao-tai the Chinese served for toasts—I still have four bottles—tasted as one imagines gasoline might taste. It was awful. The only thing that made it tolerable was that the more we consumed, the more we began to ignore the taste.

I was two tables away from Nixon, but watched as he imbibed. Once I noticed him standing up and looking over at me, grinning, raising his glass up and down. The Old Man wanted to lift glasses with me, which I did.

The following night we attended a ballet, done in what seemed to be tennis shoes, rather than ballet slippers, and titled The Red Detachment of Women. In a Maoist rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where Eliza flees Simon Legree and his dogs, a peasant girl escapes from a cruel landlord, joins the Red Army, fights alongside other heroines to victory, and returns to kill the landlord, whom I took to be Chiang Kai-shek. Nixon sat in front of me beside a tiny, severe-looking woman. This was Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife and ideological leader of the Gang of Four, the drivers of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The onetime actress had married Mao in Yenan and would wield power over culture and propaganda until the Great Helmsman’s death in 1976, when she was arrested. Prosecuted, imprisoned, released, she would commit suicide in 1991. Nixon thanked Jiang Qing for escorting him to the ballet, and applauded the show, which was pure Maoist propaganda. We were American props who were filmed giving a standing ovation to this portrayal of the revolution that had driven our allies from the mainland in defeat and put to death millions of our friends and allies from World War II.

Rogers was excluded from the talks between Nixon and Mao and Nixon and Chou, and Kissinger negotiated what would be the “Shanghai Communique,” which both sides would sign at the close of the summit. The secretary of state was relegated to talks with his opposite number at the foreign ministry and was frustrated. During one meal at our guest house, Rogers, exasperated, said he had had to spend the morning explaining and defending America’s role in the Boxer Rebellion. He seemed unaware that the United States, whose Marines helped to relieve the international legation barricaded in Peking, had used its indemnity from China for scholarships for Chinese students to study in the United States.

When, during the transition, Nixon had named his old friend Bill Rogers, attorney general in Eisenhower’s cabinet, as secretary of state, and Henry Kissinger as national security adviser, I told Ray Price that Henry would eat his lunch. Ray disagreed. But given Henry’s lust for power and fame, his knowledge, bureaucratic skill, proximity to the President, and daily access, Rogers never stood a chance. Before the election Nixon told me he wanted a foreign policy adviser who could teach him something, not someone he would have to teach. Rogers’s problem was that his old friend, now the President, knew far more about foreign policy than he ever did.

No Tipping Allowed

While in Peking, Buckley invited me to lunch at a popular restaurant, where we ordered the Peking duck. At issue was the candidacy of Congressman John Ashbrook, the Ohio conservative who had challenged Nixon in the primaries and been endorsed by the Manhattan Twelve, including Buckley.

The New Hampshire primary was only days away. We had no fear of Ashbrook defeating or wounding Nixon in the Granite State, where we were also being challenged by Congressman Pete McCloskey, a Marine Corps veteran of Korea and Silver Star winner who was conducting a Gene McCarthy–style antiwar campaign. I told Bill that our concern with Ashbrook was not New Hampshire or Florida, the next primary, so long as John withdrew after that and did not run in the California primary. In the Golden State, Ashbrook on the ballot could do real damage to Nixon, as Joe Shell had done a decade before in the GOP gubernatorial primary. He could stir up the right against us and the party split could cost us California in the fall. Buckley assured me he would withdraw his support from Ashbrook after Florida and call on him to pull out of the race, arguing that the conservatives had made their point.

The Buchanan-Buckley Pact would not survive the Peking summit, so disgusted was Bill with the President’s toasts to Mao and other leaders. After we finished the long and excellent meal, Bill said, “Watch this.” He paid the $1.50 bill and left a fifty-cent tip and we walked downstairs. Before we could get into our car, the waiter was at the car door yelling at Buckley to take the tip back, that in Mao’s China, waiters did not accept tips, that this is some capitalist custom Chinese do not observe. Appreciated the lunch, I told Bill. Delighted, he said, you can reciprocate at Le Pavillon, Henri Soule’s famous French restaurant in New York.

As a member of the official party, I went with the President and First Lady to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, and attended the athletic events. In my free time, I ordered up a car and driver and ventured out with State Department aides. I made several trips to the “Friendship Store,” where members of the press could always be found. “Trading with the enemy, eh, Bill?” Haldeman had said when he spotted Buckley buying up jade.

The prices were astonishing. For thirty dollars I bought a twelve-inch ivory lion. Barbara Walters came into the store, saw me, took charge, and picked out some splendid brocade for a dress for Shelley. For a few dollars, I bought nine sandstone sculptures for my parents and eight brothers and sisters. To wrap the statues and prevent breakage, I went to a department store to buy a blue Mao jacket like those millions of Chinese wore and that Chairman Mao had been famously photographed in in wartime Yenan. The store was a dreary place with nothing colorful on the shelves. Talking with the salesclerk and trying on the jacket, I was swiftly surrounded. There must have been forty Chinese crowding in on me, none saying a word. They seemed curious, but robotic. I was relieved to be out of there.

One morning, Charles Freeman, a State Department interpreter, and I went to the train station to observe. Seeing a train pulling out with curious faces at every window, I waved. Not one Chinese waved back. During the day the streets were empty of automobiles and in the mornings one could see Chinese doing tai chi exercises alone, or riding by silently on bicycles.

Another episode, my fault, was revealing. When the call came for our motorcade to pull out from the guest house to Air Force One, I was packing, and threw in my suit, which was still on the hanger. When I reached the car, the Chinese fellow who made the beds was beside me screaming. Someone translated: a hanger was missing! I rummaged through my bag, found it, and gave it to him. And felt terrible that I had almost gotten this fellow into serious trouble with his superiors because he had lost one of his hangers to a member of the US delegation. The panic in the man’s face, the visible relief that followed his getting back his hanger, stayed with me. China in 1972 was a desolate land ruled by mad monks.

In Shanghai, I recall being driven at night at a high speed through narrow streets that had no lights as dark bundles rushed across in front of us, with the driver paying them no heed. Recalling my eighteen-day November visit to the USSR and how grim that country had seemed, I told a colleague, “This place makes Moscow look like Mardi Gras.”

—

The first days of our journey were exhilarating, especially that first night in the Great Hall of the People, as the People’s Liberation Army band played “America the Beautiful” and other tunes every American cherished. But, as the days went by, the intoxication wore off. Peking began to appear as it was—a dim, grim, unhappy place. Almost no one smiled. And those we were toasting were the rulers of a regime with more blood on its hands than Stalin’s, and some of that blood was American. These Chinese had played the leading role in killing 33,000 Americans in Korea and brainwashing our POWs. After the triumph of their revolution in 1949, they had slaughtered millions. Yet here we were, night after night, toasting them, as they shipped to Hanoi the Soviet weapons killing US soldiers in the South and US pilots. The Chinese were even then seeking to inflict upon us a humiliating defeat that would change Saigon, after a Hue-style massacre of our friends and allies, into the kind of dismal dictatorship this place was.

Geostrategic reality dictated that the United States, confronted by two formidable hostile nuclear powers, not deny itself access to the less menacing. Yet some of the gatherings we held, especially in the evenings, seemed like the events at a high school reunion. “Isn’t this great!” a Nixon aide burbled to Hugh Sidey of Time. Hugh told me he was astonished by the exhilaration in the Nixon party. President Nixon seemed to be going overboard with his toasts. Even Henry expressed astonishment. The thought intruded. Are we any different than that American party that traveled to Yalta, where FDR and Churchill, who was downing “buckets of champagne,” according to Lord Moran, capitulated to Stalin’s demands for all of Eastern Europe?

The real jolt came when I was given, before its release, a copy of the Shanghai Communique, the document the summit conference had produced to guide future relations between our countries.

The Shanghai Communique

Reading the joint communique Henry had negotiated, I was angry, disgusted, and ashamed. In stating the US position, Henry had begun with such milquetoast as “No country should claim infallibility for itself and each country should be prepared to re-examine its own attitude for the common good.” We were leading a US declaration of principles to Mao’s China with an appeal to humility. And what were the opening lines of Peking’s response to this American invitation to a joint examination of conscience?

The Chinese side stated: Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Countries want independence, nations want liberation, and the people want revolution—this has become the irresistible trend of history….

The Chinese side stated that it firmly supports the struggles of all the oppressed peoples and nations for freedom and liberation….All foreign troops should be withdrawn to their own countries.

Of our principal Asian ally, Henry had written, “[T]he United States places the highest value on its friendly relations with Japan; it will continue to develop the existing close bonds.” Peking’s response: “The Chinese side…firmly opposes the revival and outward expansion of Japanese militarism and firmly supports the Japanese people’s desire to build an independent, democratic, peaceful and neutral Japan.”

China was calling our Japanese ally undemocratic, militaristic, and aggressive and demanding that Tokyo abandon its alliance with the United States and adopt neutrality—that is, terminate the US-Japan mutual security treaty. Peking was also demanding the withdrawal of all US forces from the Japanese home islands, Okinawa, and all Asian nations with which the United States was allied.

But it was on the issue of the Republic of China on Taiwan that the contrast was most dramatic. Peking stated its position first:

[T]he Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China; Taiwan is a province of China which has long been returned to the motherland; the liberation of Taiwan is China’s internal affair in which no other country has the right to interfere; and all U.S. forces and military installations must be withdrawn from China. The Chinese Government firmly opposes any activities which aim at the creation of “one China, one Taiwan,” “one China, two governments,” “two Chinas,” and “independent Taiwan,” or advocate that “the status of Taiwan remains to be determined.”

The fate and future of the Republic of China on Formosa and millions of indigenous Taiwanese on the island was none of our business, said Peking, because the island and its people belong to us. Henry’s robust rebuttal:

The United States Government acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China and Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it reaffirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.

This was the price of the most celebrated summit of the century. We got eight days of magnificent footage from Peking, the Great Wall, and the Forbidden City, at the beginning of the election year. Mao got from us a commitment to abandon the Republic of China, whose name was never mentioned in the communique. We had agreed to the eventual transfer of millions of ethnic Taiwanese to the custody of Mao’s China, an enemy of every freedom for which Americans stood. We had cut loose a loyal ally alongside whom we had fought in World War II, and with whom we still had a mutual security treaty. The wishes of the Taiwanese majority on the island, who rejected any return to the “embrace of the motherland” of which they had not been a part since 1895, did not matter. Such is the morality of great powers. The state is a cold monster, said General De Gaulle.

Bill Rogers had gone to see the President in Shanghai to raise some “real problems” with the communique. But he promised Nixon he would be a good soldier and support it, as would his department. As we left Shanghai, Chou En-lai smilingly told Marshall Green of the State Department, who was going to Taiwan to brief Chiang Kai-shek, that he did not envy Green his assignment. Mao, on meeting Nixon, had joked about his old enemy on Formosa, who was now being jettisoned by his American visitors. As an awed Henry Kissinger wrote of his own and Nixon’s first meeting with Mao:

This was the colossus into whose presence we were now being ushered. [Mao] greeted Nixon with his characteristic sidewise glance. “Our common old friend, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, doesn’t approve of this,” he joked, taking Nixon’s hand in both his own….

I was ill at what I read in the communique, as was Rose, who had many Chinese friends from her years with Nixon, who had himself been among the few Americans Chiang Kai-shek really trusted.

Coming Home

On Air Force One out of Shanghai to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage Alaska, where we overnighted and flew out in the morning to arrive at Andrews in prime time, I sat in the rear of the plane. Having told other White House staffers what I thought of the Shanghai Communique Henry had negotiated, he came back, sat down with the document, and asked what was wrong with it. I started in and ripped it apart, saying that it was a sellout of Taiwan, and where the Chinese stated their side of the ideological conflict with clarity and conviction, our side of the argument was a sermon of platitudes. Why didn’t you let me review the language? I asked. Let the Chinese say what they want in their section, and we do the same in ours. Why all this mushy language moving our position closer to theirs, while they didn’t yield an inch? The endless equating of the People’s Republic with China, I told Henry, amounts to de facto recognition that the PRC is the legitimate government of China. We still have an embassy in Taipei, but this document recognizes Peking. Henry got up and went back up front.

A while passed and he came back. This time he did not ask to sit beside me, but stood in the aisle, berating “the conservatives” for attacking him on the Middle East, where he and Nixon were moving toward a more even-handed policy. I told him he was wrong: the right was with him on the President’s policy in the Middle East. Henry went on, complaining about the conservatives, shifting the issue to where he felt on firmer ground. I had had enough. Though sitting in a window seat, I stood up, leaned over, put my face about eighteen inches from his, and shouted, “Bullshit!”

Henry was gone. As I looked around to see the reaction, I saw on the other side of the aisle General Brent Scowcroft. He had a big grin and gave me a thumbs-up. Whether he agreed with me I do not know, but he seemed to have enjoyed my exchange with his boss. Henry described that ride home from Shanghai on Air Force One:

[T]here was an odd sense of ambivalence on the plane back from Peking. Nixon…was sufficiently political to recognize the danger he might face from his old conservative supporters if the first press accounts determined the national mood. Pat Buchanan, a conservative speech writer who considered himself Nixon’s conservative conscience, was morose. In the best tradition of Presidential entourages he blamed pernicious advisers (meaning me) for the President’s departure from grace. (Ray Price, the liberal conscience, often had the same tendency and the same target.) Nixon stewed in his cabin, not knowing what he would find on his return.

In his diary entry of February 28, Bob Haldeman filed a similar report:

[President’s] very concerned, because on the flight from Shanghai to Anchorage, we got the newspaper report of the Post’s coverage which was pretty negative and made a big point on the sellout of Taiwan, which had him concerned….

We also discovered that Buchanan was very negative on the whole thing. Henry spent some time trying to give him some background so he could swing his position around, but it apparently didn’t do any good, since Pat stayed negative and Rose joined with him.

Resignation

Believing we had thrown a friend and ally over the side to fraternize with enemies of all we believed in, with some of the greatest mass murderers in human history, I made up my mind on the plane to resign. When we got to Andrews and I reached the top of the ramp from which the President and First Lady had just descended, I could see my father and mother smiling proudly. They had come out to welcome me home and were elated with what they had seen on television, their son with Nixon and Chou En-lai at the banquets and on the Great Wall. As they drove me up Suitland Parkway, I told them I was resigning, and why. It made for an unhappy trip home.

When I got back to the White House, I talked with conservative friends who were as despondent as I. Bill Gavin, one of Nixon’s original six writers who had moved on to USIA, would depart quietly. I called Haldeman in Key Biscayne, told him of my decision, and said I wanted to convey it to the President and would come down on the courier plane. In his diary for Thursday, March 2, 1972, Haldeman wrote:

Buchanan called me this afternoon to say that he had thought the whole thing over and decided he had to resign and would like to come down Friday evening and meet on the courier plane with the P[resident] to tell him he was leaving and why. I jumped on him pretty hard….He feels he’s got to be his own man, but he can’t support the communique, and that if he can’t then he has no business staying on the staff….I discussed the whole thing with K[issinger] and E[hrlichman], and we all agreed that we’ve got to find some way to avoid Buchanan’s leaving.

As the weekend approached, I began to have second thoughts. I had made my views known to Kissinger, Haldeman, and the President, and I did not intend to issue any denunciation of the President when I departed. For I wanted to see him reelected, and had been working toward that goal for a year. I asked myself: What would be accomplished by a quiet resignation? What was the point? This would not change what was in the communique. And I could do more for the cause and the President’s reelection by staying through November, and departing then.

My resignation had become a subject of discussion in Key Biscayne, with Nixon first angered at me—and understandably so—then concluding that if I was leaving over China that was fine by him. Here are Haldeman’s diary entries from that Sunday and Monday before the New Hampshire primary:

Sunday, March 5, 1972

We got into the Buchanan resignation problem. The P says he won’t talk to Pat, that he thinks he should go to work for Mitchell. He’s afraid he’ll poison the well at the White House if we keep him there….P’s basic inclination is to let him go rather than try to keep him around….He, then, however, started talking about the arguments to use on Buchanan, the fact that his successor hasn’t yet been trained, that if he goes, he’s got to keep quiet. It would be the height of disloyalty for him to attack the P at this point. He has no right or business to talk about the communique, and they should point out that P never said Chinese Communism was good. He should look at the subtlety of the comments.

Monday, March 6, 1972

First thing this morning the P talked to me about Buchanan. Wanted me to tell him that P understands completely what his problem is and that we’ll work it out….I then talked to Buchanan and opened with P’s view but then Buchanan said he thought the whole thing through, that he now realized that he had expressed his view to me, to K, Rogers, Haig, and through me, to the P, and that there was no need for him to express it any more publicly than that and that he would do the cause more good by being on the inside than being outside, and therefore he decided he should stay on. When I reported this back to the P, it wasn’t clear that he was particularly pleased that Buchanan was staying. At that point he was pretty well ready for Pat to go on his way.

This was the closest I would ever come, in my nearly nine years at Nixon’s side, to resigning. Had Nixon not been at Key Biscayne that weekend, had Bob Haldeman not been throwing up arguments against my departure, had Rose not called to tell me this would be a terrible mistake, I would have left the White House. My life would have turned out differently. And I would have made a great mistake.

One lasting benefit of the trip to China was that it cured me of an addiction to cigarettes I had had since high school. When I had smoked all the American cigarettes I brought, our Chinese hosts gave me packs of Pandas and Chunghwas, the worst cigarettes I ever smoked. After I got home, I never smoked again, but I still keep a pack of Chunghwas in my desk.

Wrong About China?

Nixon’s trip to China is regarded as a diplomatic coup and brilliant move on the global chessboard, the signal achievement of his presidency. And those of us who feared that Taiwan had been thrown to Maoist wolves and would soon be devoured were proven wrong. Forty-five years later, the Anschluss has not taken place. And while the Republic of China lost its seat on the UN Security Council and was expelled from the General Assembly, the island and people of Taiwan steadily became more democratic, prosperous, and free than they had ever been.

But, when all is said and done, what did we gain from the China trip? Four decades after Air Force One lifted off—thanks to $4 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing had been allowed to run at the expense of the United States—China had become a mighty economic and military power that had begun to threaten neighbors and assert claims to almost all the islands of the South and East China Seas. Beijing seems bent on driving American power back from the coast of Asia to Guam. While the regime is not so malevolent as Mao’s, it remains a brutalitarian communist dictatorship that crushes religious freedom and political dissent and represses ethnic minorities like the Tibetans and Uighurs. In 2015, it was revealed that, in a brazen act of cyberwarfare, Beijing had hacked into the records of the US Office of Personnel Management and stolen the confidential files of possibly 18 million present, past, and prospective federal employees—and their spouses and families.

For all of the years since that trip I remained skeptical of its wisdom. I opposed ceding Most Favored Nation trade status to China, and deplored the hollowing out of American industry as US jobs and factories were shipped off to the Middle Kingdom in pursuit of lower wages and less regulation. “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will move the world,” Napoleon said. He was right, and Nixon, at the end of his life, said to Bill Safire, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”

The Geostrategist

As scholar and historian, Henry believed a balance of power was indispensable to world order and world peace. His defining work was A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822, published in the 1950s. Henry’s deficiency was that he did not know America or Americans any better than did his patron Nelson Rockefeller. As Pascal said, the heart has reasons that the mind knows not. Most of those who supported Goldwater, Nixon, Agnew, and Reagan were people of the heart. They approved of their sons being drafted and sustained the nation through the Cold War because, a moral people, they believed we were “on God’s side.” They were “flag-waving, God-and-Country patriots” standing for what was right. To such as these, America was a “good country,” “a godly country.” During the Cold War, liberal intellectuals might sneer at denunciations of “godless communism” and “atheistic communism,” not understanding that, for millions, if the cause lacks a spiritual and a moral dimension, Americans would not sustain it with the blood of their sons. Among the difficulties presidents have had in rallying support for wars in the Middle East and elsewhere since the end of the Cold War is that the country has never been convinced that great moral issues are at stake.

Kissinger disparaged the objections of liberals and conservatives alike that we might be betraying old friends or abandoning trusting allies, because to him, dumping Taiwan to close a deal with the People’s Republic of China was worth doing. This was the stuff of history. In the great game of chess Henry sought to play, morality must not get in the way of trading a bishop for a rook. When the President and Kissinger toasted Mao, “the colossus,” to an extent they “de-moralized” the war in Vietnam. Parents might ask: Why should our sons fight and die resisting Asian communism in Vietnam when Nixon and Kissinger are toasting the most malodorous and murderous of Asian communists in Peking? The reversal of alliances, the discard of the Republic of China on Taiwan for an entente with Mao, may have been brilliant diplomacy. But what it also said was that, at the apex of power, this is all really just a Game of Thrones.

Bill Buckley, who told me in Peking he would not have been surprised if Nixon had risen to toast Alger Hiss, wrote on our return:

We have lost—irretrievably—any remaining sense of moral mission in the world. Mr. Nixon’s appetite for a summit conference in Peking transformed the affair from a meeting of diplomatic technicians concerned to examine and illuminate areas of common interest into a pageant of moral togetherness at which Mr. Nixon managed to give the impression that he was consorting with Marian Anderson, Billy Graham and Albert Schweitzer.

Reagan, a conservative of the heart as well as the mind, knew in his bones what Henry never appreciated. This is why Reagan wreaked such havoc upon President Ford in the primaries of 1976, in speeches, some of which I helped to write, by denouncing “détente” with what he would one day call an “evil empire” and the “focus of evil” in the world. Reagan re-diabolized Brezhnev’s Soviet Empire, remoralized the conflict, and won the Cold War.