In the Indo-Pakistan war, we have turned “disaster into defeat.”
—KISSINGER TO NIXON, DECEMBER 16, 1971
Every visit to China was like a carefully rehearsed play in which nothing was accidental and yet everything appeared spontaneous.
—KISSINGER, White House Years
Nixon entered the fall season of 1971 in an upbeat mood. The Summit meetings in Peking and Moscow scheduled for the first half of 1972 moved him to tell Colson, “International affairs is our issue.” If he were to be reelected, it would be because of foreign policy gains. In particular, détente with China and the Soviet Union seemed likely to help end the Vietnam War, and, more important for the long run, substantially reduce Cold War tensions. “Our goal today,” Nixon told a meeting of organized labor in a November speech, “is to win a peace that will end wars and that goes beyond…ending the war that we are in.” It was a restatement of Nixon’s Wilsonian vision. Unlike so much else in Nixon’s public life, this rhetoric was not at variance with his private beliefs.
Vietnam remained a dark cloud over the administration’s promises of improved international relations, but Nixon’s pronouncements in the autumn about bringing home the troops and ending the war could not have been more optimistic. A draft extension bill in September 1971 that allowed him to maintain a significant force in Vietnam contradicted his declarations on an early end to the conflict. Instead, he emphasized that a commitment to strong armed forces gave him the wherewithal “to negotiate for peace in this critical period.”
He and Kissinger remained confident that they could force a settlement. On September 30, when Henry met with Gromyko, he said, “we were now in the last phase of the war and we were determined to end this one way or the other.” He predicted that peace would come in the winter of 1971–1972 as a result of America’s unilateral action, meaning a massive military campaign to end the conflict, or through negotiations. He tried to pressure Gromyko by declaring that the unilateral course would risk détente and a conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Kissinger said that he was “prepared to go secretly to Moscow to meet for three days with a suitable personality from Hanoi.” Gromyko considered this an interesting proposal, but he did not think that Moscow had the wherewithal to force Hanoi into a settlement.
More than ever, Nixon tried to strengthen America’s hand in the Paris negotiations by combating defeatism in the press, the Congress, and the public. In October, when stories appeared in the media about crewmen on the aircraft carrier Coral Sea petitioning Congress to bar the ship from another combat mission in Vietnam, and of plans for a total U.S. troop withdrawal before the end of 1971, Nixon ordered Kissinger to “knock down” these stories, “fire whoever is making trouble,” or at the very least, “muzzle the dopes” putting out such reports.
In public, the president exuded confidence about ending the war. On September 25, at a briefing in Portland, Oregon, for northwest media executives, he described significant progress toward an honorable peace—three hundred thousand troops out of Vietnam, casualties at a fraction of 1968 levels, the likelihood of American POWs coming home, and a non-Communist South Vietnamese government. In a nationally televised talk on November 9, Nixon said he hoped to end the war and realize a goal not seen in the twentieth century—“a full generation of peace.” At a news conference on November 12, he announced that 80 percent of America’s troops—365,000—had been withdrawn from Vietnam and another 45,000 of the 184,000 left would depart in the next two months. In yet another speech on December 1 before a national youth group, he declared that he was ending the war.
In private, Nixon and Kissinger were not so sure. They discussed the possibility that they would have to resort to another round of military action. But they faced renewed congressional discussion of mandating the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam by June 1, 1972, and it angered them. “The irresponsibility of people is unbelievable,” Henry complained to a congressman. “If our policy weren’t working, but it is,” he added, ignoring the stalemate in the secret Paris negotiations. Henry warned that Congress might destroy all possibility of negotiation and faith in U.S. reliability. The idea that allies and foes would see a prompt U.S. withdrawal as sensible realism formed no apparent part of the Nixon-Kissinger outlook. They were too wedded to a settlement on U.S. terms to accept the likelihood that an end to the Vietnam conflict, on whatever conditions, would be seen as in the larger national interest.
The Middle East remained as much a dilemma as Vietnam. On September 30, Gromyko and Kissinger tried to find some formula for advancing peace talks. The Soviets were ready to bar additional arms shipments and withdraw military forces from the region and would guarantee an interim peace arrangement but on the condition that it included provisions to work toward a final settlement.
Kissinger did not see how the two could be definitively linked. The “discussion at the moment concerns theology,” he said. An interim agreement would be more theory than substance, which would not necessarily turn into an acceptable final settlement. Besides, Henry cautioned, “there was no possibility of implementing a final agreement before the American election.” Commitments to provisions that did not entirely satisfy Israel would provoke an outcry in the United States that would be most unwelcome in an election year. Henry suggested to Gromyko that they secretly reach an interim understanding, which could be turned into a final settlement at the Moscow Summit in May 1972. They agreed that neither Egypt nor Israel should be kept abreast of the talks and that Henry and Dobrynin would begin exploratory discussions in late October.
It was all a form of wheel spinning: “Have you had a chance to talk to the President about the Middle East,” Henry asked John Mitchell on October 7. “No,” Mitchell replied. Well, “the Israelis will never accept” preliminary Soviet-American discussions, Henry said. “They are climbing the walls now.” Besides, Henry warned, if the Soviets thought we were trying to squeeze them out of the Middle East, it would undermine prospects for a successful Summit.
Divisions between Kissinger and Rogers and between the United States and Israel—let alone between the United States and Russia—made a Middle East settlement at the end of 1971 impossible. Public and private initiatives by Rogers and the state department in October to pressure Israel into trading occupied lands for Arab recognition threw Kissinger into a rage and provoked sharp Israeli objections. When Mitchell told Nixon and Kissinger on October 9 that “the Middle East situation is being screwed up” by state, Henry exploded, “Do you know what that maniac [Rogers] did now?” Sisco was going to mediate between the Israelis and the Egyptians at the UN. The outcome would be Soviet and Egyptian convictions that “we are screwing them.” And Rogers was doing this without “one word to us…The insolence, incompetence, and frivolity of this exercise is beyond belief,” Henry shouted.
Alongside developments in Sino-American and Soviet-American relations, the Middle East had become a sideshow that commanded limited attention at the White House, except as a bureaucratic battleground and a negotiating subject that could produce more harm than good. Nixon complained that all the back and forth on the Middle East was a lot of “bull shit.” Henry thought it would be “suicide to get involved in these negotiations because it will turn the Jews and everyone else against me.” Yet if the U.S. stayed on the sidelines, he feared “a blowup in the Middle East next spring.” The best solution he and Nixon saw was to talk to the Soviets at the Summit about an interim agreement; it seemed calculated to head off a 1972 Middle East war.
BY CONTRAST with the Middle East, China commanded the White House’s full attention. In July, after announcing his intention to visit China early in 1972, Nixon obsessed about how to exploit it politically. He wanted Ehrlichman to accompany Kissinger on a fall trip to arrange the details of the 1972 meeting. Ehrlichman’s presence could minimize Henry’s public image as the architect of the dramatic change in China policy. Nixon’s preoccupation with winning exclusive credit for the China initiative angered Kissinger, who successfully objected to having Ehrlichman on the fall trip as likely to discourage impressions that the president deserved exclusive credit for the China initiative.
Nixon ordered Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman to stimulate press discussion of how much the visit was the result of his leadership and how important it would be in changing international relations. Nixon was determined not to allow any other public official to “dilute the effect” of his trip; he wanted to get the greatest possible “mileage” or “leadership credit” for it. It was part of what Kissinger called “the monomaniacal obsession of the Nixon White House with public relations.”
Although, unlike Nixon, he did not have to run for reelection, Kissinger’s similar private weakness made him susceptible to the same “obsession.” He was as determined as the president to milk the opening to China for as much personal credit as possible. After Nixon told Ehrlichman that Henry was excluding him from the trip, Ehrlichman and Kissinger got into an ugly exchange at a White House meeting. It was ostensibly over Henry’s sloppy administrative procedures and Ehrlichman’s intention to bypass him. Henry “blew and said…nobody’s going to go around him.” Harsher words followed and Henry stalked out of the room shouting that no one could speak to him that way. It was a double standard for someone who had a reputation for verbally abusing his subordinates.
Kissinger’s real battle with Ehrlichman was over his competition with the president for introducing the China policy. But Ehrlichman wasn’t the only one trying to eclipse Henry. In September, when Rogers learned that Kissinger would be returning to Peking, it provoked another White House fight. “It will be one of those continuing agony type things,” Haldeman confided to his diary. The following week, when Rogers told the New York Times that reports of domestic tensions in China over Mao’s leadership made Kissinger’s trip uncertain, Henry “raved on and on” in a conversation with Haldeman about Rogers’s attempt to “ruin things with the Chinese.” After they confirmed their desire for Kissinger’s visit and the press credited Rogers with forcing Peking to do it, Henry was “practically beside himself again.”
Insistence that the Chinese accept a large press contingent and a ground station to broadcast live TV pictures back to the United States also troubled Kissinger. Nixon and his PR advisers saw these conditions as supremely valuable for his reelection campaign. Henry saw the PR concerns as distracting from longer-term consequences. He feared that the trip would be viewed as a “circus” staged for television. He also saw it provoking an adverse reaction in China and around the world.
But Nixon ignored Henry’s concerns. It produced some testy moments with the Chinese, Kissinger says. “Even in the millennia of their history the Chinese had never encountered a Presidential advance party, especially one whose skills had been honed by the hectic trips of a candidate in the heartland of America…When I warned Chou En-lai that China had survived barbarian invasions before but had never encountered advance men, it was only partly a joke.”
As Kissinger was landing in China on October 20, Nixon asked Haig to remind Henry that he should arrange separate meetings with Mao and Chou with only interpreters present. Nixon wanted to “make it clear,” he told Haldeman, “that Henry isn’t manipulating the entire operation, but rather, the P[resident] is clearly in command.”
The message was not lost on Kissinger. His five days in China from October 20 to October 25 required a balancing act that would advance the two governments toward a successful Summit and enhance his prominence as a diplomat by preparing the way for a presidential visit in which he would stand in Nixon’s shadow.
There was never any question as to who would hold center stage when Nixon arrived in Peking in late February, the date quickly agreed upon for the president’s visit. But well-publicized October meetings in Peking allowed Henry to command worldwide attention. His presence at a Chinese opera—“an art form of truly stupefying boredom”—before five hundred select Chinese officials, “ostentatious public visits” to Peking’s major tourist attractions, the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, and the Summer Palace, in view of the Chinese “masses” and a North Vietnamese news photographer “served Chinese domestic necessities” and international politics.
The public diplomacy gave Henry visibility on a level with heads of state and celebrities that he craved but could not have imagined attaining as the president’s national security adviser. The notoriety was heady stuff that whetted his appetite for additional public attention, but also intensified Nixon’s envy. The October trip to China not only exhilarated Henry but also put him more than ever on guard against the president’s antagonism to someone who seemed to be eclipsing him. Deference to a jealous president became a fixed ritual in their always competitive relationship.
Putting the American delegation on display signaled Chinese determination to reach understandings that would bring Nixon to Peking. In private, Chou and Kissinger outdid each other in expressions of good will. In his opening remarks on October 20, Chou applauded Henry’s skills as a diplomat and described the Chinese as “confident” that his visit “will be a success.”
Kissinger avowed the president’s determination to improve Sino-American relations. Although the Chinese gave no indication that their fear of Soviet intentions spurred their interest in a rapprochement with America, Kissinger had no qualms about exploiting these concerns. He made transparent references, which are strikingly absent from his memoirs, to Soviet efforts to discourage Nixon’s policy. “We have received much unasked-for advice from other countries,” Henry declared, “especially one other country…pointing out the physical limitations of China’s power, and therefore, the limitations of concentrating attention on China.”
At the same time, Kissinger made clear that he was not proposing an overt Sino-American alliance against Russia. “We do not look at the normalization of our relationship as a means to drive a wedge between the People’s Republic and their old friends. And it would be shortsighted if either side tried to use this normalization to end alliances of the other side.”
The point was not lost on Chou: “We do not wish that because of your new policy you will become in conflict with the Soviet Union,” he said. “We want relaxation of tensions.” Without mentioning “any particular country,” Henry declared that until they had solidified Sino-American friendship, they “should not give those…opposed to this new direction an opportunity to say it’s only a trick to destroy existing relationships.” In short, neither side would spell out the pressure their rapprochement would put on Moscow: For Peking, it was a means to discourage Soviet aggression against it; for Washington, it was a way to prod the Soviets into arms control and pressure Hanoi to end the Vietnam War.
Technical arrangements for the president’s visit were agreed to quickly and with some humor. Henry warned that the requirements of a presidential visit would far outrun what had been needed for his two stays in China. Henry joked that upon their arrival in Shanghai American communications experts might connect all the cities’ phones to the White House. Nixon’s visit would require “several battalions” of technical people.
Kissinger described the press corps as a more difficult problem. The New York Times, Henry said, viewed itself as a “sovereign country.” “I was afraid the Prime Minister had had to deal with [retired columnist] Walter Lippmann and James Reston in one year; and that is a degree of invasion no country should be required to tolerate.” Although Chou declared himself “not afraid of that,” Henry sarcastically described Reston as granting him “an interview before I left. He doubted that I could perform my duties without his advice about how to treat the Prime Minister.”
Chou agreed that the technical details of the president’s visit could be settled amicably. Substantive matters would be more of a problem. They acknowledged that they faced major difficulties over Taiwan, Indochina, Japan, the Soviet Union, Korea, and a growing dispute between India and Pakistan. Chou conceded that Nixon’s principal purpose in Peking was to resolve political differences that could permit normalization of relations. He also agreed that Kissinger’s catalog of problems were the principal barriers to détente except for Russia, which Chou dismissed as not “a main issue. The main issue,” he asserted, “is China and the United States.” He refused to acknowledge that Washington’s dealings with Moscow were of more than passing interest to Peking.
Kissinger’s and Chou’s greatest challenge was to craft a communiqué for release at the end of Nixon’s visit. Henry had convinced the president not to include Ehrlichman in the October discussions as a way to limit speculation that a White House aide had entered into substantive agreements before Nixon had gone to China. The objective was to convince the world that Nixon and Mao had personally negotiated any agreement that emerged from their talks.
In fact, Kissinger and Chou skillfully negotiated an announcement that essentially codified the new relationship between Washington and Peking. Henry arrived in China with a draft statement Nixon had agreed to: “It followed the conventional style,” Kissinger writes, “highlighting fuzzy areas of agreement and obscuring differences with platitudinous generalizations.”
After reading the American draft, which Kissinger himself described as an exercise in “banality,” Chou gave a “scorching” response, declaring that the communiqué had to acknowledge “fundamental differences,” lest it have an “untruthful appearance.” Mao and Chou apparently saw any soporific pronouncement on the new Sino-American relationship as too big a departure from the recent past, in which hostile descriptions of U.S. imperialism had been part of a daily propaganda barrage. Moreover, the Chinese were determined to avoid publication of a document that Moscow could use against them in the competition for hearts and minds in the Third World, where anti-Americanism was a given.
A Chinese counter draft, replete with unacceptable language about U.S. misdeeds that would have embarrassed any American president who signed it, became the basis for a compromise statement. During a nearly nonstop twenty-four-hour session, the two sides hammered out a statement that muted the problem of Taiwan, the chief difference between them. Henry came up with a brilliant pronouncement that greatly impressed Chou. He explained that he adapted the “ambiguous formula” from a state department document written in the fifties. “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Straits maintain there is but one China. The United States Government does not challenge that position.”
Kissinger’s language conformed to what both Chinese Communists and Nationalists could agree on—namely, that Taiwan was part of China. Nothing was said however about which of the opposing Chinese governments should govern both the mainland and Taiwan. That decision was left to the Chinese, but with the American understanding that it would not be the result of force. The Nationalists on Taiwan were put off by the formulation—the much greater likelihood that Peking rather than Taipei would control “one China” made the Nationalists unhappy with the document. Because Henry had no direct communications with the White House during these discussions, he and Chou agreed that the final language of the communiqué would await the president’s arrival in China. As Henry departed the guest house, Chou, speaking to him for the first time in English, said: “Come back soon for the joy of talking.”
The PRC’s admission to the UN coupled with Taiwan’s expulsion on October 25—a much discussed possibility for three years—eclipsed Kissinger’s successful negotiations in China. Nixon was furious that so many countries in the General Assembly beholden to the United States voted to oust Chiang Kai-shek’s government. By the fall of 1971, he knew that the United States could no longer bar the PRC from the Security Council; nor, given evolving relations with Peking, was he eager to prevent it. He had hoped, however, to appease Taipei and its conservative supporters in the United States by convincing a majority at the UN to let Taiwan keep its General Assembly seat.
Nixon had George Bush at the UN and the state department lobby NATO allies, Israel, Ireland, Laos, Latin American and African countries to follow the U.S. lead in supporting Taiwan’s continuing membership. But past favors and a variety of future promises failed to ensure a successful outcome. “At least half of these countries just don’t have any goddamn business to be fooling around with that,” Nixon complained to Kissinger about their negative votes. As he explained to Rogers, he was particularly incensed at the Israelis, the Venezuelans, the Irish, the Panamanians, the Greeks, the Turks, as well as the African countries. After the African states lined up against Taiwan, Nixon instructed Haldeman: “Kick the cannibals, and don’t put us too much on the side of foreign aid.”
Nixon instructed Henry not to return to Washington until the afternoon of October 26, ostensibly to mute speculation tying Henry’s discussions in China to Taiwan’s ouster. Kissinger, however, saw the decision to delay his return as Nixon’s way of diminishing his visibility. “The President was becoming restive at the publicity I was receiving,” Henry noted. “Nixon, like any other President, had no intention of being up-staged by his own Assistant.” When Kissinger arrived at Andrews Air Force Base on October 26, he was delivered to “a distant corner” of the landing strip that was “inaccessible to newsmen and photographers.”
Kissinger’s suspicions were well founded. As Henry landed, Nixon told Haldeman, “We’ve got to move now to get K under control on backgrounders.” The president “doesn’t want him to give so many, because he feels they build up the man who’s doing the backgrounding, rather than the P.”
Yet it was not so easy to rein in Kissinger. After almost three years in the White House, he had honed his skills as a self-promoter. His effectiveness in crafting a communiqué with Chou and his first-hand knowledge of the discussions with the Chinese made him indispensable to Nixon in finalizing arrangements for the Peking Summit.
Moreover, reports to Nixon that Rogers was taking credit for the administration’s China policy moved him to have Kissinger give press briefings that would set the record straight. Haldeman and the president understood that Kissinger had become “the biggest asset we’ve got” on foreign policy and his considerable influence with the press could make a difference in public perception of the administration’s China achievement.
Kissinger used a briefing to range over a number of foreign policy issues that normally, the Chicago Daily News reported, would have been “handled by the President or Secretary of State.” He “emerged in the briefing as a ‘quotable’ source after years of anonymity…And his performance tended to confirm the view held by many that Kissinger has preempted the turf of Rogers.” Another reporter said, “The effect of the [news] conference on State was similar to that of an atomic bomb.”
IN THE FALL OF 1971, differences in the administration and the country over White House China policy posed little threat to a major transformation in Sino-American relations. A larger danger to rapprochement with Peking and détente with Moscow came from rising tensions in South Asia. A disastrous cyclone in November 1970, which had taken two hundred thousand lives in East Pakistan, had undermined Yahya Khan’s government. Ineffective rescue and relief operations had weakened his standing and contributed to a decisive political defeat in December elections.
Long-standing tensions between the Punjabis, who dominated the central government in West Pakistan, and the Bengalis in the East now erupted into a full-scale crisis. With only their shared Muslim religion to tie East and West together and India providing a thousand-mile geographical divide between the two parts of the country, threats of secession by the Bengalis were an ongoing part of Pakistan’s twenty-four-year history. After Yahya refused to honor the election results, which favored the Bengalis, and rioting erupted in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, he sent forty thousand troops to suppress the uprising. The arrest of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly known as Mujib), the head of the anti-Yahya political party, provoked additional turmoil.
Unrelieved suffering from the cyclone, coupled with brutal repression by Yahya’s troops, who may have killed as many as five hundred thousand men, women, and children, sent millions of refugees (80 percent of whom were Hindus) across the border into India’s West Bengal region. The Indians responded with private and public expressions of support for East Pakistan’s independence that threatened to touch off an Indo-Pakistan war.
Nixon and Kissinger initially resisted involvement in a crisis they saw little chance of influencing. They were especially concerned not to jeopardize their ties to Yahya, who was so instrumental in opening contacts with Peking. In March, at a Senior Review Group Meeting, Henry stated that “the President will be very reluctant to do anything that Yahya could interpret as a personal affront.” He advised against having the American ambassador say anything about the crisis to the Pakistanis. The group agreed to recommend a policy of “massive inaction” to the president.
Nixon agreed that a hands-off approach would best serve U.S. interests. But American diplomats in Dhaka viewed a neutral stance as unwise and immoral. In April, they described the administration’s silence in the face of indescribable horrors and the suppression of the election results as “moral bankruptcy” and an acquiescence in authoritarian rule at a time when Moscow was speaking up for Pakistani democracy.
The protest provoked Nixon’s and Kissinger’s wrath. “If we get in the middle of this thing,” the president told Henry, “it would be a hell of a mistake. The people who bitch about Vietnam bitch about it because we intervened in what they say is a civil war. Now some of those same bastards…want us to intervene here—both civil wars.” In response to the pressure, however, Nixon agreed to increase aid to the Bengali refugees, and privately urged Yahya and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to avoid a full-scale war. Nevertheless, he continued to resist suggestions that he or any outside power mediate the conflict. He acknowledged that East Pakistan’s autonomy was probably inevitable, but he wanted it to come from Pakistan’s “own arrangements.”
At the end of May, when the White House received news of Indian troops massing on East Pakistan’s border, Nixon and Kissinger were determined to deter New Delhi from toppling Yahya’s government. If the Indians moved, Nixon told Henry, “By God, we will cut off economic aid.” Kissinger replied, “And that is the last thing we can afford now to have the Pakistan government overthrown, given the other things we are doing.” Three days later, Nixon complained that “‘the goddamn Indians’ were promoting another war.” Henry agreed. “They are the most aggressive goddamn people around.”
The president and Kissinger had less interest in what the Indians or Pakistanis did to each other than in assuring that nothing sidetracked Henry’s trip to China and the revolution in Sino-American relations. Our objective should be to “buoy up Yahya for at least another month while Pakistan served as the gateway to China,” Henry told Nixon at the beginning of June. “Even apart from the Chinese thing,” the president replied, “I wouldn’t…help the Indians, the Indians are no goddamn good.”
In July, on his way to Peking, Kissinger discussed the crisis with Pakistani and Indian officials in Islamabad and New Delhi. Before he left, Joe Sisco urged him to take a tough line with Indira Gandhi. Sisco complained that “you people in the W[hite] H[ouse] don’t understand how serious” the situation is. “We know,” Henry countered. “At the end of the monsoons, India will attack.” Sisco advised him to tell the Indians, “we know you are supporting the guerrillas…There’s too much kiss ass on this thing.” Henry responded, “That’s not my specialty.” (Given his stroking of Nixon, was he mocking himself?)
Kissinger’s meetings with the Pakistanis were cordial, but, predictably, the Indians complained that U.S. support of Pakistan was encouraging a “policy of adventurism,” which China was also promoting. Gandhi saw little chance of a political settlement: “She did not want to use force and was open to suggestions,” she told Henry, “but the situation is unmanageable now and is being held together only by willpower.” Henry warned the Indians that a war “would be a disaster for both countries and…the subcontinent would become an area for conflict among outside powers.” He also assured them that “we would take the gravest view of any unprovoked Chinese aggression against India.”
Kissinger recalls returning from his trip with “a premonition of disaster.” He expected India to attack Pakistan after the summer monsoons. He feared that China might then intervene on Pakistan’s behalf, which would move Moscow “to teach Peking a lesson.” If a South Asian war were confined to the principals, Nixon and Kissinger saw it as of limited consequence. But they feared that a conflict would not only jeopardize the China initiative and provoke a new round of dangerous tensions with Moscow, but also endanger Nixon’s reelection, which he believed would depend greatly on ending the war in Vietnam and achieving some breakthrough in the Cold War. At this time, Kissinger states, “no one could speak for five minutes with Nixon without hearing of his profound distrust of Indian motives, his concern over Soviet meddling, and above all his desire not to risk the opening to China by ill-considered posturing.”
Nixon described the Indians in an NSC meeting on July 16 as “‘a slippery, treacherous people.’ He felt that they would like nothing better than to use this tragedy to destroy Pakistan…He said that we could not allow—over the next three to four months until ‘we take this journey’ to Peking—a war in South Asia if we can possibly avoid it.” Kissinger agreed. He called the Indians “insufferably arrogant,” and eager for a conflict that would allow them to overwhelm Pakistan and take on China. “Everything we have done with China will [then] go down the drain.”
An Indo-Russian treaty announced on August 9 convinced Nixon and Kissinger that there would be a war, which would probably ruin their foreign policy. Henry described the agreement as a “bombshell.” It assured India of Soviet support against China in a war with Pakistan. And vice versa: “If you read it [the treaty] literally,” Kissinger told Rogers, “it says that India has to support the Soviet Union in any situation that involves the threat of war.” Henry saw Moscow as throwing “a lighted match into a powder keg.”
Former assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs William Bundy disagreed: “Nixon and Kissinger—with their strong tendency to see great-power ties as the key to regional situations—judged the positions of both China and the Soviet Union to be far stronger and more committed to the opposing sides than was probably ever the case.” They refused to believe that Moscow’s action was a defensive response to the emerging rapprochement between Washington and Peking. But the Soviets were less intent on provoking a South Asian crisis, in which they could inflict a defeat on China, than on countering what they saw as a U.S. anti-Soviet offensive in Asia through collaboration with China and Pakistan.
In the late summer and fall of 1971, the administration’s highest priority in South Asia was to avert a war. Conversations with Indian and Soviet officials became repeated warnings against an Indian attack on Pakistan. In September, when the Indian ambassador to the United States, Lakshmi Jha, asked Kissinger what “interest the United States had in keeping East Bengal a part of Pakistan,” Henry replied that our aim was to head off not secession but a war that could turn “into an international conflict.” In October, in another conversation with Jha, who predicted a military outbreak by the close of the year unless there was a political settlement, Henry warned that America would cut off all economic aid to New Delhi if it started a war.
To make the case for war, Indira Gandhi traveled to several Western capitals, including Washington, at the beginning of November. Nixon agreed to see her as a last-ditch effort to head off a conflict. Two conversations on November 4 and 5 were case studies in heads of state speaking past each other.
During a morning meeting on November 4 in the Oval Office, they agreed to discuss tensions in South Asia, with a second days’ meeting to focus on Sino-American relations. No easing of tensions was evident from the morning’s exchanges. Nixon emphasized what America had been doing to relieve tensions between India and Pakistan. We had sent relief aid to the nine or ten million refugees who now had congregated on both sides of the Indian–East Pakistan borders. Nixon warned that military action might serve India in the short run, but would work against its political interests over time. Moreover, a war might pose grave dangers “for the whole framework of world peace.”
Largely ignoring the president’s remarks, Gandhi responded with a bill of particulars against Pakistan. Although she denied any interest in destroying India’s Muslim adversary, she said that partitioning the subcontinent had “left the peoples of the area restive and dissatisfied.” Pakistan’s hatred of India had generated the 1947 and 1965 wars, she asserted, and U.S. arms shipments to Pakistan had outraged Indian public opinion. Pakistan, moreover, was beset by separatist movements that destabilized the region. “It was no longer realistic to expect East and West Pakistan to remain together.” India’s military presence on the East Pakistan border and the treaty with Moscow were deterring President Yahya from a “holy war.”
Nixon asked her how a solution could be achieved, but she would only say that “India’s major concern was the impact of the situation on India itself.” Nixon’s concern about the dangers to world peace from a South Asian war made no impression on her. She had a parochial absorption with India’s problems, but she also rejected arguments that a South Asian war necessarily translated into larger Cold War dangers.
Nixon took her unresponsiveness to his observations as both indifference to compelling international threats and arrogance toward someone she considered socially and intellectually inferior. Her response incensed him. He showed up forty-five minutes late for their second meeting without an explanation. In private, he called her a “bitch” and much worse. “Nixon’s comments after meetings with her,” Kissinger says, “were not always printable.”
Henry’s weren’t much better. On the morning of November 5, before they saw Gandhi again, Kissinger described the Indians as “bastards…They are starting a war there” with the objective of destroying all of Pakistan. “To them, East Pakistan is no longer the issue,” Henry said. “Now, I found it very interesting how she carried on to you yesterday about West Pakistan.” He thought that the president had scored points in the exchanges with her. “While she was a bitch,” he said, “we got what we wanted…She will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn’t give her a warm reception and therefore in despair she’s got to go to war.”
Nixon put the best possible face on the conversation as well. “We really slobbered over the old witch,” he said. Kissinger replied: “You slobbered over her in things that did not matter, but in things that did matter, you didn’t give her an inch.” As an aftermath to the talks, she told a journalist that “the times have passed when any nation sitting 3 or 4 thousand miles away could give orders to Indians on the basis of their color superiority to do as they wished.” Reading her comment in the press, Nixon told Henry: “This is the heart of her anti-Americanism. She doesn’t seem to mind the color of our aid dollars.”
Gandhi reciprocated the hostility by later describing Nixon to another journalist as a cipher. According to Gandhi, during their conversation, he had Kissinger do most of the talking. He would say a couple of words and then turn to Henry and ask, “Isn’t that right, Henry?” She complained that the president “was unwilling to accept my assessment of any situation.” Nixon certainly was not receptive to her verbal attacks on Pakistan, but the documentary record of their November 5 conversation does not bear out her description of who did the talking. The official transcript in Nixon’s National Security files drawn from an audiotape is a dialogue strictly between the president and the prime minister.
More convinced than ever that a war would jeopardize everything they had been aiming at in foreign affairs, Nixon and Kissinger now intensified their efforts to head off a conflict. But it was a one-sided démarche against India. In their judgment, the aggressor, with Soviet backing, was New Delhi. Never mind that the state department, the Congress, the press, and the attentive U.S. opinion thought otherwise. Yahya’s unrestrained campaign against the Bengalis, which had cost so many lives, had largely destroyed his standing in the United States, where India, whatever the truth about its intentions, was generally seen as an exponent of peace.
When a full-scale war finally erupted on December 3, the CIA could not say which country had initiated the hostilities. Nevertheless, Nixon and Kissinger blamed New Delhi. India’s attack “makes your heart sick,” Nixon told Henry. “For them [the Pakistanis] to be done so by the Indians, and after we have warned the bitch…We have to cut off arms…When India talked about W. Pakistan attacking them, it’s like Russia claiming to be attacked by Finland.”
With Rogers counseling restraint on announcing a military cut-off to India, Kissinger told him, Nixon “is raising Cain again. I am getting hell. He wants it [a statement] to tilt toward Pakistan.” Later that morning at a Special Actions Group (SAG) meeting, Henry described himself as “catching unshirted hell every half-hour from the President who says we’re not tough enough…He really doesn’t believe we are carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt toward Pakistan, and he believes that every briefing or statement is going the other way.”
Despite the CIA’s analysis, Henry reported to Nixon that “It’s more and more certain it’s India attacking and not Pakistan.” Nixon responded: “Everyone knows Pakistan [was] not attacking India…It’s a tragedy, the Indians are so treacherous.”
Nixon saw at least one domestic benefit from the war. It would discomfort American liberals, who would have to choose between China and India. “You realize this is causing our liberal friends untold anguish, Henry,” the president said. Kissinger agreed, and predicted that “in terms of the political situation, we won’t take any…[more] immediate flak, but in six months the liberals are going to look like jerks because the Indian occupation of East Pakistan is going to make” Pakistan’s treatment of the Bengalis look benign. Henry reported that the liberal press was still blaming Pakistan for the war, but was “beginning to tilt against India.” Nixon replied, “We got to make it tilt more, because we know they are totally to blame…We know the Paks don’t want this.”
Although they thought it would do nothing to affect the outcome of the war, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to promote a discussion at the UN Security Council, where the Soviets promptly vetoed a cease-fire resolution. “The Security Council is just a paper exercise,” Henry said, but “it will get the Post and Times off our backs. And the Libs will be happy that we turned it over to the UN.” The important thing, Nixon asserted, was to get “some PR out” putting “the blame on India.”
The Soviet veto triggered a fresh discussion of the war’s impact on American foreign policy. “What we are seeing here,” Kissinger advised Nixon on December 5, “is a Soviet-Indian power play to humiliate the Chinese and also somewhat us.” They believed it essential to vigorously support another UN resolution. A retreat would mean doing “away with the gains of the last two years…If the Chinese come out of this despising us, we lose that option. If the Russians think they backed us down, we will be back to where we were in May and June.” It would then resonate in the Middle East, where we would lose our ability to pressure the Russians and the Egyptians into any sort of settlement.
With Nixon’s agreement, Kissinger called in the Soviet Counselor of Embassy Yuli Vorontsov. Henry threatened Moscow with a serious setback in Soviet-American relations if it participated “in the dismemberment of another country. The President did not understand how the Soviet Union could…work on the broad amelioration of our relationships while at the same time encouraging the Indian military aggression against Pakistan.” Brezhnev needed to understand that “we were once more at one of the watersheds in our relationship.” Vorontsov was taken aback, and hoped that Nixon had no intention of canceling the Summit. He was confident that Moscow would be eager to entertain a U.S. solution to the South Asian crisis.
With India defeating Pakistani forces and the increasing likelihood of an independent East Pakistan or Bangladesh emerging from the conflict, Nixon and Kissinger became all the more antagonistic to Gandhi. They saw India’s success as a defeat for the United States in its dealings with Moscow. In a conversation on the evening of December 6, they agreed that it was essential to take a hard line with the Soviets: “You’ll be better off, Mr. President, 6 months from now,” Kissinger said. “If they lose respect for us now, they’ll put it to us.” Nixon worried that he had been “too easy on the goddamn woman when she was here.” He thought he had been “suckered” in their talks. Kissinger regretted that he had not urged the president “to brutalize her privately.” He thought Nixon should have warned her that he would seize “every opportunity to damage her.” Nixon declared, “She is going to pay,” and he and Kissinger drowned each other out in professions of determination to punish her.
They also agreed on a message to Peking saying that if the Chinese felt compelled “to take certain actions…you should not be deterred by the fear of standing alone against the powers that may intervene.” Nixon wanted an intelligence report on Indian war plans leaked to the press. It “will make her [Gandhi look] bad.”
It was more than a little reckless to promise the Chinese support against the Soviets. Were they suggesting joining China in a war against Russia? Such a verbal commitment, however vague and private, was more a demonstration of unfettered emotions than thoughtful consideration of the challenges posed by the South Asian crisis. None of this, of course, was for public consumption. Nixon instructed Henry to give a background press briefing in which he made clear that the United States shared no responsibility for the conflict, unlike the Russians and the Chinese. Henry was to say: “The Russians have an interest in India. The Chinese have a hell of an interest in Pakistan. We only have an interest in peace. We’re not anti-Indian, we’re not anti-Pakistan. We are anti-aggression.”
A CIA cable on December 7 reporting an Indira Gandhi press briefing further inflamed Nixon and Kissinger. She chided the United States for its pro-Pakistan policy and predicted that the new nation of Bangladesh and a shrunken Pakistan with diminished military power to challenge India would emerge from the war. When Nixon and Kissinger discussed developments in South Asia on the following day, Henry was more convinced than ever that Soviet support would allow India to turn Pakistan into “a state akin to Afghanistan.” It would have a disturbing impact on other countries threatened by Soviet power, particularly in the Middle East, and might encourage the Chinese to turn away from the United States.
The wisest response to Soviet-Indian aggression, Henry advised the president, was to increase pressure on the Indians and Moscow to discourage New Delhi from crippling Pakistan. It might risk the Summit, but “the Summit may not be worth a damn if…they kick you around. We have only one hope now. To convince the Indians the thing is going to escalate. And to convince the Russians that they are going to pay an enormous price.” Nixon summed up Henry’s advice: If we let things go, “it will certainly screw up the South Asian area…Your greater fear, however, is that it may get the Chinese stirred up so that they do something else…And it will encourage the Russians to do the same thing someplace else.”
To counter the Indians and the Soviets, they agreed to urge the Chinese to move troops to their Indian border, to deploy a U.S. carrier force in the Bay of Bengal, and send another tough message to Moscow. Even if Pakistan were dismembered, Henry concluded, “We will still come out all right” if they compelled the Soviets to “maintain their respect for us.”
On December 9, they began acting on their hard-line policy. Nixon seized on a conversation at the White House with the Soviet agriculture minister, Vladimir Matskevich, to send Moscow an additional blunt message. The bewildered minister, “a bubbly and beefy man,” who had no license to discuss…foreign policy, listened passively to a Nixon monologue on current hopes and dangers in Soviet-American relations. Prospects for friendship between their two countries were greater than ever, but the South Asian war placed “a great cloud over” a new relationship, Nixon said. The war was poisoning Soviet-American relations; it was pushing their countries toward a confrontation: “The Soviet Union has a treaty with India, but the United States has obligations to Pakistan. The urgency of a cease-fire must be recognized.”
The same day, Nixon ordered that a carrier group go from Vietnam to the Bay of Bengal. Kissinger told him that he was going “back and forth” on the question of whether to deploy this force. No one would believe that the ships were there to evacuate two hundred Americans from East Pakistan. Instead, “The Indians will scream we are threatening them,” Henry warned. Nixon thought that was fine. “Aren’t we going in for the purpose of strength?” he asked. Kissinger thought it would allow him to make a case to the Chinese for moving troops to the frontier. When Kissinger saw Vorontsov the next day, he told him, “we’re moving some military forces…In effect, it was giving him sort of [a] veiled ultimatum.”
On the afternoon of December 9, in a lengthy backgrounder with the press, Kissinger tried to quiet complaints that the United States was lining up with Pakistan against India. Time called the administration’s “blatant partiality toward Pakistan…both unreasonable and unwise.” Kissinger told the reporters that the White House was “neither anti-Indian nor pro-Pakistani…but opposed to the use of armed forces across borders to change the political structure of a neighboring state.” He justified a cut-off of economic aid to India as a condemnation of aggression. He called the reports of an American tilt in the war as “totally inaccurate.”
On the evening of December 10, Kissinger went to New York to meet secretly with two of China’s UN representatives at a shabby hideaway apartment. The session was part confessional and part conspiracy. With only UN Ambassador Bush, and Kissinger aides Haig and Winston Lord present on the American side, Henry confided, “We tell you about our conversations with the Soviets; we do not tell the Soviets about our conversations with you. In fact, we don’t tell our own colleagues that I see you. George Bush is the only person outside the White House who knows I come here.” He then described his conversations with Vorontsov, which “are known only to the White House and only to you.” He reported on the pressure they were exerting to rein in Soviet backing for India’s aggression, including a warning that it could lead to a Soviet-American confrontation. He described the movement of U.S. warships into the Indian Ocean as a demonstration of American resolve.
“I come now to a matter of some sensitivity,” he said. Intelligence information that China was eager to know about the disposition of Soviet troops “on your borders.” The U.S. was ready to share what information it had. More important, Kissinger reported the president’s desire to assure Peking that if it “took measures to protect its security” in response to the situation on the Indian subcontinent, “the U.S. would oppose efforts of others to interfere with the People’s Republic.” The president also wanted the PRC to understand that “if East Pakistan is to be preserved from destruction,” it was essential to intimidate the Indians and the Soviets. He advised the Chinese that Gandhi was intent on destroying “the Pakistani army and air force” (in fact, an intelligence report said only “armored and air force strength”) and annexing a part of Kashmir. “This is what we believe must be prevented and this is why I have taken the liberty to ask for this meeting.”
The Chinese ambassador thanked Kissinger for the information and promised to forward it to Chou. However, he complained about the difference in Kissinger’s presentation and America’s public posture. Kissinger’s tough talk did not square with the U.S. government’s “weak” public position. In its statements to the Pakistanis, Indians, and Soviets, it supported a cease-fire and political negotiations, but failed to advocate a withdrawal of Indian forces from East Pakistan. It meant giving life to “another Manchukuo,” the puppet state the Japanese had created in Manchuria in the 1930s. “I may look weak to you, Mr. Ambassador,” Henry countered, “but my colleagues in Washington think I’m a raving maniac.” The ambassador described political negotiations as “completely unacceptable.” Henry answered: “We are talking to you to come to a common position.” His objective in asking for their meeting was “to suggest Chinese military help, to be quite honest…not to discuss with you how to defeat Pakistan,” or arrange for an independent Bangladesh.
On Sunday morning, December 12, with no response from Moscow to the warnings to Vorontsov and Matskevich, Nixon decided to send a hot-line message to Brezhnev. “Does that sound like a good plan to you?” he asked Kissinger. “It’s a typical Nixon plan,” Henry enthused. “I mean it’s bold. You’re putting your chips into the pot again. But my view is that if we do nothing, there is a certainty of disaster. This way there is a high possibility of one, but at least we’re coming off like men. And that helps us with the Chinese.” Reassured, Nixon said it showed that “‘the man in the White House’ was tough.”
It is astonishing that in the midst of a major international crisis the principal American policy makers would be fretting over whether they came across as “tough.” Impressing foreign adversaries as firm about U.S. national interests made sense, but there was something less than rational about “coming off like men.” It was as if the contest with Soviet Russia was a test of Nixon’s manhood. Personalizing a great crisis or turning any political debate into a battle over a leader’s identity or sense of self is never calculated to serve the national interest. In the end, it is amazing how well Nixon and Kissinger did in making foreign policy in spite of unacknowledged impulses to make decisions partly based on their amour propre.
The Nixon and Kissinger conversation now focused on what the Chinese would do. Henry was angry at being told that U.S. policy was “weak.” So far, Peking had done nothing. “We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality,” Kissinger said. Until the Chinese moved some troops, they shouldn’t say another word. As they were speaking, Haig brought a message that the Chinese wanted a face-to-face meeting in New York “on an urgent basis.” This call for a meeting, Henry said, was “totally unprecedented. They’re going to move. No question, they’re going to move.”
Nixon and Kissinger discussed the potential results of Chinese action. If China menaced India, they anticipated a Soviet military response. If the U.S. then did nothing, Henry predicted, “we’ll be finished.” Nixon asked: “So what do we do if the Soviets move against them? Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?” Kissinger replied: “If the Soviets move against them…and succeed, that will be the final showdown…We will be finished. We’ll be through.”
Henry wondered whether it would be better to call the Chinese off, but answered himself by saying, “We can’t call them off.” If we did, it would destroy the China initiative. Nixon agreed that it would not only destroy the rapprochement with Peking but would also jeopardize any advance in relations with Moscow. They quieted their worries by reassuring each other that the Soviets would back down from a confrontation with China and the United States. Henry said they simply couldn’t let Pakistan be swallowed by India or allow China to be “destroyed, defeated, [or] humiliated by the Soviet Union. It will be a change in the world balance of power of such magnitude that the security of the United States for, maybe forever, certainly for decades” would be altered.
Nixon agreed that they had to face down Moscow. But he thought it best not to think in terms of “Armageddon…When I say the Chinese move and the Soviets threaten and we start lobbing nuclear weapons, that isn’t what happens.” At least, he hoped that would be the case. Kissinger agreed. “We don’t have to lob nuclear weapons. We have to go on alert.”
When Nixon met with French President Georges Pompidou the next day in the Azores, he reflected on the “sober, somber fact” that a nuclear war could kill 70 million Americans and 70 million Russians. “It is essential,” he told Pompidou, “that the two nations pursue the negotiating track rather than the confrontation track. We have impressed this on the Soviets with regard to Southern Asia in the last 24 hours.”
Nixon and Kissinger assumed that a Sino-Soviet war would at least allow them to “clean up Vietnam.” But Nixon didn’t think the Russians would attack China. “Well,” Henry said, the Russians “are not rational on China.” They agreed that as soon as the Chinese did something, they would have to caution Brezhnev about taking military action. Henry told Nixon that his decision was nothing less than “a heroic act.”
A message from the Soviets later that morning assured Washington that India had no intention of attacking West Pakistan and that cease-fire discussions were underway. Because the assurances about New Delhi lacked “concreteness,” Nixon cabled Brezhnev that they needed to continue “closest consultations…I cannot emphasize too strongly that time is of the essence to avoid consequences neither of us want.”
To their surprise and relief, the Chinese message, which Haig picked up in New York on the afternoon of December 12, said nothing about moving troops to the Indian border. Instead, appreciating that independence for East Pakistan was a foregone conclusion, Peking said it was prepared to endorse an American UN proposal for a standstill cease-fire and forego a demand for mutual troop withdrawals.
The crisis now petered to a conclusion. Between December 14 and 17, Indian forces completed their conquest of East Pakistan and agreed to a cease-fire in the West with no occupation of additional Pakistani territory. Although Nixon and Kissinger put the best possible face on the outcome, the result of the war was essentially a victory for India and its Soviet ally, which declared the emergence of Bangladesh from the ruins of East Pakistan a triumph for Socialist and democratic principles.
Nixon and Kissinger expressed satisfaction at having preserved West Pakistan and privately asserted that their pressure on Moscow had been decisive in restraining Indian ambitions. “You saved W. Pakistan,” Kissinger told Nixon. “If it hadn’t been for us, Pakistan would have been destroyed.” Both of them saw limits to their success. “As far as public opinion is concerned, I don’t think they give a damn,” Nixon said. Henry agreed and acknowledged that the best they could do was “turn disaster into defeat,” or into “a net minus.” Most important from their perspective, the war had not destroyed the scheduled Summits in Peking and Moscow.
William Bundy’s conclusion that “Nixon and Kissinger’s policy on the Indo-Pakistan war was replete with error, misjudgment, emotionalism, and unnecessary risk taking” has considerable merit. A reconstruction of their day-to-day response to the crisis suggests that they were feeling their way through the crisis. Bundy’s additional assertion that their policy was fashioned out of an “overriding emphasis on balance-of-power factors” suggests a degree of rational calculation that was also a part of the mix. Their underlying assumption, in Kissinger’s formulation, was not to “allow a friend of ours and China to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s,” which was a crude way of saying that they needed to maintain a balance between the two Communist superpowers.
Their highest priority, however, was to prevent the conflict from aborting the 1972 Summit meetings in Peking and Moscow. Such an outcome not only would have wrecked their strategy of playing China and Russia off against each other but would also have made the Nixon presidency a failure and jeopardized the likelihood of a second term. The South Asian conflict produced unwelcome results, but it left rapprochement with China and détente with Moscow intact. Yet the White House could take only so much credit for the achievement. Peking’s and Moscow’s determination not to let the war overwhelm what they saw as their larger interests—keeping the transformation of relations with the West on track—was an even bigger factor.
CASUALTIES OF THE TWO-WEEK CONFLICT were Kissinger’s reputation for honesty and his ties to Nixon. To be sure, the press relied on backgrounders with Kissinger for vital information and he and the president conferred repeatedly during the crisis; but leaks to the press revealed that Henry was exceeding his authority and not being candid about U.S. policy. It put strains on his relations with Nixon and almost drove him out of the White House.
Nixon, with a long history of surviving personal political crises, faced the Indo-Pakistan war with what might be described as controlled anxiety. For Henry, the war burdened him with concerns he had never confronted before. During his almost three years in the White House, he had struggled with issues of war and peace in every part of the world. Each problem had the potential for long-term disaster. But in every instance, he saw himself advancing the United States toward diminished conflict and greater security. The South Asian problem, however, was another matter: It seemed to demand U.S. reactions that could lead directly to a great power war, possibly a nuclear holocaust.
From the start of the Indo-Pakistan war, Kissinger went into a funk that was ostensibly about renewed difficulties with Rogers and the state department. Between December 7 and 14 Henry registered repeated complaints with Haldeman and the president about his differences with state over how to deal with Pakistan and India. But his objections were more strident than usual and included repeated threats to resign. Nixon confided to Haldeman that he was “quite shocked” at how Henry had “ranted and raved” at Haig during a phone conversation, telling Haig that he “had handled everything wrong” and calling George Bush “an idiot” for his performance at the UN. Nixon believed that something more pronounced was going on with Henry, something beyond his policy differences with state. Haig told Haldeman that Henry had a sense of failure about South Asia and seemed to be physically exhausted.
Two developments on December 14 added to Kissinger’s distress. On a plane trip back from the Azores meeting with Pompidou, Henry told three reporters that unless the Soviets became more active in restraining India, the president might have to consider canceling the Moscow Summit. When the warning led the evening television news, the White House denied that Nixon was considering such a drastic step. Privately, the president’s press spokesmen explained that Kissinger had overstepped his authority. “I blew it, I was just damn stupid” to have spoken so freely to hostile reporters, Henry told a friendly journalist.
He suffered a greater embarrassment that day when the Washington Post ran a front-page story by columnist Jack Anderson that described a White House “tilt” toward Pakistan in its war with India. The report, which included verbatim quotes, contradicted everything Nixon and Kissinger had been saying about administration evenhandedness and raised the possibility of a credibility gap like the one that had plagued Lyndon Johnson.
A White House investigation of the leak turned up evidence that Charles Radford, a Navy yeoman serving as liaison between the Joint Chiefs and the NSC, had passed documents to Anderson, and as troubling, had provided the Chiefs with secret Kissinger-Nixon memos. Personally opposed to White House policy toward India, where he had served in the U.S. embassy, and offended by the Nixon-Kissinger distortions about administration neutrality, Radford had leaked transcripts of WSAG Meetings to Anderson revealing the Nixon-Kissinger insistence on a “tilt.” Under orders from Pentagon admirals to watch for White House materials that Nixon and Kissinger were withholding from the JCS, Radford, who had access to Henry’s secret files in burn bags, made copies that he regularly passed along to the Chiefs. Although Nixon was angry that his Chiefs were spying on him, he refused to fire anyone lest it “blow up the whole relationship with” them.
Nixon was angry at Kissinger and worried about his reaction to the revelations. “The real culprit is Henry,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman on December 23. “We’d all like to find somebody else to blame—the goddamn state department or the defense department. But Henry could never see anything wrong with his own” staff, Nixon added. “That’s his problem. He doesn’t want to admit to himself this could be” his fault. Nixon didn’t want to talk to Henry about the problem. “I won’t have Henry have one of his childish tantrums. I will not discuss it with him…I don’t want another crisis.” Nixon instructed Haldeman and Ehrlichman to talk to him. “Henry is like a child. He won’t know how to handle it. What to do, so forth,” Nixon said.
On December 24, after Ehrlichman gave Kissinger evidence of Radford’s spying, he “began striding up and down loudly venting his complaints. ‘He [Nixon] won’t fire [ Joint Chiefs Chairman] Moorer,’ Henry shouted. ‘They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us and he won’t fire them! If he won’t fire Rogers—impose some discipline in the Administration—there is no reason to believe he’ll fire Moorer. I assure you all this tolerance will lead to very serious consequences for the Administration!’”
Irritated at Henry’s intemperate comment to the press about the Moscow Summit and especially at Radford’s skullduggery at the NSC, Nixon limited Henry’s access to him. “I am out of favor,” Henry told a journalist. Regular morning meetings with the president were canceled and Nixon would not take Henry’s phone calls. On the afternoon of December 24, Henry “walked in, unbidden,” to Nixon’s EOB office, Ehrlichman remembered. “In a very low, somber voice he spread gloom and doom. ‘I tell you, Mr. President, this is very serious. We cannot survive the kinds of internal weaknesses we are seeing.’ Henry left when he had delivered his load of melancholy.”
Having been embarrassed by the repudiation of his Summit threat and by Anderson’s revelations about the “tilt” policy, Kissinger was incensed at Nixon, Rogers, the White House staff, and now the Joint Chiefs for their abuse of his and the president’s right to have private exchanges: “I was beside myself,” he said. “I was outraged.” Haldeman described him in his diary as “absolutely convinced now that Rogers is engaged on a total plan to destroy Henry and he’s putting out all the stuff that makes Henry look bad…Henry’s at a point now where he’s so emotional about the issue that he’s not really thinking it through clearly; and he’s much more concerned with what’s being done to him, than what the problem is for the P.”
John Scali, who had assumed the job of improving Nixon’s public image, was incensed at Kissinger for undermining the president’s credibility. “Henry has practically taken leave of his senses,” Scali complained to Haldeman. “He’s lying to the press, lying to the Secretary [Rogers], and worst of all, lying to the P…. Scali thinks there’s going to be a substantial problem for Henry with the press, because a number of them realize he’s lied to them and are out to get him.”
Kissinger seemed so troubled that Nixon, who had had psychiatric counseling after his 1962 defeat, suggested to Ehrlichman that Henry get such help. Ehrlichman believed that Henry had serious problems: He saw him as “very insecure,” as someone who “cared desperately what people wrote and said about him.” Henry could be “devastated by press attacks on his professional competence.” He also felt besieged by state department bureaucrats. “How could I survive in this Government where half the town is laying for me?” he asked a Newsweek reporter. “You know there is nothing half the bureaucracy would like to find more than me with no support from the President.”
Nixon asked Ehrlichman to talk to Kissinger about getting therapy and to ask Al Haig as well to discuss the matter with Kissinger. But Ehrlichman “could think of no way to talk to Henry about psychiatric care.” He wasn’t sure it would help him, and he didn’t want to confront him “with the President’s apparent lack of confidence in his mental stability.” When Ehrlichman raised the issue with Haig, Al sprang to Henry’s defense. Reading the suggestion as a smokescreen for firing Henry, Haig declared that Henry was essential to the president’s effective conduct of foreign policy.
As the year came to an end, Kissinger mulled over his problems in a conversation with Haldeman. Henry described himself as “going through a period of very deep thinking and serious evaluation.” He felt that Nixon had “lost confidence in him.” Haldeman saw Kissinger as “very uptight,” and Henry admitted that “he was egotistical and nervous…but also said that he felt he was a great value to the P.” Though he mentioned the possibility of moving into “a very low key position,” one with less visibility and tension, he immediately negated the suggestion by remarks about “being essential to the China trip and so on.”
Robert McNamara, Johnson’s secretary of defense, who had resigned in 1967 after coming close to a nervous collapse, called Henry to commiserate with him. “It is a tremendous accomplishment that you are staying here so long,” McNamara said. “I know what you are paying and I really admire you.”
However stressed Kissinger was, however strained his relations with Nixon, there was little chance he was going to resign or be forced out. He had considerable resiliency, and Nixon simply could not afford to let him go. Not only did he know too much that could embarrass the White House and possibly defeat Nixon in 1972, Henry also was indispensable to the success of the president’s trips to Peking and Moscow, but especially Peking. Without Henry, the ties to Chou En-lai would have been frayed, if not lost, and possibly a chance for a declaration announcing significant steps forward in Sino-American relations. As a consequence, by the beginning of 1972, Nixon and Kissinger were back in regular contact. Daily conversations about current and future issues were resumed as if there had been no hiatus.
When Kissinger spoke at the annual dinner of the Washington Press Club in January, Henry joked that Democrats were eagerly watching his appearance: “They wanted to see if a man who has been assassinated can commit suicide…As you know, I have been a somewhat controversial character lately…A question that I ask myself just before retiring every night, as I look under the bed: ‘Is someone trying to get me?’” He assured the audience that he got along with everybody, including secretaries Laird and Rogers. Laird “assured me that his confidence in me is unbounded. As evidence of that, he has recommended that I go along on the first space shuttle.” Should “I accept, he will urge the President to let the shuttle stay in orbit an extra month.”
As for Rogers, when Henry proposed to him that they continue a situation room discussion in the White House mess, Rogers agreed, but asked, “before we go to your office, couldn’t we get a bite to eat?” Speculation that he would announce his resignation at that night’s small dinner audience was false. “After all, there are twenty-thousand people in the State Department alone who want to be there for that occasion.” When he got to China in February, he planned to ask about the methods “used to frighten the bureaucracy during the Cultural Revolution,” the Chinese upheaval of the sixties defending Communist orthodoxy.
As 1972 began, Nixon was determined to get the press and public focus back on larger foreign policy matters. He was particularly concerned to disarm conservative hostility to détente. He sent Kissinger to Los Angeles to talk to people on the right fretting over the upcoming Summits. In an off-the-record luncheon talk at Perino’s restaurant, Henry defended Nixon’s foreign policy. He described the “tilt” toward Pakistan as frustrating Soviet ambitions and serving “world peace.” He portrayed Vietnam as an inherited war that the president would end in an honorable way. The president was rebuilding the nation’s defenses despite the resistance of a hostile Congress and a critical press. He was using a newfound relationship with China to force Moscow into accommodations serving U.S. national interests. This would not entail the betrayal of Taiwan. When the history of this period is written, Henry concluded, it will celebrate the opening of an era of foreign affairs in which the United States established a more stable international order.
Yet Nixon understood that to win reelection in 1972 he needed to focus less on disgruntled conservatives, who seemed unlikely to desert him, than on the broad electoral center, which principally wanted to end the Vietnam War. That “bitch of a war,” as Lyndon Johnson had described it, remained a political liability that Nixon could not remove unless he brought home U.S. ground troops and POWs and preserved at least the appearance of Saigon’s autonomy.
In December, Nixon complained to Moscow that the Soviets had failed to push Hanoi into conclusive negotiations. He described himself as ready to escalate U.S. military actions if Hanoi intended “to rely on a military solution.” To give substance to his warning, Nixon ordered renewed bombing of North Vietnamese military targets for five days in response to attacks on unarmed reconnaissance planes and the shelling of Saigon on December 19.
On January 2, during a nationally televised interview with CBS’s Dan Rather, Nixon emphasized how effective this latest round of bombing had been. Eleven days later, he announced the withdrawal of seventy thousand more U.S. troops over the next three months. By May 1, the American ground force in Vietnam would have shrunk to 69,000. U.S. casualties in January stood at a six-year low, and on January 7, the networks reported that there were “no ground combat deaths for the first time in 7 years.”
Publicly, Nixon described the success of Vietnamization as allowing him to withdraw American troops. But in private, he and Kissinger feared that a North Vietnamese offensive during the February trip to China could “create a super crisis” by cutting South Vietnam in half. It would embarrass both the president and the Chinese. The biggest North Vietnamese buildup in four years seemed like the prelude to a major offensive. Nixon believed it essential to counter this growing threat. It could “discredit Vietnamization and undermine Thieu…and weaken our position both at home and vis-à-vis Peking,” Nixon said. “I just don’t believe you can let them knock the shit out of us.” The only response he saw was airpower, and pressure on Saigon to strengthen its forces.
Nixon reflected his sense of urgency about the impending threat in comments to the NSC. “I will not accept any failure which could be attributed to a lack of available U.S. support or shortcomings in our own leadership or decisiveness. We must do all we can to assist the South Vietnamese and to ensure that they have both the means and the will to meet Hanoi’s challenge this year.”
When Rather asked the president if his actions on Vietnam and the timing of the upcoming Summits were politically motivated, Nixon denied it. He assured Rather that “those decisions have no political connotations whatever.” Nor did he believe that Johnson had political motivations when he announced a bombing halt on October 31, 1968, which was Nixon’s way of saying, Isn’t that what the Democrats did to try to defeat me?
Haldeman’s diaries and Nixon’s memos demonstrate that foreign policy actions were closely linked to election-year politics. Haldeman recorded that Nixon reminded Kissinger every day “about the trouble Nixon’s in on Vietnam.” Nixon decided to announce the additional troop withdrawal and follow this up later in the month by revealing Henry’s secret talks in Paris with the North Vietnamese, whom he intended to blame for the deadlocked negotiations. “This he figures will be a major blockbuster on the Vietnam thing,” Haldeman wrote. His “first announcement will suck all the peaceniks out, and the second move will chop them all off.”
Because Nixon refused to promise that he would remove all ground troops from Vietnam until POWs were repatriated, he hoped to mute dissent over the war by eliminating the deployment of draftees to Southeast Asia. While some 8,000 draftees a month had gone to Vietnam during 1970, the number had fallen to between 2,500 and 5,800 through September 1971, with 1,200 in November and only 500 in December. During the next six months, between 400 and 700 would be deployed each month, and after that, the number was likely to fall to about 300. A “no draftees to Vietnam” policy was now a realistic possibility, an NSC aide told Kissinger.
If he were going to win reelection, Nixon believed that he had to eliminate the bureaucratic battling that had produced leaks and undermined impressions of him as fully in command of foreign policy. He wasn’t sure that he could control Henry. On January 13, he told Haldeman that “maybe we’ve got to bite the bullet now and get him out. The problem is, if we don’t, he’ll be in the driver’s seat during the campaign, and we’ve got to remember that he did leak things to us in ’68, and we’ve got to assume he’s capable of doing the same to our opponents in ’72.”
But Kissinger was not about to leave, and Nixon saw more risk in showing Henry the door than in keeping him on. Consequently, on January 18, he sent Kissinger and Rogers a memo summarizing discussions he had instructed Haldeman and Mitchell, who was managing Nixon’s reelection campaign, to have with them about a “clear operating procedure” on China, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Cuba, and Chile. Nixon told Haldeman, “The only winner from our failure to work together would be our enemies both at home and abroad.”
Kissinger yielded grudgingly to Nixon’s pressure. When Haldeman and Mitchell met with him and Haig, “Henry kept interrupting us as we tried to start telling what the situation was. And we had to listen to a 45-minute tirade from him, at the end of which he emotionally said, ‘Tell me what your proposition is, and I’ll do it. I’m not here to strike a treaty with the P.’ [Yet] every time when we tried to tell him, he’d interrupt again, and go off.” Nor did the conversation settle anything. Within days, Henry was complaining that Rogers was “psychopathic.”
Nixon and Haldeman agreed that Henry and Rogers were both flawed men, but that Henry was of greater value to the administration than Rogers. For the time being, they saw nothing to do but “figure out a way to continue to live with both of them.” If they could “fuzz” the conflict or “ride through it until after the election,” they could then get rid of Rogers.
In the meantime, Nixon felt compelled to rein Rogers in on the Middle East. Haldeman was to remind him that dealings with Israel had significant domestic implications: “We can’t have the American Jews bitching about plane deliveries, and we can’t push Israel too hard and have a confrontation…We must not let this issue hurt us politically.” Nixon also wanted Mitchell to remind Rogers that in 1968 Jews gave $8 million to Humphrey during the last two weeks of the campaign. “We’ve got to be careful about their potential influence,” Nixon emphasized. Kissinger told Mitchell in January, “We must get Sisco to open the [military] pipeline this year. Sisco says we will sell planes in July 1973.” Mitchell responded, “That’s silly and not consistent with what the President said.” Kissinger promised Rabin that they would provide Israel with between twelve and twenty-four fighters over the next twelve months. Rabin didn’t need to be told that election-year politics were Israel’s best friend.
The greater political danger, however, remained the war. The Vietnam “debate is not a winner” for us, Kissinger told the president. “I know that,” Nixon replied. “The American people want us out.” Nixon hoped to enlist public support for his end-the-war policy with a nationally televised speech on January 25. Nixon was eager to speak before an expected North Vietnamese offensive. Otherwise, it might seem like a reaction signaling weakness and a desperate need to make peace.
The speech was a brief against Hanoi for failing to agree to generous terms put forward during Kissinger’s secret negotiations in Paris. Nixon revealed that Henry had made twelve trips to see the North Vietnamese representatives, but their insistence on toppling the Thieu government had stymied the talks. Nixon characterized his peace proposals as still open to negotiation and urged the American people to rally behind their government in its pursuit of peace. “Let us unite now, unite in our search for peace—a peace that is fair to both sides—a peace that can last.”
Nixon simultaneously wrote Brezhnev urging him to pressure the North Vietnamese into an agreement that would benefit Soviet interests as well as those of the United States. The alternative, Nixon warned, would be increased fighting that could only “serve to complicate the international situation.”
Nixon had small hope of a positive response from Hanoi or Moscow. The real target of his address was the U.S. electorate. But Nixon was concerned to ensure that the press and the public not see his speech as part of the presidential campaign. How, he asked Kissinger, do we answer charges that we are doing “this to embarrass the Democrats?” Henry suggested they say that public misunderstanding of the administration’s actions had become “so enormous” that the president needed to clear the air with a description of how hard they had tried to end the war.
Privately, they had almost no hope that anything would come of Nixon’s appeal, but they made it because antiwar sentiment in the United States left them no alternative. “The tragedy is,” Kissinger told Nixon, “—if there were a six year presidency—we could do it [end the fighting] by having a hundred thousand men there. Then we could do it.” Nixon replied, “Well, we can’t do it.” Henry conceded that “It can’t even be considered.”
The White House hoped that the speech would be a public relations coup. But when the New York Times and Washington Post described the reaction as “mixed,” Nixon assumed that they had won no converts. As a follow-up, they needed an effective PR campaign to overcome a negative press, which was unwaveringly critical toward the administration’s failure to end the war.
At a briefing for Republican congressional leaders, Nixon, Rogers, and Kissinger denounced the North Vietnamese as “masters of ‘delphic utterances,’” who were using political opponents of Nixon’s policies as “dupes.” Nixon urged them “to take the speech and fight back.” Barry Goldwater told his congressional colleagues that “they ought to take this [the president’s] proposal and, with regard to Democratic doves, ‘shove it down their throats and then shove it up the other end until it meets someplace.’”
Reverting to campaign tactics that had carried him to victories in the past, Nixon now demanded that everyone at the White House slam Democratic critics as “the party of surrender,” which wanted “a Communist South Vietnam. We should drop the subtleties and fight,” he told Haldeman. He told Colson and Haldeman: “It is vital to sustain a massive counterattack on the partisan critics of our proposal.” They should be described as “consciously giving aid and comfort to the enemy…They want the United States to surrender.”
A Washington Post editorial calling his speech “The Same Old Shell Game” infuriated Nixon. He instructed Ziegler to remove Post reporters from the list of press people accompanying the president to China in February. “They deliberately screwed us, and we are going to have to get back at them.”
Kissinger believed that Nixon’s firm stand on Vietnam was having an impact on Hanoi. On February 14, when Walters sent word from Paris that the North Vietnamese wanted to have a luncheon meeting with Kissinger on March 11, Henry was “ecstatic.” Their unprecedented invitation to a meal and the promised presence of both Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho convinced Henry that there would be no offensive and that it might be the prelude to a peace agreement. He was sure that the buildup of U.S. airpower and the likelihood of the president’s reelection were forcing Hanoi into a settlement.
Likewise, he believed that the administration’s refusal to abandon Vietnam had persuaded the Chinese and the Soviets to invite Nixon to their respective capitals. The Summits “would have been impossible had we simply collapsed in Vietnam,” he wrote later.
Kissinger’s assumptions about a North Vietnamese offensive, Hanoi’s interest in a settlement, and the impact of the administration’s Vietnam policy on Moscow and Peking were wishful thinking. Hanoi had every intention of striking fresh military blows at Saigon in the spring of 1972 and of holding to its demand for an end to Thieu’s regime. Moreover, neither the Soviets nor the Chinese were receptive to improved relations with the United States because it continued to fight in Vietnam. It was America’s capacity as a superpower that made all the difference. With the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops and the questionable reliability of South Vietnamese forces, U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed like a foregone conclusion. But America’s capacity to incinerate a major adversary made it a threat and an asset in the rivalry between Moscow and Peking. Détente with the Soviets and Chinese rested not on anything we did in Vietnam but on the benefits each of them saw in having the United States as a kind of ally or, at least, not an adversary in their struggle with each other.
NIXON PREPARED for his trip to Peking beginning February 17 with characteristic care. He wished to anticipate and consider every possible development to assure against anything that might detract from what he saw as a great asset in his reelection campaign and the overall record of his presidency.
In January, he sent a party of eighteen national security and public relations officials, led by Haig and Ziegler, to spend a week in China preparing for the Summit. Because a significant part of the preparation involved TV coverage, which Nixon believed essential to give his trip the resonance he wanted in the United States, print journalists began complaining that the White House was making “a TV spectacular out of it.” But he dismissed their objections as “inevitable,” and predicted that the importance of the trip would dwarf all the critical harping. “People think that China is the overriding event of our time,” Nixon told Kissinger, and the press was “panting” after the story.
Before going to China, Nixon took counsel from a number of books and asked André Malraux, France’s cultural affairs minister under de Gaulle, whose fame as a philosopher and writer had brought him together with Chou and Mao Zedong, to help him understand them. In a White House conversation, Malraux admitted that his knowledge of Mao and events in China were not up to date, but he described his contacts with Mao as “very close.” Nixon asked Malraux why the Chinese leaders wanted to meet with him. Malraux thought it was “inevitable”—the product of a desire for U.S. economic help in raising China’s standard of living. China, he asserted, was indifferent to the outside world, except as it threatened her. The Chinese had “never helped anyone. Not Pakistan. Not Vietnam. China’s foreign policy was a brilliant lie. The Chinese do not believe in it; they only believe in China.”
In contrast to Malraux’s analysis, which put little emphasis on the Sino-Soviet split, Kissinger urged Nixon to see broad-gauged geopolitical developments behind the invitation to Peking. Mao and Chou were “hard realists who calculate they need us because of a threatening Soviet Union, a resurgent Japan, and a potentially independent Taiwan…Assuring the security of their country and their system for their successors must preoccupy them.” They hoped to use the United States to help fend off any foreign attack.
As for Chou, he was a statesman on a level with de Gaulle. He was also an actor who was not easy to read. “Although he will sometimes state agreement with what you say, he will often merely nod, and you cannot be sure whether this gesture means comprehension or accord.” Kissinger had never met Mao, but he had heard that he was even more impressive than Chou. Where Chou was “the tactician, the administrator, the negotiator, the master of details and thrust and parry,” Mao was “the philosopher, the poet, the grand strategist, the inspirer, the romantic. He sets the direction and the framework and leaves the implementation to his trusted lieutenant…They will make a truly imposing and formidable pair.”
Nixon summed up Henry’s analysis by saying that “the three points Mao wanted before he died: (1) China must be united—that means Taiwan; (2) China should be a great nation, respected; and (3) economic progress.” Henry replied: “That third point they will want to do on their own.” Nixon responded, “You can be sure we won’t raise it.”
Although they were about to enter into conversations that would affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Nixon and his entourage couldn’t rise above political image-making and petty bickering. On the plane across the Pacific, Nixon, Haldeman, Kissinger, and Ziegler debated the advantages of holding a press briefing during a stop in Hawaii. Henry thought it a bad idea: it would convince the Chinese that the trip was “just a PR venture.” Ziegler suggested that he hold “a reception for the press, rather than a substantive briefing.” Henry wanted to do this himself, but accepted that neither the president nor he should be directly involved. Nixon told Ziegler to stress the importance of bipartisan support for the meetings in Peking. “Can we act as a nation or simply as a babble of voices?” he wanted Ziegler to say. It was essential, Nixon stressed, to control the media and create the impression that the president was engaged in difficult negotiations in which he acquitted himself effectively.
Nixon constantly fretted over the competence of his staff to produce the desired results. During the week he spent in China, Nixon “had a really tough time sleeping,” and he “brooded over the problems he was dealing with, the lack of understanding of him by the press and others that are bothering him,” Haldeman recorded.
After landing in Hawaii, Haldeman and Henry had “an incredible chat with Mrs. Nixon, who wasn’t the least bit interested in getting any advice from any of us, particularly Henry, on how to handle things,” Haldeman wrote. As a shadow figure who had been kept in the background, she was antagonistic to Nixon’s aides and any attempt to use her for their purposes. Nixon and Henry also argued over the best way to begin the discussions with the Chinese. Nixon rejected Henry’s advice that he read an opening statement and engage in “long, drawn-out historical and philosophical discussions with Chou.”
When they landed in Peking at eleven-thirty on the morning of February 21, Nixon insisted on leaving the plane alone. Rogers, Kissinger, and the rest of the White House cast were to wait until the president could be filmed shaking hands with Chou. “We had been instructed on this point at least a dozen times before our arrival in Peking,” Henry recorded. Nixon was determined not to share the spotlight before the millions of viewers at home and around the world as television captured the historic moment. The Nixon party was upset by the absence of anyone in the streets as they drove to the guest houses in the center of the city. But Nixon instructed everyone to get out the line that they had expected neither crowds nor hoopla on their arrival; it was, of course, exactly what Nixon hoped would greet him.
Public relations or image making was not absent from the Chinese side. “The reception was understated in the extreme.” All the notables greeting the Americans at the airport were attired in drab Mao jackets, suggesting no distinction in status. Anyone knowledgeable about the Communist government, however, understood that someone’s place in line coincided with his position in the government hierarchy. The Chinese consciously assigned their American visitors to particular guest houses according to their status.
A tone of grandiosity on both sides marked the visit. Consciously acting on a world stage, Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, and Chou reinforced each other’s sense of importance. It was as if they shared a conviction in their common greatness, which their coming together made all the more real to themselves and believable to millions of fascinated onlookers. “Your handshake,” Chou told Nixon during their ride into Peking, “came over the vastest ocean in the world—twenty-five years of no communication.”
Shortly after their arrival, a summons came from Mao to the president and Kissinger, but not the secretary of state, who was transparently a man of less importance, to see China’s emperor in the Imperial City, where he presided over the Kingdom of Heaven, which is how the Chinese traditionally viewed their domain. It was all evidence, as Kissinger remarked later, “that the mystery and majesty of the eternal China endured amidst a revolution that professed to destroy all established forms. There were no trappings that could account for the sense of power Mao conveyed.”
Nixon and Kissinger described this first meeting with Mao in tones of hushed awe. Henry called it “our encounter with history.” The seventy-eight-year-old Mao, who had suffered several strokes that had impaired his capacity to move and his ability to speak, was helped to his feet on their arrival. He stood holding Nixon’s hand for about a minute. The conversation, which lasted a little over an hour, half of which was consumed by translations, was notable for its understatement on Mao’s part. As a way to mute the Taiwan question, for example, Mao introduced Chiang Kai-shek into the discussion by declaring that Chiang “doesn’t approve of this.” Describing the name-calling between them, Mao said, “Actually, the history of our friendship with him is much longer than the history of your friendship with him,” signaling, as Kissinger appreciated, that the Taiwan issue was one for the Chinese to settle themselves.
The contrast in style between Nixon and Mao was on display in their relatively brief conversation. Eager to get down to business and score points, Nixon, mindful that his reputation as a fierce anti-Communist might remain a bar to trust, declared that past disagreements should not shape current decisions. “What brings us together is a recognition of a new situation in the world and a recognition on our part that what is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy,” he said. “What is important is its policy toward the rest of the world and toward us.” When Nixon ticked off the countries—Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union—that were of importance to both of them, Mao responded, “All those troublesome problems, I don’t want to get into very much. I think your topic is better—philosophic questions.” When Nixon made reference to the upcoming election in the United States, Mao repeated the point: “Those questions are not questions to be discussed in my place. They should be discussed with the Premier.”
Nixon was eager to flatter Mao. Despite his initial resistance to Kissinger’s suggestion that he engage Mao in “historical and philosophical discussions,” he told Chou that he would like to talk with the Chairman about “philosophic problems.” When Mao asked about this, Nixon responded: “I have read the Chairman’s poems and speeches, and I knew he was a professional philosopher.” Kissinger interjected, “I used to assign the Chairman’s collective writings to my classes at Harvard.” Mao declared, “Those writings of mine aren’t anything. There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.” Nixon objected: “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world.” But Mao insisted: “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.”
Nixon brought the conversation back to the present: “We know you and the Prime Minister have taken great risks in inviting us here. But having read some of the Chairman’s statements, I know he is one who sees when an opportunity comes, that you must seize the hour and seize the day.” Mao dismissed the reference to his words by joking: “I think that, generally speaking, people like me sound a lot of big cannons.” Chou laughed.
Lighthearted banter disguised the seriousness of Mao’s remarks. “Mao would deliver dicta,” Kissinger wrote later. “They would catch the listener by surprise, creating an atmosphere at once confused and slightly menacing. It was as if one were dealing with a figure from another world who occasionally lifted a corner of the shroud that veils the future, permitting a glimpse but never the entire vision that he alone has seen.”
“I voted for you during your last election,” Mao declared with a broad smile. You “voted for the lesser of two evils,” Nixon said. “‘I like rightists,’ Mao responded, obviously enjoying himself…‘I am comparatively happy when these people on the right come into power.’” Nixon reinforced the point. In America, “at least at this time, those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about.” Kissinger added, “There is another point, Mr. President. Those on the left are pro-Soviet and would not encourage a move toward the People’s Republic.”
As they departed, Mao, in a slow shuffle, walked them to the door, confiding that he had not been feeling well. “But you look very good,” Nixon assured him. “Appearances are deceiving,” Mao replied, perhaps suggesting that the Americans would have to give substance to their friendly words.
Meetings over the next seven days were carefully orchestrated. Mornings were given over to touring, with TV cameras giving Americans a glimpse of China’s monuments and long history. More important to Nixon, it encouraged pictures of him as a world statesman accorded honor and respect in a distant land. Fortunately, the images resonated more forcefully than his words: “This is a great wall,” he told the press in a comment about the Great Wall memorable only for its banality. Afternoons were reserved for conversations between the president and Chou and evenings were given over to banquets with hundreds of people, including sumptuous eating, drinking, and elaborate toasts punctuated by shouts of gam bei or “bottoms up,” compelling toasters and recipients of the toasts to empty glasses of mao-tai, which Henry likened to combustible airplane fuel. The banquets were also carried on live television in the United States between 6 A.M. and 8 A.M.
The afternoon discussions were most notable for their high-flown rhetoric and limited substance. “We cannot cover up with protocol and fine words the differences we may have,” Nixon declared. “It does not serve the cause of better relations to put a cosmetic covering over fundamental differences of opinion. The conventional way to handle a meeting at the Summit like this, while the world is watching, is to have meetings for several days…and then put out a weasel-worded communiqué covering up the problems.” Chou agreed: “If we were to act like that we would be not only deceiving the people, first of all, we would be deceiving ourselves.” Nixon reinforced the point: “That is adequate when meetings are between states that do not affect the future of the world, but we would not be meeting our responsibility for meetings…which will affect our friends in the Pacific and all over the world for years to come.”
Chou’s pronouncement hardly squared with his history as the premier of a totalitarian state, where press and dissenting opinion were strictly controlled. Moreover, Nixon’s statements little reflected his determination to limit access to their conversations. “The Chairman can be sure,” he told Mao, “that whatever we discuss, or what I and the Prime Minister discuss, nothing goes beyond the room. That is the only way to have conversations at the highest level.” Not even his own secretary of state would have full access to the records of these talks, Nixon confided. “I’m determined where the fate of our two countries, and possibly the fate of the world is involved, that we can talk in confidence,” Nixon added. It was essential that both sides feel free to speak frankly, which would be undermined by “disclosures to the press.” Public announcements should be approved by both sides. It was no problem for his government, Chou declared. “We can immediately reach agreement on that.”
The conversations contained no surprises. Nixon mostly elaborated what Kissinger had stated about Taiwan, Moscow, Japan, South Asia, and Vietnam in his earlier visits. And Chou deepened Nixon’s and Kissinger’s impressions of a government fearful of being encircled by hostile powers led by the Soviet Union. The task of the new Sino-American relationship was resisting “hegemonic aspirations,” which was code for Soviet ambitions. China had no intention of intervening in the Southeast Asian conflict, whatever its sympathies for North Vietnam. The emphasis was on ensuring a shared perspective on the dangers to international order.
Because the conversations yielded no dramatic substantive commitments (continuing official ties to Taiwan ruled out recognition of Communist China), it seemed essential to issue a communiqué that signaled the significant change in Sino-American relations.
Kissinger labored for twenty hours with his Chinese counterpart to find words that accommodated the needs of both sides on Taiwan and the Soviet Union. Where the Nixon administration was under domestic pressure not to abandon Taiwan, Mao’s government couldn’t afford to depart from its insistence on the withdrawal of U.S. support for Taiwanese independence.
They settled the issue by a U.S. acknowledgment that there was only one China of which Taiwan was “a part.” In return, the Chinese agreed to a declaration that the U.S. government “reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms 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.” In short, America’s withdrawal rested on an implicit Chinese Communist commitment to avoid a military resolution of its differences with the Nationalists in Taipei.
More important, the two sides signaled their shared determination to advance toward “the normalization of relations” and resist Soviet expansionism. They declared their opposition “to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony…Both sides are of the view that it would be against the interests of the peoples of the world for any major country to collude with another against other countries, or for major countries to divide up the world into spheres of interest.”
With the conference coming to a close, Nixon became anguished over whether the Summit would be seen as a great accomplishment. On February 27, the Americans flew to Shanghai before leaving for home on February 28. In the middle of the night, Nixon called Haldeman and Kissinger to his suite on the upper floor of a modern hotel in the center of the city. Nixon couldn’t sleep, despite consuming several mao-tais. He must have been thoroughly sloshed, having drunk a half dozen before and during lunch and several more during dinner.
He insisted on a discussion with his exhausted aides about the results of the past week. He had little confidence that the press, with which he felt locked in unrelenting conflict, would understand “what really has been done.” He consoled himself with the thought that his success “will come out eventually.” The conversation later moved Henry to describe Nixon as this “lonely, tortured, and insecure man” who was begging for “confirmation and reassurance.” Because the achievements were genuine, “it was easy to give Nixon the reassurance he wanted,” Kissinger says.
But Kissinger’s positive outlook didn’t erase Nixon’s doubts. He pressed Henry on the plane ride back to the United States to take pains “to cover the right wing.” On his return, he provided guidelines to Rogers, Laird, and Kissinger on the administration’s public approach to discussions about the Summit. When he briefed congressional leaders on February 29, he couldn’t resist chiding the press. He reported that he told Mao and Chou, “If you don’t believe what the press says about me, I won’t believe what the press says about you.” He described one reporter’s conclusion that the U.S. and the PRC had come together because “their philosophies were not that far apart” as “naïve.” It was mutual “cold-blooded interest” that had brought them together.
Although Nixon understood perfectly what had led to the revolution in relations with China and was right to believe that long-term judgments would be almost universally positive, he could not let go of the uncertainties that drove his ambition—no triumph, however great, could satiate his quest for acceptance or, perhaps better stated, self-esteem. If his complaint to his therapist after the 1962 defeat that he was someone of little worth had some connection to his life experience, his gloomy ruminations after his success in China speak volumes about his inner life. To be sure, there was press criticism and complaints from the right that he had sold out Taiwan, but the more universal reaction to the Summit was enthusiastic approval.
“We encountered the curious phenomenon,” Kissinger said, “that success seemed to unsettle Nixon more than failure. He seemed obsessed by the fear that he was not receiving adequate credit.” He could not accept the reality that actions speak louder than posturing. “The conviction that Nixon’s standing depended less on his actions than on their presentation was a bane of his Administration,” Kissinger observed. “It conveyed a lack of assurance even during his greatest accomplishments. It imparted a frenetic quality to the search for support, an endless quest that proved to be unfulfillable.”