Interest in George H. W. Bush’s presidency has grown in direct proportion to the violence and instability of the twenty-first century’s first decade. Many recall with fondness the end of the Cold War and Bush’s White House tenure, conjuring halcyon (if not necessarily accurate) memories of a more optimistic moment for the international community, when American-led peace and democracy seemed ready to flower throughout the world. Fascination with Bush’s legacy—in effect, a desire to glean from his presidency applicable contemporary lessons—grows steadily. His diplomatic record is widely lauded, with successful navigation of the Cold War’s end, Germany’s reunification, victory in Panama and the Gulf, and negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement heading his administration’s list of achievements.
Yet George H. W. Bush himself largely remains an enigma, as the implications of those achievements remain in dispute. A generation after he left office, Bush’s diplomatic reputation offers less a collection of guiding principles than a canvas upon which contemporary commentators paint their own preferred outlines of a successful foreign policy. To some, Bush has become a sage embodiment of a more pragmatic American foreign policy; to others, the poster child for policies built on narrow interests rather than universal ideals. Depending on which particular axe the speaker chooses to grind, Bush was a reaper of geopolitical good fortune or a sower of international discontent.
Timing explains much of this confusion. Juxtaposed in history’s stream against the eloquent certitude of Ronald Reagan, the intellectual flexibility of Bill Clinton, and the unbridled certainty of George W. Bush, the elder Bush, known for his prudence (itself a malleable virtue), remains largely ill defined as an international strategist. This is a particularly unfortunate puzzle, because decisions made by Bush’s White House not only were historic in their own right but also left a lasting imprint on the central strategic questions of the twenty-first century, including the inherent tensions between political stability and economic modernization, and the promise of a democratic peace alongside the potential chaos of ethnic and religious strife catalyzed by popular rule. A generation later, not even the flashpoints of American foreign policy have changed: they remain Iraq, China, Russia, free trade, and oil. The questions that troubled Bush during that more optimistic time continue to plague American policymakers today.
This much is certain: Bush governed during a period of tremendous international transition, the end of an old order and the birth of something new. The half-century-long Cold War came to an end on his watch, and Washington assumed center stage in the international system that took its place. Bush thus led America at the peak of its power during the long American century. The United States feared no strategic competitor during his time in office. After the Gulf War, Americans did not even fear a reprise of the Vietnam syndrome of their past. In geopolitical terms—measured solely by a nation’s might in comparison to that of its allies and adversaries—Bush during his single term might well have been the most powerful president the United States has known, and thus for a brief span the most powerful leader in world history.
Yet what did this powerful man stand for, save pragmatism and prudence, and how do we begin to evaluate his diplomatic record given the continuity of international quandaries remaining from his time in office? He governed during revolutionary times; this much cannot be denied. But was Bush responsible for fundamental change or merely its midwife? Was he a master strategist owed credit or blame for the new international system born on his watch, or merely a capable manager skilled more in holding a steady hand on the wheel of the ship of state than in charting a new course for it? Answering these questions—and, in turn, divining what lessons his choices offer subsequent leaders—demands enunciation of his core beliefs about diplomacy and the nature of the international system.
Such answers are not easily gleaned from his biography. Bush made his political living at the crossroads of broad trends easy to identify yet difficult to fully reconcile, being at once Northeastern yet Texan, religious yet hardly doctrinal, conservative yet with roots in the Republican Party’s progressive wing, born to established Eastern wealth yet consciously remade in a West Texas oilfield. His career epitomized the growth of the Sunbelt after 1945, where conservatism flourished in response to change and prosperity. He is not, in other words, a man easily defined, especially given the shadow his son’s diplomatic record invariably casts over even impartial assessments of the elder Bush’s accomplishments.
Bush’s China Diary reveals his core foreign-policy principles. It recounts in his own words one of his most formative diplomatic experiences: his tenure as de facto United States ambassador to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1974 to 1975. It was in China that Bush most fully developed the gentlemanly diplomatic style—equal parts personal, genial, pragmatic, and conservative—that became his hallmark. This was his longest overseas experience since World War II, coming in the wake of Watergate and after more than a decade in domestic politics. One striking aspect of Bush’s career as a diplomat—given the widespread perception during his presidency that he was more concerned with foreign than domestic affairs—was how late in life he came to international relations. Bush’s first foray into global politics did not occur until 1970. He landed in China as Washington’s envoy a mere four years later. Even these tentative moves toward diplomacy resulted more from circumstance than a real passion for foreign affairs, though a passion for diplomacy eventually developed.
Bush’s time in China came during a crossroads moment in his career and at an impressionable juncture in his life. His experiences over fourteen months—decamped in the small American compound in Beijing, at the epicenter of the complex and sensitive Sino-American relationship during a particularly tumultuous period for American Cold War diplomacy—changed the course of his life. They surely left their mark on his diplomatic style. The era he witnessed while in Asia included the end of the Vietnam War, tenuous détente with the Soviet bear, the growth of an American relationship with a rising though still Communist China, and the steady wearing down of American international prestige that underlay much of the 1970s. Each was a challenge to the established order of the Cold War’s first half that exactly coincided with Bush’s adult life, and each successive blow pushed Bush to question the only international system he had ever truly known. After his personal engagement with the exhausting political firestorm that was Watergate, with its attendant erosion of public trust in the political system, he was primed while in China to question all that he had once taken on faith. Service so far from home during such tumultuous times made Bush define who he was as a diplomat, a strategist, and ultimately as a leader. His China Diary was thus more than a daily record of his activities. It became instead his private sketchbook for his later presidential diplomacy, the canvas upon which he first seriously began to paint his own diplomatic image.
The diary itself is remarkably accessible, composed in a comfortable style and devoid of either pretense or predetermined obfuscation. This accessibility reflects both the style of its author and the circumstances of its composition. Never one to employ a convoluted term when a simple one would do, Bush also never suspected others would read his journal. He wrote this China Diary for himself. Unlike more self-conscious journals composed for a wider audience, and certainly unlike memoirs often written after the fact in order to refract history’s judgment, Bush’s daily account is an easily read description of his adventures and impressions while in an exotic land. Written only for personal use and not with additional readers in mind, its most pertinent themes and remarkable observations are scattered throughout the text, and it is that characteristic of the diary that prompts this chapter.
This essay is intended to serve two main purposes. First, it offers a short sketch of Bush’s political life and evolution as a diplomat in order to place his experience in China in a broader perspective. It portrays the Bush who landed in Beijing in 1974, the diplomat he was at the time and the one he would become, and the ways his China experience influenced his later presidential decisions. Second, it highlights several of the China Diary’s main themes, drawing into sharp relief those events and principles that formed the foundation for Bush’s subsequent diplomacy and style of leadership. It is intended to make Bush’s China Diary more useful to those interested in this president and intrigued by his place in history.
Bush’s diary offers a vital source for such an endeavor. Neither his public statements nor records of his most intimate moments with advisers shed much light on the core aspects of his leadership. Even his most fervent supporters concede that verbal acuity was never Bush’s strong suit. Words often failed him from the bully pulpit, but he was also hesitant by nature to enunciate his abiding principles with specificity. He routinely rejected language crafted for him by professional speechwriters and advisers, thinking their well-chosen words would sound inauthentic coming from his lips. The broad terms he employed as a consequence—including some of those most frequently associated with his presidency, like “new world order” or “vision thing”—allowed others to define Bush according to their own agenda. When asked to define what Bush meant by “new world order,” for example, Bush’s White House Press Secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, conceded, “Well I don’t think it ever really got defined. . . . The problem with that, of course, is that it leaves a vacuum of definition that others can jump in and fill.” Public rhetoric is always an unreliable gauge of a president’s true sentiments, being as much political theater as political science. In Bush’s case it would appear less helpful than with other Oval Office occupants to study his public words as a means of discerning his private thoughts, because the precise words he spoke were infrequently his own, and those that came from his heart were most often broad to the point of imprecision.1
Records of Bush’s private words are only marginally more helpful in discerning his core diplomatic principles. Believing that discussions of overarching theories of international relations were best left to professional theoreticians, Bush eschewed broad philosophical discussions, even when alone with his closest associates. He was by his own admission a “practical man,” as he declared in 1987 when kicking off his presidential bid: one who preferred “what’s real” to what was “airy and abstract. I like what works . . . and I do not yearn to lead a crusade.” Asked to recall any instance when Bush willingly discussed a personal theory of international relations, his national security adviser and close friend Brent Scowcroft could recall few if any such moments. “He’s very reticent to talk in those terms,” Scowcroft explained. “He does not talk in a philosophical way. He’s uncomfortable talking in that way.” Bush was guided by overarching principles when it came to the international system, Scowcroft believed. But “they only come out . . . [by seeing] the way he does things.”2
Bush also frequently hid his personal views from the documentary record, though more in the interests of effective leadership than to purposefully obscure history’s critique. Unlike Dwight Eisenhower —also a well-known obfuscator in his presidential utterances, but a president who ruled his national security team with a clearly articulated iron will behind closed doors—Bush preferred to keep his conclusions largely private during key meetings, lest his subordinates interpret his utterances as inviolate decrees. He wanted open discussion in his presence, and he consciously cultivated as many varied opinions as possible. He routinely asked aides to debate the merits of their conflicting positions in his presence, hoping that a front-row seat for these “scheduled train wrecks,” as they were called in the West Wing, would allow him to appreciate not only the conclusions his deputies reached but their thought processes as well. He rarely intervened in these debates, believing that any interjection would color whatever discussion followed, and he confidently allowed others to speak first, often during crucial cabinet or National Security Council (NSC) meetings. Before one of the first NSC meetings following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, for example, Bush asked Scowcroft to present the forceful stance against Iraq’s aggression that the two men had previously discussed in private. Those in the room knew that Scowcroft’s words invariably carried great weight with the president, but his views would be easier for the other participants to debate if Bush himself did not open the discussion. The transcript of the meeting’s discussion therefore reveals a largely quiet president, belying his engagement with the crisis at hand.3
Bush’s diary is thus among our best sources for discerning his thoughts on the international system, as it was one of the few places he felt comfortable fully articulating his abiding principles. Like a scientist’s workbook or an artist’s sketchbook, it is filled with little inconsistencies, arguments with himself, and the like. Nevertheless these rough diary sketches do in fact form coherent guideposts and provide a clear window into the origins of his successful diplomacy —to no small extent because Bush’s China Diary reveals his reactions to one of the most confounding periods of the Cold War.
For all that Bush’s White House years arguably coincided with the apex of American power, the glum 1970s saw its nadir. American-backed South Vietnamese forces would lose their generation-long struggle against Communism while Bush was in China. Saigon would fall. Laos and Cambodia would descend into chaos. Historic problems in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, in addition to the global struggle against international Communism, challenged American policymakers while Bush served in Beijing. At home, inflation, unemployment, and gas prices were on the rise; the dollar seemed in a steady decline; and faith in governmental institutions fell to historic lows in the wake of Watergate. As National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger explained, the central problem facing the United States during this period was the decline of American power not in absolute terms but rather relative to the rest of the world. Although still strong, America was no longer the globe’s preponderant power. American leaders could no longer direct the free world by fiat, a privilege they had largely enjoyed since World War II. Some seven thousand miles from home, these events prompted Bush to question the very foundations of American politics and foreign policy as his country entered this new and complex era. “Where is our ideology?” he asked himself. “Where is our principle? What indeed do we stand for? These things must be made clear.”4 He believed that Washington still had an international role to play despite such setbacks. But “we have got to be realistic,” he cautioned. “We have to have our eyes open.”5
The conclusions Bush reached in response to these questions reveal a man committed to American values yet cognizant of the limits of American power; a leader dedicated to personal diplomacy as a means of navigating the rougher waters of international relations; and a strategist deeply committed to balancing Washington’s interests with those of its allies. They demonstrate his overriding belief in stability over radical change; a willingness to engage the perspectives of other nations; and a desire to promote an American model through example rather than force. These were principles that had become ingrained in him over the course of his life before 1989, and the ones that most clearly defined his presidential diplomacy. They were most sharply defined during his fourteen months in China in the mid-1970s. The Bush presidency was in this sense made in China.
That such a relatively short period in a far-off land would matter so deeply might surprise readers familiar with Bush’s life, given that he was widely regarded, upon taking office, as among the twentieth century’s best-prepared presidents in terms of the complexities of foreign policy. Beginning in the 1970s he served in rapid succession as Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations, de facto ambassador to Beijing, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although his other positions during the decade were not diplomatic posts in the strictest sense, he also worked as head of the Republican National Committee during Richard Nixon’s final years in office and as an international businessman during the Carter administration. His subsequent presidential bid landed him a spot as Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1980, and international affairs dominated his vice presidential agenda. He chaired the White House’s international crisis management committee (termed by one historian “a kind of NSC-plus”), and frequently met and sometimes negotiated with visiting foreign leaders and dignitaries. Bush visited sixty-eight nations during these years, joking that regular attendance at state funerals provided the motto “You die, I fly.” Yet in practical terms, such travels, even on condolence missions, would offer Bush the opportunity to meet the world’s elite long before he assumed the Oval Office.6
Despite this impressive list of prepresidential credentials, Bush came to foreign affairs late in his professional life. With better electoral luck, he might never have cultivated this interest at all. From the time he flew his last mission as a naval aviator in the Pacific theater during World War II until he lost his bid for a Texas Senate seat in 1970, Bush was a domestically focused businessman and politician. He made his fortune in the West Texas oil fields after graduating from Yale in 1948, and, though he founded a successful offshore drilling company named Zapata Oil, the major share of its profits during its first decade came from projects near the American coast. He moved his family to Houston by the end of the 1950s, to an area whose growing conservatism would prove a bellwether for the South’s changing political winds. Inspired by John Tower’s surprising victory in a 1961 special election for Lyndon Johnson’s vacated Senate seat, one of the GOP’s first statewide victories since Reconstruction, Bush became party chairman for a burgeoning Houston district in 1963. He hoped to forge a winning coalition at the ballot box by melding the social conservatives then on the rise in Republican circles—many from the ultranationalist John Birch Society, which preached isolationism, fear of international organizations, and vigorous opposition to Communism— with the fiscally conservative moderates from whose number he hailed. “We’re all Republicans,” he cautioned constituents who considered the Birchers too radical, “and we’re not going to divide ourselves, calling anyone ‘crazies’ or nuts.”7
It was easy for Bush to be accepting of different conservative ideologies during his first statewide campaign in 1964, a bid for the Senate against the left-leaning Ralph Yarborough, because his own political views were far from fully formed. He wanted passionately to hold office, believing it a duty for the privileged and successful to seek public service. Yet he was uncomfortable exposing too much of his inner thinking to voters on the campaign trail—in part because the modesty his mother had constantly preached during his youth conflicted with the traditional boasts of the campaign trail, but also because Bush simply did not hold his views as close to his heart as did many of the GOP’s more strident conservatives. As a consequence he offered himself as a hodgepodge of East and West. He mixed the Eastern establishment, internationalist Republicanism of his youth—a wing of the party that claimed his father Prescott Bush, a Connecticut senator and Eisenhower ally, for whom probusiness sentiments outranked social issues—with the stringent frontier conservatism then coming to the fore in Texas GOP circles. His 1964 campaign focused more on attacking his opponent’s liberalism than extolling his own virtues, and he even integrated much of the Birchers’ right-wing critiques into his own stump speeches, though always with a caveat befitting his upbringing. “Bush said America ought to get the hell out of the UN,” journalist Richard Ben Cramer wrote, “if that organization seated the Red Chinese.” Washington should reduce foreign aid, Bush declared—but it should target those cuts against states that were soft on Communism. And it should be in Vietnam to win—though only using levels of military force the Pentagon advised. One can almost hear the pauses and see the ellipses when reading Bush’s statements from this period, denoting a man more eager to hold public office than certain why he wanted to.8
Bush campaigned enthusiastically and by all accounts effectively across his adopted state, but 1964 was Lyndon Johnson’s year. He trumped Arizona’s Barry Goldwater in the national contest, deriding his opponent as too hawkish, too doctrinaire, and too conservative. Yarborough rode Johnson’s coattails to victory, and conservatism appeared on the decline nationally in the wake of his landslide. Bush’s nascent political career appeared to be in jeopardy.
Bush took from his electoral defeat a renewed desire to transform the GOP by driving out the right-wingers and isolationists he blamed for his party’s national drubbing, and in doing so he firmly sided with the internationalist wing of his father’s Republican party. This was once more a decision made more for pragmatic than ideological reasons: he believed Republicans would achieve long-term success only through appeals to the broadest possible range of voters. “I am anxious to stay active in the Party,” he confided to Nixon, while admitting that he “felt that the immediate job would be to get rid of some of the people in the Party who [permit] no difference, who through their overly dedicated conservatism are going to always keep the party small.” They were in fact “a bunch of ‘nuts,’” Bush conceded, putting aside his previous prohibition on such labels, and “responsible people are going to have to stand up and do something about it.” He said the same to Senator Tower and to Peter O’Donnell, chairman of the Texas State Republican Party. “I think it is essential that the State Executive Committee go on record in favor of responsibility and as opposed to Birchism (whether by name or not is debatable). This is no move towards liberalism—it simply takes some long overdue action in favor of right and against these mean, negative, super-patriots who give Texas Republicans the unfortunate image of total irresponsibility.”9
Bush’s first electoral defeat revealed his discomfort with doctrinaire definitions of his own ideology. and with ideologues more generally, especially those who rejected the internationalism of his youth. He was still far from making foreign affairs the center of his career, however. Narrowing his sights for 1966, he won election to Congress on a moderate platform. Upon his arrival in Washington he was chosen as president of the incoming congressional class and placed on the influential Ways and Means Committee (the only freshman so honored), a testament in part to his father’s enduring influence on Capitol Hill. Four years later, with Nixon’s backing, he gave up his safe House seat in order to run once more against Yarborough for the Senate. Bush essentially lost the general election after the Democratic primary, when the moderate Lloyd Bentsen, with whom Bush shared many policies, defeated Yarborough for his party’s nomination. “Given a choice between Phillie Winkle and Winkle Pop,” one Texas magazine laughed in 1970, “Texan’ll take the dude with the Democratic label.” The magazine’s prediction proved correct.10
With little desire to return to Texas after his brief taste of Washington power, Bush lobbied Nixon for the job he truly wanted: Treasury secretary. The Treasury post was one of Washington’s most coveted, providing its holder a leg up on any future bid for higher office. But Nixon preferred another Texan for this critical post, John Connally, believing appointment of a Democrat from that crucial state could help shore up his own reelection bid in 1972. “Every Cabinet should have at least one potential president in it,” Nixon believed, and he did not think Bush fit the bill. Connally’s appointment came “much to George’s disappointment,” his close friend James Baker later recalled. Undaunted, Bush surprised Nixon by offering to become Connally’s deputy. Yet again Nixon demurred. Hoping to keep Bush in Washington but unsure how best to employ him, he suggested instead a nondescript position as a White House adviser with an undefined portfolio. After Daniel Patrick Moynihan refused Nixon’s invitation to become ambassador to the U.N., however, the president offered Bush the job. He accepted without hesitation, thus forging from the ashes of political defeat the beginning of a diplomatic career that would carry him to the White House.11
Bush’s path to the United Nations is revealing. His service in New York was his first real exposure to international politics, and thus the first résumé line cited by supporters who later trumpeted his qualifications for the presidency. Yet diplomacy was not his first choice in 1970, and paradoxically it was his passion for domestic politics that ultimately secured him this first diplomatic job. Upon learning he was being considered for the U.N. position, Bush lobbied hard for it. He argued that he would be more than Nixon’s loyal spokesman at the world body: his social and family connections throughout the Northeast might aid the president’s reelection bid. In New York he could “spell out [Nixon’s domestic] program with some style,” Bush promised, in a candid pitch that revealed his willingness to openly state his qualifications alongside the qualities he lacked. Predicting that neither Nixon nor the domineering Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s principal foreign policy aide, would allow him much of a voice in foreign affairs, he instead made his ignorance of diplomacy a virtue. “Sitting in [Chief of Staff H. R.] Haldeman’s choice office in the West Wing,” Bush recorded, we “discussed what the White House would be looking for in a U.N. ambassador. Obviously someone who didn’t overestimate his role: the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations . . . doesn’t make policy, he carries it out.” He added, “even if someone who took the job didn’t understand that, Henry Kissinger would give him a twenty-four-hour crash course on the subject.” After Bush had become president, Nixon wrote of his decision that he thought “it would be helpful to him in the future to have this significant foreign policy experience.” This was a kind way of saying that Bush was unqualified for the job, save that he possessed the qualities Nixon cared most about: ambition and obedience. Even Haldeman later conceded that Bush’s loyalty was his primary virtue. He “takes our line beautifully,” he mused.12
Other critics would not be so judicious. Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson, whose father had been U.N. ambassador under John Kennedy, pronounced Bush “totally unqualified” for the job, describing his appointment as “an insult” to the U.N. The Washington Star was equally condemnatory: “The appointment of a political loser,” the paper editorialized, and “a lame-duck congressman with little experience in foreign affairs and less in diplomacy— would seem a major downgrading of the U.N. by the Nixon administration. And the senators who sit in judgment of the nomination are certain to question the appointment of a conservative Republican Texas oil millionaire to the nation’s highest ambassadorial post.” The New York Times was blunter: “There seems to be nothing in his record that qualifies him for this highly important position.” Even Bush’s closest associates expressed their bewilderment. “George,” one longtime friend exclaimed, “What the f**k do you know about foreign affairs?”13
“You ask me that in ten days,” Bush responded. “They laid down a challenge,” he later wrote of critics who questioned not so much his diplomatic experience but his competence, and thus “got my competitive instincts flowing.” He threw himself into the job, studying what the State Department advised, querying former American ambassadors for their advice, and assembling a proficient staff by mixing loyalists from his congressional office with State Department experts. “Everybody said, well, he doesn’t know anything about diplomacy and everybody was right, I didn’t,” Bush recalled decades later. “But I learned, and worked hard at it.” It did not escape him that his new job would be a final tweak to those right-wingers from his home district who despised international organizations. “It will be interesting to see what the Texas reaction is,” he deadpanned to the diary he began after the November electoral defeat—the journal that evolved into his China Diary.14
Bush received a crash course in diplomacy while in New York, though it would be hard to call Manhattan a foreign assignment. He lived in the American ambassador’s large suite at the Waldorf-Astoria and had the use of an impressive social budget. His was a taxing and high-profile job, but it was no hardship post. In New York Bush learned how diplomacy was conducted at the epicenter of American financial and cultural power. Two dominant lessons stand out from his two-year experience. First, he left the U.N. convinced that personal relations mattered to diplomatic success. Second, he came to realize that most professional diplomats disputed this view, and that his personal style was the direct opposite of the approach taken by the most important American diplomat of all: Henry Kissinger. To a degree while at the U.N., but especially later while in China, Bush would come to perceive Kissinger as a peerless model of diplomatic intrigue and master of strategic calculation—even though his was a model Bush deliberately chose not to emulate.
Bush learned the first of these lessons on his own. He approached his new job as a politician, making a point of meeting diplomats from foreign delegations—save for the Cubans, North Koreans, or others with whom Washington’s relations were strained—not only professionally but also socially. He drew heavily on his family’s connections, as he had promised Nixon he would, though more to broaden his own ties with foreign representatives than to strengthen the president’s political base. To his mother’s house in Greenwich, which was only a short drive from Manhattan, he frequently invited diplomats for Sunday brunch, including on one occasion the Communist Chinese delegation from Beijing, then newly arrived in New York. To his uncle’s box at Shea Stadium (the man owned a portion of the New York Mets) Bush invited stag groups for a night of the national pastime. He even threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the 1971 season, and later he took the U.N.’s entire Economic and Social Council to a game. At each of these events he combined the personal touch that just seemed to come naturally to him—“You can’t do this job if you don’t like people,” he quipped— with a willingness to learn. “I think the best policy around here is to demonstrate your willingness to ‘go to others,’” he recorded in his journal, “to ask advice, to be grateful, and to get here earlier and leave later than the rest of the people.”15
Bush’s style ran contrary to much of the advice he had received upon taking the job. It certainly made him a different kind of ambassador from those who had served before him. Arthur Goldberg, President Johnson’s representative in New York, told Bush that, amid the cacophony of the unwieldy international forum, his principal duty should be to highlight American power. “We are the United States,” Goldberg advised. “You’ve got to remember that. They [other delegations] should come to you, not the other way around.” Bush instinctively behaved differently. He believed warm personal ties would grease the cogs of diplomacy, just as they had always eased his path in politics and business. This was not a course of action to which he seems to have given much direct thought in 1971; joining the personal and the professional was simply fundamental to his being. The U.N. experience “taught me a lot about treating nations, large or small, with respect,” Bush recalled. “I got there and called on the Burundi ambassador. I thought the woman [in the office] was going to have a heart attack. . . . But I knew that word would get all around the United Nations that we recognized and respected the sovereignty and the vote of every country there.” This was “just a difference in approach” from his predecessors, Bush said, “and maybe in the process [it] helped influence some political decisions.”16
This combination of respect in the present and hope for favor in the future lies at the crux of Bush’s faith in personal diplomacy, the belief that leaders should cultivate one-on-one ties with those across the negotiating table. This was an evolving view in 1971. While he set out from the beginning to cultivate friendships with his fellow ambassadors, Bush did not necessarily believe that each ambassador was his equal. Upon arriving in New York, he habitually referred to smaller states, especially those from the developing world, as “little wiener nations,” incapable of determining their own future without the guidance of larger states such as the United States or the Soviet Union. He respected as individuals the men and women who represented smaller countries, and he seems to have made no distinction in his social calendar between colleagues from large states or small; he simply did not hold the strategic concerns of their nations in particularly high regard.17
By the time he left New York his opinions had softened for two reasons. Those “wiener nations” were proving increasingly influential at the U.N. And his desire to humanize diplomacy in order to help other nations appreciate Washington’s point of view had inadvertently catalyzed his own ability to see the world as others saw it. Bloc voting was on the rise at the U.N., Bush warned when he left the post in 1973. What was really on the rise was voting against Washington’s wishes. The United States had controlled much of the outcome of General Assembly votes since its inception in 1945, often by lining up most of the Western Hemisphere on its side. Yet the swelling ranks of new nations created by the wave of decolonization after World War II ensured that such dominance could no longer be taken for granted. “There was a time when all my predecessors had to do was to raise their eyebrow and we had an instant majority,” Bush said in 1973. “That isn’t the case now.” Moscow and Beijing offered new states an alternative model for development, and votes were increasingly going their way. American diplomats had to be more sensitive to this changing reality, Bush argued by the time he left the U.N., and hence more responsive to international opinion. “I mean we’re the United States,” Bush later concluded when asked to consider his time in New York. Whenever a vote came up, “we could have said [to foreign representatives] look, you little bastard, you can go do it your way, but we are the higher power, [and] that’s not the way it ought to be.” Washington could have conducted its diplomacy this way, but doing so would in the end have been unproductive. “In my view,” he concluded, diplomacy was best built on a foundation of respect rather than bullying, because “the more [power] you have, [the more] you have to say what you believe.” He had arrived in New York speaking of the “little wiener nations.” He left thinking that it was important to “treat people with respect and recognize in diplomatic terms that the sovereignty of Burundi is as important to them as our sovereignty is [to us].” In this, his first diplomatic post, Bush began to appreciate the international implications of Washington’s power, including its limitations.18
Bush’s personal diplomacy also engendered in him a newfound respect for foreign opinions beyond the strategic calculus of bloc voting. The Bush who spoke passionately of respecting the sovereignty of every nation was not the Bush of 1971. He was the Bush of 2005, a man who relished his role as a senior statesman. This is why Scowcroft believed that his tenure at the U.N., along with his time in China, formed “one of the two seminal experiences” in Bush’s development as an international thinker. “He would go around,” Scowcroft later recalled, “and visit his fellow ambassadors; just sit down and talk to them [asking]: what are your problems; what’s going on in your country; what do you think of the UN; what do you think of the United States?” While such conversations were motivated by a desire to win favor for American diplomatic initiatives, Scowcroft believed they also “had a profound impact on him [Bush], in terms of understanding just how different the world is. . . . I think that gave him an appreciation of how to deal with the world, because [other] people don’t [always] think like we do.”19
Scowcroft also believes that Bush’s penchant for personal diplomacy later paid handsome dividends. When he became president, Scowcroft recalled, Bush “would call foreign leaders, for no particular reason, just to say ‘hi, how are you.’” More than mere courtesy was involved. “When we really needed something, he’d go to them, and they were inclined to support us because they knew who he was, where he came from, and it just made a world of difference in our diplomacy.” Others who worked under Bush shared this experience. “Diplomacy was easy under those circumstances,” Dick Cheney later said of his time as Bush’s defense secretary. “You show up in Morocco and the King is waiting for you. His old buddy, George Bush, has talked to him and, yes, he’ll send troops. The strength of his [Bush’s] personality, his experience, the fact that he dealt with these guys over the years and they liked him and trusted him,” Cheney contended, made a significant difference to Washington’s successful Gulf War diplomacy. Bush later said of his approach that he always “tried to put himself in the other guy’s shoes,” leading one prominent journalist to suggest in 1990 that “friendship is Mr. Bush’s ideology, and personal diplomacy has driven his presidency.”20
Bush firmly believed that friendships could go a long way in smoothing over diplomatic rough spots, and that, in times of crisis especially, leaders who knew each other personally would find it easier to defuse difficult situations. While president, he practiced what he preached. Although he had first been exposed to the value of personal diplomacy at the U.N., the China Diary reveals that he tried daily to live by this approach while in Beijing. He purposely met with foreign dignitaries and diplomats as part of a never-ending list of social engagements, inviting them to the United States Liaison Office (USLO) for drinks, dinners, and movies. He visited their offices and apartments. He turned to tennis for far more than exercise. “Sports is a great equalizer,” Bush said in 1975 of his habit of intermingling tennis with diplomatic contacts. “If you know people and can relax with people, then maybe you can head off a crisis that you couldn’t head off with people you’d only met at a reception.” The emphasis on personal diplomacy that came to characterize Bush’s presidential work, therefore, had its origins in the 1970s.21
This is not to suggest that Bush’s time in New York—or in Beijing, for that matter—was entirely consumed by parties, baseball games, or hours at the tennis club. On the contrary, his service at the U.N. coincided with a brutal diplomatic showdown, coincidentally over China, which served not only as a crash course in the winner-take-all aspects of international politics but also as a profound lesson in Kissinger’s method of operation. The question of which Chinese government would hold the country’s U.N. seat dominated Bush’s agenda. China’s Nationalist government, based in Taiwan, had represented the country in the General Assembly since its founding in 1945, retaining China’s seat after the 1949 victory in the Chinese civil war. Though Mao Zedong’s government controlled the mainland, Washington’s overriding power, and its Security Council veto, had thus far salvaged the Nationalists’ U.N. standing. In the midst of an increasingly heated global Cold War, Washington simply refused to recognize the legitimacy of a Communist regime in the world’s most populous nation.22
This was a principled but lonely position. The Communist government was recognized, for example, not only by Moscow but also by London. Their control on the mainland was hardly in dispute. Still the Americans pushed hard to isolate Beijing from the international community, and they severely curtailed Sino-American relations in the process. Sanctions led to outright diplomatic rejection once hostilities broke out on the Korean peninsula in 1950, months before Chinese forces entered the conflict. The two sides enjoyed virtually no trade, no athletic competitions or cultural exchanges, and only a handful of tourist and scholarly visits for another two decades. On a philosophical level, American strategists hoped an isolated China might collapse under its own weight and poverty. Politically, a powerful “China Lobby” operating on Taiwan’s behalf stood ready to punish any president who even considered improving ties with Beijing. After Harry Truman’s searing experience as scapegoat for American setbacks in Asia, few of his successors dared make any conciliatory gestures toward Beijing. Eisenhower worried that “many members of Congress want to crucify anyone who argues in favor of permitting any kind of trade between the free nations and Communist China,” and John Kennedy told his advisers that “I don’t want to read in The Washington Post and The New York Times that the State Department is thinking about a change in China policy.”23
No change in Washington’s China policy was in the offing throughout the first half of the Cold War. American policymakers routinely challenged the Communist government’s rule, terming them the “Red Chinese” and calling their capital “Peiping” to suggest its captivity under an illegitimate foreign force. Communist Chinese leaders reciprocated by labeling Washington the leader of the world’s reactionary forces, its allies “running dogs,” and its leaders warmongers or worse. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even refused to shake Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s hand during a 1954 conference convened to decide Indochina’s fate. This was a slight the Chinese would not soon forget: they mentioned it to Nixon and Kissinger almost reflexively during the early 1970s. To say the Sino-American relationship was frozen during these years would be an understatement. There was hardly a relationship left to chill. The Soviet Union was Washington’s greater geostrategic threat throughout the Cold War. Yet by the mid-1960s, few American policymakers considered the Soviets to be insanely driven by their ideology. They considered the Communist Chinese to be just that irrational, even before the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, portraying them to the American public as oriental, devious, and dangerous. Mao’s willingness to push the Americans into a series of crises over Taiwan in the 1950s, and his subsequent suggestion that China would not only survive but welcome a nuclear exchange, surely did not help his image. Moscow posed the greater threat to Washington, but Beijing was Public Enemy Number 1. Because it was a significant symbol of American opposition to Communist rule, successive administrations refused to relinquish Taiwan’s U.N. seat to such a government.
Sino-American relations began to warm in July 1971. Nixon made a world-altering announcement that Kissinger had secretly held face-to-face meetings with Zhou in Beijing, and that he was planning his own visit to China the following year. The two sides had made halting steps to improve relations before Nixon’s announcement, but this was the moment when the world learned that leaders from its most populous country and its most powerful country would speak directly for the first time in over two decades. Nixon hoped for Beijing’s aid in ending the lingering Vietnam War, and he hoped to offset Moscow’s strength by hewing closer to Beijing. The Chinese similarly sought to counter Soviet power. “We have broken out of the old pattern,” Nixon would later tell Zhou as the two stood on the tarmac of Beijing’s airport, warmly (and pointedly) clasping hands. This would be one of the most profound developments of the entire Cold War, a meeting that Nixon would aptly term a “week that changed the world.”24
Tectonic shifts in the geopolitical landscape orchestrated by visionary leaders frequently leave rubble for others to tidy up. Most American commentators praised Nixon’s White House for its forward-thinking “triangulation” of American interests with those of the Soviets and Chinese. Not everyone was so enthusiastic, however. The still-formidable “China Lobby” demanded that Washington renew its pledge to safeguard Taiwan’s security and the U.N. seat they considered symbolic of Taiwan’s sovereignty. Kissinger and Nixon each endorsed closer ties with Beijing, yet State Department strategists maintained there were international points to be scored by defending Taiwan’s seat. At a time when many American allies suffered under Communist pressure, they reasoned, Washington needed for the sake of its prestige to support Taiwan’s U.N. claim. The best solution, Kissinger reasoned, would be for both Chinese governments to have a seat in the forum, though implementing this plan would not prove easy. During the 1960s the Americans had won a hard-fought procedural ruling requiring a two-thirds vote before Taiwan could be expelled from the General Assembly. This proved an important victory by the 1970s, as a majority of the members were habitually voting in Beijing’s favor, casting ballots that were symbolically against American leadership as much as they were in favor of the PRC.
Bush came to the U.N. aware that preserving Taiwan’s seat would be among his highest priorities. After Nixon’s announcement, however, it seemed only a matter of time before Beijing took a place at the table in New York. As Bush confided in his diary, “At this moment I don’t know what our China policy in the U.N. will turn out to be, but all the U.N. people feel that the ballgame is over, Peking is in and Taiwan is out.” Despite such private concerns, he vigorously hewed to Washington’s official line on dual representation, even though the odds seemed stacked against him. Throughout the late summer and early fall of 1971, he and his staff lobbied other delegations during the day and counted votes at night. “It is all encompassing,” he wrote a friend only days before the critical vote, which was scheduled for October 25. “Night and day—at every meal—first thing in the morning, last thing at night. I think we can win for a policy that I believe strongly in, but it’s going to be terribly close.”25
Bush’s tenacity was motivated largely by his loyalty to Nixon, yet he also believed that fundamental issues were at stake, specifically Taiwan’s sovereignty and American credibility. Unlike many of his fellow conservative Texans, he valued the U.N., and he was not so vicious an anti-Communist that he opposed Beijing’s inclusion as a matter of faith. He genuinely believed that every country deserved a say in the General Assembly no matter its political persuasion. He also believed that because successive American governments had promised to defend Taiwan’s seat—and by extension, its very existence—he was honor bound to uphold the trust Taiwan had placed in the United States. “Bringing [the] PRC in [was] a move towards reality, and I support it,” he wrote. But “we must not let a big reality ‘muscle out’ a smaller reality.”26
Weeks of lobbying and vote counting led Bush to believe that “we could win by one or two votes.” But just as he was making his last-minute appeals and preparing his last speech to the assembly only hours before the final vote, news broke that Kissinger was in Beijing. He was there in preparation for Nixon’s visit, scheduled for the following spring; he later argued that the timing was an unfortunate coincidence. Yet the picture of Nixon’s personal envoy tacitly demonstrating that Beijing represented the Sino-American relationship that really mattered destroyed any chance of saving Taipei’s seat. Bush was booed when he rose to give his speech, and the vote turned into a rout. “There is no question that the U.N. will be a more realistic and vital place with Peking in here,” he confided to a friend days afterwards, “but I had my heart and soul wrapped up in the policy of keeping Taiwan from being ejected.” Combining pragmatism with a sense of responsibility, this was a telling remark. So too was his unscripted reaction to Taiwan’s ouster. When the final vote was tallied and cheers erupted from the assembled delegates, the sight of Taipei’s ambassador exiting the hall, for the final time, brought a cascade of jeers. Not wanting the man to suffer such condemnation alone, Bush left his seat, put his arm around his colleague, and escorted him from the hall.27
Bush was as taken by surprise as anyone by the news of Kissinger’s travels. He had previously discussed the timing of the final vote with Nixon, and he had been assured by Secretary of State William Rogers that there would be no overlap with Kissinger’s expected Beijing trip. “Everybody would think we were deliberately undercutting our own effort” if the two events coincided, Rogers had warned Nixon. Out of earshot, however, Kissinger told the president there simply were not enough votes for the American side. “The votes are set now,” he told Nixon. “As we were going to lose . . . we were better off losing on the old stand. But I think we are farther behind than they [Rogers and Bush] think. You have to consider that these diplomats when they talk to us, they’ll try to make it sound as good as possible.” American interests would be best served by cementing the Chinese relationship that mattered for the future, he convincingly argued.28
Kissinger’s preoccupation with Beijing undermined Bush’s efforts on behalf of Taiwan. Though he left it to others to charge that Kissinger had embarrassed him, Bush clearly felt slighted. All he would concede privately at the time was “the fact that we were saying one thing in New York, and doing another in Washington, the outcome was inevitable.” Ever loyal, he said little else publicly. Later he conceded, “Kissinger’s being in Beijing at the time we were working the problem essentially signed the death warrant for Taiwan” at the U.N.29
Three weeks later, however, the emotions of the previous months finally boiled over. During their first face-to-face meeting following the fateful vote, Kissinger accused Bush of not hewing to the administration’s line on China, obliquely pinning blame for Taiwan’s ouster on a lackluster effort by Bush’s U.N. delegation. Bush jumped to the accusation. “I told him my only interest was in serving the President,” he later recorded, “and told him I damn sure had a feel for this country,” reminding Kissinger that he did not work directly for him, and implying that he considered Kissinger’s own understanding of America and its politics deficient. “For 2 to 3 minutes we had a very heated and somewhat spirited exchange,” Bush recounted in his diary.30
Cooler heads eventually prevailed, but the residue of this exchange proved bitter. “One of the reasons he and I communicated so much,” when Bush was in China, Scowcroft later concluded, “was that he thought Kissinger pulled the rug out from under him at the U.N.” On the other side of the relationship, Kissinger promised Bush following their spat that he would continue to seek his counsel, even suggesting that he considered Bush among his most valued ambassadors. In reality, however, it was at this moment that Kissinger began to actively edge Bush out of his most intricate diplomatic initiatives, in particular his dealings with the Chinese. In March 1972, for example, he told China’s U.N. ambassador, Huang Hua, that “Bush doesn’t know about our meetings any longer,” adding that Bush would attend subsequent meetings “only if United Nations business is involved.” By August, Kissinger was openly disparaging Bush to the Chinese. “I saw Ambassador Bush this morning,” he told Huang. “You intimidated him. We will have to give him more backbone.” The available documentary record does not reveal whether Bush knew of such slights. What is clear is that Bush departed the U.N. a more astute observer of foreign affairs, with a healthy respect for the sovereignty and opinion of other states and their representatives, and with a sharper understanding of the way in which domestic forces, such as the realities of Taiwan’s place within American political calculations, framed foreign policies. He also left New York with a deep wariness of Henry Kissinger.31
Kissinger dominated American foreign policy in the early 1970s, and he played a formative role in Bush’s growth as a diplomat even when the two were continents apart. The China Diary reveals that Kissinger shaped Bush’s diplomatic style more than any other colleague—though primarily by presenting a counterargument to nearly everything Bush valued. Understanding the Kissinger who stalks Bush’s diary requires an appreciation of his inestimable power during the 1970s. He was arguably the most calculating chief diplomat the country has ever known, one who coupled strategic vision with an obsessive penchant for control. This combination made him the perfect foil for the ever-scheming Nixon, for whom he was first national security adviser and then secretary of state—the only policymaker to ever hold the two posts simultaneously. Together the pair “developed a conspiratorial approach to foreign policy management,” Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, a close Kissinger aide during the 1970s, later concluded. They were secretive and tightly wound, at once brilliant for their Bismarckian scheming yet utterly fearful, given their presumption that foreign leaders were equally devious. Historians debate which man deserves more credit for their foreign policy victories and failures. Most conclude that their work is best understood as the product of a tense partnership. Joan Hoff terms their labors “Nixinger diplomacy,” and Robert Dallek has recently argued that the two functioned effectively as co-presidents during Watergate’s darkest days.32
There is no similar debate over Kissinger’s role during Ford’s first year in office, when Bush was in China. Kissinger ran American foreign policy. He continued to serve as both national security adviser and secretary of state, though Scowcroft managed day-to-day activities at the White House. Ford was not as passionate as Nixon about foreign policy during his first year in office, nor was he particularly adept at controlling Kissinger, who by 1974 was one of the world’s most famous men. “Henry is a genius,” Nixon cautioned Ford before his resignation, “but you don’t have to accept everything he commends. He can be invaluable, and he’ll be very loyal, but you can’t let him have a totally free hand.” It took Ford at least a year in power before he managed to heed this advice, and as a consequence Kissinger dominated American diplomacy during Bush’s tenure in Beijing.33
Bush proved deeply conflicted over the Kissinger he grew to know. “Kissinger is brilliant,” Bush recorded after witnessing his meetings with Chinese officials, possessing “tremendous sweep of history and a tremendous sweep of the world situation.” Yet he was difficult as well. “It is a great contrast to the irritating manner he has of handling people,” Bush wrote. “His staff is scared to death of him.” Kissinger’s oftentimes gruff personal manner cut against the grain of Bush’s own much-stated preference for civility. More profoundly, the China Diary also reveals Bush’s discomfort with Kissinger’s centralization of policymaking. “I am wondering if it is good for our country to have as much individual diplomacy,” he recorded in his journal. “Isn’t the President best served if the important matters are handled by more than one person?” Bush believed the president was in fact best served by the airing of multiple opinions. In late 1974, for example, Bush recorded a discussion with New Zealand’s ambassador to China, who argued that Ford was too reliant on Kissinger. “No one is immortal,” Bryce Harland told Bush. Though willing to openly disagree with other speakers in the diary—we are after all reading Bush’s own thoughts, and, as the old saying goes, no one ever appears a dullard in their own memorandum of a conversation—in this instance as elsewhere Bush tacitly agreed that Kissinger’s monopoly over American decisionmaking posed a genuine risk. But after nearly a year in Beijing, he reluctantly concluded there was little he could do from his far-off post to challenge the secretary. “I am just not going to worry about Kissinger’s peculiar style of operation,” he lamented to his diary, “where he holds all the cards up against his chest and refuses to clue people in on what is really happening.”34
Bush and Kissinger offer an important contrast and an instructive comparison not merely because Kissinger played such a significant role in the events recorded in Bush’s China Diary, but also because their intellectual (and biological) descendants would dominate American foreign policy for the ensuing three decades. The 1970s provided their first opportunity to work together. And it was during the 1970s that they came to distrust each other. The two could not have been more different. Kissinger was the poor, bespectacled immigrant—a Jew, no less, with all the attendant complexities—who rose to prominence first as an academic and then through the patronage of powerful men. While Bush hesitated to discuss the world in theoretical terms, Kissinger thrived on such language and introspection, belittling lesser minds around him with his verbal acuity in his tireless quest for power.
Bush was his polar opposite. Born to a patrician family, athletic and outgoing, he was an Ivy Leaguer as much by birthright as through classroom work, whose business and political successes derived in equal measure from his impressive family connections and his own frenetic energy. Kissinger, the one-time refugee from the Nazis, might have felt he never truly belonged in the corridors of power. Bush never questioned his own place within those same circles. Yet both men felt they belonged at the president’s side, Kissinger on account of his intellect, Bush by virtue of his very being. By the same measures, each considered the other an interloper.
Theirs was not a cordial relationship. In 1971 Kissinger privately termed Bush “too soft and not sophisticated enough” for high-level diplomatic work (though he said this to Nixon, and the two had far worse to say about other leading figures of the time). More important to understanding Bush’s reactions as expressed throughout the China Diary, Kissinger also made a habit during the early 1970s of publicly belittling Bush for his foreign policy inexperience. “Don’t you discuss diplomacy this way,” he lectured Bush (who was serving as U.N. ambassador at the time) in the midst of one session with Chinese diplomats. Only days after his designation as head of the USLO in Beijing, Kissinger further denigrated Bush in front of China’s vice foreign minister by suggesting Bush was “learning more about international politics this evening than you ever did at the United Nations.” Bush was not used to being spoken to this way. His diary makes clear that he did not soon forget such experiences, and when president, Bush rebuffed each of Kissinger’s requests to reenter government service.35
Kissinger dominated Bush’s diplomatic experiences during the 1970s and clearly influenced his diplomatic approach. In practical terms, Kissinger’s mania for control meant that Bush’s own staff in Beijing had no real marching orders until the secretary personally briefed them. “It is difficult to define what our function is here,” Bush recorded after a few months in Beijing. “How much leeway we think we should have. How much initiative we should take, etc.” He could only wait for Kissinger’s lead. “Clearly any of these decisions will be made by the secretary and, given the overall perspective he has, [he thinks] it is best that the really important ones be handled on that end.”36
Bush in time found an outlet for his frustrations with Kissinger’s monopoly over policymaking, as he developed an independent (and quite secretive) means of communicating with Ford while in China; he subsequently made direct access to the president a condition of his posting as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1975. More significant, he frequently wrote the president directly through Scowcroft’s White House office, thereby avoiding the State Department bureaucracy altogether. As Kissinger spent the majority of his time at the State Department during this period, Scowcroft was clearly in a position, both hierarchically and geographically, to provide Ford with Bush’s private correspondence without Kissinger’s knowledge. Yet it is clear from the diplomatic record that Scowcroft (wisely) did not make a habit of doing so at the time. Looking back thirty years later, he concluded that Bush’s own desire as president to cultivate a variety of sources was a direct result of his experience dealing with Kissinger’s monopoly on Ford’s ear. “What he [Bush] learned from Kissinger was ‘don’t depend on only one single voice, however good that one voice is,’” Scowcroft later recalled. “That’s not the way he thought he ought to get his information [while president]. . . . what he wanted was to hear strong people, knowledgeable people, argue points of view in front of him. And that’s the way he really developed what the whole policy issue was; what were the salient questions; what were the points where people disagreed. That helped him make his decisions.”37
The China Diary also highlights a subtle though real difference in the ways Kissinger and Bush each evaluated the utility of personal diplomacy. Each has been termed a realist, one who views the world in terms of hard power and calculations of national interest. Yet their sense of realism differed. Kissinger conspicuously developed his own network of contacts and associates throughout his career. He disagreed, however, with the extent to which Bush believed that personal trust could facilitate international relations. His worldview, shaped by war, hatred, and the Holocaust—and perhaps even by insecurities over his own social status—simply did not put much stock in a concept as illusory as trust. Kissinger appreciated that a network of contacts could lubricate the gears of the international system, and he conceded following his government service that personality played a larger role in foreign affairs than his academic studies had led him to anticipate. Yet he simply did not at any time believe that true statesmen would be influenced by bonds of friendship in the decisions they took. They would instead do what was in their own state’s best interest, nothing more and nothing less.38
Bush seemed forever taken aback by Kissinger’s pessimistic assessment of personal ties. “He seems to put no faith in individual relationships,” Bush recorded in his China Diary in early 1975, after the two men had shared a private conversation during Kissinger’s visit to Beijing. “It doesn’t matter if they [the Chinese] like you or not,” Bush says Kissinger advised him, because strategic calculations were all that mattered to great powers. “It seems to me however that he is overlooking the trust factor and the factor of style,” Bush told his diary. “I do think it [personal diplomacy] is important.” This conversation clearly left a mark on Bush, who emphasized it in his own memoirs more than twenty years later. He simply believed to his core that personal diplomacy mattered. It was the primary lesson he drew from his U.N. experience, and it surfaced repeatedly in the pages of the China Diary. He surely believed his hard-won ties to foreign leaders helped his presidency, and he continued to place great stock in personal diplomacy —as the preface to this book makes plain.39
Bush left the U.N. in 1973 fascinated by diplomacy, although, as we shall see below, he was not yet ready to make a career of international affairs. Neither, as it turned out, had he yet had his fill of lessons from Kissinger—or, for that matter, from the Chinese.
Events conspired to remove Bush from the United Nations by the close of 1972, and thus from Kissinger’s immediate purview. Nixon won reelection that November in the landslide he had always sought, despite the lingering story of a break-in at the Democratic Party’s Watergate office. The scandal ultimately led to his resignation, and directly to Bush’s appointment to China. This part of the story begins with Nixon’s decision in the aftermath of his electoral triumph to shake up his cabinet. He required every senior official to submit a letter of resignation. Bush did as he was told and quietly let it be known that if he were to leave the U.N., his preferred landing spot would once more be the Treasury Department.
Nixon had other plans. He tapped Bush to head the Republican National Committee (RNC). Robert Dallek recounts Nixon’s demands for a second-term cabinet full of senior leaders who “should not necessarily be brainy or impressively competent, but loyal.” Indeed Nixon ordered Haldeman to “Eliminate the politicians. Except George Bush. He’d do anything for the cause.” He wanted Bush to be his point man in translating his massive victory into a Republican vise grip on the electoral system for years to come. Bush’s Eastern background coupled with his Texas credentials made him the embodiment of the new Southern and Western party Nixon believed the GOP could become. Barbara Bush did not want her husband to take the job, thinking it too partisan a post for his moderate reputation and political future. “Anything,” she said, “but not that committee.” Other friends counseled that the RNC job was technically a demotion from the high-ranking post of U.N. ambassador. Bush countered with one of his father’s favorite adages: “You just can’t say no to the president.”40
Watergate spiraled into the greatest political scandal in American history. Though uninvolved in the White House’s conspiracies, as RNC chair Bush was nevertheless embroiled in the political firestorm. He repeatedly asked Nixon if the allegations against him were true. Each time, Nixon denied the charges to Bush’s face. After each of these fabricated declarations of innocence, Bush sallied forth to put his own reputation on the line in defense of the president. His was a no-win position. Republican constituents split in their assessment of Bush’s actions: half thought he should pillory the president in order to save the party; the other half criticized him for not doing enough for Nixon in the face of partisan attacks. In the compilation of letters Bush subsequently published, he termed this chapter of his life “The Eye of the Storm.”
The experience of defending a president whose web of deceit unraveled a bit more with each passing day left Bush traumatized. Still he remained in his post, even as Nixon’s position became untenable. “Heaven knows,” he told his friend Baker in November 1973, “I wish we were moving back to Houston today . . . but I must stay here.” Poll numbers commissioned by Baker suggested that, in any event, Bush’s reputation in Texas was not faring well enough for victory in any statewide election. By March 1974, Bush admitted to a close friend that “these are extremely complicated times—this job is no fun at all.” More poignantly, he wrote that he “longed for an escape—and an escape in my fantasy usually takes the form of running around in the boat in Maine—no telephone.” He appears to have believed in Nixon’s innocence to the bitter end. “I am confident that full disclosure on Watergate will vindicate the President,” he stated, even as doubts about Nixon’s political viability began to crowd his thoughts.41
Nixon eventually resigned, and Gerald Ford’s unusual path to the White House nearly carried Bush with him. Ford needed a vice president, and he consciously made the selection process as open as possible, canvassing legislators from both parties for their suggestions. Bush was not necessarily at the head of anyone’s list, but he was a consensus second choice. His candidacy made good electoral sense: he was a party loyalist but also a moderate; his political background offered Ford geographic balance; and he had been the good soldier through the maelstrom of the past months. Much like Ford, moreover, he had a reputation for honesty.
Bush proved Ford’s second choice as well, behind New York’s Nelson Rockefeller. Bush wanted the job, and he authorized his supporters to lobby his cause in this most unusual of campaigns. Rockefeller was better known nationally, however, and he had not been on the stump over the past twenty months defending Nixon. Ford nominated him for the post. Disappointed by his near miss, Bush wanted out of Washington, and Ford was eager to excise all traces of Watergate as soon as possible. He offered Bush an enviable choice as a reward for his service: the ambassadorship to either London or Paris. Each was a coveted post, carrying with it prestige, luxury, and geopolitical stature.42
Bush instead requested China. In doing so he was asking not to be posted to one of Europe’s fabulous capitals, but rather to be sent to a nation without formal diplomatic relations with the United States, where luxuries were basically unknown, and where he would arguably be as far removed from Washington’s center of power as was possible in 1974. Following Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, America and the PRC had each had established a “liaison office” in the other’s capital to carry on the consular work typically done in an embassy, while remaining devoid of the trappings associated with formal ties. David Bruce, one of Washington’s most esteemed diplomats, with three decades of bipartisan experience, had opened the USLO in Beijing in 1973. He would transfer to the NATO ambassadorship upon Bush’s arrival. Bush would not technically be an “ambassador” in Beijing (though, as a consequence of his U.N. position, he retained the title). Technically he would rank below the representative of any nation with formal ties to Mao’s government. Whereas the American ambassador in London or Paris would typically be received first in any social function, Bush was frequently placed behind the envoy from the Palestinian Liberation Organization.43
Bush chose China for a variety of reasons. It was obviously an exotic place, and he believed its global role would only grow in the decades to come. Time spent there would be an adventure, he told friends. Others termed it a well-earned sabbatical. Unlike service in Europe, moreover, where ambassadors were expected to supplement their embassy’s social budget from their own pockets, Beijing would prove downright cheap. After a decade of public service— and with three children yet to attend college—Bush had financial considerations in mind in choosing Asia over Europe. He marveled repeatedly through his China Diary at the low cost of living he encountered. Even the caviar was cheap, he realized to his delight.44
Many considered Bush’s decision an unusual one. The Beijing of 1974 was still embroiled in the Cultural Revolution, subject to blackouts and ill lit on the best of nights, brutally hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter, polluted, noisy, hard to get to, and cut off from easy mail or phone service. Entertainment was extremely limited, as was travel by foreigners beyond the city limits. More than one expert warned Bush that boredom was the major enemy of any foreigner posted to Beijing. The USLO itself was a work in progress, despite the Herculean effort of Ambassador Bruce’s wife, Evangeline, to transform the shabby quarters they inherited into a dignified compound. Her hard work aside, the residence was hardly a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. When asked to explain his unexpected choice, Bush contended that he considered China crucial to the future. It was home to a quarter of the world’s people, and even Kissinger conceded that the job offered the chance to “do some substantive business.” If nothing else, this posting would give him an unusual line on his résumé, if and when he decided to reenter politics. “What the hell,” he told one reporter, “I’m fifty. It won’t hurt anything.”45
Bush was sincere in these explanations, but Beijing’s most appealing quality after the stresses of the previous months was undoubtedly its distance from Washington. “Am I running away from something?” Bush asked his diary while en route to Beijing only weeks after accepting Ford’s invitation. “Am I leaving what with inflation, incivility in the press and Watergate and all the ugliness?” Most important, by flying halfway across the world to an isolated post, “Am I taking the easy way out?”46
Bush told himself he was not just running away, but the evidence suggests otherwise. His first letters home from Beijing combined with his diary entries portray a man reveling in the solitude he found. They express his joy at the fact that “the telephone is strangely silent. What a change.” What a relief, too. As he wrote a friend only weeks into his stay, “It’s the new me, meditative, no phones ringing, little mail, time to think but plenty to do. How awesome!” He similarly told a political ally that “the change of pace is enormous. My phone doesn’t ring—after many years of incessant ringing, it’s rather weird.” Barbara Bush noted her own enthusiasm for her husband’s suddenly relaxed schedule, and she too focused on the bizarre (in their lives) experience of a silent telephone. “Back in Washington or at the United Nations the telephone was ringing all the time,” she told a reporter. “I think he misses the phone as much as anything,” she joked. She even took to calling her husband in his USLO office during the day, even if she was only yards away in their residence, just so he would not feel too lonely.47
One phone call Bush could not escape came from Watergate prosecutors, who tracked him down during a refueling layover on his initial trip to China. The political scandals of his recent past were not so easily shunted aside, and he was forced during his first week in Beijing to compose a detailed response to their queries. “The incident itself is not important,” he wrote in his diary, “except that here I was leaving the United States, last point of land, and a call out of the ugly past wondering about something having to do with Watergate, cover-up, and all those matters that I want to leave behind.” Watergate’s reach even across the Pacific seemed to validate his decision to leave American politics, if only temporarily.48
Some found much to criticize in Ford’s decision to place Bush in such a sensitive post. “The replacement of the career diplomat David Bruce with the GOP chairman George Bush in the sensitive Peking post makes no sense,” one writer to the Washington Post argued. The New York Times believed that, “at a time of continuing Sino-Soviet tension and a period where Washington seeks a realistic post-Vietnam policy for Asia, an experienced Asia hand might have been a wiser choice.” Even the sympathetic Los Angeles Times admitted, “Bush is by no means a China expert though he is close to, and well regarded by, Mr. Ford, a fact that presumably will assure China’s leaders that they can count on clear access to the President.”49
Bush’s assignment drew subtle criticism from the Chinese as well. Bruce was Washington’s most respected diplomat, the only man to have served as ambassador to Bonn, London, and Paris, and a private confidant of every American president since Franklin Roosevelt. Huang Zhen, Beijing’s representative in Washington, was equally esteemed in Chinese diplomatic circles. Bush’s diplomatic experience was hardly in their league. Clare Hollingsworth, a British reporter based in Beijing, reported that Chinese officials thought Bush’s selection somewhat insulting, despite his political credentials.50
In truth, no one could match Bruce’s experience, and Bush’s selection signified, if nothing else, a new, energetic spirit for the USLO. When asked by his government to comment on the appointment, for example, Britain’s ambassador in Washington concluded that “Bush’s main problem in Peking will be to find an outlet for his abounding physical energy: the US Liaison Office will probably find themselves engaged in endless tennis tournaments.” Indeed these British observers, who had far more practical experience dealing with the Chinese than the Americans did, believed that Bush’s political experience would stand him in good stead. As one British diplomat concluded, “The Chinese will be more interested in having a man whom they know is fully in the President’s confidence. They are unlikely to hold against him what was said in New York and are likely to regard it has having been merely carrying out of instructions.”51
Bush thus arrived in Beijing in the late fall of 1974 a tired man, a man running from Washington’s political maelstrom. Yet he immediately set out to energize Sino-American relations by relying on the personal style of diplomacy he considered his hallmark. On the flight to China he told his diary—perhaps more as a pep talk to himself than anything else—that “it is my hope that I will be able to meet the next generation of China’s leaders—whomever they may prove to be. Yet everyone tells me that that is impossible.” Kissinger believed Bush’s efforts to win favor with the Chinese by improving personal ties would prove pointless—and potentially hazardous given Kissinger’s own desire to control all aspects of American foreign policy. Many at the State Department shared his low opinion of personalizing relations with the Chinese—or at least they were wise enough to tell Kissinger as much—and Bush’s quest was therefore openly ridiculed in Foggy Bottom as naïve in the extreme. “Bush has energetic plans to try to meet as many significant Chinese as he possibly can, especially political leaders,” Winston Lord, an Asia specialist (and future American ambassador to China) who directed the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, wrote Kissinger. “We doubt that he will have any breakthrough in this regard but you may wish to outline your concept of his proper role in the policy area.”52
Many professional diplomats did not consider Bush’s gregarious desire to build bonds of trust with China’s elite to be “proper.” Their discomfort should not be surprising. If the Foggy Bottom professionals believed their Chinese counterparts could be swayed by friendship, they would have to concede that they too might be so influenced. It was better to keep Sino-American relations on a coldly detached plane, the experts advised: given how sensitive the emerging relationship was in the early 1970s, what little might be gained by positive personal relations paled in comparison to the risks posed by the wrong statement or an ill-conceived gesture. The professionals had on their side recent experience of the way offhand remarks to the Chinese could undermine months of hard work. Kissinger’s aide Alexander Haig, while in Beijing in January 1972 to discuss Nixon’s visit, nearly derailed the entire affair by assuring Zhou Enlai that Washington valued China’s continued “viability.” Haig intended to assure his hosts that the Americans had no further intention of undermining their regime. Zhou and Mao interpreted the comment differently. “No country should depend upon a foreign power in maintaining its own independence and viability,” Zhou scolded Haig, lest the dependent country “become that power’s subordinate and colony.”53
Zhou’s passions subsided, but Haig’s gaffe left an indelible imprint on Foggy Bottom. It drove home the perception that Sino-American relations were fragile in the extreme and made Kissinger wary of trusting anyone else to meet with Mao’s top leadership. Given Bush’s dearth of formal diplomatic training, Kissinger’s staff verily shuddered every time their new USLO head secured a private meeting with a Chinese official, and balked every time Bush invited a friend to Beijing. The State Department’s discomfort with American visitors extended even to members of Congress, many of whom pressed their old colleague Bush for one of the personal invitations (and visas) that Chinese officials had informally promised he could dispense. A Chinese visa in one’s passport was a valued commodity in Washington in 1974. Yet the State Department wanted to control such visits whenever possible, fearing that politicians untrained in diplomatic nuances might inadvertently—or perhaps intentionally—disrupt relations. Immediately before Bush’s departure in October 1974, the State Department’s Arthur Hummel cautioned Kissinger that “Bush has already stated arrangements to request visas on ‘a personal basis’ for two Congressmen and their wives to visit Peking this winter. . . . we have so far strictly followed a policy of not promoting any Congressional visits (except those officially arranged).” From Hummel’s perspective, “Bush is creating a problem for himself, and for us.” Despite repeated warnings, he “appears determined to retain his ‘personal’ flexibility.”54
Bush pushed forward despite such warnings, though he frequently wrote of his frustration with the way Washington kept him on such a tight leash while in Beijing. He continued to invite personal friends to Beijing despite the tension such invitations caused in Washington, and he strove to meet as many Chinese leaders as possible, even though Kissinger’s office thought such meetings would prove fruitless. He even filed a protest with the department over its micromanagement of his personal guest list. When visiting American congressmen did behave poorly in 1975, as a result of diplomatic naïveté mixed with alcohol, Bush easily dismissed their gaffe even as some in the State Department feared fallout. “It was not a disaster but it was pretty bad,” he told his journal. “We are too damn goosy on the program and they [the State Department] have too little confidence in me in the sense that they seem scared that everybody is going to blow it. It is the result of Kissinger’s strong arm on everything to do with China.”55
If Bush’s desire to engage the Chinese on a personal level allowed room for missteps and human foibles, American officials had every reason to fear for the long-term stability of Sino-American relations in 1974, because the honeymoon was surely over. Multiple problems remained after the heady days of Nixon’s initial visit. Many pundits had believed most of the issues facing the two superpowers would be solved during Nixon’s second term. He would have four years to put his indelible mark on the globe, they reasoned, while China’s leadership would be eager to complete their life’s work by returning their country to global prominence before making way for the next generation. Kissinger thought formal recognition at least could be accomplished before 1976. Watergate scuttled these hopes. Beijing had its own reasons for slowing the pace of rapprochement after 1972 as well. Having thawed relations with Washington largely as a counterweight to Moscow, China’s senior leaders proved hesitant in the ensuing years to tilt too far toward the Americans.56
Bush therefore arrived in Beijing at a moment when Sino-American relations were widely perceived as stagnant. And stagnation was not a concept the energetic Bush found acceptable. On his initial flight over the Pacific he wrote that “Kissinger keeps the cards so close to his chest that able officers in EA [State Department Bureau of East Asian Affairs] seem unwilling to take any kinds of initiative. This troubles me a little bit because I worry that our policy is ‘plateaued out,’ and that if we don’t do something the policy will come under the microscopic scrutiny the CIA has come under, [and] that the Middle East policy has come under.” He worried throughout his diary that a dearth of visible progress would in time be perceived in the United States and around the world as evidence of failing relations. It was a fear that shows Bush at his clearest: a leader who favored steady and stable relations devoid of high-risk though high-reward breakthroughs, and a man who believed relations were best cultivated far from public view. As he readily conceded, his obsession with the relationship’s image grew directly from his own political background. “The only tack that I have got that can be helpful is this approach of having been in politics.” Politics created their own reality, he had learned; and he wanted to create an aura of positive momentum in which Sino-American relations could make genuine progress.57
Bush came to believe while in Beijing that a steady drumbeat of positive announcements, even superficial ones, could drown out any legitimate criticism of a relationship gone cold. During his first weeks on the job he probed his staff and colleagues for some way to demonstrate progress within Sino-American relations, because “the American people are going to be looking for forward motion.” He verily pleaded with Washington for some means of demonstrating such forward motion, no matter how trivial. Realizing it was not within his power to alter the substance of Sino-American relations on his own, Bush instead concentrated on improving the relationship’s image, hoping to focus international attention elsewhere. There is an elitist strain at work in Bush’s thinking: a conviction that diplomacy functions best when handled quietly among experts far removed from unbridled public passions, and that the public can be easily distracted from matters of substance by symbolic gestures. Bush returned to the topic of symbolic progress constantly during his first weeks in Beijing, raising the issue during most of his early meetings with Chinese officials and with his counterparts in Beijing’s diplomatic community. “I have been concerned by several ambassadors suggesting that our relations have deteriorated, and I made a point of telling Qiao [Guanhua, China’s foreign minister] that two ambassadors had raised this question with me,” Bush recorded. “I also told him I wouldn’t be here if I felt that the relations were going backwards.”58
At the least, he worked to change the USLO’s image in Beijing, raising its public profile as a way of demonstrating that all was well within the broader Sino-American relationship. He and Barbara purchased bicycles. They were the city’s preferred means of transportation, but, more important, he calculated that people would take note of the American ambassador arriving on two wheels rather than in a staid chauffeur-driven automobile. He wanted the Chinese, the city’s ever-watchful diplomatic community, and the growing band of journalists to notice how normally he conducted his own affairs, thereby providing prima facie evidence of the normality of an American presence in Beijing. He simultaneously peppered the State Department with suggestions for demonstrating forward motion, such as enlarging the USLO or the size of its staff, and he even mentioned his concern to Deng Xiaoping when the two first met in November 1974. “I gave him my thesis that there must be visible manifestations of progress for our China policy so it will avoid some of the hyper-microscopic analyses that we are getting on other policies in the States.” Following this logic, he directed his staff to operate in Beijing as though theirs was a typical embassy rather than merely a low-ranking liaison office. Whereas Bruce had banned (with Kissinger’s blessing) his staff from attending national day celebrations at other embassies, Bush reversed this policy. He wanted Americans to be visible in Beijing’s diplomatic community, and reasoned that the informal conversations at these receptions might augment the USLO’s information-collecting efforts. The diplomatic record shows the decision was his alone, taken even as Foggy Bottom dithered over this question of protocol. Seven thousand miles from home, it proved easier for Bush to gain forgiveness than permission when striving to suggest Sino-American progress.59
Bush’s frenetic efforts raised hackles at the State Department, especially as his political background gave him a foundation of support outside the normal confines of the foreign service. Kissinger knew he could not control Bush as easily as he might have managed an ambassador who had risen through the State Department’s oftentimes conformist ranks, and he quickly began to fear that Bush’s insatiable demands for progress might undermine his own more cautious plans. Like Bush, he believed that high-level diplomacy functioned best when conducted between elites with little public scrutiny. But unlike Bush, Kissinger assumed that public perceptions could be massaged as necessary, and in time he concluded that Bush’s preoccupation with the topic revealed a failure to grasp the broader nuances of his own global policy. After reading numerous cables from Bush detailing his “progress” thesis, alongside transcripts of Bush’s discussions of the topic with leading Chinese officials, Kissinger determined in November 1974 to set his new envoy straight. The press might write that Sino-American relations were stagnating, but “you and I know this is not true, as do the Chinese.” These were the opinions that truly mattered, Kissinger instructed, and it would be unwise to state that all was well in the bilateral relationship given the real issues that remained. “For tactical reasons,” Kissinger rebuked Bush, “we don’t want them [the Chinese] to think that we don’t have domestic problems or that we don’t risk criticism if we give away too much on Taiwan.” Bush wanted signs of visible progress in order to take Sino-American relations off the international front burner; Kissinger embraced stagnation as a necessary means of keeping Beijing’s feet to the fire.60
Kissinger thus strove to isolate his envoy’s impact. In Beijing at the close of November 1974, for example, he deliberately chided Bush in front of his Chinese hosts. “George doesn’t think I am spending enough time on China,” he quipped, showing the Chinese that he did care about their country while effectively telling Bush to cool his heels. He reiterated the point when the two met privately, and Bush appears to have heeded these warnings. The volume of his cables back to Washington detailing his day-to-day dealings dropped precipitously following this meeting; their number would decrease further every month he served in Beijing. Nevertheless, he confessed to his diary his skepticism with Kissinger’s strategy. “I think I can convince him that we have been right in the fact that some think our policy is declining and that we need to do certain things to demonstrate that it is not.”61
Bush’s concern with public perception evolved over time into a broader worry that Beijing’s penchant for criticizing Washington risked poisoning American public opinion. This was an important transition in his thinking. He arrived in Beijing thinking that only excessive public scrutiny might derail Sino-American relations, but over time he came to believe that Beijing’s heated anti-American rhetoric might inadvertently draw the very scrutiny he longed to avoid. In early November 1974, he lamented that “China unloaded on us at the World Food Conference in spite of my tactful suggestions to both Qiao and Deng that this not happen. They don’t realize that this eventually will not help our policy at all.” He presumed that Beijing’s leaders “feel that they must make brownie points with the Third World and we will understand,” but he feared that “if Americans focused on what they were saying they wouldn’t understand, unless they were in on all the policy decisions.” He remained convinced that the public was fickle and uninformed when compared to elite decisionmakers such as himself.62
This is a common trope of leaders and pundits, for whom discussions of the public’s ignorance remains an easy means of suggesting their own sophistication. Bush rarely criticized the public so explicitly, though his experience of Watergate had surely taught him to fear its wrath. If roused by Beijing’s constant din of rhetorical assaults, he worried, public anger might prevent elites such as Kissinger (and himself) from performing positive work. The Chinese “ought to knock it off but they don’t seem to want to.”63
Bush’s frustration with the Chinese attacks, which he termed “empty cannons of rhetoric” after hearing Qiao Guanhua employ the term, increased throughout his time in China. He knew that anti-American proclamations were issued primarily to reaffirm Beijing’s anti-capitalist credentials. Harsh rhetoric had long been central to Chinese diplomacy, a role reinforced by the ideological rigidity of the Cultural Revolution. Hot war was not always practical, Zhou Enlai lectured to the Foreign Ministry in 1949. For the true revolutionary, “There may not be a war of swords every year [but] as sure as night turns into day, there will be a constant war of words, every day of the year.” Bush understood, but he did not approve. He found Beijing’s jeremiads to be misguided, potentially dangerous, and particularly galling given his opinion that they were so frequently just plain wrong. “It is annoying beyond belief to read the attacks in the Red News on the United States,” he recorded in November. “China feels it must attack the United States. ... I just have this inner feeling that these Chinese leaders do not subscribe to that view in its entirety. Perhaps I am wrong. But I have heard them talk enough to know they don’t believe that. How does one balance that with their desire for frankness in dealing, their desire for openness, their desire to ‘keep their word’ etc.” Later he wrote, “I am absolutely convinced that American public opinion will turn against this [rhetoric] at some point and a relationship which is very important to China will be damaged. Maybe China’s rhetoric is more important to them than the relationship, but I don’t really think so.”64
Underlying Bush’s ever-increasing frustration with Beijing’s level of vitriol was his growing belief that the Chinese operated on a double standard. Chinese officials thought little of criticizing the Americans, but Bush thought them thin-skinned. “Would China understand it if we struck back in these areas, diplomatic fora, against China,” he wrote. “I am wondering how they would feel if we attacked their closed system, no freedom of press, without taking away from their many accomplishments, the total lack of individual freedom.” Several months later he returned to this question again —in truth, he never left it for long—writing, “We need to make our position known to the Chinese in a friendly and frank fashion. We do have principles and it is time we stood up for them without being contentious. Everybody in our mission knows what I am talking about when I say that China talks about their principles, and when they want to turn something down, they can turn it down on principle. But they do not accord others the same courtesy when it comes to understanding their principles.”65
Bush’s preoccupation throughout his China Diary with the public aspects of diplomacy dovetailed with his own belief that diplomatic relations functioned best when leaders resolved their issues in a friendly fashion far from public scrutiny. “At some point our relationship,” he concluded, “whether the Taiwan problem has been solved or not, should get to the point where Kissinger can come here, have frank discussions and there not be this over-expectation.” Bush returned to this theme in mid-1975, criticizing journalists who felt Ford should delay visiting Beijing until divisive issues could be solved. “The visit in my view should be hailed as simply a visit to get to know the Chinese leaders,” he argued. Leaders needed to talk. “Deng went to Paris,” he noted. “There were no agreements, no signed communiqués, but he had good talks with [President] Giscard d’Estaing of France. This is the kind of meeting this should be billed as. There are global reasons why it makes sense.” Of course, the more the Chinese blustered, the more pressure they placed on Ford to produce dramatic results while in Beijing. “I get tired of reading all of this propaganda and being surrounded with it,” Bush sighed into his diary. “China insists on hammering away at the decadence of our society and labeling us as imperialists etc. I would think that if you want better relations you would lower one’s voice on that kind of thing, but it doesn’t work that way.” By June 1975 his patience was at an end. “They continue to slam us around,” he fumed. “Not as much as they used to obviously, and the China specialists will say less than they might. But I say they are doing it too much, because I worry more about American public opinion than some of our China specialists, and the public opinion’s effect on our being able to perform and fulfill a policy.”66
The global context is crucial to understanding these 1975 remarks and Bush’s Asian experience as a whole. Saigon fell while he was in Beijing. Cambodia plunged into disarray. Détente was being pilloried in Washington and on the verge of collapse in Europe. Everywhere he looked, Bush saw American leadership questioned. All the while, Washington’s allies throughout the world, but especially in the Pacific, scrambled to ensure their own strategic interests should the American people take these losses as cause for a general pullback from the world. In some sense Washington’s Asian allies had been scrambling since Nixon’s historic rapprochement to China in 1971. After a generation of condemning any relations with China, Americans in 1971 had seemed to be changing the rules of the game. In 1975 many worried it was a game they were losing.
From Bush’s vantage point, a general reordering of the strategic landscape was in the offing. He witnessed leaders from the Philippines, Malaysia, and other Pacific countries—men who had for the most part been longstanding allies and pliant adherents to the American effort to isolate China—journeying to Beijing in order to cement ties with Mao’s regime. They appeared in his eyes to be turning from an American-led democracy they no longer trusted toward a new center of power in Asia. “China continues to support revolutions in all these countries,” Bush noted, “and yet many of the countries like the Philippines, Malaysia and others keep trying to get closer to China.” In his opinion, “They have to because they don’t see in the U.S. the firm kind of interventionist support that they have been able to count on in the past.”67
This was the domino theory as Bush saw it. Not the knee-jerk fear that Communism would spread, like a disease, from victim to victim as had been believed in the past, but rather a more nuanced sense that America’s declining credibility would allow Communism’s influence to grow throughout Asia by invitation. In Bush’s worldview it was not so much that Communist influence would spread outward after its victory in South Vietnam, picking up speed and heft like a snowball rolling downhill. Instead he feared that, in the wake of the American pull-out from Vietnam, countries throughout the region would be drawn to Communism’s increased gravity. They would hew all the faster to Beijing as the epicenter of Asian Communism if they perceived a general American withdrawal from the region—the proof of which would seem to be Washington’s refusal to counter Beijing’s harsh rhetorical critiques. “There is a domino theory,” he wrote as Saigon fell, because he feared its fall undermined the one domino that mattered most in international relations: American credibility. As Bush put it in 1975, “Clearly as the United States has reneged on commitments and pulled back, and is unwilling to support recommendations of the president, the free countries” of the world will begin to lose faith in America. “As Cambodia weakens, as North Vietnam makes gains, many of our allies are compelled to move toward the PRC. The domino theory is alive and well,” he told his journal. A general strategic realignment, to Washington’s eventual detriment, seemed the likely result. “I have complete conviction that there is such a thing as a domino theory,” he later wrote. “Thailand, and the Philippines and others rushing towards new alignment. Kim Il Sung of Korea talking much tougher now about the South in Peking. Obviously trying to capitalize on the decline of the free countries in the southeast.”68
Bush’s reactions to Saigon’s fall are among the China Diary’s most revealing passages. They illuminate the centrality of credibility to his definition of a successful foreign policy, and his belief that a successful foreign policy demanded constant reevaluation. Rhetorically asking what he would do if in charge of Washington’s diplomacy at that critical juncture, Bush offered a broad outline of his most basic diplomatic principles, revealing a man cognizant of the complexities of the positions he advocated, yet aware of the limitations of his own experience. He suggested he would employ multilateral approaches in international forums such as the U.N. to a greater extent than the Nixon and Ford administrations, but that he would also ensure (exactly how he never states) that Washington received credit from these bodies for its good works. American policymakers had to rehabilitate their standing throughout the world, he argued to his diary, because “as soon as America doesn’t stand for something in the world, there is going to be a tremendous erosion of freedom.” Yet, fresh from the traumas of Vietnam, he also thought the country could not go off on further quixotic crusades where vital interests were not involved. “We have got to be realistic. We have to have our eyes open.” Most important, Washington needed to determine with its allies the issues that truly mattered. The world system needed American leadership to function, Bush believed, but that leadership needed to be perceived as simultaneously credible and rational. Credible in the sense that promises would be kept, but rational in that Washington would promise only that which it was prepared to defend to the hilt. Even if allies disagreed with Washington’s strategic conclusions, they would at least better appreciate Washington’s reasoning if fully involved in such discussions. “Everyone out here is so down on our policy in Cambodia and Southeast Asia in general,” he lamented. “Even our allies talk about how wrong our policy is.” Such widespread criticism of American policy, even if wrongheaded, hardly enhanced Washington’s standing throughout the world. It did little good to pursue quixotic policies merely because the crusade had already begun. Rather, Bush came to believe that what was needed after Vietnam was a broad reassessment of American interests— “not a withdrawal, but a reexamination”—so that the promises Washington made, and the commitments it in turn could be expected to keep, were themselves worthy of the effort. We have to “redraw the lines,” he wrote, “perhaps in the Pacific, so we are not committed in wars we shouldn’t be involved in, where we’d have no support from the American people . . . along with allies.”69
The international events Bush witnessed while in Beijing reinforced his belief that credibility was crucial to a successful foreign policy, but it was not the only necessary ingredient. Equally important was a willingness to make credible promises only for matters truly worthy of widespread sacrifice and support. Bush did not vainly think in 1975 that he alone possessed the perfect formula for preserving American power in the world. “If somebody said to me today what would you declare” to be Washington’s vital interest and broad strategy, he conceded, “I’d be damned if I know how I’d define it.” But he knew enough in 1975 to question what he saw around him. This is the point of a sketchbook, after all: to play with ideas. He was in Beijing a man in thought, confronting questions he had until then not thought to ask.70
The answers Bush found to the questions he posed while in China surely influenced his worldview and his later actions while president. His Beijing experience made him more sensitive to the international implications of political rhetoric and more convinced of the importance of personal diplomacy. Perhaps most important of all, it shaped his understanding of the power of the domino theory and the necessity of confronting tyrannical aggression with firm resolve. His response to each of the major events of his presidency—including the end of the Cold War, the Gulf War, and the vexing Tiananmen crisis—has its origin in the lessons he imparted to his China Diary.
Of these three lessons of Beijing, Bush’s aversion to harsh diplomatic rhetoric is the most easily seen, as his frustrations with Chinese “cannons of rhetoric” clearly left its mark. He incorporated the phrase into his own vocabulary after 1974, employing the term throughout his career to denote political language developed for domestic ears that was diplomatically meaningless unless it was believed overseas. When pressed in 1984 to elaborate on Ronald Reagan’s use of the term “evil empire” to discuss the Soviet Union, Bush cautioned reporters against making too much of the heated term. “Every day in China,” he recalled, I “heard the ‘red news and the blue news,’ the former filled with bombast, the latter with fact.” But when he asked the Chinese about the contrast, they merely “referred to empty cannons of rhetoric” as a way of excusing their tone and language. Similarly, in 1987 Bush told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to worry if the impending American election seemed heated. “I told Gorbachev not to be concerned about the ‘empty cannons of rhetoric’ he would hear booming during the campaign, and explained what the expression meant,” Bush recalled. “It was a phrase Chinese leaders, I think Mao Zedong especially, had used years before to describe their propaganda criticizing the United States. Don’t worry about excessive bombast, they would say; look at deeds and actions instead.”71
Bush strove to follow his own advice. He refused to gloat when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in 1990, for example, noting, “If we exhorted change, our rhetoric might produce a military backlash and set back the cause of freedom throughout the Soviet Union rather than move it forward.” His “caution prompted criticism” from American politicians who wished to celebrate, Bush later reflected, but he had come to believe that every presidential statement carried consequences. “Hot rhetoric would needlessly antagonize the militant elements within the Soviet Union and the [Warsaw] Pact,” he explained.” His awareness of that potential effect was clearly the result of earlier experience.72
The conclusions Bush reached about Vietnam and the domino theory can also be directly read in his Gulf War policies. In the runup to the war Bush frequently employed a historical analogy to explain his hard line. History taught that dictators were only stopped by resolute force, he argued, comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. This was a shrewd rhetorical tactic, given that most Americans unflinchingly accepted Hitler as an enemy. As Marlin Fitzwater pointed out, Hussein was a “bad guy on whom Americans could focus their response” to the war, while another White House speechwriter recalled of Hussein that “I remember thinking and I’m sure saying, that this guy is a classic villain.” Bush even suggested by the eve of war that Hussein was in fact more evil than Hitler, though he did not push this point particularly hard.73
While the Hitler analogy sold well on Main Street, what really drove Bush’s Gulf War policy was not so much the lesson he drew from 1938 but the one he had learned in 1975. In 1990 Bush did not fear that Hussein would attack neighbor after neighbor if his conquest of Kuwait went unchallenged, as Hitler had done when his initial conquests went unopposed. He was instead primarily concerned that failure to check Hussein’s initial aggression against Kuwait would prompt Iraq’s neighbors throughout the volatile Persian Gulf region to realign their strategic interests in tune with the new geopolitical reality. Just as when Vietnam fell and Asian leaders looked to Beijing for leadership, Bush believed, if Washington left a vacuum in the Gulf by tacitly endorsing Kuwait’s fall, others would look to Hussein (or worse) for stability. “I can’t honestly feel that Southeast Asia is vital to the security of the United States,” he recorded in his journal in 1975. But a general realignment of Asian interests would surely prove of vital concern to American strategists. Similarly, in 1990, Kuwait itself mattered less to Bush than did the principle of its sovereignty, and the practical effect of its loss to the broader region. “All will not be tranquil until Saddam Hussein is history,” he told the National Security Council during one of their first meetings after the Iraqi invasion. American inaction would allow the dominoes to fall in 1990, as he had seen them tumble in Asia a generation before. Before he had time to hear Bush’s full reaction to Hussein’s invasion in 1990, Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell remarked to one of his commanders, “I think we’d go to war over Saudi Arabia, but I doubt we’d go to war over Kuwait.” Powell was only half right. An Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia would surely have triggered an immediate American response. But Bush went to war even when no such attack materialized because he believed the loss of Kuwait’s sovereignty would be felt far beyond its borders. This is why he constantly referred to the Gulf War as a “test” of the post–Cold War system. It was a moment to show that the United States would not retreat from its post-1945 role of international stabilizer. The China Diary suggests that Bush had internalized this lesson years before.74
Bush’s sense of recent history, spanning both the appeasement of Munich and the fall of Saigon, drove his response to Hussein in 1990, but his assessment of falling Asian dominoes in 1975 was historically invalid. In the wake of Saigon’s fall there was no widespread strategic realignment of the kind Bush feared and described in his China Diary. He did not stay long enough in China—he departed Beijing in December 1975—to see that the steady stream of Asian leaders he had witnessed journeying to meet with China’s leaders never presaged a significant erosion of American influence in the region. He feared Communism’s rise in Asia not by conquest but rather by increased influence. He took as a central lesson of his Cold War, and of his time in Beijing in particular, the notion that credibility mattered because allies and adversaries alike were forever on guard for any reduction in a great power’s commitment. He internalized this lesson in 1975. Yet Bush’s fears never came to pass. Pacific nations such as the Philippines and Malaysia improved ties with China after 1975, but neither fell to the Communist menace as a consequence. There was no widespread stampede away from Washington’s influence and toward Beijing after South Vietnam fell; there was no general realignment of the region’s alliances and strategic policies. Even if they were teetering in 1975—and this point itself is debatable—Asia’s dominoes simply did not fall.
But by the time American credibility throughout the region had been reestablished, Bush was long gone to his next assignment. Indeed, frustrated by his inability to engage the Chinese in the manner he desired—more on that momentarily—Bush had even ceased writing in his China Diary months before his ultimate departure. He seemed a man ready to move on. What he took from Beijing for application later in life was therefore a lesson molded at a singular moment in time, in the difficult summer of 1975. It was not a lesson with a long historical view, save for its impact on Bush at the moment in his own life when he actively sought strategic truths. Put another way, because Bush was a man in thought in 1975, he was also deeply impressionable.
Not all of the lessons Bush drew from his Beijing experience were pessimistic in tone. On the contrary, Bush’s Beijing experience confirmed his faith in personal diplomacy. This faith surely informed his response to the Tiananmen crisis during his presidency, despite the fact that the China Diary shows his ultimate frustration when his goal of befriending Chinese leaders proved elusive. “It is my hope that I will be able to meet the next generation of China’s leaders,” he wrote on his initial flight across the Pacific in October 1974. Yet only months later he fumed “I am continually amazed at how hard it is to get close to the Chinese.” And further, “They are just determined [not] to let us, or any foreigner in that regard, get too close. It is impossible to pick up the phone, ask somebody over, and have a meaningful discussion about Southeast Asia or Russia or someplace like that.” Later he would prove downright angry at such rejections. “The people are so nice here but they can be so obtuse, they can be so removed—so little chance for contacts.” Comparing his situation with that of China’s envoy in Washington, he wrote of “the enormous contrast between life here and Huang Zhen’s life in Washington. He can talk substance with anyone he wants. I can sit formally for one hour with [the Foreign Ministry’s] Wang Hairong who says absolutely nothing. Middle Kingdom syndrome, with an underlying hatred of foreigners, is amazing.” By the time he wound down his diary four months before his departure, Bush had sadly concluded that, from the Chinese perspective, “We are the foreigners, the barbarians. For polite people they act in very strange and tough ways.”75
Bush took this failure to build strong ties hard on a personal level. He felt slighted by his Chinese hosts, who, even after months of meetings and social events, still treated him coldly. In July, after his massive Independence Day party at the USLO, Bush met Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua at a party. Yet he “spoke to me but with no great warmth or friendship. I said I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He simply nodded. There is a[n] enormous difference in the way we are treated here and the way Huang Zhen is treated in Washington.” More hurtful was a late July meeting with Lin Ping, head of the Foreign Ministry’s American Affairs department. Lin had hosted a USLO group on a weeklong expedition throughout northeast China. The two men had traveled together and dined together. Yet a week after their return to Beijing, Bush recorded that he “saw Lin Ping at the Peru reception—almost as if our trip had not taken place.”76
Bush’s inability to personalize Sino-American relations in the manner he initially desired prompts a fundamental question for any who wish to understand his diplomatic style: just how valuable is personal diplomacy? Bush never naïvely believed that friendships might trump national interests. But he firmly believed that such friendships between leaders mattered, especially if they helped defuse international crises. Tiananmen would seem to offer a perfect test case for answering this question. If personal diplomacy really worked as Bush hoped, then his longstanding friendship with China’s top leaders, Deng Xiaoping in particular, should have helped him defuse the Sino-American crisis that Deng’s crackdown engendered. One obvious flaw of personal diplomacy is that it can function most efficiently only when leaders with personal ties each remain in power. Elections, coups, or mere bureaucratic shifts diminish the benefits of international friendships assiduously cultivated by a previous generation of leaders. This critique does not apply to Bush’s handling of Tiananmen, however, as many of the leaders who ran China in 1989 were the same group Bush had come to know in 1974–75.
Bush readily concedes that his personal ties to Deng affected his reaction to the crisis. Scowcroft, Baker, and James Lilley—Bush’s ambassador to China at the time and a man Bush had befriended when they both served in the USLO in 1974—all agree on this point. Bush had numerous meeting with Deng Xiaoping in the years that followed his time at the USLO. He met with Deng, among others, during a 1977 return visit to China, and Deng repaid the courtesy by visiting Bush in Houston while on his own 1979 trip to America. On each occasion they discussed one of their favorite topics: oil. In fact, during his brief stint as a private citizen before the 1980 presidential campaign began in earnest, Bush helped Deng negotiate the foreign development of one of China’s primary oil fields. They saw each other relatively often while Bush was vice president. It was experiences like these that prompted more than one American policymaker to note that President Bush acted as his own “China desk officer.” Whether Bush was in fact a China expert is debatable; he indisputably considered himself an expert on Deng.77
Yet Bush never translated that intimate knowledge into a satisfying response to Beijing’s Tiananmen crackdown. He tried repeatedly during the first days of the crisis to communicate directly with China’s leaders. He tried to speak to Deng in particular, thinking their friendship might offer some advantage in tempering Beijing’s fury against its pro-democracy protestors. At the least, he thought Deng would afford him the opportunity—if only out of respect for their long friendship—to express Washington’s displeasure, even if he refused to listen to others.
Deng refused all such overtures, to Bush’s great frustration. “One of the things that I think he was disappointed about during the Tiananmen thing,” James Baker later noted, “was that Deng Xiaoping did not take his call, and he was really disappointed in that, because he felt that Deng had become a colleague, and a friend.” Baker points out that “when the President of the United States calls . . . you usually take his call.” So galled was the White House by this wall of silence that many American strategists began to fear that Deng was perhaps no longer in power or, worse yet, no longer alive. How else to explain this personal affront? Deng was in fact still in power, though undoubtedly preoccupied by the crisis, and thus his rejection of Bush’s overtures unequivocally challenged the latter’s faith in personal diplomacy. “It was a telling comment on just how limited were the ties between American and Chinese leaders,” journalist James Mann noted. “At the time when it mattered, Bush’s friendship with Deng Xiaoping didn’t count for much.” Asked to render his own judgment two decades later, Baker would only cautiously conclude that Bush was “deeply disappointed” in Deng’s behavior, because he “considered the man his friend.” Indeed Baker emphasized the word “friend” when making this point, making it sound long and profound. This was a word that meant something real to George H. W. Bush.78
Undaunted, Bush gave up on the telephone and instead wrote Deng a personal letter. He wrote the first draft in his own hand, without input from his advisers. “I wanted a letter straight from my heart,” Bush later explained, “so I composed it myself.” He showed the text only to Baker, Scowcroft, and Chief of Staff John Sununu before sending it. Deng eventually accepted the letter, and he ultimately agreed to Bush’s suggestion that the Chinese receive a “special emissary who could speak with total candor to you representing my heartfelt convictions.” This and similar references to their longstanding relationship emerge throughout Bush’s message to Deng. Scowcroft, who had himself met many of the Chinese leaders during the 1970s, eventually undertook this secret mission, whose details were not publicly released until months later. Indeed an additional personal element to this story arrived in the way the White House delivered the letter. Finding most official channels blocked, Scowcroft personally handed it to Han Xu, China’s ambassador in Washington, an acquaintance since 1971. “He was literally the first Chinese communist official I met,” Scowcroft later noted.79
Bush’s personal ties with China’s senior leadership were never likely to have prevented their crackdown on the pro-democracy protesters scattered throughout their country. This was never Bush’s hope. But he did believe such ties should have helped defuse the ensuing Sino-American crisis. Personal ties were cultivated for just such crisis moments, he had long believed—yet his ties to the Chinese ultimately did not provide him with special access, as he would have predicted. One may ask whether perhaps Deng did place greater stock in Bush’s personal overtures because he trusted this American president as a friend. Perhaps Deng did in fact heed Bush’s letters more than if another politician had occupied the Oval Office. No matter the answer to these questions, one fact remains: Bush thought he deserved more, and he believed that his personal faith in Deng’s friendship had proved misguided.
Bush’s own reaction to the crisis, conversely, was clearly influenced by his long experience with the Chinese. At the crucial moment, when critics across the American political spectrum demanded a harsh response, he sought instead a quiet policy. He cut high-level political and military ties between the two capitals and endorsed other sanctions. Despite heated calls from Capitol Hill for further reprisals, however, Bush spent considerable political capital to keep sanctions below the threshold he thought would cause lasting damage to the fragile bilateral relationship. As he related to his diary in the midst of the crisis, events were “highly complex, yet I am determined to try to preserve this relationship—[and to] cool the rhetoric. ... I take this relationship very personally, and I want to handle it that way.” He said much the same during a 2005 interview, noting that his personal relationship with Deng deeply informed the policies he pursued. “Had I not met the man,” Bush said, “I think I would have been less convinced that we should keep relations with them going after Tiananmen Square.” Indeed, as James Lilley conceded in his memoirs, Scowcroft’s visit to Beijing was itself deeply personal, in that he carried Bush’s personal assurance that—despite the glare of public scrutiny, despite public calls for condemnation and reprisal, and despite the fact that there would inevitably be a political fallout—this particular president was committed to China for the long term. “We had to sanction them because of the public pressure in the United States,” Lilley later said, but “Bush wanted to preserve the relationship.” He might not have proved able to leverage his friendship with Deng to achieve a useful diffusion of tensions, but that friendship clearly prompted Bush to preserve relations to the greatest extent possible. It prompted from him a less caustic line than another president, less intimately involved with China and its leaders, might have pursued.80
Taking a longer historical view, Bush’s personal response to Tiananmen offers a curious verdict on personal diplomacy, especially when one considers for a final moment the response from Kissinger, Bush’s long-term diplomatic foil. Both men endorsed the same reaction to Beijing’s Tiananmen crackdown. Kissinger, who had long disparaged Bush’s hopes of personalizing the Sino-American relationship, advised the maintenance of ties with Beijing, lest this temporary setback in China’s march toward democracy lead to a true change of course. In other words, each man reached the same realist’s conclusion, although Kissinger never claimed to make decisions based on personal ties. Perhaps personal diplomacy ultimately matters little when strategists make policies, although it might matter a great deal in how they choose to implement them. Indeed Nixon advised the same policy of rapprochement toward China, and even traveled to Beijing in late 1989 to chastise Chinese leaders privately for their actions, but also to demonstrate what he had called for publicly: maintenance of the relationship.
Bush’s preoccupation with personal diplomacy and his concern for the public side of diplomacy pervade his China Diary, and thus the question of their utility confronts readers. Even Bush would concede a full decade after composing the diary that “I don’t think rhetoric has any influence on what states do. They act out of self-interest.” The same could just as easily have been said by Kissinger. It is the realist’s fundamental trope.81
What the diary shows us then, in the end, is a matter of style. As with any sketchbook, Bush’s diary helped its author work through the fundamental issues he confronted, be they personal or geopolitical. It is the intimate story of a man eager for more: more power, more prestige, and a more prominent role on the world stage. What the diary shows is what Bush planned to do with that role if ever entrusted with it. It helps us understand his later policies when he was in fact granted that power. But most fundamentally, it shows Bush’s thinking, and indeed his style, well before the Oval Office. The Gulf War, the end of the Cold War, Tiananmen, NAFTA, and the rest of the crises he faced while president are better understood as a result of studying the diary. These pages help us understand how Bush weighed the pragmatic realism he innately believed in against the potential and pitfalls of personal diplomacy. It reveals the value he placed on credibility in international affairs and his conception of the domino theory then and later—one that, though based on a flawed historical assessment, still produced a successful argument for war in 1990. He did not learn to be a diplomat while in Beijing, but while there he laid the foundation for his own gentlemanly style of diplomacy while president.
Of all the diary’s revelations, the most profound might be the least surprising. Bush left China a more sophisticated student of foreign affairs than when he had arrived, because he had internalized the lesson one almost always gains from an extended overseas experience: that not everyone views the world as Washington does. “The American people do not have any concept of how others around the world view America,” he concluded after six months in China. “We think we are good, honorable, decent, freedom-loving. Others are firmly convinced that . . . we are embarking on policies that are anathema to them.” As his diary demonstrates, Bush came to China in 1974 a relative neophyte in foreign affairs. In a very real sense— because he had come to appreciate that the world looked different from Beijing than it did from Washington, or from New Haven or Houston, for that matter—he left an internationalist.82
1 Bush’s statements are not easily parsed; his passionate defenses of his own rhetoric frequently obfuscate more than they illuminate. In 1995, for example, he offered (in a quote worth citing in full): “Vision is an interesting word. I’m the President that the national press corps felt had no vision, and yet I worked for a more peaceful world. And we did something to say to a totalitarian dictator in Iraq, you’re not going to take over your neighboring country. There’s a vision there, which was peace. So, I’m a little defensive in the use of the word. Because I think the pundits had it down that I had no vision, but I did. You need a vision, you need a central core. You need to say, ‘Here’s what I’m going to try to do to make life better for others.’ It doesn’t have to be proclaimed in the fanciest prose. It doesn’t have to be done with the most rhetorical flourish. It has to be your inner self. It’s got to drive you. And it can be a personal thing. It can be your set of values. Your vision can be ‘I want to live to this code of behavior.’” See Academy of Achievement induction interview, June 2, 1995, at www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/bus0int-1, accessed June 1, 2007. For Fitzwater, see Roy Joseph, “The New World Order: President Bush and the Post-Cold War Era,” in Martin Medhurst, ed., The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 97.
2 George H. W. Bush, announcement speech, October 12, 1987, Bush Presidential Library. For “reticent,” see editor interview with Brent Scowcroft, March 8, 2007. Transcripts of this and other interviews have been made available for researchers at the Bush Presidential Library.
3 Bush Presidential Library, NSC Files, Richard Haas Files, Working Files: Iraq 8/2/90–12/90, Meeting of the NSC, Aug. 3, 1990. Scowcroft alludes to their coordinated approach to this meeting in George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Scribner, 1999), 318–19.
4 Diary entry for April 30, 1975.
5 Diary entry for April 26, 1975.
6 David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 218. Ronald Reagan recorded in his diary that “Historically the chairman [of the Crisis Council] is Nat. Security Adviser [Dick Allen]. Al [Haig] thinks his turf is being invaded. We chose George because Al is wary of Dick.” See Douglas Brinkley, ed., The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 11. For “you die, I fly,” a term coined by James Baker, see Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner, 1999), 321.
7 Bush, All the Best, 86 and 89; see also Herbert Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York: Scribner, 1997), 96, and Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes (New York: Random House, 1993), 419.
8 Cramer, 419.
9 ”I took on General Walker [a Birch Society leader], The National Indignation Council and the rest of these people,” Bush wrote. “It got most unpleasant as you can imagine.” All the Best, 87 and 89–92.
10 Parmet, 141.
11 For “every cabinet,” see William Safire, Before the Fall: An Insider View of the Pre-Watergate White House (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 498. For “disappointment,” see James Baker, Work Hard, Study, and Keep out of Politics! (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 2006), 25.
12 For “spell out,” see Tom Wicker, George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 26–27. For “what the White House would be looking for,” see Bush and Victor Gold, Looking Forward (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 110. For Nixon, see Parmet, 148. For “takes our line beautifully,” see Cramer, 611.
13 Bush and Gold, 107 and 110. For the profane reaction, see Parmet, 149.
14Parmet, 149; editor interview with George H. W. Bush, July 8, 2005; and Bush, All The Best, 133.
15 For Bush at Shea, see Joseph Durso, “Mets Beat Expos in Rain, 4–2,” New York Times, April 7, 1971, 31. For “like people,” see Robert Alden, “Bush, Leaving UN Post, Is Fearful of Bloc Voting,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 1972, 8. For “best policy,” see Bush, All the Best, 137.
16 Editor interview with George H. W. Bush, July 8, 2005. When asked to describe his U.N. approach, Bush said he merely recalled his mother’s advice. “Be kind. Don’t be a big shot. Listen, don’t talk. Reach out to people. [It] doesn’t have anything to do with diplomacy; it has to do with life. Treat people with respect and recognize in diplomatic terms that the sovereignty of Burundi is as important to them as our sovereignty is [to us]. Slightly different scale, I might add. But nevertheless this is just a value thing. This isn’t any great diplomatic study from the Fletcher School or something. This is just the way you react to things.”
17 Cramer, 611.
18 For “there was a time,” see Alden, 8. For “we could have said,” see editor interview with George H. W. Bush, July 8, 2005.
19 Editor interview with Brent Scowcroft, March 8, 2007. Scowcroft most likely learned this story secondhand, as he and Bush did not become close until later, during Gerald Ford’s presidency. Yet the story is that much more powerful for our understanding of Bush’s public persona if Scowcroft had in fact come to believe he had witnessed the events he described: it had become part of Bush’s lore.
20 For “call foreign leaders,” see editor interview with Brent Scowcroft, March 8, 2007. For “diplomacy was easy,” see Parmet, 462. For “in the other guy’s shoes” and “friendship,” see Maureen Dowd, “The Personal Means a Lot These Days,” New York Times, July 12, 1990, A14.
21 John Burns, “George and Barbara Bush: A Breezy Yankee Style in Peking,” People Magazine, May 5, 1975, 4–7. The international relations literature on an individual’s role in history is vast. For an overview, see Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In,” International Security, 25 (Spring 2001), 107–46.
22 Victor S. Kaufman, “‘Chirep’: The Anglo-American Dispute over Chinese Representation in the United Nations,” English Historical Review 115 (April 2000), 354–77, and Rosemary Foote, The Practice of Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 22–52.
23 Jeffrey A. Engel, “Of Fat and Thin Communists: Diplomacy and Philosophy in Western Economic Warfare Strategies toward China (and Tyrants, Broadly),” Diplomatic History 29 (June 2005): 445–74, Eisenhower quote on 453. For Kennedy, see Victor S. Kaufman, Confronting Communism: U.S. And British Policies toward China (Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 151.
24 Margaret Macmillan, Nixon and China: The Week That Changed the World (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006), 6.
25 Bush, All The Best, 149–52.
26 Ibid., 152.
27 Ibid., 153–55.
28 Rogers believed the vote was winnable. “We are neck-and-neck with the opponents of our approach to Chinese representation in the United Nations,” he informed Nixon on October 12, 1971. “Although it is impossible to predict the final outcome because of the number of uncommitted or wavering votes, I would say that our prospects for success are just a little less than even.” Rogers reported that the State Department “has mobilized all its available resources . . . [and] Ambassador Bush has been equally unstinting in his own efforts.” United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS], 1969–76, vol. 5, “Memorandum from Secretary of State Rogers to President Nixon,” Oct. 12, 1971, 828–30. For “deliberately undercutting,” see National Security Archive, Negotiating US-Chinese Rapprochement, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 70, Conversation among President Nixon, Secretary of State William Rogers, and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, Sept. 30, 1971. For “votes are set,” see FRUS, 1969–76, vol. 5, 845 note.
29 For “outcome was inevitable,” see Bush and Gold, 116. For “death warrant,” see editor interview with George H. W. Bush, July 8, 2005.
30 For “my only interest,” see Bush, All The Best, 155–56.
31 For “communicated,” see editor interview with Brent Scowcroft, March 8, 2007. For “Bush doesn’t know” and “backbone,” see William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: New Press, 1998), 70.
32 For “a conspiratorial approach,” see Macmillan, 60. Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994), and Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). The available literature on Kissinger is discussed in the essay on sources.
33 Douglas Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford (New York: Times Books, 2007), 65.
34 Diary entries for Nov. 26, Nov. 14, and Oct. 22, 1974, and June 16, 1975.
35 For “too soft,” see Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA), National Security Files, Box 1031, Exchanges Leading Up to HAK Trip to China, Dec. 1969–July 1971 (1), Telcon, The President/Mr. Kissinger, 8:18 p.m., Apr. 27, 1971. For “don’t you discuss” and “learning more,” see Burr, 51 and 285. Many commentators interpreted President George W. Bush’s turning to Kissinger (and to Donald Rumsfeld, another of his father’s rivals from the 1970s) as a deliberate attempt to distance his own presidency from his father’s legacy. The younger Bush met with Kissinger at least monthly, according to journalist Bob Woodward, “making the former secretary the most regular and frequent outside counsel to Bush on foreign affairs.” Such a turn was, in the words of one Washington insider, “a chance to prove his father wrong.” See Bob Woodward, State of Denial (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 406–10; and Maureen Dowd, “Aux Barricades,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2007, A19; and “Don’t Pass the Salted Peanuts, Henry,” New York Times, Oct. 4, 2006, A31.
36 Diary entry for Nov. 5, 1974.
37 Editor interview with Brent Scowcroft, March 8, 2007. James Lilley contended that, while at the USLO, he transmitted messages for Scowcroft through his CIA communications channels, so that Bush could avoid the State Department’s system altogether. Indeed Lilley employed this same trick when, in 1989, he wanted to communicate with Bush’s White House without fear that his State Department cables might be inadvertently leaked to the press. Editor interview with James Lilley, March 9, 2007.
38 Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), 254 and 268. For Kissinger on personality’s role, see Byman and Pollack, 108.
39 Diary entry for Feb. 6, 1975, and Bush, All the Best, 60. Bush does not record a specific moment for this conversation with Kissinger. The full quote is instructive: “I believed that personal contact would be an important part of our approach to both diplomacy and leadership of the alliance and elsewhere. Some feel emphasis on personal relationships between leaders is unimportant or unnecessary. Henry Kissinger once argued to me that these are no substitutes for deep national interests. He pointed out that the leader of one country is not going to change a policy because he likes another leader. I suppose there is a danger that one can be naively lulled into complacency if one expects friendships will cause the other party to do things your way, but I thought that danger was remote. For me, personal diplomacy and leadership went hand in hand.” Importantly, Bush believes such relationships must be cultivated: “You can’t develop or earn this mutual trust and respect [from foreign leaders] unless you deliberately work at it.”
40 For “loyal,” see Dallek, 434. For “anything” and “can’t say no,” see Cramer, 610–11.
41 For “moving back” and “complicated times,” see Parmet, 163–64. For “escape,” see Bush, All the Best, 176.
42 Barry Werth, 31 Days: Gerald Ford, The Nixon Pardon, and a Government in Crisis (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 165–67.
43 For Bruce, see Priscilla Roberts, ed., Window on the Forbidden City: The Beijing Diaries of David Bruce, 1973–74 (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Centre of Asia Studies, 2001).
44 ”We went back and talked about England,” Bush recorded of his conversation with Ford. “He wondered if it was substantive enough—so did I. We talked about the money. I told him I had lost a lot of money and didn’t know if I could afford it.” See Bush, All the Best, 196, and Werth, 166.
45 For “substantive business,” see diary entry for Oct. 21, 1974. For “what the hell,” see Don Oberdorfer, “China: Change of Pace,” Washington Post, Dec. 2, 1974, B1.
46 Diary entry for Oct. 21, 1974. Lilley believed Bush’s choice was like “pulling the covers over your head, and getting the hell out of Washington.” Editor interview with James Lilley, March 9, 2007.
47 Bush Presidential Library, Personal Papers of George H. W. Bush, China Files, Correspondence Files, Box 1, Bush to Armstrong, Nov. 6, 1974; Bush to Bartlett, Oct. 29, 1974; and Bush to Rhodes, Nov. 28, 1974; Oberdorfer, B1.
48 Diary entry for Oct. 21, 1974.
49 ”Mr. Ford’s Ambassadorial Nominations,” Washington Post, Sept. 13, 1974, A27; “Mr. Ford’s Diplomats,” New York Times, Sept. 6, 1974, 32; and “Ford’s Choices for Diplomatic Posts,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 6, 1974, B6.
50Hollingsworth’s opinion comes from Priscilla Roberts, editor of David Bruce’s Beijing diaries, personal communication, June 25, 2007.
51 United Kingdom National Archive (formerly British Public Records Office) FCO 21/1234, Relations between China and USA, Ramsbotham to Wilford, Sept. 12, 1974, and Wilford to Ramsbotham, Sept. 19, 1974.
52 For “it is my hope,” see diary entry for Oct. 21, 1974. For “energetic plans,” see National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 59, Lot 77D114, Records of the Policy Planning Staff (Winston Lord Files) (hereafter NARA, Lord Files), Box 375, China: Sensitive Chronological: January-February 1975, From Habib and Lord to Kissinger, Feb. 4, 1975.
53 Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 273. Margaret MacMillan points out that Haig’s unfortunate choice of words, which he pleaded was merely “the simple language of a soldier,” came after several days of discourtesy and intentionally rude treatment by the Chinese, as the Shanghai Clique attempted to subvert the impending Sino-American rapprochement. MacMillan, 221–24.
54 NARA, Lord Files, Box 376, Chronological, August 17-Oct. 15, 1974, Hummel to Kissinger, Oct. 8, 1974.
55 Diary entries for April 1 and April 2, 1975.
56 Particularly useful on normalization are Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, “Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China,” Journal of American History 92 (June 2005), 109–35, and William Kirby, Robert Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of U.S.-China Relations: An International History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005).
57 Diary entry for Oct. 21, 1974.
58 Diary entries for Oct. 21 and Oct. 29, 1974.
59 Diary entry for Nov. 1, 1974.
60 NARA, RG 59, Lord Files, Box 375, China: Sensitive Chronological, Oct. 16–Dec. 31, 1974, From Kissinger to Bush, Nov. 12, 1974; and NARA, RG 59, Lord Files, Box 331, China Exchanges, Aug. 9–Dec. 31, 1974, From Kissinger to Bush, Nov. 4, 1974.
61 Diary entry for Nov. 26, 1974.
62 Diary entry for Nov. 8, 1974.
63 Ibid.
64 For Zhou, see Macmillan, 45. Diary entries for Nov. 17 and Dec. 19, 1974.
65Diary entries for Nov. 17, 1974, and April 16, 1975.
66 Diary entries for Nov. 30, 1974, and June 2, March 11, and June 8, 1975.
67 Diary entry for May 6, 1975.
68 For the domino theory generally, see Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Diary entries for April 8, March 17, and April 22, 1975.
69 Diary entries for April 30, April 26, and March 3, 1975.
70 May 6, 1975.
71 Bush had in fact employed the term “cannons of rhetoric” while U.N. ambassador, in reference to the newly seated Chinese delegation. After Qiao Guan-hua delivered a blistering assault on the United States in the General Assembly, Bush chastised Qiao for his “intemperate language,” noting that it was “disturbing” to see the Chinese “firing these empty cannons of rhetoric.” “Peking’s Wordy Debut,” Time, Nov. 29, 1971. For Bush in 1984, see Jack Rosenthal, “George Bush’s Daily Dilemma,” New York Times, Sept. 25, 1984, A26. For Bush and Gorbachev, see Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 5.
72 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 115, 149, 207.
73 Rachel Martin Harlow, “Agency and Agent in George Bush’s Gulf War Rhetoric,” in Medhurst, 66.
74 Diary entry for May 6, 1975. For “tranquil,” see Bush Presidential Library, NSC Files, Richard Haas Files, Working Files: Iraq 8/2/90–12/90, Meeting of the NSC, August 6, 1990. For Powell, see James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004), 184.
As Scowcroft explained during one of the first NSC meetings of the Gulf crisis —speaking on Bush’s behalf, as described above—the fear was not Hussein, but the instability Hussein’s victory might sew. “Beyond the consequences of a successful move by Iraq are what else the DCI [director of central intelligence] said: that they would dominate OPEC politics, Palestinian politics and the PLO, and would lead the Arab world to the detriment of the United States, and the great stakes we have in the Middle East and Israel. It seems while the alternatives are not attractive, we have to seriously look at the possibility that we can’t tolerate him succeeding.” See Bush Presidential Library, NSC Files, Richard Haas Files, Working Files: Iraq 8/2/90–12/90, Meeting of the NSC, August 3, 1990.
75 Diary entries for October 21, 1974, and July 6 and May 29, 1975.
76 Diary entries for July 14 and July 29, 1975.
77 For foreign oil development, see editor interview with James Lilley, March 9, 2007. For “desk officer,” see Rothkopf, 291, and Baker, 100.
78 Editor interview with James Baker, Feb. 25, 2007; James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relations with China, From Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage, 2000), 191.
79 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 100–103.
80 Ibid., 104 (see also 111). For “met the man,” see editor interview with George H. W. Bush, July 8, 2005. In each case emphasis mine. For Lilley, see Mann, About Face, 208.
81“Rosenthal, A26.
82 Diary entry for May 12, 1975.