In January 1972, Nixon revealed that secret negotiations had taken place in Paris between the North Vietnamese and Kissinger. After that, Kissinger made the cover of Time and Newsweek. A front-page headline in the Times referred to him as a “Super Secret Agent.”1 And in February 1972, when Nixon finally did go to China, Chairman Mao Zedong said during their first meeting: “We two must not monopolize the whole show. It won’t do if we don’t let Dr. Kissinger have a say. You have been [made] famous about your trips to China.”
“It was the president who set the direction and worked out the plan,” Kissinger said.
“He is a very wise assistant,” Nixon said, “to say that.”
Mao laughed.
“He doesn’t look like a secret agent,” Nixon said. That could be taken more than one way. The president started praising his adviser, sort of. “He is the only man in captivity who could go to Paris 12 times and Peking once, and no one knew it—except possibly a couple of pretty girls.”
“They didn’t know it,” Kissinger said. “I used it as a cover.”
“Anyone who uses pretty girls as a cover must be the greatest diplomat of all time,” Nixon said. It was as if he was parodying what the papers were saying about Kissinger.
“So,” Mao asked, “you often make use of your girls?”
“His girls, not mine,” Nixon said. “It would get me into great trouble if I used girls as a cover.”
Zhou (also present) laughed. “Especially during elections.”
Kissinger laughed.
The next day in the Great Hall of the People, the conversation turned serious. Zhou informed Nixon that China would continue to support North Vietnam in the war, even if he withdrew American forces completely. Once again, the Chinese premier called for a swifter withdrawal:
Since the U.S. had decided to withdraw all of its forces from Vietnam and the whole of Indochina, and the U.S. would like to see the region more or less neutral, that is to say, non-aligned, with no particular force occupying that region, then if that is the president’s policy and that of your government, I think it would be better to take more bold action. Otherwise, you would only facilitate the Soviets in furthering their influence there.… So in this sense the later you withdraw from Indochina, the more you’ll be in a passive position, and although your interests is [sic] to bring about an honorable conclusion of the war, the result would be to the contrary. You admitted that General de Gaulle acted wisely when he withdrew from Algeria. In fact, General de Gaulle even withdrew more than two million European inhabitants from Algeria, an action which we didn’t dare to envision, and to have withdrawn in such a short space of time. And General de Gaulle encountered great opposition at home.2
Nixon lobbied for a decent interval with greater subtlety than Kissinger. America would “let historical processes decide or settle military and political matters in which the issue would be taken to the South Vietnamese,” said the president. “We would hope there would be elections.”3 Not that he expected there to be.
As televised spectacle, the summit was a great success. Triangular diplomacy—the hope that Nixon and Kissinger could use China as leverage on the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union as leverage on China, and both as leverage on Hanoi—dazzled the nation. But it didn’t stop the North Vietnamese from launching a full-scale invasion of the South a few weeks later.