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President George Bush had been the first envoy to China during the Ford Administration. A job he had loved.  He was a friend to the People's Republic of China, and he actually picked the nation to be the first place he went on an official trip as President. 

Which put him, and his administration, in an awful spot when Deng Xiaoping ordered the military to crush a student demonstration that had gone on for several weeks in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. It would take the deft management of this skilled diplomat to weather the storm of outrage  in our country as this tragedy unfolded on the other side of the world. 

This is that story,  of how President Bush went about defending the human rights of the students victimized in the square, while also keeping a very idealistic American Public from seeking a severe response against the nation that had become a major trading partner  and ally of the United States, and while also keeping our relationship with China from a collapse at a pivotal moment at the end of the Cold War. 

It is the first major moment in what would become a long list of major moments in the foreign policy of the United States as the Cold War came crashing to an end.  George Bush seemed to know as it all unfolded,  that in the long term,  it would be China that would one day be the Communist World's nearly sole survivor.  

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