The Richard Nixon Experience

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In this episode we witness President Richard Nixon's triumphant return to the United States. But it was not without real worry about how the trip and the Shanghai Communique would be received by millions of Americans who had spent a lifetime fearing the Chinese.  It went better than Nixon could have imagined and though Watergate would derail the effort for a while by 1979, the Administration of Jimmy Carter would finally normalize relations with China.

Here we listen to President Nixon's arrival ceremony in Washington D.C. and hear speeches from Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and then hear from Richard Nixon himself. 

As Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce would later tell Nixon, "No matter what else happens, a thousand years from now they will say Richard Nixon went to China"..... 

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While China represented mystery, exotic locales, and an entirely different cultural experience for Americans watching back home on television.  There was still a lot of work being done on the trip itself. There was a lot at stake for both countries and for allies around the world who were watching and worrying about what it all would mean for peace and world order.  This was especially true for three other countries in particular,  America's long standing ally in Taiwan,  China's ally in North Vietnam, and in the Soviet Union, the other great Communist power on Earth who was for the moment not an ally of either country involved.

A communique on the new friendship being forged during this week was being written by the leadership of both countries and its wording was a struggle.  By the time the parties arrived in Hangzhou a strain on both sides was beginning to show. But both sides were determined that a communique would emerge that would work for all. President Nixon, Premier Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger would keep on negotiating until 4 am on this day before the final leg to Shanghai. It was announced the Communique was ready, and then it all fell apart.

Here is the story of how a State Department, who had had its leader Secretary of State Bill Rogers kept out of the main discussions from the start, objected to entire sections of the communique and almost led to its derailment.  How Henry Kissinger had to return to the bargaining table with a frustrated Chinese contingent. And how one man took it upon himself, sensing all of the issues were within the American delegation, to save the day, the communique, and make the trip an everlasting success with a late night visit to the villa of the State Department contingent.

The fruits of that moment, a half century later, still bare fruit, even though our current relationship with China is strained,

"This diplomatic triumph was one of the great American successes of the past century... because the Shanghai Communique structure has worked, Chinese can associate with whomever they choose without asking, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and I have been succeeded by tens of thousands of American investors and businesspeople who have helped build the largest bilateral trading relationship in world history. Around $160 billion of U.S. goods and services are sold in China annually, representing nearly one million U.S. jobs, with another 100,000 American jobs supported by Chinese direct investment in the United States. "  -  Stephen Orlins has been President of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations since 2005, for  The Diplomat  on February 28, 2017 article

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Chairman  Mao was the great father figure of China. But it was Zhou Enlai who was the great diplomat of China. He was a man of enormous vision and also he was a man of an extraordinary ability to see problems and fix them with extraordinary skill. As we will learn on our next episode on the Shanghai Communique.  He knew how to smooth out the rough edges and make situations not only work but to bare fruit too. 

Zhou Enlai was originally the foreign Minister,  he was often the man chosen to deal with hostile powers, and was often called the world's greatest diplomat by many who dealt with him. Zhou Enlai was a strong advocate of modernizing China and he saw the outreach from the United States as an opportunity to achieve that goal, to develop a modern economy in China. 

He would be diagnosed with cancer later in the year of Nixon's opening to China and pass away in January 1976. When an attempt was made to remove memorial wreaths laid in his honor  from  Tiananmen  Square a riot broke out, something almost unheard of in China. Zhou Enlai had come under attack by folks in the  radical anti-Confucius campaign, but the ordinary people stood by his memory.  He was that well regarded by the people of China. 

To commemorate the historic moment, a half century ago, of the opening to China by President Richard Nixon we thought this the right moment to look at the man on the other end of the historic handshake that welcomed President Nixon to China. 

Our special edition of "Bridging the Political Gap" honors  Zhou Enlai,  and gives us all a chance to get to know the first Premier of the People's Republic of China.

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During the week that President and Mrs. Nixon were in China there were several staged tours arraigned for the party and at those events there were often staged people too.  This is the story of the wandering adventures of the party and the press corp as they traveled around China all the while President Nixon and Zhou Enlai were busy negotiating out the Communique from the trip. 

They would visit the Great Wall of China, The Ming Tombs, and fly to the city of Hangzhu.  At one point reporter Ted Koppel would stay behind and catch the Chinese picking up bystanders staged at an event that had been designed to put the best face on the everyday life of ordinary Chinese. A life far harder and less colorful than these families with state of the art transistor radios would have had you believe. 

Here you will get a look at the excitement, the mystery, and the adventure that this trip to China offered for the Americans who had never seen anything quite like it before. 

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Somethings never change, and one of those things that will never change is the troublesome issues the press can create by trying to get into mischief and question everything they see. This was very true with the traveling press corp as they were bused around China.  The Chinese tried to contain them but it was to no avail and they managed to find a good story or two while they were there. one of which was the staged children and families seen around the places where President and Mrs. Nixon would visit. 

The other is that hardliners exist wherever you go and they are as hard to control as the press a lot of the time. Poor President Nixon was subjected to a little taste of hardline communism while in China as the Chairman's wife made him sit through a ballet "The Red Detachment of Women"  about the ruling evil landlords and the peasants who were subjected to their capitalistic ways, only freed when they rebelled as a united group of workers. 

In what can only be described as a half hearted attempt to put a good face on it , we will listen in as President Nixon responds to a question about whether he enjoyed the ballet. It is diplomacy at its best an even the Chinese knew it was all seemed  a bit much. 

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In a trip planned and choreographed to the minute, an enormous surprise happened with in hours of the President's arrival.  Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai showed up at the guest house where President Nixon was staying and whisked him away with only Henry Kissinger, his aid Winston Lord, and one Secret Service Agent in tow. 

Bob Haldeman recorded in his diary his worry at having the President just taken ,without security, and without the usual Presidential entourage surrounding him.   Richard Nixon was off for what would be the most important meeting of his entire journey. He was off to see Chairman Mao Tse Tung, undisputed ruler of China. It was an extraordinary meeting, full of philosophical comments, and friendly banter, between one of the leading Communist in all the world and one of the great politicians in all the world who had made his career as an anti-communist crusader. The meeting went stunningly well.

The next day the Chinese were informed of the American President's presence in China and that the meeting had the stamp of approval of the leader, Chairman Mao.  It marked a new beginning in United States and Chinese relations. it started a relationship that has grown ever since .  It is a relationship that has grown ever more complicated and intertwined for a half century. 

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"One story about the famous meeting with Richard Nixon remained a secret for many years, until Nixon’s memoirs appeared.

The story began in the mid-50’s, when America and China had no diplomatic relations, and there was great hostility between the two nations. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, at a meeting in Geneva, deliberately snubbed Zhou Enlai, refusing to shake his hand. He said that he and Zhou would only meet in a car crash.

Diplomatic memories are long; proud leaders rarely forgive an outright insult like this. So in 1972, Richard Nixon, who knew what had happened in Geneva, made his point as he descended the steps of Air Force One on the tarmac in Beijing.

Chinese protocol required that Premier Zhou Enlai, as the host, should extend a hand to his visitor first. But Nixon moved quickly and took Zhou’s hand warmly, before Zhou could extend it. In his memoir, Nixon said that he wanted to be the first to extend his hand.

Zhou smiled enthusiastically, and accepted the handshake. He was acutely aware of the significance of the President’s gesture, as were a few of those present who knew about the long-ago insult. The visit proceeded with great success.

So it was that the first breakthrough in relations between America and China began with an act of courage, and an act of forgiveness." ----- The Zhou Enlai Peace Institute

This is that story. The story of the day President Richard Nixon arrived in Peking, China with his hand extended and a vision for a better, safer world. This is how it began, 50 years ago this month.  

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Finally the door has been opened to China. President Nixon would send a group of young men under the supervision of 34 year old Ron Walker to China to lay the groundwork for the historic visit. They would find it immensely rewarding but not without many frustrations as they entered a world that was totally foreign to the one they left.  A world where technology was behind, a world where the the people had been totally isolated, and a world with propaganda everywhere that portrayed America as imperialist dogs. 

But it was also obvious that the Chinese wanted this new found friendship to be a success just as much as the Americans did. They would build a trust and learn from each other.  As they made the plans for the historic visit of President Richard Nixon to mainland China. This is the story of how they made it happen and we get a sense of the anxiety an anticipation of what each step would bring along the way. 

Finally, we get an inside look at the flight that would bring a President half way around the world for a week. 

A week that changed the World. 

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In this episode we look backwards at how the China initiative came together. Richard Nixon had envisioned reaching out to China long before he became President of the United States. He wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1967 where he talked briefly about Asia after Vietnam and the importance of reaching out to China. There were hints in his inaugural Address about building a world in which no one lived "in angry isolation"

This was such a different approach than was being considered in diplomatic circles or in the basic tenants of American foreign policy that when Nixon started talking to Henry Kissinger about making the approach, Kissinger thought he had lost his mind. When they identified Warsaw , Poland as a place where they could make that move to China, the American Ambassador to Poland did not believe the direction was actually from the President. He refused to do it. Nixon had to call the man home to instruct him to do it so he would believe the order was real. 

It was a far different world than what we live in today. A world Richard Nixon largely had the vision to create. Here we will relive all the various cloak and dagger operations that the administration had to do to keep the initiative secret and get it to finally bare fruit.  Here is the story of the secretive messages, the ping pong diplomacy,  and the trickery it took to get our secret envoy, Henry Kissinger into China, and then the moment (Eureka!!!) that it all came together with the invite to China. 

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The opening of our Season 2 look at the Administration of Richard Nixon begins with the signature event of his time in office., the opening to China.  It marks the beginning of a season of triumph for America and for Richard Nixon. It begins with a journey into the unknown because China and the United States had had no diplomatic ties for a quarter of a century. In fact, China had bee isolated from the rest of the world for much of that time as Chairman Mao had consolidated his power. 

Just as Nixon had ascended to the Presidency, our intelligence agencies had been gathering information about a growing rift in the communist world between China and the Soviet Union. That rift had become much worse as shots had actually been fired across the border between the two Communist giants.  Richard Nixon, who had known he wanted to reach out to China long before he had even taken over the Presidency, knew that this would be his chance and immediately started working toward that goal. Much to the shock of his most trusted advisors, including Henry Kissinger, whose job it would be to actually go over to China and work out the deals to allow Nixon to make his move. 

It would take a couple of years and a lot of cloak and dagger operations concealed from the public and even from our own State Department, but by July of 1971, Richard Nixon would make an announcement that would shake the world.  He would be invited to go to China. Over the next six months all types of preparations would be made for the trip to be a success and both sides, talking different languages, with different cultures, and different ideologies politically, would work tirelessly to pull it off. 

This is that story, the story of Richard Nixon's trip to China, how it happened, how it came together, and how in that one week he would open China and welcome it to the International stage.