Beyond Peace (3 page)

The Bible says for me to live as Christ and die is gain; there's a gaining about death. For the believer, the brutal fact of death has been conquered by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For the person who has turned from sin and has received Christ as Lord and Savior, death is not the end. For the believer there's hope beyond the grave. There's a future life.

Yesterday, as his body was escorted to the plane for its final journey here, the band played and the familiar strains of a hymn he especially loved, maybe the hymn that he loved the most, were played: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now I'm found; was blind, but now I see. Through many dangers, toils and snares, I've already come; 'tis grace that brought me safe thus far, for grace will take me home.”

That hymn was written 200 years ago by an Englishman named John Newton. He was a cruel man, a captain of a slave ship. But one night in a fierce storm he turned to God and committed his life to Christ. Newton not only became a preacher of the gospel, but he influenced William Wilberforce and others in Parliament to bring an end to the slave trade. John Newton came to know the miracle of God's amazing grace and it changed
his life, and it changed our lives as well.

And so we say farewell to Richard Nixon today with hope in our hearts, for our hope is in the eternal promises of the almighty God.

Years ago, Winston Churchill planned his own funeral, and he did so with the hope of the resurrection and eternal life which he firmly believed in. And he instructed after the benediction that a bugler positioned high in the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral would play taps, the universal signal that says the day is over. But then came a very dramatic moment. As Churchill had instructed, another bugler was placed on the other side of the massive dome and he played the notes of reveille, the universal signal that a new day has dawned and it is time to arise. That was Churchill's testimony; that at the end of history, the last note will not be taps, it will be reveille.

There is hope beyond the grave, because Jesus Christ has opened the door to heaven for us by his death and resurrection. Richard Nixon had that hope, and today that can be our hope as well.

And to the children and the grandchildren, I would say to you, you have that hope within your hearts. I had the privilege of knowing them when they were little girls, and I've seen them as they've come to know Christ, and to know God in their lives. And we look forward to seeing Dick and Pat someday in the future again.

Shall we pray?

God of all comfort, in the silence of this hour we ask Thee to sustain this family and these loved ones, and to deliver them from loneliness, despair and doubt. Fill their desolate hearts with Thy peace, and may this be a moment of rededication to Thee, our Father. Those of us who have been left behind have the solemn responsibilities of life. Help us to live according to Thy will and for Thy glory so that we will be prepared to meet Thee. We offer our prayer in the name of Him, who is the resurrection and the light: Jesus Christ, our Lord. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.

When I met with Mao Tse-tung for the last time in Beijing on February 27, 1976, I was shocked at how his physical condition had deteriorated since our first meeting in 1972. He was a shell of the man he had been. He was still sharp mentally, but a massive stroke had robbed him of his ability to put his thoughts into words. The charismatic communist leader who had moved a nation and changed the world with his revolutionary exhortations could no longer even ask for a glass of water.

As we sat together in his book-cluttered office in the Forbidden City, I was reminded of President Eisenhower's intense frustration after suffering a stroke in 1957. A few days after he had returned to the White House from the hospital, he described to me the ordeal that simple speech had become. He complained that when he wanted to say “ceiling,” it would come out “floor.” When he wanted to say “window,” he would say “door.” He smiled without much warmth and said that he was afraid that fighting for words sent up his blood pressure. I tried to relieve the tension by pointing out that his problem was that his brain worked faster than his mouth—the opposite of the problem most politicians have.

Fortunately, Eisenhower recovered completely. Mao never would. As we spoke in Beijing he was six months from death, and a succession crisis was already raging around him. But I was addressing a man who was still the revered leader of nearly a billion people, and who had played an indispensable role in
bringing about the new relationship between our countries that had begun four years before.

During our conversation, I said that we must continue to cooperate in seeking peace, not only between our two countries but among all the nations of the world. It was painful to watch as he tried to respond. His face flushed as he grunted out half-words. His translator, an attractive young woman dressed in a drab, shapeless Mao suit—one of the worst punishments ever inflicted upon Chinese women by the old-guard communists—tried to put his grunts into English.

Mao knew enough English to realize that she had not understood him. He shook his head angrily, grabbed her notebook, and wrote out the words in Chinese. She read them aloud in English: “Is peace your only goal?”

I had not expected the question and paused briefly. “We should seek peace with justice,” I answered.

My reply was adequate within the context of the Cold War. Today that is too limited a goal for the United States. Our goal then was to end the struggle between East and West in a way that would avoid a nuclear war and also ensure that freedom and justice would prevail over tyranny. Today, the communists have lost the Cold War. Marxism-Leninism has been utterly discredited as a political doctrine. The Berlin Wall, the ultimate Cold War symbol of political injustice, has been demolished, and pieces of it can be seen in midwestern town squares and the museums of presidential libraries. The threat of nuclear war between the United States and Russia no longer hangs over us. In a very real way, peace with justice has been achieved. Yet it is clear that the defeat of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century was just the first step toward the triumph of freedom throughout the world in the twenty-first century. This will be assured only if the United States—in its policies at home and abroad—renews its commitment to its founding principles.

We live in a new world—a world we helped create. For
forty-five years, America and its allies fought one of the longest struggles in human history. The Cold War touched every region of the world and made most of it hostage to a vast conflict of political ideas and economic systems. For the United States, Korea and Vietnam were battles in that war. Our major goal for nearly five decades—first the containment and then the defeat of Soviet communist aggression—has now been achieved.

In the past five years, we have witnessed four of the greatest events of the twentieth century: the liberation of one hundred million people in Eastern Europe from Soviet-imposed communism in 1989; the defeat of Iraqi aggression in the Persian Gulf War in the spring of 1991; the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in December 1991; and the failure of socialism and a mass movement toward capitalism in nations as different as Sweden, India, France, and even communist China.

We have achieved a goal we would not have dreamed possible five years ago: free-market capitalism, not socialism or communism, is the wave of the future.

These spectacular developments represent some of the greatest triumphs for freedom in history. Yet at a time when we should be celebrating victory, many observers are wallowing in pessimism, as if we had suffered defeat. Instead of pressing toward the mountaintop and beholding a new vision of peace and freedom for the future, they are wandering in a valley of self-doubt about the past.

One sign of this defeatism is that the leaders in Western Europe, Canada, and Japan who played major roles in winning the Cold War have either been rejected by the voters or have some of the lowest approval ratings in history. All of the Group of Seven industrial countries—the nations wealthiest in goods—are experiencing massive public discontent with their governments, their social and economic problems, and their nations' roles in the world. At the Tokyo summit meeting of the industrialized democracies in July 1993, President Clinton's approval rating was at a record low compared with those of his predecessors
in their first year in office, and yet his rating was the highest among the G-7 leaders. Ironically, the only leader at the summit with a higher approval rating was President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, whose political and economic problems dwarf the West's.

The United States and the other members of the G-7 have the richest economies on earth. Economic power, however, is not the same as strength of national character. Our country may be rich in goods, but we are poor in spirit. As we sink further into a false, almost hypnotic contentment because we are at peace abroad, and a myopic preoccupation with our domestic problems, the persuasive power of our principles and our ability to project a worthy example for the rest of the world inevitably weaken. We are justifiably concerned about our budget deficit. But our crisis of values at home, coupled with our lack of a coherent mission abroad, has created an even more deadly spiritual deficit. We seem to be experiencing what Arnold Toynbee, in his
Study of History
sixty years ago, called “the dark night of the soul.”

This phenomenon results from the way the Cold War ended, and also from the kind of struggle it was. In generations to come Americans will not celebrate V-USSR Day to mark the anniversary of the day the red flag over the Kremlin came down, or even V-B Day to celebrate the day the Berlin Wall fell. No surrender documents were initialed in solemn ceremony. No monuments were erected to the Cold War's fallen heroes, and no reunions will be convened for its veterans. It was a war of values, words, nerves, and sometimes surrogates, but it never became a war of bullets, at least insofar as direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was concerned. The world was brought to the brink of nuclear war more than once, but the fatal shots were never fired. Then, suddenly, the Cold War was pronounced over.

In World War II, we won victory by forcing our adversaries to their knees in unconditional surrender. This dramatic triumph
produced a sense of exhilaration. The end of the Cold War produced only a sense of exhaustion and anticlimax. In its final stages, the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, having been pushed to the brink by the leadership of nine successive American Presidents and a mighty Western alliance, finally imploded. Since our victory gave the impression of being a victory by default, the West was deprived of the sense of satisfaction it deserved over a job well done.

There are those who now argue that communism was never a real threat and that our efforts in the Cold War were unnecessary, even wasteful, since the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway as a result of its internal contradictions and its failure to fulfill the boast that it would overtake capitalism. By 1986, when I first met with Mikhail Gorbachev, twenty-seven years after my “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev, the question had become not when the Soviet Union would overtake us but whether it would survive at all without drastic economic reforms. Had we done nothing, the argument goes, the results of the Cold War would have been exactly the same.

It is true that communism would eventually have collapsed, because it was and remains a false faith. Talking about the Russian people, John Foster Dulles presciently observed forty years ago, “People who understand the intricacies of the atom will eventually see the fatal flaws in communism.” As history demonstrates, evil ideas inevitably fail because they are fundamentally at odds with human nature, but until they fail, they can do enormous damage to humanity. Evil regimes have prevailed for long periods of time and have won significant victories. Ultimately, however, unless they expand, they will die. In the Cold War, the United States and the West blocked the expansion of the idea of communism. Our active resistance to communist aggression, and the weapons of economic power we brought to bear on the communist regimes, ensured that communism would be defeated years, perhaps decades, before it would have collapsed on its own.

Our efforts during the Cold War prevented communism from spreading into Western Europe and also blunted its expansion in what was then called the Third World, particularly in Afghanistan, the only Third World nation where the Red Army committed its forces. The much-maligned military buildup under President Reagan placed enormous strains on the Soviet system to compete, which it ultimately could not do. That program, as well as the efforts of all the Cold War Presidents from Truman to Bush, prevented Soviet communism from making further gains and thus hastened its collapse. In doing so we saved millions from misery and tyranny.