Three days before, in what was a considerable breakthrough, and, as it turned out, by direct order of Mao Tse-tung himself, the U.S. Ping-Pong team, at the end of an international tournament in Japan, was invited to tour the People’s Republic. It was such an obscure gesture, few outside the White House and the Kremlin took any notice of it. The Chinese released long-held prisoners; there were further secret contacts in different capitals; and Mao gave a relatively conciliatory interview to American longtime fellow traveler Edgar Snow. Two giants were almost indiscern-ibly winking and twitching at each other across a crowded and unobservant world. On May 18, as Soviet-American relations warmed, with the U.S. no longer asking Moscow to apply any pressure on Hanoi, and Moscow uneasily detecting some movement in U.S.-China relations, an outline was announced of a comprehensive arms-control agreement between the two superpowers.
On June 2, again via the Pakistani channel, Chou reported that Mao would be delighted to welcome Nixon to China, and that for a preparatory and organizing visit Chou would welcome a designated senior official, who was soon confirmed to be Kissinger. Eight days later, unannounced, Nixon ended a 21-year trade embargo on China. He was conducting an extremely delicate and intricate minuet on a high-wire, with consummate skill. The country was heavily distracted by the publication of the Pentagon Papers, purloined from the Defense Department by a disaffected Vietnam expert, Daniel Ellsberg, and published in successive newspapers. The government tried to enjoin publication, but the papers were disparaging of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, not of Nixon’s.
Henry Kissinger departed on July 1 on his Asian trip to Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi, and Pakistan, where he feigned illness and was conveyed to the airport in disguise in an old car driven personally by the Pakistani foreign minister, in the dead of night, and then flew to Beijing. Kissinger and Chou agreed that American forces could leave Taiwan if China promised not to invade the island, a sober and fair communiqué was worked out, largely by Mao, and Chou promised not to grant entries to any more American politicians who were seeking them until after Nixon’s visit.
Kissinger left Beijing after a completely successful visit on July 11, recovered from his pretended stomach flu in Northern Pakistan, flew on to Tehran, and, by prearrangement, sent on the maximum security line from the U.S. embassy there the preagreed one-word message to Nixon, delivered to him by General Alexander Haig, “Eureka.” At 7:31 p.m., July 15, 1971, Richard Nixon electrified the world with an unscheduled announcement on all radio and television outlets in the United States, as an identical announcement was made in Beijing. It was stated that Kissinger had been invited to China by Chou En-lai, had visited and expressed Nixon’s interest in visiting China, and that Chairman Mao Tse-tung had cordially invited the president, who was happy to accept and would go to China before his scheduled visit to the Soviet Union in May 1972. Every government in the world except Pakistan was thunderstruck. The timing of the trip was to ensure that Nixon had maximum leverage on Mocow when he went there. He had all the world powers in a row; it was a remarkable feat for a country that just 30 months before was riot-torn, was diplomatically inactive, and saw no exit from Vietnam.
On August 13, 1971, Nixon rounded up his economic officials and advisers and brought them to Camp David for a serious discussion of how to avoid inflation and rev up the economy in the year before the election. He said that conditions had changed and that no one should be bound by past positions. He announced the next evening a package of investment credits, excise tax reductions, a 5 percent reduction in the number of federal employees, a 10 percent cut in foreign aid, a 90-day wage and price freeze, a 10 percent tax on all imports, and a suspension of the gold convertibility of the dollar. It was a bold program that responded to the renewed international interest in effectively buying gold from the United States at discounted prices. It could be assumed to stop inflation temporarily (until after the election), stop the foreign pickpockets, stimulate the economy, but introduce an age of relatively little discipline between currencies, when they would have no value at all, except opposite each other. He concluded that “Whether the nation stays Number One depends on your competitive spirit, your sense of personal destiny, your pride in your country and yourself.”
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It was a popular program that again confounded the Democrats, who thought Nixon incapable of price controls and were gearing up to accuse him of being soft on inflation. Europe and Japan were accustomed to exploiting a high dollar with cheap exports, while undermining the dollar by exploiting its convertibility. Nixon ended this. In removing the dollar from any standard of comparative measurement other than its value opposite other free-floating currencies, he was opening the floodgates to more easily disguised inflation, a temptation future administrations could reasonably be assumed to have trouble resisting. He should, after the dust had settled, have reintroduced some disciplinary yardstick for intergovernmental transactions, even a blend of gold, oil, and consumer necessities.
In the autumn of 1971, East Pakistan (originally Bengal and later Bangladesh), separated by a thousand miles across India from West Pakistan, was agitating for independence from the West and had voted accordingly in December 1970 (97 percent for Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League). Nixon’s ally Yahya Khan had persuaded himself that both China and the U.S. would come to his aid against India, and Nixon suspected the Russians of inciting the Indians and the Bengalis. He cut aid to India, but general disorder broke out when Mujib declared East Pakistani independence. Yahya unleashed the 70,000 soldiers he had deployed in the East, and hundreds of thousands of East Pakistanis were killed and millions fled to India. The United States and China wanted to be helpful to Yahya, but there were limits to what they could reasonably do against such a strong sentiment of national expression, and in the face of Yahyas brutal and unimaginative response to it.
Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi visited Washington in November 1971 and had a very unsatisfactory exchange with Nixon. She pledged to leave West Pakistan alone but required that the violence cease in East Pakistan and that the refugees who had poured into her country in millions be permitted to return. It was not an unreasonable position, but Nixon suspected her of fomenting the violence in the East and of having designs on the West. At the end of November, guerrillas armed and trained by the Indians entered East Pakistan and the Indian army came a few miles across the East Pakistan border, ostensibly to maintain order at the request of the local authorities (a complete fabrication). Gandhi was duplicitous and Yahya was delusional, an unpromising state of affairs for the subcontinent, and on December 3, Yahya insanely launched an ineffectual attack on the Indian air force. It did little damage but gave the Indian leader all she needed to launch an all-out invasion of East Pakistan. The Indians decimated the Pakistani air force, enjoying superior numbers.
Nixon blamed India for escalating the crisis, Pakistan for starting the war, and the Russians for inciting the Indians. He warned the Soviet Union and India against any attack on West Pakistan, and moved a nuclear aircraft carrier task force to the Bay of Bengal. Nixon used the visiting Soviet agriculture minister and then the direct hotline to Brezhnev to send his warning. This was the best he could do for Yahya. On December 10, Kissinger gave the Chinese ambassador to the UN a full sheaf of aerial photographic reconnaissance of Soviet force dispositions all along its Asian borders from Turkey to the Far East. On December 16, the Pakistani army in East Pakistan surrendered to overwhelming Indian forces, having put up a respectable fight in a dubious cause. It all settled down quickly but lengthily embittered relations between India and the U.S.
Nixon met with the principal West European leaders at different temperate places in December, assured them of America’s solidarity with Europe, and agreed to a revaluing of currencies that enabled him to cancel the 10 percent import surcharge in his August economic message. Nixon told all three leaders—France’s Pompidou, Britain’s Heath, and West Germany’s Willy Brandt—that the five geostrategic points with the industrial and military strength to influence the world were the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Russia, and China. As head of one, he was concerned to strengthen his alliance with Europe and Japan, detach China completely from Russia, and then, from a position of strength, negotiate de-escalation of tensions and a reasonable working relationship with Russia. All the European leaders purported to understand, and concurred. It was perfectly correct and skillfully executed pure strategy. The great challenges to the United States since it had become the world’s greatest power had come from Nazi-dominated Western Europe (1938–1944) and the Russia of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev since then; an economic challenge from a friendly Japan was already developing, and a Chinese rivalry was predictable eventually. The United States dealt effectively with each as it arose.
As the election year of 1972 opened, Nixon announced a withdrawal of another 70,000 Americans from Vietnam by May, which would leave only 69,000, a reduction of 88 percent from when he entered office. He awaited the Democrats’ claim that this was insufficient and that total withdrawal should be offered, and it was not long in coming. Senator George McGovern, one of the leading candidates for the presidential nomination and almost an outright pacifist, demanded that Nixon offer total withdrawal in exchange for release of American prisoners of war. Nixon then, on January 25, 1972, revealed Kissinger’s secret negotiations in Paris and hammered the Democratic peace candidates with the fact that Hanoi had not only been offered what McGovern and the others accused Nixon of not offering, but had rejected it. He said that “the only reply to our plan has been an increase in troop infiltrations and communist military offensives in Laos and Cambodia. We are being asked publicly to set a terminal date for our withdrawals when we already have offered one in private.... If the enemy wants peace, it will have to recognize the important difference between settlement and surrender.”
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As usual, Nixon outsmarted his critics.
President Nixon and his party of over 300 landed at Beijing Airport on February 21, 1972, and Nixon descended the gangplank and offered his hand to Premier Chou En-lai, concluding the handshake offered by Chou and rebuffed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at Geneva in 1954 (Chapter 12). Shortly after his arrival, Nixon and Kissinger (but not Rogers) met with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai at Mao’s home. The photographs of their warm handshake astonished the world more than any such burial of the hatchet since Stalin smiled benignly on the handshake between Molotov and Ribbentrop at the Kremlin in August 1939.
For the next week, as they traveled about China, Nixon and Chou En-lai conducted an itinerant summit meeting that ranged widely and was entirely cordial. Nixon was so overwhelmingly informed and conscious of the historic character of the occasion, he was the undoubted star of the session, the public parts of which were telecast live to the United States. The principal formal agreement was that there was only one China and that Taiwan was part of it, but that there would be no reunification of China by force. Nixon made the point that the Chinese would prefer American forces in Japan to a remilitarized Japan, and that if China could prepare its self-defense better, the United States would be able to reduce its defense expenditures. He was explicit in his offer to assist China in the event of Soviet attack, and Chou was implicit in his indication of determination to discourage North Vietnam from imagining it could defeat the United States itself. Nixon said: “We are not going to walk out of [Vietnam] without an agreement.... [Otherwise] the U.S. would be a nation that would . . . deserve nothing but contempt before the peoples and nations of the world, whatever their philosophies.” The visit was accurately described by Nixon in the closing banquet as “a week that changed the world”;
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it was an overwhelming triumph, and incited the mutually hoped-for unease in the Kremlin.
11. RELATIONS WITH THE USSR
On March 30, North Vietnam launched an all-out assault on the South, hoping to move before there were any consequences to the Nixon visit to China or his upcoming visit to Moscow and while the weather still was unfriendly to air operations. They invaded directly across the DMZ and from Laos and Cambodia, with 150,000 North Vietnamese regulars and 200 of the latest Soviet tanks. It was an even greater offensive than that at Tet in January 1968, when there were 500,000 American servicemen in country. Nixon ordered massive air attacks on the North, accused the Joint Chiefs of cowardice, defeatism, and their own flake-out in Vietnam, said the “air force is not worth a shit,”
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an uncalled-for overstatement from the commander-in-chief, and threatened to fire the high command if they didn’t carry out his orders for a comprehensive aerial pummeling of the enemy.
He added 85 B-52s, an aircraft carrier, and nearly 500 fighter-bombers to the air-strike capability in and around North Vietnam. Finally, on April 16, Nixon dispensed with Johnson’s failed bombing halt of four years before and darkened the skies of North Vietnam with American warplanes. They smashed the air defenses and the harbor facilities at Haiphong (damaging four Russian ships), and bombed selectively in Hanoi. The bombing attacks were raised steadily and maintained at 1,000 air strikes a day in the North, an unsustainable assault on such a small and relatively primitive country trying to conduct a war on its neighbor, and provided almost instant and massive close-air support to ARVN, taking the full brunt of the communist offensive on the ground. Nixon made it clear to everyone, including the public, that he would punish the North Vietnamese and was not concerned with whether the Soviets canceled his invitation to them for May (as Khrushchev canceled Eisenhower’s over the trivial U-2 affair 13 years before).