We reworded our private 1963 toast in Taiwan to De Gaulle, this time to Richard M. Nixon.
I was beside myself with curiosity about what had happened in Beijing. John Holdridge had accompanied Kissinger. After a decent interval, I invited him to lunch at the Metropolitan Club and pumped him on his experiences. Here, at last, was someone who knew the Chinese at first hand, from the Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. For Americans, Beijing was the other side of the moon. I was all ears and wrote careful notes right after our meal. Many of the details of the mission became legend later on––the deceptive departure for Pakistan, complex conversations with Zhou Enlai, the tour of the Forbidden City. Holdridge’s observations to me were more what one China watcher would make to another.
For example, he told me that there were no differences in style between the Communist Chinese officials he met and their counterparts across the Taiwan straits. Foreign Minister Huang Hua, for example, came across as an old, honorable Chinese gentleman, not a Marxist ideologue. The food was the best Chinese palace cooking, but all the dishes were ones that Holdridge had seen before. The accommodations, however, reflected Soviet influence. The Kissinger group had stayed at a Middle European–style villa in the western part of the capital. Beijing seemed very subdued—people quietly going about their business on a Sunday, no crowds jamming the parks, no gongs, hubbub, or street vending cries, as in the city Holdridge remembered. He used his Chinese, especially at meals.
Marshall Ye Jianying, Deputy Foreign Minister Zhang Wenjin, and Ambassador Huang Hua met them at the plane. The Chinese made a point of identifying Ye as a military man, and pains were taken, Holdridge said, to show that the People’s Liberation Army was firmly behind the opening to the United States. Marshall Ye sat in on all the talks. I noted that of all the PLA men in the top leadership Ye was the one with the closest ties to Premier Zhou Enlai. The premier, John commented, looked old and drawn, as if “he had been through hell.” His approach was low key, but forceful, humorous, and intelligent.
The hell he had been through, I surmised, was the Cultural Revolution.
“Have you heard of our Cultural Revolution?” Zhou had asked Holdridge.
“Yes,” he had replied politely, “but we would not want to deal with something that we believed to be an internal matter of the PRC.”
“Oh no,” said Zhou, “I want to tell you,” and he went on at length and with apparent sincerity to describe this time of “great turmoil, great upheaval, and great reorganization.” Holdridge was convinced that Zhou’s use of this familiar Maoist formulation now applied to the world outside China. The Chinese were ready to change the power equation with the Soviet Union and the United States.
During the first day of talks, Zhou presented Chinese positions in familiar set-piece form, as if to get them on the record. Later, after the U.S. side had responded, he relaxed and became more candid. The United States made no deals and no promises, Holdridge insisted. There were no conditions set for President Nixon’s visit. The Chinese appeared very anxious for Kissinger ’s trip to be successful and for an announcement of the president’s visit to be made public. In fact, it was the Chinese who stayed up all night drafting the announcement. The Americans went to bed around 3 a.m. The “Knowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the PRC, Premier Zhou, on behalf of the Government of the PRC, has extended an invitation etc, etc.” The problem was how the sentence would be cast to satisfy the Chinese that the Americans had made the initiative and the Americans that they not appear to be coming hat in hand. There were some tense moments over the interpretation of the word for “knowing,” liao jie, which has the broader meaning of “understanding.”
The entire Forbidden City was closed off for the Kissinger party. The tour of the palaces included viewing a spectacular, recently discovered imperial body stocking made of small squares of jade sewn together with gold thread. There was also a look at the Empress Dowager ’s bedroom. The dust on the floor—the group left tracks— suggested that very few visitors were taken here. (Kissinger told Joe Alsop about the jade body stocking and was furious that the way he wrote it up suggested inside knowledge to support Alsop’s pure speculations on the substance of the conversations with the Chinese.)
Kissinger had been skillful, irrepressible, and humorous throughout the visit, Holdridge said, and was the only person who could have brought it off. He and Zhou enjoyed their meetings. John relished the supreme irony that the Chinese were sitting down at the same table with the representative of the man they had only months before labeled “the God of War.”
I probed Holdridge about onward preparations for the president’s visit. No one had focused yet on the question, he replied. His impression was that the entourage would be small by normal presidential visit standards—no larger than a planeload. After lunch I returned to my office on the seventh floor of the State Department, hoping against hope that there might be a way for me to tag along when President Nixon, accompanied by Secretary Rogers, visited China the following February. As I plied my bureaucratic trade during the rest of the year, I was aware that additional Kissinger trips were in the works to prepare for the Nixon visit, but the secretary of state’s office continued to be cut out. Instead, State Department officers like Al Jenkins, William Brown, and Roger Sullivan worked directly with John Holdridge to create briefing papers and draft communiqué language for the national security advisor ’s use.
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