Nixon and Mao

Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan - Books - Review - New York Times

February 28, 2007
Books of The Times
Four Visionaries With Cloudy Visions
By JOSEPH KAHN

NIXON AND MAO
The Week That Changed the World

By Margaret MacMillan 404 pages. Illustrated. Random House. $27.95.

The story of how Nixon came to meet Mao in 1972 has been told by journalists, historians and many of the principals themselves. It has been memorialized in film and mythologized as opera. “Nixon to China” must be one of the most widely understood terms of art in politics and diplomacy.

In that sense, the rapprochement between the United States and China makes a compelling topic for Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian now widely noted for writing seamless, big-picture historical narratives. In her previous work, “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World,” she examined the negotiations that followed World War I, showing how a varied cast of outsize egos literally redrew the map of the world.

In “Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World,” Ms. MacMillan seeks to present the frigid week in February 1972 that Richard M. Nixon spent in China in much the same way. She retells the tale engagingly, from Mao Zedong’s enigmatic outbursts, to Zhou Enlai’s seductive diplomacy, to Henry A. Kissinger’s obsessive distrust of the State Department.

Yet the momentous event that changed the world is a common conceit for popular works of history, and it is an unsatisfying premise for examining the opening salvo of the complex and unsettled relationship between the United States and China.

The re-establishment of relations was, of course, a milestone, but it was also an artifact of the cold war. It did not alter history the way any of Ms. MacMillan’s four protagonists, Nixon, Mr. Kissinger, Mao and Zhou, thought it would. Ms. MacMillan acknowledges as much, but she has the delicate task of treating her main actors as visionaries when none of them foresaw the outcome.

The United States has yet to abandon Taiwan and force it to return to mainland Chinese rule, perhaps China’s most important goal in opening its door to Nixon. China did not pressure North Vietnam to make major concessions to end the Vietnam War on terms favorable to the United States, one of Nixon and Mr. Kissinger’s dominant concerns. Their common rival, the Soviet Union, took two decades to collapse.

One event that arguably did more to change the world came a few years later, after Mao and Zhou had died, Nixon had resigned in disgrace, and Mr. Kissinger no longer had a patron in the White House. That was when Deng Xiaoping abandoned Maoist policies in both domestic and foreign relations and overhauled China’s economy. Today China and America are no longer cards for each other to play. They have become giants warily circling each other in what could be the decisive contest of the 21st century.

In describing Mr. Kissinger’s intensive negotiations over the wording of the Shanghai Communiqué during Nixon’s visit, Ms. MacMillan reports that he urged his Chinese hosts not to waste time discussing trade. “The maximum amount of bilateral trade possible between us, even if we make great efforts, is infinitesimal in terms of our total economy,” Mr. Kissinger said. Ms. MacMillan, with characteristic understatement, calls these “interesting predictions.” In 2006 China’s trade surplus with the United States exceeded $230 billion.

Yet it is clear that Ms. MacMillan did not write the book for the weighty reasons she claims. She wrote it because it is a gripping, old-fashioned drama from the “great men” school of history. It has larger-than-life characters whose motivations ranged from the sordid to the profound. They staked their reputations on bridging the chasm between the world’s richest country and its most populous one at a time when far more modest strategic realignments seemed likely to upset the cold war balance of power.

Ms. MacMillan explores the tectonic shift in the thinking of both top leaders that made the overture possible, then follows the intrigue of their tentative probes, through Poland, France and Pakistan, to open negotiations.

Mao, at the time still championing the Cultural Revolution that was tearing his country apart, determined that he liked dealing with “rightists” like Nixon. Nixon, whose red-baiting anti-Communism carried him to the highest office in the land, fawned before Mao when invited to meet the chairman in his study.

Both men, perhaps especially Nixon, were self-conscious about making a grand historical gesture. But they acted out of weakness. Nixon could find no face-saving solution to the Vietnam War. Mao’s boundless paranoia had focused on his chosen successor, Lin Biao, even as his own health deteriorated sharply. Both sides worried deeply about the Soviet Union.

Ms. MacMillan makes skillful use of the trove of archival information that has recently become public, mining it for detail that gives her narrative fullness and subtlety.
Nixon’s presidential advance team left behind a Xerox machine when the Americans realized that the Chinese had to copy every diplomatic document manually. The Chinese insisted on having their own pilots fly Air Force One over Chinese territory, but they did not know how to use the advanced navigation system on the Boeing 707.

The theme that comes through most clearly is the mendacity and pettiness of the Nixon White House. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger schemed to exclude their own State Department from any significant role and competed with each other to get credit with the news media.

Mr. Kissinger, in a gesture that now seems recklessly generous, passed along to the Chinese reams of top-secret intelligence on the Soviet Union and India. That, and the fact that Nixon went to China without any assurance that Mao would meet him, signaled clearly that the Americans came as supplicants.

Ms. MacMillan presents much of this information unvarnished and remains aloof from the raging debate over the conspiratorial style of Nixon and Mr. Kissinger. “About Face,” by Jim Mann, and “A Great Wall,” by Patrick Tyler, a former Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times, offered more polemical versions of the same events. William Burr also analyzed much of the material in “The Kissinger Transcripts.”

Ms. MacMillan’s dispassionate approach does not challenge the historical record. She also does not fulfill her own promise of showing how the world was forever altered. But Nixon’s meeting with Mao was undeniably a shock, and Ms. MacMillan has written an electrifying account .