Nixon and Mao Read Online Free PDF

Nixon was easily distracted. “P. is all of a sudden enamored with the use of the Dictaphone,” Haldeman wrote in his diary one day, “and is spewing out memos by the carload.” Nixon fussed endlessly about the details for state banquets or the latest story in the press. 59
    “All people think the P’s doing an excellent job,” he told Haldeman in 1972 just before the China trip, “but no one loves him, fears him, or hates him, and he needs to have all three.” 60 He had the last two, at least in some circles. He suspected, though, that even his own staff did not take his orders seriously when, like the Red Queen, he demanded that this person be fired at once and that office be closed down immediately. If sheer hard work and attention to image could have done it, Nixon would have had love too, but he knew well and sometimes despaired that he was not naturally charismatic. 61
    He was generous to his staff, but he seems not to have known how to treat them as human beings. He never thought, for example, to ask Haldeman how many children he had. And although his chief of staff spent hours with Nixon every day, the president only once invited him and his wife to a purely social dinner with Mrs. Nixon. 62 But then Nixon had few purely social occasions or friends. Haldeman, who tried to anticipate everything, once tried to find a friend for Nixon, someone he could confide in. Nixon was astonished. In any case, he already had the perfect friend in Bebe Rebozo, “a genial, discreet sponge,” who sat silently for hours while Nixon held forth. 63 Otherwise it is difficult to know whom he was close to. His daughters certainly; perhaps his wife, Pat, although he rarely showed any interest in her after the first few years of their marriage. He had thousands of acquaintances but very few close friends.
    He often talked about his mother, who was widely held to be a saintly figure who had suffered the early deaths of two of her children. She was a cold saint, however, doing her duty uncomplainingly but never showing her children open affection or warmth. Nixon told his sympathetic biographer, Jonathan Aitken, that his mother had never kissed him. When Aitken seemed surprised, Nixon grew angry. Aitken’s reaction, Nixon felt, was like something from “one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists.” 64 Yet he wept in Billy Graham’s arms when his mother died. Henry Kissinger, who could be so cruel about Nixon, once said, “He would have been a great man had somebody loved him.” 65
    The area where Nixon came closest to real greatness, in his own mind and in those of his defenders, was foreign relations. As he took off from Washington that February day in 1972, he was flying not just toward China but to, he thought, a shift for the better in the United States’ position in the world. Perhaps even more important to him was the historic nature of his trip. He talked about it incessantly in the months before his departure. 66 He was the first American president ever to visit China, and he was going to a country that was a mystery to most of the world. “A trip to China,” he told journalists, “is like going to the moon.” 67 He was determined that it would go well.
    “I know of no Presidential trip,” wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, “that was as carefully planned nor of any President who ever prepared himself so conscientiously.” 68 Nixon summoned the venerable and mendacious André Malraux from Paris; the French man of letters and former minister of cultural affairs, after a brief encounter with Mao, claimed to be a China expert. Malraux assured Nixon that if de Gaulle stood in his place, he would salute him as well for the step he was taking: “You are about to attempt one of the most important things of our century.” Kissinger was less impressed, saying, “Unfortunately Malraux was grossly out of date about China.” He did admit, with the respect of a connoisseur, that Malraux was wonderfully eloquent. 69