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Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World
By
Margaret MacMillan
On Thursday, February 17, 1972, President and Mrs. Nixon walked out to the south lawn of the White House, where a helicopter waited for them. A small crowd, among them Vice President Spiro Agnew and his wife, Republican and Democratic congressmen, and the two Nixon daughters, Tricia and Julie, saw them off as they started the first leg of their long trip to China. The brief ceremony was carried live on American radio and television. Nixon spoke briefly. He was making, he said, “a journey for peace,” but, he added, he was under no illusions that “twenty years of hostility between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America are going to be swept away by one week of talks that we will have there.” Nevertheless, he was going in an optimistic spirit: “If there is a postscript that I hope might be written with regard to this trip, it would be the words on the plaque which was left on the moon by our first astronauts when they landed there: ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’ ” It was classic Nixon, that mixture of pragmatism and grandiloquence.
Inside the waiting plane at Andrews Air Force Base, the rest of Nixon’s party, which included his secretary of state, William Rogers, and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, watched the ceremonies on television. Winston Lord, a young aide to Kissinger, joked nervously that if the plane blew up, they would all see themselves going sky high. As Nixon was boarding the plane, one of the waiting reporters handed him an atlas of China that had the seal of the CIA on its cover. “Do you think they’ll let me in with this?” asked the president, sharing a rare joke with the press as he climbed aboard Air Force One
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