Word: communists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...year-old presidency, and one of the most important in recent U.S. history. At precisely 9:01 Friday evening, the President, seated at his gleaming wooden desk in the Oval Office, looked gravely into the TV cameras and in a calm, steady voice revealed that the U.S. and Communist China had secretly and suddenly decided to end nearly 30 years of bellicose estrangement. The two countries would establish normal diplomatic relations...
That evening the suspense ended, on both sides of the world. While Carter was reading the joint communique on TV in the U.S., Hua Kuo-feng, China's Premier and Communist Party Chairman, was reading the statement to about 100 Western and Communist reporters in Peking. It was the first press conference ever held by a Chinese Communist Party Chairman, and Hua was in good form. He even answered a few questions, ritualistically describing Taiwan as "a sacred territory of our country" and its people as "compatriots of our own flesh and blood...
...touched me with his hand. 'I have some joyful news,' he said, and related Hua's announcement. There were handshakes all around. The feelings of the man on the street may not have been as enthusiastic as Ho's, but most Chinese felt some satisfaction over the change. A Communist border guard near Hong Kong spotted a tourist's American passport, broke into a broad grin and exclaimed: 'We're friends...
...boldly waved the country's new red flag, which has a yellow star (symbolizing the Khalq Party) surrounded by some wheat instead of a hammer and sickle. After it unfurled this banner in October, the regime promptly 1) withdrew recognition from South Korea in favor of the Communist North, 2) described its accession to power as a "continuation" of the Russian Revolution, and 3) gratuitously parroted Brezhnev's charge of "imperialist" interference by the U.S. in Iran. But except for the ever suspicious Chinese, diplomats in Kabul have found no evidence that all this was on Moscow...
Still, the break between these two gifted public servants was baffling be cause they have much the same approach to world affairs. Unsentimental to the point of acidity, both appreciate the imperatives of power and have no illusions about their Communist opponents. Perhaps it was style as much as anything that separated them: the difference between a man whose words were always guarded and one whose words never were, between a man who practiced quiet diplomacy and one who sought public confrontation...