Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sunday morning, Dec. 12, Nixon, Al Haig and I met in the Oval Office, just before Nixon and I were to depart for the Azores to meet with French President Georges Pompidou. It was symptomatic of the internal relationships of the Nixon Administration that neither the Secretary of State nor of Defense nor any representative of their departments attended this crucial meeting, where, as it turned out, the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship was taken...
...sent a message over Nixon's name on the hot line to Moscow-its first use by the Nixon Administration. (Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev later used it during the October 1973 Middle East war.) Actually, this Moscow-Washington telegraphic link worked more slowly than did the communications of the Soviet embassy. But it conferred a sense of urgency and might speed up Soviet decisions. The one-page hot line message declared that the President had "set in train certain moves" in the U.N. Security Council that could not be reversed. It concluded: "I cannot emphasize too strongly that...
...Nixon understood immediately that if the Soviet Union succeeded in humiliating China, all prospects for world equilibrium would disappear. He decided-and I fully agreed-that if the Soviet Union threatened China we would not stand idly...
...recognize and with which we had had next to no contact for two decades would obtain some significant assistance-the precise nature to be worked out when the circumstances arose. To provide some military means to give effect to our strategy and to reinforce the message to Moscow, Nixon now ordered an aircraft carrier task force that had been alerted earlier to proceed through the Strait of Malacca and into the Bay of Bengal...
...Chinese message was not what we expected. On the contrary, it accepted the U.N. procedure and the political solution I had outlined to Huang Hua during a secret trip to New York City 48 hours earlier-asking for a ceasefire and withdrawal, but settling for a standstill ceasefire. But Nixon did not know this when he made his lonely and brave decision. Had things developed as we anticipated, we would have had no choice but to assist China in some manner against the probable opposition of much of the Government, the media and the Congress...