Word: nixonize
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...some extent, both leaders had anticipated the moment. In 1967, Nixon, then a defeated candidate for both the presidency and the California governorship, had written in Foreign Affairs magazine: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations." Two years later, as President, he let it be known that he wanted to visit the mainland before leaving office. On hearing this, Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, smiled at a colleague and said, "Fat chance." Kissinger would soon find himself responsible for the trip's logistics and official communiqu?s. As for Mao, he had told...
...this momentous event came about is the subject of Margaret MacMillan's fascinating book Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao. She begins with the historic encounter itself-a meeting on Feb. 21, 1972, that the American delegation was not sure would actually take place. Yet as Nixon was going over his briefing books and practicing how to use chopsticks en route to Beijing, the seriously ill Mao was getting his first shave and haircut in months. As soon as Air Force One landed and Nixon greeted Premier Zhou Enlai with a prolonged handshake, Mao ordered Zhou to bring...
...With the Nixon trip as the leitmotiv, MacMillan, a University of Toronto historian, deftly weaves together biographies of all the principals (including their wives), contemporary geopolitics (China and the Soviet Union were at odds over their interpretations of communism), and a perceptive understanding of Chinese sensibilities. She explains, for example, the importance of that Nixon-Zhou handshake and a later one between Nixon and Mao that appears on the book's cover: the Chinese feared a replay of their humiliating snub at the 1954 Geneva conference on Indochina and Korea, when U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spurned Zhou...
...Nixon, who clearly preferred foreign to domestic policy, emerges as a true wonk. He writes his own wide-ranging speeches, makes intelligent comments on staff memos, and scribbles perceptive notes to himself. In Washington, Nixon had jotted down the trip's priorities: "1. Taiwan-most crucial. 2. V.Nam-most urgent." One of the juiciest subplots in Seize the Hour involves the efforts of Nixon and Kissinger to keep Secretary of State William Rogers out of the loop. The State Department didn't know in advance of Kissinger's first secret trip to the mainland. And it was Kissinger, not Rogers...
...book's title comes from one of Mao's poems, which Nixon quoted in his banquet toast on the day he met the Chairman: "Time passes. Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day, seize the hour." With intelligence and verve, Margaret MacMillan has seized the true spirit and significance of "Nixon in China...