Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This sometimes led to absurdities. On a state visit to Ottawa in 1972, an advance man decided that the tan furniture in Pierre Trudeau's office would not flatter Nixon on television and took it upon himself to redecorate the Prime Minister's private office with blue-covered sofas. He was stopped at the last minute by an incredulous associate of Trudeau almost incoherent with rage...
Even in the brief meeting with Nixon, Mao could not escape the nightmare that shadowed his accomplishments and tormented his last years: that it might all prove ephemeral, that the exertions, the suffering, the Long March, the brutal leadership struggles would be but a brief incident in the triumphant, passive persistence of a millennial culture which had tamed all previous upheavals. "The Chairman's writings moved a nation and have changed the world," said Nixon. "I have not been able to change it," replied Mao, not without pathos. "I have only been able to change a few places...
...strong enough for one last outburst against the pragmatists. And then that great, demonic, prescient, overwhelming personality disappeared like the great Emperor Qin Shihuang-di (Ch'in Shih Huang-ti), with whom he often compared himself while dreading the oblivion which was his fate. And his words to Nixon, like so much of what he said and attempted, had the ring of prophecy: "I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking...
...Nixon had always felt cheated because the narrowness of his 1968 victory and the pressures of Viet Nam had prevented a house-cleaning of the bureaucracy, which he had mistrusted as packed with holdover Democrats. Still, it does not explain the frenzied, almost maniacal sense of urgency about this political butchery. To ask for resignations en masse within hours of being elected, to distribute forms obviously mimeographed during a campaign in which many of the victims had been working themselves to a frazzle, was wounding and humiliating. Nixon's later troubles had other causes, of course; yet he surely deprived...
Triumph seemed to bring no surcease to him. He withdrew into a seclusion even deeper and more impenetrable than in his years of struggle. Isolation had become almost a spiritual necessity to this withdrawn, lonely and tormented man. It was hard to avoid the impression that Nixon, who thrived on crisis, also craved disasters...