11/13/2023 0 Comments Nixon visits china explanationNixon was certainly entitled to some self-admiration. That book was subtitled “Six Months That Changed the World.” The subtitle of the new book is “The Week That Changed the World.” The phrase is Nixon’s own: he used it in his parting toast, in Shanghai. Her previous book, “Paris 1919,” was a revisionist study of the talks that produced the Versailles Treaty, at the end of the First World War. The geopolitical consequences of their co-dependency will be topics of controversy and debate forever, but one adventure has earned almost universal respect: Nixon’s trip to China, in February, 1972, which is the subject of Margaret MacMillan’s “Nixon and Mao” (Random House $27.95). Each hoped to use the other to promote his own renown, and each was devious and paranoid enough to find ways of preventing the other from fully succeeding. Kissinger was a ladies’ man (or cultivated the reputation) Nixon had trouble opening a bottle of aspirin. “The care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of his presidency,” Nixon’s speechwriter Raymond Price once said, “but he was worth it.” The couple was odd in many dimensions. Like all foreign-policy realists, Kissinger was drawn to power. Less than three weeks after the election, Nixon put in a call to Kissinger, and when he was sworn into office, in January, 1969, Kissinger was sitting behind him on the platform, the new national-security adviser. He despised these people because he believed that they despised him, but he could never let them alone. He hated Harvard professors he loathed rich East Coast establishment types like Rockefeller he was suspicious of Jews. Nixon, of course, was a seething cauldron of ressentiment. Kissinger was also a professor at Harvard, not a place where he was likely to rub up against a Nixon supporter. Kissinger was a protégé and associate of Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s chief competition for the Republican nomination, and he shared Rockefeller’s opinion: that Nixon was an opportunist without vision. ![]() “The man is unfit to be President,” Henry Kissinger said of Richard Nixon during the 1968 Presidential campaign. The United States and China both had excellent reasons for wishing to establish better relations in 1972.
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