To China With Nixon

When Richard Nixon suddenly grabbed the television mike to announce not only that we were ending our ostracism of Red China but that he would himself visit China sometime before the following spring, the shock waves were everywhere palpable; but Mr. Nixon knew enough about his constituencies, voluntary and co-opted, to know that he might safely proceed from the television studio to a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles, there to celebrate his diplomatic triumph in a highly publicized private dinner at which the champagne corks popped in complacent harmony with the impending public elation. A few precautions were taken, as if by a master electrician running his eyes over the fuses. I sat viewing Mr. Nixon's television performance in the relaxedly hushed living room of Governor Ronald Reagan in Sacramento, with my brother Jim. We were together not only because of ideological consanguinity, or because we are friends, or because we thought foresightedly to man the same fortress at a moment when President Nixon would say something we were alerted to believe would be more than his routine denunciation of wage-and-price controls--we happened to be at Sacramento because earlier that afternoon two of my television sessions had been taped, one each with the governor and the Senator, wherein we probed the differences between their views and mine, when we could discover them. But the coincidence was happy--we could reflect now together on the meaning of Mr. Nixon's démarche, without pressure.

The governor turned off the television after the network commentators began transcribing the delighted stupefaction of the international diplomatic community. There had been no comment in the room, save one or two of those wolfish whistles one hears when someone on one's side in politics says something daringly risqué; kinky, even, gauged by the standards of Nixon-straight. The television off, there was silence in the room for a second, not more--the telephone's ring reached us. The butler appeared. "Dr. Kissinger," he said to the governor, who got up from the floor and went to the sequestered alcove where the telephone lay. He wasn't gone for very long, but even by the time he returned, somehow we knew that the question Did Richard Nixon say something he shouldn't have said? Did he undertake a course of action he should not have undertaken? was somehow not up for generic review. Nixon had pierced the veil, and the defloration was final. Henry Kissinger had, within five minutes of the public announcement, reached and reassured the most conspicuously conservative governor in the Union that the strategic intentions of the President were in total harmony with the concerns of the conservative community. We sensed, all of us, the albescent tribute to Mr. Nixon's solid good sense.

The balance of the evening was given over only glancingly to the great catharsis, which not many months later, by compound interest, would emerge as a Long March jointly undertaken by the Uníted States of America and the People's Republic of China. The dissenters were much more than helpless; they were paralyzed. In a matter of hours the political emotions of the country were permanently rearranged. Nixon had done it. Surely Nixon is our bargaining agent, the old anti-Communist community reasoned. I thought of the mine workers, who on one occasion were surprised when John L. Lewis announced the agreement he had reached with the operators. The terms appeared dismaying. But it is easier on such occasions to reason a priori, from faith in the leader. John L. Lewis will not make settlements strategically disadvantageous to his constituency. No more Richard Nixon to his. To be sure, we lisped out our reservations. Senator Buckley issued his cautionary notes. I broke wind with heavy philosophical reservations. A fortnight later a few of us met in Manhattan and decided, as a matter of historical punctilio, to suspend our formal support for President Richard Nixon. The press, though visibly amused--as if grandfather Bonaparte had come in from the village to disown the young emperor--gave the story attention, faithful to the spastic journalistic imperative that anything that might conceivably embarrass Richard Nixon is newsworthy. But that was about it. There was the formal gesture by Congressman John Ashbrook, who ran primary campaigns against the President in New Hampshire, Florida and California. But it was much too late. The Zeitgeist was so far ahead of us it had time to stop and laugh as we puffed our way pot-valiantly up the steepening mountain. And soon the great day came when, glass raised high in Peking, the President of the United States toasted the Chairman of the People's Republic of China; after which we disappeared from sight.

Princeton, New Jersey, March 10, 1972. One important effect of President Nixon's trip to China [the Gallup Poll reported today]--and the period leading up to this historic event--is the far more favorable image the U. S. public has of the Communist Chinese today than they did in the mid-Sixties. Respondents [to the poll] were asked to select from a list of 23 favorable and unfavorable adjectives those which they feel best describe the Communist Chinese. The terms "ignorant," "warlike," "sly" and "treacherous" were named most often in 1966, the last time the measurement was taken. Today, however, "hard-working," "intelligent," "artistic," "progressive" and "practical" outweigh any negative term used to describe the Chinese.

It was mid-January in New York and I was lunching with friends, among them Theodore White, already embarked on his industrious monitorship of a Presidential year. Someone asked White whether he would succeed in getting a ticket on the coveted flight to Peking accompanying Nixon. You might as well have asked the queen whether she would get a ticket to the coronation. "If I don't get one," he said excitedly, "I might as well give up writing my book! How can one write a history of the making of the American President in 1972 and not travel to Peking with Nixon?" He elaborated, most discreetly, on the measures he had taken--the strings he had pulled, the people he was prepared to exalt, or to strangle, according as they proved helpful, or obstructive--in transacting his application. His eyes lit on me suddenly, and the pointed mirth that makes him such good company fastened on the subtle reticulations of my own position. You son of a bitch, he said, if you're on that plane and I'm not, I'll never speak to you again! That afternoon I wrote and applied perfunctorily for a seat. Five weeks later, White and I were facing each other across the aisle of the Pan American press jet, en route to Hawaii, first leg on what we were repeatedly reminded was a historical voyage, a presumption none of us doubted. I had had a call, in Switzerland, from the White House--did I really want to go? . . . Yes, I said, over the transatlantic phone, I was most anxious to go. Forty-eight hours later Ron Ziegler reached me to say that I was among the chosen. Forty-eight hours and 20 minutes later, Herbert Klein called me to say the same thing.

The mood aboard the press plane was mostly muted, inquisitive in an unobtrusive way; languid like the professional athlete on the eve of protracted exertion. The build-up was subtle, but palpable. Mr. Nixon paces himself carefully, with an eye on the relevant coordinates: his health, and television prime time. He does not believe in arriving anywhere unrested, uncomposed, or unobserved. Though he is capable of staying awake all night, he does not chart his trips so as to make this likely. It was only on the fifth night that, experiencing impasse with Chou En-lai, he stayed up until dawn, pressing his position--presumably on how to phrase the vexed question of Taiwan (he might as well have stayed in bed). Accordingly, we spent a day and a half in Hawaii, which we left at dawn, destination Peking. The President left with us, but to go only as far as Guam, there to "overnight," as they put it.

Safely on board, Teddy White was Buddha-happy, sitting with a pile of news clips on his tray whence from time to time he would pluck out an anti-Red Chinese tidbit and offer it to me playfully in return for anything favorable to the Red Chinese I might supply him from my own pile, gentleman's agreement. Now he beamed. "I have a clip here that says the Red Chinese have killed thirty-four million people since they took over China. What will you offer me for that?" I foraged among my material and triumphantly came up with a clip that said the Red Chinese have reduced illiteracy from 80 percent to 20 percent, but White scoffed me down, like a professional pawnshop broker. "Hell," he said, "I have that one already. Everybody has that one." I scrounge about for more pro--Chinese Communist data, and finally tell him, disconsolate, that I can't find one more item to barter for his plum; he smiles contentedly at his tactical victory, and I wonder if he hasn't, however, lost the war.

We merely refueled at Guam and went on ploddingly to Shanghai. Guam--Shanghai is only four hours, Guam--Peking six. But all along we had been directed to stop over there, before flying into Peking, giving 85 out of 85 reporters the opportunity to wire back the knowing historical observation that the purpose of the stopover was indisputably to wrest from us a jet-age facsimile of the traditional obeisance of the visiting dignitary who, on his way to an audience with the Emperor in the Middle Kingdom, was made to pause at the hem of the imperial gardens to beg leave to proceed. But it is also a Chinese tradition that official guests are not made to stop merely in order to water their horses. So therefore there was a grandish meal at the airport, prefiguring the routine that lay before us--one official Chinese seated next to every American around the round tables; like the other Chinese we would meet, functional in English, but not very much more than that. White, who had left Harvard 35 years earlier to devote himself to Sinology, could not suppress his curiosity about the great city of Shanghai, which he had not seen since before "Liberation" (October 10, 1949), went on with his questions. "What has become of the old race track?" he asked. "It--is--a--people's--park," said his host measuredly. "A people's horses' park?" another reporter asked solemnly, confident that the satirical turn the questioning had taken would go unnoticed (it did). "No," said our host, not quite getting it, but sensing the danger, "a people's park." Walter Cronkite turned to White and explained matter-of-factly: "They race people there." That too passed without difficulty. But White was not to be deterred. He gave up finally only when, on asking "What will we see in Shanghai?" he got back the answer, "A city of ten million people." Cronkite, responding to the many toasts that had been offered to us at four-or five-minute intervals during the long lunch, rose gravely, glass in hand, to toast a "most auspicious beginning."

Back on the plane, the final leg of the trip, to Peking. We are boarded onto buses, making our very long way to the Nationalities Hotel, beyond the Great Square of the People. There is no other traffic, only bicycles, and the drivers use their horns as routinely as safari drivers plying their mosquito swatters, to keep the road clear of the blue-suited bicyclists, half of them wearing white gauze masks over their mouths, a native precaution against the spreading of germs. Why doesn't the cold kill the germs? I wondered. Or why don't the germs kill the cold. ... I was slipping into fantasy, under the torture of fatigue after 17 hours' journey. In the hotel lobby full of bags and people and confusion we found we were expected to eat yet again. I went to the dining room with Bob Considine, who asked, in the best manner of W. C. Fields, "Do you have a bar?" The comrade in charge of the dining room answered, "Yes. You want olange juice?" "No," said Considine, "whiskey . . . wheeskee . . . glub glub glub," he motioned with his hand on an imaginary highball glass. "Ah," the functionary smiled, "beeh?" "Take me," Considine turned austerely toward me, "to the nearest war lord." We stumbled off to our rooms. Large, utilitarian, mid-Victorian, comfortable, dimly lit, plenty of hot water, chocolates and hard candy and fruit on the table, instant service at the press of a button. I do not know whether Considine rang for a war lord. I was within seconds sound asleep, snug in bed in the capital of Red China. When you are very tired, and your bed is warm and your room is silent, (continued on page 104) To China with nixon(continued from page 98) nothing else matters. Nixon had a point, though, staying over in Guam. Nixon always has a point.

They ask you, What did you find in China that surprised you? Or--more often--What did you find in China that surprised you most? But one is better off asking such a question of someone who has just returned from terra altogether incognita; from those parts of the Up per Amazon (I take it there are still some) about which we have all learned from National Geographic that no human being from the civilized world has ever traveled there (interesting question: What is the "civilized" world? What does the word nowadays mean?). Mysterious China, during the period since Liberation, has not been mysterious in the National Geographic sense. There have been travelers to China all along, even during the convulsions. Much was seen in China even during the Cultural Revolution that was not laid on for foreign visitors to see. The control of visitors' movements, during the Cultural Revolution, was less thorough by far than the control after the Cultural Revolution; than the control today, when by contrast with pre-ping-pong China, it is considered a country relatively open to discreet inspection by foreign journalists. But even during the 20 years largely closed to Americans, there were others who went there, others who reported on China in our own language, among them some who measured China by Western values. Clement Attlee led a delegation of Englishmen there 18 years ago, one of whom wrote a mordant little book called No Flies in China, urbanely mocking the only absolutely verifiable revolutionary achievement in the city of Shanghai--in fact, the reporter hadn't seen a single fly. But then possibly he wouldn't have noticed the absence of flies if their absence hadn't been remarked to him, and if he hadn't read somewhere that Shanghai used to be full of flies.

What would have surprised us?--traveling to China a few months after Ross Terrill of Harvard did, and James Reston of The New York Times, and William Attwood of Newsday, and dozens of Canadians and Australians and, for that matter, French and West Germans, whose reports we had read. "Have you noticed about the dogs?" one journalist asked me, four days into the trip. No, I said, scratching my head. Were the dogs class-consciousless, I wondered? What had I missed? . . . "There are no dogs," he said. I hadn't noticed, but it was true. True, more exactly, that we hadn't seen any dogs. Not true, necessarily, that there weren't any, someplace--it would not have done for President Nixon to have presented the Peking zoo with two dogs. Another journalist, after three days in Peking: "Have you noticed about the grass?" Same thing. There was no grass. I mean, there was no grass. The explanation may be simple. Maybe grass is extremely hard to grow in the climate around Peking. On the other hand, grass grows all right in Maine and in the Laurentians, where it is also very cold. No doubt there is another explanation, on the order of having to use all the available earth for food, or perhaps there is a positive cultural antipathy toward grass as conspicuous horticultural consumption. But I hadn't in fact noticed it.

What the questioner is really asking, after a trip of this nature, is: "What surprised you that didn't surprise the newsmen who have previously reported on their travels throughout China?" But even that question generates an answer only on the assumption of the incompetence or venality of your predecessors. This cannot safely be assumed, mostly because in conspicuous cases the people who had been to China were neither incompetent nor, all of them, beholden to the Communist myth. Of the ideological sycophants there were of course a number, but their writings, though distracting, are disregarded by the practiced reader as automatically as the lesser stars by the navigator. One does not examine the reports on China of a Felix Greene, except as one is interested in ideological pathology. It was a problem for years where Russia was concerned, and although it's true that there are people around who are willing to say gaspingly about China the same kind of thing the boys used to say about Stalin's Russia, in China, on the whole, observers have been at once more cynical and more wise. The more cynical--the Wilfred Burchetts, the Felix Greenes--presumably know what they are doing but are willing to do it anyway. Joseph Stalin had his apologists even after the Moscow Trials were exposed. The typical journalist visiting China is as I say at once wiser and more jaded, so that on the one hand he does not automatically accept on their terms the representations of his hosts, but on the other hand is world-weary about applying only standards of conduct that would have satisfied Wood-row Wilson, or the Committee for Cultural Freedom.

What would have surprised us? Well, we'd have been surprised if, say, a political prisoner had been tied to a stake outside our hotel and shot for breakfast. We'd have written home about that. We'd have been surprised if, turning a corner during an unaccompanied walk through the streets of Shanghai, we had bumped into a corpse in the middle of the street, dead of undernourishment, or boredom. We'd have been surprised if the secret police (they call them the Social Affairs Department--the Maoists are really wonderful on terminology, though after a certain amount it cloys, like Franglais) had come in one night to the hotel and dragged Barbara Walters off in handcuffs--you could have counted on us to cause a hell of a good row.

But that kind of thing didn't happen. So what was it that did surprise us?

Leaving out the nonexistence of dogs and grass, and the trivial anomalies that strike each observer differently--what was it that surprised all, or nearly all of us?

If you winnowed down the list ruthlessly, I think you would have something very nearly like general agreement on the following.

It surprised us that the airport greeting given to President Nixon was so scandalously spare. There were present at the airport (1) an honor guard of a couple of hundred soldiers; (2) a diplomatic retinue of several dozen Chinese, led by Chou En-lai; and (3) us. One journalist, struggling to assimilate the implications of it, ventured the ingenious explanation that perhaps the Cultural Revolution had been so successful, this was in fact all the Chinese that were left. Americans are good at absorbing social shock. Richard Nixon proved superb at it.

Ten hours after he landed he went to the microphone to return the toast of Chou En-lai, and oh, what a crafty toast it had been. It drew its strength from the implicit friendship between the American and the Chinese people. Alas, "Owing to reasons known to all, contacts between the two peoples were suspended for over 20 years." Chou En-lai went on to say, in the principal banquet hall of a capital city in which the Chinese people did not at that moment know even that the President of the United States was physically present in their city (they would learn it the next morning, when Nixon's picture appeared in the papers, visiting with Mao Tsetung), in a country in which the people haven't the liberty: to choose what they want to read, or to write what they want to write, or to express themselves in behalf of the kind of society they want to live in, or to take the job they want or leave a job they don't want, or to practice the religion they want to practice or to leave the city for the country or the country for the city, or to travel to another part of China, or out of China . . . said Chou in his toast, "The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history." And he toasted the health of the President.

The surprise came when Richard Nixon did what he did. He could have got up, a genial, wizened smile on his face, to thank Chou for whatever efforts he was prepared to make to further the people's interests, the world over; to encourage him to join the United States in a joint search for peace; to toast the health of all leaders of the People's Republic of China, and of the people of the People's Republic of China . . . and have sat down, smiling. Perfectly proper. Impeccable.

We could not believe it, what he did. I mean, there was no one there who was unsurprised--except, maybe, those who had projected rigorously how Richard Nixon characteristically does things: the imperative fusion of Quaker rectitude, and political exigency. . . . He began, under the shadow of that reception at the airport, by thanking Chou for his "incomparable hospitality." If Milton Berle had used those words, under similar circumstances, the general response would have been: "Good old Uncle Mil-tie. That's the way to treat those snotty bastards who sent a corporal's guard out to meet the President of the United States." Then Mr. Nixon talked about bridging the differences between the two countries. Then, in a breath-taking gesture of historical ecumenism, Mr. Nixon talked about undertaking a "long march together." The Long March being Red China's Bastille, Winter Palace, and Reichstag fire, the invocation of it by Richard Nixon as historically inspiring could have been matched only by Mao Tse-tung's bursting into the hall and saying that he wanted to be there passing the ammunition to Richard Nixon next time America faced the rockets' red glare. Then Nixon quoted Mao himself, in tones appropriate to Scripture. Then he toasted not the health of Mao and Chou but, directly, Mao and Chou.

Nor was that by any means all. President Nixon did not return to his table to sit down. He returned only to pick up his small glass of liqueur, armed with which he strode to the adjoining table, crowded with Chinese officials, and paused, effulgently, to toast each one of them individually, his cheeks flushed (with grand purpose--Nixon is to all intents and purposes a teetotaler), and on to yet another table of Chinese dignitaries, to do the same. I commented in a dispatch cabled that evening that I would not have been surprised if Mr. Nixon had lurched into a toast to Alger Hiss. My comment was taken amiss here and there. When I wrote it, I had no reason to know that the next morning U. P. I. would report that the widow Snow had just released the text of a letter received from Richard Nixon during Edgar's last hours on earth, expressing hope for his recovery and saying, "It will strengthen you to know that your distinguished career is so widely respected and appreciated." Edgar Snow had been a full-scale Communist apologist, writing from China, during the Forties and Fifties, as only a Communist sympathizer could. But there could not have been any observer of that extraordinary scene in the Great Hall of the People who understood the raised Presidential glass as motivated other than by a pure transideological desire to touch the soul of Chinese Maoists, in a way poor Nixon has never succeeded in touching American Democrats. It was an astounding gesture, freighted with innocence. But he would have had a hell of a time explaining it to the Committee on Un-American Activities.

Anyway, that surprised us.

We were surprised the next day when they took us off to see the ballet, the Red Detachment of Women. It was a small hall, and we had our only glimpse of Chiang Ching, Madame Mao Tse-tung, whose displeasure over a ballet in 1965 that showed insufficient servility to the thought of Mao Tse-tung had triggered the Cultural Revolution. There was no chance that the Red Detachment of Women would trigger anything among American viewers surrounding the President of the United States other than contempt, tempered by pity. It was as if the President had called together the chiefs of the black republics of Africa to a ballet in the White House on the theme of Little Black Sambo. What surprised us was not so much the hard-drug ideology--we are a country that absorbs Jane Fonda--as the curious social effrontery. The Chinese had nothing at all to gain, but unmistakably something to lose, from a concentrated display of agitprop as art to a conscripted audience of Americans who sensed the restraints imposed upon the President by the diplomatic situation; and worried both that he might visibly fret under the strain; and that he wouldn't. (Oh, how much R. N. might have accomplished, the following night, in his next public toast, by an urbane reference to the Red Detachment of Women. How easy, how effective, how inspiriting, how just!) There could not have been anyone in the audience who didn't think: Orwell. Rose Macaulay, on reading 1984, commented late in her life that she really didn't understand how George could have written such a book, because such a society as he described was simply unthinkable. I thought of Rose Macaulay. There was no need for our hosts to make us think of Rose Macaulay. After all, they had taken the trouble not to shoot dissidents outside our hotel room. Why should they do it to art, a few feet away from us?

And--remember, the list is as compressed as I can make it--there was surprise over the affair at Peking University. Every morning we had a choice of five or six tours to take--typically, a visit to an army unit, or a cooperative, or a hospital, or a museum, that kind of thing. It happened that on this morning, the day after the ballet, the majority of us signed up for a tour of Peking University, the center of learning in pre-Liberated China, where at about the time of the Versailles Conference a young assistant librarian, Mao Tse-tung, is said to have steeped himself in learning, the better to compose his visions of a New China.

So there we were, 30 or 40 of us, on that hallowed ground, in the cold, cold rector's office, wearing our overcoats, and seated in a great semicircle. A translator was giving us in English the rector's dreary account of the noble aims of Peking University under the patronage of Chairman Mao. The whole mechanical business was exasperatingly slow, in sodden harmony with the text, which was boiler-plate Mao, as revised by the Cultural Revolution. The reporter next to me leaned over and whispered, "That guy"--pointing to the rector--"speaks perfect English. He sat next to me at the banquet last night. Hell, he got his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in the Twenties." It was so, and in quick order all of us knew it, and it became evident that he was not speaking in English only because of the Red Guards, who, it transpired, were still in control of the university, and who didn't understand English. Two of them, chunky, unsmiling 20-year-olds, flanked their 76-year-old rector, ears cocked for ideological error. He committed none.

Does anybody get dismissed from PKU? was one question.

No, nobody gets dismissed.

Do you ever decide that a student should return to farm, or work?

We have no such cases.

Do students pick their own specialties?

Their choices are combined with the needs of the state.

What was it that was wrong with PKU before the Cultural Revolution?

We were imitating the elitist practices of Russia.

What did you do to remedy that situation?

A Mao Thought Propaganda Team came in the fall of 1968, stayed a full year, and then left a revolutionary council to run PKU.

What is it that PKU now has that it didn't have before?

Sufficient class consciousness, and a proletarian spirit.

The rector, tall, thin, gray, wore his authority as naturally as Robert Hutchins, spoke a little anxiously, and after a while, sensing that we all knew that he knew English, began discreetly helping his translator. Hearing him, a doctor of science from Chicago, say what he said, was a deeply saddening experience. It would have helped if he looked like Carmine De Sapio, but he looked like H. B. Warner. A little like Pasternak, who died more or less trying. The rector at (continued on page 150)To China with Nixon(continued from page 106) PKU chooses to live and to hang on to power, and has to pretend he can't speak English, and presides over a university gutted of spirit and intellect which, Sinologist White concluded, after surveying the curriculum, offers fewer courses in Chinese history than any important university in the United States. We were surprised. Not so much that PKU is as it is but, once again, that we should have been allowed to see it under the circumstances. We were surprised, but I began to get the idea; and the idea is deadly.

The long march for America has been away from Wilsonianism in foreign policy, but we have not meditated what else it is that we are losing along the way. We did not make the world safe for democracy--Wilson's stated objective--by our venture into the First or the Second World War. In fact, a very good case can be made for the idea that the more strenuously we sought to export our democracy, the less democracy flourished, and perhaps it wasn't coincidence. It was well before Nixon's China trip that we gave up on that illusion, reducing our general position by one gigantic step. Now we committed ourselves to making the world safe for those countries that wished to resist subjugation by a major Communist power. Call it, if you will, the Fulbright Reservation. It was neatly stated by him a few years ago: "Insofar as a nation is content to practice its doctrines within its own frontiers, that nation, however repugnant its ideology, is one with which we have no proper quarrel." The corollary of the Fulbright Reservation was that we did have a proper quarrel with any nation that was not content to practice its doctrines within its own frontiers, though I think the Senator would have wanted to refine that just a little, to read: subject to United States resources, and to our evaluation of the strategic implications of a defeat of the country resisting the exportation of a foreign ideology. It was, of course, the application of the Fulbright Reservation that brought us to war in Korea and Indochina, and to the brink of war in Quemoy, Berlin, Lebanon and Cuba.

The China trip did much to dislodge the Fulbright Reservation, though Fulbright himself, and many others, had meanwhile done a great deal to put pressure on the dam Mr. Nixon yanked open. They did this by seeking to explain, or if you prefer, to explain away; by managing to understand, and then to tolerate, that which was formerly thought of as quite simply repugnant. And, at the other end, by seeking to disparage, and otherwise abuse, that which was formerly accepted, if not as ideal, quite clearly as nonrepugnant. In this endeavor much of vocal American society has engaged over recent years. Martin Luther King said about America that it was "the greatest purveyor of violence" since Hitler, even as some historians were discovering that the Cold War could not truly be said to have been primarily the fault of the Soviet Union. At the barricades in American academies, students and professors were denouncing this country as militarist and materialist and racist, while we began indulgently to understand certain historical necessities, certain quite understandable practices, under the circumstances, in Russia and China. The young American president of the National Students Association went to North Vietnam to broadcast to the South Vietnamese the news that theirs was the worst military despotism in history. Professor Noam Chomsky and like-minded folk were saying you could not believe a word uttered by the Government of the United States, while urging us to accept the word of the government of the Soviet Union on everything from statistics on genocide to the control of atomic testing and production. A perfect equilibrium was finally reached, in the egali-tarianization of Them and Us, in a speech given in the spring of 1971--by Senator Fulbright. General de Gaulle prefigured it all when he used to refer to "the two hegemonies," but most people put that down as sour grapes from the junior varsity. Fulbright now was talking about our unnecessary fear of the growth of Soviet naval power in the Mediterranean. "This is not to suggest that the Russians are lacking in ambitions in the Middle East," he said. "There is no doubt that they desire to maximize their 'influence' in the Arab world and that they derive gratification from sailing their warships around the Mediterranean. This, however, is normal behavior for a great power: It is quite similar to our own. We too keep a fleet in the Mediterranean, which is a good deal farther from our shores than it is from the Soviet Union; and our main objection to Soviet 'influence' in the Arab countries is that it detracts from our own. Were it not for the fact that they are Communists--and therefore 'bad' people--while we are Americans--and therefore 'good' people--our policies would be nearly indistinguishable."

There, now.

Professor Ross Terrill, an Australian teaching now at Harvard, moved rather more philosophically into the question in two brilliant articles published in The Atlantic immediately before President Nixon's trip. They were, reportedly, closely examined by all of us, and although Terrill's personal biases were instantly apparent and sometimes even schoolboyish (it was "Mr. Chou," but just plain "Rogers"), he did not attempt to disguise, in the manner of the Stalin apologists, the lack of freedom in China, as conventionally understood: with emphasis on the qualifier. "Turning back toward the hotel, I pass a Protestant church--its closed gates bearing the banner 'Carry through the Cultural Revolution to the end.' " Sometimes he tried to explain a particular deprivation. "Wherever I walk, there is a People's Liberation Army man with boyish grin and fixed bayonet. 'Back the other way.' Well, it is a sensitive area. . . . There was an openness and a practical root to nearly all the restraints that met me in China." But the effort is halfhearted --there wasn't, after all, any readily understandable explanation of the practical root for the refusal of any news vendor to sell him the morning papers. Nor does Terrill tell us that the straitened freedom is otherwise compensated for, say by meritocratic integrity. "Another PLA [People's Liberation Army] officer, a tough, cheery man who confessed his total ignorance of medicine, was head of a Peking hospital." He does not even begin to suggest that there is cultural freedom in China. "I found cultural life far more politicized. . . . Public libraries, and museums too, are closed. Churches are boarded up, empty, and checkered with political slogans. . . . In 1971 you simply do not find, as you could in 1964, segments of social and intellectual life around which the tentacles of politics have not curled." The propaganda, in the style of the Red Detachment of Women, is altogether relentless. Terrill confirms that in Shensi, with a population of 25,000,000 people, 100,000,000 Mao works were published during the Cultural Revolution. A little liberty, perhaps, for the people liberated on Liberation Day by the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China? "I inquired of the spokesman of the factory Revolutionary Committee, 'Can a worker transfer work by his own individual decision?' I might have asked if the leopard can change his spots." Terrill too knew about the plight of higher education. "At PKU I saw the English class, which was reading, and discussing, Aesop's fables. . . . They received me with clapping--though few, I found, knew what or where Australia is."

But after all that, the breath-catching evasion. The cement poured on the floor Senator Fulbright seeks to stand on. "People ask, 'Is China free?'--but there is no objective measure of the freedom of a whole society." He explains that there are differences in ours and the Chinese historical experience that account for many differences in attitude. But he agrees that yes, "At one point we and China face the same value (continued on page 203)To China With Nixon(continued from page 150) judgment. Which gets priority: the individual's freedom or the relationships of the whole society? Which unit is to be taken . . . the nation, trade union, outclass, my cronies, me? This is the hinge on which the whole issue turns." (Those who hear a familiar ring are right--the implied doctrine is undiluted fascism.) Terrill gives examples. He has told us already about Professor Fu, a scientist inclined to the study of pure science, who however was recently instructed by the state to devote himself entirely to pest control. "Professor Fu . . . did not make his own decision to take up the problem of insect pests--it was handed him. Is that wrong?" He recalls the writer Kuo Mo-jo, who used to satisfy himself, before Liberation, writing books suited to his own taste, for small audiences. The government decided he should appeal to wider audiences. "The writer . . . cannot now do books for 3000 or at most 8000 readers, as Kuo used to in Shanghai in the 1930s, but must write for the mass millions--and he's judged by whether he can do that well or not. Is that wrong?"

Is that wrong.

Wrong! What is wrong?

What's right is things like Eliminating Graft. (Why, then, oppose Mussolini?) "The elimination of these conditions in China," writes historian Barbara Tuchman, exultantly, "is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance." The loss of every known freedom is defined, now, as a Negative Aspect.

We have been 50 years discovering the limits of Wilsonian politics, our experience as an imperial power having taught us, fitfully, that the Wilsonian idea simply didn't work. But we never tried to do without it altogether. The Wilsonian idea, during its brief golden age, was not only a mandate for concerted action by the good states against the bad states, which mandate foundered in its first major test against Mussolini's Italy for invading Ethiopia. The Wilsonian idea, for all that it was impractical, like the United Nations Convention on Human Rights, at least preserved a loose set of criteria concerning the human condition that are epistemologically optimistic. Wilsonianism believed there were ways societies should behave toward their citizens and shouldn't behave. Very well. If we cannot march in to save the Tibetans from being overrun by the Chinese, who proceed genocidally to extinguish a religious creed, we can express ourselves on the heinousness of the act with philosophical and moral security. We will try hard not to be censorious, let alone priggish, in making judgments, and we will be scrupulous as to the form in which they are pronounced. We will be worldly enough, for instance, to recognize the probability that Ghana will move quickly from emancipation as a colony of England to self-rule as a one-party state. But never so worldly as to dismiss the subsequent torture and murder routinely practiced under Nkrumah as merely a Negative Aspect--who knows, perhaps even . . . appropriate?

The retreat from Wilsonianism toward ideological egalitarianism is quite general, though there are interesting exceptions, mostly arising from polemical opportunism. George McGovern has railed against the Greek colonels and against President Thieu with a fervor he never summoned against, say, Tito, or Ho Chi Minh or, for that matter, in recent years, against the Devil. He minded it greatly when Agnew went to Greece and to Spain, not at all when Nixon went to Romania or to Yugoslavia. There is something there that seems to say: It is the higher duty to suspend criticism of any power that is strong enough to initiate a world war. You see it is still fashionable to inveigh against undemocratic societies but only provided that they are (a) weak and (b) allied, in some general way, with the West. The further they recede from the family's orbit, the less we criticize them. This is so for reasons that are psychologically understandable. You castigate Cousin Joe when he starts hitting the bottle, but the alcoholic at the other end of town is a statistic. And then--no question about it--there is the racial point. Arthur Schlesinger remarked somewhere that he finds it disquieting that his fellow intellectuals seem to be saying that communism, which would never be tolerated here (read: among civilized white Americans), is somehow Ok over there (read: among uncivilized yellow people).

But now, with the Fulbright-Terrill-Nixon offensive, even those words of Mr. Schlesinger, uttered only a few years ago, seem strangely reactionary. They rely, after all, on acquiescence in the proposition that ---

But is communism wrong?

We were in Hangchow, and of course there was a banquet. We were restless. Tired and a little bored: demoralized and a little ashamed. There were so many vanities to be indulged. Chinese vanity had us flying in from Peking in two shifts because they wouldn't let us use our own big Boeing jet, insisting that we use their little jet, which was Russian at that. Our deadlines for filing copy meant that the first shift couldn't leave before one a.m., the second therefore not until four a.m. The hotel in Hangchow, hailed as a tourist center ever since Marco Polo, proved to be too small to give us each the indispensable solace of a single room. The day was gray and cold. There had been no hard news. The night before, Nixon and Chou En-lai had been up until dawn, chewing the impasse. We did not know what was the nature of it and were tired of sending speculation back home. Then--sensing something amiss--the President invited us all to his villa at four p.m. We got there, wandered about a bit in the ornate gardens and quarters, and found finally the outdoor patio where we were expected. It had been rigged for one of those group pictures, planks on light scaffolding, with a cavity in the center, which meant He would be posing with us. We lined up, already shivering from cold. Mr. Nixon entered, beaming, and we all posed. Then he turned around to face us, spoke genially and said: I'm sorry I can't give out the details of what we're working on, but you must understand that in order to help you do your duty of reporting the news well, I cannot risk doing my duty, which is diplomatic, badly. So help me that was all he said, but it took him 20 minutes, during which the wind and the cold went to work lasciviously on our bones and our spirits, as we stood silently there on the scaffolding, 80 titans of the American media, chin just above the head of the man in front, four tiers of us, like cadets having one last docile session with the drill-master, before graduation. Then, the briefing at an end. Nixon said, sort of teasingly, that if any of us wanted to present our spouses with proof that we had indeed been in China with the President, not, er, elsewhere doing something else, he would be glad to have his picture taken with each of us individually. End Sulk, Eighty-odd grand masters lining up to have their picture taken with the President of the United States, making self-conscious conversation as the line moved forward slowly. The indignity, all the more biting for its having been self-inflicted, hung heavy in the stomach two hours later in the banquet hall, where we reported as told to do promptly at 7:45. There we stood, waiting. Nixon and Chou arrived 40 minutes later. The pre-dinner booze was the same Chinese syrup, with zero anesthetizing power. For the first time I was asked a provocative question, by the Chinese official standing next to me, waiting, as we all were, for the principals, and for the first (and only) time, I answered a Chinese shortly. He had heard, he said, that I was "a conservative." What was an American conservative? I answered crisply: someone who believes in individual freedom and in--I reached for the most incendiary word--capitalism. Did I really believe in "capitalism"? he asked mockingly. Yes, I said, and for all anyone is permitted to know, you do too. He feigned ignorance of the allusion to his intellectual paralysis, and smiled as sickly sweet as the Chinese wine he brought to his lips to toast me with. Joe Kraft said he was going next door to the bedroom to fetch something (the banquet hall abutted the hotel). He came back two hours later (he missed a splendid meal) and in plenty of time for the toasts, which were just beginning. "Where on earth have you been?" I whispered. "Sleeping," he winked. Trés cool. We were listening to the usual business from the Chinese toastmasters. We were relieved to learn from Chou's toast that the Chinese people still feel friendship for the American people, and that nothing had happened to change that since last night's toast. Then came Nixon, and by God, he was likening the revolution led by George Washington to the revolution led by Mao Tse-tung. But after all, why not? As Terrill would say, is that wrong? Both were revolutions, weren't they?

Albert Jay Nock wrote a line that never leaves the memory. I paraphrase him: "I have often thought that it would be interesting to write an essay on the question: How do you go about discovering that you are slipping into a dark age?" In any such essay I think you would have to reflect on the special problems a democracy has in mobilizing public attitudes in such a way as to inform foreign policy in directions that are essentially moral. The great totalitarian systems do not have this difficulty. It sufficed that China should publicize a picture of Mao Tse-tung fraternizing with President Richard Nixon to satisfy the people that a friendly relationship with the United States was the right thing to do. Only two years ago, Chairman Mao pronounced that "U. S. imperialism is slaughtering the white and black people in its own country. Nixon's fascist atrocities have kindled the raging flames of the revolutionary mass movement in the United States. The Chinese people firmly support the revolutionary struggle of the American people." The speech in which that passage presumed was still being passed around (in several languages) while we were there. I got my copy in the hotel lobby. As easily as Mao now redirected the public on the proper attitude toward America, he could redirect it back to where it had been, as Hitler and Stalin twice changed attitudes toward each other, on either end of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.

A free society cannot do this kind of thing. And America--young, inexperienced and moralistic--can do it least. When we fought hand in hand with Stalin, Churchill had said he would make a pact with the Devil himself to defeat Hitler. In America, our leaders, far from thinking of Stalin as a devil, began to find great qualities in him, who before long became "Uncle Joe." Thus have the Chinese Communists been transformed, under diplomatic exigency; so that now the polls tell us that the American people, assimilating the Nixon trip, have discovered that the Chinese enterprise is "intelligent," "progressive" and "practical." To be sure, the Chinese don't do things the way we do, but their distinctive ideas on how to do things are understandable--and anyway, who are we to criticize? Who ever said we were so great?

And then too, a free society makes decisions concerning its own defenses with some reference to what it is that it seeks to defend itself against. Our own defense budget is a great extravagance--unless it is defending something that is indeed worth 80 billion dollars a year defending, and at the risk of a nuclear war: That is the logic implicit in owning and manning 1000 multiple-targeted nuclear Minutemen. As the differences between what we are and what we might become in the absence of an irresistible defense system diminish in our mind, so does the resolution diminish to make the sacrifices necessary to remain free--the tacit national commitment that the risk of death is better than the certain loss of liberty.

Nineteen-sixty: "Do you believe that the United States should defend itself even at the risk of nuclear war?" Yes, 70 percent--of the student body of Yale University, in answer to that question.

Nineteen-seventy: same college, same question--"Do you believe that the United States should defend itself even at the risk of nuclear war?" Yes, 40 percent.

Is that wrong?

Well of course it depends. Presumably if the people in the Dark Ages had known it was dark and why it was dark, they'd have done something about it--let in the light. As a matter of fact, eventually they did. "If the whole world is covered with asphalt," Ilya Ehrenburg wrote, "one day a track will appear in the asphalt; and in that crack grass will grow." How will we know then that it is grass?

I have not worked that out.