Free American History Revised by Jr. Seymour Morris

be the loser, Chiang Kai-shek.
    Shortly after he became president, Richard Nixon contemplated opening relations with China, the Communist superpower and ally of North Vietnam, with whom the U.S. was then at war. He consulted with Asian specialists in the State Department and academia; virtually all of them told him to forget it, that nothing could be done until after the Vietnam War was over. But Nixon disagreed and plunged ahead.
    “Nixon put himself in Mao’s shoes,” said former diplomat James C. Humes. “He sensed that the Communist leader might not be too happy about North Vietnam expanding its military might into Southeast Asia, with inroads into Laos and Cambodia. How would the United States react, Nixon thought, if Mexico were taking over the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador?” By appreciating his enemy’s self-interest, Nixon was able to establish common ground and achieve a diplomatic breakthrough. Adds historian Barbara Tuchman, “Twenty-seven years, two wars, and
x
million lives later, after immeasurable harm wrought by the mutual suspicion and phobia of two great powers not on speaking terms, an American President, reversing the unmade journey of 1945, has traveled to Peking to meet with the same two Chinese leaders. Might the interim have been otherwise?”

    No one would accuse Winston Churchill, author of the mighty phrase “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” of being soft on communism. Yet when Stalin died in 1953 and the new Soviet leaders signaled interest in the relaxation of tensions, Churchill was interested. “A new hope has been created in the unhappy, bewildered world,” he wrote Eisenhower. Eisenhower, however, was not interested. At a conference in Bermuda, the American president told off the British prime minister in no uncertain terms: “Russia was awoman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present ‘beat’ into the back streets.” Against Churchill’s advice, Eisenhower refused the Russian overtures, appointed as his secretary of state “the high priest of the Cold War,” John Foster Dulles, took a soft line against the McCarthy outrages, and preached concepts of peace that included “going to the brink” and “massive retaliation.”
    In 1962 the U.S. got into a showdown with Russia over nuclear missiles in Cuba, America’s backyard. Yet Cuba was supposed to have been an American colony, not once but twice. Back in the late 1850s, the U.S. was all set to write Spain a $50-million check for “the Pearl of the Antilles” when Congress, fearing President James Buchanan would try to divert some of the money into a personal slush fund, nixed the deal. Then, forty years later, Cuba reappeared at the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898. The U.S. found itself with a lot of new territories: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines. Not knowing what to do with all these places, and more interested in acquiring Hawaii and building a Pacific empire, President William McKinley decided to let one of them go its own way—Cuba.
    In 1963, President Kennedy and British prime minister Harold Macmillan negotiated with Khrushchev to implement a comprehensive ban on nuclear weapons testing. The Russians wanted to allow only three annual on-site inspections, the minimum number technically necessary. The British agreed. The U.S. Joint Chiefs, however, insisted on twenty. President Kennedy got that number down to seven, but the Russians would not go along with what almost everyone agreed was unnecessary snooping, and so the effort had to be abandoned. The result was an arms race of expensive new generations of multi-warhead nuclear weapons.
The “Tipping Point” That Sent America into Two Wars
    1963, 2001 The “tipping point” is a concept used to describe a pivotal turning point at a moment when events could have gone one way