Free Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan Page B

that benefited Britain. Lloyd George, he said, was “cunning.” Everyone who dealt with Chou found the same thing. “He shifts his line so subtly,” wrote a Guomindang official, “that it often escapes your notice. Of course he makes compromises, but only minimal and nominal compromises at the very last moment just to keep the negotiations going. When you study his statements afterwards, you realize that he hasn’t made any substantial concession on any important issue at all.” 33

CHAPTER 4
    AT THE DIAOYUTAI

    N IXON’S MOTORCADE SWEPT ON THROUGH TIANANMEN SQUARE, up to the northwest of the city. Important foreign visitors to Beijing stayed, as they still do today, in a special heavily guarded compound. The Diaoyutai had been created at the end of the 1950s for the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Most of its villas were new, but the site itself was very old. Generations of scholars had loved its lakes and groves. A famous Chinese poem talked of its weeping willows against the darkening hills to the west: “Peach blossoms float on the water at sunset.” Emperors and noblemen built their pavilions there and fished from its terraces, and the great eighteenth-century Qianlong emperor, renowned, among much else, for his calligraphy, wrote out its name—the Fishing Terrace, or Diaoyutai—for a plaque that is still displayed by one of the gates. The Communists had surrounded the area with barbed wire, searchlights, high walls, and armed guards and appropriated it for themselves and their friends. Mao and his wife each had villas there, which they used from time to time. Kim Il Sung, the dictator of North Korea; Nikita Khrushchev; and Che Guevara had all preceded Nixon there. So, several months earlier, had the prime minister of North Vietnam. The U.S. press corps heard rumors that Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, whose clever balancing act between the Communists and their American enemies was finally over, had just moved out of Villa 18, where Nixon and his immediate entourage were housed. (Today, in the new China, it can be rented for $50,000 a night.)
    In that nineteenth-century bourgeois style so loved by the Soviet and Chinese Communists, its rooms were filled with overstuffed armchairs and sofas, each with its antimacassar. Nixon and Chou En-lai sat side by side on a sofa in the main reception room, while the other Americans and Chinese sat in a semicircle drinking tea and listening to their exchange. (Although the Americans had brought their own interpreters, they had agreed to use Chinese ones for most meetings.) “Both seemed to be very friendly, but noncommittal,” Haldeman recorded for his diary. “They didn’t get off of the trivial ground at all during the session.” 1 Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, watched the body language. “I found it extraordinary that Chou Enlai would be focused on the President, would drill in on him, but the President kind of would look off or look down on the floor and would not focus directly on Chou Enlai.” 2 Kissinger found the conversation itself troubling. Nixon, he complained later to Haldeman, had responded to Chou’s compliments about Kissinger’s work in getting the trip organized by saying that other Americans had done the advance work; this, Haldeman said, “had Henry disturbed that it would put him down in the eyes of the Chinese.” 3
    It was not unusual for Kissinger to be worried about his position. His time in the Nixon administration, first as national security adviser and then, after the 1972 election, as secretary of state, was punctuated by complaints—about his rivals, his subordinates, his colleagues. He repeatedly accused William Rogers and the State Department of stabbing him in the back and moaned that the president did not do enough to defend him. Nixon, in turn, worried about Kissinger’s mental state. As Raymond Price, one of Nixon’s speechwriters, put it, “The care and