Cold War hero
Taki
Gstaad
Margaret MacMillan’s new book, Nixon and Mao, brought back pleasant memories. It was February 1972, and I’d just returned to Saigon from Phu Bai and Hue in the north, where I was reporting for National Review. I was eager to get back to civilisation and some skiing in Gstaad, when President Nixon’s trip to Beijing took us all by surprise. Not Bill Buckley, however, my nominal boss at NR, who had accompanied Richard Nixon to the land Imperial England had permanently ‘turned on’ with its opium. MacMillan writes that Nixon, a lifelong anti-communist and cold warrior par excellence, was moved when Mao took his hand and would not let go. The handholding did not impress Buckley, however. Alone among the accompanying journalists, Bill complained that it was ‘as if the prosecutors at Nuremberg had suddenly embraced the defendants begging them to join them in the making of a better world’.
Writing for NR back then was like being employed by one’s uncle in the local family newspaper. When I suggested a trip to Albania — Greece had established an embassy in Tirana sometime during the late Sixties, and I could see the headlines, ‘Taki reports from the land that time forgot’ — Pat Buckley vetoed it as being too dangerous. Pat had nothing to do with the magazine except for being the founding editor’s wife, but her opinions counted. When the great North Vietnamese offensive was expected sometime after the fall of Quang Tri in May of ’72, Pat again tried to block my going but the story was too big, even for her. I returned to Vietnam in time to cover the attack that never came. In fact, the only raid I covered was Willy Shawcross’s assault on American salty peanuts in the Saigon PX. (Shawcross was a critic of the war, and I a great supporter, hence I thought it unfair that Willy was allowed to use the American PX in order to satisfy his peanut craving.) But back to Nixon. I was and continue to be a great fan. Call it what you will, but his trips to Beijing and Moscow changed the world without a shot being fired. To the West’s advantage. Nixon was hated by the liberals and distrusted by conservatives. But he was intelligent enough to know what he was doing all along. He made conscious use of the conservatives and, unlike Ayn Rand, who spoke the truth as she saw it, and was expelled from the NR family for it, did not lose conservative support until the Watergate coup d’état — which is what it was — did him in.
Nixon was demonised by the press from day one. He was ill at ease in public, and did not possess the Kennedy blarney which so endeared that flawed Irish clan to the chattering classes. He was not cool, as my son would say, but so what? After all, is style superior to substance, especially where politics are concerned? Nixon inherited Vietnam, realised the war was unwinnable, got out with honour, and gained China by his and Kissinger’s diplomacy. Now that’s what I call a statesman. His presidency was crippled by a media feeding frenzy against a man they didn’t like on purely aesthetic grounds. His hounding of Alger Hiss, much derided by the soft-on-communism Beltway insiders, turned out to be spot-on. Hiss was a traitor, but being an upper-class traitor, like his English counterparts, he had support within the establishment. The messenger, Nixon, got the shaft instead.
Such are the joys of hypocrisy. There is no point in talking about a politician’s principles. They don’t have any, but Nixon had more than those who helped bring him down. I dined with him a couple of times after his fall, and, to paraphrase a JFK quip, it was like dining alone with Thomas Jefferson. His brainpower and understanding of the world were extraordinary, and I also found him to be a tortured man who bore no grudges and had a very gentle side to him. He wrote me the most encouraging and flattering letter when I was in Pentonville paying my debt to society, when he had absolutely no reason to do so. We corresponded until the end. One thing is for sure. His two daughters and his wife Pat have put every other presidential child and wife to shame, although I must say the present Mrs Bush is as perfect a first lady as we’ve had since Pat Nixon. (Just think of Hillary and scream your head off.) Margaret MacMillan’s previous book, Paris 1919, which covered the Versailles conference with vivid portrayals of the big shots involved, was unputdownable. As is this one. Nixon and Kissinger seemed to be giving away the shop to the brutal Mao regime, but they knew what they were doing. Moscow had had enough of a madman like Mao by 1969, a madman armed with thousands of nuclear weapons which he might unleash at any time against anyone he didn’t fancy. The Russkies were contemplating launching a preventive nuclear strike against him. The unthinkable was a real possibility. In stepped Nixon, and in one short visit housebroke the Chinese dragon for good. I’ve said it before, Nixon was the greatest statesman of the Cold War, and those midgets who brought him down will never be even a footnote in history.
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