This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s trip to China, the first by a sitting U.S. president to the People’s Republic. Throughout the visit from February 21st to 28th, Nixon and his advisors, including National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, engaged in talks with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that ultimately produced the Shanghai Communique, a landmark agreement that both nations would work towards the normalization of relations. 

Much of the visit was televised to enthralled audiences in the United States, proving a public relations victory both for Nixon in a pivotal election year, and for the PRC, as the trip produced a huge positive shift in U.S. public opinion towards China.

To mark the anniversary of Nixon’s 1972 visit, The Wire is publishing photos from that trip shared by the Nixon Presidential Library, along with stories from some of the officials who were there. 

FROM WASHINGTON TO BEIJING

President Nixon departed by helicopter from the White House on February 17th, 1972, following a televised departure ceremony that attracted a throng of supporters.

“[I]f there was a postscript that I hope might be written with regard to this trip, it would be the words on the plaque which was left on the moon by our first astronauts when they landed there. We came in peace for all mankind,” said Nixon in his departure speech.

“A very significant thing is that in that group was Mike Mansfield, the Democratic Senate majority leader and Carl Albert, the Democratic Speaker of the House,” says Dwight Chapin, who served as chief of protocol for the trip.

“What dawned on me was that the country was all behind this. It was like the biggest thing that could have possibly happened, and it was very bipartisan in terms of the support that the President had.”

“I’ve worked with several presidents and been in many summits; I’ve never seen a president work this hard in advance of a meeting,” says Winston Lord, then a staffer on the National Security Council. “We put together six briefing books — if you piled them one on top of the other they would be at least a foot high. And I know that Nixon read every single page because almost every single page was marked up with his comments. ”

President Nixon was welcomed by Premier Zhou Enlai on the airport tarmac in Beijing. “As Nixon reached the last steps he thrust his arm out towards Zhou and the two men shook hands, seemingly for longer than usual,” writes historian Margaret MacMillan in Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao.

“This was very purposeful, because Secretary John Foster Dulles had refused to shake Zhou Enlai’s hand 22 years before in 1950 in Geneva. So Nixon made a real show of striding forward at the airport and shaking his hand,” says Lord.

Nixon would later memorialize the handshake in a plaque entitled “The Order of The New China Hands” that was presented to participants after the trip. 

MEETING MAO

Barely four hours after their arrival in Beijing, the U.S. delegation received an unexpected invitation from Chairman Mao for a face-to-face meeting. 

“I was in a meeting early that first afternoon when one of our Secret Service agents found me and said that [China’s protocol director] Han [Xu] had arrived back at our guesthouse and wanted to see me,” writes Chapin in his new memoir, The President’s Man. “As I walked to the front entrance, I found Premier [Z]hou standing with him. Han said, ‘We are going to see the Chairman,’ meaning Chairman Mao [Zedong]. ‘Please get the president.’”

“We drove into this sprawling compound called Zhongnanhai and went to Mao’s home, which was a very modest dwelling with two uniformed people outside,” says Lord. “We went into his study, a modest sized room filled with manuscripts and books all over the place… it was a very unprepossessing room.”

The American delegation was small — composed of Nixon, Kissinger, Lord, and a single member of Nixon’s Secret Service detail — and notably lacked an interpreter. Mao’s interpreter, Nancy Tang Wensheng, translated for both delegations. 

“It was a very bad practice,” says Chas Freeman, a veteran diplomat who was the lead interpreter with the U.S. delegation at the time. “Nixon had a pretty consistent habit of not involving American interpreters, because he feared the press. If you involve an American interpreter, that interpreter might be encountered by a member of the press and might say something. If you use a Russian or a Chinese interpreter, they are totally inaccessible.” 

“Nixon kept trying to engage in substantive exchanges with Mao, and Mao kept saying, no, that’s for Zhou Enlai to handle these details,” says Lord. “He would only give very brief answers to questions, seemingly in random fashion, changing from one subject to another using jokes and self-deprecation, symbols, metaphors… But we began to realize in the coming days as we negotiated further with Zhou and others that Mao had been very skillful. He had said enough in brushstrokes to give the essential Chinese position, which then Zhou Enlai could take and position in greater detail.”

THE BANQUETS

“[The banquets] were spectacular,” says Lord. “I’ve been to a lot of summit meetings and other meetings with banquets, and there was nothing close to the scale of this one. Despite the fact there were so many people to feed, the food was really very good.”

“There must have been at least a few thousand people at the banquet. It was there that the Chinese army band played American songs, like Turkey in the Straw,” says Lord. “And it was pictures of this banquet, with Zhou and Nixon toasting each other and the American music that were beamed back to the United States, that helped to make the visit a popular success back in the U.S.” Other songs played by the band included Home on the Range and Sweet Georgia Brown.

“This was the Cultural Revolution, and there were probably six or so surviving restaurants in Beijing, in a city of six million. Everyone else ate in cafeterias and so on,” says Freeman. “Zhou Enlai personally helped to preserve classic upscale Chinese cuisine. He did it at the [Peking] Hotel, which became the premier training ground for the next generation of chefs once Deng Xiaoping opened things up again. So he personally went over the menu.”

“The Americans had all been briefed on how to behave at Chinese banquets,” wrote MacMillan, the historian, in Seize the Hour. “Everyone had been issued with chopsticks and urged to practice ahead of time. Nixon had managed to become reasonably adept, but Kissinger remained hopelessly clumsy.”

“When we first met with the President in the Oval Office to talk about the trip, he was of a mind that the trip would be 8 or 10 people,” says Chapin. “We would use a smaller airplane, it would be like going over there for a meeting. Of course, over time, that grew up where we ended up with 391 people in our party.”

THE TALKS 

“These were the people we did the detailed negotiations [over the Shanghai Communique] with,” says Lord. “[Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Qiao Guanhua] obviously got instructions from Zhou Enlai, but the wordsmithing was done with him and [Chang Wen-chin].

PHOTO OPS

“Today we get footage from China every day, but back then we hadn’t seen anything,” says Chapin. “So everywhere that [Mrs. Nixon] went was a new discovery and of significant interest to the audience — not only in America, but we had press coming from all over the world.”

Premier Zhou had revealed to Mrs. Nixon that China would be gifting two pandas to the United States in celebration of Nixon’s visit. Chapin, citing Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s biography of her mother, wrote about their conversation in The President’s Man: “The First Lady was sitting next to Premier [Z]hou at a dinner and referring to a cylindrical tin of Panda brand cigarettes on the table in front of them. She said she loved them. Zhou said, ‘I’ll give you some.’ She said, ‘Cigarettes?’ And he said, ‘No, pandas.’”

In Beijing and Shanghai, the U.S. delegation met with all four members of the ‘Gang of Four,’ the ultra-Maoist faction of the Chinese Communist Party who vehemently opposed rapprochement with the United States. At least two leading members — Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife, and Zhang Chunqiao — were photographed in close proximity to President Nixon.

Freeman says that this was likely a deliberate move organized by Premier Zhou to damage the influence of the Gang of Four. “This was a very common practice politically. If someone has a poster policy, you get them to announce it, and then they can’t repudiate it anymore. That’s why Jiang Qing had to be at the performance of The Red Detachment of Women.”

Chapin says that on at least two occasions — during the U.S. delegation’s visit to the Ming Tombs and at Hangzhou’s West Lake Park — the Chinese crowds seemed to be staged. 

“The media was not sucked into that,” says Chapin. At the Ming Tombs, ABC correspondent Ted Koppel stayed behind after the rest of the press had left and caught Party cadres picking up all the tape recorders, cameras and radios that the Chinese audience had been playing with as the Americans visited. ABC aired the footage of the staged scene back in the United States. 

“[The American press] wrote about it and the Chinese officials complained to Ron Ziegler, the press secretary,” says Chapin. In an interview years later, Koppel says he was told by Henry Kissinger that Nixon received a personal apology from Zhou Enlai for the staged scene.

COMING HOME

The American public had been engrossed with Nixon’s China visit. A Gallup poll found that 98 percent of Americans had heard or read about the trip. Nixon returned to the United States to a seven point bump in his public approval rating, and went on to carry 49 states in the 1972 presidential election.

Many diplomats and staffers on the trip maintained lifelong connections with their Chinese counterparts. “I made friends on the Chinese side with whom I’m still in touch,” says Freeman. “There’s a saying in Chinese, 不打不成交 — if you don’t fight you can’t become friends.”

Chapin, who was later convicted and jailed in connection with the Watergate scandal, speaks of his enduring friendship with Han Xu, his counterpart as director of protocol during the 1972 visit: “I came home from being incarcerated on April 1st, 1976. The next day… I picked up the phone and it was Han Xu, who was now ambassador in Washington. He said he was calling because he wanted to be the first to welcome me home… That is symbolic of how close we became as friends.” 

But Chapin writes that Nixon had little faith that good bilateral relations would last. In The President’s Man, he recalls the president saying before the trip: “We are going to China because in fifty years we will be adversaries and we must be able to talk to one another.”

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