Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [264]
Roused from slumber by the announcement that dinner was ready, we filed into the dining room, where the first course proved to be a contribution from Abplanalp, who had branched out from manufacturer of aerosol valves for spray cans to entrepreneur of smoked fish—a kind of Gentile Barney Greengrass. While we ate our smoked tuna, smoked trout, and smoked salmon, the real purpose of the dinner became apparent. The massacre of the Chinese student protesters in Tiananmen Square had occurred only two months earlier, and Nixon was debating whether he should continue with his plans to revisit China. He was also deeply concerned that the reaction of “the liberal media” toward events in China might prejudice Chinese-American relations, on which he set great store as the major achievement of his foreign policy.
Han Xu had won Nixon’s respect and friendship in 1972, and he was in a position to carry to the Chinese leaders an informal message that, despite the unfortunate events in Tiananmen Square, Nixon was still on their side. The role of the rest of us was, on the one hand, to flesh out the dinner party—surely orchestrated because a social occasion would be more palatable than a simple face-to-face meeting between Nixon and Han Xu—and, on the other, to provide a suitable audience of industrialists (Abplanalp, of the smoked fish, and Dwayne Andreas, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland), high-level mandarins (Solomon and Robert Ellsworth, a former representative and ambassador to NATO), and a media figure and/or intellectual (me).
A year or so later, when Nixon came to lunch at Simon and Schuster, his genial, good-natured aide, John Taylor, actually provided in advance a list of suitable questions for us to ask the former president. Each of us was allocated one question, to which Nixon then gave an articulate five-minute reply; to at least one editor’s regret, though, Watergate was not on the list of suggested subjects. In his own home, Nixon followed much the same formula in reverse. He went around the table, introducing each of us in turn (when it came to my turn, the president chuckled wickedly and said, “He’s a type we don’t often get at this table, heh heh—a New York intellectual!”) and asking us to give a short summary of the state of our business or concern. He listened intently—nobody was a more intent listener than Nixon—and then, for the benefit of the Chinese, gave his own views on what we had said.
Needless to say, the Chinese were not there to hear about the book-publishing business, agricultural products, precision valves, or smoked fish. Ellsworth brought up the key question—the pièce de résistance, as it were—which was how America was reacting to Tiananmen Square and whether Nixon should go to Beijing.
The Chinese came to full attention at this. I could not help admiring the way Nixon had managed to get somebody else to raise the question—surely the diplomats must have appreciated the subtlety of it, too—and the way he gave it careful scrutiny, as if it had caught him by surprise. Nixon, I seemed to remember, had done some acting at school and had put on amateur theatricals to amuse the troops when he was a naval officer in the Pacific; it occurred to me that if fate had called him to the stage instead of to the bar he would have made a fine actor. He knitted his brows and appeared to give the matter serious consideration. He believed, he said, that there was more to be gained by Nixon’s going than not. Some people (he frowned darkly)—naysayers, pinko parlor liberals, professional skeptics—would doubtless criticize Nixon. Nixon was used to that. It had never stopped Nixon in the past.
The Chinese nodded.
Great powers, the former president went on, could not allow their foreign policy to be determined by the scruples—he chuckled—“or prejudices” of the liberal media.
A set of deeper nods, with a hint of puzzlement, from the Chinese, for whom media scruples were surely not a problem.
The interests and the good relations of two such powers as China and the United States were more important than transitory events, Nixon