It was a moment in history, of a kind that those of us in the resident foreign press corps knew we would probably not see the likes of again: the morning 40 years ago on Tuesday, when Richard Nixon touched down to be greeted by the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, at the airport in what Westerners in those days still called Peking.
As if it were yesterday, I see the crisp blue and white of Air Force One, “United States of America” emblazoned on its fuselage; the flutter of the Chinese and American flags in the winter wind; the band of the People’s Liberation Army playing a somewhat toneless version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; the historic handshake at the foot of the gangway.
Premier Zhou was immaculate in manner as always, while Nixon was heavily masked by television makeup, in what seemed like a parody of the lessons he learned from that 6 o’clock shadow moment in his televised debates with John F. Kennedy. And me: in my 20s, so seized with it all, so nervous, that all I managed were a few largely illegible scribbles in my notebook.
Not that it mattered, for that sky-blue day is as clear in its detail now as it was then. How often since have I cherished the note of mischief that the Chinese smuggled into that solemn moment. Plain as could be, inscribed on a large posterboard at the rim of the airport apron that overlooked the cockpit of Air Force One, picked up by the television cameras relaying images of that famous handshake, were Mao Zedong’s words in Chinese, set in white on a red background in the manner of the “big character” posters of the Cultural Revolution: “Make trouble, fail; make trouble again, fail again, until their doom. This is the logic of all imperialists and reactionaries the world over, and they cannot go against it. This is Marxist law.”
If the board had been bigger, the inscription might have added these still blunter words from the same passage: “When we say ‘imperialism is ferocious,’ we mean that its nature will never change, that the imperialists will never lay down their butcher knives, that they will never become Buddhas, till their doom.” But the Chinese, ever economical in their dealings with foreigners, must have felt that they had made their point with sufficient clarity. Even many in the press corps traveling with the president failed to notice the implicit message: that China, too, was a great and proud nation, welcoming the leader of the world’s most powerful country as an equal, unminded to bow its knee even modestly, or moderate its polemics, as the price of ending a generation of estrangement.
I was then the Peking correspondent of The Globe and Mail of Toronto, the only Western newspaper at the time with a correspondent based in China. The posting was the product of an arrangement made more than a decade earlier, when China — trading for Canadian wheat in massive quantities to compensate for the widespread famine that followed Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward in the 1950s — suggested that The Globe open a bureau in Peking, in exchange for a small but symbolic North American foothold in Canada for the official New China News Agency, which functioned then as an outpost of the Chinese state intelligence apparatus.
If the arrangement was The Globe’s passport to China, it proved, in time, to be my passport to The New York Times. Lacking its own correspondent in China until the Nixon visit began the wider accommodation between Washington and Peking, The Times had been publishing by syndication some of The Globe’s stories from China.
To be a “local” correspondent, in the sense of not being part of President Nixon’s traveling press corps, was to some extent a disadvantage. To be sure, we were on hand when the president visited the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the idyllic lakeside city of Hangzhou, and finally, for the farewell banquet in Shanghai, an event awash in heads-back, swallow-it-whole toasts — with the maotai firewater favored by the Chinese on such occasions — that left Nixon, audibly that night, somewhat the worse for wear.
But, as also happened during Henry Kissinger’s follow-up trips to China, we who were based in China were in coach class, professionally speaking, a step or 10 lower on the rungs of access and privilege than the Barbara Walterses, the Dan Rathers and, not incidentally, the Max Frankels. Then The Times’s Washington bureau chief and later a generous and far-seeing mentor as the paper’s executive editor in the 1990s, Max won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the trip.
Still, there are worse things for a reporter than being an outsider, and being forced by circumstance to resort to improvisation, shoe-leather energies and end-around plays, all invaluable when confronted with the unyielding resistance that the Chinese bureaucracy, like so many others, display when challenged by those waving copies of the First Amendment.
On the evening of that first day, the “locals” were seated so far from the table in the Great Hall of the People where Premier Zhou hosted Nixon with a state banquet that we had to stand on our seats with binoculars to glimpse what American television viewers were seeing close-up. In my frustration, I waited until the banquet ended, then raced through the madding crowd of guests to the top table. There, I made a close inspection of the gold-embossed menu cards, along with the similarly gilded place cards (“Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States”) and ivory chopsticks where the two principals had been sitting.
A felonious thought occurred: How about simply taking all of it, and hiding it in my pocket, as a matchless souvenir? The stern-faced Chinese security official, statue-straight in his Mao suit, seemed to counsel against it, but just then one of those improbable things happened, proving again that a reporter pushing the boundaries can make his own luck. The security man turned his head for a moment, and winked. And off I went with my guilty booty.
But I hadn’t reckoned — and there were many in our profession who made this error — with the inimitable Helen Thomas, stalwart of United Press International, dean of the White House press corps, a newswoman so ferocious in pursuit of a story that her cohorts used to say it was a brave man who would presume to step between her and a telephone. As we tripped down the red carpet to the main doors of the Great Hall, she asked me what it was she had seen me looting. And I told her. Within 24 hours, a telegram was delivered to my Peking flat — “Mr. John Burns, China” — from a New York curio dealer offering me $25,000, as I remember it now, for the entire suite of mementos, about two-thirds of my annual income at the time.
Naïve as I then was to the ways of the world — or principled, as I would like to think — I cabled a rejection, saying I could not stoop to making a profit from my work, or more properly put, from my light-fingered diversion. Some years later, as I was preparing to leave Peking for a new job as a reporter on The Times metro desk in New York, George H. W. Bush, then head of the American Liaison Office in China, a quasi-embassy that grew from the Nixon visit, and also my doubles tennis partner, offered over our last game together to send them in the diplomatic bag to Nixon. He was then disgraced, after his resignation, and living in San Clemente, Calif. When last I heard, they still resided there in the Nixon presidential library, along with the letter I wrote to the former president wishing him well. But that’s another story.
What was accomplished in those days of February 1972 is so well known, so thoroughly rehearsed in the histories and biographies of that era, as well as in John Adams’s terrific opera, that it needs little in the way of further commentary by me. As Nixon said in the handwritten letter he sent thanking me for the return of the purloined pieces, it was the high point of his presidency, and, he hoped, the accomplishment for which he would be remembered after the scandal of Watergate dimmed.
The visit brought about the rapprochement between the two great nations that continues to develop today, in awkward fits and starts, and occasional eruptions of distemper, just as that big-character poster at the airport suggested it might. And it put me on the path to the terrific years, 35 and counting, that I have spent as a foreign correspondent for The Times. I’ve often said that it’s a life of adventure and reward, in terms of the extraordinary people and places and events that are part of the fabric of a foreign correspondent’s life, that I would have chosen to live unpaid had I been born the grandson of a John D. Rockefeller or a J. Pierpoint Morgan. But little that I have seen has been quite so momentous, or quite so exhilarating, as that far, fierce hour watching the arrival of Richard Nixon in Peking.