Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

The same day that Nixon ordered his staff to contrive feel-good stories, Nixon received some genuinely good news—a small signal from a faraway source that was momentous in its significance. On December 9, at 6 P.M., Kissinger was visited in his office by the Pakistani ambassador bearing an envelope containing a handwritten missive on white, blue-lined paper. It was a personal message from Chou En-Lai, the prime minister of the People’s Republic of China, to President Richard Nixon. After some obligatory agitprop about Taiwan, the message stated that a “special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking.” Kissinger later recalled that the participants in a drawn-out diplomatic process rarely know when history is being made, but this time he had no doubt. The national security adviser’s initial skepticism that Nixon could open Red China was fast disappearing. Nixon’s feelers to Beijing, delivered through Pakistan’s Yahya Kahn, had teased out a surprising, enticing response. The world order was about to change, thanks to the farsightedness of a lower-middle-class boy who had once lain awake listening to trains in the night. The moment the Pakistani ambassador left his office, Kissinger hurried down the hall to the Oval Office to tell Nixon.53 The