In preparation for his heroic journey, the president was avidly reading up on the Chinese leadership. He was especially impressed by French writer André Malraux, whose Anti-Memoirs contained fascinating portraits of Mao and Zhao Enlai. As a young leftist in the 1920s, Malraux had met the two revolutionaries in China, and then decades later as Charles De Gaulle’s Minister of Culture he had returned there to interview Mao, whom he regarded as one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.
