JAMES ROSEN: Payback From the Right
MacMillan, Margaret
ULLES ALWAYS USED TO SAY that he had to operate alone," Henry Kissinger told President Nixon on June 13, 1971, "because he couldn't trust his own...
...Whatelsemighthighofficialswhofeltbetrayedby Nixon and Kissinger have done to torpedo the duo's surprisingly conciliatory policies of detente and arms control with the Soviet Union, withdrawal from Vietnam, and rapprochement with Communist China...
...Surely the proud anti-Communists across the river, at Langley and the Pentagon, looked with equal disfavor on Nixon's slashing of the defense budget, between January 1969 and October 1970, by more than $17 billion...
...Finally, and even more incongruously, she ends the book with a quote from StarTrekVI;surelytherearebetterwaystoacknowledge the extent to which the phrase "Only Nixon can go to China" has entered the vernacular, or at least better ways to end a book of this caliber...
...Even so, courts tended to treat counterfeiters leniently, although on occasion real annoyance set in: In1720,onecounterfeiterwashangedinPhiladelphia, and in Newport, Rhode Island, another had his ears loppedoff...
...Asked in November 1986 who his source was for the IndiaPakistancolumns,Andersonsaidonly:"Youdon'tget those kind of secrets from enlisted men...
...nor was it in August 1973, but July, when the Senate committee uncovered the existence of Nixon's taping system...
...B O O K SI NR E V I E W A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 6 7 JohnCorryisasenioreditorof TheAmericanSpectator...
...It ought to have worried the hell out of Margaret MacMillan, too...
...Of greater use to opponents of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy would be the exposure of their activities and decision-making, in what later generations would call "real time...
...WhereWashingtonandMoscowhadfoughtaCold War and conducted bilateral diplomacy for decades, Nixon's sudden overture to Mao was an especially bitterpillfortheAmericanrighttoswallow.Chinawasnot merely a brutal totalitarian regime and an unflinching enemyintheKoreanWar;itwasalso,thetopbrasshad reasontobelieve,anactivekillerofU.S.troopsinSouth Vietnam...
...Consequently one Big Jim Kennally devised an improbable plan...
...demobilization since World War II, which saw the combined strength of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines sink, for the first time in nearly five years, below three million men...
...In 1869, Wood was succeeded as Secret Service chief by Hiram C. Whitely, and in 1874 honest Elmer Washburn, the former, and highly unpopular, police chief in Chicago, succeeded Whitely...
...Serious miscreants do not enlist police informers to help them...
...In sum, the president asked [Kissinger] to review the entire discussion of the Taiwan issue so that we wouldnotappeartobedumpingonourfriendsand so that we would be somewhat more mysterious about our overall willingness to make concessions in this area...
...The author's portraits of Nixon and Kissinger, Mao and Chou are judicious and perceptive ("Nixon did many 6 6 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 B O O K SI NR E V I E W immoral things in his life, but he longed to be good," shewrites,addingthat"forallhisabusesofoffice,[he] accepted and believed in democracy"), and her accounts of the trends and factors that made Nixon's trip possible, such as the growing tension in SinoSoviet relations after 1949 and Mao's grudging recognition of the catastrophes wrought by his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, are rendered brisklyandauthoritatively.NixonandMaoisabsorbing and enlightening, learned and lively, a detailed and comprehensive--yet highly readable--book that is sure to become the standard single-volume reference work on the American opening to China and its profound impact on modern geopolitics...
...And she makes fleeting reference to the deployment, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of a spy to penetrate the veil of secrecywallingNixonandKissingerofffromothertop policymakers...
...Family Resemblances ACTUALLY THE GRAVE ROBBERS were never up to the job, and their caper was doomed from the start...
...Genuine bills were called rhino, nails, putty, or spon-dulics...
...And in no time at all, the colonists began counterfeiting, too...
...Drawing on dozens of memoirs andscholarlystudies,ondocumentaries,contemporaneous oral histories, and fresh interviews with key players (including Kissinger), and on hundreds of declassified documents and transcripts published by the George Washington University's National Security Archive and by the StateDepartmentitself,initsForeign Relations of the United States series, MacMillan skillfully re-creates the uniqueconfluenceofhistoricalforces and idiosyncratic personalities that madepossiblethegreatthawinSinoAmerican relations, a triumphant, transcendent, and still reverberating eventinworldhistory...
...PERHAPSMACMILLANneverconnectedthedots.She quotes, without elaboration, the characteristicallycleversimilethatconservativecommentatorWilliamF.BuckleyJr.,oneofthe90journalistswho accompanied the American delegation, used to describehishorroruponwatchingNixontoasthishostsat the opening banquet...
...While MacMillan's sweeping account alludes periodically to the dangers of a conservative backlash against the Nixon-Kissinger project in China, a predictablereactionwhenoneisdeceitfully"dumpingon our friends," she never pauses to examine either the philosophical underpinnings of this opposition norhow, as a practical matter, it was manifest in the remainder--and fall--of Nixon's presidency...
...Stealthily rifling Kissinger's briefcase and burn bags...
...Unconventional certainly, but also effective: Within a year Wood and his roughnecks had seized more than 200 counterfeiters and confiscated an enormous amount of queer...
...ULLES ALWAYS USED TO SAY that he had to operate alone," Henry Kissinger told President Nixon on June 13, 1971, "because he couldn't trust his own bureaucracy...
...the president swiftly realized the irony...
...ChiefamongtheseallieswasTaiwan,wherenationalistChineseforces,ledbyChiangKai-shek,had retreated after Mao's victory, and which Washington had ever since recognized as China's sole legitimate government...
...Thus the New York Times's William Beecher couldreportonJuly23,1971--aboutamonthafterthe Pentagon Papers began appearing in his newspaper, and less than a week after Nixon had publicly announced his plans to visit China--the details of the American negotiating posture in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union, informally known as SALT...
...When the English colonists in Rhode Island and the Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam agreed to adopt Indian wampumaslegaltender,theAlgonquinsbeganpassing off ersatz wampum to the colonists and keeping the good stuff for themselves...
...nine months away from the discovery of his spy in Kissinger's National Security Council, would declare in Senate testimony that the "overall strategic balance" had "dramatically shifted" in the Soviets' favor...
...Despite periodic threats by Mao to use military force to bring Taiwan under the mainland's Communist rule, successive White Houses had held fast to the "two-China" policy, an inviolable article of faith for conservative anti-Communists, especially, since1949...
...The Chinese had to overcome their deeply ingrained suspicion of Western powers, which centuries of experiencehadtaughtthemtoseeasexploitativeandhypocritical, and which only intensified after Mao and the Communists came to power in 1949...
...That much MacMillan quotes, but Haig's memo continues: [Nixon] emphasized that the discussions with the Chinese cannot look like a sellout of Taiwan...
...on the greatest U.S...
...Nixon was enraged...
...Then Boyd could get back to thelucrativebusinessofengraving...
...On June 2, the national security adviser had received a secret message from Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai, conveyed through Pakistani intermediaries, inviting him totravel to Beijing and lay the groundwork for Nixon's own historic visit to China in February 1972...
...And yes, the editor in chief of the magazine you nowholdinyourhandsisalsonamedTyrrell.PatrickD...
...What to do...
...Counterfeiting, it seems, is as American as Mom's apple pie...
...Washburn insisted onprofessionalstandards,and as Craughwell writes, Dublinborn Patrick D. Tyrrell, now a family man in Chicago, was justthekindofagenthewanted.Tyrrellwas"honest,respectable,incorruptible,"and hekeptwrittenrecords...
...That was good for Dulles," Kissinger added, "but we pay for it now because we are stuckwiththebureaucracy...
...Indeed, by March 1971, the chairmanoftheJointChiefs,AdmiralThomasMoorer,still A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 6 5 TheChinesehadtoovercometheir deeplyingrainedsuspicionof Westernpowers,whichcenturiesof experiencehadtaughtthemto seeasexploitativeandhypocritical...
...Haldeman and his White House aides, are now, at a distance of 35 years, firmly ensconced in the modern mind--the stuff of plays, movies, and at least one opera, integral to the very language of international relations--MacMillan makes clear how fragile the enterprise was from the start: how many junctures there were when it seemed as though Air Force One might never touch down in Beijing's civilian airport, how uncertain it was that the ailing Mao Tse-tung B O O K SI NR E V I E W 6 4 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 James Rosen is the State Department correspondent for Fox News and author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, forthcoming from Doubleday...
...IT WAS IN THIS ENVIRONMENT that Nixon ordered the formation of the White House Special InvestigationsUnit,betterknownasthePlumbers, executors of the Ellsberg and Watergate break-ins-but also the discoverers, in tandem with an experienced Defense Department investigator, of the Joint Chiefs' treasonous mole in the NSC...
...In 1682, William Penn complained that his "holy experiment" in Pennsylvania was failing...
...H]e expressed a very graveconcernaboutnotonlySALT,"testifiedtheJustice Department's Robert Mardian, "but about his ability to govern if he could not maintain the confidentiality of the White House...
...and on the frequent appearance of headlines like the Washington Post's of October 4, 1970: AMERICAN POWER MARGIN IS SLIPPING...
...Tyrrell and his colleagues seriously undermined Midwestern counterfeiting when they broke up a big criminalringin1875;butanunintendedconsequence ofthiswasthegrave-robberyplot.BenjaminBoyd,one of the men they put in jail, was highly regarded by other counterfeiters for the excellence of his engravings, and his absence put a dent in their earnings...
...That's pretty severe stuff: "a federal offense of the highest order," as Nixon himself termed it when he was informed of the matter, in December 1971...
...OccasioningKissinger'sreference to John Foster Dulles, the Eisenhowerera secretary of state, and to the general untrustworthinessofcareergovernment officers, was that morning's publication, in the New YorkTimes, ofthefirstinstallmentofthePentagonPapers:thelargestleakofclassifieddocumentstothenews media in recorded history...
...Funneling some 5,000 classified documents, against the wishes of the commander in chief, tothechiefofnavaloperationsandthechairmanofthe Joint Chiefs--for 13 months in wartime...
...he was "not to indicate a willingness to abandon much of our support for Taiwan until it was necessary to do so...
...But counterfeiters adjusted and thrived, and on theeveoftheCivilWarnearly4,000kindsofcounterfeit bills--or queer or coney--were in circulation...
...Thomas J. Craughwell has given us a richly detailed, highly entertaining, andbroadsliceofourhistory...
...By the summer of 1970, pure heroin began streaming into combat zones at 20 percent of its street retail value, leading one congressional investigator to see, as the Post reported, a "Communist plot to incapacitate our troops in Vietnam by feeding them hard drugs at absurdlylowcost...
...Although Nixon's visit to China and its surreal imagery, stage-managed with innovative genius by H.R...
...PaybackFrom theRight D Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan (RANDOM HOUSE, 432 PAGES, $27.95) Reviewed by James Rosen B O O K SI NR E V I E W would even meet with Nixon, and how rocky the negotiations were that preceded the trip and spawned its concluding document, the Shanghai Communique...
...He would get underlings to steal Lincoln's body from its tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and keep it in hiding until the governor of Illinois released Boyd from jail...
...Thatmemorableevent,andthediplomaticschemingthatproducedit,arebroughtvividlytolifeinNixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, a magisterialstudybyUniversityofTorontohistoryprofessor Margaret MacMillan...
...Where MacMillan does touch on the Watergate scandal, in a brief coda, she settles, incongruously, for generalizations and errs on basic facts: It was not the Senate Watergate committee that released burglar James McCord's letter to Judge Sirica, but Sirica himself...
...A Senate subcommittee investigation found fatal drug overdoses among American GIs had risen fromtwoamonthin1969totwoadayinOctober1970...
...Tyrrellwashisgreat-greatgrandfather,andanoldpictureinStealingLincoln'sBodysuggestsastrongfamily resemblance...
...In July 1971, however, as Kissinger readied for his first trip to Beijing, a secret kept from both the press andseniorlevelsoftheStateDepartment,Nixoncoldly instructed his emissary to jettison the two-China policy in exchange for Chou's help on Vietnam...
...but her otherwise impressive bibliography contains no entries for the several recent works of scholarship that demonstrate most clearly how conservatives in the defense and intelligence establishmentsdidnottaketheChinagambit,orNixon and Kissinger's other bold foreign policy initiatives, lyingdown.NixonandMao,inshort,mighthavebenefitedfromsomesignthatitsauthorappreciateshow tightly intertwined were the president's foreign policy and fate, how dearly Nixon paid for his dalliance with Mao...
...The effect was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor's stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace GoeringandGoebbelsandDoenitzandHess,beggingthem to join him in the making of a better world...
...But Stealing Lincoln's Body is asmuchaboutotherthings--theSecretService,counterfeiters, embalming practices, ethnic Chicago, even the Pullman Strike of 1894--as it is about bungling grave robbers and where they went wrong...
...We do,"Nixonsaid...
...Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell (BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 234 PAGES, $24.95) Reviewed by John Corry...
...A spy...
...Washburn also wanted hisagentstoforgothecowboy tactics that Wood and, to a lesser extent, Whitely, had condoned...
...These faults, however, ought not distract from MacMillan's extraordinary achievement...
...Beecher's story, which was accurate, cited "senior administration officials" speaking "privately...
...Ijustwish,"Nixonmused, "that we operated without the bureaucracy...
...Kissinger, Nixon said, was to convey the policy shift with measured, enigmatic words...
...AlexanderHaig,Kissinger'sdeputyandthethirdmanpresent in the Oval Office, recorded Nixon's orders in a now-declassified "top secret" memorandum...
...ThisdramaticsurgewasattributedtotheChinesegovernment,thenfloodingVietnamwithcheapnarcotics...
...Earlier that year, in a single 49-day stretch from March to May 1971, Anderson had published no fewer than 13 columns based on leaks of classified material...
...And when war broke out, four months later, between India and Pakistan--the very country whose good backchannel offices had enabled Nixon and Kissinger to pry open the doors of the Diaoyutai in Beijing--the NSC minutes containing the president's confidentialordertoKissingerto"tilt"Americanpol-icy towards Karachi showed up, days later, in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning columns published by the syndicated muckraker, Jack Anderson...
...Kissinger laughed...
...the Americans, meanwhile, bogged down in Vietnam and coming to gripswiththerealityofdiminishedsuperpowerinfluence across the globe, feared appearing as supplicantsandupsettingnumerousallies...
...half the coinage there was fake...
...agents weretoldtokeeptheirnames out of the papers and operate inthedark...
...You only get them from generals and admirals...
...Washburn's great inspiration was to make the Secret Service truly secret...
...As massive a breach of national securityasitwas,DanielEllsberg'sdisseminationofthe Pentagon Papers had only covered pre-1969 history: the activities and decision-making of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations...
...Just eleven days earlier, the back-channel diplomacy Kissinger was extolling, and had personally elevated to an art form--running rings 'round Nixon's affable but overmatched secretary of state, William P. Rogers, undertheinstructionandtutelage ofthepresidenthimself--hadpaid handsome dividends...
...Clearly something had to be done, and so Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase authorized WilliamWood,aherooftheMexican-AmericanWar,toput counterfeiters out of business...
...The dodgy Wood, who wouldbecomethefirstchiefoftheSecretService,then hiredthreeassistants:aChicagojailbird,aNewJersey counterfeiter,andasuspectedfive-timemurderer...
...Allthegoodthingsthatarebeingdone," Kissingerclarified...
...That investigator, W. Donald Stewart, told the Senate Watergate committee in February 1974, in previously unpublishedtestimony:"IfIfoundoutthatthemilitarywas spying on a president of the United States, it would worry the hell out of me...
...By 1864, about half the bills in the North were fake...
Vol. 40 • April 2007 • No. 3
