White House Years by Henry Kissinger

Author:Henry Kissinger [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-05-23T22:00:00+00:00

“Polo II”

WHEN I review the exchanges preceding what we code-named “Polo II,” it is difficult to imagine how we had ever made it to Peking three months earlier with only the Pakistani channel. In the interval we had managed to enmesh the new relationship in bureaucratic complexity. The Chinese were astonished at the size of what we called an advance party for the Presidential trip, and the fact that it would need to be followed by a third visit by a yet larger technical team. They were about to learn methods of bureaucratic management unknown even in the country that had invented bureaucracy two millennia earlier. The compartmentalization of knowledge that Winston Lord had to keep track of on my first trip had grown in complexity as we brought with us a large group of technical personnel in October. My party would contain at least four levels of knowledge, which the indefatigable Lord had to keep straight; I, Lord, and Holdridge were familiar with both the policy and some of the technical side of the President’s trip (though not with how he intended to exploit it domestically). Dwight Chapin, Deputy Assistant to the President and head of the advance team, was fully acquainted with all technical issues (and probably knew more than I did about the public relations plans). The security and communications technicians were familiar only with the necessities under their care. Finally, there was a State Department representative, the able, wise, and witty old China hand Alfred Jenkins. He was an expert in the bilateral issues that had been the staples of Sino-American discussions for two decades; my task was to give him a sense of participation without letting him in on key geopolitical discussions, especially the drafting of the communiqué.

I solved this problem as best I could by conveying to the Chinese through our Paris channel a logistical proposal about my trip of such complexity that a less talented people would never have straightened it out in time. It involved several levels of meetings, each tailored to the “need to know” of a particular group, preferably going on at the same time, so that Chou and I and a restricted group could settle the most sensitive issues undisturbed.

The Chinese, with long experience with the strange ways of barbarians, took all this with remarkable aplomb. They helped to solve our bureaucratic intricacies as if it were the most natural service to render to a country six months earlier still depicted as the capitalist archenemy. Indeed, the Chinese arranged the meetings so seemingly spontaneously as to give the impression that it was all their idea. First, of course, there had to be many meetings between the intrepid General Walters and the Chinese Embassy in Paris. He reported in characteristic style one session with Ambassador Huang Chen, lubricated by the powerful liqueur mao-tai, with which I was already painfully familiar:

Food was then brought in. First, stuffed pastries, stuffed round patties, fried shrimp and, finally, soup. Large quantities of all of these were heaped on my plate at regular intervals.

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