Quote of the Day (Bob Haldeman, Behind the Scenes With Nixon in China)

“One building issue is the problem of [Secretary of State William] Rogers. He called me today to say that he was concerned about the news reports as they were building at home, which pointed out that he wasn’t involved in any of the important meetings, and was being kept out of things. He was obviously uptight about being left out of the meeting with Mao [Tse-Tung] on Monday, and made the point that if there’s any other meeting with Mao, he wants to be sure that he is included. He also was carping about the fact that [National Security Adviser] Henry [Kissinger] had two NSC people in the Chou meeting with the P [President Nixon], while there were no State Department people there. Later today, Henry charged in, furious, because he’d learned that Rogers had raised, with the foreign minister, the question of their participating in writing the communique, and the Foreign Minister had said no, that Prime Minister Chou [En-lai] had assigned it to Dr. Kissinger, and Mr. Chiao. So it put Rogers in a rather embarrassing position. This is a problem that’s going to continue, I think, on a similar basis.”—H.R. Haldeman, diary entry for February 23, 1972, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (1993)

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Captain James T. Kirk is given the unenviable task of escorting an ambassador from his implacable enemies, the Klingons, on a peace mission to the Federation. When he asks why he’s been chosen for this unlikely assignment, Mr. Spock tells his friend, the space-age cold warrior, of “an old Vulcan proverb”: “It took Nixon to go to China.”

Forty years after the 37^th President’s extraordinary week in Red China, “Nixon going to China” is shorthand for a rapprochement with a foe that only the hardest of hard-liners can conclude. After that event, it seemed, anything was possible.

The images of Richard Nixon with Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the very symbol of world Communism on the march, gave a tremendous boost to the President in the year of his re-election effort. (Four months later, the Watergate burglary occurred, giving a double meaning to the Chinese astrological cycle designation for 1972: “The Year of the Rat.”) Over the long term, the move was part of a four-corner diplomatic maneuver in which Nixon sought to move China to nudge North Vietnam toward a more favorable negotiating position at the Paris peace talks, and to use China in turn to prod the Soviet Union toward better relations (including the first SALT treaty).

But, as the passage above from the diaries of Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman indicates, the week also brought to the fore a trend occurring within the U.S. delegation: the growing chasm between the State Department and the upstart agency, the National Security Council. Assuredly, prior Secretaries of State had not always seen eye to eye with the men (and they were all men back then) heading this new agency created by National Security Act of 1947. But no other NSC head before Henry Kissinger had sought so relentlessly to cut the President’s senior Cabinet member out of the all-important information loop.

Kissinger found a willing ear in Nixon, who had views of foreign policy strong enough that he wouldn’t have minded acting as his own Secretary of State. Since he couldn’t do that, Nixon appointed to the office a longtime friend who happened to be inexperienced in foreign policy: William Rogers. The latter has often been characterized by historians as weak, but the Haldeman diary entry here demonstrates that even Rogers had his limits: he was not going to be humiliated in front of the media during the most important foreign-policy initiative by the President.

Nixon didn’t think much of several units within the State Department. The Latin American division, he felt, was a “disaster area,” and, his investigation as a congressman of Alger Hiss could not have inspired confidence. Above all, he noted, in a top-secret discussion with Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai (pictured here with the President), the State Department had been given only the most sanitized version of the 500-page summary of Kissinger’s secret July 1971 talks with Chinese officials because the department “leaked like a sieve.“

Not long after the election, Haldeman was deputized with urging Rogers to hand in his resignation. The news rankled the Secretary of State, who 20 years before had helped Nixon survive his “slush fund” scandal by urging him to address the nation on TV in the “Checkers” speech. But Nixon and Haldeman ended by doing Rogers a favor: he wasn’t around to be consumed by the growing Watergate scandal that burst on the administration the following spring.

State Department-NSC tensions hardly ended with Rogers’ resignation (and Kissinger’s assumption of both posts). Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski had worked together before they joined the Carter Administration, but they quickly fell out over policy differences. The pattern repeated itself in the Reagan Administration, with first Alexander Haig bickering with Richard Allen, then George Schultz watching angrily as Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter did the President’s bidding in fomenting the Iran-contra mess. It is very likely that some President in the not-so-distant future will create another mess involving two governmental units out to defend their foreign-policy prerogatives.