This is

the B. S. I and the world. I'm John Bachelor with Isaac Stone Fish.

The new book is America Second, how America's elites are making China stronger.

We've introduced the most important

player in American culture and political life since 1971. Henry Kissinger.

He was there in July of 71 to Dr. Jo.

He's with us today and God bless him.

However, in those intervening years until 1998,

Tiananmen was a huge block.

But I learned from Isaac's book

that the Bush administration and then the Clinton

administration, two sides of Tiananmen's catastrophe, were also agreeable

to the Chinese Communist Party.

Let's begin with George H.W.. What was his part in this romance between Beijing and Washington?

Bush was an early representative to China before we had official relations. He spent about a year there in the

mid-70s and developed a relationship with Deng Xiaoping who he seemed to admire quite greatly and Bush played two roles in the US-China

relationship that bear mentioning here. One is how he steered the country when he was in office, which I think could

have been sterner to Beijing, but broadly speaking was quite reasonable. But then following the path that Kissinger

trailblazed after Bush left office, he became a consultant and some of his clients

were US companies looking to do business in China.

And Beijing enjoyed the propagandistic value of that, of being able to say,

look, Elder Bush is a friend of China and be able to contrast the way that he spoke about

...