Nixon Goes to China (Part 1) | The Nixon Era
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2018
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode of Whistlestop travels back to February 21, 1972 when President Nixon, a staunch anti-communist, begins the thawing of relations with China with a personal visit to the country.
Whistlestop is Slate's podcast about presidential history. Hosted by Political Gabfest host John Dickerson, each installment will revisit memorable moments from America's presidential carnival.
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Email: whistlestop@slate.com
Podcast production by Jocelyn Frank. Research by Brian Rosenwald.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson, co-host of CBS this morning. |
| 0:09.0 | The president's study material stacked as high as a standard mailbox, towering to about four feet. |
| 0:15.9 | It contained historical analysis, CIA maps and theories, State Department communicates, cables and commentary, |
| 0:22.5 | and the 500 pages of notes from his national security advisor, a former Harvard professor who wrote to the |
| 0:29.1 | president, your meetings with the Chinese will be totally unlike any other experience you have had. |
| 0:35.5 | The president consumed the mountain of information for weeks and carried it |
| 0:39.1 | on the plane with him for his flight across the globe, like an actor trying to conform to a role, |
| 0:44.3 | but instead of trying to understand how to play Don Corleone, the star of the godfather, which |
| 0:49.3 | would come out later that year in 1972, he was trying to get into the head of his interlocutors. |
| 0:55.2 | He'd started his homework before he was even in office, or rather when he was between offices, |
| 1:00.5 | when he was a loser in exile. Nobody thought he'd be in office again. He didn't think he'd be |
| 1:06.1 | in office again. But nevertheless, in those wilderness years, he folded himself into the seats of airplanes on transatlantic flights, because even as a civilian, he was driven to understand the world. |
| 1:17.9 | In his own private stash of briefing materials, the president collected page after page of yellow legal paper, curled from his heavy pressing of the pen with the urgency of a prisoner arguing for parole. |
| 1:29.0 | It was the way he ordered his thoughts about the sealed off country of China. |
| 1:33.8 | We were embarking, Richard Nixon later wrote in his memoirs, |
| 1:37.6 | upon a voyage of philosophical discovery as uncertain and in some respects as perilous, |
| 1:43.8 | as the voyages of geographical discovery of a much |
| 1:47.2 | earlier time period. But the research material the President perused was not entirely the dry |
| 1:52.9 | millet of international affairs. His studies also included poetry, a set of lines he had committed |
| 1:59.2 | to memory. And those lines were, |
| 2:02.4 | it is the bitter sacrifice that strengthens our firm resolve, and which gives us the courage |
| 2:08.2 | to dare to change heaven and skies, to change the sun, and to make a new world. |
... |
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