Hello and welcome to Whistlestop, a podcast about the presidency.

I'm John Dickerson co-host of CBS this morning.

Welcome to the third and final installment of President Richard Nixon's visit to China.

What a whirlwind this three-part series has been.

The wind has been world.

It's February 1972.

When Richard Nixon landed in China on February 21st, 1972,

not everything was settled on the itinerary.

The biggest open question was whether the president would meet

with Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Just because Nixon had

memorized Mao's poetry didn't mean that he was going to get a chance to sit by his knee and recite it.

This was risky leaving all of this to chance.

If Nixon returned to the United States without having met Mao, his trip would have been regarded as a failure

and a humiliation for the United States. Conservatives in particular, like writers like William F. Buckley,

were ready to pounce on this failure.

Here's how Buckley, for example, characterized Nixon's arrival, you'll remember that,

the plane lands and it's a very muted arrival not a lot of big applause

certainly not the kind of reception next was used to in other countries and not the

kind of reception other leaders had been given when they got to China and so you can hear Buckley in referring to the

simply waiting to use that rapier to skewer the president in the posterior.

Until the moment came, Buckley was busying himself by delivering smaller Nix and cuts with his rape here.

And here's how he wrote about Nixon's reception and then how Nixon then characterized that

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