Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, 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, 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 Nixon 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 back to that welcoming, almost,

you can hear the rape your keen wit whistling through the air, simply waiting to use that rapier to skewer the president in the posterior.

Until the moment came, Buckley was busying himself by delivering smaller Nixonicks and cuts with his rapier.

And here's how he wrote about Nixon's reception and then how Nixon then characterized that reception to his hosts.

This is Buckley.

Then there was the treatment of Mr. Nixon on his arrival in China, the already famous reception,

at which the Guard of Honor looked as

though it was there to perform quarantine duty. The motorcade through empty streets. If charity

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