Margaret MacMillan: Her book on Nixon and Mao is cinematic (not a good thing, says John Lewis Gaddis, though the book is admirable)
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Neil Armstrong said — or meant to say — when he set foot on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. Richard Nixon, who had become president of the United States six months earlier, called it “the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation,” thereby inadvertently irritating the faithful among several of the world’s greatest religions.
Even as he was celebrating that triumph, the new chief executive and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were planning a comparably dramatic giant leap in diplomacy. It reached fruition on Feb. 21, 1972, when Nixon stepped onto an airport tarmac in Beijing, grasped the hand of the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai, and stood at attention as a People’s Liberation Army band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A few hours later the president of the United States was exchanging pleasantries with the world’s most prominent revolutionary, Mao Zedong, a conversation that only months earlier would have seemed far less likely than landing men on the moon.
Thus began, as Nixon described it, “the week that changed the world,” and this time no one questioned his claim. Margaret MacMillan has made it the subtitle of “Nixon and Mao,” surprisingly the first fully documented history of how the Americans and the Chinese “opened” to one another after a quarter-century of bitter hostility. In doing so, she echoes her widely acclaimed “Paris 1919,” a volume notable for its scope, mastery of complex issues and vivid portrayals of the statesmen who shaped the post-World War I peace settlement.
A professor of history at the University of Toronto, soon to move to Oxford as warden of St. Antony’s College, MacMillan in her earlier book defended the peacemakers of 1919 against the charge that they had failed. The outbreak of a new world war two decades later, she argued, resulted not from their mistakes but from those of their successors. She has little need, in “Nixon and Mao,” to defend the peacemakers of 1972, for in the three and a half decades since they met, regrets have been remarkably few. An event that seemed inconceivable before it happened was instantly regarded by almost everyone after it happened as having made perfect sense. Rarely has foresight been so at odds with hindsight....
he world-changing week in Beijing reflected interests that had been converging for some time. MacMillan’s account of these, however, does not converge as clearly as it might have. Rather than tracing the roots of Sino-American reconciliation to the point at which they intersected, she flashes back to them from within the critical week itself. The intention may be cinematic but the effect is jarring. Nixon’s motorcade can hardly move through the streets of Beijing without MacMillan interrupting its progress to explain the history of Communism in China or to analyze the delicate Nixon-Kissinger relationship. Her method also confuses chronology, so Kissinger’s top-secret trip to Beijing in 1971 follows by more than a hundred pages her description of Nixon’s arrival in that city in 1972. It’s a relief when, in the second half of the book, the narrative settles into a more conventional framework....
Read entire article at John Lewis Gaddis in the NYT Book Review
Even as he was celebrating that triumph, the new chief executive and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were planning a comparably dramatic giant leap in diplomacy. It reached fruition on Feb. 21, 1972, when Nixon stepped onto an airport tarmac in Beijing, grasped the hand of the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai, and stood at attention as a People’s Liberation Army band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A few hours later the president of the United States was exchanging pleasantries with the world’s most prominent revolutionary, Mao Zedong, a conversation that only months earlier would have seemed far less likely than landing men on the moon.
Thus began, as Nixon described it, “the week that changed the world,” and this time no one questioned his claim. Margaret MacMillan has made it the subtitle of “Nixon and Mao,” surprisingly the first fully documented history of how the Americans and the Chinese “opened” to one another after a quarter-century of bitter hostility. In doing so, she echoes her widely acclaimed “Paris 1919,” a volume notable for its scope, mastery of complex issues and vivid portrayals of the statesmen who shaped the post-World War I peace settlement.
A professor of history at the University of Toronto, soon to move to Oxford as warden of St. Antony’s College, MacMillan in her earlier book defended the peacemakers of 1919 against the charge that they had failed. The outbreak of a new world war two decades later, she argued, resulted not from their mistakes but from those of their successors. She has little need, in “Nixon and Mao,” to defend the peacemakers of 1972, for in the three and a half decades since they met, regrets have been remarkably few. An event that seemed inconceivable before it happened was instantly regarded by almost everyone after it happened as having made perfect sense. Rarely has foresight been so at odds with hindsight....
he world-changing week in Beijing reflected interests that had been converging for some time. MacMillan’s account of these, however, does not converge as clearly as it might have. Rather than tracing the roots of Sino-American reconciliation to the point at which they intersected, she flashes back to them from within the critical week itself. The intention may be cinematic but the effect is jarring. Nixon’s motorcade can hardly move through the streets of Beijing without MacMillan interrupting its progress to explain the history of Communism in China or to analyze the delicate Nixon-Kissinger relationship. Her method also confuses chronology, so Kissinger’s top-secret trip to Beijing in 1971 follows by more than a hundred pages her description of Nixon’s arrival in that city in 1972. It’s a relief when, in the second half of the book, the narrative settles into a more conventional framework....