Setting Out
On Thursday, February 17, 1972, President and Mrs. Nixon walked out to the south lawn of the White House, where a helicopter waited for them. A small crowd, among them Vice President Spiro Agnew and his wife, Republican and Democratic congressmen, and the two Nixon daughters, Tricia and Julie, saw them off as they started the first leg of their long trip to China. The brief ceremony was carried live on American Radio and television. Nixon spoke briefly. He was making "a journey for peace," but, he added, he was under no illusions.
He, the man who had made his name as a dogged and vociferous anti-Communist, was reversing two decades of American policy by travelling to Beijing, into the very heart of Chinese Communism. He was taking a considerable gamble: that conservatives at home would not attack him and that liberals would not be disappointed by the results of his trip. He was pleased by many fervent messages he had received wishing him well, but also concerned. "I told Henry that I thought it really was a question of the American people being hopelessly and almost naively for peace, even at any price," he recalled. Kissinger was, as always, reassuring. Americans were excited by the boldness of Nixon's move.
Nixon also did not know whether the Chinese themselves would overcome their decades of hostility to the United States and make his visit a success. Although every detail of his trip had been negotiated, Nixon did not know for certain whether he would have a meeting with Chairman Mao Tse-tung, who, from his seclusion in Beijing, still controlled China. If Nixon came back to the United States without having met Mao, his trip would be regarded as a failure and, worse, a humiliation for the United States.
Still, Nixon, it has often been said, especially by his supporters, was the only American president of the late twentieth century who could have taken advantage of the split in the Communist world and made the breakthrough in China-U.S. relations. The man and the times were right for each other. The area where Nixon came closest to real greatness, in his own mind and in those of his defenders, was foreign relations. As he took off from Washington the February day in 1972, he was flying not merely towards China but to, he thought, a shift for the better in the United States' position in the world.
The presidential plane was to land at the civilian airport in Beijing at 11:30 a.m., on Monday, February 21, a time chosen carefully to ensure that Nixon's arrival would make television news in all time zones back in the United States, where it would be 11:30 p.m. on the East Coast and 7:30 p.m. on the West. On the flight earlier that day from Guam to Shanghai he had gone over the details of the Beijing arrival over and over again with his chief of staff. "He's very concerned," wrote Haldeman in his diary, "that the whole operation at Peking airport be handled flawlessly since that will be the key picture of his whole trip."