the wing at that time. we can't go inside the jet, but what you'd see, two different levels, on the downstairs, you have a radar navigator and navigator and their primary responsibility is managing the weapons, ensuring proper coordinates are in the weapons, and really ensuring that the weapon hits the target. on the upper level is where you'll have the pilot and the copilot. you can see the cockpit area up here. relatively small compared to the overall size of the jet. most people would expect the cockpit to be quite a bit bigger, but not a lot of room in there. five crew members is the standard crew complement, up to ten. but overall, notroom. you have the pilot right here and the copilot on the other side and the back actually facing backwards is where the ew, electronic warfare officer section is, that's really all there is to it. it's an older weapons system, but like we said, it gets the job done.

itti capable aircraft. all the money that goes into this aircraft, you know, is spent on modernization of the weapons system. we talked about all the different kinds of weapons it has, very modern weap it able t accomplish the objectives, any command or intent out there. >> the last production b-52 was delivered in 1962, and it still provides the dominance. it's considered an icon of american air power. b-52 has been around for many years and has been in many conflicts. you range back from vietnam, kosovo, to the first "desert storm" afghanistan, and even to the second fight over in iraq, so it's been around for many years and, believe me, our allies, they love us for that, the capability that the weapons system brings as well as the enemy fears us, and it always gives them that second thought

if diplomacy should break down that the b-52s could be on their way. >> all weekend long "american history tv" is featuring shreveport, louisiana. learn more about shreveport and find out where c-span's local content vehicles are going next online at cspan.org/localcontent. you're watching "american history tv" all weekend every weekend on c-span3. >> each week at this time "american history tv" features an hourlong conversation from c-span's a sunday night inter interview series "q and a," here's this week's encore "q and a" on "american history tv."

>> this week on "q and a," our guest is margaret mcmillan, author of "nixon and mao: the week that changed the world." >> margaret macmillan, why did you think a book of nixon and mao would sell? >> i thought it was a good subject and i love the good juicy stories of history, and i thought here you have two extraordinary personalities with great flaws but also great talent, and i thought their moment of meeting was an interesting moment which ended the long cold period between the united states and china and started something else, so i thought if i wanted -- my next book i want to do something that is manageable but has a good,

really strong story to it. >> who did you rely upon to tell you what the moment of meeting was like? >> i looked at documents. there's a very, very full record now. all the transcripts are there. plus memoirs. bob haldeman kept a diary which was helpful, and nixon and kissinger kept diaries and i gathered from what i could from those who had been there. >> did you learn something that we didn't already know? >> i learned something i didn't know, i think. i think i learned a great deal more about richard nixon, which i had to do. i learned a lot more about his capacity as a statesman, which i think i'd never fully grasped. there are a number of things that surprised me. i'm surprised how anxious the americans were for the meeting with mao and to have that opening to china, and i was surprised how far they were prepared to go in reassuring the chinese. i was surprised by the sorts of material that the americans handed over to the chinese, top secret, classified, for example, about the soviet union.

that really did surprise me. >> the meeting was february 21st, 1972. >> yes. we're right at the 35th anniversary. >> what was the world like then? >> it was a troubled world i think particularly for the united states and china. united states was still embroiled in vietnam and that was overshadowing the nixon presidency, and nixon was very concerned about it. he wanted to get the u.s. out of ne vietnam, and that wasn't easy. and he was under a lot of domestic pressure. the united states i think had been very badly hurt by vietnam. very badly divided, so i think that was a concern, and a lot of economic trouble because of inflation was running high, partly because of the expenditure on vietnam. and so nixon was very conscious of the position in the united states in the world had been very damaged by its own internal troubles and its problems with vietnam. he was concerned about his relationship with his allies and he was very concerned about the

soviet union which was, of course, thoroughly enjoying the spectacle of the americans going to grief in vietnam and was dragging its feet on arms negotiations, for example. i think the early 70s were troubled, and nixon was very concerned, and i think that's one of the reasons why he thought that an opening to china might help to rebuild the position of the united states. >> what was the relationship in 1972 between the united states and china, but actually probably ought to drop back a little bit before that in '71 when i assume the liaison started and how did it start? >> well, basically there was no relationship. >> none. >> to speak of before 1971. from 1949 up until the end of the '60s there was virtually no contact between the americans and chinese. >> any trade? >> no trade. no trade. and, in fact, the americans had a huge establishment in hong

kong, part of whose purpose was to make sure goods coming into to hong kong from the peoples republic were not then reexported to the united states. there was no trade. no tuourism, no american journalists went to china, and no chinese went to the united states. and even in the u.n. -- there was virtually no contact. occasionally american and chinese diplomats would have to talk about, for example, prisoners of war or some bits of unfinished business and they would talk in war ssaw at the a ba ambassadorial level. there was an absolute gulf between china and the united states. >> what was the relationship at that time between china and russia, the soviet union actually? >> it's a very interesting question because it was a very bad relationship. the two great communist powers had had a complicated relationship but they'd fallen

out and split at the very beginning of the 1960s. it was something like a fight within a family. each of the soviet union and the peoples republic of china accused the other of being bad communists and they became rivals for supremacy in the third world, for example, and so it was very unpleasant. by the end of the 1960s it was more than unpleasant, it actually had potential for a major conflict. soviets started moving troops out to the common borders and they moved bombers out which were capable of carrying nuclear warheads and there were armed clashes between soviet and chinese troops in 1969 and towards the end of 1969, the fall of 1969, there were rumors and well-founded rumors that the soviet union was contemplated a nuclear strike on china tokn a . >> did china have nuclear power? >> yes, they did. they exploded a nuclear bomb in 1964 but they didn't have nearly the means of delivery that the

soviet union had. soviet union was much the greater military power, had left china very badly prepared to fight off a potential invasion. the armed forces occupied most of them in trying to keep order in the cities. and china was friendless and in a very dangerous position at the end of the 1960s. >> so, when we bought things in 1972 and 1973, it was made in taiwan? >> it was made in taiwan. >> what's the relationship between taiwan and china and taiwan and hong kong? >> taiwan had no relationship with china at all. the government in taiwan which was the remnants of the national government which had ruled china in the 1930s and 1949 and its leader sat in taiwan claiming to be the real government of china and refusing to recognize the government that actually held

power in beijing and the united states for a combination of reasons had supported that position and supported taiwan, so taiwan held the u.n. seat that was reserved for china, for example, and reprd various othe bodies, and every so often the relationship between taiwan and the chinese in taiwan and the mainland chinese threatened to bo war. taiwan is 100 miles off the shore of china, it's fairly well protected from a seaborne invasion, but china had taken some islands off the coast of china, one sits right in the wo heavily fortified, occasionally short of lobbing shells at the chinese mainland and hurling insults over loud speakers and saying awful thing about mao and so on and the chinese would retaliate. it was a very serious crisis in '54 and at the end of the '50s

when the chinese government started shelling. and the relationship between taiwan and china was a dreadful one and always had the potential to flare up into a nasty war. >> you're canadian. did canada have relations with the peoples republic of china? >> we were moving to establish relations. as canadians we had to be careful about what the united states thought. it's always been very difficult for canada to take a path that is too divergent from the united states and on the whole we tend to agree with the united states, we certainly did on the cold war on major foreign policy issues, but i think we never felt committed to taiwan as the united states did and we never felt i think as viscerally anti-communist perhaps as many in the united states did and we're also sort of a practical people and we had a lot of wheat at the end of the 1950s and china had a lot of famine and they came to the canadian china and we'd like to buy your wheat and we're prepared to pay hard currency, so we started trading

with the peoples republic of china not to the pleasure of the united states, the united states was not pleased about it but we established a trading relationship and then at the end of the 1960s, the new prime minister reviewed all our foreign policies and came to the conclusion and i think he was right that it was absurd for canada not to recognize the peoples republic so in 1970 actually we established a diplomatic relationship office in beijing and we moved toward full recognition. >> bring us up to date on your own career. i see on the jacket of the book you are moving to oxford. >> i was happy ensconced at the university of toronto and i teach history there and i didn't think about what i would do when my term ended and i got a phone call about a year and a half ago from oxford saying would i be interested in being their warden which is not quite what it sounds like, it doesn't mean running it like a prison. it's a fabulous place. i did my graduate work.

>> st. anthony's. >> st. anthony's. >> how big a college is it? >> 250 all graduate students and 50 fellows and they do international relations, so it's sort of right up my street and i thought this would be too good an opportunity to miss so i'm moving over there for a few years. >> you were at oxford to get, what, your masters or your doctorate? >> yeah, i went there and i did something like a two-year degree and i flirted with politics, political science and i scuttled back to history and that's really my field and i did a doctorate in the british in india. >> oxford has how many colleges? >> 33 i think. i should know this, i think it's 33. >> what's the biggest? the >> i think it may be new college which in spite of its name is one of the oldest ones. >> and is st. anthony's one of the smallest? >> it is one of the smallest. and it's all graduates. >> when will you start?

>> the end of june. >> are you goingwrite? >> i hope both. i hope they'll let me do a bit of teaching which i would love to do and, yes, i want to keep on writing. i like writing and i've got a few projects in mind so i'm going to keep going. >> go back to this book on nixon and mao. when was the first moment you can remember where you thought this was even a book? or even an article? >> i guess it was when i was -- my paris book, much to my surprise and my publisher's surprise did well. i think they had not expected it to do as well as it did, and it came out in england and then won a prize and the day after it won a prize, my publisher said to me, by the way, what is your next book going to be we'd like to know. i thought quickly, i hadn't thought about it much, and a possibility is the nixon trip to china and i thought it would be a fairly contained story and it wouldn't be too big a book which made sense because i was taking

on a new job and to my amazement, they came back and said, great, here's the offer. i thought the spur of the moment idea was a good one because i taught chinese history and i also taught and still teach history of the cold war, so at least i have some of the feeling for the period. >> well, to bring people up to date, i have the paperback version "paris 1919." originally 2001 in great britain, 2002 in the united states. 2003 with the paperback. and i want to talk to you some more about "paris 1919." how many copies did this sell? >> i tried to add them up, i think it must be around 240,000. >> how often does a history book sell 240,000? >> i don't think that often. we're not in the same league as "da vinci code" or cookbooks. i'm very pleased about it actually. >> you thought about the idea of this book. where was the first place you went to study up on what happened? >> i started with reading

nixon's memoirs and then reading the steven ambrose biography of nixon. i thought i knew about him because i was growing up when nixon was president and i remember watergate very well, but when you're a historian you've got to really study it in more depth instead of having vague impressions. i started studying that and i found a wonderful archive at georgetown and it's online and they had declassified or asked for declassification of all sorts of documents including the transcripts of the conversations between nixon and mao and between nixon and kissinger and li, so i started reading all that and gradually stuff was declassified because the foreign relations of the united states was just doing the nixon years and a whole bunch of stuff was coming out, so i began to collect whatever i could in north america and then i don't read chinese, so i got a couple of chinese graduate students to start going through the chinese

sources for me and translating those for me. >> did it make a difference? >> it did i think. the chinese still have not released nearly astateand the u states is very open generally about what it will release, so there's a tremendous amount on the record. the chinese still i think have the habits of secrecy which come from the old communist party days when they were an underground organization and they don't like toe stf and particularly if it's a sensitive area or more recent history and taiwan is still a very sensitive area. their relationship with vietnam is still sensitive. the relationship with the soviet union and now russia was still sensitive, so i didn't find -- not all that much, but there are some memoirs and biographies and authorized history of u.s./chinese relations which have interesting stuff. >> do you have evidence of who between henry kissinger and richard nixon or somebody else possibly thought about this idea first? >> well, there was conflicting story. and i think everyone involved would like to take credit for

being the one who pushed it through. i think it was richard nixon who got the idea. he'd been talking about it before he became president, before he won the election in 1968. he'd written an article for foreign affairs in 1967 in which he said sooner or latermust bec community of nations. he'd given talks in which he'd said that and i had a very interesting conversation with someone who knew him the other day who said he remembers talking to nixon about this in 1968 and nixon said i'm going to go to peking as it was pronounced in those days. i think it was nixon that had the vision. the record at the time is that henry kissinger was surprised that nixon said it, said to haldeman among others, the president wants to go china, what's going on, i think he's lost his senses here. kissinger has now said and said in his memoirs that he and nixon were always at one on this and i think it's absolutely true when kissinger realized that this was in nixon's thinking, he saw the

possibilities and he saw the advantage of an opening to china and worked very hard on it, but it was my sense that nixon who was there pushing it. >> you say in the back under interviews and oral histories that you interviewed henry kissinger in paris may 15th of 2003 and may 18th of 2003. what were the circumstances? >> i was at a conference. i'd been invited to a conference by a friend who knew that henry kissinger was going to be there and knew henry kissinger and very kindly sort of said to kissinger, look, this historian would like to interview you and don't worry, she won't ask you impossible questions, anyway, vouched for me. and i met him the very first day of the conference, it was a cocktail party, we'll talk at the end. i won't tell you anything now. and then started telling me wonderful stories, because he's a wonderful raconteur, and then we had lunch at the end of this particular session. we had a very, very, i thought very interesting conversation. i made all sorts of notes.

and he i don't think told me anything that he hadn't already said in his memoirs or said in other interviews but what was so helpful was just the flavor. it's wonderful to be able to say to someone you were there, what was mao really like, and what was richard nixon really like and what did you feel when you were in china, that was fascinating. >> what's the moment like when they met, mao tse-tung and richard nixon? >> it's a funny moment. i thought when i started writing the book, the hour when they met, nixon's first day was 35 years ago and i thought the meeting would be absolutely fascinating. this is clearly going to be one of the great momentous earthshaking meetings, and i thought this would be an extraordinary meeting and then i read the transcripts. and it's not what i would call a very fascinating conversation. nixon had come very well prepared. nixon liked to be really well prepared for these very important occasions and he had all sorts of things he wanted to

say and you see at the beginning of the meeting, a little bit of chitchat, nice to see you, thank you for coming, how was your trip and then nixon starts in, now, there are a number of things i want to say, mr. chairman, and this and that and he doesn't get very far and mao says, no, no, let's not talk about this stuff. i don't really deal with those sorts of things. that's too general for me. let's just chat. and so you see nixon trying to get on to the stuff like relations with the soviet union that he wants to talk about, you see mao sort of avoiding it. so, it's a rather insubstantial and inconclusive and meandering conversation. and mao was not a well man. and li kept checking his watch, and he said chairman mao has had enough and mao agrees and they go out. and at first the americans, it was nixon, henry kissinger and winston lord who were there were rather depressed. they said this didn't really go anywhere and it wasn't much of a

conversation but then they all began to think about it and they decided or they persuaded themselves that, in fact, it was a brilliant conversation and kissinger has this wonderful passage in his memoirs we realized it was like a wagner oversure, mao referred indirectly to everything later on we were going to discuss. my own sense they were being a bit optimistic when they read that back into the conversation. i think really important thing about the conversation was that it happened. it took place and then it appeared in the media. >> how long was richard nixon in china? >> he was there about seven days. >> but he never saw mao again. >> never saw mao again. >> why didn't he get a chance to see him again? >> he wanted to see mao again and certainly it had been indicated to him by li that there would be another meeting and he partly wanted to see mao again partly to carry on the conversation but also because rather embarrassingly they hadn't taken secretary of state william rodgers to the first meeting and they were hoping for the first meeting so rodgers

would be mollified and included in the photograph taken. i think they didn't have a second meeting because mao was too sick. he looked okay at the meeting with nixon but he had really been at death's door six weeks previously and he'd been sort of resuscitated and they propped him up and he looked okay but he was not a well man. >> did he have lou gehrig's disease yet? >> i'm not sure. but he had congestive heart failure. he had emphysema, he was retaining liquid. one of the reasons mao had a new suit made for nixon's visit was because he couldn't get into any of his old ones because he was so bloated. i think also possibly, and i may be wrong, but mao although he was a communist, had taken on the attributes of an emperor. he'd accepted his position, and emperor's always tend to live in splendid isolation and very few people got to see them very much, so the idea that mao would sit down and have long

discussions and long negotiations with nixon i think was just not something mao intended to do and didn't fit in with his concept as leader of china. >> the interesting thing is mao and li the number two both died within four years. >> yes. >> and li at one point he writes -- who was he, by the way? >> li was also like mao a dedicated communist. he'd been a communist as a young man. he came from a morema he came from one of those old learned families that had provided so many civil servants in china down through the centuries, become a communist and had somehow survived not just the chinese nationalists trying to kill them and not jus survived the equal ambitiousint within the communist party. he was a great survivor. he had a knack for realizing which way the current was going and choosing the side that would win and fairly early on in the

1930s, he saw mao was the right figure and allied himself with mao and became the faithful, long-serving second hand. he was mao's second in command. he never challenged mao and that was very wise, because mao did not like anyone challenging his authority. >> did i understand you to say that li got bladder cancer? >> yes. >> and mao did not want him treated? >> mao -- and i don't know whether it was sheer cruelty or that mao didn't believe in -- that doctors. we have an interesting memoir and mao wouldn't take his medicine, wouldn't take ordinary precautions, simply, you know, refused to believe in medicine. and when li got bladder cancer, mao said, oh, he shouldn't have an operation, he is too old, it will simply upset him and caused mule, it may have malevolent, but i think it may have been that mao didn't believe in doctors. and finally a pretty young technician persuaded mao to have

the operation but by that point it was too late, the cancer had spread. >> four people, li, mao tse-tung, nixonnd anybody else of importance -- you mentioned winston lord but in this whole event. >> i think those are the four key figures, but there was also a very skilled man on the a lot side who was the deputy of the negotiations with henry kissinger for the shanghai communique which was the statement they both issued at the end of the visit. >> you put that in your book. >> yeah, i put that in my book, i put the communique. and i put something about the very capable man, and the foreign minister was not. he came along with the meetings with rodgers and the two of them talked about actually not very important things. the other two figures who i think who are interesting who were there are pat nixon, richard nixon's wife, and j jan jeng, the wife of wow.

and pat nixon was a much less controversial figure. she was a very loyal wife and she did all the sightseeing which nixon hated and she went to the model farms and approved of the model pigs and she looked at the model kindergartens and she did all that sort of stuff. mao's wife was very much more controversial and after mao's death, in fact, was blamed for a lot of his crimes and was put in prison. she was i think a terrifying personality. she'd been an actress in shanghai, very pretty in her youth, and had made her ways up to the hills of the communist in the late '30s and had attracted mao's attention and he had fallen for her and divorced his other wife, his wife at the time, and his senior colleagues had said to him, this was the nature of the chinese communist party, we'll only give you permission to divorce your wife and marry this pretty actress in shanghai as long as she stays out of politics, and mao accepted the deal, but his wife resented it bitterly. when mao wanted to start the

cultural revolution, the bizarre event which turned china upside down and led to him attacking his own communist party, she became his right-hand woman. when she was tried, she shouted out this famous thing, i was chairman maos dmao's dog, and w he told me to bite, i bit. and she used the revolution to slight people, people who knew too many details about some of her sort of perhaps less savory goings-on when she was young, she had affairs, she may have possibly worked for the nationalists at one point or the police, anyway a lot of people suffered because of her, and she became a sort of great the sort of mouthpiece of mao and she took particular responsibility for chinese culture and so she oversaw chinese films during the cultural revolution with the result that almost none were made because they weren't revolutionary enough. and she produced these dreadful, i've seen one of them, dreadful

revolutionary operas which the nixon party were taken off to see, but she was a dangerous, dangerous woman. >> you told us earlier that there was no relationship between china and the united states. >> yeah. >> when all this started in '72. i want to mention some figures. we'll put them up on the screen. and they are trade pictures. and start with the balance of trade. you'll see this on the screen there, it's the u.s. balance of trade with china 2006. at the end of the year. we were exporting to china $55 billion worth of goods. they imported last year $288 billion to this country. that means there is a trade imbalance to their favor not to ours of $233 billion. the next slide i want to show is the foreign holders of u.s. treasury securities as of december of 2006. china holds $349 billion which is second only to japan.