you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. there's a new website for american history tv where you can find our schedules and preview our upcoming programs. watch featured video from our regular weekly series, as well as access our history tweets, history in the news and social media from facebook, youtube, twitter and foursquare. follow american history tv all weekend, every weekend on c-s n c-span3 and online at cspan.org/history. february 2012 marked the 40th anniversary of president nixon's 1972 trip to china. coming up next, former ambassador, nicholas platt, who traveled to china with nixon, discusses how americans viewed china in the 1960s and '70s and reflects on the politics of nixon's visit to china. this program is about 40 minutes. >> well, that was a wonderful hour, mike.

it really is a nice piece of historiful. let me start with you, max. and then next to you, mike. you suggested that there was kind of a real manipulation of this whole sort of epic journey. but what was the narrative you didn't get? i mean, if nixon hadn't been trying to make a giant campaign commercial out of this, what was it you would have gotten? >> oh, well, i spent about a week before we went at the cia and got myself briefed on who's who in china and what's going on in china. i had a longstanding relationship with kissinger after his secret trip. he was quite ready to boast about many of the things that happened. i had my head full and my notes full of the diplomacy of the

issue, the taiwan issue and so on. plenty to write about during this meeting. it was not hard to speculate about what was really goingon behind the scenes and what they were talking about. on top of that, as this film well suggests, we spent a great deal of time sneaking away, not just to the university, but walking around town, the department store. i was covering china. and people at home were eating it up because this was the other side of the moon suddenly being exposed to american curiosities, something that -- and then finally there was the whole spectacle of this manipulated scene, which i could get above and write about, making fun even of cronkite and barbara walters and company, so that i had a lot of witty and sarcastic material as well to go with the very heavy diplomacy.

it was a great spectacle and a great joy. of course, i was writing with a fury that nixon had held us to one seat. we wanted help. our deadline was such that i had to file by breakfast in beijing. which meant i had to sit up all night writing and all day covering. there was no chance to sleep. it was a nightmare. and here we are. we survived. >> do you think in retrospect, we have overplayed the significance and the meaning, game-changing significance of this trip? >> in nixonian terms, yes. the back story of all this is a piece nixon and company and largely the republican party were responsible for creating the china problem, for selling themselves so heavily to the

support of taiwan and alienating not only communist chinese and having no dealings with them, while we were, in fact, having lots of dealings with the russians. but insisting that the democrats, if they made any approaches to china, would suffer for it politically because they had lost china to the communists. so what nixon was exploiting was the readiness of the american public, really, for a new relationship that our politicians had maneuvered themselves into preventing. ande himself personified that resistance to a new diplomacy with china. so the fact that he turned made this an epic event, as much in american politics as it was in international diplomacy. so it was important in that sense.

but we also were there because of the chinese were lusting for this relationship. the ping-pong was the overt first signal, the fact that my boss, james dresden, was in there even moments before kissinger was, much to nixon's annoyance, was proof that the chinese were reaching out to us because the triangular diplomacy that was occurring was as important to them as it was to us. therefore, i believe it would have happened sooner or later anyway. when i said flippantly, what would have happened if i said, d reagan would have gone. he would have enjoyed it immensely. he would not h said in berlin, "tear down that wall." [ laughter ]

and by not tearing down that wall, i think history itself would have evolved in pretty much the same way as it has. >> so, mike, you've sat with all of this footage now for a long, long time. do you think this was just sort of a natural course of events, as max suggested, it was bound to happen? this some really innovative and significant insight that nixon and kissinger had had to foresee this -- >> i think there's tof t ise th right, eventually, sooner or later the logic of having a relationship with china and the lunacy of not having a relationship with china would have hit critical mass anyway. but i've been living and breathing this thingtime. i think nixon and kissinger deserve credit for sort of

susing out that there was a moment and acting on it. nixon's calculation was that only a guy like nixon could do this. and interestingly, i interviewed morley safer h talks about having lunch with nixon in hong kong in 1967 and asking nixon -- wanting to ask nixon about vietnam and nixon saying, vietnam is not important, it's a sideshow. china is important. and he wrote a report about it. but what nixon said to safer was, the only person who can do an opening to china politically in the states would be a republican president because he was the one who had credibility with the people who were against it. if a democrat had been doing it, nixon would have been the first one to sort of get on the bandwagon and bait them for betraying taiwan and so on. he was able politically to do it and to sell it to a lot, not all, but a lot of the skeptics on the right by saying, well, this is our great step to

counter the soviet union andon side. and therefore, if we have to do certain things. so you have to give them credit. i'm a product of the 1960s, the anti-war movement. i was not exactly a fan of nixon growing up. but he's an extremely complicated figure who had great insights and pulled this off and was simultaneously the most petty, vindictive, conspirato conspiratory -- and when you look at their fear of losing control, it's almost like a split personality. they did this amazing thing with the other side of it that was not so nearly attractive. >> you at this point were a foreign service officer and i assume steeped in the ideology of the cold war and presumably

not particularly pr lly pro-com. what w to n to the land of the antichrist, to bury the hatchet and to have your leader, president nixon, embrace these people who we had spent decades in opposition to? >> i was just pinching myself. this is a dream, you know? i had studied chinese in the early '60s. i'd spent year as a china analyst in hong kong, working with people like stan karno and so on and so forth. and the idea that we were actually going to go to china and that nixon -- by the way, this took a lot of political will in both governments. and only people as powerful as mao and nixon were able to pull this off. >> but tell us about -- how did you all sort of repurpose your brains from this sort of cold

war perspective to suddenly, this is okay? >> my brain was already repurposed. i wanted a relationship with china. i thought it was long overdue. we had operated under the analytical assumption that china and the soviet union were a united bloc, which was crazy. it was wrong. so much evidence that that was not so. and what nixon was doing was taking advantage for the first time in policy terms of the sino-soviet difficulties, sino-soviet and it completely changed the way the dynamics of international politics went. >> and how did the drip itself, max and nick, change your minds? when you landed there, you were of one frame of mind. what frame of mind were you in

when you left? >> well, when i left, i was still pinching myself. even in strange bubble that we were in, no contact with the chinese other than our own particular minders, we had spent our time talking about sort of the nuts and bos of a relationship to come, trade, travel, investment, legal issues, sports, culture, et cetera, et cetera. all of which ultimately became the relationship, after the triangular diplomacy came to an end. but my distinct memory, people ask me when i came back, what did you learn that you didn't know before? and i said, well, it's really silly for me to say this. but i came away with the

impression -- strong impression that communism is a very thin veneer and that thisg with chin. i'd been dealing with chinese from hong kong, from taiwan, so on and so forth. but that these people that we were dealing with were chinese. and they said, wow, is that what you learned? >> how about you? >> i had two dominant impressions. one was, especially driving through the countryside, what a poor country this was. we knew that it was massively populated but we had -- i had no idea of the primitive nature of the agriculture that we witnessed as a bus was speeding through the country -- >> and you were seeing the best of it? >> that's right. but even more vivid in my mind,

because of the poverty, was going through beijingnpossible, had spent three years in the soviet union. and i'd seen a great communist country and how it functioned and the terrible the sloppiness of life in moscow as i had experienced it. and here, going around beijing, the store that was selling multicolored ping-pong balls, magnificently arranged in a retail fashion that you could never have seen in moscow. somebody else -- another sreran and a few primitive art supplies. but the pride of display, not done for us, but this was in the normal run of things. in the department store, the efficiency with which the sales slips were -- with a clothespin

were to the cashier and they would come back promptly -- and everything worked functionally. i that chinese people elsewhere, especially in the united states but also in indonesia and throughout asia, when turned loose in an entrepreneurial fashion had enormous creativity and work ethic, which i never saw in the soviet union. and i remember saying to somebody, if these people are ever turned loose, watch out. >> you and napolean. >> right. >> watching this hour, you see very early the sort of beginnings of this sort of cat-and-mouse game between the press and the chinese government, which continues in

>> you get to see the show commune -- i went to the hospital on my trip and we saw the acupuncture, anesthesanesth which was the first big composuexposure of that kind of tightly controlled, showcased tourism. that became the mainstay of what a lot of visitors did. and part of the story of the american press over the last 30, 40 years has been this interaction with the system and pushing and pushing and then the system pushing back. i think in fairness, it's in in china for all of the problems. and there are still many from the point of view of reporters. there's no comparison because i

think to quote ron walker, they had no idea what was going to hit them. it's true. they never had -- when you think about who was there, all the top network anchors, all the most powerful people -- and then this other kind of collection of people that nixon liked and people like william f. buckley and james michner, it was an odd collection -- >> tourists. >> but all of them, significant figures here, all wanting something and all bringing their own prejudices and so on. what's amazing to me is for all of the things that could have gone wrong and sort of did go wrong at one level, that there wasn't some sort of catastrophic media disaster that poisoned the whole trip. i think that's partly because of

the sheer newness and freshness and exoticness of it and the historic import of an american president being there outweighed all these other petty aggravations. so that's not the ultimate takeaway, even though that was central to the experience of a lot of the reporters then. the other interesting observation that struck me is the relation to the diplomacy. here you have nixon and mao spending so much time together, talking casually. i should say parenthetically, we were very lucky in this film to get a lot of those images because we learned in the course of the research that nixon hired a film crew through a filmmaker, but this crew was for nixon's personal use. they had, in addition to the access to all the news events,

all this behind-the-scenes access. it was never intended to be shown publicly. it was for nixon himself. it sat there for almost 40 years while they tried to figure out whether it belonged to the nixon family or the nixon estate. it was determined that it belonged to the archives. and we got access to you can't president and an american president having this easy banter. it's a two-hour formal dinner and that's it. and absent a whole week of that, you wouldn't have had quite the same degree of mutual confidence that allowed the leadership on both sides to move ahead with the risks that they had undertaken into the whole trip happening at all. >> sosh, nick, how do you think meeting with zhou enlai and mao, how did that affect rogers and

kissinger -- what was their sentiment besides their sense of triumph of having gotten there and accomplished something rather significant? what do you think the personal sentiments were that they took away from their trip? >> well, nixon, i think, took away a sense of satisfaction. we told me at one time i ever had a conversation with him, he said, from now on, you china boys are going to have a lot more to do. and that turned out to be true. that's why my book is called "china boys." but in any case, i think kissinger also came away with a sense of achievement. and he and zhou had developed a relationship which was to be used for -- until zhou died. it was a very important relationship because nixon was gone within a year -- two years, i guess it was, august of '74, he was out.

and that relationship carried -- our u.s./china relationship forward. rogers comes across as kind of a zeroid in this combination of personalities. but, in fact, rogers played, i think, a fairly important role in that he was -- his advice was listened to very carefully by kissinger and nixon and so forth, when talking about how to frame these issues for the public and for the congress. rogers was kind of the resident rightist on the delegation. i think he was personally humiliated by being left out of the meeting with mao.

but zhou enlai made a point of calling on him secretly during the trip, partly to, i think, asa assuage some of this humiliation but also to find out whether there really was a split in the u.s. delegation, whether the kind of objections that rogers and marshall green had raised meant that the delegation was divided and that this whole thing was going to disintegrate as soon as we got back to the united states. and rogers satisfied him on this score. rogers was a thoroughly grown-up gent. and he did not have the role in the making of foreign policy that kissinger did. but he was a good explainer and a good presenter and a team player.

>> before we open it up to questions from you all, let me just ask all of you just to comment very briefly -- do you think that this could have happened without this visit in 1972? max, we'll start with you. >> i don't know enough about chinese politics, honestly, as to whether it could have happened on their end. i think on american side, yes, i think the public was way ahead of the nixon trip and its readiness to change attitudes about communist china, not that it would be an admiring attitude but open to a relationship -- >> pragmatic? >> pragmatic relationship. the american public was ready for it.

the fact that the quick switch that was developed at taiwan wa unceremoniously thrown out, practically, with no real public that's proof of that. so i think on our end, we were ready. i defer to the china scholars on -- >> i think you can make a pretty good argument that without the nixon trip and the success of the nixon trip and the american feather in mao and zhou's cap, i think that did strengthen people in the chinese leadership who were looking to kind of move away from the ideological extremism of the revolution and take a more pragmatic approach to china and china's dealings with the world. i don't think it's entirely a when the e that a year later, liaison office is opening.

that would have been a factor in strengthening the hand of people who would see a role for somebody like dung as china kind of settled down and connected again with the world. >> it was zhou enlai's baby, mao assented. but zhou did it and dung zhou ping was his legacy. >> my table at the banquet, the first night, was full of people who had been sent to the countryside. distinguished physicians, trained at yale, being dden rehabilitated. it was a clear signal within elite circles in china that there was a new wind. >> i don't think dung could have -- i think he would have done it in due course. but i think that the nixon trip gave the relationship a jump-start. and the creation of the channels

through which we invested, traded, did exchanges, education,o on and so forth, all followed very, very quickly during the liaison office days. and you'll have to remember that it was brasinski and carter who actually fashioned and negotiated the formal recognition of china. and it was dung who rode on that. he came to the united states right after we'd formally recognized. and the negotiation process was very tortuous and very difficult. and there was a lot of infighting in the american government, too. but i can't see dung being able to normalize, to pull things

off, toana his own reforms as quickly as he did without having been given the impetus of the nixon trip. >> sort of broke the ice. okay.'s t past 8:00. let's dos of questions for you. i urge you all to keep them short. and we'll try ee there are microphones. please raise your hands. let's see. i see one way in the back. any other hands? yeah, back on the left. put your hand up again so that you can be seen. >> thank you. my question is for ambassador platt. knowing about nixon's sort of plan for the trip and what he ink at he achieve, if nixon was would -- what would he think

about how they've developed with what he envisioned? >> i think nixon would have been astonished. none of us had a clue that china was going to develop economically so rapidly or that economic and people-to-people relationships between the u.s. and china were going to play such an important role in our overall relationship now or grow to such a gigantic size. he was interested in the trilateral diplomacy and in trying to put the soviets off-balance, get them to be more responsive to his policies, his desire to get out of vietnam. his arms control arrangements and so forth. but after the soviet union

collapsed and so forth, the relationship had to survive these great blows to the relationship. and did so on the basis of the people-to-people contacts to which he and nixon relegated to the state department. anyway, i think he would have been astonished at the size of the relationship and quite delighted with the role that he played in starting it all. >> i think it would be fair to say that all four of us, given our experience in china in the early and mid '70s are astonished by what's happened in china. another question. right here? >> you mentioned a little bit earlier about your visit to the cia to sort of get some

background work before going on the trip. i was just wondering to the extent that you can say, what sorts of documents or media that you consumed to prepare you for what you might encounter? how did you come to understand the culture, the geography, the manners? anything? what sorts of things did you consult for study before you went over? >> i'd be curious to know, too, max, if you feel the cia had it right or how did they have it when you were reading or talking with them before you went? >> i didn't mean to make it such a great mystery. the cia, as you know, functions in two halves. there is the secret operational part of the cia that i could never get anywhere near, of course. i went to the analytical side, where ever since period, most of the experience china hands were left in the american government because they