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>> february 2012 marked the 40th anniversary to china. former ambassador travelled to china with nixon and discusses how they viewed china and reflects on the politics of the visit to 89a. this program is about 40 minutes. what was the narrative you department get if nixon was not trying to make a giant commercial out of this. what was it you would have

gotten? >> i spent about a week before we went at the cia. got myself grieve about what's going on with kissinger after his secret trip. he was ready to boast about other things that what happened. i had my head on and plenty to write about. it was not hard to speculate about what they were talking about. on top of that, finally the

whole spectacle of this manipulated scene which i could get above and write about even of cronkite and barbara walters and company. i had a lot of witty and sarcastic material as well. it was a great joy and i was writing with a fury that mix on held us to one seat. we wanted help. our deadline which meant i had to sit up all day covering it. >> do you think in retrospect

they overplayed the game changing significance? >> in nixonian terms, yes. the back story of all of this is a piece of history. they were selling themselves so 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 lost china to the communists. what nixon was exploiting was the readiness of the american public that our politicians had

maneuvered themselves into preventing. he himself personified that resistance. a new diplomacy to china. it made this an epic event. as much in american politics as in international diplomacy. it was important in that sense. we were there because of the chinese lusting for this relationship. the ping pong was the overt first signal and the fact that my boss 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 of the enemy as important to us.

i believe it would have happened sooner or later anyway. as i said flip antly, what would have happened if nixon had not gone, i said i think ronald reagan would have gone and enjoyed it immensely. he would not say tear down that wall. and by not tearing down that wall, i think history would have evolved in pretty much the same way as it has. . >> do you think this was sort of an actual source of events as max suggested was bound to happen or was this an innovative and significant insight that nixon had to foresee this?

i think nixon and kissinger do deserve credit for a moment that was acting on it. nixon's calculation. 60 he talks about having lunch with nixon in hong kong in 1967 and asking nixon about vietnam

politically to do it in this is the great step and bringing the chinese in and therefore if we have to do certain things, we have to give them credit. and i was not a fan of nixon, but he is a complicated figure who pulled this off and it was simultaneously pettiy and vindictive and kissinger the

same way. it's really a complete split personality. they did this amazing thing with this other side that was not nearly so attractive. >> presumably not pro communist. what was in your head when you were about to go to the land of the anti-christ and bury the hatchet and have your leader, president nixon, embrace these people who we spent decades in opposition to. >> i was pinching myself. i took this as a dream. i have studied chinese in the early 60s. i spent years as a china analyst in hong kong and working with

people and the idea that we were going to go to china and now by the way, this took a lot of political will. in both governments. and only people with power were able to pull this off. >> tell us about how did you all repurpose your brains to suddenly this is okay? >> my brain is 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 block which was crazy and wrong. so much evidence. they were taking advantage for

the first time of the split and it changed the dynamics of international politics. they landed there and one frame of mind. what frame of mind were you in when you left. we had spent our time talking about the nuts and bolts of the relationship to come. train and travel and investment and legal issues the triangular

diplomacy came to an end. people asked me when i came back, what did you learn that you didn't know before? i said it's silly for me to say this. i came away with the strong impression that communism is a very thin veneer and we are dealing with chinese. i have been dealing with chinese from hong kong from taiwan and so on and so forth. these people that we were dealing with were chinese. they said wow, is that what you learned? >> i had two dominant

impressions. one was driving through the countryside. we knew it was massively populated, but i had no idea of the primitive nature of the agriculture that we witnessed as speeding through the countryside. because of the poverty and going through beijing on my own where possible and mind you, i had spent three years in the soviet union and seen a great communist country and how it functioned and the terrible shortages and the sloppiness of life. the story that was selling multicolored ping pong balls.

in a retail fashion that you could never have seen. another store had crayons and drawing paper and a few primitive art supplies. the efficiency with which the sales slips were passed on a string to the cashier and it comes back promptly. everything worked functionally. especially in the united states, but also in indonesia and throughout asia. i never saw it in the soviet union.

if these people are turning loose, watch out. >> so mike, watching this hour, you see very early sort of the beginnings of this cat and mouse game between the press and the chinese government which continues in different ways. this must have been rather familiar territory for you. >> i first went to china in 1973. the cat and mouse part of it and the -- you get to see the show commune and the -- i went to a hospital on my 73rd trip and we saw the accupuncture and anesthesia. this was the first big exposure of that kind of very tightly controlled showcase tourism that became the main stay of what a

lot of what they did. part of the story is this interaction with the system and this pushing and pushing and pushing back and in fairness in many ways it's night and day. today for all of the problems. i think the quote and they had no idea what would hit them. they never have and all the most powerful people. the collection of nixon and people like william f buckley.

significant figures wanting something and bringing their own prejudices. what's amazing to me is for all the things that could have gone wrong and did go wrong at one level, there wasn't a catastrophic media disaster that poisoned the whole trip. i think that's partly because just the sheer newness and freshness and exoticness of it and the historic import of an american president being there outweighed the other petty aggravations. that's not the ultimate take away even though that was central to the experience. a lot of the reporters there. you have nixon spending a week with him, almost literally every single day and meetings and i

should say we were lucky in this film to get a lot of those images because we learned in the course of the research that mix on hired a film crew through david. a very well-known movie maker. he made roots and theater lights. this was for personal use and behind the scenes access was never intended to be shown publicly. it sat there for 40 years while they tried to figure out whether it belonged to the nixon family or estate. we have gotten access to it in the fall. you can't imagine an american president and chinese president having an easy banter. it's a two-hour meeting and a formal dinner and that's it. absent a week of that, you wouldn't have quite the same

degree of mutual confidence that allowed the leadership on both sides to move ahead with the risks they have undertaken with the trip happening at all. >> how do you think meeting with them in a much shorter time frame affected with rogers and kissinger and nixon. they haven't gotten there and accomplished something rather significant. what do you think the personal sentiments were that they took away. >> nixon took away satisfaction. he told me if i ever had a conversation with him, you china boys are going to have a lot more to do. that turned out to be true.

kissinger also came away with a sense of achievement. it was a very important relationship. nixon was gone within a year. august of 74 he was out. that relationship carried our china and u.s. china relationship forward. in fact rogers played i think a fairly important role and his

advice was listened to 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 resonate rightist on the delegation. i think he was personally humiliated by being left out of the meeting with mao. he made a point of calling on him secretly. partly to i think a swage this humiliation, but partly to find out whether there was a split in the delegation. whether the kinds of beings that rogers and marshall have raised meant that the delegation was divided and that this whole thing would disintegrate. rogers i'm sure satisfied them

on this score. he was a grown up gent and he did not have the role in the making of foreign policy that kissinger did. he was a get explainer and presenter and a team player. ultimately opening up with china to the outside world. could it happen?

>> on their end, i think the public was way ahead of nixon and the nixon trip and the readiness to change attitudes about communist china. not that would be admiring and open to a relationship. the american public was ready and the fact that the quick switch that was developed at the united nations and taiwan was unceremoniously thrown out. that's proof of that. on our end, we were ready. i defer to the china scholars on that. >> i think you can make a good argument without the nixon trip and the success of the nixon

trip and the american leadership moved away from the extremism and take a more pragmatic approach to china and china's dealings with the world. i don't think it's a coincidence that they must win the offices opening and the relationship that they are moving in. that would have been a factor and strengthening the hand of people who would see a role of somebody like that as trying to settle down and connect it again with the world. >> that was joe and he agreed. >> my table at the banquet.

it was a clear signal that there was a new win. >> i think he would have done it in due course. i think the nixon trip gave the relationship a jump-start. the creation of the channels for which we invested and traded and did exchanges and education and so on and so forth, all followed very, very quickly. during the liaison office days. it was carter who actually fashioned and negotiated the formal recognition of china. it was done -- he came to the

united states right after we formally recognized him. the negotiation process was very torturous and very difficult. there was a lot of infighting too. i can't see him being able to normalize those things to manage his own reforms as quickly as he did without having been given the impetus of the nixon years. >> it broke the ice. it's ten past. let's do ten or 15 minutes of questions. i urge you all to keep it short and we will try to keep the answers short. the microphones. please raise your hands. i see one way in the back. any other hands? back on the left. put your hand up again so you

can be seen. >> i'm ben and my question is for ambassador platt. knowing about nixon's plan for the trip and what he wanted to achieve. if nixon was looking at u.s.-china relations now, do you think he would -- what would he think about how they developed with what he envisioned? >> i think nixon would have been astonished. none of us had a clue that there was going to develop economically so rapidly or economic and people to people relationships between the u.s. and china were going to place 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 and get them to be more responsive to his policies and his desire to get out of vietnam and his arrangements and so forth. after the soviet union collapsed and the relationship had to survive the great blows to the relationship. he did so on the basis of the people to people context to which he and nixon relegated.

and they were quite -- >> the four of us, given china in the early 70s what happened subsequently. >> another question, right here. you mentioned about your visit to the cia to get back ground work. i was wondering to the extent that can you say. what sorts of documents. media that you consume to prepare you. how did you come to understand the culture and the manner. >> if you feel the cia had it right or how did that happen when you were reading or talking with them before you went.